Book-Love in a Time of Cholera

That's the title of Brian Attebery's introduction to the latest issue of the JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS. He discusses how a reader's experience of literature changes under the influence of real-life circumstances, offering a different angle on the topic of my previous post. Attebery remarks that reading in the shadow of COVID-19 feels "rather like getting messages from an alternate timeline in which people still. . . count on health, employment, and a predictable future." He reminds us that whenever we reread a text, in a sense we're reading a different book, because "works of literature are never merely or entirely themselves" but instead "products of an interaction between text and reader."

The pandemic has inevitably brought Stephen King's THE STAND to the forefront of many readers' minds. Someone on a list I subscribe to recently said of COVID-19, "This isn't Captain Trips." All SF and horror fans would instantly recognize that allusion. Even though King's novel is decades old, current events give it fresh resonance and meaning. Some readers may find a similar relevance in Connie Willis's DOOMSDAY BOOK, in which the heroine time-travels from mid-twenty-first century Oxford to the time of the Black Death in fourteenth-century England. Although she gets stranded in an alien era, surrounded by the ravages of the plague, she and the reader know the hope represented by the distant future from which she comes. Even the worst disasters don't last forever.

Paul Tremblay's SURVIVOR SONG, published in July of this year, seems eerily appropriate to the current crisis. Given the lead times in traditional publishing, however, it must have been written well before the pandemic became known. Here's the first paragraph of the novel's summary on Amazon:

"In a matter of weeks, Massachusetts has been overrun by an insidious rabies-like virus that is spread by saliva. But unlike rabies, the disease has a terrifyingly short incubation period of an hour or less. Those infected quickly lose their minds and are driven to bite and infect as many others as they can before they inevitably succumb. Hospitals are inundated with the sick and dying, and hysteria has taken hold. To try to limit its spread, the commonwealth is under quarantine and curfew. But society is breaking down and the government's emergency protocols are faltering."

The story maintains a tight focus on a small group of characters trying to get one of them, a pregnant woman in labor, to a hospital that has room for her to give birth. Along the way, we witness the near-total breakdown of social norms surrounding islands of refuge, such as hospitals and clinics, where people struggle frantically to provide aid in the midst of chaos. In an odd way, this story offers the comfort—like DOOMSDAY BOOK—that we aren't anywhere nearly so bad off as THAT. Also, the epilogue, set years later, portrays a society that has completely recovered. Tremblay's virus, unlike COVID-19, doesn't produce a "slow catastrophe." Because of the violent symptoms and short incubation time, its epidemic flares up and burns out quickly.

As Attebery's essay points out, events such as the present crisis may also evoke new meanings from fictional works that seem on the surface to have only a tangential resemblance to real-life circumstances (e.g., stories of isolation).

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Catastrophes and Fiction Writing

The annual ChessieCon was held virtually this past weekend. One session explored how catastrophic events influence literature. The panelists mentioned works of fiction inspired by real-life disasters, whether sudden and traumatic or longer-term "slow catastrophes," and discussed the ramifications of choosing to compose stories about such events. Authors may write about characters caught up in the real-world event itself, a science-fiction scenario that transforms the actual situation into speculative terms, or a near-future society that reflects the ongoing effects of the catastrophe.

They considered some advantages and disadvantages of making art out of contemporary catastrophes. Pro: It's a way to form a deep emotional connection with the audience. A story that mirrors the trauma and anxieties of the present time can feel immediate and believable. Moreover, SF and fantasy can, of course, offer a fresh perspective on events that may seem overwhelming if faced straight-on. Con: Authors may find themselves writing the same kinds of stories as everybody else inspired by the same event. A story about a pandemic, for instance, may get lost among hundreds flooding the market at the same time. Another potential pitfall is the accusation of exploiting a grave crisis for personal gain by writing fiction about it.

Literature, of course, has always reflected the catastrophes and traumas of its time. C. S. Lewis, in an essay about the impact of the King James Bible on English literature, points out the difference between influences and sources. One can hardly understand many of the great English classics without knowing the biblical stories they mine for sources. The influence of biblical prose on the style of later writers, on the other hand, isn't nearly so widespread, if only because "Bible language" stands out so obviously. Likewise, disasters, whether natural or human-caused, supply fiction with endless sources of material. "Influence," as I conceive it, refers to a more subtle, indirect effect that pervades the cultural atmosphere even when not explicitly mentioned. Many early twentieth-century authors were influenced by World War I in both senses of the term, whether they wrote war fiction or not. Hemingway wrote war stories, but he also wrote about characters living with the social and psychological aftereffects of the war. Those effects show up in genres where you might not expect them, such as Lord Peter Wimsey's posttraumatic stress (as we'd call it now) in Dorothy Sayers's detective novels. The recent Great War shadows the background of the literature of the period.

