From Dark Underbelly/Blood Relations
"That sounds like a case of 'atheist in church,'" Lewis said when I was finished.
"Atheist in church?" I asked. "More wise sayings from the Founder?" Lewis was not above quoting from the writings of the Founder of Stochasticism, who is never referred to by name, mainly because he gave so many names, all of them false. Quite a Trickster was the Founder.
"The very same," Lewis said. "The Founder had a lot of things to say about religion and what place it has in society. 'The Atheist in Church' is one of his best essays. He says, look, there are a whole slew of reasons for having churches. They're a form of social organization, you meet people, get moral instruction helpful for living in society. They can be a store of wealth, a means of education, all that stuff. So even an atheist might wish to join a church, regardless of what his opinion of the theology might be.
"But an atheist makes the theists nervous. He can abide by all the same rules, profess the same moral code, and still the regular churchmen don't like his presence. He's not committed to the group, you see. He doesn't say the password. A secret password can't be something that you can figure out by just being reasonable, it has to be something arbitrary. So religions make their believers do things that just don't make sense. That's what really defines the group, the things they do that don't make sense."
"So what does that have to do with me?" I asked him.
"It's a matter of freedom," he said. "We like to think that freedom is a good thing, but joining society means giving up some freedoms. And society doesn't want it to be a conditional thing. It's not supposed to be a matter of choice. We much prefer to have people who can't rather than won't transgress. Which is the better husband, the man who couldn't beat his wife no matter how he feels, or the man who simply refrains?"
I opened my eyes to see how closely he was watching me when he said that. But he was staring out a view panel at the clouds. "I thought that the whole point of it was moral choices," I said. "You talk as if not having a choice is better."
"'Lead us not into temptation,'" he quoted. "Because we might succumb." He looked over at me and grinned. In my current exhausted state it looked a little like a grimace.
"There are a lot of things in life that we don't know about until they happen to us. It's a lot of potential rather than actual freedom. And the potential may be bogus. We might not be able to do it when push comes to shove. That's part of what dice living is about. To test the limits. But if you do it from the dice, the gods might not get so angry at the freedom. That's a clear thread in most mythology. The gods get very angry when confronted by a free man."
"So do you think that it's just the gods being angry with me?" I asked. I smiled again to show that I thought it was a joke.
His face got a bit more serious though. "That's all metaphor," he said. "'A man's reach must exceed his grasp, else what's a meta for?' The gods are stand-ins for human fate in human society. Stick your head up too far and the body politic will try to shear it off. You make people nervous, pardner. They don't know what motivates you. They don't know what you're capable of, but they're pretty sure you're capable of more than they want to know. If there's the choice of having dinner with someone who hated me and wished me dead -- but couldn't do me harm no matter what -- versus someone who liked me, but could kill me without a thought if he so chose, well, most people would go for the first guy, not the second."
I sat up and looked at him carefully, but he was back to watching the cloud patterns. I looked out at them, but I knew that he saw things in them that I'd never see. And vice versa.
"What about you?" I asked. "You said 'most people,' but you don't say about yourself."
He looked at me and grinned. "Oh, I'd probably go with the first guy also; at least I'd load the dice that way." He paused for a moment. That's the secret of the punchline: timing.
"Present company excepted, of course," he said.
Showing posts with label Dark Underbelly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dark Underbelly. Show all posts
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Tumbling Dice
As I have said before, the late 60s actually took place in the early 1970s, and it was an interesting time, with a lot of ideas in the wind. One of the ideas in the wind was probabilistic decision making.I suspect that the I Ching had something to do with it. All those college kids taking a hit off the bong, tossing the coins, then reading poorly translated Confucian texts in an attempt at fortune telling. It sounds very hippy dippy woo woo, but some of us knurds looked at it and said, "Aha! A probabilistic response to a non-full knowledge game." Then we'd take another bong hit.
Then you had Dungeons and Dragons, with all those weird polygonal dice. Given the degree of emotional investment in D&D characters, it was probably inevitable that someone would try something similar in real life.
D&D came out in 1974, but The Dice Man, by George Cockcroft (writing as "Luke Rhinehart," the ostensible protagonist of the novel) was published in 1971. The story is of a psychiatrist who, suffering from boredom and midlife crisis, decides to start making decisions based on the random toss of dice. Then, as zest, he begins adding some "forbidden" possibilities, including raping the wife of his next door neighbor. This being the sort of fantasy that it is, the dice pop up with that order, he complies, and she enjoys it (I know, I know).
