Urban Flight, Epidemics, and Demographic Change

In recent weeks, many people who can afford to do so have fled the congestion of cities for suburban, rural, or resort areas. Some such prized destinations have taken aggressive action to exclude non-residents:

Second Homes

It's being speculated that the flight from cities may lead to a permanent shift from urban to suburban living, for those who have the luxury of choice. The work-at-home trend may continue and accelerate after the present crisis ends. One commentator (see "Great American Migration" below) says, “You’ll still have urban centers. But they’ll be less intense and more dispersed. You’ll no longer have to choose between unaffordable, overcrowded cities and incredibly boring countryside. There will be a more attractive middle ground.”

Great American Migration

Other observers point out that the 1918 flu pandemic didn't cause the downfall of cities, and predictions that people would retreat from large urban centers after 9-11 didn't materialize. In fact, most cities have continued to gain population regardless of these and similar crises. Cities may have to adapt, but they aren't likely to empty:

Will the Pandemic Empty the Cities?

During the plagues of the past, people frightened of disease have often tried to escape the lethal overcrowding of cities. Boccaccio's 14th-century DECAMERON introduces a group of young, wealthy gentlemen and ladies who flee from the Black Death to a villa outside Florence. In antebellum New Orleans, upper-class families annually retreated from the city to country homes during "fever season." Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" portrays the gruesome fate of a prince who barricades himself and his cronies in his palace for a nonstop orgy while taking refuge from the titular epidemic.

As Arno Karlen explains in MAN AND MICROBES, his book on the evolution of infectious diseases from prehistory to the era of AIDS and Ebola, the phenomenon of epidemics began with the invention of agriculture and cities. Agriculture allowed the same land to support a much higher population than in hunter-gatherer or nomadic societies, but with negative trade-offs. People eating a monotonous diet of mostly grain tend to be less healthy than hunter-gatherers (as archaeology confirms). The resultant overall decline in health impairs the immune system. Moreover, by living in close quarters with domestic animals, they fall victim to animal diseases that mutate to prey on human hosts. With the growth of cities, for the first time in human history enough people lived together in a congested environment for epidemic diseases to flourish. Before modern sanitation and medicine, cities were deathtraps compared to the countryside (for the poor and working class at least).

We think of our contemporary world as being dominated by urbanization. Yet rural, agricultural communities still flourish, too. Herding and hunter-gatherer societies still exist, even if pushed to the margins by industrialization. Some people enjoy cutting-edge, high-tech conveniences and comforts, including smart houses, while others don't yet have indoor plumbing. This subject reminds me of a weakness in much SF that depicts contact with extrasolar planets. Too often, the alien world seems to have only one level of cultural and technological development that's uniform all over the planet, as well as one religion, a universal language, and, sometimes, a single ecology (the ice world, the desert world, the jungle world, etc.). Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover offers an example of doing it right; we see a variety of languages, climates, landscapes, and cultural customs on Darkover. Think of what different impressions of Earth extraterrestrial explorers would get if they landed in New York, Tokyo, Yellowstone Park, central Africa, the Australian outback, or northern Alaska and didn't bother to look any farther than their initial touchdown point.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

An Ethical Duty of Civility?

The National Conference of State Legislatures publishes a magazine called (appropriately) the STATE LEGISLATURE MAGAZINE. Their July/August 2019 issue contains an article titled, "Is There an Ethical Duty to be Civil to Our Rivals?" My spontaneous answer is, "Yes, of course, you betcha." And, indeed, one recent survey finds that 93% of Americans believe our nation has a "civility problem." So, if the vast majority of Americans think we need more civility, why do we have a shortage of it? The article points out that inflammatory remarks and "negative campaign strategies" often backfire, causing the public to react against the perpetrators of "uncivil attacks." When this kind of behavior becomes too prevalent, it not only lowers the general tone of political discourse but tends to damage "the public perception of government and public officials overall." The article does suggest, however, that sometimes a "middle ground" between civility and "extreme incendiary language"—flavoring one's assaults on the opposing position with a dash of snark—can be effective for winning support.

