'Sleep on It:' Separating Inspiration From Indigestion

Looks like the question isn't so much getting good ideas. It's telling the difference between a good idea, and one that's not. And some research says that "sleep on it" is pretty good advice.

"How Do We Identify Good Ideas?"
Jonah Lehrer, Frontal Cortex, Wired Science Blogs (January 23, 2012)

"I've always been fascinated by the failures of genius. Consider Bob Dylan. How did [Dylan] ... conclude that Down in the Groove was worthy of release? Or what about Steve Jobs: what did he possibly see in the hockey puck mouse? How could Bono not realize that Spiderman was a disaster? And why have so many of my favorite novelists produced so many middling works?

The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity: Even those blessed with ridiculous talent still produce works of startling mediocrity. (The Beatles are the exception that proves the rule, although their subsequent solo careers prove that even Lennon and McCartney were fallible artists.) The larger point is that mere imagination is not enough, for even those with prodigious gifts must still be able to sort their best from their worst, sifting through the clutter to find what's actually worthwhile...."

Don't worry: the writer does get around to telling how we tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one.

"My Fair Lady" - "Oklahoma!" - "Spiderman?!"

By the way, I'd forgotten that someone tried to make Spiderman into a musical. And spent $70,000,000 doing it:

"Bono's 'Spider-Man' musical still weak, critics say"
Reuters (June 15, 2011)

"Broadway's most expensive and ridiculed musical, 'Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark,' suffered another round of crushing reviews on Wednesday, a day after its long-delayed official opening drew celebrities such as former president Bill Clinton and actor Robert De Niro.

"The $70 million comic-book adaptation, featuring music by U2's Bono and the Edge, was lambasted earlier this year while playing in a record-breaking 180 previews as its producers struggled to overhaul the production...."

Still, it could be worse. What if someone talked an investor into backing a rewrite of "Hamlet:" as a musical comedy. With songs like Ophelia's "My Dad, So Sad;" and Hamlet's "I Get the Point." Say, maybe that's not such a bad idea after all.

Nietzsche, Experts, and University Students

Lehrer quotes Nietzsche, the gist of which is that artists don't get flashes of inspiration: they're just good at sorting out nifty stuff from the ideas that everybody gets. I'll buy the idea that creativity involves a whole lot of selection and connection of notions. Back to Lehrer's post:

"...A new study led by Simone Ritter of the Radboud University in the Netherlands sheds some light on this mystery. In the first experiment, 112 university students were given two minutes to come up with creative ideas that might alleviate a mundane problem: improving the experience of waiting in line at a cash register.... half of them went straight to work, while the others were first instructed to perform an unrelated task for two minutes. ... this delay was to give the unconscious a chance to percolate, to let that subterranean supercomputer invent new concepts for the supermarket queue.

"There was no difference between the groups in terms of creative output - both the conscious and unconscious/distracted subjects came up with the same number of new ideas. Although previous studies have found an impressive link between unconscious incubation and the imagination – it really is better to sleep on it - that result was not replicated here, perhaps because two minutes of distraction wasn't long enough. (True creativity takes time.)

"Here's where things get interesting. After writing down as many ideas as they could think of, both groups were asked to choose which of their ideas were the most creative. Although there was no difference in idea generation, giving the unconscious a few minutes now proved to be a big advantage, as those who had been distracted were much better at identifying their best ideas. (An independent panel of experts scored all of the ideas.) While those in the conscious condition only picked their most innovative concepts about 20 percent of the time ... those who had been distracted located their best ideas about 55 percent of the time. In other words, they were twice as good at figuring out which concepts deserved more attention...."
(Jonah Lehrer)

Writing For the 19th, 20th, or 21st Centuries

I haven't read Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories for quite a while. In terms of style, they're popular detective stories. I doubt that Doyle thought he was writing 'great literature,' or was trying to snooker his readers into seeing the tales that way.

On the other hand, Doyle wrote those stories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it shows. In "The Hound of the Baskervilles," it takes 342 words to get Watson from a train station to Baskerville Hall. The two paragraphs have some beautifully descriptive prose: but they're long-winded by today's standards.¹

Then there was Charles Dickens, a solidly 19th-century writer. A humorist said that an analysis of the style of Charles Dickens suggested that he was paid by the word. That's a fairly common practice in publishing, and another topic.

English prose got a tad more terse in the 20th century: although I've wondered if 'best sellers' ran longer than the usual novel because publishers figured that readers expected big, heavy books. More topics.

That was then, this is now, and 'how to write online' advice that I've seen often advises brevity. Short sentences. Not too many sentences in a paragraph. Almost the exact opposite to the manner in which I'm prone to compose, given my background not only as a recovering English teacher but also as someone who loves language.

It's an effort, writing tersely.

Jonah Lehrer's style in this post is readable: but I think it's more appropriate for printed matter. Still, he gets the point across.

And I've gotten off-topic again.

Crabs, Sauces, Apples, and Moods

One more of Johan Lehrer's paragraphs, and I'm (almost) done:

"...But waiting isn't the only approach. A few years ago, a team of German researchers gave several dozen subjects a variety of word puzzles known as remote associate problems. The puzzles feature three words (such as 'pine,' 'crab' and 'sauce') that share a common compound word. (In this case, the answer is 'apple.') Here's the clever part: only some of these remote associate problems had an actual answer. The rest were impossible. Interestingly, the scientists found that subjects in a positive mood were far better at figuring out which remote associate problems could be solved and which were a waste of effort. In fact, even when they didn't end up finding the solution, those who were happy were much at figuring out which problems had solutions. As a result, they wasted much less time searching for epiphanies that didn't exist, or chasing down possibilities that didn't pan out...."
(Jonah Lehrer)

Now that's interesting. And contrary to the 'anguished artist' stereotype.

Sometimes a writer can't 'sleep on it.' Deadlines loom, and staff writers don't always get time for a second look at their work. But if circumstances permit? It looks like there's evidence that taking time to pick out morsels of inspiration from a plate of mostly-indigestible notions is worth it.

Lehrer lists some good ways to step away from your work. Literally, in some cases:

• Take a few days off
• Play a stupid video game
• Go for a long walk
• Sleep on it

When the alternative may be explaining to an investor what happened to $70 million? That sounds like really good advice.

Bottom line? Write in haste, edit with deliberation.

Related (?) posts:

• "A Not-Entirely-Misspent Afternoon"
  (August 20, 2010)
• "Advice, Opinions, Resources, and How-2 for Writers: Over a Hundred Micro-Reviews"
  (August 25, 2009)

---

¹ Excerpt from

"...The train pulled up at a small wayside station and we all descended. Outside, beyond the low, white fence, a wagonette with a pair of cobs was waiting. Our coming was evidently a great event, for station-master and porters clustered round us to carry out our luggage. It was a sweet, simple country spot, but I was surprised to observe that by the gate there stood two soldierly men in dark uniforms, who leaned upon their short rifles and glanced keenly at us as we passed. The coachman, a hard-faced, gnarled little fellow, saluted Sir Henry Baskerville, and in a few minutes we were flying swiftly down the broad, white road. Rolling pasture lands curved upward on either side of us, and old gabled houses peeped out from amid the thick green foliage, but behind the peaceful and sunlit country-side there rose ever, dark against the evening sky, the long, gloomy curve of the moor, broken by the jagged and sinister hills.

"The wagonette swung round into a side road, and we curved upward through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart's-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge, and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the gray boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak and fir. At every turn Baskerville gave an exclamation of delight, looking eagerly about him and asking countless questions. To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the country-side, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year. Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed. The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation - sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles...."
("The Hound of the Baskervilles," Arthur Conan Doyle (1902), via Project Gutenberg)

Oklahoma Earthquake - or - THEY Awakened the Sleeping Spawn of CTHULHU!!!

Considering the crazy things folks have been known to take seriously, I'd better make a disclaimer: Cthulu is fiction. Make-believe. Not real. Moreover, I don't really believe that Old Ones imprisoned the star-spawn of Cthulhu deep under our feet. Mainly because 'all of the above' are not real. Neither is what I suggest in this post, for the most part.

After writing about the big Oklahoma earthquake in another blog, I realized that part of the post belonged here.

Now, let's see how the desire to blame someone (preferably someone using newfangled technology) the unknown, and a little craziness might make the Oklahoma earthquake even more interesting than it really is.

'Inspired by Real Events' - Awakening Horrors from the Deeps of Time

Ignoring warnings by the Last Seminole Shaman and the Earth First! Society, heartless Big Oil carelessly used hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to release - as they thought - natural gas from the rocks below Oklahoma. (Drama aside, this is true: fracking has been used to extract natural gas in the Oklahoma area.)

But in their Greed and Perverse Ravaging of Fair Mother Nature - whoops, that's more a Captain Planet thing - these unwitting mortals have awakened an Ancient Evil!!! Even now, "unexplained" tremors abound as forgotten horrors from the depths of time burrow inexorably upward, seeking to destroy those who released them, and re-establish - - - well, you get the idea.

Keep doing that for about 100,000 words, and you've got a novel.

Hey! Maybe Big Oil woke up the big guy himself: Cthulhu.