He introduces his patients to "dice therapy" and things get out of hand in the sort of way that novels described as "funny, bawdy, [and] outrageous," get out of hand. A cult forms around him. The government gets involved. All very counter-culture in its way.
So, was it D&D or The Dice Man that was responsible for the following scene at a science fiction convention in the mid-1970s? Elevator stops, doors open. Outside is a woman looking into the elevator. She shakes her hands together, looks at the dice, then looks back at the elevator and waves goodbye.
Anyway, plays have been written, songs sung, lifestyles devised and documented. It struck a chord. I saw no reason not to use it as part of the basis for a religion several centuries from now. It's not as if randomness is going to go away.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Wishing
One of the hardest lessons to learn in life is that wishing doesn't make it so.
It's possible to view the history of science fiction as a long search for magic wands, for things that will fulfill the wish fulfillment fantasy. We've had potions and rays, ESP and PSI, interstellar empires, nuclear power, and radiation giving people mutant powers. Sometimes it's virtual reality, or cyberspace, the knurd imagination writ large. Sometimes it's something as simple as a new way to get laid (telepathically!).
So we come to parallel worlds and quantum indeterminacy, with the latter being shorthand for some method of wishing yourself into the parallel world that is to your liking. Some of this comes from the confusion that results when someone identifies personally with the word "observer" in the Copenhagen Interpretation. If you wish and wish with all your might, for Schrödinger's Cat to be alive when the box is opened, then, by golly, the Cat will live and come out to play with Tinkerbell.
But even if you take the "Many Worlds" interpretation, there are problems. Perhaps it excites you to imagine that there is a parallel world in which you are married to Angelina Jolie, but there are a number of problems with the very concept. First, even if there is a world in which someone who shared a timeline with you up until the lucky streak (for you; let's not consider what the situation would mean for Ms Jolie) that gave that result, that fellow isn't you. Not anymore. And this stricture applies even more forcefully to those worlds where "you" are of a different sex (because then "you" are actually "your sister"), or born with a different genetic makeup, etc. You might as well imagine yourself as someone else in this world, because identity doesn't give you a free ride. Who told you that you're the same person that you were yesterday, incidentally?
Moreover, just because you think you can imagine something doesn't mean that it can happen. There are a lot of ways for something to be impossible, and the deck may not have those five aces in it.
Besides, there are consequences to any proposition. That was Ursula LeGuin's point in The Lathe of Heaven. Sometimes what you think you want has consequences that you don't actually want. In fact, you might scratch that "sometimes" and put in "always." This is a principle that applies even to a single world. You just have to hope that the main consequences of your (always well-intentioned) actions outweigh the secondary consequences, over which you have less control, and certainly have less knowledge.
Ultimately that's why we have ethics, morality, and to a degree, even science. We want to know as much about the consequences of our actions as possible, and we want those consequences to be as good as we can manage. Sometimes we fail. But we should always try, and the trying consists of acting, and not wishing, because wishing doesn't make it so, nor do good intentions.
It's possible to view the history of science fiction as a long search for magic wands, for things that will fulfill the wish fulfillment fantasy. We've had potions and rays, ESP and PSI, interstellar empires, nuclear power, and radiation giving people mutant powers. Sometimes it's virtual reality, or cyberspace, the knurd imagination writ large. Sometimes it's something as simple as a new way to get laid (telepathically!).
So we come to parallel worlds and quantum indeterminacy, with the latter being shorthand for some method of wishing yourself into the parallel world that is to your liking. Some of this comes from the confusion that results when someone identifies personally with the word "observer" in the Copenhagen Interpretation. If you wish and wish with all your might, for Schrödinger's Cat to be alive when the box is opened, then, by golly, the Cat will live and come out to play with Tinkerbell.
But even if you take the "Many Worlds" interpretation, there are problems. Perhaps it excites you to imagine that there is a parallel world in which you are married to Angelina Jolie, but there are a number of problems with the very concept. First, even if there is a world in which someone who shared a timeline with you up until the lucky streak (for you; let's not consider what the situation would mean for Ms Jolie) that gave that result, that fellow isn't you. Not anymore. And this stricture applies even more forcefully to those worlds where "you" are of a different sex (because then "you" are actually "your sister"), or born with a different genetic makeup, etc. You might as well imagine yourself as someone else in this world, because identity doesn't give you a free ride. Who told you that you're the same person that you were yesterday, incidentally?