In the 1950s and 60s, many science fiction works explored nuclear war and its aftermath, such as ALAS BABYLON, ON THE BEACH, and Heinlein's FARNHAM'S FREEHOLD. A bit later, pollution became a dominant theme. For instance, I own an old paperback about which I've forgotten everything except the title, THE SEA IS BOILING HOT. Nowadays, numerous authors confront the potential short-term and long-term effects of climate change. After the 9-11 attacks, most TV series continued their story arcs (if any) in an alternate present wherein the attacks were never mentioned. A few, though, incorporated the aftereffects of the catastrophe into their plotlines, such as NCIS and a series about firefighters and police officers in New York City. NCIS and its spinoffs continue to inhabit a world where terrorism remains an ever-present concern. As far as "influence" is concerned, most fiction set in the present day or near future takes for granted an environment of security checks at airports and our country's perpetual involvement in anti-terrorism campaigns.

A striking example of the long-term cultural influence of a "slow catastrophe" appears in "Thoughts and Prayers," by Ken Liu, reprinted in THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY 2020, edited by Diana Gabaldon. This story combines our society's free-floating anxiety about mass murder rampages with the total devastation of privacy made possible by the internet, in the harrowing experience of a family whose teenage daughter has been killed in a school shooting. Aside from some near-future computer technology that doesn't yet exist but can easily be imagined as realistic, there's nothing in this story that couldn't happen right now.

One downside (in my opinion) of including acute catastrophic current events in fiction wasn't mentioned by the panel. If a writer incorporates such material into a story while the disaster is either ongoing or fresh in memory, it almost has to dominate the work. That's fine if the story is "about" the crisis itself or the protagonist's confrontation with an aspect of it. What if you're writing about some other dimension of a character's life with the disaster looming in the background, though? After the disaster recedes from current events into recent history, the story becomes dated. That's why I haven't mentioned the pandemic or its societal effects in my recent fiction. The three pieces I've had published last year and this year, as well as the novella I'm finishing at the moment, fall into the light paranormal romance subgenre. Allusion to the present crisis would throw those stories completely off balance. Also, it would "date" them in a way I don't want. Assuming our current plight won't last forever, I chose to set my stories in an alternate present where the pandemic doesn't exist, so that if anyone happens to read them (let's say) two years from now, they'll still feel contemporary.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it today!

We're preparing our usual turkey dinner—actually, my husband does all the hard parts, one thing I'm thankful for—although on a smaller scale than in some years. The only participant outside our household of three will be our oldest son, who lives alone.

I often remind myself to be grateful for how much better off we are than so many people in these times. Because my husband and I are retired, our lives didn't change much with the shift toward staying home more. As a writer, I can keep doing pretty much what I would be doing anyway, thanks to the internet. All four of our offspring are securely employed, three of them in positions that allow working from home. Thanks to Facebook, we can see what's new with the grandchildren. We're lucky to have many local restaurants that deliver and offer the convenience of online ordering. Anything we need that our neighborhood stores don't have, we can order from Amazon or the equivalent. Deliveries, mail, and other essential services continue to operate efficiently. Our supermarket has mostly recovered from the supply-chain problems of earlier in the year and usually stocks the things we need. And, again, if they run out, online sources can often fill the gaps.

The conventions we normally attend—ChessieCon this weekend and my International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in March—are able to offer virtual experiences rather than canceling altogether. Our church holds virtual services, too—experiences that would have been unimaginable a couple of decades ago.

Imagine how much more difficult this year would have been without contemporary technology and communications.

