A View from the Geek: Do Your Own Research Vs. Do Your Research • By Eric Dontigney

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As a fiction writer, you must strive for verisimilitude. It’s the gold standard, that appearance of or resemblance to truth or reality. It’s even more important when you delve into speculative fiction. The more outrageous the story you plan to tell, in terms of breaks from understood physics, the more time you must spend grounding and cloaking the rest of the story in the garments of truth. It’s why writers spend so much time on the details. Mind you, they don’t need to be familiar details. Science fiction and fantasy thrive on building new worlds. The catch is that the details must make sense. They must be consistent.

Maybe it’s all the years of striving for verisimilitude in my fiction. Maybe I just had better-than-average teachers. Maybe it was all those years studying philosophy with its unusually rigorous demands for arguments that make sense. Maybe it’s all of those things that make me want to do physical violence on people when I see the phrase, “Do your own research,” bandied about on the Internet. It would take more words and space than is practical here to unpack everything that underlies that phrase, so I’m just going to hit the highlights.

The underlying assumption of that phrase is that you cannot trust the things that so-called authorities tell you. At best, those authorities are misguided. At worst, they’re actively engaged in a national or even global conspiracy to deceive you into doing something that is not in your best interest.

And people say that speculative fiction writers push the edges of plausibility. Let’s pause and consider how well people keep little secrets. On the whole, people who aren’t sociopaths are terrible at it. It’s routinely obvious when someone is keeping a secret, even if you don’t know about exactly what. Half the time, the person keeping the secret winds up telling someone else the secret and then swearing that person to secrecy. Considering how well person one kept that secret, it’s sort of baffling that they think person two will do a better job. These are for small, non-dangerous secrets.

So, let’s consider how likely it really is that the employees of the 200 or so governments in the world are successfully keeping a conspiracy under their hats. How likely is it that every last one of those millions of people is actively lying to everyone they know on daily basis and doing it successfully? How likely is it really that not a single one of those people have been struck by a crisis of conscience and released definitive evidence of the conspiracy to a news outlet? Yeah, it’s about as likely as you winning the lottery. Actually, you have about a one in fourteen million chance of winning the lotto on average. On balance, you probably have better odds of winning the lotto than the odds of a global conspiracy being kept secret for any length of time.

Setting aside that there is about zero chance of a global conspiracy staying secret, let’s look at how you’re supposed to deal with these lying conspiratorial authorities.

The apparent explicit cure to this problem is to “do your own research.” Yet, no one really digs into what that entails. Let’s take something like, oh, I don’t know, vaccinations against a global pandemic as our case in point. How does one “do their own research” about vaccinations for a global pandemic? I don’t have a multimillion-dollar laboratory at my disposal. Do you? I also don’t have a Ph.D. in biology, chemistry, biochemistry, or an MD. So, even if I did own a private laboratory by some fluke, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I wouldn’t know how to test vaccines or how to interpret the results if, by some science magic, those results simply appeared. I have zero expertise in epidemiology. So, I have no way to correlate the result I do not have, from research I cannot conduct, in the expensive laboratory I do not own to said pandemic.

Of course, the “do your own research” crowd doesn’t actually mean that you should do your own research. What they mean is that you should go out and find a source, any source, no matter how unreliable that source, that confirms your existing position. That is not doing your own research. That’s nothing more than proactively confirming your assumptions.

Doing your research means that you find reliable sources. In our society, that generally means you rely on the actual research conducted by people who are actual experts in their fields. Yes, that does put you on somewhat shaky ground in terms of pure logic. Relying on expert opinions is a logical fallacy known as appeal to authority, but it’s the best we can do until everyone can master every subject. No, your high school and/or college biology and chemistry classes do not make you an expert on things like vaccinations…unless you’re an actual biologist or chemist or doctor engaged in vaccination research. But, if that’s the case, you’ve become an authority and we’re all bickering about how you either are or aren’t a sadistic conspirator trying to wiretap our brains with the nanotechnology you’ve embedded in those dastardly vaccinations. (Yes, it hurt my soul to write that last sentence.)

“What about when there’s dissenting research?” Screeches someone from the slathering horde. “That’s proof, PROOF, that the authorities are lying!” 

