It Doesn't Work Like That - Books That Get it Wrong

[Tyler]

Makes a person wonder - how many times has introducing a non-native predator or virus actually worked as advertised? Maybe we should implement Jack Rabbit Drives like back in the '30s...

[CBRetriever]

In the US Southern states we have nutria and kudzu and in the dryer climate states, there's tons of eucalyptus trees (fire hazard) plus feral hogs (very dangerous)

[Jacqueline]

Well they should start by not introducing something in the first place so that they have to bring another predator or virus in to get rid of it. Reminds me of a kids book.

I used to go out shooting rabbits in the 80s. I lived on a farm and we’d bring them all back for the dogs. Or my mother in law would make a big rabbit stew. Gun laws have tightened in Australia since then and people report it when they hear gunfire around. Used to hear gunshots ringing up and down the valley once but not anymore.

There are traps of course but then you run the risk of trapping something you don’t want to trap. And poison down the burrows. I remember when they’d close off areas and shove 10-80 down every burrow they could find. Unfortunately that also kills off animals you don’t want to kill. Including the farm dogs in some instances.

[Tyler]

It is the very definition of farcical...

[Jacqueline]

Eucalyptus is very much a fire hazard. The leaves are full of oil. One of the reasons why the bushfires are still burning just west of here months after they started. One of the scariest things I’ve ever heard was a eucalyptus exploding in a fire. Over the road from my house. Not fun.

We stayed in a B&B in Houston and there were eucalyptus trees and bottlebrush trees in the backyard just like home. It was weird when a squirrel ran across the top of the fence beside us lol The lady who owned the place thought of them as exotic lol

[CBRetriever]

Arizona is full of eucalyptus trees and to keep on topic, I don't wince when SciFi books refer to Earth plants on another world - I think of them as having hitched a ride on a previous ship. And you know spaceships will have rat and bug problems too...

[Tyler]

I think the real trick is if the hitchhiker can survive on the new planet. Would they be able survive in the soil or eat the plants/animals there without being poisoned. Would they be able to absorb the necessary amounts of vitamins and minerals. Not to mention day/night cycles and different amounts of radiation, etc...

It's not hard to see how plants and animals can survive on a different continent, but on another planet with a completely different evolutionary history revolving around a likely different soil chemistry, etc.

Any smart person able to chime in here? I don't have the information to even begin to hypothesize.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

To keep it on topic, that's one of the things that bothers me most about first contact type stories. They almost never talk about the bacteria or viruses! I'd think the microbiology of new worlds or new species would be the biggest threat.

[Tyler]

What do you think the chances of an alien virus being able to infect us is? I'm not sure it'll be War of the Worlds easy. There are lots of viruses on our own planet that don't infect us. Would it be easier or more difficult for a virus that didn't evolve to infect us be able to infect us? Granted, we wouldn't have any evolved defenses either, but how close to our biology would they have to be to be able to harm us?

[Beth]

A ship's cat is a must, even in space! :)

[Wolfdog]

Tyler wrote: "What do you think the chances of an alien virus being able to infect us is? I'm not sure it'll be War of the Worlds easy. There are lots of viruses on our own planet that don't infect us. Would it ..."


The chances are slim because well I am pretty sure that aliens are built differently from us. But the chances of them having their viruses from their planets and spreading it to ours if it has not happened yet why would it happen now? It would probably infect us because our bodies have never come in contact with these viruses.

[Tyler]

Would their mechanisms for infection even be compatible with our cells? We can't catch viruses from trees, after all. It seems like the more different you are genetically, the less likely it is that you can be infected by something that would infect 'them'.

Edit**
So, panspermia - maybe. Otherwise, probably not?

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

If it's a world we could interact with, chances are it'd have similar levels of important elements. Chances are, something would interact with our biology or the biology of things we needed to survive in an unforeseen way that our systems are not equipped to repel, or, equally bad, that our biology interacts in an unforeseen way with the other species' biology.

[CBRetriever]

and then there are the SciFi books that postulate other worlds were seeded by the same entities so the biologies are similar...

[Karin]

Jacqueline wrote: "They got the virus and got sick then took it to their burrow and died infecting the rest of them along with it. Mosquitos and fleas are the carriers. Myxomatosis is nasty. When the rabbits started ..."

