Worldbuilding | A Fistful of Photons

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.

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).

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.

If I Were One to Squee…

…I’d be squeeing about now.

‘Babylon 5’ reboot in development with original series creator J. Michael Straczynski at the helm

No word yet on what the story, period, or characters might be, but it does sound like it’s a ground-up reboot a la Battlestar Galactica. As others have observed, it’d be difficult to simply re-film the original story as we already know the twists and turns and surprises, so like BSG it may only borrow the overall concept and some thematic and universe elements for a very different story.

On the bright side, JMS is in charge, and has 25 years of added experience to draw on and technological advances at his disposal. Imagine the ships, battles, Shadows, etc. rendered using state-of-the-art CGI rather than (for-then state-of-the-art) Amigas. It’s also been suggested that this time around, Warner Brothers is actually very supportive of the project and is giving Straczynski a lot of latitude in writing and producing the show – and, one hopes, an adequate budget.

But then, as Ridley Scott and Prometheus show us, such things don’t automatically translate into a good product. So, I’m tempering my enthusiasm for now until more information is available.

Families in Science Fiction

At Powered by Robots, James Pyles asks “Where Are the Families in Science Fiction?”

I’m curious. Of the science fiction and fantasy you read, have you seen any family life shows in a positive way, especially in more recent publications?

I haven’t seen much in recent science fiction, because I haven’t been reading much science fiction recently. My reading priorities lately trend to the Classics and other nonfiction.

However, when we started out writing what became “In the Shadow of Ares”, this was one of the elements that we noticed was missing from a lot of SF at the time. We wanted to write a young adult novel that avoided the cliches of that genre and SF itself. So, we created a main character who was human, who made mistakes, and who wasn’t some sort of infallibly smart and precociously wise Secret Chosen One destined for greatness, and we set her in a family with parents who made some pretty risky sacrifices to make a go of it. We explicitly avoided making her an orphan, or situating her on her own in some manner like many of Heinlein’s juveniles’ protagonists (stowaways, runaways, castaways, and kidnappees). Too, families fit with the overall nature of the fictional universe, in which Mars is just starting to be settled – one character observes (perhaps only in draft) that if you’re not having babies, it’s a base and not a settlement…you’re not really committed to stay and build a new world.

In “ItSoA”, Amber’s positive relationship with her parents (especially her father) is a key element, while in the sequel, “Ghosts of Tharsis”, her close relationship with her mother is explored. In both books, the issue of children and families on Mars is an important theme, and this theme reappears in “Redlands” and (indirectly) in “He Has Walled Me In”. In “Pipeline” (unpublished), Thoreson’s children are entrusted with his business empire on Earth when he emigrates to Mars with his grandchildren to run the project. Also in “Ghosts of Tharsis”, every protagonist is shown in the context of family: Amber, Marek’s children, Ethan and his parents, Ezekiel and his brothers, even some tag characters. The only story we’ve published so far without a positive family element in it is “Anatomy of a Disaster”, which is appropriate given the story is a farce inspired by the Piper Alpha disaster. Even our non-Ares Project story, “Silent Stalker”, involved the positive portrayal of two families.

The funny thing about it, though, is that while we chose consciously at the beginning to include positive portrayals of family, it’s played out naturally in the creation of characters and situations. For example the “Baby Taboo”, once conceived (no pun intended), took on a life of its own in the fictional universe and suggested different but always opposed reactions from different characters – everyone hates the taboo, and you never see anyone but the villains truly supporting it. At the beginning of “Ghosts of Tharsis”, when the MDA relents and allows a small number of children 13 and older to emigrate, that not only brings Amber some kids her own age to associate with but necessitates exploring the family backgrounds of those new arrivals to explain how and why they ended up on Mars.

Apart from that initial decision, though, it’s not something that we’ve shoehorned in, and is not presented in a treacly or sentimental way. It just followed naturally as we drew on our own experiences and those of families around us.

Perhaps that’s the real problem: those authors who cannot or will not write positively about something as commonplace and essential as families are themselves broken children from broken homes. Like the majority of modern culture creators, their creative priority is the non-stop masturbatory airing of their childhood resentments – they hate their fathers so much that they write them out of the future.

Life Imitates Art: The Mars Rovers of Iceland

On my next to last day in Iceland, I drove the Kaldidalur route from Reykholt to Thingvellir, passing en route the Langjokull ice cap. Much to my surprise, there was a modestly-marked turnoff that led not merely close to the ice but out onto it (just left of the prominent hill in the center of the image):

Between Iceland and Norway, I’ve been up close to a dozen or so glaciers but have only ever seen ice caps from a distance. I always pictured them as being bounded by ridges or mountains where they didn’t squeeze out through passes as outlet glaciers, and didn’t anticipate that the margin of the ice would simply taper off to nothing. Just look at this – is this what you would have expected? That such a huge mass of ice would just kinda…end?

I took some pictures and made some notes and filed it all away for when we eventually send characters to the North Cap. Expect to encounter this scene with a red tint at some point.