Granted that the past is a different country, nevertheless I feel a certain nostalgia for the historical eras—if they actually existed—when even men preparing to kill each other in duels exchanged challenges in unfailingly courteous language. It costs nothing to be polite instead of rude, and claiming the high ground makes one's opponent look worse in comparison. Does this constitute an "ethical duty"? I think so, because a pervasive attack-mode verbal culture may lead to concretely harmful actions. Ben Shapiro, by the way, makes a distinction between "inflammatory" speech (which, he acknowledges, is still wrong) and speech that actively incites to violence. This strikes me as a valid distinction in principle, but in practice it seems that drawing the line between the two would be difficult and delicate.

Maybe the unpleasantness all too prevalent in political discourse arises from a version of the Prisoners' Dilemma, which you've probably heard of. Here's the Wikipedia explanation of it:

Prisoners' Dilemma

In short (if I understand the setup correctly), the prisoners will achieve the best outcome for both of them if both behave generously. Since they aren't allowed to communicate, though, if each assumes the other will turn informer then betrayal appears to be the optimum strategy. Do politicians and pundits fear that if they're the first to act nice to their opponents, they'll place themselves in a position of weakness?

What would highly advanced extraterrestrial visitors think about the behavior of our public figures? Imagine a society like that of Vulcan, or what Vulcan at least claims to be. Its purely rational citizens would argue the merits of each controversy on logical grounds, and theoretically the discussion would reveal the obvious solution to the problem, which rational beings would naturally agree to carry out. A hive-mind species would presumably have no trouble reaching consensus quickly, because they would all have the same factual knowledge and complete access to each other's opinions and motives. Klingons, on the other hand, would probably wonder why we don't settle political disagreements through trial by combat. Now, although that wouldn't be rational, it would certainly make election campaigns more exciting while not necessarily discourteous.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

When It Will Change

In the March-April 2019 issue of FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, an article by Jerry Oltion discusses what effect the confirmed discovery of extraterrestrial life would have on the people of Earth. His provocative answer in "E.T. Shmee-T" is "not much." Astronomers seeking evidence of life on other solar planets or around distant stars assume that if we knew we weren't alone in the universe, the "effect on human society" would be "profound." The knowledge would either humble us, inspire us, or (according to Stephen Hawking) possibly destroy us. Oltion thinks the majority of the population would simply continue their daily lives with, at most, mild interest in the discovery.

He points out, citing numerous examples (many of them new to me), that throughout most of human history, many people have believed the moon and planets to be inhabited. In 1795, astronomer William Herschel even proposed that the sun was inhabited. These beliefs had no practical effect on the life of the average person. As Oltion acknowledges, one reason why nobody cared about life on other worlds was that we had no way of reaching them. However, he doesn't think most people's lives and attitudes would change even if aliens landed on Earth, an opinion I disagree with. Granted, people's day-to-day activities would probably go on much the same as always, at least at first. But I think the long-term effects would permeate and alter our culture. As for long-distance communication proving the existence of aliens, the impact on our culture would depend on what kinds of information we received. Alien technology could significantly change life as we know it even if we're never able to meet the aliens face-to-face. What about religion? Oltion thinks the predicted philosophical and religious upheaval wouldn't materialize. If the aliens turned out to look humanoid, missionaries might try to convert them—and how would that be different, except in scale, from the missionary ventures of our own history?

The March 2019 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, coincidentally, leads with an article on the current search for extraterrestrial life. According to an estimate cited in the article, based on the data gathered by the Kepler space telescope, our galaxy should contain about 25 billion planets in the "habitable zone"—worlds where life as we know it could evolve. SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is only one of many routes to the goal of finding alien life. The next generation of telescopes may have the power to search for visual traces of chlorophyll. Spectrometer analysis may detect free oxygen in a planet's atmosphere. SETI, of course, concentrates on analyzing radio waves for signs of artificially created signals. We inhabit a big universe, as the article points out; the fact that SETI hasn't found any such signs yet doesn't mean there's nothing to find. In 2015 an investor named Yuri Milner established the Breakthrough Initiatives, an organization committed to the search for alien civilizations and extra-solar life in general, to the tune of at least 200 million dollars.

