Challenging assumptions in science fiction: 4. You say you want a revolution?

My mid-week posts this month have been a series of meditations upon what I think are outmoded science fictional tropes, be they ever so time-hallowed. There are just some times and settings in which I can't suspend my disbelief of these extrapolations.

The series was inspired by my thoughts while reading Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey. Let's get this straight, right off the top: I have some issues with it, but it's still a wonderful space opera, well crafted and thoroughly worth reading.

So worthwhile, in fact, that the SyFy Channel has turned it and the other books of the highly successful Expanse series into a TV show, also called The Expanse, which is in its third season as I write this. In particular, my comments center upon Ceres Station, its population, and its governance, as portrayed in the book.

I compiled a short list of outstanding reasons NOT to live on Ceres:

• Human life is apparently cheap, and easily squandered with no penalty. 
• Freedom of speech is nonexistent, and so is freedom of the Fourth Estate. 
• The nutritional base is crap. Seriously? Fungi and fermentation was all they could come up with? Readers of this blog don't need to guess what I think of this idea.
• Misogyny is alive and well, but mental health care is not.

Last week I examined the reasons why I think a highly educated and intelligent work force of relatively few people, supervising lots of robots, were a far more realistic and likely extrapolation than a dense population of "expendable" humanity.

I also said I thought that Silicon Valley and the current aerospace industry--not the coal mines and textile mills of yesteryear--were the likelier model for ideas about what you'd find among workers in space.

Granted, the tunnels of Ceres do bear something of a resemblance to the visual effect of this Industrial-Revolution-era coal mine. And the leadership's disdain for the denizens of this world seems about on par with this era. But I think it's a misleading extrapolation.

Today I want to take on the questions of human rights and quality of life issues--and explain why I think the government of Ceres, as portrayed in Leviathan Wakes, wouldn't have lasted nearly as long as it apparently did, even with Star Helix Security activating in its most fascist mode.

It was never clear to me exactly what sort of governing system Earth supposedly had set up on Ceres (don't look to the wiki for help, either), but it clearly wasn't a representative democracy. Why not? Apparently, we readers weren't supposed to ask or care, and the residents certianly weren't supposed to weigh in on the matter. 

Which means it doesn't take a genius to figure out why there might be unrest. Seriously, people! Nobody needed a gang problem (although the form of government certainly might foster one) to foment unrest on Ceres. Heck sake, the quality of the food alone probably set off riots! (remember: fungi and fermentation only. Yeep).

The food alone ought to set off riots on Ceres. Given the abysmal governance, no wonder the locals got restless!

But given the realities I foresee for the "immediate to intermediate future" of space, whether the governing body is a corporate overlord or a government, the days of the “company store,” debt bondage, and indentured servitude would either be a non-starter or at the very least won’t last very long in a realistic future setting.

Rational human beings will recognize those ideas for the royal shafting they are (as they always have, truth be told), and they will sooner or later find a way to overturn it.

I'm extrapolating that only the bright and well-educated will make it into space--the career-driven, who wouldn't know what do do with a baby. But they certainly will know what to do with anyone who tries to mess with their freedom of speech or assembly. How long did the Gilded Age last? Two decades? And they didn’t have the Internet. I’m betting on much, much sooner than later.

But if Silicon Valley is a more likely model than a coal mining company town, we're still not out of the woods--and in that way, the Ceres of Leviathan Wakes is all too realistic: the misogyny in this world is at times breathtaking. I'm writing this on the other side of #MeToo, but this is one battle that is very far from being won, yet.

I haven't read the whole series, so I don't know if the misogyny changes later on--but changing science fiction culture itself to stifle misogyny is not for the faint of heart. If you remember Gamergate, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't click on that link!

All I'm saying is, The Expanse series is supposed to begin a couple centuries on from now. Sisters, if we haven't raised consciousness and kicked some butt by then, God help us!

IMAGES: Many thanks to Amazon, for the Leviathan Wakes cover image; to Fact File for the coal mining photo;  to Vox, for the photo of a riot on Ceres from The Expanse; and to Shout Lo, for the "Equality Loading" image. I deeply appreciate all of you!

