Hana's Husband

Exode pulped: a whimsical depiction
of how Hollywood might present
the secret history of Earth...aliens
created the human species and then
used us as slave labor. Image source

When I started writing Exode, Hana was supposed to be the main character in the novel. The story was to begin on Earth and show Hana dealing with the behavioral problems of her daughter, Hilde. There was to be a mystery surrounding both Hilde's odd behavior and her father, whose location was unknown to readers at the start of the story: he had "abandoned" Hana half way through her pregnancy.

Prediction: Hollywood's obsession with alien monsters
in space is just as silly as imagined sea monsters.

If  I
were
to
give
in to
my
muse
and
affix
the
most
cliché
and melodramatic Space Opera spin to the plot of Exode, I'd say that poor Hana had secretly been used as a convenient incubator for a human-alien embryo. As a scientist in training, Hana could not help studying both her daughter and the mysterious puzzle of how a virgin (Hana) could get pregnant.

Hana finds the unique
gene pattern of Hilde.

Putting together the various available clues and puzzle pieces and making use of new DNA analysis tools like gene restriction enzyme site mapping, Hana eventually learned too much about her daughter.  As a consequence of her insatiable curiosity, Hana got to meet "Hank" Montpellier, an Interventionist agent.

Far left: Hilde.

Hank realized that Hana was soon going to reveal to the world the fact that the human species had been -and continued to be- crafted by aliens. Hank knew that he could "get rid of Hana" by telling her about other inhabited worlds in the galaxy and offering her the opportunity to go visit them.

Hana was a good mother, but when she was offered a chance to leave Earth and go exploring among the stars, she went. Hank had arranged for his assistant (an artificial life form that, for simplicity, I'll call a robot) to become the surrogate mother for Hilde.  Exode was intended to be the story of Hana's travels among the stars and her discovery of what motivated the Interventionists to work secretly on Earth.

Click image to enlarge. Kirk loses another redshirt. Classic
Space Opera: male protagonist, damsels in distress, alien
monsters, dead redshirts...all sadly lacking from Exode.

Although I seldom write stories about death and destruction, I spent some time trying to decide if I should include the death of Hana's husband in Exode.

The term "Hana's husband" is really a misnomer. Hana was never married, so if "Hana's husband" has any real meaning then it is something like: "the father of Hilde".

Suspicion of who might be the father of Hilde has, through the years, fallen on a few likely suspects.

Peter pulped. source

Firstly, there is the Editor. About the time that Hana became pregnant, the Editor was her boy friend. However, Hana and the Editor never engaged in sexual intercourse, so it always seemed very unlikely that the Editor was Hilde's father.

The second suspect was Peter. Peter did know Hana when they were in college and Peter, as a carrier of many alien genes, believed that he could not father children with Earth women. Confident that he could not become a father, Peter had unprotected sex with several women, including Hana's college roommate. Later, after discovering that Peter was inter-fertile with some Earthlings, some commentators noted that there was a theoretical possibility of Peter being Hilde's father, but there was never any evidence to support this idea.

Hilde's family tree.

Eventually, when advanced DNA sequencing technology became available, it was possible to demonstrate conclusively that neither the Editor or Peter was Hilde's father.

Surprisingly (for Hilde, Hana and the Editor), Hilde turned out to be one of the Atlantis clones, a group of alien-human hybrids who play an important role in the Exode Trilogy.

Peter had rather callously implanted an embryo inside Hana, but he never bothered to explain his actions to Hana.

Ivory's attempt to use the Bimanoid Interface.

When Ivory Fersoni was growing up, she was trained to fill out forms by indicating that her father had been a man named Adão. Since hearing that story of her origins from Ivory, I have subsequently received hints from Angela that contradict such a conventional explanation for Ivory's existence. Here are two alternative stories:

1) Marta, realizing that no human male on Earth could father her children, simply cloned herself. In other words, Marta might have been the original Atlantis clone.

2) The Atlantis clones originated as a woman who long ago lived in the Galactic Core. According to this hypothesis, when Marta wanted to have a child, she was simply implanted with an "Atlantis clone embryo".

Next: I had so much fun with the Hank Montpellier character (A.K.A. Parthney) that I decided to give him a larger role in Exode.

The Undead of Exode

horror trumps science

For me, part of the fun of writing science fiction is trying to break out of my rather restricted comfort zone. Ever since discovering Isaac Asimov and Author Clarke back in the 1970s I've been a fan of what I view as being "hard" science fiction. As a science nerd, I enjoy stories that include science, high tech gadgets and characters who logically solve problems in a futuristic setting.