Moreover, just because you think you can imagine something doesn't mean that it can happen. There are a lot of ways for something to be impossible, and the deck may not have those five aces in it.
Besides, there are consequences to any proposition. That was Ursula LeGuin's point in The Lathe of Heaven. Sometimes what you think you want has consequences that you don't actually want. In fact, you might scratch that "sometimes" and put in "always." This is a principle that applies even to a single world. You just have to hope that the main consequences of your (always well-intentioned) actions outweigh the secondary consequences, over which you have less control, and certainly have less knowledge.
Ultimately that's why we have ethics, morality, and to a degree, even science. We want to know as much about the consequences of our actions as possible, and we want those consequences to be as good as we can manage. Sometimes we fail. But we should always try, and the trying consists of acting, and not wishing, because wishing doesn't make it so, nor do good intentions.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
On Faith
The online world is a lot like college dorm bull sessions, with a lot of outrageous opinions being expressed, sometimes simply because they are outrageous. Add in the fact that a lot of the discourse is contributed by anonymous or semi-anonymous individuals, and it’s a recipe for a free-for-all.
The upside of that is that it provides cover for “dangerous ideas.” Now some of those aren’t really dangerous at all. I can’t think of anyone who has been sent to jail for being “politically incorrect” in the common usage of that term, though there are plenty who pat themselves on the back for being so “daring” as to express blatantly racist or misogynistic sentiments (usually anonymously) . On Bill Maher’s TV show(s) “Politically Incorrect”, all manner of things were given a pass; then Maher agreed with Dinesh D’Sousa that it might be less cowardly to fly a plane into a building than launch cruise missiles at 500 miles, and huh, that turned out to be incorrect politically. Who would have guessed?
Similarly, hate speech is rarely dangerous to the speaker. The danger is directed elsewhere.
Nevertheless, the overall turbulence of discussion allows some ideas to be expressed more forthrightly than when public discourse is filtered through conventional outlets. That, plus the fact that there are religious wars (both hot and cold) going on, has led to a good many atheists coming out of the closet.
I’m a pretty dovish atheist. I tend to look on religion as one of many rationalizations that people use to justify elevating their own gut feelings and prejudices to the level of absolute philosophy. I’ve found plenty of libertarians who are just as fundamentalist, utopian, and dogmatic as any bible thumper of my childhood, and plenty of communists to pair them up against. Philosophy, of whatever flavor, is more a rationalization than a rationale.
Still, it’s refreshing to see some unapologetic atheists writing about what they find obnoxious about faith. That’s particularly true about atheists who are also scientists, since it’s so often the case that scientists make a big deal about science not being incompatible with religion, etc. I mean, I understand, the apologetics; scientists have to live in the world, and it can get tiresome explaining to people that, no, not believing in God doesn’t automatically send you on a rape, murder, and pillage spree, but if that’s all that’s keeping you from doing that, then, please, by all means, continue to believe in God. More to the point, many scientists are religious, either conventionally or unconventionally. Sometimes it even affects their science, usually, but not always, detrimentally.
That leads to one argument that, contrarian that I am, I will take some issue with, and that is the assertion that there is no place for faith in rational discourse. I could mention The Prisoner’s Dilemma in this context, but that’s a bit of a cheat; one solution to TPD is often called faith, but it’s actually more like commitment. You choose not to defect (with the expectation that the other prisoner will also so choose) because you are committed to them, or to whatever it is that binds you, or even your own sense of integrity. Noble sentiments, but not necessarily dependent on faith.
No, I’m going to say just a little about interpretations of quantum mechanics.
There are really two major interpretations of QM. One, the dominant view, is the so-called “Copenhagen Interpretation.” This holds that a “mixed wave state” can exist until a “measurement” is made of it, at which point the wave function “collapses” to a localized quantum event. This interpretation led to the Einstein-Poldalsky-Rosen experiment and the unpleasant concept of “spooky action at a distance,” that so intrigues quantum mystics. The “wave function collapse” that happens in an EPR type experiment seems to operate faster than light, and that has led to all sorts of sci-fi speculation about how to use it for space travel, time travel, or what-have-you.
The wave collapse is hardly the only effect in physics that has FTL properties; the best known is “phase velocity” that occurs in a traveling wave tube. You can also get superluminal velocities from the moving spot on a cathode ray tube for similar reasons: they are illusions that do not carry information. Point at the sun. Now point at the moon. What you are pointing at has just moved faster than light. But that “what” has changed, hasn’t it?