Yes, the introduction of rabbits to Australia is tragic, and it's hard to wipe out an entire species with one disease. I hadn't known it was so helpful in the Great Depression, but did study about this in university in ecology.

[Trike]

Tyler wrote: "What do you think the chances of an alien virus being able to infect us is? I'm not sure it'll be War of the Worlds easy. There are lots of viruses on our own planet that don't infect us. Would it ..."

There are only so many ways life can be organized, so eventually an intergalactic species will encounter something that will make them sick. Or want to eat them.

That’s why dodges such as the one Niven used in Known Space work so well: billions of years ago there were only a couple species in the galaxy. The tnuctipin were slaves but super high tech. They created “food planets” to feed the empire of the slavers, known as the Thrint. Exercising a long plan, the tnuctipin eventually destroyed the Thrint and their empire... at the cost of wiping out every sentient species, including themselves.

Fast forward billions of years and the galaxy is repopulated with numerous species: humans, pak, the cat-like Kzinti, etc. They can all eat each other because they all evolved from the food planets, sharing common DNA.

We now know that the basic building blocks of life can spontaneously occur in outer space as elements combine, among comets and other supposedly inhospitable places. Since those move around, they can spread their virus-like and bacteria-like thingamobobbers to every planet and moon in the system. That’s called panspermia.

Panspermia could be a method that allows for interspecies infection, but it’s more likely that it would just be within our solar system. So microbes on Jupiter’s moons could very well infect us if both our planets were “seeded” by roving comets. Those creeps.

This is why NASA has a job with the coolest title ever:

Planetary Protection Officer.

That person’s task is to keep alien diseases from coming here, but also to prevent us from contaminating other planets. Recently a private Israeli probe crashed on the moon, spilling a bunch of earth DNA including tardigrades all over the place. Those things are so hardy they can probably survive there, which might make for a nasty surprise for future lunar colonists. So the private sector is already doing to other planets what it did to other continents here.
https://www.wired.com/story/a-crashed...

[Tyler]

@CBRetriever right, so panspermia. Even then, the only constant would be, what, that we are both carbon based? The amount of evolution since a panspermian event should make us far more different from aliens, biologically speaking, than we are from trees.

Even with convergent evolution, their planet would have to be nearly identical to ours.

On a tangential note, would they have to be relatively near us as far as their distance from the center of the galaxy, I wonder? Are the ratios of elements different as you get closer to the center of the galaxy? I'm going to have to look that up when I get home.

[Micah]

Beth wrote: "A ship's cat is a must, even in space! :)"

[Musical interlude]
Lucifer, go to sea
Be a hip cat, be a ship’s cat
Somewhere, anywhere
That cat’s something I can’t explain!
~ Pink Floyd, Lucifer Sam from Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)

[Micah]

Tyler wrote: "@CBRetriever right, so panspermia. Even then, the only constant would be, what, that we are both carbon based? The amount of evolution since a panspermian event should make us far more different fr..."

The idea of panspermia wouldn't just be that we are carbon based, but rather that the basic RNA/DNA structure would be spread across worlds. And not necessarily just within the solar system.

Almost a year ago there was a paper released about it … The peer-reviewed journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology published the paper called Cause of the Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic? with 33 authors from a wide range of reputable universities and research institutes. It's a review of the evidence supporting panspermia that's been gathered over the last 60 years.

But all of this is still just conjecture (not just panspermia, but the whole question of what kind of life we're likely to find elsewhere) because we only have one data point for life. We have no idea if carbon based life like ours is the most ubiquitous form of life, or possibly the only viable way life can arise. Some scientists have postulated there might be other chemical routes to life. Until we find (or make) some other kind of life we can only speculate.

So I'd give authors a pass if they have people show up on other planets and be able to eat the plants/animals there. I'd hope the author would at least explain how that is unusual or typical (i.e. they really should have some kind of world building to explain whatever they write).

It's far worse to have all alien species speaking English or to have humans showing up a million years in the future with no evolutionary change at all (looking at you Stephen Baxter!).

[MrsJoseph *grouchy*]

Trike wrote: "There are only so many ways life can be organized, so eventually an intergalactic species will encounter something that will make them sick. Or want to eat them."

Agreed.