With my narrow focus of interest on hard science fiction, I don't have much patience with other genres such as fantasy. However, on the distant horizon of my writing "to do" list, I have my ultimate challenge: to write a fantasy story ... but I still really can't imagine how I will bring myself to do that.

magic trumps logic

In the same way that some people can be color blind, I'm "fantasy blind". I recently saw part of one of the Harry Potter movies where two of the characters were able to magically fly across an ocean in a flash, then in the next scene it was a major challenge for them to cross an additional 100 feet of water inside a cave. I've never understood the rules that guide the course of events in fantasy stories. I would not know how to construct a fantasy story...when I write I enjoy working within the constraints of natural laws that limit what is possible.

Through my participation in a collaborative fiction writing project (The Search for Kalid), I discovered how to appreciate the fun of including Space Opera elements in stories. That was a major breakthrough for me because I began writing science fiction with the intention of creating only "serious" stories that would not have room for goofy Space Opera elements. Most recently, I decided that rather than gripe about horror in science fiction, I'd make an attempt to include a horror thread in the story Exode. I'll need to mve gently towards my goal of including an element of horror in Exode: I want the horror element to be part of the suspense and mystery in adventure of the story, not an excuse to splash blood and guts across the pages.

zombies in political commentary

I'm impressed by authors who can effortlessly work in multiple genres, jumping between genres with agility. I've long enjoyed the science fiction of Jack Vance, but I've never been able to follow him into his fantasy or the "thriller" Bad Ronald. As a long-time hard science fiction fan, I'm just not very adventurous in seeking out othrer types of fiction and I frequently suffer when it seems that the science fiction genre is being over-run by types of stories that I do not enjoy reading. I recently came across the blog of David Loeff, another suffering science fiction fan, who wondered if the science fiction genre had become "un-dead" after having been over-run by vampires and zombies. David lamented the fact that writers seem to find it easier to jump on the band wagon some current pop culture theme like zombies rather than write more conventional fiction (pointing towards Vance as an author worthy of emulation).

Higgs-induced zombie eats a physics student.

As an example of where zombies trump science fiction I'll point to the recently released "Decay", an amateur movie built upon one of the great science stories of this year, the observation of Higgs particles at the LHC facility in Europe. In Decay, we are asked to imagine that when the Higgs decays, the resulting radiation magically turns people into cannibalistic zombies. It seems a sad commentary on our time that rather than create an interesting science fiction story about physics, a bunch of Ph.D. students would simply punt and make a silly zombie movie.

Apparently, part of the fun for the makers of Decay when they produce a movie about zombies at the LHC, was using zombies as a way to make commentary about how some people in the world view science. When the LHC was first going online, some people feared that black holes would be generated, leading to the end of the world. I suppose it is just a short step from fantasy black hole production to imagining that the LHC can turn people into zombies. Still, I'd be happier if the makers of Decay had been able to make a creative science-based adventure story.

zombie economics

It might well be the case that for writers trying to put bread on the table, it pay$ to write about zombie$ these days. The entertainment industry is driven by fads and if I was a starving artist I'd be tempted to $pin a few zombie tale$ simply to cash in on the craze. I occasional fantasize about a story in which Hollywood film executives are zombie-like aliens who simply make movies about topics that they are familiar with on their home world.

Immortal Buld
Since deciding on a rather unusual process of linked birth and death for the Buld in Exode, I've been trying to finalize my construction of a particular Buld character who needs to be at least 15,000 years old. When a new Buld arises as a conceptus, it quickly sets about the task of replacing the cells of its mother's body with its own cells. Part of the neural network structure of the mother's brain is retained when the baby's neurons replace those of the mother, so some of the thought patterns and personality of the parent can be passed from generation to generation. The Buld are hermaphroditic and, due to the ubiquitous presence of nanoscopic medical repair robots, they all retain the ability to become pregnant, even those who abstain from sex and live to be thousands of years old.

One of the great religious pillars of Hemmal is the dictum: "live eswer, die eswer". "Eswer" is from an ancient Preland language and in this context it can best be translated as "sword". Although the Prelands and Buld of Hemmal use the English language, there has never been a sword on the planet: the meaning of many words such as "sword" have never found their way from Earth to the culture of Hemmal. However, many of the heroic epics that are popular among the Prelands include the tragic theme of a hero who makes a tool. At first the tool affords magical success to the hero, but ultimately, the tool use backfires and there is a tragic ending. These tools are often called esweri ("swords") but they are depicted as being a magical hand-held device, rather like a basket hilt with no attached sword blade.

Among the Buld of Hemmal, a second interpretation of "live eswer, die eswer" (English translation: "live by the sword, die by the sword") has arisen. For the Huaoshy, the Buld Clan is a means by which new combinations of human genes can be produced, tested, and if found beneficial, transferred to Earth. Buld sexual behavior is shaped by religious ritual in Buld temples and Buld reproduction is carefully guided by the pek. Some of the Buld are aware of the mechanism of Buld reproduction and that when a "true" Buld becomes pregnant the new conceptus will usually develop into a true Buld by means of a process that causes the death of the parent. A Buld individual can live indefinitely...as long as thon does not become pregnant. In Exode, Yandrey is a Buld who has lived on Hemmal for more than 15,000 years as an Interventionist agent who helps make sure that "false" Buld such as Parthney can leave Hemmal and make their way to Earth.