The “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, first advanced by Hugh Everett III, does not suffer from the confusion between real and virtual events, at least not in the FTL sense. I’ve read the original paper. It’s not actually very technical, in the sense that there isn’t much mathematical jiggery pokery in it. The basic concept is fairly simple. Everett just decided to ignore the “wave function collapse.” Wave functions split at every quantum event, but none of them ever vanish, they become “uncorrelated” with other wave sets. So how does one then interpret an EPR experiment, in which a paired particle set is separated and one quantum characteristic (often spin) is measured at a distance, thereby assuring what the other particle’s spin is? Simple, by measuring one particle’s spin, you have determined what “path” you take if you wish to confirm the other particle’s spin. You can only take a path to the one that is correlated with your measurement. The complementary spin still exists for the “split” version of the other particle, you just can’t get to it because you’re “uncorrelated” with it.
Of course, the existence of the other particle cannot be tested in any way. You just have to take it on faith. That’s the same faith that you must have in the “wave function collapse,” if you are following the Copenhagen Interpretation.
Some people hate the many worlds interpretation though. I was once on a panel with Larry Niven, who is one of those who dislike the MWI and I asked him why. His replay was, “Because I sweat over my decisions, and I resent the idea that I could just as easily have decided the other way.”
Food for thought, and I’m not embarrassed that I didn’t have a ready reply. But I do have a reply now: The guy who made the other decision isn’t you. It wasn’t all arbitrary. By making a decision, you literally create a new and different universe for yourself and those around you. How can you resent something like that? You’re playing God.
Larry’s story expressing his view is the title story in All the Myriad Ways.
One of mine is my story Shiva. Another is Aphrodite's Children. That one is a prequel to Dark Underbelly and Blood Relations. Anyone following those will notice that I've formulated an entire religion based on this quantum interpretation thing. You can take it seriously, or as an amusing SF construct. Either way, it creates new universes, by my way of thinking.
The upside of that is that it provides cover for “dangerous ideas.” Now some of those aren’t really dangerous at all. I can’t think of anyone who has been sent to jail for being “politically incorrect” in the common usage of that term, though there are plenty who pat themselves on the back for being so “daring” as to express blatantly racist or misogynistic sentiments (usually anonymously) . On Bill Maher’s TV show(s) “Politically Incorrect”, all manner of things were given a pass; then Maher agreed with Dinesh D’Sousa that it might be less cowardly to fly a plane into a building than launch cruise missiles at 500 miles, and huh, that turned out to be incorrect politically. Who would have guessed?
Similarly, hate speech is rarely dangerous to the speaker. The danger is directed elsewhere.
Nevertheless, the overall turbulence of discussion allows some ideas to be expressed more forthrightly than when public discourse is filtered through conventional outlets. That, plus the fact that there are religious wars (both hot and cold) going on, has led to a good many atheists coming out of the closet.
I’m a pretty dovish atheist. I tend to look on religion as one of many rationalizations that people use to justify elevating their own gut feelings and prejudices to the level of absolute philosophy. I’ve found plenty of libertarians who are just as fundamentalist, utopian, and dogmatic as any bible thumper of my childhood, and plenty of communists to pair them up against. Philosophy, of whatever flavor, is more a rationalization than a rationale.
Still, it’s refreshing to see some unapologetic atheists writing about what they find obnoxious about faith. That’s particularly true about atheists who are also scientists, since it’s so often the case that scientists make a big deal about science not being incompatible with religion, etc. I mean, I understand, the apologetics; scientists have to live in the world, and it can get tiresome explaining to people that, no, not believing in God doesn’t automatically send you on a rape, murder, and pillage spree, but if that’s all that’s keeping you from doing that, then, please, by all means, continue to believe in God. More to the point, many scientists are religious, either conventionally or unconventionally. Sometimes it even affects their science, usually, but not always, detrimentally.
That leads to one argument that, contrarian that I am, I will take some issue with, and that is the assertion that there is no place for faith in rational discourse. I could mention The Prisoner’s Dilemma in this context, but that’s a bit of a cheat; one solution to TPD is often called faith, but it’s actually more like commitment. You choose not to defect (with the expectation that the other prisoner will also so choose) because you are committed to them, or to whatever it is that binds you, or even your own sense of integrity. Noble sentiments, but not necessarily dependent on faith.
