Taboos as Time Goes By

I've been musing over the past couple of days about social taboos, particularly constraints on language. The latter especially affect writers; there used to be words that were labeled "unprintable" and seen on the page only in pornography. Norman Mailer's novel THE NAKED AND THE DEAD subsitutes a similar-sounding nonsense term for a common four-letter word frequently uttered by soldiers. An oft-repeated anecdote claims Dorothy Parker once said to him, "Oh, you're the young man who doesn't know how to spell f--k."

In everyday polite interaction, there are still some taboo conversational topics. We can hold forth at length about the excellent dinner we ate at a restaurant over the weekend. Among relatives or close friends, it's okay to "geeze" about one's bathroom-related physical problems. But we can't remark that we had great sex over the weekend, except to the person we had it with (or possibly in intimate, alcohol-fueled same-gender gatherings). That's never an acceptable topic for general conversation.

Taboos change over the decades, generations, and centuries, of course. Eighteenth-century novelist Laurence Sterne includes what appears to be a perfectly sober, respectable mention of the four-letter word for excrement in his TRISTRAM SHANDY. Radical shifts have occurred within my own lifetime. The "unprintable" F-word for sexual activity and S-word for excrement are now printed and spoken freely with (in my opinion) regrettable frequency. On the other hand, we're well rid of a term that was commonplace, although not considered polite, in my youth and is now so taboo that published works never show it written out, except sometimes in fictional dialogue—the N-word for Black people.

Consider the film of GONE WITH THE WIND. It gives the impression that the director made numerous concessions to be allowed that single "damn" in Rhett Butler's final line of dialogue. In the book, Prissy objects to being sent to look for Rhett at a "ho'house." In the movie, she has to say something like "Miz Belle's place." Earlier, we don't hear Scarlett's whispered question about the woman Rhett compromised; in the novel, it's shown as, "Did she have a baby?" When Rhett and Scarlett have a furious quarrel during her last pregnancy, Clark Gable says, "Maybe you'll have an accident," instead of using the word "miscarriage" as in the book. Most absurdly, when Rhett angrily tells Scarlett in the novel, "Keep your chaste bed," the movie rephrases the line as, "Keep your sanctity." Mentioning chastity is borderline obscene? LOL.

Non-verbal taboos, naturally, change too. In the 19th century, exposed feminine ankles were considered risque. Yet in some tribal societies, women routinely go bare-breasted in public. Film-makers used to be forbidden to show a man and woman in a bed together, leading to the notorious twin-bed arrangements of married couples on old sitcoms. Although I lived through part of that era, it still jars me when I watch old movies and TV shows and witness almost everybody casually smoking EVERYWHERE. And, to cite a custom not grounded in either health considerations or sexual mores, in my childhood a woman wouldn't be dressed correctly if she showed up at church without a hat or shopped at a department store in slacks instead of a dress or skirt.

Robert Heinlein casually drops references to changing social taboos into his novels. The protagonist of twin-paradox interstellar adventure TIME FOR THE STARS returns to Earth after almost a century of near-light-speed travel (still a young man) to be shocked that decent girls and women are no longer required to wear hats in the presence of unmarried males. After thirty years in cryonic sleep, the narrator of THE DOOR INTO SUMMER wakes from suspended animation to find that in the year 2000 a formerly innocent word, "kink," has become an unspeakable obscenity. In some subcultures in the far-future universe of TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE, nudity is perfectly acceptable at mixed-gender social gatherings.

For a fascinating exploration of why certain apparently irrational taboos and other "bizarre" customs have rational origins and serve pragmatic social purposes, check out COWS, PIGS, WARS, AND WITCHES (1974), by anthropologist Marvin Harris. Also recommended: His follow-up book THE SACRED COW AND THE ABOMINABLE PIG (1985), more tightly focused on food-related taboos and customs.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Advice on "Breaking In" to Publishing

Cory Doctorow's newest LOCUS column discusses the beginning writer's obsessive quest for tips from pros on how to get started in publishing. In particular, we love to read about how successful authors landed their first sales:

Breaking In

The major premise of this article: The publishing field changes so fast that a veteran author's story of how he or she first got accepted for professional publication isn't likely to be of any practical help today. As Doctorow puts it with reference to his own early experiences, "While I still have an encylopedic knowledge of the editorial peccadilloes of dozens of publications, most of them no longer exist, and the ones that do have been radically transformed in the intervening decades." What Doctorow supplies instead is "meta-advice," advice on where to find the best advice. According to him, novice writers can get optimal assistance by pooling their knowledge of current publishing practices and trends with other novice writers, sharing what they've discovered through researching markets and submitting to editors. "Just as a writers’ critiquing circle should consist of writers of similar ability, so too should a writers’ professional support circle consist of writers at similar places in their careers."

He does offer some general guidelines applicable to everyone, a more specific, pragmatic version of Heinlein's well-known "rules." Doctorow also narrates his own "breaking in" story with mention of several publishing veterans who assisted him, including Judith Merril. He declares that an established author's most "powerful tool for helping out new writers" is encouragement.

My first adventure in professional publication (my only previous published work being limited to short pieces in our high-school newspaper), in the late 1960s when I was just over twenty years old, certainly has little if any practical application for writers today. I didn't have the benefit of mentors or networking of any kind. I knew nothing about submitting manuscripts except that they had to be double-spaced on only one side of the paper and had to include a SASE (self-addressed, stamped envelope, for those who've never submitted a paper manuscript). My sole source of information about the industry came from the annual WRITERS' MARKET reference volume in the public library. Today's novice writers are so fortunate to have the resources of the internet. I assembled a collection of stories for a vampire anthology, wrote an introduction, and sent the package to Fawcett in New York. After a year of silence, I mailed them a humorous "haven't heard from you" greeting card. Now that I know better, I'd never think of doing such a thing. Yet they responded promptly, apologized for the long wait, and offered me a contract. In view of my total ignorance, the editor had to explain to me how anthology payments worked and how to arrange for reprint permissions. That proposal became my first book, CURSE OF THE UNDEAD, a mass market paperback.