Yandrey

Because of past connections to the Buld Scholars, Yandrey is one of the few people on Hemmal who knows that "eswre" and "suen" were the ancient Preland words for the genitalia of the hermaphroditic Prelands. Among "modern" Prelands, "live eswer, die eswer" means roughly, "if you make use of tools then those tools will kill you". This meaning is known to the Buld, but for a few Buld such as Yandrey the alternate meaning is "preganacy will kill you", although other Buld often mis-translate this as "sexual activity will kill you".

Over the long history of pek-human interactions, a continually reoccurring problem has been a tendency for some Prelands to mistakenly worship the pek as the creators of the human species. The pek actively try to keep the lives of Prelands short so as to facilitate a rapid pace of evolution and it is possible for Prelands to become aware of the fact that the pek are non-biological, what we might call artificial lifeforms...and immortal. Some Prelands come to think that their Creators want humans to become "undead" immortal beings like the pek. Unavoidably, some of these memes from Genesaunt Culture have made their way to Earth and been twisted into forms that can persist among humans who are allowed no contact with pek.

Yandrey is like an immortal seeker of souls who extracts poor unsuspecting humans such as Parthney from Hemmal, sending them off across space to do the bidding of the Interventionists. The pek like Reginal do their best to make Parthney stay on Hemmal. The tension that exits between Yandrey and Reginal spills over into the first chapter of Exode, but Parthney himself is largely unaware the battle for his soul. The reader is left to wonder what is best for Parthney and humanity.

Death among the Genesaunts

Neuron death and personality death

In Exode, the human residents of Hemmal do not get sick. Their bodies swarm with symbiotic nanoscopic components that efficiently repair damaged molecules, cells and tissues. Under such conditions, might the residents of Hemmal be immortal?

The Huaoshy have a few specific reasons for keeping humans on Hemmal. In particular, the Prelands are being subjected to a continuing process of genetic modification and artificial selection in an attempt to produce human variants that can merge into the transgalactic Genesaunt civilization that has been created by the Huaoshy.

Humans, as evolved on Earth, are viewed by the Huaoshy as little more than a dangerous and self-destructive life form, an evolutionary dead end. On worlds such as Hemmal there has been a 7-million-year-long search for useful gene combinations that might allow apes from Earth to evolve into a new form of life that is compatible with Genesaunt civilization. The Prelands are a work in progress, part way along the evolutionary arc between humans as we exist on Earth and the type of artificially evolved form of life that the Huoashy hope to craft from Earth's genetic stock.

Hermaphroditic Prelands: the future of human evolution

Given the advanced technology available to the Huaoshy, it is possible to keep the residents of Hemmal alive indefinitely, but such immortality would not facilitate the continuing evolution of the Prelands. Prelands are trained to live dramatic lives in an attempt to attain heroic glory and they usually die young.

The second important function of worlds like Hemmal is the production of Interventionists. The Buld Clan is an evolutionarily specialized branch of humanity. The Buld were engineered as a hermaphroditic human variant that can evolve in parallel with humans Earth. A true Buld has one more pair of chromosomes than we Earthlings. When additional Interventionists are needed on Earth then "false" Buld can be produced by subtracting the extra chromosome.

The Buld believe themselves to be immortal. However, while their bodies can be repaired and can theoretically last indefinitely, their brains are constantly changing. After a hundred years a Buld has few memories that are 100 years old and so that individual will have a distinct cognitive identity that is different from that of 100 years before. Each Buld individual has a human-like concept of the self, but that cognitive self is not immortal. Further, the Buld have an interesting reproductive process that impacts heavily upon the Buld concept of immortality.

Reproduction on Hemmal

 

Preland reproduction is entirely artificial. Genetic material is extracted from Prelands and artificially recombined to produce new Preland individuals. The infant Prelands are raised by the pek who have complete responsibility for passing the Preland culture from generation to generation.

Buld reproductive processes are different for the true Buld and the "false" Buld. The "false" Buld are difficult to distinguish genetically from Earthlings. The first few months of gestation take place inside the body of a true Buld then the pek assist in an early birth process. Gestation continues artificially (inside the body of a pek who will function as the "false" Buld's mother for the first few years of life). The newborn "false" Buld is raised in a special pek community to adulthood. In most cases, a "false" Buld has trouble fitting in to Buld society and is happy to leave the home world, receive training and then serve as an Interventionist agent on Earth.

