Things We Take For Granted: Morality

Congratulations to Linnea Sinclair for winning a P.E.A.R.L. award for Shades of Dark!


Margaret's gritty post about Infanticide was like a starter cannon for my thoughts on what we think of as normal and moral, and what shocks us.

I raced off to one of my favorite non-fiction tomes: SEX IN HISTORY by Reay Tannahill.

There's a wonderful quote in the front matter:

i suppose the human race
is doing the best it can
but hells bells thats
only an explanation
its not an excuse

DON MARQUIS
Archy says

[Quoted as published.]

Reay Tannahill has also written FOOD IN HISTORY, and FLESH AND BLOOD: A HISTORY OF THE CANNIBAL COMPLEX.

The cover art is provocative. I'm not sure if the dark-winged goddess's crotch is the cynosure of all the kneeling dudes' eyes --with lines of sight depicted-- or if she is simultaneously blessing six worshippers with accurately directed, individual golden streams of enlightenment.

In the section of the book on "The Second Oldest Profession" (p79) the Greek historian, Herodotus is quoted as observing of the temple prostitutes:

"Every woman who is a native of the country ... must once in her life go and sit in the temple and there give herself to a strange man.... She is not allowed to go home until a man has..." thrown his silver in her lap

Imagine living in that world!
In fact, elements of my own worldbuilding were inspired by this (the "Virgins' Balls at the Imperial Palace) although the custom was only for the benefit and enjoyment of the royal Tiger Princes.

My spymaster, Madam Tarra's courier courtesans were inspired by Austrian Prince Metternich's use of prostitutes as intelligence gatherers.

Back to SEX IN HISTORY.

Later, there is a very frank and amusing transcript of a letter from a material girl of the Athenian hetairai. A courtesan named Philumena reportedly wrote to a lover:

"Why do you boher writing long letters? I want fifty gold pieces, not letters. If you love me, pay up; if you love your money more, then don't bother me..."

Chapter Four (p84) is a vivid and amusing reminder that some ancient Greeks and ancient Japanese societies apparently took male homosexuality and pederasty for granted.


And then, there's socially acceptable killing.

Recently, I read an interview with Marc Hauser, author of "Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right And Wrong."

A trolley is coming down a track and it's going to run over and kill five people if it continues. A person standing next to the track can flip a switch and turn the trolley onto a side track where it will only kill one person (instead of five).

Is it right to divert the trolley?

A nurse approaches an ER doctor. "Doctor, we've got five patients in critical care; each needs an organ to survive." (Different organs.) "A healthy person has just walked in... we can (kill him and) take his organs and save the five..."

Is it right to kill the one?

Apparently, most people cannot explain why their answers are different. Yet, the problem is basically similar. The life of one person who would not otherwise be killed is weighed against the lives of five others who are doomed to die unless there is an intervention.

I think I could take a stab at explaining, but that would take the fun out of the puzzle. I'd love to know what you think, though.

Do we learn our morals? Or are we born with a basic moral code? Almost every culture has some kind of "An eye for an eye..."/"Do as you would be done by" code of conduct.

I wouldn't stop there. I believe that quite a few animals have it as well.


Which brings me to "sacred cows" also known as political correctness.

One of the things I love about our genre is that we alien romancers can explore politically incorrect ideas without being uncomfortably offensive.

We are like the "allowed fools" of the European courts of the Dark Ages. Idiots and space aliens have immunity from the reprisals that good citizens face if they want to say something blasphemous, seditious, or iconoclastic.


For example:

Tigron Empire. 58th gestate in the reign of Djerrold Vulcan V Fictitious op ed piece.

I've not yet heard anyone blame affirmative action for the bad decisions made by banks, personal-shuttle companies, brokerage houses, insurance companies, and so forth.

No reasonable, responsible, nice Tigron person would try to blame minorities for the current crisis. That would be like kicking the underdog.

And yet, over the last twenty gestates, Alderboran law and peer pressure has obliged interstellar companies to promote a token number of people whose best qualification for their job may have been their gender, their sexual orientation, their ethnic origins, or some other persuasion.

