Category: Science Fiction

More Than Human

I’d never heard of this book, though the title itself seemed familiar (probably from the similar phrase from Blade Runner). I’d also heard of Theodore Sturgeon as one of the big names of the Silver Age, but knew nothing of his writing, and nothing of him beyond Heinlein famously helping him out of a spell of writer’s block. When I saw this book, I took the  opportunity to expand my classic SF reading.

Well. It was weird. I’ll give him that.

The story concerns a group of children with seemingly random psychic gifts: a young man with telepathy, a young girl with telekinesis, young twin girls with teleportation, and a…baby…thing…with partial telepathy and “superintellect” (not sure what an appropriate psychic term for this gift would be).

It’s a short book that covers a lot of ground. The first section concerns how they are drawn together to form a cooperative psychic ‘entity’ they call the “gestalt” – they remain distinct individuals, but their abilities link them into a greater, integrated whole. The second section addresses what happens when one part of the gestalt is lost and must be replaced – by the non-ideal replacement available at the time – and how it changes as a result. The third section concerns a normal person affected by crossing paths with the gestalt, and how what happens to him threatens to pull the entity apart.

As I said, it was weird. Not good-weird, like a Twilight Zone episode or a Lovecraft story, nor bad-weird, as in consciously trying to be outré or cutting edge or ‘experimental’. It was weird in a very similar way to Bester’s The Stars My Destination, from around the same time (1953 vs. 1946) – an unusual subject handled in an unusual way.

Sturgeon’s use of language is actually quite good, and he manages to successfully wrangle a number of details of the action, the nature of the various gifts, and in-story history, while showing believable character changes over time – all in, again, what is a fairly short novel.

Besides the resemblance to Bester, one thing that stuck out to me was the occasional pandering on racial issues. Like Heinlein, Sturgeon created non-white characters at a time (circa 1950) when that was not commonly done. But unlike Heinlein, Sturgeon wasn’t always as adept at smoothly weaving this ahead-of-the-times element into the story. There are moments when he presents the reader with a clumsy “racism bad, m’kay?” message of the type common to broadcast television of the Seventies, in what felt like the same manner: We interrupt the dramatic flow of this program to shoehorn in a Very Special Moral Lecture against __-ism. 

Overall, I can’t say that there was a much in it that stuck with me in terms of ideas. After reading it, it was like I’d…read it. That’s it. Entertaining in the moment but lean on lasting impressions, especially compared to Earth Abides, which I purchased at the same time and with which I read it back-to-back.

Earth Abides

This book caught my eye when I mistook it for the source of The Quiet Earth. (It’s plain from the jacket blurb that they’re not the same story at all.) It’s one of those books whose title I’d heard a number of times, enough to be at least aware that it was a post-apocalypse story, but surprisingly had never read.

My opinion is…mixed.

The story starts with the protagonist, Ish Williams, receiving a rattlesnake bite that happens to save his life. When he recovers and returns from his remote cabin, he discovers that nearly every human on Earth has died from “super measles”, an contagion of unknown origin and extreme lethality. The book then follows Ish through the next 50 years, focusing on three different periods, as he finds other survivors and builds a…er…tribe. 

And “tribe” is a big, big part of the problem.

On first reading, the story was entertaining and interesting. Stewart thought through a number of details well, such as the lingering of hydropower, the rapid failure of the roads, and the rewilding (or extinction) of domesticated plants and animals. There are a number of really good emotionally-charged scenes (dealing with Charlie, the Joey scene, and much of “The Last American”, for example).

It takes a little while to get used to his writing style, which I guess you could call “post-war experimental” (it was first published in 1949). The dialogue is sterile in some places, academic in others, rarely naturalistic. The ongoing effects of the near-disappearance of Man are described by italicized narrative dumps, whose perspective isn’t consistent (much of the time these read like excerpts from a far-future historical overview of the Great Disaster, but sometimes like a narration of ongoing events, and at other times like conventional omniscient perspective). It quickly takes on that “period” feel of other books from that era, e.g. Alas, Babylon (1959), and you just go with it.

It was compelling enough to read straight through over the course of a weekend. But the more I’ve thought of it over the past week, the more problems I’ve found with it.

  • The repeated malthusian elements, which seem common to the point of obsession with SF authors from the end of WWII through perhaps the mid-1980s. Okay, we get it. There are a lot of humans. Fine. But it gets really tiresome when (like global warming, which took its place as favored hobby-horse) it has to be repeatedly, compulsively, reflexively inserted into every story.
  • The nihilism. There is a thread throughout that, hey, you know, maybe it’s a good thing, after all, that human civilization is nearly dead. Maybe it’s overrated, and even a mistake, and we should let it die. Which they do, albeit passively.
  • The passivity – the characters’ unwillingness or lack of motivation to do anything active to preserve civilization for the following generations. This is demonstrated intentionally through the running “joke” about getting a gas-powered refrigerator working, the single, desultory instance after two decades of scouting for other long-term survivors, and the lack of interest in restoring electricity or repairing the water supply. Ish himself comments repeatedly on how he feels himself to be an observer, which appears to restrain him from taking meaningful action when necessary.
    The most significant instance is Ish’s petulant and impotent complaints about lack of support from the other parents regarding teaching their kids to read. The abundance of long-shelf-life food is blamed (nobody has to work to eat, so the kids are allowed to play all the time, there’s no sense of urgency in learning or preserving knowledge, etc.), but this abundance could have had exactly the opposite outcome had Ish put any effort at all into actually being a leader: having no need to hunt, forage, or farm, the kids had all the time in the world to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to restart human civilization. But he didn’t plan for that when the kids were still infants, and he didn’t put his foot down when the parents didn’t support him, in spite of being the obvious and unquestioned leader of the Tribe.
    When he discovered that his failure to push their education had resulted in a growing superstitiousness among the children, Ish could have harnessed it to ensure a longer-term recovery of civilization by creating a “priesthood” to serve (and preserve) the university library. But nah. Better to let the kids continue goofing off and remain illiterate and innumerate, and complain  impotently about it, than to try.
    After Joey meets his blatantly telegraphed doom (you didn’t see that coming fifty pages away?), Ish performs one last act of teaching: showing the kids how to make a bow and arrow – as a toy. After that, he gives in and gives up, and does nothing more to rekindle civilization, letting the Tribe degenerate into a primitive, superstitious, and ignorant band of savages.

Ish is a pathetic coward. Kinda ruins the book.

The only other apocalypse fiction where I’ve encountered this “giving up on civilization” element is the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. But there, a clear reason for doing so – the cycle of growth and collapse – had been established from the beginning (“All of this has happened before; all of this will happen again.”). The active choice at the end of the series to abandon technological civilization and merge with the early homo sapiens of our Earth is portrayed as a measure to break this cycle. The characters accept its necessity yet are hopeful that something better might emerge in time – they’re not passive in the moment and ambivalent about whether regains civilization or even survives as a species.

Tales of Known Space

I’ve been making a lot of progress on the “launch” story for the new fictional universe over the past two weeks, but started to notice that the text was a bit academic. I figured this was due to not reading any fiction for a while, so I set aside The Master and His Emissary (yet again – it’s slow going), and picked up my old, old copy of Larry Niven’s anthology, Tales of Known Space.

Niven was one of the first science fiction authors that I ever read*, and along with Heinlein (who I didn’t discover until I was 17) was long my favorite author in the genre. But after a while, and for very different reasons, both lost their luster – Niven because of his Eternal 1968 Southern California fixation**, Heinlein because I couldn’t un-read his biography.

While there was a bit of that fixation evident in ToKS, I was surprised at how very different some of his early stories were in tone and style to those which came only a few years later. “Becalmed in Hell” and the three Mars stories, “Eye of an Octopus”, “How the Heroes Die”, and “At the Bottom of a Hole” (all published 1965-66) had the feel of Arthur C. Clarke stories. Contrast this with “Cloak of Anarchy” (1972), which displays pretty much all of Niven’s characteristic themes and elements (“A Relic of the Empire” from 1968, which is not in this anthology, shows his distinct style even earlier).

I think Niven was a good choice of an example for tightening up my own fiction, given how much detail he seems to pack into few words. “Eye of an Octopus”, for example, is quite short as short stories go, yet covers a lot of ground: introducing his (ultimately doomed) Martians, partially explaining why Mars is bypassed in the Known Space future history, laying the groundwork for the two sequel stories, etc., mixed in with some plausible xenoarchaeology and a bit of unexpectedly exciting biochemistry.

Writing technique aside, the story that stood out for me the most was “How the Heroes Die”. I don’t remember reading it before, so much so that it felt like an instance of the Mandela Effect. I’ve been immersed in Current Year for so long that I got to the reveal of why John Carter (no, not that one) murdered Lew Harness, and bust up laughing. Not only could I not remember having read that before, I couldn’t believe that I had never once encountered any outrage about it, nor calls for Niven’s cancellation. Sure, it was published in 1966, but when has the passage of time ever stopped presentists from denouncing someone for expressing then-ordinary-now-problematic notions?

* – The first science fiction book I recall reading was Lucifer’s Hammer. In fifth grade. Imagine a Current Year govskool teacher’s scandalized reaction to finding one of her precocious inmates reading a post-apocalypse novel where Black Power militants join forces with Army deserters to pillage the ruins of civilization while eating the survivors – and aren’t the protagonists.

