Just The Caffeine Talking

Historical Perspective

Like most of the rest of the world I've been thinking about diseases lately. What I've been thinking about is how mild the coronavirus epidemic has been. No, stop shouting at the screen and look at some numbers.

         

The Spanish Flu: the post-World War I influenza epidemic caused 17-50 million deaths; I've seen the figure of 20 million most frequently so let's use that. World population at the time was about 1.8 billion, so that represents a death rate of 1.1 percent of the entire population (not just the infected).

 

Coronavirus: deaths currently stand at just over 200,000 people. Let's be pessimistic and assume twice that many die of it before the epidemic subsides. The world currently has 7.8 billion people. That would be a death rate of 0.005 percent. The influenza was 200 times more deadly.

 

I'm not trying to minimize the current crisis. What I am doing is pointing out that modern civilization has weathered much, much worse. A pandemic today would have to claim about 86 million people to be as bad as the Spanish influenza. That's about the population of Germany or Iran.

 

A death rate like that nowadays would be an inconceivable tragedy. But in 1920 . . . not so much. Sure, the world had just come through World War I, and wartime controls on news may have limited how much people knew about the epidemic. But I've read a fair amount of literature from that era, both fiction and nonfiction, and it's kind of surprising how little attention the influenza got compared to the war itself. My collection of H.L. Mencken's writings doesn't touch on the flu; James Thurber references the Dutch Elm disease epidemic but not the Spanish Influenza. Hemingway, Graves, Isherwood — nothing that I can recall. 

 

In historical fiction set in that era, written by later writers, there's likely to be mention of the terrible epidemic, and it may even claim a minor character or two. But at the time, writers just shrugged it off. And the world's economy pretty much shrugged it off, as well.

 

I have a few theories about why it wasn't such a big deal.

 

The Greater Trauma: I think that a lot of people at the time simply lumped the epidemic in with the Great War. After all, for all of recorded history up to that point, wars were invariably accompanied by plagues. World War I was something of a turning point in that more soldiers actually died of wounds than disease, but it was not a huge margin. So the epidemic and the battlefield deaths were all part of "The War" in most people's minds.

 

People Get Sick: It's also worth remembering how much more prevalent and deadly infectious diseases were, right up to the mid-20th Century. Epidemics may have been less widespread, but they could still generate shocking local death tolls. Germans in 1920 could remember the cholera outbreak of 1892, which took nearly 10,000 lives. Americans at the time might recall their grandparents talk of the cholera epidemic of the 1870s, which caused about 50,000 deaths. 

 

And it's not as if the Spanish influenza was the only fatal disease around in 1920, either. People still died of typhus, smallpox, scarlet fever, yellow fever — and the undefeated historical grand champion killer, malaria.

 

For modern Americans (and increasingly for modern people all over the world), dying is something that happens to the very old, or to soldiers in wars. But for most of human history, right up to around the time I was born, people could die at any age. An epidemic with a death rate of one percent was just part of the "background noise." This leads to my final explanation.

 

We Care More: Medicine, nutrition, and sanitation have worked miracles in the past half century. Increasingly, people just don't die of infectious diseases. They die of old age, cancer, and violence. This is a wonderful thing, but it has encouraged a dangerous way of thinking. For most people nowadays, dying before you're in your seventies means it's somebody's fault. The product was defective, the pilot made an error, the driver was drunk. This is also why we often slide into victim-blaming when people get sick. He was obese. She smoked. He should have taken better care of himself. She should have stayed out of the sun. We have lost the easy fatalism of our ancestors. We don't want to think of death as a random event. We want it to be a solvable problem.

 

Hence the widespread paranoia about "toxins" in foods or consumer products making us sick. Hence the "anti-vaxxer" movement. Hence the anger about the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. And hence the current omnidirectional finger-pointing and rage about COVID-19. I think there is some good in the view that illness is a problem to be solved, rather than something you just have to live with. But the problem with this virus is the virus. Not the people you already disagree with.

 

  

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.

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.

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.

Very Sad News

Freeman Dyson has died. He had a long, productive, and apparently happy life, so it's not really sad news for him. It's sad news for the rest of the species, which will have to get by without one of the modern era's foremost intellects.

He was one of those scientists who are better science fiction writers than anyone in SFWA. Back in 1960 he invented the concept of the "Dyson Sphere" — a shell of artificial habitats and solar collectors completely harvesting the energy of a star. In the 1980s he tossed off the idea now called a "Dyson tree," a bioengineered space habitat rooted on a comet, spreading vast leaves to catch the light of the distant Sun. Both notions have become staples of SF, but Dyson got there first.

I'm afraid we shall not see his like again.

Signs of the Times

Things I've seen in the past few days:

• Disposable plastic gloves now get a listing on the supermarket aisle sign.

• Big displays of disinfectant wipes at the front of multiple stores.