And the universe is a dirty, dirty place.

[Micah]

MrsJoseph *grouchy* wrote: "And the universe is a dirty, dirty place."

Or, as Ford Prefect put it: "Listen, it's a tough universe. There's all sorts of people and things trying to do you, kill you, rip you off, everything. If you're going to survive out there, you've really got to know where your towel is."

Amen. And amen.

[MrsJoseph *grouchy*]

Micah wrote: "MrsJoseph *grouchy* wrote: "And the universe is a dirty, dirty place."
Or, as Ford Prefect put it: "Listen, it's a tough universe. There's all sorts of people and things trying to do you, kill you, rip you off, everything. If you're going to survive out there, you've really got to know where your towel is."

Amen. And amen. "

Amen

[Trike]

Micah wrote: "The idea of panspermia wouldn't just be that we are carbon based, but rather that the basic RNA/DNA structure would be spread across worlds. And not necessarily just within the solar system."

Now that both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have crossed into interstellar space, we know how difficult it would be for other objects to get out there. I suppose that a really violent collision early in a solar system’s development might spread basic life bits to other nearby systems, provided they were close enough. But way out here in the boondocks? Odds are really long.

Despite Oumuamua’s appearance last year, that sort of cross-contamination seems unlikely.

Another thing that people don’t talk about is the expansion of the universe. Because the distances involved are so huge and getting bigger by the second, we are already trapped into our local cluster of galaxies and sooner rather than later we will be trapped within our own galaxy. (Provided we don’t discover a way around the increasing distance between star clusters such as traversible wormholes.)

Taken altogether, this likely means that panspermia is a localized phenomenon, relegated to an individual solar system, or perhaps a few systems if they are huddled together.

[Tyler]

Trike wrote: "Micah wrote: "The idea of panspermia wouldn't just be that we are carbon based, but rather that the basic RNA/DNA structure would be spread across worlds. And not necessarily just within the solar ..."

I certainly agree other than the semantics of being trapped within our own galaxy. We'll be pretty friendly with Andromeda in 4.5 billion years or so =P

Speaking of Voyager, I wonder if we'll get any information on if the solar system's bowshock can or tends to deter interstellar objects from even entering the solar system. Obviously not always, but I wonder if it can and to what extent.

[Kateb]

Jacqueline wrote: "Well they should start by not introducing something in the first place so that they have to bring another predator or virus in to get rid of it. Reminds me of a kids book.

I used to go out shooti..."

and what about cane toads. Another pest introduced with nobody really studying . THe beetles they were brought in to kill lived on the top of the plan, nobody thought about that, just took the word of some sugar cane grower over seas.

[Jacqueline]

Yeah I talked about them somewhere up further.

[Cheryl]

Two questions.

1. Is it ok when the narration is by the protagonist, and then they die? Iow, "I did this, I did that... oh no, oh shi..." My husband just read a book that did that and was peeved.

2. Is it ok that sentries are predictable, so all the invaders have to do is time their rounds in order to get through? That just seems stupid to me.

[CBRetriever]

2. yes - it's called discipline otherwise they sentries would patrol when and if they want to (if they did at all). It's too difficult to schedule a random schedule of sentry rounds and have people understand and follow them. Eventually some sort of routine would develop that could be timed.

1. sometimes it's OK, especially if the book is about the life of a character and you know they died in the end...

[[deleted user]]

2. I would disagree with CBRetriever on this. Modern soldiers are generally not idiots and, in my own past military experience, the emphasis was on fixed guard or watch/listening positions. Roaming patrols, especially around base perimeters, were done along variable times and patterns, as long as you did them at the frequency requested by superiors, precisely to avoid ambushes. That was especially important in Afghanistan, where a patrol using the same route at fixed times was nearly assured to eventually hit a mine or a roadside bomb. Fixed posts guards were told to scan continuously their surroundings in order to see in advance any approaching enemy and to not stand at rigid attention like idiots and mindless robots (something that drastically cuts your field of view and quickly tires your muscles). Using some kind of distraction against sentries (get a pretty and sexy girl to pass by that headquarters entrance, for example) is a trick that works well, generally.