In the news, we have the hopeful prospect of three promising vaccines so far. Focusing on the positive helps me avoid sinking into depression when the news occasionally doesn't look so good. The world has survived worse; there's a light at the end, and this time it isn't an oncoming train. Best wishes to all for the upcoming holiday season, even though different from what we expected.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Tyranny of Now

The November/December issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER contains an article by psychologist Stuart Vyse titled "COVID-19 and the Tyranny of Now." The phrase refers to our tendency to choose immediate rewards over potential future benefits. Our instincts drive us in that direction, since we evolved in environments where basing choices on short-term results made sense. There was little point in worrying about one's health in old age when one might get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger long before reaching that stage of life. Vyse's article summarizes this tendency as, "Smaller rewards in the present are chosen over larger ones in the future." Understandably, our first impulse is to go for the immediate, visible reward instead of the hypothetical future one that may or may not become reality. That's why people living in high-risk situations tend to heavily discount the future; if a young man in a dangerous neighborhood frequently sees friends and neighbors getting shot, the wisdom of long-term planning may not seem obvious to him. In the context of his physical and social enviroment, that choice makes sense.

Vyse reflects on climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic as two current high-profile examples. We have immediate experience of the inconveniences and hardships of changing our lifestyles to minimize the effects of those two phenomena. The potential rewards of self-denial, on the other hand—a return to being able to lead "normal" lives without catching the disease, a cleaner and more stable environment—exist in a future we have to take on faith. In connection with the pandemic, the fact that any effect of precautions or lack thereof shows up weeks (at least) after we change our actions makes it harder for us to judge the value of restricting our behavior. Another factor is that a drop in cases as a result of lockdowns can lead to the tempting but irrational response, "What we've been doing has worked, so now we can stop doing it" (my summary of Vyse's analysis). In short, delays are difficult. We have to make a deliberate, analytical effort to resist immediate impulses and embrace long-term gain. As Vyse quotes from an anonymous source, "If the hangover came first, nobody would drink."

Here's an article explaining this phenomenon in terms of a struggle between the logical and emotional parts of the brain:

Why Your Brain Prioritizes Instant Gratification

"The researchers concluded that impulsive choices happen when the emotional part of our brains triumphs over the logical one." The dopamine surge can be hard for the rational brain to resist. The article explores some methods for training oneself to forgo immediate pleasures in favor of later, larger gains, such as managing one's environment to avoid temptation.

This Wikipedia article goes into great detail about the neurological, cognitive, and psychological aspects of delayed gratification:

Delayed Gratification

It devotes a section to the famous Stanford marshmallow experiments of the 1960s and 70s, in which preschoolers were promised two marshmallows if they could resist eating a single marshmallow for a certain time span. Children who succeeded devised strategies to distract themselves or to imagine the tempting treat as something less appetizing. Interestingly, this article reports that, according to some studies, 10% more women than men have the capacity to delay gratification. It also mentions that the ability to exercise that kind of self-control may weaken in old age. "Declines in self-regulation and impulse control in old age predict corresponding declines in reward-delaying strategies...."

It's easy to think of a different reason why some elderly people may abandon the "rational" course of postponing rewards. The choice not to delay gratification may result from a perfectly sensible cost-benefit calculation, rather than surrender to the "emotional brain." In the absence of a diagnosed medical condition that poses an immediate, specific danger, if you're over 90 do you really care whether too much ice cream might make you gain weight or too much steak increase your cholesterol?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Living in the Moment

Kameron Hurley's newest LOCUS column further discusses the quandary of living in these fraught times.

Measuring Life in Keurig Cups

She describes the joy of creative projects other than writing, endeavors that engage the body and senses such as the backyard pond she and her spouse constructed. She reminds herself and us that we can choose to brood over what's happening in the country and the world outside of our control or focus on what we can control, how we spend our own time.

I especially like her quote from Paul Harvey: “During times like these, it helps to remember that there have always been times like these.” Hurley brings up the example of Monet painting within earshot of bombardment during World War I. I often remind myself that the country and the world have survived much worse and returned to whatever "normal" may have been at the time. Consider the plague-devastated village at the end of Connie Willis's DOOMSDAY BOOK or London during the blitz in her BLACKOUT and ALL CLEAR. And yet here we are.

A message in Hurley's essay that particularly resonates with me is the theme of living in the moment. She puts it, “Am I physically all right, in this moment? Is everything okay here, in this moment?" This is a reminder I try to invoke for myself regularly, but I tend to think of it in negative terms: Is anything terrible or unbearable happening right now? The answer is usually "No." Of course, it may occasionally be "Yes," as with acute grief or terror or agonizing physical pain. More often than not, though, I suffer self-inflicted unhappiness by obsessing over bad things that may or may not happen in the future. Even impersonal forces such as political trends—sometimes I have to figuratively hit myself upside the head with the reminder that if the party I oppose wins the November election, the apocalypse won't descend upon us in the first week of November or even on Inauguration Day. To paraphrase a quote I came across somewhere recently, worrying doesn't make tomorrow any better; it makes today worse.

