Just The Caffeine Talking

New Story at the Decameron Project

Seven centuries ago, the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a series of stories, presented as tales told by a group of travelers seeking refuge from the Black Death in a house near Florence. The tale-telling takes place over ten nights, giving the work it's title: The Decameron.

In the present era, our plague isn't quite as deadly, and people are taking refuge in their own homes (though I might risk a case of COVID-19 if I can spend a couple of weeks in a villa outside Florence). It's a good time to read some stories.

A group of SF and fantasy authors have created the Decameron Project, a Patreon operation to raise funds for Italian Coronavirus relief. There's a new story every day, with an ongoing frame story written by Jo Walton. And today's story is a brand-new piece of my own, called "The Code of the Expats."

It's based very loosely on an anecdote my mother used to tell, about something that happend to a friend of hers in Mexico in the 1950s. I hope you all enjoy it, and please drop a donation in the plate at Patreon.

Astronomical Notes

The big stargazing news this spring is Comet ATLAS (it's in all caps because it's named for the acronym-titled instrument which discovered it, not the ancient Greek Titan). It's been getting some attention in the skywatching and pop-science press because it has been brightening much faster than expected as it has approached the Sun. Right now it's crossing the Earth's orbit, but don't be alarmed since its orbit is tilted and it's not getting anywhere near our planet.

Anyway, I took advantage of a rare clear night to go out and have a look. I used my binoculars, and paid careful attention to where to look . . . but I couldn't see anything comet-like. I'll try again in a week or two as ATLAS nears the Sun and warms up. 

 

 

Big Podcast News!

My short story "Treatment Option" will be the lead episode of the new DUST studios podcast series Flight 008, which releases tomorrow, March 25. You can listen to it here.

There's even a nifty trailer video!

This project began as a Web-based fiction collection, Seat 14C, which was part of an XPrize Foundation look at visions of the future twenty years from now (well, twenty years from 2017). My usual reaction to Utopian visions is to make sure I'm near the exit, so my story is a little more skeptical than some, but I enjoyed working on the project and since then I've been involved in several other XPrize activities as part of their Science Fiction Advisory Board. (No tiara.)

Non-Political Coronavirus Post

As an SF writer my thoughts naturally turn to the future. What will be the long-term effects of this pandemic?

Telecommuting: This may be the tipping point for telecommuting and working from home. A lot of businesses have resisted the idea much longer than they should have — chiefly, I think, from a nagging sense among managers that if employees are not around to be watched, admonished, and dragooned into meetings, the role of manager will be diminished. But if the millions of Americans working from home these two weeks get as much (or more!) accomplished as they would have in their cubicles, then businesses are going to start wondering why they need all those cubicles in the first place.

That being said, as someone who has worked from home for nearly three decades, I understand the importance of getting out of the damned house. We may see people going out to coffeshops or "coworking" spaces just to do their telecommuting.

The distinction between work and home is a recent one; for most of human history your living space and your workspace were the same. I think it's the "default state," for humans. With the barriers removed I expect a surge of people to start making use of the option.

Homeschooling: I also expect there will be an uptick in homeschooling after this — not just among evangelicals, secular knowitalls like my wife and myself, and political enthusiasts of every stripe. Because despite all our sitcom griping and jokes, most parents actually kind of do like their kids, and vice-versa. After a fortnight of, effectively, homeschooling their own children, I think more parents may be willing to take the plunge.

Cleanliness: A general improvement in cleanliness and sanitation is likely. All the people (like myself on occasion) who grumbled about the foolishness of trying to keep things germ-free will shut up now, and we can expect a lot more hand-washing and hand-sanitizing. This may have useful long-term effects on the transmission of other diseases. (It may also breed sanitizer-resistant germs in time.)

However I don't expect any kind of extreme permanent "social distancing" to last. We're not going to wind up living in bubbles. Humans are social animals, and a face on a screen is simply not the same as actual presence. Your forebrain may be okay with teleconferencing but your hindbrain gets lonely.

Health: A personal data point: I've been home for a week now with my family, cooking fancy meals as a bit of stress relief. Diane has been doing a lot of baking. We've been drinking more wine and cocktails. I haven't been able to get to the gym.

. . . And I've lost about three pounds. Turns out that it really is easier to eat in a healthy manner if you're doing your own cooking. And that fast food really is fattening. Not to mention those absurdly huge cookies at Starbucks.

I don't know if this has been true for others, but we may see a modest resurgence in home cooking. Especially if all those telecommuters decide to use the travel time they save as time in the kitchen.

How Risky Is Your Gathering?

In a time of alarm over virus transmission, how dangerous is a gathering of people? This post from Tyler Cowan's blog features a risk assessment calculator, giving the probability that someone at an event is carrying the Wuhan Coronavirus, based on the size of the event and the number of carriers nationwide.

It's reassuring to see that gatherings of up to about 30 people are pretty safe even if there are 100,000 carriers nationwide. This particular calculator is scaled for the USA, with 300 million people. For smaller countries, I think it would scale by reducing the number of carriers for a given risk level in proportion to population. I think.

Prince Prospero could have used this calculator when making up the guest list for his famous Masque. He invited a thousand other nobles to his event, but at the time the number of Red Death carriers in his kingdom was extremely high relative to population, so naturally the party guests got infected. If he had limited himself to a small dinner-party he might have made it through the epidemic alive.

Hamiltonian Musings

A couple of weeks ago the Crack Team launched an expedition to the distant isle of Manhattan. We toured the museum ship Intrepid, saw an exhibit of clockwork automata at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ate some fancy food, and saw a matinee of Lin-Manuel Miranda's famous hip-hop musical Hamilton.

Quick summary: it's good. Just like the soundtrack album.

And that's not just damning with faint praise. It is a great musical experience. But the staging of the show was overwhelmed by the songs. It's not a grand spectacle. The dancing is skillful but with a fairly small stage the performers mostly have to strike poses on a rotating floor section because there isn't room to move.

To me it would be as great an experience if the performers were just standing on stage in evening dress in front of the orchestra, with the chorus on risers in the back. And I find myself wondering, why not? A purely static musical performance can be profoundly moving. 

I have heard that a film version is in the works, and I hope the director isn't content to plant a camera in front of the stage. The music would work just as well against a realistic period background. The dancers could really cut loose. Freed from the theater stage, the spectacle of the show could finally match the music.

I was very impressed by the cleverness of the lyrics and the structure of the piece. At some point Mr. Miranda must have sat down with a notepad and jotted down all the words and phrases he could think of connected with a pistol duel, and then tried to build songs around them. I suspect his hard drive contains discarded drafts of a number about "fire," perhaps one about "paces," or "triggers," or "the ground."

I was also impressed by a bit of casting: all the performers who play Hamilton's friends in the first act are his adversaries in the second, which heightens the depiction of a man becoming more and more isolated as his ambition cuts him off from everyone around him. The exception is the man who plays John Laurens and Phillip Hamilton; in both acts he's the Guy Who Dies. I do wonder if in some earlier draft Laurens had a spotlight number in the first half to match Phillip's in the second.

(No doubt there will be a book or three written about this show which might confirm or explode my speculations. Until then, I'm free to guess.)

Jim says check it out.