Surely if these quests were successful, the public reaction and the impact on society and culture would vary depending on the form the revelation took. There are big differences among finding evidence of extraterrestrial life, discovering signs of sapient extra-solar beings with an advanced civilization, and having firsthand contact with alien visitors. Judging from the experiences of pre-industrial Earth societies during early contacts with Europeans, wouldn't the physical advent of aliens on our planet have a "profound" effect? In support of Oltion's position, however, we do have "All Seated on the Ground," a typically witty Connie Willis novella in which aliens arrive on Earth but make no attempt to communicate their purpose, don't respond to human overtures, and basically don't do anything interesting. After a while, the public and the news media get bored with the aliens, and only scientists trying to study them continue to pay much attention to them. Read this story if you possibly can, by the way; the narrator, a journalist who's on the commission for tenuous reasons not clear even to herself, discovers how to break through the visitors' apparent indifference. It's in Willis's collection A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS. Great fun!

Oltion is skeptical of the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets, on the premise of the Fermi paradox, the "Where is everybody?" question. If a civilization capable of interstellar travel exists, wouldn't they have visited us or at least come within our detection range by now? This argument doesn't convince me. I can easily think of several plausible reasons why we wouldn't have been contacted by such a civilization, the most obvious being that it hasn't yet had time, or possibly sufficient motivation, to reach our cosmic neighborhood on the outskirts of the Milky Way.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Varieties of Freedom

Are you watching THE HANDMAID'S TALE? It's interesting to hear "Aunt Lydia"—who seems to sincerely believe that the theocratic regime of Gilead is doing what's best for the people, including women—talk about freedom. She chides the Handmaids under her supervision for desiring the now-obsolete "freedom to." "Freedom to" would include most of what we think of as civil rights and liberties, e.g., freedom of speech, the press, and religion, the right to vote, choice of career, privacy rights, control over one's own body, etc. Instead, Aunt Lydia thinks women should be thankful for "freedom from"—the freedom from fear and insecurity they enjoy by living under the protection of men. They're fed, sheltered, and clothed, and they walk the streets without danger of being attacked (as long as they adhere to the rules prescribed for them).

"Freedom" means different things in different societies. To a slave trying to escape, freedom means no longer being treated as property. To a prisoner, freedom means release from confinement. In the title of a pair of folk song albums I own, "Sing Irish Freedom," the word refers little if at all to individual civil rights. The freedom being sought by the rebels celebrated in the songs is the liberation of their country from foreign (English) rule. In the section of the TV series ROOTS that occurs during the American Revolution, slaves laugh among themselves about the white folks fighting for freedom. To the slaves, freedom would mean control over their own bodies and lives. The white revolutionaries were striving for a broader, less personal goal, the breaking of British rule over the colonies.

To a hive-mind species, the concept of individual freedom would have no meaning. If we met an alien, sapient, ant-like or bee-like species and urged them to claim their liberties by overthrowing their queen, they would probably meet the suggestion with blank incomprehension. Defending their hive from domination by an outside culture, on the other hand, would come naturally to them. If we encountered the Borg from the Star Trek universe, whose aim is to create an ever bigger and better collective mind by assimilating useful species, they would most likely be baffled by our insistence on clinging to our individual identities and "freedoms." Like Aunt Lydia in THE HANDMAID'S TALE, the Borg would urge us to accept assimilation and embrace the resulting freedom from fear, insecurity, and the existential ordeal of making our own decisions. Many of the house elves in the Harry Potter series do not want to be liberated. Of course, they don't belong to a hive mind, so in that case the essence of freedom would be allowing each elf the free choice of his or her own preferred way of life.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

About Lying

The cover story of the June 2017 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC explores "Why We Lie." A pie chart of motives for lying or deception includes almost a dozen categories, such as personal gain, covering up a mistake or misdeed, playing pranks, hoaxing people for entertainment, self-aggrandizement, economic advantage, and the "social or polite" lie, what's often called "little white lies"—to avoid minor embarrassment, making someone else feel bad, etc. Everybody commits dishonesty sometimes. Cognitive scientists view the emergence of the ability to lie as an important childhood developmental process. Sophistication in deceit requires a well-developed "theory of mind," the capacity to see the world from someone else's viewpoint. Perpetrating falsehoods seems to have a connection with the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing emotions. The more often we lie, the weaker the amygdala's response becomes, so lying grows easier. Because our default inclination is to trust other people unless they give us reasons to distrust, the liar starts with an advantage. Also, familiar information is more likely to "feel" true, so the more we hear an alleged fact, the more we're likely to believe it. That's why publicly refuting misinformation is a risky endeavor; by repeating the statement, even to disprove it, you fix it in the audience's mind. Yet one more reason to resist immersing ourselves in a social-media bubble of information sources repeating stuff we already agree with.

