Back From Vacation

Sadly, not much of what I did was very relevant to writing, unlike previous big adventure trips – most of the trip had to do with medieval and pre-WWI history rather than exotic locations or futuristic (or futurizable) settings.

You never know, though. The rise and fall of the Habsburgs and the shifting borders and power politics in the Kingdom of Hungary back in the day may prove useful. Somehow. If I were to write a Dune-style epic on Mars, perhaps.

The one thing that I can see as useful is the visits to several skansens – the Slovak equivalent of Brigadoon (a living village minimally changed from 1800 due to its remoteness and inaccessibility), another Slovak village combined from elements saved from a nearby dam project and representing 1880-1900, and the Roman village of Carnuntum with a number of (meticulous but still somewhat speculative) reconstructions of Roman homes, shops, and public buildings from around 350.

Why I see these as useful is that they give a perspective on what a minimum village (or settlement, in the case of Mars) and its structure/infrastructure might look like. No, Martian colonists won’t be living in colorful log houses, but these houses give functional clues what accommodations could look like when a settlement is first constructed: quarters of 2-3 small rooms, with a portion of the living area dedicated to (hand) work, shared areas for larger tasks or common functions like cooking or hygiene, meeting spaces used for social, religious, and administrative matters, etc. Carnuntum provided examples of how this could progress with time and prosperity into larger quarters encompassing more of the colonists’ daily activities: individual living, cooking, leisure, and hygiene spaces, and larger, purpose-built, and public-facing working and business spaces.

The integration of work/business into the home was different in each of the three, but was a key element in each in a way we’ve generally moved away from over the past century or more. Yes, people still do “live above the store”, so to speak, but it’s nowhere near as common, nor integrated in quite the same way as in these old examples (particularly Carnuntum).

And no, your home office where you do Zoom calls doesn’t count.

Apart from that, I can see basing a scene on something I did while hiking in the Tatras (crossing Prielom, in the direction of Polsky Hreben, in the rain – ’nuff said), and how I handled it when I realized how dangerous and stupid it was. And basing settings on some of the landscapes I either saw for the first time or saw in a new way (due to observing mountain climbers on them, or actually having crystal-clear weather for most of the trip).

 

Journal Review Project Status

…continues, albeit slowly thanks to family visits and summer activities.

I started out by scanning and reviewing my collection of index card notes from about 2009 on, during which exercise I kept finding observations that worked as Silas Hudson quotes (indeed, I found the origin of a few of them that were ultimately used in Redlands). Amused by this, I worked backwards through the (then) five notebooks covering 2022 through 2024, then through the margin notes in several books I had read on topics relevant to the character. Those sources alone filled four books like these with fictional quotes from Silas Hudson:

Very nice, but not what I use for everyday notes

At some point, I decided to go back to the beginning of the journals (or at least to 2006, when I became a lot more diligent about writing down ideas) and work forward systematically. Which turned out to be interesting for several unexpected reasons.

First, a lot of the content from 2006-2013 related to the citizen journalism project (People’s Press Collective) that I was involved in at the time. Almost one entire 140-page notebook was nothing but descriptions of argumentative tactics I had encountered online, information I had intended to use in training classes for activists. (When we closed down PPC, I had already created over 600 charts worth of class material. There are probably a few hundred more in the notebooks waiting to be written up. Even after combining and culling duplicates, this would have been a somewhat long training class.)

Second, there was a major shift of content in 2014. From about 2011 to 2013, writing-related notes gradually increased from about 15% of each journal to about 30%, and general ideas and observations went from maybe 5% to about 20%. For some reason, this shifted to about 30-35% writing-related and 50% or more ideas and observations starting when I started a new notebook mid-July 2014. I don’t recall anything happening at that time to cause it, but it’s night and day different from the one notebook to the next.

Prior to this point there were maybe a dozen Silas Hudson-relevant notes (very different from the index cards). After this point, they started appearing regularly, albeit nowhere near as often in the 2022-2024 notebooks.

In contrast, there was a constant trickle of Jedediah Thoreson-relevant notes throughout. But these too became noticeably more frequent after July 2014, though not yet as common as those relevant to Silas Hudson.