Yeah, it’s not. Science and medicine don’t operate in the realm of absolute, unassailable truth. That’s philosophy. Specifically, it’s a reference to the ideas of Platonic realism that assert that there are pure forms of things that exist in some abstract realm. These Platonic forms, assuming they exist at all, are absolute, unassailable truth. They are the thing perfected, but only as an abstract idea. Contravening research certainly doesn’t carry the weight of a priori knowledge that you can demonstrate as true sans any reference to experience and through logic alone. Science and medicine are a posteriori ventures. They literally accumulate knowledge through experience. They investigate the observed effect to determine the cause. It’s imperfect, but not insidious on the whole. 

That means that when there is dissenting research, you must weigh that research against the whole body of similar research. If 99% of the research performed with good experimental controls all come up with similar conclusions, that dissenting research is probably wrong or accidentally measuring an aberration. That’s what doing your research looks like. It means you listen to what the actual experts on a topic say. You consider the weight of evidence supporting their claims. Then you act on the best information available. Taking that 1% of research as proof that everyone else is lying doesn’t make you smart, or a rebel, or dedicated to freedom. It’s just evidence of ignorance.

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Eric Dontigney is the author of the highly regarded novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, as well as the Samuel Branch urban fantasy series and the short story collection, Contingency Jones: The Complete Season One. Raised in Western New York, he currently resides near Dayton, OH. You can find him haunting obscure sections of libraries, in Chinese restaurants or occasionally online at ericdontigney.com.

 

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A View from the Geek: Masters of the Universe: Revelation - Swing and a Miss • By Eric Dontigney

So, let’s talk about that Masters of the Universe: Revelation. I’ve steered clear of it so far because there has been what is becoming standard issue polarization around the subject. On one side are hard-core purists who hate it. On the other side are people who adore it. Unfortunately, those battle lines also seem to “shockingly” correspond with two all-too-familiar demographics of the speculative fiction community. The hard-core haters either are or are being painted as the same misogynistic d-bags who drove the Gamergate controversy. The adoring fans are or are being painted as the progressive wing of the community.

There is an element of truth to those characterizations. It is, however, a pretty incomplete picture of the reactions to Masters of the Universe. If you consider the basic distribution on a bell curve, those two camps make up the most vocal 5% of the community. Everyone else is somewhere inside that middle 95%. So, yes, it’s possible to dislike Masters of the Universe and not be a misogynistic, repressive douche who thinks that anything with a female lead is crap. I know, because I’m one of them. I intensely disliked Masters of the Universe and it had nothing to do with He-Man not being in the lead for most of the first five episodes. It had a lot to do with the stupidity of how they wrote Teela in the first episode.

One of the major plot points of the first episodes is Teela’s promotion to Man-at-Arms. In the context of the He-Man universe, she’s being promoted into an officer’s rank in their standing army. Her father gives this little monologue about how proud he is of her and how she’s become this master strategist and warrior. All of that implies that before that promotion, Teela was essentially a foot soldier. Maybe she was some kind of non-commissioned officer like a sergeant, but a foot soldier, nonetheless.

Then, there is Prince Adam, the sometimes hero known as He-Man. You could argue that He-Man’s actual identity is probably the single greatest military and national secret in all of the lands. There are also very good reasons to keep that secret as tightly held as possible. While He-Man might prove all but unassailable, Prince Adam is far more vulnerable. Just as importantly, he likely spends far more time as the vulnerable Prince Adam while he eats, sleeps, attends state functions, and interacts with citizens. Adam’s safety is precarious at the best of times.  

By keeping the circle of people in the know very small, Adam has deployed a basic operational security measure called compartmentalization. That information was kept to the people who, in the INFOSEC parlance, had a “need to know.” If there’s anything that soldiers understand, it’s that not all information is available to all parties. They’re trained on information security. They get the importance of “need to know.” You can’t disclose to the enemy -- a terrifying, skull-headed death mage, in this case -- what you don’t know.