For true Buld, the conceptus is never born. After three months of growth in the uterus the cells of the developing embryo become aggressive and, in cooperation with a swarm of symbiotic nanites, the cells of the new embryo being to spread through the body of the parent, eventually destroying and replacing all of the parental cells. Typically the parent is unaware of the pregnancy until the cells of the central nervous system are being replaced. The parent is suddenly incapacitated and enters into the religious ceremony of taiuoro, viewed by the Buld as a religious ritual of transformative meditation. After several weeks of being cared for by pek in a temple, the transformed Buld returns to normal life, usually with dramatic personality changes and vastly disrupted memories of previous life.

Many Buld view their life cycle as being a significant advance over that of the Prelands. Most Buld view the taiuoro as a kind of reincarnation. Some religious Buld think of the taiuoro as an opportunity to move one's self closer to perfection. Others view "the change" as an indication that one's past life was a failure and "the change" as being imposed by the Creators as a way to erase a failed Buld from existence. Some non-religious Buld abstain from engaging in sexual activity and thus avoid the taiuoro. A central tenet of Buld religion is that sexual behavior is required for transformation of the Buld towards the form of the Creators, however the Buld believe that they have evolved beyond the need for physical change and the needed transformation is spiritual.

Related reading: The Religion of Exode.

Web Weaving

This is the time of year when houses mysteriously sprout giant spider webs and I can't avoid thoughts of the ghost story Moon Hammer. In Moon Hammer, the normal boundary between life and death receives no respect. Characters from Earth's history who we all know to be dead and buried show up as characters in the story, living out their lives at a secret underground city on the Moon. Moon Hammer was intentionally written as a Halloween story, so it might be possible for readers to relax and have fun with the rather casual way in which some terrorists are at one moment blown up in an explosion on Earth then in the next moment shown to be living on the Moon. As Viole Falushe says in the Jack Vance novel, The Palace of Love, "Life, death; these are imprecise terms."

In other circumstances, I find it a challenge to relax my standards and allow fast-and-loose play with the deaths of fictional characters. I've previously declared it a Dirty Trick when authors first make the reader think that a character died, only to later say, "fooled you, that character did not really die!"

That particular Dirty Trick is part of a larger challenge faced by story tellers. My previous blog post touched on the sometimes irresistible temptation to insert a character into a story who just should not be there. Examples of when I've done this include inserting Isaac Asimov into the story The Start of Eternity and inserting Carl Sagan into a fanfiction Contact television series. It is pure mischief to insert Asimov and Sagan into fanfiction extensions of their works, but as Asimov himself wrote, some authorial pranks are just too much fun to resist.

The Final Problem

I'm currently developing the story Exode and my compulsion to insert a real world figure into the story has been growing. Previously, I agonized over the idea I could advance the story by engineering the death of Hana's husband. With time, I was able to accommodate myself to the introduction of a senseless death into Exode. About a month ago I decided that it would be convenient to construct the story in such a way that Hana would spend considerable time and effort searching for her husband, then finally discover that he had been killed.

I still like the idea of making Parthney agonize over the death of Hana's husband in some way. I also like the idea of there being a period of time during which Hana blames Parthney for the loss of her husband. This is becoming a rather tangled bit of web weaving:
1) On Earth, Hana's husband becomes a security risk for Parthney and so Parthney must send him away. Parthney lies and tells Hana that her husband is dead. Since Parthey won't explain the circumstances of the death, Hana suspects that Parthney is responsible for the death of her husband.
2) Eventually, both Hana and Parthney have left Earth behind. They meet again while Parthney is trying to make contact with the Huaoshy. At this point in Exode, Parthney is desperate for Hana's cooperation with the search for "god" (the creators of the human species). He admits that while on Earth he lied about the death of her husband. As is so often the case, one lie leads to another and so Parthney tells Hana that her husband accompanied some Fru'wu on a trip to the Andromeda galaxy.
3) Hana now wants to find her husband and she works with Parthney in an attempt to find a way to travel to the Andromeda galaxy.

Original artwork by Lee Moyer

4) Eventually, Parthney develops a working relationship the Fru'wu who decide that they must provide a spaceship to Parthney for an all-human mission to the Andromeda galaxy. By this point in the story, a romantic relationship has developed between Hana and Parthney's son, Boswei. Hana's devotion to her husband and her desire to find him has become a distraction by this point in Exode. Parthney, now well practiced in lying to Hana, lies once more, saying that her husband died while on an earlier Fru'wu mission to the Andromeda galaxy, a mission that was destroyed by the Nereids (who have their home world in the Andromeda galaxy).

Of course, once they reach the Andromeda galaxy and make contact with the Nereids, Hana learns that the earlier Fru'wu missions to the Andromeda galaxy were not destroyed. The crews of the ships that previously arrived in the Andromeda galaxy are still alive and living as the guests of the Nereids. The Nereids are able to assure Hana that her husband was not part of one of the Fru'wu missions to the Andromeda galaxy.

By this point in Exode, Hana and Boswei are happy together. Parthney returns to his original lie, telling Hana that her husband died on Earth. Of course, by now Hana cannot believe anything that Parthney says, particularly since he still has never given her a coherent account of her husband's death.

Eventually, Hana's son Izhiun goes to Earth. Hana requests that he try to find out what happened to her husband. While on Earth, Izhiun discovers that Hana's husband is still living on Earth! Long ago he made a deal with Parthney to disappear from Hana's life and Parthney promised to never tell Hana that had been her husband's choice.

Now, here is where my instinctive dislike of the Dirty Trick is aroused. The reader has been told several times that Hana's husband is dead. Suddenly, near the end of Exode Hana's husband finally walks on stage. And, to make things worse, this is where I feel the need to compound my transgressions.

At the end of Exode (which is actually described on the first page), Izhiun decides to provide the people of Earth with a written account of Genesaunt Culture. A Buld spaceship has reached the Solar System from the galactic core, and the Overseer-enforced restrictions on Earthlings having knowledge of Genesaunts have finally been eased. It is a trivial matter for Izhiun to leave behind on Earth a copy of the Exode story when he departs for Mars, but I've been feeling a little strange about the physical form that Exode takes (pages of a blog).

The very first part of Exode that I wrote was an account of a meeting between Parthney and Hana on Earth, just before she decides to leave Earth. In that chapter of Exode, it is revealed that Hana's husband is a writer who she met when they were attending college. I'm tempted to write myself into the story and say that I am Hana's husband...a choice that would explain how the Exode story ended up reaching the internet by way of a blog that I created.

Writing yourself into a story

I've previously mentioned the fact (see the end of this blog post) that Jack Vance found an amusing way to write himself into one of his novels. The Demon Prince novels are full of fictional quotes and blurbs that help sketch for readers some of the cultural background of the fictional universe that Vance created. Vance stuck this in:

"Is it conceivable that he Institute wields more control over the human psyche than we suspect?" - Jan Holberk Vaenz LXII


To me, this looks like a hint from Vance about the dramatic extent to which the mysterious Institute exerts control over the people of the Oikumene. He inserts the hint in such a way that we can imagine it coming, 1,500 years in our future, from a mysterious writer named "Jan Holberk Vaenz".

This kind of trickery reminds me of Isaac Asimov's story Gold. Although the story Gold never mentions either Asimov's name or The Gods Themselves, it is clear that he modeled the "Gregory Laborian" character in Gold after himself.

When I wrote (what was at that time) the first chapter of Exode I originally provided a name for Hana's husband, but it might be possible to simply refer to him as "Hana's husband" through most of the story.

Question for fiction authors: have you ever written yourself into a story?

If so, did you openly use your own name or did you use some trick to disguise the fact that a character in your story was actually you?

The Dark $ide of Hollywood

Back in the spring my thoughts turned to summer science fiction movies and my personal fantasy that Hollywood might actually depict an interesting space alien adventure on the big screen. But, now, on second thought, I wonder why we need look "out there" for space aliens when we have, right here at home, Hollywood and what passes for the modern "entertainment" industry.

When looking online for lists of 2012 SciFi movies I was surprised by some of the listed flicks. Part of the problem is that there has long been a blurring of the boundary between science fiction and fantasy. Another problem is that "superhero" movies like The Avengers often crossover into science fiction. Some SciFi fans included The Dark Knight Rises on their lists of anticipated summer films (example) and, sadly, some SciFi fans have gone to see The Dark Knight Rises, expecting summer time science fiction fun (example).

We find ourselves, all of us, as part of a great experiment in which "artists" try to top each other with ever more shocking video game and film depictions of murder and mayhem. We've gone from Psycho to Dark Knight in 50 years, from the innocent days when a bloody knife and the fictional death of one woman was shocking and on into a brave new era when the ca$h-centric folks in Hollywood can coolly and quickly calculate the marketing advantages to be had from shooting 70 moviegoers at a theater.

What, no movie theater massacre?
"Among the hundreds of innocent people he kills are numerous police officers, the police commissioner, a judge, and, of course, Rachel Dawes. Oh, and don't forget the he also blew up a hospital."

Don't forget. We know you will. Yawn. What is the new venue for mass murder this year? Give us something unexpected and cool, maybe a football stadium. But no murders at movie theaters! That would be too upsetting. Seriously, who in Hollywood could even imagine the mass murder of moviegoers?

When you go to see The Dark Knight Rises, who do you think you are going to be sitting next to? Hint.

Who are the kinds of people who thrive on -and flock to- the violence of Hollywood's Dark Knights? Hollywood marketing department motto: "depict a mass murder on screen and audiences will come." The pop gurus of the entertainment industry will keep telling us that we must respect the artistry, realism and deep philosophical meaning of the violence and anarchy that they $ell to us. Just as the tobacco industry assures us that $moking does no harm, just as oil companie$ assure us that global warming is natural, so too the entertainment industry assures us that flooding the minds of moviegoers with images of ever-more-realistically depicted "fanta$y violence" does no harm. And just to make $ure, the merchants of death will spend billions on marketing and anti-science disinformation campaigns.