No, I’m going to say just a little about interpretations of quantum mechanics.
There are really two major interpretations of QM. One, the dominant view, is the so-called “Copenhagen Interpretation.” This holds that a “mixed wave state” can exist until a “measurement” is made of it, at which point the wave function “collapses” to a localized quantum event. This interpretation led to the Einstein-Poldalsky-Rosen experiment and the unpleasant concept of “spooky action at a distance,” that so intrigues quantum mystics. The “wave function collapse” that happens in an EPR type experiment seems to operate faster than light, and that has led to all sorts of sci-fi speculation about how to use it for space travel, time travel, or what-have-you.
The wave collapse is hardly the only effect in physics that has FTL properties; the best known is “phase velocity” that occurs in a traveling wave tube. You can also get superluminal velocities from the moving spot on a cathode ray tube for similar reasons: they are illusions that do not carry information. Point at the sun. Now point at the moon. What you are pointing at has just moved faster than light. But that “what” has changed, hasn’t it?
The “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, first advanced by Hugh Everett III, does not suffer from the confusion between real and virtual events, at least not in the FTL sense. I’ve read the original paper. It’s not actually very technical, in the sense that there isn’t much mathematical jiggery pokery in it. The basic concept is fairly simple. Everett just decided to ignore the “wave function collapse.” Wave functions split at every quantum event, but none of them ever vanish, they become “uncorrelated” with other wave sets. So how does one then interpret an EPR experiment, in which a paired particle set is separated and one quantum characteristic (often spin) is measured at a distance, thereby assuring what the other particle’s spin is? Simple, by measuring one particle’s spin, you have determined what “path” you take if you wish to confirm the other particle’s spin. You can only take a path to the one that is correlated with your measurement. The complementary spin still exists for the “split” version of the other particle, you just can’t get to it because you’re “uncorrelated” with it.
Of course, the existence of the other particle cannot be tested in any way. You just have to take it on faith. That’s the same faith that you must have in the “wave function collapse,” if you are following the Copenhagen Interpretation.
Some people hate the many worlds interpretation though. I was once on a panel with Larry Niven, who is one of those who dislike the MWI and I asked him why. His replay was, “Because I sweat over my decisions, and I resent the idea that I could just as easily have decided the other way.”
Food for thought, and I’m not embarrassed that I didn’t have a ready reply. But I do have a reply now: The guy who made the other decision isn’t you. It wasn’t all arbitrary. By making a decision, you literally create a new and different universe for yourself and those around you. How can you resent something like that? You’re playing God.
Larry’s story expressing his view is the title story in All the Myriad Ways.
One of mine is my story Shiva. Another is Aphrodite's Children. That one is a prequel to Dark Underbelly and Blood Relations. Anyone following those will notice that I've formulated an entire religion based on this quantum interpretation thing. You can take it seriously, or as an amusing SF construct. Either way, it creates new universes, by my way of thinking.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Final Chapter, or Is It?
Just a little note to announce that the first book of Dark Underbelly is now complete. Some mysteries are now solved, some are not, and there will be a second serial coming soon.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
A Jack Bauer Moment
I don't watch 24. In fact, I cannot watch 24; I find it offensive beyond measure. It feeds into the idea of finding terrorists under every bed, and into the idea that just a little torture from the right man can make it all turn out okay.
As I note in the Author's Introduction, I wrote Dark Underbelly well before 9/11. It contained some of my notions about authoritarian states and what it can do to people, especially the best people. And, deep in the background, is a vision of an authoritarian state that is necessary, as necessary as the authority of a captain at sea, in vessel that has taken on water, and which only harsh and decisive leadership has a hope of saving the ship and those aboard her.
All this is through the opposite end of the telescope, of course. All you get to really see at first is the wreckage of one human life, someone permanently damaged and trying to act as if his every moment, waking or sleeping, is something other than a fight with himself and his own desire to end it all.
I'm pimping a little for the story at this point because there is now enough of it to grasp, and because the protagonist, Ed Honlin, has just maimed three men (who, at least, did not fail to deserve what was done to them), and has interrogated someone using methods that are, by any reasonable meaning, torture. He has threatened a man's life in order to obtain information.
Is this a paradox? Is this a "Jack Bauer Moment" and have I created just an SF version of 24?"
I do not think so, and I do not think that my reasons are rationalizations, but I recognize that this sort of scene might appeal to those who also find 24 appealing. Still, I know where my own inspiration came from, and a lot of it was Mickey Spillane, whom I have lauded before, and who was more sophisticated than usually given credit for.
Part of the distinction is pretty obvious: Mike Hammer and Ed Honlin (and Dave Robichaux and Matthew Scudder, to name others) are both in the "fallen knight" tradition. They are not government operatives—although Hammer gets what is basically a CIA ticket at one point, and Honlin is operating as a "special consultant" to the police. But no one is really fooled here. They are rogues.
But so was Dirty Harry, and you can still make that case for Jack Bauer. Sure. So the distance isn't that large, still, is it?
However, I will point to the important thing about Chapter 13 in Dark Underbelly, and that is this: very little information is gained in the interrogation. Honlin, the protagonist, is primarily verifying information that he already knew was there, and getting answers to questions that could have been answered by more conventional means. In short, he is terrorizing someone because he wants to, in fact, because he needs to, just as he needed to go out and find a fight in the previous chapter, entitled I'm from the Goddam Planet Krypton.
As I note in the Introduction, Something Very Bad happened to the protagonist before the book begins. It takes rather a long time to find out what happened, and for very good reasons. But there are other questions and other mysteries and other things to discover along the way. And because this is science fiction, rather retro science fiction at that, the protagonist is a wish fulfillment fantasy of a sort, but it is not a "happily ever after" fantasy, because that is not the kind I write. And anyone who thinks that Ed Honlin (or Mike Hammer, or—especially—Jack Bauer), is someone they'd like to be, or even emulate, is mistaking fantasy for reality, and I write the kind of fantasy that tries to make its position very clear, even when it is morally ambiguous.
As I note in the Author's Introduction, I wrote Dark Underbelly well before 9/11. It contained some of my notions about authoritarian states and what it can do to people, especially the best people. And, deep in the background, is a vision of an authoritarian state that is necessary, as necessary as the authority of a captain at sea, in vessel that has taken on water, and which only harsh and decisive leadership has a hope of saving the ship and those aboard her.
All this is through the opposite end of the telescope, of course. All you get to really see at first is the wreckage of one human life, someone permanently damaged and trying to act as if his every moment, waking or sleeping, is something other than a fight with himself and his own desire to end it all.
I'm pimping a little for the story at this point because there is now enough of it to grasp, and because the protagonist, Ed Honlin, has just maimed three men (who, at least, did not fail to deserve what was done to them), and has interrogated someone using methods that are, by any reasonable meaning, torture. He has threatened a man's life in order to obtain information.
Is this a paradox? Is this a "Jack Bauer Moment" and have I created just an SF version of 24?"
I do not think so, and I do not think that my reasons are rationalizations, but I recognize that this sort of scene might appeal to those who also find 24 appealing. Still, I know where my own inspiration came from, and a lot of it was Mickey Spillane, whom I have lauded before, and who was more sophisticated than usually given credit for.
Part of the distinction is pretty obvious: Mike Hammer and Ed Honlin (and Dave Robichaux and Matthew Scudder, to name others) are both in the "fallen knight" tradition. They are not government operatives—although Hammer gets what is basically a CIA ticket at one point, and Honlin is operating as a "special consultant" to the police. But no one is really fooled here. They are rogues.
But so was Dirty Harry, and you can still make that case for Jack Bauer. Sure. So the distance isn't that large, still, is it?
However, I will point to the important thing about Chapter 13 in Dark Underbelly, and that is this: very little information is gained in the interrogation. Honlin, the protagonist, is primarily verifying information that he already knew was there, and getting answers to questions that could have been answered by more conventional means. In short, he is terrorizing someone because he wants to, in fact, because he needs to, just as he needed to go out and find a fight in the previous chapter, entitled I'm from the Goddam Planet Krypton.
As I note in the Introduction, Something Very Bad happened to the protagonist before the book begins. It takes rather a long time to find out what happened, and for very good reasons. But there are other questions and other mysteries and other things to discover along the way. And because this is science fiction, rather retro science fiction at that, the protagonist is a wish fulfillment fantasy of a sort, but it is not a "happily ever after" fantasy, because that is not the kind I write. And anyone who thinks that Ed Honlin (or Mike Hammer, or—especially—Jack Bauer), is someone they'd like to be, or even emulate, is mistaking fantasy for reality, and I write the kind of fantasy that tries to make its position very clear, even when it is morally ambiguous.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Author's Note and Some Introduction to Dark Underbelly
About [cough] number of years ago, I had this idea. I had it while reading technical papers on the atmosphere of Venus.
The Cytherean (the hoity toity adjective for "Venusian") atmosphere is way cool for an atmospheric scientist. For one thing, there's so much of it, almost 100 times as much as Earth's. It has about as much nitrogen as Earth's atmosphere, but the rest of it is carbon dioxide, pretty much a planetary supply of it, whereas most of Earth's carbon dioxide is locked up in carbonate rocks, with a lesser amount dissolved in the oceans, and just a whisper in the air itself. Our oxygen does derive from CO2, however, with the remaining carbon mostly spread about in little bits of graphite in the crust, plus a few smidges in higher concentrations, which we call fossil fuels.
Venus is a "runaway greenhouse," hot as hell on the surface, and pressurized to boot. Not a place you'd want to live.
But while I was reading those technical articles, I noticed the pressure/temperature curves, and they said that between 50 and 60 kilometers above the surface, where the atmospheric pressure was near one bar, i.e. what we have on the Earth's surface, the temperature was also pretty livable, maybe 20-30 Celsius, say from 68 to 86 degrees F, for those who think in those units.
Well, there's a reason for that, and part of it has to do with Venus being an imperfect greenhouse, like Earth is, except that Earth has a lot of water vapor and not much CO2 and Venus has a lot of CO2 and not much water vapor. It does, however, have clouds of dilute sulfuric acid. The tops of those clouds are pretty close to that "Earth zone" of pressure and temperature.
Okay, so even in the "Earth zone" breathing the air would kill you in seconds, so you'd never notice the acid fog as it ate away your clothes and skin. So you don't want to try to live out in the open. But how about inside of something?
The air is carbon dioxide. A balloon filled with oxygen and nitrogen will float in a carbon dioxide atmosphere.
So I wrote a story about it, "Aphrodite's Children." A. J. Budrys liked it, so it appeared in Tomorrow SF. And there was a back story, about interplanetary colonies cut off from Earth because something really bad had happened on Earth. I made it a plague, with a lingering planetary defense system that had gone crazy because it was robotic and robots go crazy when a lot of people die on them. Seemed reasonable. Part of it is old SF tropes, and part is the "we need to colonize Space because all our eggs shouldn't be in one basket." And part of that was just how dubious a rationale that is for colonization. Losing Earth would probably kill any actual colonies, but I put it through the everything-you-expect-is-wrong grinder and came out with a lost Mars colony, a weirdly flourishing Venus, and an authoritarian State on the Moon.
All in the back of my head, you understand. Little of this made it to "Aphrodite's Children."
And then I woke up one morning with the beginning of a story in my head that I couldn't shake. The guy in the story woke up too, and he was irritable, and smart-mouthed, and dangerous, and he'd done something really, really bad once, and a lot of people were very indebted to him because he'd done it.
And I didn't know what he'd done, but I had to find out, so I began to write.
I was part of an ongoing group of professional writers at the time, since jokingly named "Will Write for Food." We had monthly meetings, and I brought in about three chapters a month. And most everybody was fascinated by the story, especially including me. It was rather like reading one of the old serialized pulp stories, even for me, because things kept happening in it that I didn't expect or plan on.
And the protagonist, Ed Honlin, (look, his name came from the dream also, so I can't tell you how I got it), was a classic noir detective, in an environment where firearms were almost entirely absent. You don't shoot off a gun when you're inside of a balloon, even if metal is plentiful, which it isn't on my Venus. And you don't use guns on the Moon, because, well, damn, there's vacuum outside, isn't there?
So it's all martial arts and such, and my guy is both big and well-trained. It turned out that he'd had some enhancements added as well. He can't beat everybody, but he can pretty much beat anybody, if you know what I mean.
He's also damaged goods, in many, many ways. And he knows much more than he should about torture. I wrote all of this before Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and I found upon later re-reading it that I didn't have to change a thing. I hadn't done any in depth research on torture, but it doesn't take a maven to realize that Jack Bauer fantasies are crap.
Anyway, you can get this much from the first chapter. I'm going to put up the whole thing, a chapter at a time, at my convenience or at others' urging, because there aren't any old pulp magazines to serialize this thing, and I've been recently reminded that life is short and I'm tired of waiting for agents and publishers to figure out what to do with it. Maybe if a few more people read it, they'll figure it out.