My first professional fiction sale came about in a more conventional manner that still applies to today's markets, other than the shift from snail mail to e-mail submissions and communications. I received a call for submissions to Marion Zimmer Bradley's second Darkover anthology, FREE AMAZONS OF DARKOVER, probably because the rudimentary fan activities I'd started doing had somehow gotten me on Bradley's mailing list. The zip code on the envelope, however, was wrong, and the letter had reached me barely in time to meet the deadline, if I worked very quickly (for me—I wasn't quite as slow then as now, but I haven't been a truly fast writer since my teens). So this sale had an element of luck, too; the submission invitation could have been lost completely. Without much hope of success, I wrote a story and mailed it just in time. To my surprise, it was accepted. After that, I had stories included in numerous later Darkover anthologies. They stayed in print for many years and, for a long time, supplied my most reliable (although modest in amount) source of royalty income.

Doctorow's "advice" for beginners may be broadly summarized in the eloquent statement, "Writers blaze their own trails, finding mentors or not, getting lucky or not, agonizing and working and reworking, finding peers and lifting each other up."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Failures of Prediction

To dispose of one point up front, of course we know the purpose of science fiction isn't literally to predict future technology and social structures. Its speculations typically explore hypothetical paths that may or may not become reality, some of which are so extreme nobody seriously expects their fulfillment. They're extrapolations that answer "What if. . . ?" or "If this goes on. . . ."

Nevertheless, it's entertaining to contemplate some of the future technological and cultural developments in older SF works that drastically missed the mark. One classic example shows up in Robert Heinlein's HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL, where human colonies on the moon coexist with slide rules. In I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, the fabulously wealthy protagonist has to wait several days for the result of her pregnancy test, although at the time of the novel's publication, such a test could be completed in less than half an hour. (Ordinary patients had to wait only because of lab backlogs. Now, of course, we have instant home pregnancy tests, which ought to exist in the future setting of I WILL FEAR NO EVIL.) I don't count Heinlein's transplantation of 1950s family structures into the spacefaring future in his "juveniles" as a failure of prediction, because it's obvious he was simply bowing to the constraints of the market in those books. His posthumously published utopia FOR US, THE LIVING demonstrates how early in his career he envisioned alternative marriage and sexual customs.

Isaac Asimov did foresee the hand-held calculator, but that story imagines a future in which people have become so dependent on calculators that even scientists with advanced degrees don't know how to do arithmetic the old-fashioned way. I can't believe that's meant as a serious prediction rather than a fanciful thought experiment. I suspect the same about a story in which people aren't taught to read, since computers and robots convey all information (apparently -- it's not quite clear) in audible speech. (So what about deaf users?) It comes as an incredible revelation to the two boys in this tale that their recent ancestors could decode "squiggles" on paper.

Recently I reread a collection of Asimov's robot short stories, along with his novel ROBOTS OF DAWN, and was amused at some of the predictive "fails" perpetrated by such a visionary author. For one thing, the robots are almost all roughly humanoid-shaped, supposedly because the public would feel less wary of them in that form. The plan doesn't work; throughout the series, most Earth people (as opposed to Spacers, who tend to embrace the convenience of artificial servants) fear robots, and it's pretty clear that the crude approximation of human shape makes the animated machines more distrusted, not less. It would make more sense to design robots' bodies for maximum efficiency in performing their particular tasks, as real-life industrial robots usually are. Furthermore, to learn new information robots are shown reading books rather than having the contents uploaded directly into their positronic brains. Very odd from a present-day perspective, when astronomers in one story want to identify extrasolar planets likely to harbor life, they teach a robot to perform the analysis rather than programming a stationary computer to carry out the search. This piece, of course, is set in the distant future, yet we have methods of finding Earthlike extrasolar planets right now.

In terms of social change, Asimov's robot series includes elements that require generous suspension of disbelief. For instance, THE CAVES OF STEEL emphasizes how overcrowded Earth has become. As one consequence, personal hygiene occurs in what amount to huge communal bathhouses, called Personals. All right, if overpopulation means apartments are so small it makes more sense to centralize baths, showers, and related functions, I can accept that. But it's strongly implied that individual dwellings don't have toilet facilities, which would imply no running water! This assumption is confirmed in ROBOTS OF DAWN, where Earth investigator Elijah Baley is suprised to find one-person Personals in private homes. Asimov must not have thought this through. In a technologically advanced society hundreds of years in the future, people don't have any means of washing at home? And when "nature calls" in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning, they use -- what? Chamber pots? Family structures on the Spacer worlds, at least the two we see in the series, are also problematic. One world has developed a culture in which people abhor personal contact so deeply that they never touch or even meet in person if they can help it. Almost all contact happens holographically. Children are brought up in group care homes, where they're gradually trained out of the crude desire for physical proximity. Even spouses don't live together. They have sex only for reproduction, and most people detest that "duty," yet the obvious alternative of universal artificial insemination isn't embraced. On the planet Aurora in ROBOTS OF DAWN, casual recreational sex is commonplace, children are the only purpose of formal marriage, the young are reared in communal nurseries and may not even know the identities of their parents, and sexual jealousy allegedly doesn't exist. Asimov must have subscribed to the early and mid-20th-century belief that human nature is infinitely malleable. (For a lucid, detailed, entertainingly readable rebuttal of that notion, see Steven Pinker's THE BLANK SLATE.) Consider how recognizable to us are the portrayals of marriage, family, and sexuality in the early books of the Old Testament, thousands of years ago. Are a few more centuries and the relatively minor change of venue to different planets really likely to inspire radical changes in those areas of human interaction?

Famously, when later series in the Star Trek universe were developed, the producers had to cope with the fact that some technology in the original series had already become outdated, notably the flip-phone communicators. On the other hand, some SF works predict too ambitiously, as in the proverbial plea, "Where's my flying car?" The classic 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY envisioned a level of routine space travel in 2001 that we haven't attained yet. Heinlein's DOOR INTO SUMMER promised all-purpose housecleaning robots in 1970. I wish!