Another surprise, and the point of this post, was the tour vehicles used by Into the Glacier to ferry people to a man-made ice cave further out on the ice cap.

A little research turned up that they were custom made from MAN 8×8 military chassis by a British company, Army-UK. The things were huge – the pictures don’t convey just how large they seemed up close (but note the Ford Explorer for some sense of scale). I couldn’t see how many seats there were in the front cab, but it looked wide enough to seat four abreast. Army-UK gives a maximum cabin capacity of 38 passengers, which would work out to ten two-by-two rows (minus two seats for the entrance door and steps).

This one was even larger than the one above:

While these aren’t exactly how we pictured the rovers in the Ares Project universe (at least not the rovers sent to Mars as part of the titular Ares Project, which we describe as having cylindrical bodies with a single large front transparency akin to the submersibles from The Abyss), they are great analogues against which one can imagine what other sorts of rovers might look like. In particular, the rovers used by the ill-fated British Trans-Marineris Expedition of 2050…oh, wait, we haven’t talked about that story yet, have we…

Rights Enforcement Without Government

One of the common themes in the Ares Project universe is the problems that result from the lack of a government on Mars – or, to be more broad-minded about it, the lack of formalized mechanisms for resolving disputes, something traditionally handled by government.

The Mars Development Agency is a non-governmental organization, and while some characters see it as a provisional government, it’s authority and powers are strictly limited in scope and degree by the Mars Charter. It was established primarily to run the land claim registry system and to build and operate essential infrastructure in support of settlement activities. As a number of characters have pointed out, MDA has no army or police force through which it can exercise a force monopoly – a fact the stories provisionally titled “True Crime” and “The Olympian Race” explore in some detail. Its power lies in its ability to screw over the commercial settlements that get out of line by cutting off their interplanetary communications and cargo shipments via Phobos, pressuring the (in some cases vital) concessions at Port Lowell to charge astronomical prices or not do business with them at all, and in the case of settlements whose land claims have not yet vested, taking away their provisional claim and thereby undermining their business by scaring off their investors. The settlements are left to work out their own rules for resolving disputes, and when this fails to litigate through their agents on Earth.

After reading the draft of “True Crime”, one of our reviewers noticed similarities in certain elements of the story’s background to David Friedman’s contractual/market-based alternative for rights enforcement – something quite unexpected, as neither Carl nor I had heard of David Friedman. In a nutshell, the concept is that individuals contract with a rights enforcement agency to represent them in disputes with others – think of it like having an insurance policy where the insurance company protects your rights. In the event of a dispute, your agency and the other party’s agency contract with an impartial third-party arbitrator to settle the matter. Along the way, a form of law evolves out of (among other things) what the agencies are willing to go to bat for you over under what circumstances, and the track records of agencies in accepting the rulings of arbitrators and of arbitrators in how they make rulings.

I like the concept, given that it could emerge naturally in a clean-sheet society with no government in the familiar sense, made up of people most of whom have joined it through a contract (the standard 5-year employment contract covering the cost of transport to Mars), who live in communities that are essentially company towns where conduct is subject to rules laid down in the employment contracts, and where relations outside the town are subject to the terms of commercial contracts. (I can’t see this ever emerging in an existing society and displacing an extant government.)

One question that I haven’t resolved is, unfortunately, something at the core of “True Crime”: what do you do when someone murders someone? No one in their right mind is going to contract with a rights enforcement agency that would countenance the death penalty, however unlikely they are to engage in a capital offense. I’m betting this is a plus for those libertarians who would consider this arrangement, given their philosophical opposition to capital punishment: in order to get any business, a rights enforcement agency would have to state in its contract and in negotiations to select an arbitrator that it will not accept execution, torture, or other extreme penalties. If one did not, they would get few if any clients, and their willingness to let them be killed would be rendered moot by the unwillingness of other agencies and arbitrators in this regard.

That still leaves the question of how murder (for example) would be punished under a contract-based society like this. The obvious alternatives are imprisonment, servitude, and restitution. Mars doesn’t have the resources for literal prisons (barring an unlikely rate of crime that makes private prisons paid for by the “losing” agencies economically viable). That leaves servitude and restitution, which in practice may amount to the same thing – indenturing the killer to work for the victim’s settlement for some period of time, for example, or adding the dead man’s remaining contract to that of his killer (payable to the victim’s settlement) as restitution.

But as with many bright libertarian ideas, it treats the problem in purely economic terms, ignoring the moral and societal aspects. Is simply paying what is in effect a weregild adequate punishment for murder? How would one ensure the establishment of social norms beyond simple payment of money, so as to ensure that one can’t simply murder as many people as one can afford? I suspect that anyone running into this more than once would render themselves ‘uninsurable’, i.e.: unable to find any agency to protect their rights, and thus ironically in the vulnerable position of the outlaw in Commonwealth Iceland instead of being able to murder at will. Given time to look further into this, I suspect answers to most such objections can be found in medieval systems of tribal or thing law.