One way or another.
It's title is Dark Underbelly.
The Cytherean (the hoity toity adjective for "Venusian") atmosphere is way cool for an atmospheric scientist. For one thing, there's so much of it, almost 100 times as much as Earth's. It has about as much nitrogen as Earth's atmosphere, but the rest of it is carbon dioxide, pretty much a planetary supply of it, whereas most of Earth's carbon dioxide is locked up in carbonate rocks, with a lesser amount dissolved in the oceans, and just a whisper in the air itself. Our oxygen does derive from CO2, however, with the remaining carbon mostly spread about in little bits of graphite in the crust, plus a few smidges in higher concentrations, which we call fossil fuels.
Venus is a "runaway greenhouse," hot as hell on the surface, and pressurized to boot. Not a place you'd want to live.
But while I was reading those technical articles, I noticed the pressure/temperature curves, and they said that between 50 and 60 kilometers above the surface, where the atmospheric pressure was near one bar, i.e. what we have on the Earth's surface, the temperature was also pretty livable, maybe 20-30 Celsius, say from 68 to 86 degrees F, for those who think in those units.
Well, there's a reason for that, and part of it has to do with Venus being an imperfect greenhouse, like Earth is, except that Earth has a lot of water vapor and not much CO2 and Venus has a lot of CO2 and not much water vapor. It does, however, have clouds of dilute sulfuric acid. The tops of those clouds are pretty close to that "Earth zone" of pressure and temperature.
Okay, so even in the "Earth zone" breathing the air would kill you in seconds, so you'd never notice the acid fog as it ate away your clothes and skin. So you don't want to try to live out in the open. But how about inside of something?
The air is carbon dioxide. A balloon filled with oxygen and nitrogen will float in a carbon dioxide atmosphere.
So I wrote a story about it, "Aphrodite's Children." A. J. Budrys liked it, so it appeared in Tomorrow SF. And there was a back story, about interplanetary colonies cut off from Earth because something really bad had happened on Earth. I made it a plague, with a lingering planetary defense system that had gone crazy because it was robotic and robots go crazy when a lot of people die on them. Seemed reasonable. Part of it is old SF tropes, and part is the "we need to colonize Space because all our eggs shouldn't be in one basket." And part of that was just how dubious a rationale that is for colonization. Losing Earth would probably kill any actual colonies, but I put it through the everything-you-expect-is-wrong grinder and came out with a lost Mars colony, a weirdly flourishing Venus, and an authoritarian State on the Moon.
All in the back of my head, you understand. Little of this made it to "Aphrodite's Children."
And then I woke up one morning with the beginning of a story in my head that I couldn't shake. The guy in the story woke up too, and he was irritable, and smart-mouthed, and dangerous, and he'd done something really, really bad once, and a lot of people were very indebted to him because he'd done it.
And I didn't know what he'd done, but I had to find out, so I began to write.
I was part of an ongoing group of professional writers at the time, since jokingly named "Will Write for Food." We had monthly meetings, and I brought in about three chapters a month. And most everybody was fascinated by the story, especially including me. It was rather like reading one of the old serialized pulp stories, even for me, because things kept happening in it that I didn't expect or plan on.
And the protagonist, Ed Honlin, (look, his name came from the dream also, so I can't tell you how I got it), was a classic noir detective, in an environment where firearms were almost entirely absent. You don't shoot off a gun when you're inside of a balloon, even if metal is plentiful, which it isn't on my Venus. And you don't use guns on the Moon, because, well, damn, there's vacuum outside, isn't there?
So it's all martial arts and such, and my guy is both big and well-trained. It turned out that he'd had some enhancements added as well. He can't beat everybody, but he can pretty much beat anybody, if you know what I mean.
He's also damaged goods, in many, many ways. And he knows much more than he should about torture. I wrote all of this before Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and I found upon later re-reading it that I didn't have to change a thing. I hadn't done any in depth research on torture, but it doesn't take a maven to realize that Jack Bauer fantasies are crap.
Anyway, you can get this much from the first chapter. I'm going to put up the whole thing, a chapter at a time, at my convenience or at others' urging, because there aren't any old pulp magazines to serialize this thing, and I've been recently reminded that life is short and I'm tired of waiting for agents and publishers to figure out what to do with it. Maybe if a few more people read it, they'll figure it out.
One way or another.
It's title is Dark Underbelly.
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