The Joker is my Guru
"Is it bad that a homicidal, creepy, makeup wearing murderer can put a smile on my face?"

If it is only one in ten million fans of the Joker who is inspired to mass murder, can we ever, with scientific certainty, know that violence in movies has deleterious consequences?

On the day when 60 or 70 moviegoers were shot in Colorado,  my local newspaper described the Joker as a "valuable villain" who was "damaged in every way" and "doesn't care about the consequences". The secret to success in Hollywood? Find a drug-addled actor who can bring to the big screen a new "twist" on a mass murderer who jaded audiences have become bored with....and then collect your Oscars. If the actor manage$ to end up in rehab -or a grave- about at the relea$e time for the flick, then kick back and enjoy the wonder$ of free marketing.

WELCOME TO A WORLD WITHOUT RULES

Coming to a theater near you.

The human brain evolved so as to have neural circuits that promote survival, including special circuits that provide us with empathy. Scientific measures of altered brain activity in low empathy individuals might one day become possible. I'd like to run a test for empathy on the folks in Hollywood who have made it their mission in life to keep inventing new and audience-pleasing depictions of mass murder.

What brain changes occur in late adolescence and how might genetic predispositions or an environment full of fantasy violence deflect human brains from a healthy developmental pattern? Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Loughner, James Holmes. Who will step up to be the next case study?

While the scientific mills grind slowly, get out there and enjoy all those violence-filled summer flicks. Maybe you will want to drop by your local "sporting goods" store along the way and pick out a nice firearm.

related reading: 
Associations between Electronic Media Use and Involvement in Violence, Alcohol and Drug Use among United States High School Students.

An uncertain line between fantasy’s lure, nightmare" by Ty Burr

"Today, there's a general numbing of the audience. There's too much murder and killing. You make people insensitive by showing it all the time. The body count in pictures is huge. It numbs the audience into thinking it's not so terrible." - Peter Bogdanovich

Samson Smash

Death, Take a Holiday

I recently blogged about death in science fiction stories and that got me thinking about death of science fiction authors.

When I was young (probably around 1970) I was just discovering science fiction and I read about Halley's comet. 1986 seemed so far in the future (further away than the number of year I had yet lived).

When 1986 finally arrived, the comet was a flop and I started treating the turn of the century as the next great calendar milestone to be anticipated. Haley's comet was a visual flop, but its arrival corresponded to a true disaster...the start of a long chain of deaths among science fiction authors I knew.

1986. By 1986 I had been reading science fiction novels at a fairly good rate for more than 10 years. I was going to school at the University of Washington and there were some people I knew who treated Frank Herbert like some sort of guru...they'd stay up all night playing the Dune board game. I had read Dune, but I was not inspired to read the entire series and I did not see the movie. Still, it was a shock when Herbert died in 1986 at the age of 66.

1988. Then in 1988 it was Robert Heinlein who died. Heinlein was among the first science fiction authors that I read (Orphans of the Sky). I also rediscovered Heinlein in his late period of science fiction writing through The Number of the Beast and Friday. Since he was one of the "big three" science fiction authors I felt a certain obligation to read his work. However, for me, he came in third behind Asimov and Clarke. I wonder how much longer he might have lived and how many more stories he could have shared with the world if he had not smoked.

1990. When I was first starting to buy science fiction novels I would often look for the DAW logo. It was through DAW that I came to know many science fiction authors such as Andre Norton, John Brunner, M. A. Foster, C. J. Cherryh, Robert Trebor, Tanith Lee, and Jack Vance. Donald A. Wollheim died in 1990,  having been one of the most influential people in science fiction publishing.

1992. When Isaac Asimov died in 1992 I felt betrayed. I still wish that he had lived long enough to create a sequel to Foundation and Earth. Alternatively, we can make one ourselves.

1995. John Brunner died. When I was young I enjoyed his stories such as Born Under Mars.

Contact

1996. Death took a holiday in 1994, but while I was still recovering from Asimov's death, Carl Sagan died in 1996. Somehow he was able to push Contact to the brink of completion before he died. I wish he had lived long enough to bring us the needed sequel. However, I'd settle for a Contact television series.

1998. In 1998 Michael Crichton suffered his Hollywood death with the release of Sphere.

The first Crichton movie I saw was The Andromeda Strain, which was also the last Crichton movie I wanted to see. I actually had to buy the novel in order to see if it was better than the movie. As a budding biologist I was astounded by the idea of a lifeform from outer space that just happened to be perfectly suited to infect and kill humans, and it can also digest plastic! It is amazing how evolution by means of random mutations can work out just right so as to make possible Hollywood horror movie$.