• No dust masks at any hardware store.

What have you noticed?

Meta-Political Post

No, I'm not talking about politics. I'm talking about talking about politics.

I recently read a couple of interesting essays. The first, by economist Robin Hanson, is "Respectable Rants" — his standards for good political rhetoric. Note that he's not trying to limit politicians to a Rain Man style recitation of facts, nor is he urging that everyone only say nice things about each other. But he is asking, a bit wistfully, that political discourse treat the listeners — which is to say, the voters — like adults.

The second, "My Former Life as a Radical," by an academic named Gerfried Ambrosch , describes the thought processes and belief structures of a political radical. In his case, he was a leftist radical, but people on the far right, religious extremists, and all types of "radicals" share many of the same habits of thought.

 

For a thrilling story about a rebel battling evil wizards, check out my new novel The Initiate, from Baen Books — at bookstores everywhere right now!

 

 

Happy Palindrome Day! Yad Emordnilap Yppah!

Today is, of course, 02/02/2020, so happy Palindrome Day!

What makes this one rather special is that it's Palindrome Day no matter where you live and what format you use for writing dates. In the month-day-year zone based on American practice, we had Palindrome Days on January 2, 2010 (01/02/2010) and November 2, 2011 (11/02/2011); and will have another one next year on December 2, 2021 (12/02/2021).

If you follow the benighted European day-month-year style (question: do the British have to switch now?) the last Palindrome Day was February 21 of 2012 (21/02/2012) and the next one will be February 12 of 2021 (12/02/2021).

But for this one day the world can unite in palindromity!

 

Although it contains no palindromes at all, my novel The Initiate hits the bookstores this Tuesday, February 4!

Lewis and Lovecraft

This post is about a common thread I've noticed in the works of two very different writers: Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Clive Staples Lewis. (One of their few similiarities is that both are known by their first two initials.)

C.S. Lewis, of course, is famous as the author of the Narnia series and numerous works of Christian popular theology and apologetics. However, between 1938 and 1945 he wrote a trio of science fiction novels, known generally as his "Space Trilogy." In the first, Out of the Silent Planet, an Oxford linguist named Ransom is kidnapped to Mars by an arrogant scientist named Weston who has constructed a spaceship, and a greedy upper-class bounder named Devine, who wants to get rich off the project. On Mars Ransom meets several species of Martians and finally has an interview with the ruler of the planet, Oyarsa (later on we learn that's a title rather than a name). Oyarsa explains that Earth is called "the silent planet" because its ruling spirit has rebelled against the Creator, and the planet is a kind of celestial pariah state.

The second, Perelandra, takes Ransom to Venus where he faces off against Weston, who is acting as the Serpent in a new Garden of Eden, trying to tempt the first sentient beings on Venus into falling from grace the way humans did on Earth. Eventually Ransom realizes Weston is the vessel for a demonic intelligence, and the two men battle across the surface of the planet and through a nightmarish underworld.

The final novel, That Hideous Strength, blends three strands. It chronicles the crumbling marriage of Mark and Jane Studdock, two academics at fictional Bracton College; it tells of a (literally) unholy alliance between materialist science and demonic evil; and it depicts a major battle between the forces of cosmic good and the evil power controlling Earth.

Some readers don't classify Lewis's trilogy as science fiction, since it has God and angels and Satan and demons in it. When I first read it forty years ago I probably would have agreed, but now I see it as a sincere attempt to write science fiction in an explicitly Christian universe. Surely if we can suspend our disbelief for faster-than-light travel or psionic powers we should be able to imagine a universe where God is real.

H.P. Lovecraft's work is probably more familiar to science fiction fans, so I won't summarize his stories. Suffice to say that he reinvented the horror genre by jettisoning the old paraphenalia of ghosts, vampires, and family curses, substituting his own mythology of ancient alien species, cosmic entities as powerful as gods but lacking any compassion for mere humans, and beings so alien that humans are driven mad by the sight of them.

I don't know if either man read the other's work. Lovecraft died before Lewis published any of his fantasy or science fiction, so it's doubtful that HPL ever heard of C.S. Lewis. But Lewis did read a fair amount of popular literature in his own day, so it's at least possible that he ran across some Lovecraft stories in anthologies or magazine reprints. "The Colour Out of Space" or "The Dunwich Horror" are the most likely candidates. If some scholar of Lewisiana knows of any record of Lewis reading Lovecraft I'd love to hear of it.

Now that I've gotten all that introducing out of the way, here's the thread I've become aware of in their work. Both Lewis's Space Trilogy and the bulk of Lovecraft's work were attempts to grapple with the notion of humanity's place in the universe as revealed by 20th-Century science: a place inconceivably vast, ancient, and hostile to humanity.