More-or-less-related posts:

• "Lemming Tracks: Oklahoma Earthquake, 'Unexplained Increase,' and Sounding Crazy"
  Apathetic Lemming of the North (November 7, 2011)
• "Gods, Demons, and Used Spaceship Dealers"
  (February 13, 2010)
• " 'All We Want is Peace and Quiet' - Another Look at the Mind of the Alien"
  (December 9, 2009)
• " 'Waiting on a Dead World' "
  (October 31, 2009)
• "Advice from C. L. Moore: Read What You Enjoy Most, and Some Rambling"
  (September 28, 2009)

What I've Done, What I Plan to Do

I haven't posted anything here since November 12, 2010. For several reasons.

I caught what's probably the flu around that time: and haven't really shaken it since. I'm pushing age 60, and next year I am not missing the flu shot.

That's also when I started having problems doing creative work. Dealing with some sort of an influenza-like infection didn't help any, but there may be more going on than that.¹

This post is a sort of status report, telling what's changed in my plans.

Apathetic Lemming of the Month

The Lemming's blog is fun to research and write for: but I've decided that it's time to cut back a little. (Apathetic Lemming of the North (February 21, 2011))

Loonfoot Falls, Minnesota

From May 23, 2008 to November 5, 2010, I'd been cranking out a 250-word post each week in Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette, yet another blog. The idea was to develop the setting, a small town in Minnesota. Quite fictional: although it's at least as accurate a picture as Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. I actually live in a small town in central Minnesota: and that's almost another topic.

Then, in mid-November of last year, I realized that I was having a hard time creating new posts - and not all that many folks had been visiting that particular blog. Since I had a modestly rich set of characters, settings, and situations established: I haven't written anything for that blog since.

The odds are pretty good that I'll restart the Gazette column - and I'm getting to that.

Only So Many Hours in a Day

Some creative types work in a studio - either as a member of a team led by someone else, or as the chief 'idea' person. There's nothing wrong with that, in my opinion.

As I recall, the big creative names in Renaissance Italy, besides being talented artists, ran businesses. These days they'd be commercial artists, interior designers, and a plethora of other job titles. They didn't necessarily do all the work on every piece that had their name on it - any more than Walt Disney or George Lucas have been doing all the work in movies they've made.

Like I say, I have no problem with that. The idea, as I see it, is to get a movie, or a comic strip, or something else 'out the door,' and if it takes a team to do it well: it takes a team.

Which doesn't have all that much to do with what I'm doing.

I'm one person. I've gotten help, from time to time, from members of my family: but there isn't much that I write or display that I didn't make myself.

That's kind of nice for my ego - when the results come out well - but it puts very real limitations on just how much I can expect to get done. Which is why I've cut back on how much I write each day.

The World of Loonfoot Falls

As I wrote those posts about Loonfoot Falls, Minnesota, I found I was collecting material about the semi-fictional world the town was in. I made notes as I went along, even when the idea never made it into one of those 250-word posts.

There's a big difference between some nifty ideas, and a story or picture involving them that someone else might find interesting. Or, I hope, entertaining.

What I've started working on is playing with that 'extra' material from the Loonfoot Falls project, and seeing if I can make them into stories, or illustrations: or something.

Which is part of what I was working on today. Here's what I have to show for most of an afternoon's work on the world of Loonfoot Falls:



That's right: It's a door. An ordinary door that someone's apparently painted green. Or some color that's sort of green.

Not very impressive, by itself.

But, it's a start.

Not-entirely-unrelated posts:

• "Facts, Frustration, and Fear"
  A Catholic Citizen in America (January 28, 2011)
  Particularly
  • "'There's a Hole in My Mind'
• Technical Difficulties
  Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette (November 13, 2010)
• "A Not-Entirely-Misspent Afternoon"
  (August 20, 2010)
• "Getting Serious by Getting Silly: Meet Galaxy Cadet Aster Alpha"
  (March 28, 2010)
• " 'Belvedere Union Grand's Room 313' - a Short-Short Story"
  (November 2, 2009)

Background:

• "The Art Market in Renaissance Florence: Workshops, Production and Business Strategies" (.pdf)
  New York University in Florence (Spring 2009

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¹Something quite unpleasant happened around Christmas time, back in '60s, and I the way I get frantic around that time of year may be more than the usual cultural craziness. I discussed that in another blog. (A Catholic Citizen in America (January 28, 2011))

Making a Plausible Setting

I watched "2001: A Space Odyssey" last Saturday. It's been almost 42 years since I first saw the film, and quite a bit has changed. Including me.

So, I took a trip down memory lane by viewing a movie I liked in my late teens? So what?

Stanley Kubrick's film is still (fairly) convincing science fiction cinema today. In large part, I think, because he understood that his 'futuristic' gadgetry and settings had too look like people actually used them. And, he made an effort to make sure that sets which were filmed as if they connected to each other - would actually connect, if placed side-by-side. And that live sets matched (more or less) the miniatures used for spacecraft exteriors.

I spent quite a bit of time today, working out the deck plan for part of the Blue Buzzard, a ship that's the setting for what I plan as a sequence of stories. For (some) written fiction, that'd be a waste of time. All an author would have to do is make sure that - if any numbers were given - there was enough cubage to accommodate whatever the action called for.

I'd be uncomfortable with that - I've read too many stories where willing suspension of disbelief was stretched when, say, a hallway had three doors on each side in one chapter, with pictures hung between them - and was three paces long in another.

Besides, what I'm aiming for is a story involving quite a few pictures, drawings, whatever. That means that I need to have at least a rough idea of where things go.

That deck plan? I can't use it. The good news is, I know what won't work, know a few features that will - all before making a single sketch or rendering.

Why all this fuss over deck plans today? My imagination had taken a sabbatical. Which is another topic.

Sort-of-related posts:

• "Science Fiction in the Movies: 'The Satan Bug' to 'The Matrix' "
  (January 26, 2010)
• "Futuristic? Or Just Cutting-Edge?"
  (January 23, 2010)
• "Thought for the Day: Computers and Human Brains"
  (August 15, 2009)
• ""The Future, Far as Human Eye Could See" - Hollerith Cards and Anachronisms"
  (August 2, 2009)
• "Predicting the Future: a Look at a Will Be that Was"
  (June 26, 2009)
• "Getting Details Right: Cityscapes"
  (June 25, 2009)

Well, That's Interesting: The Evolution of Galaxies

This might be part of the explanation for why the Galactic Federation of Grooviness hasn't visited us - and why there's so remarkably little evidence that ALF has a real-life counterpart.

"Today's Spiral Galaxies Were Once the Ugly Ducklings"
Space.com (February 8, 2010)

"Beautiful spiral galaxies grew out of odd shapes that astronomers say were the ugly ducklings of the early universe.

"It's long been assumed that galaxies grow over time, and shapes change. But the main construction phase for many modern galaxies was thought to have occurred close to the beginning of time, the first few billion years after the theoretical Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

"Contrary to this conventional view, nearly half of the spiral galaxies of today, like our Milky Way, had peculiar shapes just 6 billion years ago — more recently than had been thought, the study found.

"If confirmed, the finding highlights the importance to many galaxies of collisions and mergers in the recent past. It also provides clues for the unique status of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, researchers said in a statement...."

"...Although our own galaxy is a spiral galaxy, it seems to have been spared much of the drama; its formation history has been rather quiet and it has avoided violent collisions in astronomically recent times. However, the large Andromeda Galaxy from our neighbourhood has not been so lucky and fits well into the 'spiral rebuilding' scenario. Researchers continue to seek explanations for this."

Short version of the article: There were a whole lot more "peculiar" galaxies 6,000,000,000 years ago than there are now. Right around that time, apparently, something happened and the universe started having a whole bunch of spiral galaxies like the one we're in.

Except that ours seems to have had less of the violent activity that normally happened.

By coincidence(?), our sun and Earth formed roughly 4,500,000,000 years back - after the spiral-making events had started.

Maybe it really was a coincidence, with no cause-effect linkage. Or, maybe (really, at our current level of ignorance, this is all pretty much speculation) the universe hadn't gone though the processes it takes for sticky stuff on a wet ball of metal and rock to grow from things wriggling in tidal basins to us - until fairly recently.

With a 1,500,000,000 year lag time, there'd still be room for some seriously old races to be around.

Who knows, maybe that fellow in the magazine was right: and we haven't met E.T. because everybody dies off. Right after reaching the awful, terrible, wasteful and (here comes a frightfully important word) unsustainable level we awful, terrible, wasteful humans are at.

I'm not all that worried, myself. But then, I'm aware that human beings stopped being "sustainable" on Earth when some maniac got the idea of poking seeds in the ground and waiting for them to grow into plants we can eat.

The way I figure it, we're at least 1,000 times over the absolute maximum sustainable limit of this planet. That's assuming that homo sapiens sapiens is strictly and only an opportunistic omnivore, with adults weighing somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty pounds.

Anyway: That article on galactic evolution was interesting.

Space Aliens and Killer Monster Robots - From Outer Space; or Pittsburgh

I definitely need a good night's sleep. I accidentally posted this to Apathetic Lemming of the North.

It starts with: "Horses aren't human.

"It might be well to remember that, when imagining non-human intelligence. Space aliens, in other words."