After Sphere crashed and sank, Carlo Cavagna wrote, "Michael Crichton is a hack. He comes up with innovative concepts, but his characters are cardboard cutouts. Given the psychological foundations of the story, that's an egregious flaw, and the ending is absurdly dissatisfying." Siskel and Ebert, along with the rest of the world, gave Sphere a thumbs down (see the video below):

1999. James White died in 1999. When I was very young I read one of his Sector General medical science fiction stories. It was amazing that patients were treated and cured...that is, with distractions like nurse Murchison around. There is an amazing website devoted to White's Sector General Saga.

Alien cook book.

 2000. L. Sprague de Camp died in 2000. His novel Lest Darkness Fall was influential for time travel fiction and alternative history. It would be interesting to know how much this one novel influenced other authors such as Asimov (both his Foundation saga and The End of Eternity).

2001. Gordon R. Dickson died, the man who taught me to dislike military science fiction.

2002. Damon Knight died in 2002. His 1950 story To Serve Man became a famous episode of the Twilight Zone. In addition to his short story writing skills, Knight had the luck to be married to Kate Wilhelm who wrote stories such as Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.

2006. In 2004, Death again failed to take any science fiction authors who I've come to know during my life time. Stanislaw Lem died in 2006. His story Solaris was one of the first science fiction novels I read and it remains one of the most disturbing first contact stories I've ever read. It would be interesting to know how much influence Solaris has had on authors such as Asimov (Nemesis).

2008. Arthur C. Clarke died in 2008. The City and the Stars was one of the first science fiction stories I read. Many others followed including Rendezvous with Rama and The Fountains of Paradise. Clarke is best known for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I'd like to see remade.


2009. Philip José Farmer, author of Riverworld. Online story: The Biological Revolt.

2010. When I was young I enjoyed the early novels of James P. Hogan such as Inherit the Stars and The Genesis Machine. By the 1990s Hogan had "jumped the shark" in novels such as Paths to Otherwhere. I'm not sure that anyone was really sad when Hogan "retired" in 2010.

2012. Ray Bradbury died about a month ago. Of all the dead science fiction authors discussed on this page, Bradbury was the only one that provided assigned reading when I was in school: Fahrenheit 451 and The Illustrated Man.

So many authors who have been important to me died in even-numbered years. Strangely, 1984, 1994 and 2004 were exceptions. I'm ready for death to take another holiday in 2014. With any luck, no other science fiction authors will die before 2016. Mr. Vance, this means you, in particular.
___________________________________

May 30, 2013.
John Holbrook "Jack" Vance died May 26, 2013.
http://foreverness.jackvance.com/

Related Reading: Jack Vance,  reflections

_____________________________

June 9, 2013.
Iain Banks died.
I've read quite a bit about his Culture Series, but I've never read any of his work, mostly due to a long standing personal dislike of military science fiction. Maybe I should skip over Consider Phlebas and find a less war-oriented entry into The Culture.

Death and Destruction

If you have never read Jack Vance's "Demon Princes" novels then I suggest you go read them and come back here later.

In the Demon Princes novels, the protagonist (Gersen) is out for revenge (actually, he explicitly denies that his motivation is that simple and it may be that he is mainly interested in preventing the Demon princes from doing more harm to humanity). He lives his life for one purpose, to kill the five criminals who destroyed his family.
Spoilers follow....

I've long been intrigued by the ways that Vance found to "terminate" the five criminals. Gersen is disciplined and he goes about his task with workman-like efficiency, although he always wants to have a face-to-face meeting with his adversaries and tell them why they are about to die. I've been thinking about death and destruction in the context of the story that I'm currently creating (working title: Exode). I completed an outline of chapters for Exode today and realized that as things stand there is no death or destruction in the entire story! I'm not sure that we are allowed to write science fiction novels in which nobody dies and no planets are blown up.

cover by Edmund Emshwiller

At the end of the first Demon Princes novel (Star King), the "bad guy" tries to escape from Gersen. Gersen is ready and willing to "blast" the bad guy with his Space Opera blaster, but an alien creature is conveniently available to deliver the coup de grâce. Gersen walks off into the sunset with Pallis Atwrode, damsel formerly in distress. Gersen saves the girl and does not actually have to bloody his hands. Although, along the way to a happy ending, Gersen does break the bones of one evil minion in hand-to-hand combat and also poisons one of the Star King's evil henchmen (Suthiro), who, ironically, is a Master Venefice, a well-trained poisoner (Gersen neatly flushes Suthiro's corpse out into the vacuum of space). A third evil  henchman (who actually kidnapped Pallis) has to live out his life as a slave-like captive under conditions that are worse than the fate of death.