Since, unlike Hurley, I don't have a creative avocation other than writing, I make a conscious effort to take note of good things happening day by day—e.g., sunny weather, functioning cars, appliances, and utilities, reasonably okay health, Facebook videos of our youngest grandson (age two), the convenience of ordering books and other treats online, the restaurants that have reopened, etc. I've started posting some of these daily on Facebook under the label "Today's Good Things," most of which probably give the impression that my life is rather boring. That's okay; I prefer boring to chaotic. I also keep track of the daily word count on my current work in progress, which encourages me with the sense that I'm accomplishing something, however slowly.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

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

Risk Assessment and Fear

So schools, bars, restaurants, theaters, concert venues, casinos, etc. in Maryland have been ordered to close, and gatherings of more than fifty people are forbidden. Both of the cons I was scheduled to attend this spring have been canceled, sadly but inevitably. While of course we'll obey the official edicts and exercise prudence in daily life, I can't help thinking some reactions are overkill. The panic-buying, for instance, aspects of which baffle me. Bottled water stripped from store shelves, when there's no threat to the drinking water supply? We have electricity, running water, heat, and cable and aren't at risk of losing them. Major retailers reassure us that there's no long-term shortage, only a distribution problem that will clear up rapidly if people stop panic-buying. If everybody would just buy what they require for a week or two at a time, the stores could keep up, and we'd all be able to get what we need.

It's a familiar truism of human psychology that we overestimate rare dangers and underestimate common ones. The extraordinary threats draw attention BECAUSE they're rare. Here are two short pieces on that tendency:

Jared Diamond on Common Risks

Drawing the Wrong Lessons from Horrific Events

As is often pointed out, we're far more likely to get into a car accident driving to the airport than to die in a plane crash. We're more at risk of injury or death in traffic on the way to the big-box store than of exposure to the coronavirus (in this region, at least). The population of Maryland is about six million. Our county has a population of 573,000. As of Monday, there are 37 confirmed cases in Maryland, only two in this county. Since members of our family haven't traveled abroad lately or come into contact with anyone who has, our individual risk of crossing paths with the virus is near zero. Yet the daily deluge of breaking news still makes me anxious (mainly, on a personal level, about being unable to restock the items we need for daily living), and to stop brooding over it takes real effort.

Psychologist Steven Pinker has a section on phobias in his HOW THE MIND WORKS. He notes that almost all phobias (irrationally exaggerated fears) fall into a few categories, derived from things that threatened our prehistoric ancestors. Hence our common fears of spiders and snakes, even though most species encountered in urban areas of North America are harmless to humans. "Fears in modern city-dwellers protect us from dangers that no longer exist, and fail to protect us from dangers in the world around us." Instead of spiders and snakes, we should be afraid of "guns, driving fast, driving without a seatbelt, lighter fluid, and hair dryers near bathtubs." While we may exercise sensible caution about such things, most of us aren't terrified of them (although driving-phobic people do exist, and transportation assistance is available for those who can't force themselves to drive across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland). For every freeway-phobic person, large numbers suffer from fear of flying, despite the greater safety of the latter mode of travel.

In C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, senior devil Screwtape reminds his nephew Wormwood that "precautions have a tendency to increase fear." When standard precautions become routine, however, "this effect disappears." (Think how blase we've become about airport security lines. I remember when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and non-flying companions could accompany departing travelers right up to the gate.) Screwtape advises Wormwood to keep the "patient" obsessing over all sorts of extra things he can do "which seem to make him a little safer" and can be developed into "a series of imaginary life-lines" in response to imagined potential developments. (Accumulating a hoard of bottled water even though there's no threat to the public supply?) Earlier in the book, Screwtape points out that "real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible."

One of my favorite Lewis quotes comes from an essay he wrote in answer to the question, "How are we to live under the threat of the atomic bomb?" It's a longish passage, but I think it's worth reproducing here:

"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. 'How are we to live in an atomic age?' I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.' . . . .

"In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."

As a last resort, we could reread Daniel Defoe's A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR, Stephen King's THE STAND, or Connie Willis's DOOMSDAY BOOK and remind ourselves our current plight isn't nearly so bad as that, nor is it likely to become so.

In case you have time to watch a video of about six minutes, here's a calming message from a layman of our church—with a Maine Coon. Cats make everything better:

Jeff Conover

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt