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

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels

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: Do SFF Authors Have a Moral Obligation? • By Eric Dontigney

Photo by Nathan Cowley from Pexels

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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Separating the Toxic Creator from Their Work • by Eric Dontigney

The speculative fiction community has had a rough go of it in recent years with so many beloved creators being outed as everything from jerks to outright sexual predators. I’ve steered clear of this topic because I’ve long been a champion of Joss Whedon’s short-lived, much-beloved Firefly (and the film Serenity). I’ve also been somewhat disheartened by the general approach of damning anyone who gets accused of misconduct. When revelations of misconduct first starting happening, the reactions struck me as being very much, “Guilty, no matter what comes next.”

That never sat right with me. It’s not that I doubted that abuses took place. I was pretty confident that most of the allegations held water. My problem was that the whole thing took on the character of a witch hunt. I doubt there has ever been a witch hunt in which perfectly innocent people didn’t get their lives destroyed. If the general assumption is that every accusation is true, a person with an axe to grind can level an accusation and watch a well-meaning mob rip someone apart. Hell, this is why we have due process. 

Of course, there is also this idea in the law called “preponderance of evidence.” It’s a term used in civil trials that correlates with, but isn’t identical to, “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal law. My understanding of preponderance of evidence is that it essentially means that one side offers better evidence on which to judge a claim. It’s not necessarily about more evidence but the more meaningful evidence. This brings us back to Whedon.

Like a lot of Whedon fans, I took a dismissive attitude toward some of the early claims. The earliest public crack in the Whedon edifice was probably when his ex-wife Kai Cole wrote an open letter about his infidelities. I won’t lie. I read it as petty character assassination with an intent to publicly damage her ex’s career by exposing private matters. At the time, Whedon still had a lot of feminist cred and the golden glow of having written/directed/produced so many works that meant so much to so many people. I was making a cardinal mistake.

There is this principle in psychology called the Halo Effect. No, sadly, it has nothing to do with Master Chief. The Halo Effect is when someone makes a positive impression on you very early on. Once you form that opinion, it tends to become your default position when evaluating anything related to that person. So, let’s say that the first time you meet someone, they help you in some meaningful way. That makes you think they’re a good person. After that, you’re WAY more likely to ascribe good intentions or look for explanations that minimize bad intent when that person does things that you’d otherwise read as unacceptable behavior.

It’s even worse when that person is someone you don’t know personally. My only interactions with Joss Whedon came through his work, which I and so many others held very dear, and public accounts that tended to treat him as a nerd god and good guy. Of course, I was a hell of lot younger and knew a hell of a lot less about how things like press tours, interviews, and career preservation worked when I was watching/reading those things. I formed my perception of Whedon based on unreliable sources and narrative content that don’t really tell you anything about a person’s character. Once I formed that opinion, though, it stuck.

So, instead of giving Kai Cole’s open letter a fair read, I read it with a jaundiced eye. I just knew Whedon was a good guy. Okay, maybe he had some fidelity problems, but he wasn’t airing his dirty laundry in public. He wasn’t talking about all the bad stuff that his ex-wife surely did over the course of their relationship. Without even realizing it, I was trying to mentally minimize the bad intent of Whedon’s unacceptable behavior. No matter what, I rationalized, these were private failures that had nothing to do with his work. If that open letter had been the last of it, I probably would have cheerfully continued on in my little bubble of denial and never given it another thought. Except, as we all know now, that wasn’t the end of it.

Account after account of Whedon’s crappy on-set behavior have come out over the last couple of years. I might have discounted even these, except there was a sick consistency to the accounts. When you boil them all down, they basically tell the same story. Whedon acts like a capricious, if not malicious, and abusive petty tyrant toward the people who work on his shows and movies with women as frequent targets for his behavior. If the accounts were scattershot, detailing wildly random stories of different kinds of off-putting behavior, you could chalk it up to Whedon having the occasional bad day. It’s the rare person who has never taken out their bad mood on a co-worker or subordinate. They exist, but they’re rare.

When every account reinforces the nature of the behaviors, though, both the volume of evidence and the preponderance of evidence seem to sit with the accusers. So, where does that leave fans of the work that Whedon leaves in his wake? The problem that many fans have is that Joss Whedon does make good and often complex TV shows and films. Buffy really was one of the first shows that did anything meaningful in terms of female empowerment on TV, though I have issues with the exact kind of empowerment offered on the show. Firefly and Serenity played with ideas about family, guilt, and survival that you don’t see that often in science fiction TV. The Avengers was a good, if flawed, film.