Sessily and Glawen

I wonder if Vance started out feeling a need to demonstrate Gersen's credentials as a ruthless killer, but then later had second thoughts about the mounting body count in the Demon Prince novels. Even before Gersen is on the trail of the first Demon Prince, Vance tells us that Gersen killed his first man in a street brawl, at the age of 14. Just to get started, to discover the names of the five Demon Princes, Gersen must torture and kill one of the evil henchmen. Much later in the series, Gersen says that he can't kill people without having a good reason for doing so. However, in Star King, Gersen poisons Suthiro for no obvious reason. (It is later suggested that as part of Gersen's training on Suthiro's home world, he learned to quickly poison anyone like Suthiro who would soon become an enemy.)

source

Revenge for murder is a popular theme in many Vance novels and central to the Demon Princes story. In Vance's Alastor Cluster novels the protagonists must deal with 1) the murder of a brother (Trullion), 2) the murder of a father (Marune), or 3) mass murder (Wyst). In the Cadwal Chronicles the pattern is similar: Glawen must deal with the murderer of his girl friend (the charming Sessily), Wayness must go on after the murder of her brother and in the final book of the trilogy they must deal with mass murder.

Cloned damsels in distress

In the second Demon Prices novel (The Killing Machine) Gersen hunts down Kokor Hekkus and blasts him to oblivion at point blank range. Along the way Gersen rescues (repeatedly) another damsel in distress, Alusz. Maybe there is a calculus according to which SciFi heroes must redeem themselves for each murder by rescue of a damsel in distress. By my count, Gersen is at about 4 murders and 2 damsels rescued by the end of The Killing Machine.

In The Palace of Love, the third Demon Prince has cloned a damsel in distress. Gersen rescues 4 cloned damsels in distress and at the moment when Gersen is ready to blast the bad guy, he falls to his death, so I'll not count that as Gersen murdering someone. By the wonders of cloning and "accidental deaths", the count has become 4 murders by Gersen and 6 damsels rescued.

Alice Wroke

In The Face, Gersen kills both Bel Ruk and Lens Larque in revenge for their roles in the death of his parents. Gersen has a serious romance with Jerdian, but I can't count her as a damsel in distress. Going into the fifth and final novel it is 6 murders by Gersen and 6 damsels rescued.

In The Book of Dreams, Gersen tries to kill Treesong, but fails. Ultimately, two of Treesong's henchmen and Treesong himself die in "accidents" that are arranged for by the Cleadhoes, Gersen's partners in retribution. I'm tempted to assign these three deaths as follows: one each to Gersen and the two Cleadhoes. Does Gersen rescue the miraculous Alice Wroke? Is she ever really in distress? I have to wonder what her fate might have been had Gersen not fallen in love with her....possibly the same fate as her father, who Treesong murdered. So my final tally is 7 murders by Gersen and 7 damsels rescued. Of course, Alice shares Gersen's motive to eliminate Treesong and along the way she rescues Gersen right back.

In one of his Foundation stories, one of Asimov's characters says, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent," but in standard Space Opera fashion, Galactic civilization begins to crumble and, as the story flowed from Asimov's trusty typewriter,  the destruction became epic. There are battling fleets of space ships and bombardments of planetary populations from space. At the personal level, Onum Barr takes revenge for the slaughter of his family by the crumbling Empire, murdering Bel Riose, the last strong General of the Empire. There is attempted assassination of The Mule and Bayta Darell has to murder poor Ebling Mis in order to prevent The Mule from becoming Emperor of the galaxy.

Exode

I'm not sure that Exode is best categorized as a Space Opera. Can you have a Space Opera story without death, battles and destruction?

In my story Exode there are many humanoid robots. Asimov is famous for his "laws of robotics" which allowed him room for stories about robots killing people and even a robot that murders another robot. In Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, an intelligent machine commits murder (Sorry, Dave).

The robots of Exode are tools of the Huaoshy. The Huaoshy are "alien invaders" of our galaxy, but they actually create the human species. In typical science fiction, alien invaders bring death and destruction to Earth. In Exode, the Huaoshy create and nurture humanity.

Kach, a character in Exode.

So far, I do not see any reason to have a murder in Exode. No wars, no space battles, no exploding planets. However, I could arrange for Parthney to kill Hana's husband. My original plan was to simply allow an Overseer to cart away her husband, but by forcing myself to find a way to add a murder to the story I can imagine that Parthney might realize that Hana's husband needs to be killed in order to prevent him from attracting the attention of an Overseer.

source

If I go this route (murder), I can also write the story so that, even after the murder, the Overseer still moves in and captures Parthney and Hana. The murder would weigh heavily on Parthney both for the act itself and because of its utter futility. What do you think? Should I throw a murder into Exode? The story is still under development and collaborating authors are welcome.
______________
Can't Count

There were several henchmen of the Demon Princes who are rather impersonally dispatched by Gersen and who I failed to count, above. In The Face, 4 of Larque's goons follow Gersen from the Black Barn and Gersen kills them all. At the high school reunion of Howard Treesong, Gersen kills 9 of Treesong's battle troops. Updated body counts.

The Exode Saga