Third, there are a lot of good notes originating ideas or scenes or details that ended up in various Dispatches and in the second book – and many that did not. Some of the latter are really interesting as different potential paths these stories could have taken, or which future stories may use. Documenting all of that is going to take a second pass through all of the material, however.

At December 2014, I’ve almost filled book #5 for Hudson, and about three-quarters of one book for Thoreson (who gets this journal). The latter character is a little more difficult, as I don’t (yet) hear his voice quite the way I do Hudson’s. Probably because I spent a lot of time fleshing out Hudson for Redlands, while Thoreson in his (incomplete) story is intentionally something of an enigma to the other characters.

 

“Believe the Science”

Can’t find it now, but earlier today I read a social media post somewhere to the effect of: “Believe the science” is not science, that’s not how science works. 

Social media being social media, this was followed by a hundred or more comments of varying degrees of conversational intensity, falling largely into the following categories:

  • Non-content-adding amens;
  • Non-content-adding dismissals;
  • Concurrence from those in scientific fields;
  • Demurral from others in scientific fields;
  • Huffy replies from those who wholly missed the point;
  • Sneering replies from those who willfully ignored the point;
  • Pedantic performatism from those harping on a tangential (but oh so smart!) point;
  • Reductionism from capital-A Atheists trampling the point astride their hobby horses.

None of which adequately addressed what I saw as the point of the original post: the phrase “believe the science” (and “trust the science”) in the context in which the public is familiar with it is in fact a method of social and political manipulation.

It’s little more than an Appeal to Authority in a lab coat.

The phrase is not infamous for its use by honest scientific professionals, after all (who might rightly refer to e.g. the provisional acceptance of research results), but as a rhetorical tactic by politicized scientists and the politicians and technocrats they serve. It uses the public prestige built up by real science* in order to imply a finality of knowledge about the subject in question, and a certainty of the practical (even moral) rightness of the approved narrative and the inescapable truth of specific policies and actions derived from it.

The tell is how it’s used not only against the uneducated hicks and faith-based hayseeds who lack the smarts to even begin to understand the Eternally True Science™ of the Moment, but against specialists in the same or adjacent fields, often those with equal or superior credentials, who dissent from an approved narrative.

When one must “believe the science”, those who perform real science are heathens and heretics.

* — I see this prestige as attributable less to abstract scientific research they probably never encounter and more to the practical applications of real science via engineering, since engineering is the “science” that the public interacts with daily. Being an engineer, I am of course biased in that regard, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

 

 

 

Silas Hudson on the Obsolescence of Technocracy

Technocratic managerialism conditioned its subjects to crave accurate and reliable guidance, while leaving that craving unfulfilled. Its experts were compromised by their biases, ambitions, and wishful thinking in ways that sim ints could not be – and could not be reliably programmed to replicate.

Sim ints quickly came to do a better job of providing accurate and viewpoint-neutral information than human experts. The itch technocracy had created found a superior scratch, one that made technocracy itself obsolete.

— Silas Hudson

We Went to Olympus Mons on a Dare, But it Turned Out Completely Boring

I plotted out a Dispatch involving the first men to summit Olympus Mons, which originally included a dramatic scene on the summit ridge on the rim of the caldera.

Which, further research revealed, is not where the summit actually is.

It turned out to be difficult to find the actual summit location, but in Google Mars (no, the one in Google Earth Pro) it appeared to be on the north rim of Pangboche. Great, I thought: I simply have to move the sequence a bit south, and the descriptions of the ridge still work just fine!

Well, no.

After more research, I finally discovered the summit is likely some 15km to the east of Pangboche. In the middle of a rolling plain.

Like this, but redder.

Well. That complicates things a bit. It’s not exactly the kind of terrain where dramatic, death-defying challenges happen. Unless, of course, there are unexpected dangers lurking in those knolls…

*- Title stolen from this, which I need to re-read. I liked it a lot more than the reviewer, and picked up on a lot more subtextual commentary than she apparently did (or than was intended, maybe), but I can see her points. 

Silas Hudson on Shiny Utopian Futures

Perhaps the most effective persuasion against technocracy was its own literature, especially science fiction depicting futures of pure reason and socialist brotherhood. These bright imaginary utopias of endless scientific progress stood in embarrassing contrast to the drab and stultifying reality that emerged from every attempt to implement in the real world the means by which these new orders were to be established.

— Silas Hudson