For fans of these works, the implicit message from cancel culture is that we must disown all of these shows and films because Whedon is a bad-faith actor. While I don’t have an ethical problem with Whedon suffering career damage or even career implosion at this point, disowning all his prior works seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. By boycotting all Whedon’s prior works, we also boycott the work of everyone else who worked on those shows and films. Did some of those people know about the problems and choose to do nothing? Yeah, probably. Are they, then, also morally responsible? Maybe so. Should we also boycott everything they ever worked on? Should I not watch Nathan Fillion’s The Rookie just because he worked with Whedon in the past? Do you see the problem?

Unlike a novel, which generally has one primary author, TV shows and films are inherently collaborative efforts. Someone like Whedon gets the lion’s share of the credit, but his creative output involved hundreds or thousands of people in the final analysis. There were writers, actors, directors, second unit directors, producers, special effects artists, camera-people, makeup artists, key grips, set builders, production assistants, editors, and countless other jobs that I can’t name off the top of my head. I’d be willing to bet that most of those people showed up to work every day with no bad intentions. In fact, most of them probably showed up and worked really hard to do a good job. Why? Because people have bills and mortgages and working in Hollywood is still a job. While all of us have worked with people who are jerks or creepy, most coworkers sit somewhere on the spectrum of basically normal with normal personality flaws. Most people show up for work and do their jobs without going out of their way to be abusive dicks. You don’t fire the entire accounting department because Jessie never learned how to play well with others. You just fire Jessie.

Boycotting Whedon’s entire body of previous work is like firing the entire accounting department. It accomplishes little to nothing useful in the long run. Maybe you deprive him of a couple of bucks if you won’t buy new copies of his old films and shows, but that’s about it. It’s a moral stand with no strength in it. He’s already made most of the money he’ll ever see off of those works. It doesn’t hurt him. It ultimately fails to make a useful separation of the toxic creator from his work. The real problem isn’t Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Angel, or Dollhouse, or Firefly, or Serenity, or The Avengers. Liking those shows and films isn’t the real problem.

Whedon himself is the problem. It’s not your relationship with his past works that’s going to change anything. It’s what you do in relation to his future works that will change things. That's where boycotting can have a real effect. Don’t tune in to his new shows. Don’t buy tickets to his new movies. Raise a stink if some studio hires him or makes him a showrunner. He does damage when he’s given authority over others. Do your best to make giving him power over others unprofitable for studios. If his works stop making money, people will stop hiring him.

Refusing to watch old projects of his because they’ve got his name on them only deprives you of something you love. It also negates all of the hard work of everyone else involved in those projects. So, I say, separate the toxic creator from the work. If you love Firefly, keep loving Firefly. Boycott Whedon’s new works instead. Make it clear to studios that you won’t support someone who behaves so badly on set. Encourage others to do the same. That is the way you can effect real change in the now.

 

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Eric Dontigney is the author of 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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OP-ED: “In Loving Memory of Cars,” by Bruce Bethke

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[Nota bene: originally published June 3, 2008. It’s reappearance now is another case of “Blame Guy Stewart.” I’ll explain why in the comments.]

This column is in memory of cars.

No, not the Gary Numan song. I started out today to write a think-piece about cars, and specifically about a certain fondly-remembered two-tone pink 1956 DeSoto Fireflite.

My writing process sometimes cross-pollinates in strange ways, though. I was out at the target range Sunday afternoon, trying out a new load, when a trick of the late afternoon sunlight made it apparent how much smoke each shot generated. Some of it was powder smoke; most of it was lubricant smoke; but given that I was shooting plain-base cast-lead bullets, a tiny but disturbing amount of it was unquestionably vaporized lead.

Nasty stuff, lead. Highly toxic. Very persistent. Gifted with a disturbing affinity for the myelin sheaths of vertebrate neurons. We call it “lead poisoning,” but the symptoms of lead-related neurotoxicity are much uglier than mere poisoning. Even at very low levels, lead in the bloodstream has a proven causal link to low intelligence, anti-social behavior, and a tendency to commit violence. At higher levels it causes impaired vision, coordination and balance problems, speech impairment and memory loss, and ultimately, paranoia, violent insanity, and death.

Short of intravenous injection, the fastest and most effective way to get a substance into your bloodstream is by vaporizing and inhaling it. Which, if you’re wondering where I’m going with this, is why I started out thinking about a 1956 DeSoto Fireflite, and ended up thinking about the fuel that 341-cubic-inch hemi V-8 ran on: leaded gasoline.

