It’s a puzzling thing, how often those who claim to think for themselves – to consider the facts and weigh different perspectives and thereby come to their own conclusions – hold views which just happen to be in lockstep conformity with the dominant narrative.
When the outcome of their intellectual labors is indistinguishable from a lazy regurgitation of the ‘official version’, it makes me wonder why they bothered.
— Silas Hudson
Better the Second Time Around
Creating an entirely new Mars-focused fictional universe has not been quite as difficult as I expected it to be.
I’d been toying with a few concepts for the past several months, and really started getting good ideas while on vacation – primarily about a “noodle incident” that creates the setting for the future history, a number of consequences in the fictional “present day”, and a few of the principal characters. So much came to me while hiking that I had to buy another notebook at Tesco to keep up.
I spent a few days after I got home working out a modified three-act structure that I think will make constructing the plots of the new novels a little easier. But rather than jumping right in to building the plots for a new trilogy, I got distracted by fleshing out the fictional infrastructure. The two play off of each other in interesting ways – I have three documents open at the moment, in which I’m capturing and integrating elements of the future history’s timeline, a large number of characters central to the trilogy (primary, secondary, and tag characters alike), and technological, social, historical, and other developments that happen between “now” (the point of departure) and then. It’s quite entertaining to see how each builds off of the others and suggests new ideas that might not have occurred to me had I tried building the plots first.
While I have a lot of pieces of plot, they haven’t snapped together yet. I can see it coming, though, and it’s got to be more efficient than putting a plot together and then doing the worldbuilding around it to make it work. The latter led to a lot of dead ends with the novel plots in the old project, requiring in some places some contrivances that would have stretched credulity.
In contrast, I hit on the idea of the “Dispatches” as a way to use and extend the worldbuilding that had been done already for the old project, letting the elements of the fictional universe suggest the stories. This worked very well, I think, as most of the Dispatches I outlined had plots with solid, organic endings from the outset.
The one thing that does chap my ass about this is all the things that I predicted in the old project’s future history that then materialized in the real world (browse the entries under the “Life Imitates Art” category for a small taste of these). Maybe I’m good at projecting trends and foreseeing innovations and their consequences – but maybe I’m not, and just got lucky the first time around.
As more comes together, I’ll start laying out here what that future history looks like, the key events and technological developments that shape the next forty years. I’ll also change the site name and update the layout once I decide what I want to call the new project.
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:
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.
Jedediah Thoreson on Knowledge
We know so much that we lose sight of how stupid we are.
— Jedediah Thoreson
“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 Futile Conversations
Never mind disagreement about the facts of the matter. You can’t hold a meaningful or productive discussion with someone who disagrees with your capacity – or your right – to hold a view different from their own.
— Silas Hudson
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.
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