Cover art for Exodemic. |
2019 update. I made a video account of how the stories of Isaac Asimov inspired me to write Exodemic. See the end of this blog post.
animated cover |
The exodemic starts with Judy's mother, Kate, who grows up near a volcano and who is almost killed during an eruption. Kate is taken off of Earth by an Interventionist agent (image, just below, to right) and trained for a return mission to Earth.
A nanorobotic artificial life form. |
Observer Base |
Overseers |
The Rossi Intervention |
In 1816 there was no shortage of men who were able to get themselves into trouble by over-confident application of one small piece of knowledge. In Mary's time, there were doctors who would apply electric shocks to patients in the wild hope of getting lucky and curing some medical problem. There was a long struggle between the tradition of midwives assisting at home births and male doctors promoting deliveries in hospitals with supervision by male physicians, particularly for unusual high-risk pregnancies. It was not until half a century later that systematic analysis of birthing records by people like Florence Nightingale finally clarified the risks and benefits of hospital delivery. Adequate sanitation was finally recognized as the key to preventing the type of maternal death suffered by Mary's mother.
Before the late 1800s, the emerging discipline of microbiology was unable to systematically isolate and identify and characterize the microbes that cause infectious disease. When Ignaz Semmelweis demonstrated in 1847 that hand sanitation could greatly reduce the type of maternal death suffered by Mary's mother, the medical profession was not yet ready for the "germ theory" of disease and scientists were only just starting to think of the human body in terms of a collection of cellular subunits.
In the absence of any understanding of the microscopic cellular components of living organisms there was a vast amount of speculation about hydrological, magnetic and electrical mechanisms in an attempt to understand bodily functions (a nice account). When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, the Age of Enlightenment was over and European intellectuals were often reacting against the bumbling enthusiasms of natural philosophers and their primitive efforts to reduce even life itself to a collection of mechanistic processes.
Following behind Mary Shelley, it has been hard for dramatists to resist the temptation to create a spiffy reanimation scene with lightening and electricity jolting dead body parts back to life. In our current age of video, science fiction stories are routinely contaminated by silly efforts to create a dramatic visual moment, often built around some recent scientific discovery or popularized buzzword. Think of the role of antimatter in the movie Angels and Demons. We get an emotional rush from a dramatic light show that is triggered by the antimatter, but no real intellectual stimulation.
One of my goals in writing the Exodemic alternative history novel was to show a version of Earth where the Age of Enlightenment never ended. The fact that Judy Renshaw was not killed by smallpox not only led to a long life for Mary Shelley's mother but also prevented the French Revolution. In Exodemic the USA never forms and the British colonies in America remain as part of a British Union where slavery is abolished and Lincoln never has to fight the Civil War. Similarly, France and its colonies develop into an economically powerful collective of nations that bring the continent of Africa into the Enlightenment.
One of my goals for Exodemic was to achieve early discovery of the non-human apes in Africa and depict the creation of successful efforts to protect animal species that are endangered in our world. In the Exodemic alternative history, the ranges of the great apes are turned into parks, not farmland. In Exodemic, philosophical Romanticism quickly gives birth to an effective environmentalism movement. Similarly, the Exodemic plot shows that Mary Wollstonecraft and like-minded people are able to liberate women and bring effective birth control to the world a century earlier that in our version of history.....world population peaks at 4,000,000,000 and most of the people alive today never have a chance to be born.
In Exodemic, Franny is a recognizably modern woman, well educated and practicing medicine and conducting scientific research...all a century before such things were possible in our world....all made possible by the sly Interventionists and the way they were able to alter the course of human civilization by slipping a few fast ones past the Overseers. When Franny is taken off of Earth, she has no trouble merging into Genesaunt culture and sets about trying to understand the dynamics of the planet-wide chess game that is played by the Interventionists and the Overseers.
The Overseers are descendants of Neanderthal-like humanoids who were taken off of Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, even before modern humans had evolved. Overseers are no longer biological life forms; they are composed of nanoscopic nanite subunits and can morph their external appearance to match the human body form. In this image, the spaceship's staircase is also composed of nanites and is being constructed before Kate Renshaw's eyes within a suffocating volcanic cloud that is killing Kate during the eruption. This scene is the "teaser" for Exodemic, a kind of "alien abduction" in the 1700s that is never explained to the reader until much later in the novel. As an Interventionist agent, Kate is kept under tight surveillance by the Overseers when she is taken off of Earth (the second time she leaves Earth, after the Overseers finally recognize her as a tool of the Interventionists).
the Huaoshy |
Just as Judy got herself into trouble and was taken off of Earth and inserted into Genesaunt civilization, sometimes Genesaunts are extracted from Genesaunt civilization and are allowed to join the vast intergalactic civilization that has been created by the Huaoshy. In Exodemic, Franny is insatiably curious about how it has been possible for Earth to be secrely under Observation for millions of years. She manages to make contact with the Interventionists, but she is being followed by the Genesaunt "police", which allows the Huaoshy to uncover a plot by which the Interventionists were being given illegal access to advanced technology in violation of the Rules of Intervention. Franny has never violated the Rules of Intervention, but she is given the option of having her hard-won knowledge of the Huaoshy erased from her mind or being extracted from Genesaunt civilization. She decides to rise another "level" and allow herself to be taken away from the Solar System in a faster-than-light space ship. Franny goes on to learn about how the Huaoshy colonize galaxies like our own over the span of millions of years.
More about Franny and her interactions with Genesaunts.
Related Reading. Comments about the prelude to Exodemic. There is more about Exodemic in my next blog post.
2019 video. Watch the Exodemic teaser video on YouTube.
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