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This is a story that needs to be told, and told again, because anyone born after 1970 doesn’t know it and anyone older has probably forgotten it. Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, it’s a lot easier to tell the story these days. When I first wrote about this subject, 15-plus years ago, [nb: 25 years, now] authoritative sources were hard to find.

Today, all I need to do is go to Google, type in tetraethyl, and voila! Sources out the wazoo! So many sources, in fact, that I probably don’t really need to tell this story after all; I could just point you to a list of other sites that have already told the tale. Assuming you don’t have the time to do primary-source research yourself, though...

In highly condensed form, it goes like this. The concept of “peak oil” is nothing new. In the 1920s, the finest minds in the scientific community were absolutely certain we were going to run out of recoverable crude oil very soon, by 1950 at the latest. Accordingly a great deal effort was put into the search for alternative automotive fuels, most notably those based on alcohol. Henry Ford in particular put a lot of time and money into agricultural projects intended to produce biologically-derived alternative fuels. (He also invested in a project to turn his factory’s considerable amounts of hardwood waste into a safe and easily handled heating and cooking fuel, which is something to consider the next time you light up those Kingsford briquets.)

At the same time, General Motors was having an engineering problem. Their car and truck engines just plain didn’t run well on ordinary gasoline. They were prone to preignition—“knock,” in layman’s terms—and while the problem could be (and eventually was) solved by improved engineering or better-quality fuels, in the 1920s they opted for a cheaper solution: specifically, they sought some magic ingredient that could be added to ordinary gasoline to boost its octane rating. This, it was hoped, would both mitigate GM’s engine design flaws and stretch the (believed to be) dwindling supplies of gasoline, as it would allow lower grades of fuel to be used in cars and trucks.

The answer to GM’s problem was not actually a mystery. It was already well-known that you could increase the octane rating of gasoline either by improving the refining process, as Sunoco was already doing, or by using non-toxic additives such as alcohol or iron carbonyl. However, in the final analysis GM, working with Standard Oil, settled on adding tetraethyl lead (TEL) to gasoline, for two very important reasons:

1. It was slightly cheaper than alcohol, and

2. Unlike iron carbonyl, GM owned the patent on TEL.

The redefinition then of “regular” gasoline to be low-grade gasoline plus “Ethyl,” (a much less frightening term than tetraethyl lead, and trademarkable, to boot), was not without its problems. The health hazards of lead exposure have been known for millennia, and once leaded gasoline went into volume production, Standard Oil refinery workers began going insane and dying in disturbing numbers. In 1925 the Surgeon General banned the manufacture and sale of leaded gasoline in the U.S. while a blue-ribbon panel of experts was convened to investigate the issue, but in 1926 this panel, which consisted of a bevy of industry experts and just one M.D., returned a report declaring that TEL was safe and there was no reason to continue the ban, therefore sales of leaded gasoline could resume. Whereupon the Ethyl Corporation—the wholly owned subsidiary of GM that owned the patent—the DuPont Corporation—which actually manufactured TEL—and Standard Oil—which blended, distributed, and sold the resulting leaded gasoline—all became very, very, very rich.

Sad to say, though, the story does not end on this happy note. As any cast-bullet shooter knows, vaporized lead and lead oxides have a tendency to condense very quickly, which is what makes gun barrels such a chore to clean after you’ve been shooting cast bullets. Likewise, the same thing happens inside automotive engines, with potentially catastrophic results. Therefore, to keep cylinders and valves from soldering themselves shut and engines from seizing up, the makers of leaded gasoline eventually wound up adding ethylene dibromide and ethylene dichloride to the mix, so that automotive internal combustion produced the highly volatile compounds lead bromide and lead chloride, which could be depended upon to leave the engine in the exhaust gas stream and go off to join that great smoggy mass in the sky, or at least to condense out after they were safely clear of the tailpipe. And at long last, there was much rejoicing in Detroit, and happy motoring in the streets.

And all over America, because of the use of leaded gasoline, the bloodstream lead levels of inner city dwellers began to rise...

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Devout Libertarians like to say that left to its own devices, the invisible hand of the free market will take care of everything, including environmental problems. I use this story to illustrate the point that sometimes the invisible hand is holding an invisible gun, and it’s pointed right at your head. What finally ended the use of TEL in common gasoline was not the force of the free market—Ford had championed the use of non-toxic lead alternatives for years, and failed—but the much-maligned Environmental Protection Agency, which in the 1970s, after years of litigation that was fought tooth-and-nail every step of the way by the Ethyl Corporation (a wholly owned subsidiary of GM, remember?), finally got leaded gasoline mostly banned in the United States.