Of course, many elements in current print and film SF that seem to us like cutting-edge predictions may turn out to be laughably wrong. As far as dystopian visions such as THE HANDMAID'S TALE are concerned, we can fervently hope so. However, I still want my autonomous housecleaning robot. I'm pleased with my Roomba, but it's only a start.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Talking with Aliens

When extraterrestrials visit our planet, or vice versa, will we be able to communicate with them? This article discusses the issue of learning alien languages:

If We Ever Came Across Aliens...?

Many linguists and psychologists maintain that the human brain is hardwired with a universal grammar. All human languages we know are built from variations on a few basic structures. Would intelligent beings who evolved on other worlds share the same innate grammatical structures we've developed? If not, an unbridgeable chasm might exist between the two species. The other theoretical framework, the cognitive view of language, places more emphasis on meaning—concepts and semantics—than on sentence structure. In that case, we might expect any sapient creatures to share certain "building blocks" of meaning. The difference between these two theories brings to mind the two main SF approaches to telepathy. In one view, mental conversation works like silent talking. The people communicating telepathically have to understand a common language. So there's no possibility of immersing oneself in another's mind and learning things he or she doesn't want to reveal. In the other approach, whole concepts are transferred from one brain to the other, and the receiver "translates" the transmitted thought into terms he, she, it, or they comprehend.

The article mentions the possibility that inhabitants of other planets might communicate in sound ranges inaudible to us. However, we might find more radical differences. Suppose the aliens' language consisted of flashing lights, bands of color, carefully modulated odors, or hand (or tentacle or pseudopod) signals? They might not recognize our mouth noises as attempts at communication. In CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR, an incident in the early life of orphaned Cro-Magnon child Ayla illustrates problems that might occur even between two human subspecies. The Neanderthal shaman, trying to teach Ayla the Clan's language, worries because she's so slow to catch on. Maybe she's mentally impaired? Meanwhile, Ayla wonders why he keeps waving his hands around, distracting her from hearing his words. The breakthrough occurs when she realizes hand signals constitute the core of the Clan's language, with oral speech in a secondary role.

The classic story "A Martian Odyssey," by Stanley G. Weinbaum, features a friendly alien whose language doesn't contain words with any fixed meaning. Every sentence is unique. While I can't quite visualize how that would work in practice, it's a fascinating idea. In one of the most thought-provoking episodes of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, Captain Picard deals with a species who converse in metaphorical allusions to cultural myths and legends. (As I've heard someone mention—probably Jean Lorrah—this mode of discourse can't be their only language; at the least, there must be a children's dialect for communicating with offspring too young to know the metaphors. Also, in my opinion they have to possess a straightforward denotative dialect for scientific and technical use.) In Robert Heinlein's BETWEEN PLANETS, the highly intelligent dragons of Venus wear electronic devices that translate their mode of communication into grammatical sentences in a Terran language. (In the case of the dragon who becomes a friend of the hero, it's English, of course.) I have faith that no matter how aliens converse, we'll figure out ways to bridge the linguistic gaps.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Me Tarzan, You Jane

Recently I've watched several Tarzan movies, including two of the classic Johnny Weissmuller films. It's always annoyed me that this version of Tarzan is so inarticulate, speaking in broken English although he seems to understand the nuances of standard English as spoken by Jane. The 1984 production GREYSTOKE: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, LORD OF THE APES portrays him as eventually learning to speak grammatically, although he remains reserved and laconic. In Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels, Tarzan not only learns French and English in the first volume (TARZAN OF THE APES) but also becomes fluent in multiple other languages over the course of the series. Moreover, while still living with his ape tribe, he teaches himself to read English from children's picture books found in his dead parents' abandoned cabin. Which of these representations of Tarzan's language acquisition is more realistic, though?

Real-life "feral children"—those who've grown up with limited or no normal human contact—seldom acquire fully developed language skills in later life. (From my cursory skim of Wikipedia entries on the topic, possibly some do, but that's uncertain.) The majority consensus among linguistic scientists maintains that human children have a critical period for learning to speak normally. The innate "language instinct" needs material to work with during that window. Everyone knows the story of Helen Keller's childhood and how she learned language from her "miracle worker" teacher. Keller, however, didn't become blind and deaf until the age of nineteen months, so she had been exposed to the spoken word and had probably started learning to talk. Therefore, she didn't totally miss the "window" of the critical period. In recalling the moment when she realized the meaning of the sign for "water," she wrote that she experienced "a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me." The concept of language, then, wasn't completely new to her but came as a "returning thought" of "something forgotten."

With these principles applied to Tarzan's development, does he have the required exposure to a template for language during the critical period of infancy and childhood? In Edgar Rice Burroughs' original novel, Tarzan is orphaned when too young to start talking to any meaningful extent. Since he's about a year old when his parents die, however, he would have heard conversations between them and begun to recognize some words, maybe even say one or two. So, like Helen Keller, he's exposed to language during the early imprinting stage. After his adoption by his ape mother, he grows up learning the speech of the great apes—the Mangani. It seems likely that the Mangani aren't any known variety of ape (certainly not gorillas, as in the Disney animated movie, because gorillas are explicitly mentioned as different from Tarzan's tribe) but rather, as Philip Jose Farmer suggests, an almost extinct "missing link" species. As portrayed in TARZAN OF THE APES and its sequels, they have a language, but a rudimentary one. It seems to consist entirely of concrete rather than abstract words, have a simple grammatical structure, and focus on present needs. The limitations of Mangani speech, however, wouldn't necessarily prevent Tarzan from learning fluent English as an adult. He might be compared to the children of pidgin speakers (people with no language in common who invent a simplified mode of communication, a "pidgin" dialect). In many known cases, those children have used their parents' speech as the basis for a fully developed "creole" language. Tarzan's achievement of teaching himself to read with no prior knowledge of what books are might strain the reader's disbelief, but as we can tell from how easily he picks up new languages in later life, the author portrays him as a natural linguistic genius.