That brings us back to Teela, the professional soldier, the supposed master strategist. What happens when she finds out that Adam is also He-Man? She loses her shit because the people around her were “lying.” Despite the fact that she’d been a foot soldier up until literally that day, she apparently believed that she had a right to the biggest military secret in the land. A piece of information so personally dangerous to Adam that he’d issued royal commands that the information not be revealed. Information that was so dangerous that Adam kept it from his own father, someone who arguably did have both the right and need to know. Then, she rage-quits from the army.

A real master strategist and professional soldier would have grasped how desperately vulnerable Prince Adam was whenever he was out of his He-Man persona. They would have grasped why that information was held back from a foot soldier. They would have understood the absolutely critical need for compartmentalization and information security around this topic. They wouldn’t have to necessarily like it, but they would get it. This wasn’t some secret that Adam was keeping about a crush or a surprise party. This was information that could easily cost him his life. Plain and simple, Teela didn’t need to know. If she was half as competent as her father thought she was, she would have accepted it.

Instead, she whined and quit her job. It made her look entitled, petulant, and stupid. To put it in context, it’d be like a corporal screaming at a general for not sharing details about a classified mission that launched from the base the corporal happened to be stationed at. After seeing that, I didn’t really care what Teela did next. Why? The odds were good that if they wrote her that way in the first episode, we could expect more of the same in the episodes that followed. Big shocker, that’s exactly what we got. That certainly isn’t the only problem with the episodes to date, but it is an example of the kind of terrible writing that marked the show.

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Eric Dontigney is the author of the highly regarded novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, as well as the Samuel Branch urban fantasy series and the short story collection, Contingency Jones: The Complete Season One. Raised in Western New York, he currently resides near Dayton, OH. You can find him haunting obscure sections of libraries, in Chinese restaurants or occasionally online at ericdontigney.com.

 

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A View from the Geek: Do SFF Authors Have a Moral Obligation? • By Eric Dontigney

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I recently ran across this article that makes the argument, gently perhaps, that science fiction authors have an obligation to address climate change. As someone with a philosophy background, I found the thesis a little dubious. So, I considered the argument and decided to abstract away from the issue of climate change and ask a broader question.

Do science fiction or speculative fiction authors have a moral obligation to address the pressing issues of their time in their fiction?

I want to stress that “in their fiction” part because that’s a very different question than whether authors as individuals have moral obligations to address pressing issues as they carry out their personal lives. Depending on what theology or morality you ascribe to, the answer to the question of whether or not people owe moral obligations to not be awful, destructive, and abusive to their fellow human beings and the planet is almost always yes. Yes, they do have those moral obligations. There are some exceptions, but they aren’t considered mainstream moral codes, so I won’t dig into them.

The question of whether those obligations extend into authors’ professional lives in terms of their fiction is another matter entirely. The very question of what, if any, obligations an author has is pretty nebulous beyond putting words on the page. Even that “words on the page” thing is pretty loosely interpreted. After all, Harper Lee was called an author and she only published two books in her entire life. Specific kinds of authors have some additional obligations. Non-fiction authors are, in theory, obligated to stick with the facts as they are known at the time. Religious authors are generally obligated to stick within the parameters of their religions. But what about SFF authors? There are some general guidelines about good writing in genre fiction, but obligations? Not so much.

In fact, beyond writing a book that will hopefully generate revenue for themselves or their publishers, I’m hard-pressed to find any obligations (moral or otherwise) that you can ascribe to SFF authors. When you get right down it, authors aren’t even obligated to write a good story. It’s bad for sales and their careers, but they aren’t obligated. So, where does this idea that SFF authors are obligated to write about pressing issues come from? Authors aren’t doctors or lawyers who take on binding, professional ethical obligations.

I think what’s happening is actually a couple of related problems. First up, is an inversion of Kant’s famous formulation that “ought implies can.” In its original formulation, this means that to be obligated to perform an act, one must first be capable of performing an act. So, I cannot be morally obligated to dive into deep water to save a drowning child if, for example, I do not know how to swim myself. What seems to be happening here is a belief that “can implies ought.” Basically, since SFF authors can write about pressing issues, they are morally obligated to write about them. To express how stupid an idea this is, let me give you a corollary. Since you can give away all the money in your bank account, you are morally obligated to give away all the money in your bank account. Can does not imply ought.