The article includes capsule portraits of famous deceivers, such as P. T. Barnum and Richard Nixon. Try to pick up a copy of the issue; it offers much to mull over.

Have you seen the comedy LIAR, LIAR? A boy wishes that for one day his father, a lawyer, cannot tell a lie. Naturally, chaos ensues. Not only does the beneficiary (or victim) of the wish find himself incapable of the deceit his profession demands, he can't withhold the truth by remaining silent or even ask a question framed in such a way as to evoke an untrue answer. He tries with little success to explain to his son why adults sometimes have to lie. It's hard to visualize human society functioning without occasional untruths. Carried to its literal conclusion, this gift or curse would make it impossible even to give an equivocal answer to avoid hurting someone's feelings on a trivial subject or, at the other extreme, to deceive the Gestapo or a slave catcher on the whereabouts of a fleeing Jew or slave.

A species incapable of lying would have a very different culture from ours. If they couldn't understand the very concept of untruth, they would of course be disastrously vulnerable in a confrontation with human invaders. The relentlessly rational horses in GULLIVER'S TRAVELS don't lie and have a very hard time grasping the concept of deceit when Gulliver mentions it. In the original STAR TREK, it's rumored that Vulcans never lie. They certainly understand what lying is, however, and in one episode Spock points out, "It is not a lie to keep the truth to oneself." The series later confirms that Vulcans, like every known sapient species, do tell lies when deceit seems logically appropriate. (We see Spock engaged in deceit on several occasions, in fact.)

From the opposite angle, societies may differ in their judgment of what constitutes a lie; outsiders may think locals are lying when the locals don't see it that way. In some Earth cultures (e.g., Japanese) a blunt answer of "No" is considered rude. Instead, a politely evasive reply is expected and understood. Foreign visitors may think they've been lied to when any member of that culture would clearly understand the courteous "lie" as a negative response.

Mark Twain's little-known story "Was It Heaven? Or Hell?" presents a thought experiment on what might happen if any form of lying, even for the most compassionate purpose, were condemned as an unforgivable sin. Two maiden aunts, nursing their widowed niece and her daughter through a fatal illness, lie to the mother for her peace of mind, telling her the girl is well and happy when, in fact, both are dying. At the end, the aunts finally die and face postmortem judgment. They have always adhered to strict moral standards, one of the most important being that "speech was restricted to absolute truth, iron-bound truth, implacable and uncompromising truth, let the resulting consequences be what they might." They refuse to make any distinction between "a lie that helps and a lie that hurts." They are also kind, loving women who adore their niece and grand-niece and were told by the doctor that the sick woman must be protected from all excitement. (The doctor also declares that he tells lies, "a million a day," and so does every physician.) Which principle should prevail? To the vast majority of twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers, the answer seems obvious, but apparently in the culture of that time and place, the dilemma was real. The question in the title remains unresolved.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Alien Holidays

Cultures in the non-tropical regions of our planet typically celebrate seasonal holidays such as lights, fire, evergreens, and feasting at the winter solstice; harvest festivals and tributes to the dead in the fall; rituals welcoming spring, e.g., Easter and May Day (as well as advance preparations for the return of spring, such as Carnival and Lent); etc. Heather Rose Jones's Alpennia series takes place in an imaginary country in a version of our Europe. In addition to familiar holidays, the capital city marks the changing of seasons by measuring when the river rises to a certain level. What kinds of holidays might be celebrated on worlds that don't have seasons like ours at all? Come to think of it, why do the Fraggles in the animated series FRAGGLE ROCK have a midwinter festival of bells? They live in a giant cavern complex, where the climate should stay uniform all year round, and they don't have a view of sun, moon, or stars to mark the cycle of the year. (Yeah, I know, because the writers wanted a sort-of Christmas episode, and I loved it, but in-universe the episode lacks logic.)