Now, I'm turning in. Goodnight.

"The Village, the Fence and the Sign"

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."
G. K. Chesterton, The Quotations Page

This story originally appeared in "Brian's Attic" on my Brendan's Island website.

---

The Village, the Fence and the Sign

Brian H. Gill

Once upon a time there was a village. South of the houses was the top of a very tall cliff. North of the houses were high, grassy hills.

It was a beautiful village. The people there were happy and safe, as long as they did not go near the cliff.

There was a sign near the cliff, and a fence. The sign said:

DANGER!

CLIFF!

DO NOT GO NEAR THE EDGE,

OR YOU MAY FALL OFF!

The fence was between the sign and the houses. The sign and the fence had been put up long ago, to keep people from falling off the cliff. Because no one wanted to fall off the cliff, no one built houses near the fence.

One day, Tom, Sharon, Bert and Courtney were playing in the open space between the houses and the fence. As they ran, Tom (who wasn't looking were he was going) ran into the fence.

Tom's head hurt, and so all four went to the village for help. Sam, who lived in the house nearest the hills, put a cloth on Tom's head, and gave him cool water. Soon Tom's head was better.

Many people in the village were worried because Tom ran into the fence, and hurt his head. Everyone knows that it's not good to hurt your head.

Sharon said, "The fence is to blame!" Tom said, "Yes! if the fence were not there, I would not have hurt my head!"

"The fence kept you away from the cliff," said Sam. But only a few people listened to Sam.

Many people in the village thought that Tom was wise. Nobody in the village had fallen off the cliff, but many had run into the fence.

They said, "If the fence had not been there, Tom could not have bumped his head on the fence."

Soon almost everyone in the village agreed. They said, "The fence is to blame!" Then they tore down the fence.

Now everyone in the village could see the cliff. They could also see the sign in front of the cliff.

Bert thought the cliff was beautiful. He said "Look how far you can see, from the edge of the cliff!" Bert could see even farther from the hills behind the village, but the cliff was closer.

Courtney was afraid when she thought about the cliff. She was afraid when she saw the cliff. She was even more afraid when she saw the sign near the cliff.

The sign looked bigger than it had when it was behind the fence.

Courtney decided she didn't like the sign. She said, "The sign keeps me from having fun!"

Bert said, "The sign is to blame!" Courtney said, "Yes! if the sign were not there, I would not be afraid, and Bert could have fun!"

"The sign reminds us to stay away from the cliff," said Sam. But only a few people listened to Sam.

Bert and Courtney told Sam to keep quiet. "When you talk about the sign, you make people feel bad," they said.

Many people from the village thought that Bert and Courtney were wise. They said "If the sign was not there, nobody would be afraid, and everyone could have fun."

Soon almost everyone in the village agreed. They said, "The sign makes us afraid! The sign keeps us from having fun!" Then they tore down the sign.

Bert said, "This feels good! Now there is no sign to make us afraid, or to keep us from having fun." Almost everyone in the village agreed.

One day, Tom, Sharon, Bert and Courtney were playing in the open space between the houses and the cliff. As they ran, Tom (who wasn't looking where he was going) ran near the edge of the cliff.

He lost his balance, and fell off. Nobody ever saw Tom again.

Sharon, Bert and Courtney were very sad. They all said, "The cliff is to blame!"

Soon almost everyone in the village agreed. They said, "If the cliff was not there, people would not fall off!" Then they tried to tear down the cliff.

They dug, and hammered, and pulled at the edge of the cliff. Soon a huge piece of rock, soil, and grass tore away from the edge of the cliff.

Sharon had been standing on that piece of grass. Now the cliff had a new edge, and Sharon was gone. The new edge of the cliff was closer to the village.

Sam ran up. "Stop!" he shouted. "You are bringing the cliff closer to your houses!"

Bert and Courtney shouted, "The cliff is to blame!" Almost everyone in the village agreed. Then they tore another piece off the edge of the cliff.

This time Bert fell off the edge.

Courtney and everyone else in the village were very sad. They were very mad, too. They said, "The cliff is to blame!"

They the tore another piece off the edge of the cliff. The edge of the cliff was next to Courtney's house now. Courtney kicked at a piece of dirt near the edge of the cliff. She lost her balance and fell off the cliff.

Now almost everyone in the village was very, very mad. They missed Courtney, and Bert, and Sharon, and Tom. "The cliff is to blame!" they shouted.

Then they tore another piece off the edge of the cliff. A huge piece of cliff fell off. Courtney's house fell off, too.

Sam tried to stop his neighbors, but he couldn't. Most of the people in the village were too mad to listen.

Sam's neighbor's tore at the cliff. Every so often, one of them fell off. Each time this happened, the rest got even more mad. They tore at the cliff even harder.

More people and houses fell off the cliff.

Soon the only house left was Sam's. The cliff had been torn back to the edge of the hills.

Sam's house rocked back and forth on the edge of the cliff. Then it fell off.

All the houses in the village were gone.

Most of the people in the village were gone.

Sam walked away. A few of his neighbors went with him. They had not been near the cliff.

They built another village. This village was high up in the hills. It was a beautiful village. South of the new village, where the old village had been, was the top of a very tall cliff.

There was a fence near the cliff. A sign was on the fence. The sign said:

DANGER!

CLIFF!

DO NOT GO NEAR THE EDGE,

OR YOU MAY FALL OFF!

copyright © Brian H. Gill 1996

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More:

• "Stories on this Blog"

A Thought for the Day: Change

"Nothing endures but change."
(Heraclitus, 540 BC - 480 BC)

So why are conservationists trying to keep everything just like it was?

Hard Science Fiction, Cultural Blinders and Laban's Sheep

Reading an anthology of hard sf - science fiction which the author and readers perceive as involving known science and rational extrapolations of what's known - I've come to the tentative conclusion that hard sf is written by and for city folks.

Beware Cultural Blinders

The collection is "The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF", edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (1994). I'm up to page 166 of 990, so what I've read can't reasonably be taken as representative of the entire volume - let alone the entire 'hard sf' sub-genre.

On the other hand, what I've read contains two examples of 'hard sf' writers who may not be aware of one of the most important practical applications of science to date. "Science," at any rate, as defined as a conscious, deliberate effort to observe phenomena and draw conclusions from the observations.

The two examples come from the 19th and 20th centuries:

• Rappaccini's Daughter
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne (1844)
• Davy Jone's Ambassador
  • Raymond Z. Gallun (1935)

The first seems like a foretaste of today's ruckus over genetically engineered food products:

"...an appearance of artificialness, indicating that there had been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery of various vegetable species, that the production was no longer of God's making, but the monstrous offspring of man's depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty...."

And

"...'My father created it,' answered she, with simplicity.

" 'Created it! created it!' repeated Giovanni. 'What mean you, Beatrice?'

" 'He is a man fearfully acquainted with the secrets of nature,'..."
(Rappicini's Daughter, Hawthorne, page 83 in "Ascent of Wonder")

Hawthorne raises worthwhile ideas in this short story, like whether or not an altered human being is a person. The story is also written in the 19th century style: giant economy-size paragraphs; rococo linguistic ornamentation; and all.

What I'm concerned with in this post is the idea that Rappaccini "created" a plant and "...that the production was no longer of God's making, but the monstrous offspring of man's depraved fancy...."

In the case of Rappaccini's shrub, "depraved" is a pretty good term. Some of the implications, though, of the author's description of the plant aren't, I think, quite so good a match with reality.

I Think Humanity's Pretty Hot Stuff - But Not That Hot

Take "create" for example. For several decades now, I've read articles about scientists "creating" life in the laboratory. "Mars jars" are still around - and being fine-tuned, as we discover more about what early Mars (probably) was like.

I'm impressed - and very interested - in research into how life, and the cosmos, got started. I'm not so impressed by scientists "creating" life, though. It's like the fellow in a story who had a talk with God, about humanity getting close to being as powerful as God. They were walking next to a stream. God pointed out that He'd created the first man from clay, and asked the man if he could do that.¹ The man said, "sure," leaned over and scooped up some clay. "Oh, no," God said: "You have to make your own clay."

The point is that people work with what we find. We're creative, certainly,² but we have to start with something. Everything we "create" is made by re-arranging existing parts. We've come a long way, since someone got the idea of setting fire to wood, or weaving string out of plant fibers: but we're still using stuff we find already in existence, made of atoms, subatomic particles, photons, or whatever - all sitting on that spacetime turbulence we call quantum foam.³

Incredible! Colossal! Controlled Evolution!

About 74 years ago Raymond Z. Gallun wrote a story about an explorer who encountered a sophisticated undersea civilization on the floor of the Atlantic. This was no "Atlantis:" the people who lived there were at home under two and a half miles of water, and regarded what they'd learned about the near-vacuum and radiation above them with something between horror and repugnance.

The sea-floor people had technology, but didn't use metal. Their 'robots' were animals they'd bred for specific purposes. As described, the seafloor civilization was impressive. And, of course, portrayed as a triumph of science.