There also seems to be a pretty fundamental category error going on here. A category error happens you ascribe properties belonging to one thing to another thing. In this case, it’s an issue of individual moral obligations and professional moral obligations. People are saying that the kinds of personal ethical obligations most people have are actually an author’s professional obligations. In other words, people conflate authors’ personal obligations to other people or the planet with a professional obligation to talk about the problems of other people or the planet.

I’ve also seen supposed moral arguments that anytime someone has the power to affect change and doesn’t, that they have failed some moral test. There are all kinds of flaws with that line of reasoning. One of the biggest problems is the idea that SFF authors have the power to affect change. It’s just not so as a general rule. First of all, there is an implicit assumption there that every SFF novel can affect change with no consideration given to the readership of said novel. There is another implicit assumption that every SFF author has the skill to talk about pressing issues in a meaningful way that isn’t condescending. There is a third implicit assumption that every SFF author has in-depth knowledge about a pressing issue. There is a fourth implicit assumption that every SFF author has the skill to weave that discussion into a fictional framework without detracting from the story. None of those implicit assumptions will hold up to scrutiny. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of SFF novels out there that try to talk about pressing issues inside the context of the story and fail spectacularly.

Beyond all of that, there is the question of whether or not SFF authors have moral obligations to themselves. What if, for example, a SFF author simply doesn’t want to write about pressing issues? What if they find joy in writing about benevolent space rogues rescuing princesses and toppling monolithic evil empires? What if trying to write about pressing issues negatively affects their mental health? While some level of self-sacrifice is standard issue in moral systems, it’s a very damn demanding system indeed that mandates you put a metaphoric bullet into the head of your professional quality of life and/or damage your mental health. It’s so demanding, in fact, that few rational people would sign on for it. It’s certainly too demanding for a group as heterogeneous and amorphous as SFF authors.

No, this claim that SFF authors somehow owe it to the world to write about pressing issues is not only absurd, it’s irrational. While there might be some public benefit when SFF authors elect to write about pressing issues, it should be left to those authors who want to write about issues and have the skill to do it well.

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Eric Dontigney is the author of the highly regarded novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, as well as the Samuel Branch urban fantasy series and the short story collection, Contingency Jones: The Complete Season One. Raised in Western New York, he currently resides near Dayton, OH. You can find him haunting obscure sections of libraries, in Chinese restaurants or occasionally online at ericdontigney.com.

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A View from the Geek: Why Do People Like Space Opera and Urban Fantasy? • By Eric Dontigney

I’ve been reading a lot of space opera and urban fantasy lately. This, in turn, has made me think a lot about why so many people like space opera and urban fantasy. Let’s be honest, these aren’t subgenres that are reputed to specialize in deep thinking. Sure, you can work in some reflections on society, maybe have a bit of introspection, but that’s not why people show up and read them. It’s certainly not why people show up and read 3 or 5 or 14 books in a series. At least, that seems to be the assumption from the outside looking in.  

It would be exceedingly easy to chalk up people’s interest in these subgenres as lazy thinking. They just show up for popcorn entertainment and that’s it. It’d be really easy to chalk the subgenres themselves up as the Marvel films of speculative literature. For some people, that might even be true. For specific examples of the subgenres, that might even be true. But it doesn’t hold water as a blanket explanation. 

Let’s take the Honor Harrington series as an example of space opera. At a surface reading, it’s just Horatio Hornblower in space…with an empathic cat. And, let’s be honest, that’s actually a really good pitch. You get exciting space battles. Naval shenanigans. A central character who is, all too often, more honorable than almost everyone around her. Hell, Harrington even fights a duel in one of the books. It certainly seems to tick all the boxes of popcorn fiction space opera.

Except, it’s not. David Weber isn’t shy about working some dense politics into the books. He’s also not shy about knocking political positions he doesn’t appreciate in the books (a hallmark of Baen books). He doesn’t shy away from complexity in his plots. The first book in the series depends on a conspiracy that takes most of the book to become obvious. He’s put a ridiculous amount of thought into the science of those space battles. Now, granted, the Honor Harrington series is widely acclaimed space opera. So, let’s look a little closer to home at something that’s received a little less critical examination.