On a planet where the main division of the year's climate falls between wet and dry, the onset of the rainy season—the time of fertility—might be an occasion for a major holiday. On Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover, which has four moons, some festivals coincide with the appearance of all four moons in the sky. Earth cultures mark months and weeks by phases of the moon, and some cultures follow a lunar rather than a solar year. How would the calendar of a world with no moon look? Without weeks in our sense, what method would societies use to set aside days of rest? Or consider a world like the planet in Isaac Asimov's classic story "Nightfall," with several suns. On that world, total darkness occurs only at intervals of over a millennium. With no memory of night and stars except in mythology, people go mad from the unprecedented sight, and civilization collapses at every "nightfall." But suppose darkness happened rarely but not all that rarely, say roughly once a year. The peoples of that world might have holidays to get them through that frightening occurrence, just as ancient cultures on Earth held rituals and celebrations to ensure that the sun would return on the winter solstice. Other kinds of worlds might have holidays centered on the periodic eruption of a geyser, the migration of important species of animals, or the blooming of a special tree. In our own culture we have celebrations such as the Cherry Blossom Festival and (in my home city in Virginia) the spring Azalea Festival. Capistrano honors the return of the swallows.

The STEVEN UNIVERSE animated series (Cartoon Network) takes place in an alternate world similar to ours but with divergences in history and geography caused by the Gem War (an alien invasion) thousands of years in the past. The characters live in Beach City in the state of Delmarva, for instance. According to the show's creator, this world has no Christmas. We've seen that there's no Halloween. (From these clues, we must assume no Christianity and therefore no Easter either.) Apparently they also don't have Thanksgiving. Other than local town celebrations, we don't yet know what holidays they do celebrate. Because they live in a temperate zone with changing seasons, though, we have to expect them to observe some holidays analogous to the ones we know.

Terry Pratchett's HOGFATHER takes place at the season of Hogswatch, Discworld's analog of Christmas. At the winter solstice the Hogfather brings toys to good children in a sleigh pulled by giant boars. People leave sausages instead of cookies for him, in keeping with the origin of Yuletide as a all-out orgy of feasting before the privations of winter. At the climax of the novel, Susan, Death's part-human granddaughter (it's complicated), has to save the original Hogfather, the primal being on whom the myth is based, from permanent annihilation. Death tells Susan that if she had failed, the sun would not have risen. When she asks what would have happened instead, he says, "A mere ball of flaming gas would have illuminated the world." It's also Death who tells us, in the same scene, "Humans need fantasy to be human."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Mother Nature

That's the title of a 1999 book by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. (No, that's not a typo.) The phrase has at least a double meaning, referring both to maternal instincts and behavior in nature and to the nature of motherhood.

Some animals practice semelparity, putting all their literal eggs in one metaphorical basket by breeding only once in a lifetime. Examples include the salmon who swims upstream to spawn and die or the spider whose newborn young eat her body. More commonly, "higher" animals practice iteroparity (what a cool-sounding word), like us and our primate kin—reproducing multiple times. A female in an iteroparous species has to balance the welfare of the newest infant against her prospects for maximizing the number of offspring who survive over the long term. "Nurturing" is only one trait of the ideal mother in nature; she may also compete against other females for the status and resources that give her children the best chance to thrive or even make hard choices about cutting her losses with one baby for the sake of future babies who will have better prospects for survival.

A culture of sapient aliens in which the dominant female's pheromones suppress ovulation in the other females in the group, as among some social mammals on Earth, would have a very different family structure from ours. Among sapient aliens with biology like that of the above-mentioned spiders, a female who devised a way to survive the birth of her children might be condemned as scandalously immoral.

Female primates during their fertile periods often mate with numerous males so that those males will protect the resulting offspring rather than threatening them. It's not uncommon for males of many social species (lions, for instance) to kill infants sired by other males in order to bring the females into estrus immediately. In some human hunter-forager cultures, people believe a fetus is built up gradually by repeated infusions of semen from multiple acts of intercourse. Women deliberately consort with several men during pregnancy, and everyone who's had sexual relations with her during that time is deemed a father to the baby. Suppose an alien species existed in which this belief reflected biological reality, so that a baby really did have multiple fathers? In their society, polyandry would probably be the norm.

Among the vast majority of primates (including Homo sapiens in most cultures), males take little part in caring for infants. A satirical novel about a women-ruled planet I've read, however, takes the logical position that because women bear the burden of pregnancy and nursing, the father should do all the rest of the work of child-rearing. Men in that society stay home to care for the house and the babies, while after giving birth women don't do much with infants besides breast-feed them.

In hard times, some pregnant animals can re-absorb or spontaneously abort embryos at an early stage. Some species even have the power to alter the sex ratios of their offspring by selectively miscarrying embryos of one sex, according to which sex has the best opportunity for reproductive success depending on the availability of resources in a particular breeding season. Think what an advantage would belong to an intelligent species that could consciously perform this kind of "natural" birth control.

Maximizing the number of surviving offspring to carry her genes doesn't mean a mother necessarily nurtures every infant she bears. In the case of a too-large litter, females of some species may abandon the weakest, maybe even eating them to "recycle" their substance as nourishment for the mother herself and her favored young.

We might find it difficult to accept as "civilized" a planet where mothers have a duty to cull sickly newborns and where eating the culls is considered perfectly reasonable. Or a society that has institutionalized and ritualized the practice of dominant males killing the children of their predecessors, as the mating duel to the death is ritualized in the Vulcan Pon Farr ceremony.

Imagine encountering a species of advanced aliens who practice one or more of these pragmatic "nature red in fang and claw" customs. Think of the Martians in Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, whose culture shocks the human characters for several reasons, not only that the Martians practice ritual cannibalism (among other things) but that they cast their young out into the desert to fend for themselves and prove their worthiness to survive. As Mike, the human "Martian," explains, among his adoptive people competition for fitness happens in infancy and childhood rather than adulthood. (We get a glimpse of this process in the earlier novel RED PLANET, which appears to be set on the same version of Mars.) Another kind of struggle for fitness among children occurs in Suzy McKee Charnas's MOTHERLINES. Upon weaning, children leave their mothers and join the "child pack." They grow up wild, learning to provide for themselves and form rivalries and alliances among their age-mates. Only at adolescence are they reclaimed by their mothers and readmitted to adult society.

Adjusting to intelligent aliens with customs like these might be more shocking to our sensibilities than the three genders and male pregnancies of the TV series ALIEN NATION.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Interrogating Cultural Taboos

Recently I read a news item about a crusade to ban slaughtering horses in the United States for human consumption. My first reaction was, "Huh? Who in this country eats horsemeat?" It turns out that some slaughterhouses in North America supply horsemeat for foreign markets. Eating horses, not to mention dogs or guinea pigs (the latter were originally domesticated as meat animals), strikes us as repugnant. As Steven Pinker mentions in HOW THE MIND WORKS, most of us eat flesh from only a few animals and, from that small group, only certain parts of the creature's body. Cultural squeamishness prevents us from taking advantage of a wide variety of perfectly nourishing protein sources. Not that I'm complaining; I share that squeamishness. (I once tried in good faith to eat a soft-shelled crab. I had to stop after one bite, since the texture struck me as not unlike a giant insect.) Pinker has a valid point, though.

Americans embrace and enshrine in law some few cultural taboos that have no readily identifiable secular, civic justification. A couple of examples immediately come to mind. Not that I personally endorse these practices—I simply propose that banning them doesn't necessarily have a rational basis.

Speaking of eating animals, what about animal sacrifice? To most Americans, the phrase conjures images of dark, savage rites. Until the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in A.D. 70, however, animal sacrifice played a central role in virtually all the world's religions. Since the meat of sacrificial animals is eaten, the practice effectively amounts to a different, more intentional and reverent way of preparing animals for food. If performed with as little pain as possible, why should it be illegal? Animals killed that way probably suffer less trauma than those herded into a slaughterhouse.

Changes in sexual mores and marriage laws often evoke cries of alarm from some people that we're sliding down the slippery slope to all kinds of dire outcomes, including legalized polygamy. But polygamy was also a widespread custom through most of Earth's history and remains legal in many countries today. Why shouldn't it be?—among consenting adults, needless to say. The only valid SECULAR reason I can think of to ban that marriage structure is fiscal. Social Security and health insurance for additional spouses would have to be funded. That problem doesn't seem insurmountable, though. Such programs cover multiple children. With minor adjustments, they could cover multiple spouses (for increased premium payments, maybe.)

When we meet extraterrestrial aliens, we'll probably encounter customs that seem as appalling to us as, maybe even more than, the practices of "primitive" cultures on Earth appeared to European explorers. For example: Most of us consider it an ethical obligation to use heroic measures to save the lives of premature babies. (The word "heroic" itself reveals our feelings about this issue.) In a hunter-gatherer society, a newborn infant too small or sickly to survive (given that culture's level of medical technology) would be left in the forest to die quickly rather than linger for days or weeks and then die anyway. A mother who refused to "expose" such a newborn wouldn't be praised for her devotion; she would be censured for subjecting the clan to a futile burden.

In Robert Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, Mike (the human castaway brought up by Martians) tells his new friends on Earth that in Martian society competition for fitness to survive occurs at the beginning of life, not in adulthood. Martian "children" past the hatchling stage are relegated to the wilderness to live or die on their own. In this novel, also, characters propose a favorable view of group marriage and ritual cannibalism. In THE DARK LIGHT YEARS by Brian Aldiss, Terrans discover aliens that make nests of their own dung. This species is intelligent, but the Earth scientists don't know that. They provide the creatures with clean, sterile environments in a well-meaning attempt to improve their health and living conditions. The aliens sicken, because their symbiotic relationship with the lower animals that live on their droppings is essential to their well-being.

Imagine meeting intelligent ETs who devour their spouses after mating, like praying mantises and black widow spiders. There's a major challenge for a romance writer! Or a civilized species in which babies eat their way out of the mother's body, like some Earth spiders. In that culture, a female who manages to survive the birth of her offspring would be an object of scandal. Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild" features human-size, centipede-like sapients who've made a deal with Terran colonists: In exchange for being granted refuge on this planet, some human hosts allow eggs to be laid in their bodies. If all goes well, the larvae get removed immediately upon hatching, and the host (usually a young man) survives unharmed. Sometimes, though, things don't go so well. . . .

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Future is Now

Rowena’s post about chastity, abstinence and time periods brought up an interesting issue that I’ve dealt with since I’ve been writing SFR professionally. From time to time I get emails from readings telling me that the militaries portrayed in my books aren’t structured properly because “that’s not the way the USAF or USN” functions (or RAF or whatever other military you want to include).

And I have to reply, “Yes, I know. But my books aren’t about any Earth-based military.” (The Down Home Zombie Blues being the notable exception).

But, but, you write science fiction romance! It’s about the future!

No, it’s not. It’s about my character’s present day.

FINDERS KEEPERS is not Trilby Elliot’s future. It’s her present day. Granted, AN ACCIDENTAL GODDESS throws Gillie almost four hundred years into the future but it’s not four hundred years into Earth’s future, but hers. She’s Raheiran. She’s never heard of Earth, Florida, France, Malaysia, Ohio, Moscow, London, South Africa or Canada. Honest. She hasn’t.

The same is true for the rest of my books (other than ZOMBIE). The same is true for a lot of science fiction and science fiction romance.

One of the reasons to read SF and SFR is to move your mind out of the usual and the known. It’s to set the “givens” aside and open up to what else just might be. Our characters’ stories often aren’t ones you can plug into your home calendar—your can’t fast forward to 2075 and think you’ll find Trilby Elliot. Or Tasha Sebastian.

The cultures, the mores, the beliefs our characters have often are not Earth-In-The-Future but right here, right now for those characters. So chastity or abstinence, if it exists in that character’s life, is because of the current beliefs or life’s structure (as it was for Branden Kel-Paten in GAMES OF COMMAND). And what god or gods they worship, how they’re educated, what they eat, how they run their militaries—these are all things unique to their current time and place.

Which isn’t here.
Except when you’re reading my books.
Then the future is now.

~Linnea

www.linneasinclair.com