Notice that I said “mostly.” Leaded gasoline is still available for use in piston-engined aircraft and as high-octane automotive racing fuel. It’s also still manufactured and sold in many countries, including Yemen, North Korea, parts of Northwest Africa, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iraq, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories.

So, let’s review. Inhaling vaporized lead has been proven to cause stupidity, insanity, and violence. And for 50 years, America’s densely populated urban centers were saturated in lead combustion by-products why?

Now tell me again about the wisdom of Charles E. Wilson, and why U.S. taxpayers should step in now to save GM from bankruptcy...

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OP-ED: “A Generation Ship The Size of a Small Planet,” by Bruce Bethke

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Nota Bene: You can blame Guy Stewart for this. A few days ago he sent me off on a quest into the RLP archives to find some things relating to his short story, “Oath,” and along the way I found this one again. I had a vague recollection of having written it, and had always meant to revisit the core idea for a new feature to be called either Tropisms or Books I’ll Never Finish, but after re-reading it now—and especially after seeing the conclusions I reached then—I present it to you now much as it first appeared in 2008, save for some typographical corrections and added illustrations. All attendant ironies remain intact.

~brb

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The Multi-Generational Con (Part I)

In the course of a discussion of Social Security, a reader named Athor Pel asked a few of my favorite questions.

I’ve been pondering some questions lately.

Why are we willing to pay taxes?

1) that we didn’t vote into existence

2) to a government that we didn’t have any say in creating originally

It was all in place before we were born.

Why should we play the game? 

These are some of my favorite questions, and not because I’m advocating a tax revolt—although I do believe that if we did not have automatic income tax withholding, and if all gainfully employed Americans therefore had to write a check to the government every three months just as we gainfully self-employed people do, then we would have one very angry tax revolt in very hot progress in very short order—

No, these questions fascinate me because of one of the hoary old mainstays of hard science fiction: the generation ship.

The idea, if you’re not familiar with it, goes like this. Since we know that the speed of light in a vacuum, c, is not just the law, it’s the absolute limit, and we know that hyperdrive, warp drive, jump drive, and all the other variously named ways of getting beyond c are merely convenient fictional gimmicks with no basis in reality, the other obvious way for humans to cross vast interstellar distances is by building ships so big they’re self-contained ecologies, and then launching them out with the assumption that the crew will breed, and it will be their many-generations-removed descendants who will actually arrive at wherever it is the ship is going.

Heinlein got a lot of mileage out of this idea. I grew up on his Starship Magellan juveniles and loved ‘em. The problem came when I, as an adult writer, started looking at the idea afresh with the intention of using it in a novel, and I started running into the same sorts of questions that Athor Pel posed.

What exactly is a generation ship? Pared down to its nub, it’s a closed, utopian society, on a mission to some goal that was defined long before the current occupants were born. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that in all my readings of history, I have been unable to find a single example of a closed, utopian society that lasted more than five generations—and that’s using a very lax definition of “utopian.” The Soviet Union, for example, was supposed to be a utopian society, and yet even the Soviet Union, with all its formidable power, did not last five generations.

Five generations seems to be the outside limit. Three generations is when things start to fall apart. The first-generation founders of the utopia usually manage okay, if they’re not complete blithering idiots (see “The Great Hippie Commune Disaster,” 1968), and the founders can usually do a decent job of indoctrinating most of their children and controlling the few nonconformists. But by the time the grandchildren of the founders come along, a lot more people are asking Athor’s questions, and by the time the great-grandchildren reach adulthood, the pressure to either radically change the terms of the mission or else to just tear the whole damned thing down and start over become nearly irresistible.

This does not bode well for the prospects of a successful generation ship on its way to Proximi Centauri.

Which leads to a different line of thought: if you have a ship so large it’s a self-contained ecology, why bother leaving Sol system at all? It’s not as if there’s a shortage of room here. Why not just park the thing, say, three months ahead or behind of Earth’s position in solar orbit, and con the poor buggers on-board into thinking they’re on a centuries-long multi-generational voyage to Farfnargle IV? Or, if you want to get really tricky, just shoot it into a long orbit out to the Kuiper Belt and back, so that the “colonists” think they’re arriving on Epison Whachamacallit when all they’re really doing is finally returning to Earth?

So that’s the root idea. Now where’s the story in this?

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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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