** – “Shall we indulge in yet another tedious narrative dump about overpopulation, strange hair/beard styles, and sexual freedom?“

Elleander Morning

I haven’t read it yet (too much on my plate and too many books on my reading pile), but this looks good based on the originality of the premise alone. Apparently there is something original to be done with the “Kill Hitler Before He Starts” genre.

“Two Years Before the Mast”

There was an element of R.H. Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast that seemed very familiar to me: the feel of an isolated, even empty world that permeates Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Endurance, and Home of the Blizzard.

Sure, it’s clear at the beginning that there is in fact a bustling, settled civilization in the background (specifically 1830s Boston), but once Dana’s ship dropped “below the hill, below the kirk, below the lighthouse top”, as it were, it’s as if the outer world no longer exists, and he is sailing on the endless seas of an empty planet.

Even after arriving in California, this sense of emptiness is barely relieved by the presence of Mexicans, Indians, and the occasional crews of other ships. There are so few people, so sparsely settled, that if anything it makes the emptiness of the world seem more rather than less acute.

It struck me that this element is actually missing from the SF I have read.

Which is strange, as you’d think it’d be a pretty obvious detail to weave into the worldbuilding of (say) the first mission to Mars, or a newly-settled planet: the characters are alone, far from civilization and from help should it be needed. They wouldn’t have it in their head that someone is watching over them, because there isn’t anyone. They wouldn’t assume that someone can be summoned to rescue them at a moment’s notice, because there is no one to call. They would know they couldn’t simply “return to civilization” should they tire of their adventures, because they are what passes for civilization.

It’s not a sense of danger or threat, though. It simply is the way the world is around them. The conditioned sense of immersion in civilization wherever one goes is simply absent, because actual civilization itself is so distant as to be wholly absent.

I think the thorough rewrite of the former project’s “The Olympian Race”  already captures some of this sense of isolation and emptiness in the climactic chapters, so this is timely.

One “character” detail that stood out for me was Dana’s personal reaction at his return to Boston. He’d dreamt for two years of finishing his contract and returning home, imagining what he would do and where he would go and who he would see. But when his ship at last reached the pier in Boston Harbor, he was instead overcome with a sense of inertia: “There is probably so much of excitement in prolonged expectation, that the quiet realizing of it produces a momentary stagnation of feeling as well as of effort. It was a good deal so with me.”

The account was fairly short, but no less powerful for that. And the book is peppered with such character observations of his crewmates and himself, fascinating little details that SF rarely seem to capture. In fairness, it’s easier to amass a collection of such observations to draw on when you spend two years immersed in the relevant environment, something rarely possible (even in analogue form) for SF writers.

I repeatedly had the same reaction I had while reading The Anabasis and Mawson’s account of his return to the hut in Home of the Blizzard: “This is such an amazing account – it would form the basis of a fantastic SF story.”

Alas, several SF versions of The Anabasis have been done. However, the story I’m currently working on, “Beneath a Silent Sky”, originated as an homage to Mawson’s account (albeit infused with paranoid mystery…).

One final item that struck me was the section written in 1860, documenting his observations from a return trip to California. In 24 years, everything that he had encountered had changed dramatically, in particular San Francisco Bay and the surrounding areas. In 1835, he described a smallish settlement around the Presidio, dwarfed by the main Mexican settlement at Monterey. When he returned, he found a city of 100,000-plus people, smaller but significant settlements scattered all around the bay, Alcatraz turned into a fortress, and a booming economy.

I always wondered if 15-20 years would be sufficient to settle Mars to the point that it could demand autonomy or sovereignty. Could enough settlers arrive and build a sufficiently large and diverse economy to support such a move? Well, here is one real-world example to draw on…

Improving on a “Classic”

How a mediocre episode of Star Trek might be improved:

Bele is taken to Lokai, and the two begin to argue about the history of their two distinct peoples. Kirk is puzzled by the animosity between the two, who appear to him to be of the same race.

When Bele explains that Lokai is evil because his people are black on the left and white on the right, Lokai interjects that the opposite is true: Bele’s people are evil because they are black on the right and white on the left.

Kirk, in an attempt to be clever, responds that he’s white on the top and black on the bottom – which, given he is clothed, they have to take his word on. “What does that make me?”

The two Cheronians howl in instinctive horror, Kirk’s snarky question having triggered the racial memory of another Cheronian people exterminated many millennia earlier. The two aliens immediately put aside their differences and unite in a campaign of annihilation against humanity, who they now perceive as either white-top-black-bottom (Kirk) or black-top-white-bottom (Uhura) members of the feared and loathed third Cheronians.