In the Weissmuller movies, Tarzan's ape friends are played by chimpanzees, which wouldn't have a true language. Therefore, it actually makes sense that this version of Tarzan might learn to comprehend standard English without ever gaining the ability to speak it fluently. He missed the critical window. In GREYSTOKE, he communicates with the apes by sounds and gestures, but there's nothing to indicate that they're speaking a language in the human sense. So it seems improbable that he'd master English as thoroughly as he does in this movie, especially since he looks well under a year old when his ape mother adopts him. Personally, though, I prefer an articulate Tarzan even if suspension of disbelief has to be stretched to accommodate him.

Robert Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, of course, reverses Tarzan's situation. The biologically human "Martian," Valentine Michael Smith, grows up among creatures MORE intelligent than Earth-humans, with a more complex and nuanced language. Mike, like Tarzan, has to learn to become fully human, but from the opposite direction.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Ownership of Ideas

Volume 31, Issue 1 of the JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS includes an article by Dennis Wilson Wise on the literary development of EPVIDS (evil, possessed, vampire, demonic swords). He begins with the trope's modern origins in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and Poul Anderson, who borrowed motifs from Finnish and Norse legends, which in turn share common roots. Wise then analyzes the uses of sentient, demonic swords by Michael Moorcock and other more recent sword-and-sorcery authors. The article fascinatingly highlights how the different writers incorporated the same archetypal concept into their fictional worlds in their own individual ways.

Editor John Campbell is said to have sometimes proposed the same plot or theme to several different contributors at once. Each writer would come up with a unique story, unlike any of the others. There are no completely "original" fiction ideas. Robert Heinlein claimed that only three basic plots exist. Space for creative "originality" lies in the execution of the idea.

I know of at least two anthologies based on filk songs that illustrate this principle. The fantasy anthology LAMMAS NIGHT, edited by Josepha Sherman, comprises a variety of stories based on Mercedes Lackey's song of that title. The volume begins with the lyrics of the song, followed by Lackey's own conversion of the poem into a prose narrative. The rest of the stories develop the premise in many different directions. CARMEN MIRANDA'S GHOST IS HAUNTING SPACE STATION THREE, edited by Don Sakers, plays a similar game with a Leslie Fish song. Long ago, I read an anthology weaving variations on the plot of "The Highwayman," the classic poem by Alfred Noyes (unfortunately, I don't remember the book's title).

Vivian Vande Velde's single-author collection THE RUMPELSTILTSKIN PROBLEM explores six different angles on the traditional fairy tale, offering explanations for the details that don't seem to make sense. (For example, if the little man can spin straw into gold, why would he care about getting the heroine's ring and necklace as rewards?) And other authors have created their own versions of Rumpelstiltskin, such as Naomi Novik in SPINNING SILVER. Among countless re-imaginings of "Beauty and the Beast," Robin McKinley wrote two, and Mercedes Lackey has published three.

These works demonstrate a truth Lackey repeats over and over on Quora, in answer to questions from naive aspiring authors: "You cannot copyright an idea."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Visualizing Characters

Any Superman fans here? I mostly enjoyed the first two episodes of the new series SUPERMAN AND LOIS on the CW network, although for me neither this program nor the older series SMALLVILLE measures up to LOIS AND CLARK. My husband complained about my griping over Lana Lang's black hair (same objection I had to that character on SMALLVILLE). Everybody knows Lana is a redhead, just as everybody knows Lex Luthor is bald (eventually ending up bald even if he doesn't start that way). Her hair is one of the iconic traits of her character in the comics. It wouldn't have been hard to have the actress wear a wig—flame-red, auburn, strawberry blonde, any shade within that general category. A visual image of a fictional character so jarringly different from expectations interferes with my immersion in the story.

Many actors have portrayed Count Dracula, the classic character I'm most familiar with, probably lots more than I've gotten around to watching. Christopher Lee and John Carradine come closest to my image of Dracula, although even Lee never performed him in a script fully faithful to the novel. Among the myriad attempts at adapting the original, the Dan Curtis TV movie starring Jack Palance makes a pretty decent try, but Palance in the title role made it hard for me to suspend disbelief. In my opinion, he's the least suitable Dracula I've ever seen.

For fans of Dorothy Sayers' mysteries, the adaptations broadcast on public TV under the umbrella title MURDER MOST ENGLISH dramatize the novels with a high degree of fidelity. Ian Carmichael, however, doesn't quite fit the image of Lord Peter Wimsey as described in the books. Still, he comes close enough not to undermine my suspension of disbelief. As far as Sherlock Holmes is concerned, for me Jeremy Brett was perfect (until he began to gain a little weight in the later seasons, but he can hardly be blamed for that). And from my perspective, Anthony Hopkins IS Dr. Hannibal Lecter, probably because I'd seen clips from the movie (although not the entire film) before reading the book.

How much does the appearance of an actor who plays a character from a novel or comic series matter to you? Does it make a difference whether or not print illustrations (as in comics or on book covers) exist to provide a template? If you view the movie before reading the original text, do you visualize the character as looking like the actor?

For writers, this topic bears on how much visual detail to provide in describing characters. Some novelists touch very lightly on physical appearance. The only characters in DRACULA described thoroughly enough to draw portraits of them are Dr. Van Helsing and the Count himself. Robert Heinlein sometimes delineates characters in detail, but not always. Although the clothing and body paint of Eunice in I WILL FEAR NO EVIL are often described, we get very little hint of how she herself looks except the "telling" rather than "showing" remark that she's very beautiful. According to Heinlein, she's meant to be Black, but the actual text of the novel says nothing to indicate that fact (nothing to contradict it, either, though). As a reader, I want to know what fictional characters look like, preferably early in the story. It's jarring to imagine a character one way and later receive information that invalidates the image I've formed. It also bugs me to visualize a fictional person as a particular gender and then find out well into the story that I've been mistaken, unless the author has a sound narrative reason for the ambiguity. As a writer, I know it can be difficult to work in descriptions of characters—particularly a viewpoint character—with grace and subtlety rather than producing a "wanted poster" list of traits. It's especially hard to manage this task with a first-person narrator, of course. If she gazes at herself in the mirror and says things like, "I brushed my luxuriant blonde hair," she'll come across as insufferably self-absorbed. That's probably a major reason why I use third-person limited rather than first-person narrative in my fiction.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Sufficiently Advanced Technology

As we know, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (Arthur C. Clarke). Conversely, many magical events in older fiction can be duplicated today by mainstream technology. A century and a half ago, someone who witnessed a translucent human figure floating in midair and emitting eerie moans would unquestioningly recognize it as a ghost. Now we'd respond with, "Cool special effect. I wonder how they did that?" Just such an apparition appears in Jules Verne's 1892 novel THE CARPATHIAN CASTLE, on the cusp of the shift between the two probable reactions. The local people think the vision of a dead opera star at the titular castle is her spirit, when it fact it's produced by a sound recording and a projected photograph.