"...Handicapped by the impossibility of fire in their normal environment, the sea folk's advancement had followed another path. Controlled evolution was what it amounted to...."
(Davy Jone's Ambassador, Gallun, page 155 in "Ascent of Wonder")

Remember, that was written in 1935. "The Abyss" wouldn't be written for another 54 years. My hat's off to the author, for imagining a plausible - and quite alien - civilization only a few miles below the shipping lanes.

On the other hand, I got the idea that "controlled evolution" was supposed to be exotic, alien, unfamiliar.

Artificial Life Forms - Like Macaroni Wheat

8,000 - or maybe 10,000 - years ago, someone 'doomed' humanity by planting seeds, protecting the plants that grew, harvesting the next-generation seeds, planting seeds from the best-yielding plants, and eating the rest.

From one point of view, it took us thousands of years to recover.⁴

My guess is that most people don't think of domesticated plants and animals as "artificial." Wheat, domestic chickens, and big, juicy apples have been around for so long that it's easy to assume that they've 'always been there.'

Besides, "technology" is something new and cool, right? Not the sort of thing that those serfs and peasants do. Or, these days, those farmers.

I think I see this sort of mindset, even among people involved in agribusiness. "Subconscious plant selection" is what a short history of wheat's (controlled) evolution called the process of selective breeding about ten thousand years back.

Jacob, Laban, and Applied Genetics

Me? I don't think we're all that much more stupid than people were a dozen millennia back. But I'm not convinced that we're that much smarter, either. Better informed, in some ways: particularly since writing has made it easier for us to preserve large volumes of precise information.

And I don't entirely buy the idea that Jacob's deal with Laban (Genesis 30:31) was based on "simple" people's ideas about animal husbandry. Whatever century Jacob was born in, it was thousands of years after people had started breeding animals. Jacob and Laban (who doesn't come across as the brightest bulb in the bin) lived in a society that had been breeding sheep for a very long time.

When Jacob suggested that he be given sheep with an unusual coat - and the birth rate of that rare breed goes up right after Jacob takes over management of the flock - I have to consider the possibility that Jacob knew more about applied genetics than a 'simple' person might.

Something to Beware of, Something to Use

This may be easier for me, than for many city folks, but I think it's a good idea for a science fiction writer to be aware of the last ten thousand or so years of technological development - including the artificial species we've developed. Make that 'over ten thousand years.' Someone apparently decided that wolves would make good hunting companions around the last time glaciers started retreating.

Remember: just because we've been using it since time out of mind, technology is technology.

The flip side is that there's an enormous pool of tech innovations - and the problems they caused - to draw story ideas from. Or interesting settings.

Related posts:

• "Mars Jars Don't Work - But Zinc Might"
  Apathetic Lemming of the North (September 3, 2009)
• "Inventions: Strange; Feared; and Yet-to-Come"
  (August 25, 2009)
• "Four Millennia of Human Nature: I Think Qoheleth is Right"
  (August 3, 2009)
• "Hard Science: It's Not Necessarily a Limitation"
  (July 25, 2009)
• "- - - 'And We're All Gonna Die!' "
  (June 30, 2009)

Background:

• "The Evolution of Wheat - Introduction"
  New Hall Mill
• "Genetics And Evolution Of The Dog"
  NPR (February 13, 2004)
• "Lesson Plans - The Human Role in Dog Evolution"
  National Geographic

---

¹ Or mud. And, yes: I know that Genesis has two creation narratives. (Starting at Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 2:4)

² It's written that we were made "...in the likeness of God...." (Genesis 5:1-2) I think it'd be a bit surprising, taking that as a starting assumption, if we didn't share - however imperfectly - some of God's attributes, including creativity. That creative nature is expressed physically. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2366) I don't think it's such a stretch to think that our reflection of "creativity" can't include economic and artistic pursuits, too. ("Economic Justice for All:" Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (November 13, 1986) (From www.usccb.org/upload/economic_justice_for_all.pdf), particularly paragraph 15 - on page 3)

³ Humanity may have unlocked the last secret of the cosmos in the mid-20th century: but I doubt it. "Quantum foam" still seems to be a pretty good way of describing what happens at the smallest scale we can observe - currently - but I wouldn't be very surprised if someone fine-tuned that model, just as Einstein and company described phenomena that get observable under conditions that Newton didn't know about.

⁴See "Inventions: Strange; Feared; and Yet-to-Come " (August 25, 2009), footnote 1.

The Observed Laws of Nature

About the 'laws of Nature' -

" 'Your mistake is to think that the little regularities we have observed on one planet for a few hundred years are the real unbreakable laws....' "

Grace Ironwood, Chapter 17.4, "That Hideous Strength," C. S. Lewis (1946)

First posted in another blog:

• ""Little Regularities" - A Thought for the Day"
  Apathetic Lemming of the North (September 23, 2009)

The Artistic Temperament: A Quote

"The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs."
G. K. Chesterton, "Heretics," Chapter 16 (1905), via The American Chesterton Society

I'll try to avoid that sort of thing. Except in the Narcissus-X blog, of course.

Timing is Everything

A question that comes up now and then, in discussions of more-or-less related topics like flying saucers, SETI, and the golden age of science fiction, is: "Where is everybody?"

Aliens by the Bushel

Science fiction of the first part of the 20th century often had people - not humans, indigenous people - living on Venus, Mars, Jupiter (cut them some slack, Jupiter might have had a solid surface), Saturn: even Mercury, Neptune, Uranus and Pluto were occasionally peopled with more-or-less plausible alien races.

Many of whom looked an awful lot like us: longish torso; hind legs almost half the total heel-to-head's-crown length, lined up with the torso; feet with a well-defined heel; two forelegs coming off well-defined shoulders, head at the end of a short neck.

Sure, some of them had bat-wings, funny-looking eyes, and weird complexions: but some makeup, an overcoat and an oversize hat, and they could walk around New York City without attracting all that much attention. Okay: maybe San Francisco or Los Angeles.

Aliens? Ain't No Aliens Here

At the other end of the spectrum there's Asimov's (original) 'robot' and 'Foundation' universe, where there weren't any aliens at all. Later writers came up with a variation on that, since we don't seem to like the idea that we're the only ones here.

But, that could be the way it is. That exotic-but-familiar universe of earlier sci-fi may be just wishful thinking. We could be the only people who have ever been living in this solar system, this arm of the Milky Way galaxy, or anywhere in the universe.

Considering that we're not selling souvenirs to, and performing colorful native dances for, tourists from the more well-to-do worlds of the Galactic Empire; or slaving away in the lint-mines of Evil Overlord Squig's Unified Worlds; there is a distinct possibility that we're it.

On the other hand, there may be people who are a whole lot smarter than we are, and who don't bother to travel: physically and openly.

As a character in Walt Kelley's Pogo said, whether it's just us, or we're at the low end of the intelligence scale: it's a sobering thought.

We Meet the Aliens: And They're Us

An intriguing variation of the 'crowded universe' scenario would be a setting some tens or hundreds of thousands of years ahead. Humanity set up shop on Mars, built orbital habitats, found its way to the stars, decided it was worthwhile to terraform Venus, and by the time of the story's 'now' there are aliens out there: exotic, strange-looking people - who are as human as you and I, but whose ancestors haven't been near Earth for quite some time.

Then, there's the possibility that we've already been to the stars. People who were essentially like us were around during the last major glaciation; the sea level was a lot lower then, exposing a great deal of the continental shelf.

Earth Was Not Always As It is Now

Think about it: Many major cities are on or very near the coast. Civilizations - the ones that we know of - grew for the most part along major river valleys. During the last major glacial period, major rivers still ran down to the sea - but the shore wasn't where it is now.

Gone Without a Trace

Somebody pointed out that a civilization equivalent to the one that bankrolled the Columbus expedition could have existed during the inter-glacial period before the one we're in - and left no obvious traces of its existence.

You can go further than that. There's been speculation that the last ice age ended fast, with continental glaciers melting and sliding into the ocean on a scale of weeks or months. If that happened, a thriving civilization's cities would have been flooded and sunk beneath hundreds of feet of water - with only a few survivors, who were near enough to boats and savvy enough to get out to relatively calm water while the getting was good.

Even if the seas rose slowly, it wouldn't have been good for any civilization. Think the worst-case global warming scenario, and multiply it by a few factors.

Atlantis? Sure: Makes a Good Story

No, I don't think there was something like our stories of Atlantis. No fantasy-cities, wizards, and all the rest. Still, it would make a good story.

I do think, though, that we don't know all there is to know about what we call 'prehistory' - the period before the civilizations we're aware of started keeping records outside their memories. There's a detail or two about the Sphinx in Egypt, for example - but it's getting late, and I need my sleep.

Nanotech and Keeping Up

Technology is changing rapidly just now. A very cool term, "nanotech," is being used - and misused - quite a lot. I put together a list of posts relating to nanotechnology, for another blog today. Here it is, with the post I created it for included.

I think the post titles give an idea of what gadgets might plausibly be used in stories set in the 'near future.' For anything more than, say fifty to a hundred years out? I don't think I'll be trying to describe how the technology works - just what it does. And, try to make sure it doesn't resemble a clunky version of something being developed this year by some outfit in Japan or Silicone Valley.

