Setting | A Fistful of Photons

“Two Years Before the Mast”

There was an element of R.H. Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast that seemed very familiar to me: the feel of an isolated, even empty world that permeates Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Endurance, and Home of the Blizzard.

Sure, it’s clear at the beginning that there is in fact a bustling, settled civilization in the background (specifically 1830s Boston), but once Dana’s ship dropped “below the hill, below the kirk, below the lighthouse top”, as it were, it’s as if the outer world no longer exists, and he is sailing on the endless seas of an empty planet.

Even after arriving in California, this sense of emptiness is barely relieved by the presence of Mexicans, Indians, and the occasional crews of other ships. There are so few people, so sparsely settled, that if anything it makes the emptiness of the world seem more rather than less acute.

It struck me that this element is actually missing from the SF I have read.

Which is strange, as you’d think it’d be a pretty obvious detail to weave into the worldbuilding of (say) the first mission to Mars, or a newly-settled planet: the characters are alone, far from civilization and from help should it be needed. They wouldn’t have it in their head that someone is watching over them, because there isn’t anyone. They wouldn’t assume that someone can be summoned to rescue them at a moment’s notice, because there is no one to call. They would know they couldn’t simply “return to civilization” should they tire of their adventures, because they are what passes for civilization.

It’s not a sense of danger or threat, though. It simply is the way the world is around them. The conditioned sense of immersion in civilization wherever one goes is simply absent, because actual civilization itself is so distant as to be wholly absent.

I think the thorough rewrite of the former project’s “The Olympian Race” already captures some of this sense of isolation and emptiness in the climactic chapters, so this is timely.

One “character” detail that stood out for me was Dana’s personal reaction at his return to Boston. He’d dreamt for two years of finishing his contract and returning home, imagining what he would do and where he would go and who he would see. But when his ship at last reached the pier in Boston Harbor, he was instead overcome with a sense of inertia: “There is probably so much of excitement in prolonged expectation, that the quiet realizing of it produces a momentary stagnation of feeling as well as of effort. It was a good deal so with me.”

The account was fairly short, but no less powerful for that. And the book is peppered with such character observations of his crewmates and himself, fascinating little details that SF rarely seem to capture. In fairness, it’s easier to amass a collection of such observations to draw on when you spend two years immersed in the relevant environment, something rarely possible (even in analogue form) for SF writers.

I repeatedly had the same reaction I had while reading The Anabasis and Mawson’s account of his return to the hut in Home of the Blizzard: “This is such an amazing account – it would form the basis of a fantastic SF story.”

Alas, several SF versions of The Anabasis have been done. However, the story I’m currently working on, “Beneath a Silent Sky”, originated as an homage to Mawson’s account (albeit infused with paranoid mystery…).

One final item that struck me was the section written in 1860, documenting his observations from a return trip to California. In 24 years, everything that he had encountered had changed dramatically, in particular San Francisco Bay and the surrounding areas. In 1835, he described a smallish settlement around the Presidio, dwarfed by the main Mexican settlement at Monterey. When he returned, he found a city of 100,000-plus people, smaller but significant settlements scattered all around the bay, Alcatraz turned into a fortress, and a booming economy.

I always wondered if 15-20 years would be sufficient to settle Mars to the point that it could demand autonomy or sovereignty. Could enough settlers arrive and build a sufficiently large and diverse economy to support such a move? Well, here is one real-world example to draw on…

Busywork as Social Order Maintenance

I found this passage from Two Years Before the Mast interesting for several reasons (emphasis mine):

Before I end my explanations, it may be well to define a day’s work, and to correct a mistake prevalent among landsmen about a sailor’s life. Nothing is more common than to hear people say, “Are not sailors very idle at sea? What can they find to do?” This is a natural mistake, and, being frequently made, is one which every sailor feels interested in having corrected. In the first place, then, the discipline of the ship requires every man to be at work upon something when he is on deck, except at night and on Sundays. At all other times you will never see a man, on board a well-ordered vessel, standing idle on deck, sitting down, or leaning over the side. It is the officers’ duty to keep every one at work, even if there is nothing to be done but to scrape the rust from the chain cables. In no state prison are the convicts more regularly set to work, and more closely watched. No conversation is allowed among the crew at their duty, and though they frequently do talk when aloft, or when near one another, yet they stop when an officer is nigh.

…This is the usual resource upon a rainy day, for then it will not do to work upon rigging; and when it is pouring down in floods, instead of letting the sailors stand about in sheltered places, and talk, and keep themselves comfortable, they are separated to different parts of the ship and kept at work picking oakum. I have seen oakum stuff placed about in different parts of the ship, so that the sailors might not be idle in the snatches between the frequent squalls upon crossing the equator. Some officers have been so driven to find work for the crew in a ship ready for sea, that they have set them to pounding the anchors (often done) and scraping the chain cables.