In George du Maurier's 1894 novel TRILBY, the villain, Svengali, uses hypnotism to transform an ordinary girl who's tone-deaf into a famous singer. She can produce exquisite melodies only in a trance. When Svengali dies, she instantly becomes unable to sing. At the time of the novel's publication, little enough was known about hypnosis that this scenario doubtless looked scientifically plausible. Now that we know hypnosis doesn't work that way, Svengali's control over Trilby seems like magic, and to us the story reads as fantasy.

Several decades ago, I read a horror story about an author who acquires a typewriter that's cursed, possessed, or something. He finds that it corrects his typos and other minor errors. Gradually, this initially benign feature becomes scary, as the machine takes over his writing to an ever greater extent. He narrates his experience in longhand, since if using the typewriter he wouldn't even be able to demonstrate an example of a misspelling. At the time of publication, this story was an impossible fantasy. Now it would be merely a cautionary tale of a word processor with an excessively proactive auto-correct feature. From the beginning of J. D. Robb's Eve Dallas science fiction mysteries, set in the late 2050s and early 2060s, almost everybody carries a handheld "link," a combination communications device and portable computer. When the earliest books in the series were published, that device was a futuristic high-tech fantasy. Now the equivalent has become commonplace in real life. But another tool Lt. Dallas uses in her homicide investigations still doesn't exist and remains problematic. Police detectives employ a handheld instrument reminiscent of Dr. McCoy's tricorder to gather data about murder victims. One of its functions is to pinpoint the precise time of death to the minute. That capability would seem to run counter to the intrinsic limitations arising from the nature of the decomposition processes being analyzed. Therefore, the exact-time-of-death function strikes me as irreducibly quasi-magical rather than scientific, something the audience has to accept without dissecting its probability, like the universal translator in STAR TREK.

The distinction between science and magic can get fuzzy when nominal SF has a fantasy "feel." Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series takes place on an alien planet inhabited partly by descendants of shipwrecked Terran colonists. Strict "hard science" readers might not accept psi powers as a real-world possibility, however, and the common people of Darkover regard laran (psi gifts) as sorcery. Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, also set on a planet colonized by migrants from Earth, features fire-breathing, empathic, teleporting, time-traveling dragons. Although these creatures have an in-universe scientific explanation, they resemble the dragons of myth and legend. Robert Heinlein's novella "Waldo" blends SF and what many if not most readers would consider fantasy. The title character lives on a private space station because of his congenital muscular weakness. Yet he overcomes his disability by learning to control his latent psychic talent under the guidance of an old Pennsylvania hex doctor who teaches Waldo how to access the "Other World." Incidentally, "Waldo" offers an example of how even a brilliant speculative author such as Heinlein can suffer a lapse of futuristic imagination. Amid the technological wonders of Waldo's orbiting home, Heinlein didn't envision either electronic books or computer games; a visitor notices paper books suspended from the bulkheads and wonders how Waldo would manage to play solitaire in zero-G.

I've heard of a story (can't recall whether I actually read it) whose background premise states that, in the recent past, the wizards who secretly control the world revealed that all technology is actually operated by magic. The alleged science behind the machines was only a smoke screen. If such an announcement were made in real life, I wouldn't have much trouble accepting it. For non-scientists, some of the fantastic facts science expects us to believe—that we and all the solid objects around us consist of mostly empty space; that the magical devices we used to communicate, research, and write are operated by invisible entities known as electrons; that starlight we see is millions of years old; that airplanes stay aloft by mystical forces called "lift" and "thrust"; that culture and technology have advanced over millennia from stone knives and bearskins to spacecraft purely through human ingenuity—require as much faith in the proclamations of authorities as any theological doctrine does.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

More on AI

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column continues his topic from last month, the sharp divide between the artificial intelligence of contemporary technology and the self-aware computers of science fiction. He elaborates on his arguments against the possibility of the former's evolving into the latter:

Past Performance

He explains current machine learning "as a statistical inference tool" that "analyzes training data to uncover correlations between different phenomena." That's how an e-mail program predicts what you're going to type next or a search engine guesses your question from the initial words. An example he analyzes in some detail is facial recognition. Because a computer doesn't "know" what a face is but only looks for programmed patterns, it may produce false positives such as "doorbell cameras that hallucinate faces in melting snow and page their owners to warn them about lurking strangers." AI programs work on a quantitative rather than qualitative level. As remarkably as they perform the functions for which they were designed, "statistical inference doesn’t lead to comprehension, even if it sometimes approximates it." Doctorow contrasts the results obtained by mathematical analysis of data with the synthesizing, theorizing, and understanding processes we think of as true intelligence. He concludes that "the idea that if we just get better at statistical inference, consciousness will fall out of it is wishful thinking. It’s a premise for an SF novel, not a plan for the future."

While I'd like to believe a sufficiently advanced supercomputer with more interconnections, "neurons," and assimilation of data than any human brain could hold might awaken to self-awareness, like Mike in Heinlein's THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, I must admit Doctorow's argument is highly persuasive. Still, people do anthropomorphize their technology, even naming their Roomba vacuum cleaners. (I haven't done that. Our Roomba is a low-end, fairly dumb model. Its intelligence is limited to changing direction when it bumps into obstacles and returning to its charger when low on power, which I never let it run long enough to do. But nevertheless I give the thing pointless verbal commands on occasion. It doesn't listen to me much less than the cats do, after all.) People carry on conversations with Alexa and Siri. I enjoy remembering a cartoon I saw somewhere of a driver simultaneously listening to the GPS apps on both the car's system and the cell phone. The two GPS voices are arguing with each other about which route to take.