From Apathetic Lemming of the North:

• "20 Years of Building Stuff One Atom at a Time"
  (October 2, 2009)
• "ViRob: Tiny 'Robot' Travels Through Body"
  (June 27, 2009)
• "Nanotechnolgy and Electronics: Atom-Sized Transistors ('Nanotronics'??)"
  (February 20, 2009)
• "Slick Idea from MIT: Nanotech Oil Spill Blotter-Upper"
  (July 10, 2008)
• "The Chembots Are Coming"
  (July 1, 2008)
• "Programmable Metallization Cell (PMC): One Terabyte of Data in a Little Package"
  (June 20, 2008)
• "Spiderman Suit: From CGI to R & D"
  (March 31, 2008)
• "Nanosieves: Energy-Efficient Filters"
  (March 5, 2008)
• "It Bends! It Cleans Itself! It's Solar Powered! Meet the Cell Phone of the Future! Maybe"
  (March 3, 2008)
• "Artificial Skin: New Technologies Coming"
  (February 12, 2008)
• "Nanotech Solar Collector: Revolutionary, With a Big Catch"
  (January 16, 2008)
• "Nanobot Designed for Clearing Arteries"
  (November 21, 2007)
• "Nanotech Batteries in Clothing"
  (October 19, 2007)
• "Something New that Water Can Do"
  (October 19, 2007)

By the way, as I pointed out in today's post in the other blog, " 'Nanotechnology' Doesn't Mean 'Kinda Small'."

Food, Agriculture, Technology, and City Folks

Back in 1969, writing a story about how everybody would be starving in the immediate future would have been really, like, relevant.

These days, not so much: but some smart people don't seem to have gotten the memo.

I'm most of the way through a book, copyright 1990, by a fairly well-known science fiction/speculative fiction writer. It's well-written - and, just as important, I like the author's style. I'll probably be 'studying' it, later, to see just how the author achieves the tone and mood. And then adapt techniques I've learned to my own writing.

On the other hand, this author - remember, I like the stories - gets on my nerves now and again.

A Digression - Expectations, Assumptions, and 20-20 Hindsight

It's not the author having "the Soviets" still running Russia - and being a world power - in a fairly distant future.

20-20 hindsight is unfair. That little mix-up the Soviet Union had in Afghanistan, and a 600-kilometer-long chain of protesters demanding freedom (August 23, 1989) didn't make the headlines all that much.

The Soviet Union collapsing in 1991 or 1992 (depending on what milestones you use) probably came as a huge surprise to many people who had never lived in a world without the worker's paradise.

Like I say, 20-20 hindsight is unfair.

Speculative fiction writers don't, I think, 'predict' so much as extrapolate something they see - or think they see. For example, a timeline I'd been playing with involved the "Holy Soviet Empire" being a fairly active force a hundred years from now - I might still use that, as a sort of 'alternate history' story. But I doubt it. ("Holy Soviet"? I'd been watching the durability of the eastern Church in Russia - and what appeared to be an increasing realization that religion wasn't going to be stamped out - and came up with some hokum based vaguely on the Holy Roman Empire.)

Food, Agriculture, Technology, Malthus, and Opportunistic Omnivores

I've run into a description of homo sapiens sapiens that called us opportunistic omnivores. One phrase stuck in my mind: 'the first impulse a human has, seeing something new, is "I wonder what that tastes like?" ' I think there's something to that.

There are a few creatures on Earth that we can't eat because they're poison to us - and more that we can eat, but can't digest, like most parts of a tree. For the most part, however - although we do have dietary preferences, which vary radically from one culture to another - we can get nourishment from just about anything we can arm-wrestle down our throats.¹

The rather more dignified way to put it is that, for most of the time humanity has been on Earth, we've been - ah - hunter-gatherers. There. Doesn't that make it sound better?

That was then, this is now. About 8,000 years ago some maniac had the crazy idea of taking seeds from plants he and his group liked to eat - and not eating them. Instead, he (or maybe she) planted them and took care to see that no other creature got at the plants first.

The idea caught on - and the human race was doomed. (See "Agriculture as a Mistake," Apathetic Lemming of the North (October 29, 2007))

Right now, we're about a thousand times over the 'carrying capacity' of Earth for our species. Like I said, we're doomed.

We can get by, I'm told, for a little over a month without eating - provided we get plenty of water and oxygen - so I figure that right around November 4th or so, 999 out of every 1,000 people will die: all around the world.

I should probably write a book about it. Some dude named Malthus wrote a book about 200 years ago, saying that irresponsible people were having babies faster than farmers could raise food - and we're all gonna die.

He took a lot longer to say that, and used bigger words - but that's the gist of it. And yes, I'm being a trifle unfair to that particular serious thinker.

The point is, this Malthus made quite a name for himself, by pointing out a terrible disaster that would doom humanity.

It hasn't happen, but his followers are still hopeful.

Wait a Minute Here! Let's Have a Reality Check

That 'thousand times over [delicate] Earth's carrying capacity' is a rough approximation - based on data which I haven't quite finished verifying. Statistically speaking, though - I'm right.

Humanity is doomed.

Civilization is going down with the scrubbin' bubbles.

And we're all gonna die.

Well, that last is almost certainly true: Given time, each human being dies. But seriously? I don't see a rapid increase in the rate, any time soon.

You see, that '999 out of a thousand will die' is based on the assumption that we all practice hunting-gathering.

Which we don't.

And haven't, most of us, for almost ten thousand years.

But if we did - and were living as opportunistic omnivores with tools that made us competitive with coyotes and wolves - Earth couldn't possibly support 6,000,000,000 of us. Each family group of us needs too much land.

So - we're doomed?

Not hardly.

News Flash! Human Beings are Clever

I think that people who are convinced that 'we're all gonna die' - from Malthus to a butterfly expert named Paul, to today's crop of doom-criers, have all missed a subtle, but important, point.

Human beings didn't stop being clever in the upper paleolithic.

We've got a long history (and a longer pre-history) of changing the rules.

Like, 'it's dark and cold at night.'

We don't like being in the dark and cold.

We figured out how to make fire.

Sometime after that, we figured out how to put out fires.

I'm not saying it's all beer and skittles - for example, not too long ago we found out why it's not a good idea to turn off the pumps in a nuclear reactor. Remember Chernobyl? Some of the 'fires' we're learning to put out these days are pretty serous.

But I don't think that people are any stupider now, than they were when someone invented string, or Archimedes got credit for inventing a helical water pump.

You Mean, Farmers Don't Look Like That? Well, Sha-Zam!

Reading that (very entertaining) book, I get the feeling that the author has something in common with quite a few of America's self-described best and brightest.

They haven't a clue what a farmer looks like.

I often get the impression that members of congress, and the 'experts' they listen to, have a mental image of what a farmer looks like that - how to I put this - is alternatively accurate.

He's got a slight posture problem: stands and walks with a slouch. Nothing serious, but noticeable. He wears dirty denim bib overalls, sometimes with a frayed straw hat, occasionally wears shoes - and sometimes has a shirt on. A flannel shirt.

He talks funny, and his intelligence is somewhere between that of an average reality-show contestant and a rutabaga.

If you asked America's serious thinkers to describe a 21st-century America farmer - jump-starting their frontal cortex in the process - America's best would probably realize that Joe Farmer doesn't pull the plow himself, or use a horse - and knows how to read and write.

Actually, the hayseed stereotype isn't all that far from the way (some) farmers dressed - in the warmer parts of America - maybe a century ago. And still do, when weather and work demand it. They do, however, wear boots. Farmers work around and in some very big, very powerful, machinery: and they need to keep their feet more than most office workers.

I think one of the problems that 'intelligent, sophisticated' people have is that, like just about everybody else in America these days - they're city folk.

I don't have anything against people who live in a city, or in the residential areas huddled around cities. For economic reasons, most people need to live close to - or in - cities. That's the way it is right now.

It does seem, though, that city folks - even if they've flown between cities - really aren't all that knowledgeable about what it's like outside the metropolitan areas. (See "The Effect of Information Technology and Media Preoocupation with Urban Events on the Relative Sophistication of Urban and Rural Populations ," Another War-on-Terror Blog (April 13, 2008))

The point I'm making is that, despite commonly-held (and, I trust, unconsidered) beliefs in America and quite a number of other places in the world, people don't have to practice agriculture the way we did a thousand years ago.

One of the big, recent, changes was the "green revolution" in the 20th century. If you're not directly or indirectly involved with agribusiness, you probably haven't heard of it. It doesn't fit the 'and we're all gonna die' model - and good news like that hasn't been relevant since sometime in the sixties.

Based on the fossil record and a few thousand years of recorded history, I doubt the "green revolution" is the last gasp of human ingenuity. These days, we may be more likely to build cute dancing robots, than something of more drearily serious merit: but I don't think we're all that much less bright than the people who figured out how to make tools out of flint.

And no: I don't think that 99.9% of humanity will be dead by mid-November.

• "- - - 'And We're All Gonna Die!' "
  (June 30, 2009)
• " 'The Dream' - a Short-Short Story"
  (June 28, 2009)
• "Getting Details Right: The Vast, Huge, and Very Large City Of The Future"
  (June 25, 2009)

---

¹ A vignette.

A diplomat, getting briefed on what to expect from the Terran ambassador, is told: "Whatever you do, don't let the human get hungry!"