[CBRetriever]

I was thinking more of the trouble with trying to do that in a fantasy set when most people didn't have watches, not in current days.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

It's one of those things that's become so commonplace in fiction that we accept it even if it is and has almost always been entirely bogus. Routine is a great way to become a victim, and that isn't something we just recently discovered. But there are so many liberties taken with things like Renaissance or medieval castles and towns and all the rest, what's one more!

[Leonie]

1. I've only read one book narrated by a character in first person, present tense, who died at the end. I really hated it.

For me, it just doesn't make sense. Maybe I'm weird, but it really annoyed me.

[Cheryl]

Yeah, the book I read that had the sentry was sf, not fantasy. Also, there was only one guard, so, it didn't make sense to me that he'd sit for 25 minutes, walk for 5, all night. What he was guarding was pretty damn important, too, so it's not like he was a bargain basement model. Thank you Michel.

[[deleted user]]

Another bad picture: medieval/ancient sentries at night sitting around a fire and looking at the flames. That always makes me roll my eyes and say to myself 'the idiots!'. First, while you look at that nice, warm fire, you basically don't see anything else but the other people assembled around the said fire. Second, you ruin your night vision, which would then take over a minute to be fully restored, time for you to get your throat slit open by an enemy that crawled to your fire. I hope to think that the soldiers of the ancient periods were not that stupid.

[Trike]

Michel wrote: "Another bad picture: medieval/ancient sentries at night sitting around a fire and looking at the flames. That always makes me roll my eyes and say to myself 'the idiots!'. First, while you look at ..."

Would they necessarily know about night vision, though? I still encounter people who don’t know such things which I consider common knowledge.

[Cheryl]

How could one not have known about night vision? If you blow out the candles, at first you can't see much in the dark, but after a little bit you can see more. Simple as that.

Nowadays we generally turn on lights before giving our eyes a chance to adapt, and leave them on until we close our eyes to sleep, so maybe some of our contemporaries don't get it... but surely those campfire-blinded adventurers did.

[Cheryl]

There is a lot of elementary knowledge that is not common, though, and so in principle I do agree with Trike.

[Trike]

Another one I forgot to mention, After the Flood, which was recommended to me by the library. It’s basically the literature version of Waterworld, but it’s no more accurate than that movie.

All land but the tops of mountaintops have been submerged, which right there is incorrect. If the worst case scenario of global warming occurs and all the ice melts and we get maximum thermal expansion of the water, the oceans will only get 216 feet deeper. Here in the middle of New Hampshire I’d be a couple miles from the new shoreline, but hardly drowned. But she still has icebergs, so that didn’t happen.

For the past few months I’ve been obsessed with YouTube videos made by people who’ve sold everything, bought a boat and are sailing around the world. So I’ve accidentally absorbed things like how much boats cost, how long it takes to travel from place to place, how much maintenance goes into boats, and so forth. She gets all of that wrong.

Then there are things like the ready availability of bread. With only mountaintops available to grow food. I mean, come on. Without modern equipment and pesticides, etc., growing flour is a labor-intensive activity under ideal conditions. When your best soil is mile underwater....

[Tyler]

Would they necessarily know about night vision, though?

I can see how that might not be common knowledge for those whose life doesn't depend on light discipline, or for those who can turn on a light by flicking a switch. I think it's not unreasonable to assume that military personnel in a pre-electricity environment would know that that looking at a fire makes it harder to see things away from the fire. You could chalk it up to laziness or poor discipline, but ignorance seems unlikely to me. After all, they would have a much more intimate relationship with fire than almost anyone alive in a first world country today.

[Oleksandr]

Trike wrote: "Would they necessarily know about night vision, though? I still encounter people who don’t know such things which I consider common knowledge."

It may sound strange but it is possible - as an example look that Aristotle said that freezing makes substances more dense, so ice should drown in water. The fact that it floats was explained by its form, like a metal ship may swim in water. It took Galileo to disprove it. So, for more than 1500 years people of science preferred a consistent theory over evidence. See details here Cause, Experiment and Science: A Galilean Dialogue Incorporating a New English Translation of Galileo's Bodies That Stay Atop Water, or Move in It

[Cheryl]

Yeah, you'd have to make bread from dried seaweed or something. And, yeah, of course, even with no ice, the sea levels can only rise so far. I might have to skip that book; ty Trike.