Not in every case. Of course.

Thus, there is a question. Is the best candidate in the job? Was that hermaphrodite Klargon teenager chosen to be the Babyliger-5 branch bank manager because his/her education and experience qualified him/her to make sensible loans to responsible customers? Wouldn't a sober, fifty-standard-year-old Mumblari who'd worked his way up through the ranks have been a safer hand at the tiller?

Does the Klargon teenager secretly suspect that he/she needs to make daring and heroic business decisions to prove to all and sundry that his/her promotion wasn't affirmative action?

Same goes for the color-blind Beancounter who got to overrule the designers and engineers of a top of the line, zero-gravity toilet system for the way station in the Kuyper Belt.

Rowena Cherry
Space Snark

The "gods of Tigron" trilogy (aka The Mating Books)

Cathy Clamp was one of the speakers on my Research workshop panel at the last RT. Her handout, and those of Jade Lee, Sandy Blair, Judith Laik, and my own can be found in the Useful Stuff area of my website

For me, the most memorable story Cathy told was of how she always takes every opportunity to see unusual things, and makes the effort to talk to strangers. So, last weekend, when I had the chance to go into a cockpit with the pilots of a plane, and to talk to them about how and where ground radar interrogates air traffic, I did.

Much to the consternation (I am sure) of the other passengers, I was in with the pilots for a long time. I learned about air ways and sea lanes, the trade winds and the jet stream, and solar winds!

There's nothing like talking with pilots (or any experts) about the right way to do this and that, in order to extrapolate how one might to the "wrong" thing, or get around the system.... which of course my aliens have to do.

Best wishes,
Rowena Cherry

(By the way, I take no responsibility for the "associated" links that youtube offers you once you have viewed the Mating Net video!)

Astronaut kidney stones

If the label at the Johnson Space Center in Houston gave proper attribution to the astronauts who kindly donated their kidney stones for the public to peer at, and wince over, I did not notice it.

One specimen on display was the size of my little toe!

I don't know whether I can make much of astronautical (should that be a word?) kidney stones in my "Forking" books (the sequels to my alien romances in the Gods of Tigron trilogy). With Forced Mate, the carefully (but not personally) researched military uses for urine were left on the cutting room floor. However, I don't think my hero is going to want to be weightless for any long period of time. I'll have to upgrade his mothership.

That means that there wouldn't be a lot of point in tying him into one of those cool, grey, astronaut sleeping bags, which had seemed to me to have some vaguely sexy possibilities... While alluding to bondage, I'd never, previously, given much thought to the fact that astronauts in a zero gravity environment have to be tied down in order to exercise.

As for floaters, did you know that astronaut toilets have a rear view mirror, so astronauts can check before leaving the throne that they are not about to be pursued around the spacecraft?

If you ever thought that an airliner's toilet made efficient use of space, with every surface a repository for some compactly-stowed item, imagine the space shuttle as an airline toilet... without gravity, and without the running water.

Every pull-out drawer had a net inside it, to stop the drawer's contents escaping whenever the drawer was opened. The different space suits were interesting. One which had chilled water pumped through it reminded me powerfully of the costumes worn in "Dune". Another made the astronaut look like a human lobster.

I've thought of "contact suits" for visiting aliens, but never before had I realised that a stiff and bulky (and sealed) headmask would mean that one could not contemplate ones own navel ... or chest. Astronauts have small mirrors on the insides of their wrists, so that they can read the dials in the control packs on their chests and other places. That means, any instructions have to be in "mirror writing".

Of course, this would not be an issue if an alien language was in symbols like our H or O or X which read the same whether upside down or backwards. Then, they'd have to have a Yoda-like concept of grammar, where word order did not matter.

Much as I love Tolkein, I don't think I'll take world-building to the extent he did, and actually invent (and use) a complete language for my alien worlds. Until every book is an e-book --and there will come a day when it is illegal to cut down trees-- pulp fiction allows a writer ever fewer pages to tell a story.


Best wishes,
Rowena Cherry

Insufficient Mating Material