Inventions: Strange; Feared; and Yet-to-Come

Science / speculative fiction often deals with technology, and how it affects people, culture, and society. Less often, the idea that people affect technology is explored.

I've seen quite a change in attitude towards technology, over the decades. Tales of Future Past, a remarkable collection by David S. Zondy, celebrates the days when:

"...our future was supposed to be a sort of technocratic, atomic-powered, computer-controlled, antiseptic, space-travelling Jerusalem that would at last free us from the curse of Eden and original sin. We expected some how, some way that we would be on the road to being freed from the human condition. We expected a sort of bloodless, benign French Revolution with Hugo Gernsback as our Voltaire and Carl Sagan as our Robespierre. And what did we get? The City of Man with Tivo. The fact is, science fiction and popular science had set the bar so high that only the Second Coming with ray guns would have satisfied...."
(Tales of Future Past)

I watched that view change to the 'and we're all gonna die' belief that technology was evil. Or, for the more up-to-date: polluting; dehumanizing; depersonalizing; and humanity is doomed anyway.

Beware the Demon Technology and Other Silliness

My guess is that some circles still see technology as a sort of secular demon bent on reducing humanity to a deplorable state of ungrooviness, Although the post-apocalyptic future of mutant frogs (Hell Comes to Frogtown) and armored dune buggies has a certain panache, I really don't think it's all that likely.

Humanity somehow survived agriculture.¹ If we can do that, we can take on just about anything.

Although some technologies are more dangerous than others, I don't think that anything human beings mess with is, strictly speaking, safe. That's because of some assumptions I have, about the nature of reality.

• Some people aren't generally
  • Nice
  • Competent
  • Careful
• Technology is most dangerous when it's used by people who are
  • Not nice or
  • Not competent or
  • Not careful or
  • Some combination of the above

I also don't think that any technology makes people do things. Yes: it's easier for people to travel, for example, now that we've got automobiles and airplanes. But people had been traveling for years before the automobile was invented.

People are People, Tools are Tools: There's a Difference

What we do can be done on a larger scale if we've got tools: but it's the human mind directing the tool; not the other way around.

Buck Rogers and the Temple of Doom

Technology can be part of the background, or it could be a central part of the conflict.

Take the early days of the industrial revolution, when people who didn't like the new technology sabotaged it with their wooden shoes. Or, didn't. Makes a good story, though. (Merriam-Webster Inc. has a pretty good discussion of where the word "sabotage" comes from.)

The point is: that's conflict, centering around technology.

A few short references to technology can place a story in history - or quickly establish a setting. Mention blowguns, poison darts, and a dugout canoe, and many (most, I hope) readers will fill in the rest of the setting from their own (more-or-less accurate) knowledge. Talk about a disrupter, shield generators, and a landing pod and you've evoked a very different setting.

Show your readers someone donning a space suit, getting into a dugout canoe, and dodging poison darts on the way to a shield generator - and you've either hooked or confused the reader.

All of which leads into another list of posts. This set deals with inventions: strange; feared; and (in the case of the warp drive) yet-to-come.

Unless otherwise noted, these posts are from Apathetic Lemming of the North.

• "Gamers are Geezers, Apparently: 35, Overweight, and Bummed Out"
  (August 23, 2009)
• "The Threat of Dangerous New Technologies: It's Not All That New"
  (August 23, 2009)
  • Socrates tried to warn us!
• "Asimov's 3 Laws, Real Robots, and Common Sense"
  (August 20, 2009)
• "Good News, Neural Devices Connect Brain, Computers: Bad News, Same Thing"
  (July 11, 2009)
• "Never Heard of the Packing Noodle? There's a Reason"
  (July 1, 2009)
• "Warp Drive Might Not Be Stable: Physcisists Take Another look at Alcubierre's Work"
  (June 12, 2009)
• "Tetris: Invented in Russia (This Time, Chekov's Right)"
  (June 6, 2009)
• "Very Odd Gizmos for the Home"
  (May 16, 2009)
• "Thomas Edison: Inventions by the Bushel"
  (May 12, 2009)
• "Technology, Perceptions of Magic, and the Human Condition"
  (May 8, 2009)
• "Warp Drive: Yes, it May Be Possible; But Don't Hold Your Breath"
  (May 7, 2009)
• "Helicopter Ejection Seats, Detachable Dog Sacks, and Other Weirdness"
  (March 18, 2009)
• "Handwriting's Dying! So are Our Personalities! (According to the BBC)"
  (February 26, 2009)
• "Protesting Against New Technology - the Early Days"
  (February 23, 2009)
• "Why 'Hello,' and Mark Twain About Telephone Conversations"
  (August 20, 2008)
• "Yesterday's Inventions"
  (August 16, 2008)
• "DC Gun Ban, Online Censorship, Individual Rights, and Power to the People"
  Another War-on-Terror Blog² (June 27, 2008)
• "Cure for Cancer and Energy from the Sea? This Might Actually Work"
  (June 16, 2008)
• "Inventor Buried in Pringles Can - No Kidding"
  (June 2, 2008)
• "The Telectroscope: New York - London Live Link"
  (May 23, 2008)
• "May 16, 1960 - Invention of the Laser on That Very Day: Sort of"
  (May 16, 2008)
• " 'Green' Gadgets That Actually Make Sense"
  (May 7, 2008)
• "Cell Phone Technology of the Future: Never Mind, it's Here"
  (April 30, 2008)
• "Better Ideas From America: Really Big Water Balloons"
  (April 13, 2008)
• "A Website Celebrating Very Strange Patents"
  (April 6, 2008)
• "Better Ideas from America: Strap-on Automotive Dog Sack"
  (March 20, 2008)
• "Better Ideas From France: A Car That Runs on Compressed Air"
  (January 24, 2008)
• "Swedish Sauna House"
  (January 2, 2008)
• "EEEK! Guns! Hoplophobia and Foreign Policy"
  Another War-on-Terror Blog² (December 23, 2007)
• "Better Ideas From ... "
  (October 15, 2007)
• "Top 10 Inventions of the Middle Ages - That's Right: Middle Ages"
  (September 22, 2007)
• "Agriculture as a Mistake"
  (October 29, 2007)
• "Don't Know What to Say?"
  (September 19, 2007)
  • Okay: This one's a stretch

And, this decade's 'it's gonna kill us all' invention, CERN's Large Hadron Collector:

• "Physics Student Notes Large Hadron Collider Glitch"
  (March 25, 2009)
• "Anatoli Bugorski and the Proton Ray of Doom "
  (February 7, 2009)
• "LHC Peril! Large Hadron Collider Black Hole Will Eat Earth!! - or, Not"
  (January 27, 2009)
• "CERN's Large Hadron Collider Goes Full Circuit"
  (September 10, 2008)
• "Large Hadron Collider - Tests Still Going Well "
  (August 26, 2008)
• "CERN's Large Hadron Collider: the Proton Beam Failsafe "
  (August 22, 2008)
• "Large Hadron Collider - the Countdown Continues "
  (July 6, 2008)
• "Large Hadron Collider - Huge Research Tool "
  (June 28, 2008)
• "CERN Large Hadron Collider: Photos "
  (March 20, 2008)
• "Photos of Five Cool Research Facilities"
  (January 5, 2008)

---

¹ Agriculture may have been the single most dangerous technology humanity has come up with yet. It took us thousands of years to recover from the devastating effects of its use. ("Agriculture as a Mistake" Apathetic Lemming of the North (October 29, 2007))

² This isn't a perfect world. Sometimes not-nice people do naughty things; and won't stop even when they're asked nicely. Which leads me to this set of thoughts:

• War isn't nice - things get broken and people die
  • This is not good.
• Diplomacy can lead to mutually-acceptable compromise
  • This is good
• War is not nice
  • But sometimes it's better than the alternative

(I value individual freedom, even for people who don't agree with a country's dominant culture. I'll admit to having a rather counter-cultural attitude on this topic: which I discuss in Another War-on-Terror Blog.)

What's pertinent to writing in the science fiction / speculative fiction genre(s) is that 'dangerous' technology isn't

• Always a weapon
• Bad by itself

Think LP gas, computers and movable type. (Discussed in Individual Freedom: a Treasure, Another War-on-Terror Blog (June 27, 2008))

The Threat of Dangerous New Technologies: It's Not All That New

An expert recently said:

"...'My issue is that it's not just gaming. It's social networking. It's the Web in general,' said [analyst at In-Stat Jim] McGregor. 'We've gained so much, but still it puts people in front of a computer screen for hours on end. It gives Americans just another reason to be fat, dumb and lazy.'..."
Apathetic Lemming of the North (August 23, 2009)

I'd be a bit more aghast at that proclamation, if I hadn't heard it before. About the Internet, cable television, television, and the telephone. As long as I can remember, someone's been concerned, sometimes with reason, about newfangled technologies.

Science fiction/speculative fiction stories can center around the effects of technology on people and cultures. Even when the story doesn't, I think it's a good idea to give a thought to what technologies are being used, how they affect people - and what people think about them.

An author doesn't have to start from scratch, imagining how technological change might affect people. Over the millennia, we've gone through quite a bit. And, sometimes, there seem to be repeating patterns.