Remember Eliza, the computer therapist program? She was invented in the 1960s, and supposedly some users mistook for a human psychologist. You can try her out here:

Eliza

As the page mentions, the dialogue goes best if you limit your remarks to talking about yourself. When I tried to engage her in conversation about the presidential election, her lines quickly devolved into, "Do you have any psychological problems?" (Apparently commenting that one loathes a certain politician is a red flag.) So these AI therapists don't really pass the Turing test. I've read that if you state to one of them, for instance, "Einstein says everything is relative," it will probably respond, "Tell me more about your family." Many years ago, when the two youngest of our sons were preteens, we acquired a similar program, very simple, which one communicated with by typing, and it would type a reply that the computer's speaker would also read out loud. The kids had endless fun writing sentences such as, "I want [long string of numbers] dollars," and listening to the computer voice retort with something like, "I am not here to fulfill your need for ten quintillion, four quadrillion, nine trillion, fifty billion, one hundred million, two thousand, one hundred and forty-one dollars."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Rules of Writing

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column explores the issue of whether there are any truly unbreakable writing rules:

Rules for Writers

You're probably acquainted with the collection of "rules" he cites, the Turkey City Lexicon, to which he faithfully adhered for many years. It's a list of colorfully labeled errors into which writers can fall, many of them specific to science fiction:

Turkey City Lexicon

The page begins with a long introduction by Bruce Sterling about the origin and background of the Lexicon. The errors and frequently perpetrated SF tropes are divided into categories such as Words and Sentences, Plots, Common Workshop Story Types, etc. Some of the entries now familiar to most speculative fiction writers include: Tom Swifties (although I prefer to think of them as "Tom Swiftlies," in keeping with the adverbial theme), e.g., "I'm not lying," Pinocchio said woodenly. "Said-bookisms," substituting an outlandishly obtrusive dialogue tag for a simple "said," e.g., "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die," Goldfinger gloated. "Call a Rabbit a Smeerp," sticking an exotic name on a mundane animal without changing the creature in any material way. Hand waving, "An attempt to distract the reader with dazzling prose or other verbal fireworks, so as to divert attention from a severe logical flaw."

Doctorow's article links the topic of writing rules to Sterling's nonfiction book THE HACKER CRACKDOWN, leading into the hacker's task of analyzing "which devices were likeliest to contain a fatal error." Inherent difficulty—proneness to error—according to Doctorow, is what the writing "rules" are really all about. At some point in his career, he received the epiphany that the guidelines he'd revered for so long "weren't rules at all! They're merely things that are hard to do right!" In the hands of a Heinlein or an Asimov, for example, an "expository lump" can be fascinating. The rule against exposition is better understood as a warning that "most exposition isn't good, and bad exposition is terrible."

It's sometimes said that there's only one truly unbreakable rule in writing: "Don't be boring." Excellent advice, although hardly specific enough to put into practice. It's on the level of Heinlein's rules for how to succeed as an author, which go something like this: (1) Write. (2) Finish what you write. (3) Submit it to an editor who might buy it. (4) Keep sending it out until it sells. He also advised, "Never rewrite except to editorial order," by which I can't imagine he meant one should submit rough drafts without revision. He apparently meant a writer shouldn't bother rewriting an unsuccessful piece from scratch but should devote his or her energy to producing a new work. Yet Heinlein didn't consistently follow his own advice on that point, as demonstrated by his recent posthumously released book THE PURSUIT OF THE PANKERA. It comprises the abandoned original version of the novel published as THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST. The first half of the text has some differences in detail, while the second half radically diverges. (Personally, I prefer the original draft, which reads much more like "vintage Heinlein" than the fun but meandering, self-indulgent NUMBER OF THE BEAST.)

In short, no ironclad rules, just wise guidelines.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Accessible Writing

The April 2020 issue of RWR (magazine of the Romance Writers of America) contains an article titled "The Literary Craft of Accessibility," by Rebecca Hunter. She begins by analyzing the difference between literary fiction and genre fiction, for which she focuses on level of accessibility: "Literary fiction expects the reader to come to the book, while genre fiction books come to the reader." To put it simply, literary fiction expects the reader to work harder. It would be easy to conclude that denser novels are therefore of higher quality than less "difficult" works, a "false—and harmful—hierarchy" the author warns against. I readily agree that a "literary" novel may be difficult and dense for the sheer sake of difficulty, putting unnecessary roadblocks in the reader's path from the mistaken notion that lucid prose and a clear narrative thread equate to "dumbing down." And a genre novel can include deep themes that make a reader think and challenge her established assumptions.

Hunter undercuts her cautionary reference to false hierarchies, in my opinion, by contrasting "lyrical" and "thoughtful" with "fast-paced" and "light," the latter suggesting a "more accessible style." A genre novel can be accessible, yet sedately paced and deeply emotional. Some factors she lists as contributing to degree of accessibility include length of sentences, breadth of vocabulary, balance among action, atmosphere, and ideas, moral clarity or ambiguity, how clearly the characters and plot fulfill "expectations set in the beginning of the story," and "use of cliches, idioms, and other familiarities." I have reservations about some items on the list. For example, I don't think a novel has to lean heavily toward "action" to be accessible. Many romance novels don't, nor do many vintage favorites in other genres. GONE WITH THE WIND is one perennial bestseller that has many more reflective and emotional scenes than action scenes in the popular sense of the word. I find the mention of "cliches" off-putting; while familiar tropes, handled well, can be welcome, an outright "cliche" is another matter. Another feature, "amount of emotional complexity spelled out for readers," sounds as if excessive telling over showing is being recommended. Every writer must balance all these elements in her own way, of course, and Hunter does address the shortcomings of cliches and "telling." She points out that "frankly, there are lots of readers who like this familiarity and clarity." So an author needs to know her target audience well. "Each reader's preferences are different. . . .there are readers for all accessibility levels." Hunter also discusses theme, which she defines as "an open-ended question our story asks" and briefly covers the possibility of increasing a work's complexity by adding additional thematic layers.