[Micah]

Cheryl wrote: "1. Is it ok when the narration is by the protagonist, and then they die?..."

Hmm … not so sure about that one. Even at the end of the story it would be odd.

But it's better than the one I saw (not sure if I mentioned this earlier in the thread but I'm not going to bother looking) …

A book I read once has a character doing a flashback, during which it cut to scene of two other characters. And that scene was of a conversation which the person having the flashback was not privy to. How the...?

Boy did that throw me for a loop!

[MrsJoseph *grouchy*]

Tyler wrote: "I can see how that might not be common knowledge for those whose life doesn't depend on light discipline, or for those who can turn on a light by flicking a switch. I think it's not unreasonable to assume that military personnel in a pre-electricity environment would know that that looking at a fire makes it harder to see things away from the fire. You could chalk it up to laziness or poor discipline, but ignorance seems unlikely to me. After all, they would have a much more intimate relationship with fire than almost anyone alive in a first world country today."


You know, I am inclined to agree. It might not have been "common knowledge" but the people who had to work with fire as their only light AND work in darkness would be inclined to know things that would help make their lives safer. And a guard at night would - by pure observation alone - realize that the light made everything else around them darker.

But, I'd also agree with Trike that it might not have been common knowledge.

[MrsJoseph *grouchy*]

Oleksandr wrote: "Trike wrote: "Would they necessarily know about night vision, though? I still encounter people who don’t know such things which I consider common knowledge."

It may sound strange but it is possibl..."

IDK...those same people also believed the world was flat, so...

And some people still do...

[colleen the convivial curmudgeon]

Cheryl wrote: "1. Is it ok when the narration is by the protagonist, and then they die? Iow, "I did this, I did that... oh no, oh shi..." My husband just read a book that did that and was peeved.
..."


For me, I think it would honestly depend on how it's done. But it could be interesting. One of my complaints about first-person narratives is that it's almost guaranteed that the MC will survive - because obviously they did if they're telling their tale.

But hubs told me about a story he read, which I forget the name of, where you find out that the first person narrator had died and has been telling his entire story from the afterlife. So that could be kind of cool, and throw off expectations.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

I don't think I've seen first person present tense where the MC dies. I have seen it past tense, like with a book about the death of a young girl who watches her family deal with her death from the afterlife, or a certain wizard who spends some time incorporeal. If the end was just "I hear a click and--" and then it ends, I'd be pissed. But if the story continues after they die, that'd likely work better for me.

[Trike]

colleen the convivial curmudgeon wrote: "But hubs told me about a story he read, which I forget the name of, where you find out that the first person narrator had died and has been telling his entire story from the afterlife. So that could be kind of cool, and throw off expectations."

Lots of movies do this: Sunset Blvd., American Beauty, Fallen, Looper, Shallow Grave... and they’re all quite good.

[Micah]

Well … and then there's Vonnegut's Galapagos where the narrator is a ghost who retells his life, but you know that from the beginning so it's not like you get dumped on at the end. Loved that book.

[Karin]

Leonie wrote: "1. I've only read one book narrated by a character in first person, present tense, who died at the end. I really hated it.

For me, it just doesn't make sense. Maybe I'm weird, but it really annoy..."

I hate, hate, hate (channeling Eloise here from the children's books) that device. It is an enormous let down. I also am sick and tired of finding out that the first person narrator is already dead and telling the story from the beyond. But if you know the last one from the beginning it's not as bad, but to me it's a btdt deal.

[Karin]

MrsJoseph *grouchy* wrote: "Oleksandr wrote: "Trike wrote: "Would they necessarily know about night vision, though? I still encounter people who don’t know such things which I consider common knowledge."

It may sound strange..."

Actually, it's a myth that everyone back then believed that the world was flat; it was disputed, but there was enough evidence that it was round that many believed it was round. Christopher Columbus didn't come up with the concept. It was argued by the ancient Greeks as well. From the 14th century at the latest most Europeans believed that the world was spherical.

There are NO records that the church ever taught that the world was flat and it isn't true that NO ONE bathed- there were public baths in the middle ages, for one thing. In addition, there was no witch fad back then--that came in the early modern era and wasn't believed by all. Also, most knights wreaked havoc and were not chivalrous, and the chastity belt didn't show up until the Renaissance.