For Lovecraft, informed by Neitszchean pessimism, the primary reaction to that vision of the universe was fear. In all of his greatest stories, the horror is simply the crushing reality — suitably reified in monstrous form — that humans aren't the pinnacle of creation, aren't the center of God's attention, aren't the hub of the universe. We're not even the masters of the Earth, really.

"The Shadow Out of Time" shows that humans are ephemeral, doomed to be replaced by beetles. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" suggests that our control of the Earth is limited to the dry land bits, and a vaster civilization waits patiently under the sea. "The Colour Out of Space" paints a vivid picture of just how alien the universe beyond the sky may be. And At The Mountains of Madness reveals we were created accidentally by ancient plant-beings from space.

What's interesting is that Lewis, the Christian convert "surprised by joy" as he put it in the title of his autobiography, reaches many of the same conclusions as grim atheistical Lovecraft, in the Space Trilogy.

Humans aren't the pinnacle of creation in Lewis's trilogy. In Perelandra it's pretty explicit that the children of Venus will be the ones to fill the role that humans on Earth failed to achieve. They will be the bridge between mortal and divine, and part of their task will be the rescue of humanity from our "silent planet" occupied by evil. Humans will be supporting cast in the Venusian epic.

Nor, for Lewis, are human concerns especially important. As Tor — the "Adam" of Venus — explains to Ransom, the biblical Apocalypse and the "end of the world" is supposed to be a new beginning — the correction of a trivial mistake before humans and Venusians can get started on the real divine plan. All our history, even the Incarnation of Christ and the Crucifixion, are a footnote.

Lewis can even create some pretty Lovecraftian beings. It's notable that they aren't the demon-possessed villains, or even the giant creepy-crawly which makes a brief onstage appearance in Perelandra. No, it's the angels. There's one scene in which the tutelary spirits of Mars and Venus ask Ransom's help in choosing appropriate forms for them to take as they pay homage to the Adam and Eve of Venus. Their first couple of attempts overwhelm Ransom's senses and shake his sanity because his brain simply cannot comprehend them. And in That Hideous Strength the invisible presence of an angel distorts the spatial perceptions of humans nearby. Since the angels impose their own absolute frame of reference on their surroundings, humans suddenly become aware that they're standing on the surface of a spinning ball whirling around the Sun.

In the other direction, Lovecraft's Fungi From Yuggoth from "The Whisperer in Darkness" could almost be Lewisian examples of the future of a fallen, demon-ruled species obsessed with material power and scientific knowledge. Weston or the scientists of N.I.C.E. would find them very congenial, and consider their habit of carrying brains around in metal jars a clever idea.

Interestingly, both men also appreciate the creepiness of stupidity: Lovecraft's ultimate Elder God is the "blind idiot" Azathoth. While in Perelandra the demon possessing Weston only uses intelligence as a tool, reverting to mindless malevolence when there's no advantage to be gained by argument.

But of course despite these similarities, I don't think anyone else has ever used the adjective "Lovecraftian" to describe Lewis's work. And the reason, of course, is the infinitely big elephant in the room: God.

Lovecraft was a diehard atheist. For him, humanity and the fate of the Earth really were irrelevant in the cosmic scheme of things. There is no resurrection after death, no afterlife. Fame is fleeting, as is civilization. Nothing matters. Hence his reaction of horror.

By contrast Lewis — after a difficult and reluctant conversion from unbelief to devout Christianity — could take comfort in the idea of an infinitely compassionate God. So that even in a vast and ancient universe the inhabitants of one fallen world are still worthy of His aid. There is a purpose to it all, somehow, even if that purpose is far too big for a mere human mind to understand. We may not be the center of the universe, but something is, and our mayfly lives do matter to somebody.

Personally I'm more in line with Lovecraft than Lewis. I lack belief. But as I've grown older I've come to realize that it is a lack. Feeling smug and superior to mere believers is at best immature, and is certainly without any foundation in fact. Atheists have managed to beat all religions quite handily in the realm of bloodshed and oppression, but I haven't seen them produce anything to match Chartres Cathedral or Mozart's Requiem. In an irony that even Lovecraft might have found amusing, it may turn out that unbelief is not an "adaptive strategy" as the biologists would say, and that brute Darwinian selection will favor the believers.

Comparing the works of Lewis and Lovecraft does make me wonder what the two men might have made of each other, had they somehow met or exchanged letters. I have no doubt that the Anglophile Lovecraft would have been vastly impressed by a real live Oxford don, even if he wasn't convinced by Lewis's religious arguments. I'm less sure that Lewis would have had much patience with Lovecraft. Pedantic self-taught know-it-alls can be rather tiresome (or so I'm told). At the very least the two of them could have shared a laugh at the false piety and boosterism of some of Lovecraft's ghost-writing clients.

 

For a look at my own take on demons and people who traffick with them, check out The Initiate, on sale next week!