Personally, I enjoy a book with a varied, challenging vocabulary and complex characters and emotions. What make me impatient are works that appear to be confusing for the sake of confusion, such as failing to clearly distinguish characters from each other or coming to a conclusion that leaves the reader with literally no way to be sure what happened—by which I mean, not an ambiguous ending deliberately designed to allow multiple interpretations, but one in which it's impossible to puzzle out the plain sense of what transpires on the page. As Marion Zimmer Bradley used to say in her submission guidelines, "If I can't figure out what happened, I assume my readers won't care." Levels of acceptable "accessibility," of course, vary over the decades and centuries according to the fashions of the times. Long descriptive and expository passages, common in nineteenth-century novels, would get disapproved by most editors nowadays, no matter how well written. Something similar to the opening paragraphs of Dickens' A TALE OF TWO CITIES ("It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. . . ."), although accessible in the sense of easily understandable, probably wouldn't be accepted by most contemporary publishers. It also used to be common for authors to include untranslated passages in foreign languages, especially in nonfiction but sometimes even in fiction. Most nonfiction writers up through the early twentieth century assumed all educated readers understood Latin and Greek. Dorothy Sayers inserted a long letter in French into her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery CLOUDS OF WITNESS; the publisher insisted on having a translation added. On the other hand, to cite a contemporary example, in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries, set in Louisiana of the 1830s, January's erudite friend Hannibal often includes Greek and Latin quotations in his speech. They add flavor to the story's atmosphere, but understanding them is rarely necessary for following the story; when it is, Hambly clues us in as needed. Readers who'd be put off by this kind of linguistic play simply don't form part of her target audience, but then, such people probably aren't fans of historical mysteries in general, which require openness to navigating an unfamiliar time and place.

Hunter's article also doesn't discuss accessibility in relation to genre conventions. For instance, Regency romance authors probably assume their target audience has some familiarity with the period, if only from reading lots of prior novels in that setting. Science fiction, in particular, expects a certain level of background knowledge from its readers. We should know about hyperdrive and other forms of FTL travel, if only enough to suspend disbelief and move on with the story. Some SF stories expect more acquaintance with the genre than others. Any viewer with a willing imagination can follow the original STAR TREK, designed to appeal to a mass audience. Near the other end of the accessibility spectrum, the new posthumous Heinlein novel, THE PURSUIT OF THE PANKERA (the previously unpublished original version of his 1980 NUMBER OF THE BEAST), envisions a reader with a considerable fannish background. The ideal reader knows or at least has some acquaintance with Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books and E. E. Smith's Lensman series. That reader also has a high tolerance for dialogue about the intricacies of alternate universes and the heroes' device for transiting among them, on which the text goes into considerable detail at some points. Optimally, that fan will also have read Heinlein's own previous work, at least his best-known books. This novel is not the way to introduce a new reader to Heinlein, much less to SF in general.

It seems to me that "accessibility" forms a subset of the larger topic of reader expectations. So the question of how accessible our work is (or needs to be) comes back to knowing the expectations of the target audience.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Trapped in Virtual Reality

Numerous works of fiction use the premise of a character stuck inside a game (including a few holodeck episodes in the various STAR TREK series). If you enjoy that kind of thing, try the Japanese "light novels" (a generic label based mainly on books' length, not the "light" or "dark" tone of their stories) in the "Sword Art Online" series by Reki Kawahara. In the first sub-series, the protagonist, Kirito, one of the beta testers for a cutting-edge virtual reality game, gets trapped inside the game world along with hundreds of other players who log in on release day. The game designer has fixed it so that nobody can log out, and anyone who dies in the game dies for real because of the way the creator covertly rigged the brain-machine interface. Thanks to Kirito's experience as a beta tester, he becomes one of the survivors. The main appeal of this story lies in his Intimate Adventure journey from his original stance as a self-reliant loner to friendship with a fellow player, Asuna, and ultimately to deep mutual love with her. The game, Sword Art Online, feels like a three-dimensional, physical experience in most ways but with many game-based factors. For instance, getting injured drains points but doesn't cause true pain. So, despite the total immersion effect, because of details such as this the players have no trouble remaining aware that they're playing a game.

The latest sub-series, which I'm reading now, introduces Kirito to a new VR system that's far advanced over Sword Art Online. The new game, still in the testing phase, simulates the physical world in such extreme detail that the environment can't be distinguished from reality. When Kirito inexplicably wakes up in this environment with no memory of how he got there (no awareness of returning to the test facility, logging in, etc.), he feels hunger, thirst, fatigue, and pain as if in his real body. The only way he can confirm his guess that he's inside a hitherto unexplored version of the game is by opening status windows for objects in the environment. To the people he meets, these windows are simply a form of magic, "sacred arts."

If such a virtual world existed, simulating the primary world in the finest details, how could you know (unless you could access game features such as status windows) whether you were in a real environment or a fictive one? Would there be any way to prove either hypothesis? Furthermore, if you experienced all the effects of living in normal reality, would it make any difference whether you were or weren't?

This scenario brings to mind the problem of solipsism, the one view of the universe that's impossible to refute. If I believe all people and objects I observe are figments of my imagination, how could you refute that belief? The fact that things I can't control and/or don't enjoy happen around me doesn't provide a valid counter-argument, because uncontrollable and unpleasant events often happen in dreams, too. The solipsist hypothesis is completely untestable. Robert Heinlein seems fascinated with this world-view. One of his classic works has a protagonist who (thanks to time travel) is all the characters in the story, including his/her own father and mother. It ends with the chilling sentence, "I know where I came from, but where did all you zombies come from?" I've read a short story (can't recall author or title) set on an interstellar spaceship, in which one character begins to doubt that his memories of Earth are real. Maybe he and his crew mates have always been on the ship? He deteriorates from doubting the reality of Earth to believing that the other people on the ship cease to exist when not in his immediate presence. In THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, Alice ponders whether the sleeping Red King is a character in her dream or she's a character in his.