In the full passage, Dana explains that there is more than enough necessary work aboard ship to keep the crew continually busy. But he implies here and elsewhere (and may at some point come out and say it explicitly) that the continuous employment at all times is a means of maintaining discipline and order among the crew. When every waking moment is taken up with some task (necessary or make-work), there is little opportunity or energy left for the kind of talk or actions that could lead to conflict or disobedience.

Which, when you think about it, is a lot like modern life: work, commuting, childrens’ enrichment activities, the DMV, tax prep, home maintenance, car maintenance, doctor or dentist appointments, walking the dog, bathing the cat, etc. And what time is not consumed in these tasks (some of which are the consequences of personal choices, and some of which seem consciously structured to maximize the waste of your time), omnipresent distractions like sportsball, addictive social media, banal entertainment, controversy-stoking “news”, shifting trends, etc. are there to absorb.

I can easily imagine this shipboard practice being implemented on ships traveling between Earth/Luna and Mars – and at least in the early days, in settlements themselves – for exactly the reasons thus far implied by Dana.

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).

Speaking of Olympus Mons

It’s curious how difficult it is to find the location of the actual summit of the volcano.

Various sources will tell you how high it is, some will tell you it’s near the south edge of the summit caldera, but you need to dig a bit to find that it’s a little west of Pangboche crater (whose north rim appears to rival it), just an unremarkable spot in the middle of a plain. If you know where to look, Google Mars kinda gets you close (yellow pins on right):

No dramatic summit ridge? No awe-inspiring pinnacle? Not even a small rise to set the spot off a little bit? I expected more from the largest (planetary) mountain in the solar system.

This is where artistic license comes into play.

Doesn’t Look All That Intimidating

Came across this while doing some story research: Olympus Mons, complete with escarpment and aureole

It’s one picture of hundreds of its kind, cited as evidence of how impassible the escarpment around Olympus Mons is to surface-traveling explorers.

Yet…

Look at the left side in this picture (west-northwest on Olympus Mons). No escarpment. No impassible five-mile-high cliffs. Just a long slope. Kinda like the ones on the south side of the volcano.

I bet you could drive a rover up those slopes…

Managerialism: Where the MDA is Headed

In a nutshell, a managerial state, implemented (enforced) via MAs: The China Convergence.

I haven’t finished the article yet, but the first several pages neatly summarize my thinking on where the MDA is headed in the second and third books, based on my reading of Burnham, Reimann, Orwell, Wells, Scott, and others.

This managerial system developed into several overlapping, interlinked sectors that can be roughly divided into and categorized as: the managerial state, the managerial economy, the managerial intelligentsia, the managerial mass media, and managerial philanthropy. Each of these five sectors features its own slightly unique species of managerial elite, each with its own roles and interests. But each commonly acts out of its own interest to reinforce and protect the interests of the other sectors, and the system as a whole. All of the sectors are bound together by a shared interest in the expansion of technical and mass organizations, the proliferation of managers, and the marginalization of nonmanagerial elements.

Interesting that art is imitating life here for a change.

My own imagined version of this based on reading Burnham is a managerial system so integrated that the sectors defined by Lyons are indistinguishable, having been systematically dismantled and rebuilt as a seamless whole.

The catch in implementing any totalitarian state has always been achieving the total part: total control requires total legibility and total ‘actionability’. If you are obliged to carry an electronic communications device in your pocket at all times, and you use it in some capacity (even just its passive presence) in every interaction with another human, it’s trivial for the state in question to harvest all the data about your thoughts and actions they could ever need. And with a machine simulacrum of intelligence to analyze it, to find subtle actions and interventions it can take to achieve its goals and eliminate dissent before it can become a problem – indeed, before the dissenters even become aware of their dissent.

Of what use are crude tools of surveillance and control like the gulag, Gestapo, Stasi, Pitešti, Room 101, struggle sessions, brainwashing, social credit, etc. when you have technology through which you can precisely spot the patterns and trends in an individual’s thoughts early, even before he does, and nudge him in a safer (for you) and more productive (for your interests) direction without his awareness?

A system of this kind, implemented objectively and with the right overall goals, could indeed be a utopia – all discontent headed off by the right incentives and disincentives applied automatically at the right moment, all personal potential optimized with targeted opportunities and constructive interferences appearing at the right moments, etc. Each subject might see himself as the luckiest man in the world as he reflects on his unbroken string of good fortune and near-misses…as if there is someone watching out for him.