After a decade-long campaign of genocide across the Federation, Kirk is brought before War Admirals Bele and Lokai in the ruins of Starbase 1, the final survivor of the human race. When the tatters of his uniform reveal that humans are not, in fact, different colors top and bottom, the Cheronians belatedly realize that they’ve made a terrible mistake.

“Um. So sorry about that.”

“Yes, yes. We really should have checked.”

Kirk, spared execution at the last moment, sighs with relief tinged with grief and regret. Looking out a nearby viewport at the scorched and ruined Earth passing below, he says wistfully, “If only I’d joked that we were colored front-to-back, instead.”

At which the two Cheronians scream in uncontrollable terror at the racial memory of a fourth, much older and more fearsome Cheronian people, and transport themselves into the blessed escape of the void.

Spock arrives to rescue Kirk as the wreckage of the station begins to enter Earth’s upper atmosphere. A trite moral lesson is presented, and the credits roll. In the following episode, everything is back to normal and none of these events is acknowledged to have happened.

Reading Analog, May/June 2024 Issue

Which would be this one:

If you’ve seen Analog covers from 1960-65, you understand why this hurts to look at.

So far, it’s reminded me very clearly why I cancelled my subscription in 2008 (and stopped actually reading the issues I received sometime around 2002).

Continue reading “Reading Analog, May/June 2024 Issue”

Melodrama and Bootstrapping

Came across this trailer the other day:

I haven’t watched any of the series, only a couple of other snippets, so I don’t know what the content is actually like, but this trailer put me off ever finding out.

When it first came out, I watched a couple of clips showing the launch of a Truax SeaDragon which, given my background and paired with the alternative history angle, piqued my interest.

This looks like…crap. Melodramatic crap. Soap opera crap on Mars. I mean, sure, the spaceships look fun, but the characters and their interactions look insufferable.

No thanks.

One of the comments caught my attention, however:

All “space colony” stories on TV and movies either stop short of the actual colonization, or skip the colonization part and move straight to how the colony was destroyed or how colonies fought against each other.

Okay, so we’re not TV or movies, but…Hello? We’re right here… That’s a major point of the entire Ares Project universe: showing the initial development stages of Mars settlement, the part that everyone else skips over.

Martian Technology: Science Pins and Pingers

These devices have been featured so far in In the Shadow of Ares and quite prominently in Redlands and He Has Walled Me In.

A science pin, as described in ItSoA, is a device shaped like a scaled-up golf tee, with a stem 1-1.5m long, and a head 100-150mm across and anywhere from 50mm to 400mm tall. The stem contains common power generation, storage, and management functions, and in the field is mounted to a peg or sleeve drilled or driven into the soil or rock.  The head consists of one or more cylindrical modules of different heights and a wide variety of functions. These modules thread together at the center with a common physical and electrical interface.

In all applications there is a communications and C&DH (command and data handling) module. This module links the pin to local and satellite communications networks, as well as to specialized instruments such as seismometer arrays or deep soil probes which are not located on the pin itself.

Modularity and standardization make it possible for science pins to be quickly emplaced and easily maintained, and readily upgraded with new or additional instruments as needed. The size and external features of the modules make them easy for suited settlers to handle with gloved hands.

Lindsay Jacobsen is shown in ItSoA maintaining a science pin she had previously deployed to monitor ground water for evidence of biological activity.

In HHWMI, Leon Toa has a strange encounter with a strange science pin in the Wilds.

Redlands prominently features a gold-plated science pin, and the action is set at one of the settlements where the devices are manufactured.

In Ghosts of Tharsis, we introduce a specialized application of the science pin concept, the “pinger”. A pinger is a science pin used as a navigation aid, particularly during mild to moderate dust storms when travel by rover is still somewhat feasible. The head of a typical pinger is a single mass-produced module containing navigation strobes and the power storage required to operate them for a month or more. The head is crowned with a passive reflector that rover navigation radars can use for distance and triangulation measurements.

Pingers at intervals and in problem-prone locations include additional instruments to monitor local weather conditions and transmit them back to a central data hub for use in travel planning.

A real-world approximation of Martian navigation pingers
A real-world approximation of what Martian navigation pingers along a rover track might look like (Öskjuvatn, Iceland).

I particularly liked the idea of reusing science pin components as the basis of navigation aids, as it reflects a potential real-world solution to the problems of navigating across a landscape with minimally-developed roadways prone to obscuring by dust. It has the added benefit of eliminating the ability of the MDA to bring to a halt surface transportation among the independents by scrambling the signals from the positioning satellites on which they have a Charter-granted monopoly. But most importantly for our purposes as authors, it makes possible a dramatic rover chase in a Class 1 dust storm…