Agriculture as a Dangerous New Technology

And yet, somehow, we've survived. Ever since some reckless maniac shoved seeds in the ground and stuck around: instead of doing the decent, sensible thing and following the herds like a proper hunter-gatherer. Pretty soon, all the counter-cultural elements in society were putting seeds in the ground and ignoring all that was noble and decent. Well, maybe not: but my guess is that a few people saw it that way.

Somewhat after agriculture destroyed humanity's culture and heritage - or opened new vistas of promise - someone developed writing. Probably several someones.

Writing as (Dangerous) Information Storage and Retrieval Technology

As long as writing was used exclusively for recording business transactions, the damage was limited to the commercial sector.

But no: some wiseacre decided to start recording ideas in this dangerous new information storage and retrieval technology.

That's where Plato comes in.

Around 360 BC, Plato wrote a work we call Phaedrus. Yes: wrote. That's the verb used in quite a few discussions of Plato's work, and it's quite possible that the ancient Greek philosopher did use the new information technology.

New, and apparently controversial.

In Phaedrus, Plato has his mentor, Socrates, enlightening someone in a dialog. I'll pick up where Socrates tells about a story he picked up in Egypt:

"...one of the ancient gods of that country; the same to whom that holy bird is consecrated which they call, as you know, Ibis, and whose own name was Theuth. He, they proceed, was the first to invent numbers and arithmetic, and geometry and astronomy; draughts moreover, and dice, and, above all, letters. Now the whole of Egypt was at that time. under the sway of the god Thamus, who resided near the capital city of the upper region, which the Greeks call Egyptian Thebes...."
(Phaedrus, p. 103-104) ¹ [emphasis mine]

Interesting story, if somewhat long-winded by contemporary standards - that's just a brief excerpt. Socrates goes on, and eventually gets to where a ruler is evaluating this invention: letters. This king, it would seem, invented regulatory agencies.

"...'The king replied: 'Most ingenious Theuth, one man is capable of giving birth to an art, another of estimating the amount of good or harm it will do to those who are intended to use it. And so now you, as being the father of letters, have ascribed to them, in your fondness, exactly the reverse of their real effects. For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the internal use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory, but for recollection,--for recalling to, not for keeping in mind. And you are providing for your disciples a show of wisdom without the reality. For, acquiring by your means much information unaided by instruction, they will appear to possess much knowledge, while, in fact, they will, for the most part, know nothing at all; and, moreover, be disagreeable people to deal with, as having become wise in their own conceit, instead of truly wise.'..."
(Phaedrus, p. 104-105) ¹ [emphasis mine]

This was over two thousand years ago: a tad over 23 1/2 centuries. We're so used to the idea of recording and retrieving information with writing that we don't think of it as a technology. These philosophers were much closer to a time when writing was starting to affect how people handled information in a big way.

And, apparently, some didn't like it.

Socrates, of course, has more to say:

"...Soc. For this, I conceive, Phaedrus, is the evil of writing, and herein it closely resembles painting. The creatures of the latter art stand before you as if they were alive, but if you ask them a question, they look very solemn, and say not a word. And so it is with written discourses. You could fancy they speak as though they were possessed of sense, but if you wish to understand something they say, and question them about it, you find them ever repeating but one and the self-same story. Moreover, every discourse, once written, is tossed about from hand to hand, equally among those who understand it, and those for whom it is in nowise fitted; and it does not know to whom it ought, and to whom it ought not, to speak. And when misunderstood and unjustly attacked, it always needs its father to help it; for, unaided, it can neither retaliate, nor defend itself...."
(Phaedrus, p. 107) ¹ [emphasis mine]

This Could be the End of Civilization as We Know It - 360 BC

Socrates was right, in a way. Before the development of writing as a medium for storing complex ideas, philosophers like Socrates and Plato relied on their own memories, and on their ability to talk about what they'd thought about. Memorizing massive amounts of information like that required a sort of mental discipline that's lacking today. I'm pretty sure that I have to work harder at wrote memorization than I probably would if I didn't know how to read and use an index or table of contents.

On the other hand, if it weren't for this dangerous new technology rotting away the mental powers of its users and (potentially) deceiving them into thinking that they actually understood what they'd read: we wouldn't know what Socrates and Plato had on their minds.

And, although they didn't have a perfect track record when it came to figuring out what things were and how they worked, they and others like them helped lay the foundation for the sciences, philosophy, and the arts.

Socrates had a point, too, when he talked about the lack of interactivity that's nearly unavoidable with writing. We didn't have a workaround for that until Information Age technologies started destroying humanity's culture and heritage - or opening new vistas of promise. Maybe a little of both.

This Could be the End of Civilization as We Know It - 2009 AD

We've gotten used to the sort of lazy memory that writing encourages, and discovered that there were advantages to being able to get at the actual words of great thinkers like Plato - not what a succession of well-meaning but less gifted people remembered someone telling them about what their teachers said Plato thought.

Don't get me wrong: oral traditions are more accurate than some people were willing to believe.² I'd still prefer the words set down by someone like Plato or Bhagwan Swaminarayan, than what someone remembers about what those people said.

I don't think that writing - symbols on a flattish surface which record ideas - will disappear, or become something that always needs a keyboard. Anyone who remembers the 'paperless office' knows what I'm talking about.

Oral tradition, I'm pretty sure, will also continue.

It's just that it looks like we're on the edge of another radical change in how people handle information. 'Information Age' technology is already changing how news is handled - and how people communicate with each other.

Me? I'm not worried. We survived agriculture: I don't think cell phones and Internet cafes will destroy us.

Related posts:

• "Gamers are Geezers, Apparently: 35, Overweight, and Bummed Out"
  Apathetic Lemming of the North (August 23, 2009)
• "Thought for the Day: Computers and Human Brains"
  (August 15, 2009)
• "Four Millennia of Human Nature: I Think Qoheleth is Right"
  (August 3, 2009)
• " 'The Dream' - a Short-Short Story"
  (June 28, 2009)
• "DC Gun Ban, Online Censorship, Individual Rights, and Power to the People"
  Another War-on-Terror Blog (June 27, 2008)

---

¹ All excerpts are from:

• "The Phaedrus, Lysis, and Protagoras of Plato"
  By Plato, Josiah Wright, Immanuel Bekker
• The book's title page reads: "The Phaedrus, Lysis, and Protagoras of Plato"
  A new and literal translation mainly from the text of Bekker
  by J. Wright, M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge,
  London: MacMillan and Co., Limited New York: The MacMillan Company, 1900

Another translation is available online:

• "Phaedrus"
  By Plato
  Written 360 B.C.E
  Translated by Benjamin Jowett
  The Internet Classics Archive, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law faculty website has something to say about Plato and Socrates.

² "...The validity and reliability of this type of transmission are confirmed by modern researchers of the Nahuatl culture such as Miguel León Portilla
(Miguel León Portilla, El destino de la palabra. De la oralidad y los glifos mesoamericanos a la escritura alfabética, FCE, Mexico City 1996, pp. 19-71)...." ("Our Lady of Guadalupe: Historical Sources" L'Osservatore Romano, via EWTN (January 23, 2002))

A Sense of Scale and Science Fiction Writers

Most people (I hope) know that Florida is closer to Jamaica than India is.

A sense of scale - at least a rough one - can, I think make or break the willing suspension of disbelief necessary for a story. Say you were reading a story about vacationers who took a bus from Hawaii to Florida, spent a day on a boat getting to Jamaica, and another day on a similar boat, getting to India?

Unless it was a magic bus, a magic boat - and the author had clued you in that the story involved (very) unusual vehicles - you might have a hard time staying focused on the story.

How Far is Alpha Centauri? Or, Let's Get Sirius

Let's say you're reading a science fiction (or, if you're up-to-date, speculative fiction) story about an epic space war. Nothing wrong with that, by the way. Not for me, anyway, Think of it like this: Star Wars did pretty well as a story.

Knowing Your Way Around the Neighborhood - Stellar Neighborhood, That Is

Now, in this space epic, you discover that it takes about twice as long to get from Sol (Earth's sun) to Alpha Centauri, as it does to get from Sol to Sirius. So far, so good. Sirius, at (roughly) eight and a half light years is approximately twice as far as Alpha Centauri.

Then, you read that it takes about the same amount of time to get from Alpha Centauri to either Sol or Sirius. Hey: Alpha Centauri is half-way to Sirius from Sol, right?

Wrong. It's pretty obvious that the author didn't check his sky charts. Alpha Centauri is about a light year farther from Sirius than Sol is. It's a bit over nine and a half light years from Sirius to Alpha Centauri.¹

Although the distance from Alpha Centauri to Sirius isn't obvious from a sky chart, it's pretty clear that Alpha Centauri and Sirius are not particularly close to each other in the sky: so making Alpha Centauri a sort of stellar Midway between Sol and Sirius isn't all that sensible.

Finding out, in general terms, what direction things are in isn't the worst thing a writer could do.

Space is Big: Really, Really Big

I don't remember where I ran into this discussion of cosmic distances, and can't remember the exact words, but it went something like this:

Space is very big. It's so big that it doesn't have a bottom. It's bottomless. It's bottomless at the top and at the bottom. It doesn't have any sides, either.