But, humans being humans, we all know a system of this kind could not and would not be implemented in such a way. As we see with things like the Google algorithm, biases, pettiness, misanthropy, ideology, etc. would prevent an objective implementation. It would be impossible for anyone capable of implementing such a system to allow it to apply positive nudges to people they see as undeserving, e.g. giving a frustrated young antisemite an art-school scholarship so as to focus his energies on something rewarding and constructive – and equally impossible to avoid programming it to sadistically apply negative nudges to those they feel deserve them.

Melodrama and Bootstrapping

Came across this trailer the other day:

I haven’t watched any of the series, only a couple of other snippets, so I don’t know what the content is actually like, but this trailer put me off ever finding out.

When it first came out, I watched a couple of clips showing the launch of a Truax SeaDragon which, given my background and paired with the alternative history angle, piqued my interest.

This looks like…crap. Melodramatic crap. Soap opera crap on Mars. I mean, sure, the spaceships look fun, but the characters and their interactions look insufferable.

No thanks.

One of the comments caught my attention, however:

All “space colony” stories on TV and movies either stop short of the actual colonization, or skip the colonization part and move straight to how the colony was destroyed or how colonies fought against each other.

Okay, so we’re not TV or movies, but…Hello? We’re right here… That’s a major point of the entire Ares Project universe: showing the initial development stages of Mars settlement, the part that everyone else skips over.

Martian Technology: Science Pins and Pingers

These devices have been featured so far in In the Shadow of Ares and quite prominently in Redlands and He Has Walled Me In.

A science pin, as described in ItSoA, is a device shaped like a scaled-up golf tee, with a stem 1-1.5m long, and a head 100-150mm across and anywhere from 50mm to 400mm tall. The stem contains common power generation, storage, and management functions, and in the field is mounted to a peg or sleeve drilled or driven into the soil or rock. The head consists of one or more cylindrical modules of different heights and a wide variety of functions. These modules thread together at the center with a common physical and electrical interface.

In all applications there is a communications and C&DH (command and data handling) module. This module links the pin to local and satellite communications networks, as well as to specialized instruments such as seismometer arrays or deep soil probes which are not located on the pin itself.

Modularity and standardization make it possible for science pins to be quickly emplaced and easily maintained, and readily upgraded with new or additional instruments as needed. The size and external features of the modules make them easy for suited settlers to handle with gloved hands.

Lindsay Jacobsen is shown in ItSoA maintaining a science pin she had previously deployed to monitor ground water for evidence of biological activity.

In HHWMI, Leon Toa has a strange encounter with a strange science pin in the Wilds.

Redlands prominently features a gold-plated science pin, and the action is set at one of the settlements where the devices are manufactured.

In Ghosts of Tharsis, we introduce a specialized application of the science pin concept, the “pinger”. A pinger is a science pin used as a navigation aid, particularly during mild to moderate dust storms when travel by rover is still somewhat feasible. The head of a typical pinger is a single mass-produced module containing navigation strobes and the power storage required to operate them for a month or more. The head is crowned with a passive reflector that rover navigation radars can use for distance and triangulation measurements.

Pingers at intervals and in problem-prone locations include additional instruments to monitor local weather conditions and transmit them back to a central data hub for use in travel planning.

A real-world approximation of Martian navigation pingers — A real-world approximation of what Martian navigation pingers along a rover track might look like (Öskjuvatn, Iceland).

I particularly liked the idea of reusing science pin components as the basis of navigation aids, as it reflects a potential real-world solution to the problems of navigating across a landscape with minimally-developed roadways prone to obscuring by dust. It has the added benefit of eliminating the ability of the MDA to bring to a halt surface transportation among the independents by scrambling the signals from the positioning satellites on which they have a Charter-granted monopoly. But most importantly for our purposes as authors, it makes possible a dramatic rover chase in a Class 1 dust storm…

There’s a Story Here

I don’t know what it is, but I can imagine a dozen of my own:

If you take away the ray-gun rifle and the gas giant in the background, it’s a retrofuturist take on the climax of our (eventually upcoming) story, “The Olympian Race”.

(Unfortunately, I found this several years ago and don’t recall now where it came from.)

Helluva Ride

I had the same reaction to this that I had when LM started putting cameras on the Shuttle External Tanks: “Why haven’t they been doing this cool thing all along?”

The departure of the heatshield was especially fun, as it’s exactly how I imagined the corresponding event in the prologue to “In the Shadow of Ares” (minus the unfortunate burn-through, obviously).

The rover’s first 360 pano is also out:

Note the similarity…