Rampant Loon’s very own Henry Vogel is a space opera writing machine. So, let’s take a look at one of his recent books, The Lost Planet. What do we get there? Big space battles. Honorable heroes. Galactic politics. Interplanetary mystery. Hmmmm…this also ticks the right boxes, except it doesn’t really fit the bill of science fiction lite, either. In fact, it’s fairly complex in terms of plotting and character development for a standalone space adventure tale. All of which brings me around to my point.

I don’t think people respond to space opera or urban fantasy because they’re simplistic or easy. I think people show up and read them for a very different reason. Most space opera and urban fantasy novels take a hard pass on delving into the “big issues.” Sure, environmental concerns might show up in a space opera, but only as a means of forwarding the plot, not as a central conceit. Poverty might show up in an urban fantasy, but it’s never the major thrust of the novel. While these issues are crucially important for societies in big picture terms, it’s very easy for people to get burned out on them.

I think of it as issue fatigue. It’s the point where you know, intellectually, that you should care about something, but you don’t have enough bandwidth to engage with the topic. The non-stop news cycle hasn’t made this any better. We’re constantly bombarded by images and stories that try to scare us, tug on our heartstrings, or some demonic combination of the two. What’s worse is that we know we should be having some kind of visceral reaction to these things, except, after a while, we don’t.

When you’re exposed to things that trigger strong emotions, it’s not just mental. It’s physical as well. Your body goes through something called the stress cycle. You see the emotional trigger, which trips responses in your hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and hypes your autonomic nervous system. That, in turn, triggers your sympathetic nervous system and sets off a hormone cascade that releases adrenaline into your system. Then, when your body decides there is no actual threat or no immediate reason for emotional arousal, it turns off the process by releasing more hormones.

When this happens a few times a month, it’s no big deal. In fact, that’s what your body is supposed to do. Your body isn’t wired to endure that process multiple times a day, every day. One of the theories is that you experience adrenal fatigue. Basically, your adrenal glands can’t keep up production of stress hormones. So, despite knowing you should be reacting to things you hear or see, you don’t get the visceral response you expect. That creates a disconnect between your physical experience and your emotional experience or expected emotional experience. It can quite literally feel like you don’t care that much.  

Assuming the adrenal fatigue theory holds up, you need time away from things that trigger that response. My theory is that people in that state (which probably makes up a lot of the saner adult population these days) don’t want to engage with the “big issues” that don’t have clear solutions in their recreational reading. It’s not that they fear complexity or want something simple. It’s that want things that are direct. They want problems where there are clear sides. They want a story where you’ve got a protagonist you more or less accept as the good guy, who tackles people who are the bad guys.

That hero can operate in the gray, as long as the people on the other side are demonstrably worse. That way, we can root for the protagonist and feel a kind of vicarious victory. We can take sides and know we’re in the right. In some way, it serves a basic need in our psychology for fairness or justice to win out in the end. That describes the reading experience of space opera and urban fantasy pretty well. It’s not universally the case, but it’s a fair expectation about 90% of the time.

I think, if there is such a thing as a simple explanation for why people read the things they do, these are the reasons why people respond to space opera and urban fantasy. It’s a way to escape the apparent expectation that we’ll engage, all the damn time, with the “big issues.” An escape that gives our poor fatigued adrenal glands a break. It’s an opportunity for us to deal vicariously with a direct problem that has clear sides. It’s a rare opportunity that lets us find basic fairness in a world that so rarely provides it.

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A View from the Geek

• "Geeking Is Good," By Eric Dontigney •

When I was a kid, geeking was purely the domain of D&D players, fantasy fiction buffs, and hardcore science fiction fans. At least, that was the general perception. Some of this was simply a byproduct of visibility and intensity. By and large, the groups listed above were populated by social outcasts, kids with lots of imagination and poor social skills, or the painfully bright. It was all of those things for some poor, damned souls. When we finally stumbled upon those of our own ilk, we stuck and stuck hard, never to look back. Geeking, which often intensified ostracization by what passed as the social elite, also meant an end to the absolute isolation so many of us experienced as kids and teens.

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