That's actually a pretty good description. Distances here on Earth can be big, by human standards, and the world gets bigger when we leave this planet.

A Drive-Through Model of the Solar System

Peoria made a scale model of the Solar system (micro-reviewed January 18, 2008 in another blog). I think it's a pretty good educational tool for giving people a 'feel' for comparative distances in our immediate vicinity. Remember: Earth is about 8,000 miles across.

The dome of Lakeview Museum of the Arts and Sciences's planetarium is our son, Sol, in this model. The scale is 42 foot = 1,000,000 miles.

Here's how big the model is:

---

Body	Distance	Size
	(from sun/Sol)	(diameter)
The sun/Sol	N/A	36 feet
Mercury	0.25 miles	1.5 inches
Venus	0.5 miles	3.8 inches
Earth	0.75 miles	4 inches
Mars	1.2 miles	2.2 inches
Ceres	1.6 miles	0.3 inches
Jupiter	4 miles	45 inches
Jupiter's rings	-	76 inches
Saturn	8 miles	38 inches
Saturn's rings	-	90 inches
Uranus	15 miles	16 inches
Uranian rings	-	32 inches
Neptune	23 miles	15 inches
Neptunian rings	23 miles	30 inches
Pluto	40 miles	0.7 inches
Eris	62 miles	0.8 inches

(Source: What is the Community Solar System?)

At this scale, Alpha Centauri A and B would be around 205,290 miles away: closer than the moon, but not by much.²

Basically, Space is BIG

These models are helpful in giving some idea of just how big the Solar system is - and how far it is between stars.

How Much Detail and Precision?

I don't think a writer could be expected to - or should try to - give the reader a precise 'feel' for just how much distance is involved. Although we've got ways to deal with very large numbers in mathematics, our brains don't seem to be particularly good at translating something like "205,290 miles" into a comprehensible distance. Not the way we can translate "four feet" into something concrete: something that can be seen with the mind's eye.

I do think that a writer can use radically scaled-down models, like the Peoria Solar system, to build a word-picture for the reader.

I also think that it's important for a writer to know a bit more about the scale of things than what gets told to the reader.

One page from the Television Tropes & Idioms website, "Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale," has an impressive list of howlers in science fiction and fantasy animation, comics, and live-action shows.

Depending on how you look at it, this page could be a sort of cautionary tale of what a writer must do to avoid ridicule. Or, an example of how a series can have astonishingly goofy mistakes and still be successful. The Star Trek franchise is a fairly familiar example of this, from either point of view.

For example:

"...'All Our Yesterdays' refers to Vulcan as being millions of light-years away. Most of the stars of the entire galaxy fit in a sphere with a diameter of about 100,000 light-years. That would put Vulcan in the Andromeda galaxy or make Vulcan's sky really empty...."
("Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale")

Don't get me wrong: I like the original Star Trek series and the subsequent television series, and have seen several of the movies. But that doesn't mean that I take the franchise as particularly serious science fiction. 'Speculative' fiction - maybe. I picked part of the Star Trek collection of bloopers because the franchise is fairly well-known, at least in American culture.

"...And then there's the Green Lantern Corps. The entire universe divided into 3600 sectors, each of which is patrolled by two (it used to be just one) Space Policemen. And most of them seem to spend most of their time on Oa, or their favourite planet, or pursuing obscure goals of their own...."
("Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale")

It's a Matter of Time

It's a familiar science fiction (oops - speculative fiction) situation: Humanity reaches the stars, and there's a wide range of people out there: Some with stone age technology, a few with 'bronze tech' - quite a large number with interstellar space ships not at all unlike what humans are using - and there's an incredibly ancient race or two, a million years old.

Good stories can be told with a setting like that: but I'm not particularly comfortable with it. From my point of view, that million-year-or-so range in the length of time the various people have been around is way, way too short.

And the wild coincidence that the majority are at the same point as humanity, when it comes to transportation tech?

Today, we've got pretty good reason to believe that the universe has been around for between 11,200,000,000 and 20,000,000,000 years. Or 10,000,000,000 and 15,000,000,000 years. Or 13,000,000,000 and 14,000,000,000 years.

I'll pick 14,000,000,000 years as a reasonable mid-range guess.

Human beings have been keeping written records for about 5,000 years. (Discussion and list of resources in "Four Millennia of Human Nature: I Think Qoheleth is Right" (August 3, 2009).)

Not so many zeroes, yes?

Cosmologists are pretty sure that it took a seriously long time for elements heavier than hydrogen to build up to the point where there was enough to form rocky planets - and us.

Maybe the scenarios where humanity is one of a number of people who, on the cosmic time scale, are all about the same age, aren't all that wildly improbable. (See "Life on Other Worlds: Evolution, Orbits, and the Galactic Environment" (August 13, 2009).)

There's Ancient, and there's Ancient

I think there's a tendency to think of anything more than a few hundred years old as "ancient." Well and good, but let's look at what "ancient" can mean.

When the Roman Republic formed, Egypt was already into its late period, running through its 20th to 30th Dynasties, and upwards of 2,000 years old.

It would have been like the American Revolutionaries living in a world where the Roman Empire was still a going concern.

That's just what we know about the 5,000 or so years since Cuneiform was developed.

Getting Imaginative

Let's say the universe is 14,000,000,000 years old. And, let's say that the Solar system formed about 4,500,000,000 years ago: which makes it a bit less than a third the age of the universe.

And, let's say that the Solar system wasn't quite the first planetary system where life got started - or where people have lived.

The Carboniferous period, when Earth's coal was laid down, is about 300,000,000 years back. That's roughly 1/47 the age of the universe, assuming that today's cosmologists are pretty close to the mark, and 1/15 the age of the Solar system.

I don't think it's all that unreasonable to think that another planet was formed 3/47 of the universe's age before the Solar system was - and that there was enough non-hydrogen around then to allow a planet like Earth to form. I'll grant that I'm on slightly shaky ground here, but I'm just imagining.

That 'first Earth' would have been as old as Earth is, now, 600,000,000 years ago. They'd have had another 300,000,000 years to work on transportation technologies before the middle of the Carboniferous period came on Earth.

They might have developed ways of getting around that we're beginning to think about: and had time to check out interesting spots in this galaxy.

They might have been curious about what would happen on Earth, and left some equipment behind to keep an eye on the place. Maybe on the moon, maybe here on Earth, in rock that they figured would be stable.

Or maybe they buried something here, confident that it would stay buried under tons of rock on a primitive planet.

Part of what's now the Arrowhead region of Minnesota might have caught their eye for this burial. There's bedrock there that had already been fairly stable for about 200,000,000 years then.

Time passed.

When the latest set of glaciers melted on the North American continent, they exposed bedrock in what's now northern Minnesota that's upwards of 543,000,000 years old. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources identifies some of the exposed bedrock in the Border Lakes Subsection as being from the Precambrian, a period starting 453,000,000 years back: more specifically, from the "Late Archean and Early Proterozoic".

Maybe somewhere, a few hours' drive north of where I live, covered by a few feet of soil, tree roots and moss, a silted-in passage leads down to a chamber where equipment - and maybe something else - has been waiting for half a billion years.

Maybe what was a deeply-buried tomb has become a shallow grave. Shallow enough to allow escape.

Maybe H. P. Lovecraft was an optimist.

And the Moral of This Story Is - - -

Obsessing over nit-picking details isn't a good way of getting a project finished - and probably wouldn't result in a particularly interesting story. On the other hand, I think it's a good idea to do a little homework, check the numbers, and avoid having your characters ride a bus from Hawaii to Florida.

That yarn about a Thing buried in northern Minnesota? No, I really don't think so. On the other hand, paying attention to the scale of the universe - in time and space - allows a writer to start imagining on a large scale.

Related posts:

• "Hard Science: It's Not Necessarily a Limitation"
  (July 25, 2009)
• "Getting Details Right: The Vast, Huge, and Very Large City Of The Future"
  (June 25, 2009)

Background:

• "Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale"
  Television Tropes & Idioms
• The Internet STELLAR DATABASE
• "What is the Community Solar System?"
  "Tour the World's Largest Model of the Solar System"
• "THE THOUSAND-YARD MODEL"
  "or, The Earth as a Peppercorn"
  Guy Ottewell, via National Optical Astronomy Observatory (1989)
• "Moon"
  World Book at NASA

---

¹ I wouldn't have the distance between Sirius and the closest major star, if I didn't use The Internet Stellar Database. That website has the position of (most) stars within 75 light years of us, and a pretty-good online function for getting distances between stars. I'd be able to figure it out, with a star catalog I've got: but the math is a bit tedious.

² At this scale, a light year (5,878,786,100,000 miles) is 246,909,012 feet, if I've got the numbers right. Or, again on this scale, a light year is around 46,700 miles. Which makes Alpha Centauri, the nearest main-sequence star (stars - it's a binary, at least), at 4.39 light years, around 205,290 miles away. Which is closer than the moon, but not by much. The distance from the center of Earth to the center of our moon is about 238,890 miles. On average. The moon's orbit is slightly elliptical, so the center-to-center distance ranges from 225,740 to 251,970 miles. According to a page at NASA, anyway. They should know, since they've sent a few ships out there - and gotten them back.