If "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream" (Poe), how would we know that? If we live within a perfect three-dimensional, multi-sensory simulation, we can't confirm or refute that possibility unless we can somehow get outside the simulation. As I read in some philosophy course long ago, "A difference that makes no difference is no difference." So it makes sense to operate on the working hypothesis that the universe and all its inhabitants actually exist.

By the way, I've written one "trapped inside a game" story, which appears in the collection DAME ONYX TREASURES, here:

Dame Onyx Treasures

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Cycles and the Seasons

Margaret Carter raised an interesting point in her New Year's post.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/happy-new-year.html

All of Earth's cultures have noticed we have a "year" -- a solar year, or cycle, and picked a point of the circle for a "beginning" of the year -- and made that a celebration of some sort. Fiction worldbuilders writing for an Earth audience have to take this kind of celebration into account when creating alien cultures - and romances across that cultural gap.

Also this year the standards authorities have brought to our attention that the Earth's rotation is slowing, and this year the master timekeeping standard atomic clock was adjusted another second.

We've only been able to measure accurately for a little while, so presumably the slowing has been going on since Earth began rotating.

Still, the Day is part of the Year cycle. The slowing, the lengthening of the Day and year, indicates a kind of non-permanence about our situation on Earth and around this star. Time is elastic. What changes can begin -- and end. The slowing of the Earth's rotation puts a whole 'nother spin on things.

In the Torah, the Creator of the Universe assigns the proclamation of the New Moon, and the New Year to the human venue. We are responsible for choosing the marking and celebrating of TIME itself -- and as Margaret pointed out, all our cultures create and innovate on how to do this. But NONE of these cultures have chosen "wrong" -- they're all "right" -- all at least OK. Because it's the human prerogative to divide and mark the cycles of Time.

From the human perspective, we all know "time" is "relative." The 20 minute wait in the dentist's office is much longer than the 20 minutes spent watching your favorite movie, or bedding your lover.

If Time were to be absolutely regular and objective, the Creator could have just assigned the cycles and markers to suit Himself. But now, only NOW, we discover that Earth's spin is not precisely repeating. No two years are alike. And it's up to us to call the end and beginning of cycles.

More than that, we now understand how our Sun fits into a spinning Galaxy that's moving through space.

In truth, no two successive years (days or months or any other cycle) are THE SAME. There actually is no "repetition" -- yet we are given the responsibility to mark the anniversaries of a death of a close relative, and other Events that are featured in our personal and collective History. All our cultures and religions have a year's calendar of Holidays commemorating such Events.

Yet the Earth is never -- ever -- in the same place twice. Even in the billions of years it takes a Galaxy to rotate completely, the Galaxy has moved through space and the suns do not come back to the same "place" in space-time.

I used the galaxy's rotation and move through space in setting up the backstory of two novels (now available on fictionwise.com as e-books as well as used on Amazon) - Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends.

Each moment of life is unique. Imagine that.

Margaret brought up one of my favorite novels by Robert A. Heinlein, Time For The Stars, where twins are used to communicate telepathically from Earth to FTL ships.

That reminded me suddenly of a wonderful little book -- HOW TO BUILD A TIME MACHINE by Paul Davies, from Penguin Books paperback 2001 -- reprinted through 2003.

I don't know if this book is still available. It might be woefully out of date with respect to the newest discoveries in astrophysics. But that wouldn't matter to worldbuilders writing fiction.

HOW TO BUILD A TIME MACHINE is popular physics which explains clearly in layman's terms how it is that there can never be any such thing as simultaneity at interstellar distances.

Gravity distorts space-time in such a way that the galactic civilizations we write about really can't exist or function as we describe them -- as analogues of Earth at the time of sailing ships.

My mind is still absolutely dizzy about this concept. Even Robert E. Forward (an astrophysicist) in order to write a good novel had to kind of cheat his way around this concept.

And then a couple years ago I took a course which I've mentioned many times in blogs and my review column ( http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2007/ ) and which led to a series of 6 review columns which I called the Soul Time Hypothesis. Those 6 review columns presenting this concept of the relationship between the Soul and Time became the basis of a course I gave in the Spring of 2008.

The mind-boggler is that the soul enters manifest reality through the dimension of Time.

Physicists obsess on measuring Time because it's a factor in almost all the key equations that describe the physical universe. So possibly they'll keep on studying and finally discover that the non-simultaneity concept has to be changed to something more amenable to SF writing. After all, physics said FTL travel is impossible, but we write about it. And physics said matter-transmission is impossible, but it's been done in the Lab (albeit on sub-microscopic particles). So maybe there's hope for writers.

Maybe, by writing such imaginings, getting others to imagine the universe CAN have simultaneous effects on events across galaxies. Maybe we can actually change the way the universe works? If Time is so plastic -- maybe other things are likewise responsive to human imagination? That was the theory behind Marion Zimmer Bradley's MISTS OF AVALON - a wonderful novel of Arthurian Legend's women.

Or alternatively, the power of the human imagination to change the functioning of the physical universe could become the reason that galactic aliens want to destroy Earth and all humans? What a threat - our novels alter THEIR reality! What a Helen of Troy lovestory!

Actually, I approached that idea sidewise in my novel DREAMSPY. But I fudged the physics with a little magic. Anyone know another novel that plays with that concept?

I don't really know how to "worldbuild" myself a universe strictly based on the non-simultaneity concept that includes the Soul-Time Hypothesis and that would work for a novel's background. Yet more than likely a blending of those two ideas would depict our objective reality (if there is such a thing) much better than any novelist has yet managed.

Well, then maybe the key for writers is to create some Aliens who do understand the universe in that blended way - non-Simultaneity plus Soul-Time, and just proceed from there?

Oh, wait -- actually, I think Edward E. ("Doc") Smith did that with the Lensman Series and his Arisians vs. Boskone war that stretched over millenia. I read all those books when I was in grammar school and High School, and they made a deep impression on me. They're still available in a recent reprint.

I haven't seen anything even remotely similar lately. If you have, please drop a note about them on the comments here. But don't forget that the Lensman Series had the first really HOT romance in the space-travel SF field. I've always wished I had auburn hair.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://www.slantedconcept.com