Challenge to a deeper dive

The Artdog Quote of the Week

Are you aware of your unconscious biases? Of course not--they're unconscious! But unconscious bias is abroad in the land, no matter where you live or who you are. The results of such biases for or against others based on gender, ethnicity, culture, appearance, and in many other areas have been observed and documented. And we all have them. It's a result of how we humans are "wired."

Becoming aware of our unconscious or implicit biases is not usually easy--and it's almost always an uncomfortable process. But it also is a worthwhile goal. And a whole lot more "fixable" than stupidity.

IMAGE: Many thanks to Quote Fancy, for this image and quote from Bertrand Russell.

Stronger than one building

The Artdog Image(s) of Interest 

Shotgun, Third Ward #1, 1966, by John T. Biggers.

John T. Biggers painted this image, Shotgun, Third Ward #1, in 1966--yet to me it hauntingly resonates with recent headlines.

Likely inspired by a rash of arsons in black churches during the early-to-mid-1960s, Biggers chose to focus on the community, rather than the sensationalism of the fire.

Then as now, the church is more than just a building, although churches were a central gathering place for the African American community during the Civil Rights era. Thus, attacks on black churches were attacks on civil rights activism, as well.

The word Shotgun in the title refers to the houses, not the weapon--and not, as popularly alleged, because a fired shell would travel through from one end to the other. Indeed, the African word "shogon," which means "house of God," is more likely the origin of the term (bringing us full-circle back to the church).

Shotguns, 1987, by John T. Biggers

The narrow, rectangular design, in which several rooms in a row open directly into one another (with no hallway) was popular for several decades, especially in the South. By the 1960s, however, "Shotgun houses" were associated with poor people, especially impoverished African Americans. Biggers returned to the image of the shotgun house for his iconic 1987 painting Shotguns. 

IMAGES: Many thanks to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, for the image of Shotgun, Third Ward #1, and to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) blog, for the image of Shotguns. I deeply appreciate both.

Challenging assumptions in science fiction: 3. Worth their weight in diamonds

This is the third in a series of posts that question some of the classic tropes in science fiction. This series was inspired by observations made while reading Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey.

The book is a really wonderful space opera, first in The Expanse series, which later inspired the creation of the SyFy Channel show, The Expanse, in its third season as I write this. But it does seem to accept unexamined some of science fiction's time-honored (and, in my mind, outmoded) tropes.

In particular, my comments center upon Ceres Station, its population, and its governance, as portrayed in the book. I compiled a short list of outstanding reasons NOT to live on Ceres:

• Human life is apparently cheap, and easily squandered with no penalty. 
• Freedom of speech is nonexistent, and so is freedom of the Fourth Estate. 
• The nutritional base is crap. Seriously? Fungi and fermentation was all they could come up with? Readers of this blog don't need to guess what I think of this idea.
• Misogyny is alive and well, but mental health care is not.

Last week I took issue with the idea that there would be abundant, expendable excess humanity available in the extrapolated setting and time span.

The primary reasons why humans won't be that abundant are the difficulty of achieving a viable pregnancy in most space (or space-adjacent) environments, and the lowered rates of childbearing among well-educated women who can control their fertility, a reality we already have seen played out in developed nations for several decades.

Today, I'd like to look at the reasons why the humans who do get there won't be expendable at all. ASIDE from the human rights angle, which ought to be the FOUNDATION of any discussion about the "expendability" of human lives, if we’re not going to have lots of excess babies in space, then Earth is probably exporting the vast majority of the people who live in space.

Every human being who is technically educated to the point of being employable Out There, then hauled up out of the gravity well is going to be an extremely valuable commodity. 

"Hauled up out of the gravity well" alone gives you one reason. In 2009, Michio Kaku explained the cost of transporting someone to Mars this way, in a Forbes article: "imagine your body made of diamonds."

The XKCD Web Comic gives us ALL the gravity wells (in the solar system, that is)!

Even now, it doesn't cost as much to put a human in orbit as it did in the early days of the Space Race, and that cost will inevitably continue to go down. But I guarantee you it'll never be so cheap and easy that "anybody can do it." 

Nor should "anybody" do it. Space is dangerous. Learning how to survive there takes a lot of training and highly specialized (not cheap) equipment. Which brings me to my next point: the "technically educated to the point of being employable" part.

If humans are neither able nor inclined to breed like rabbits in the tunnels of Ceres, that means in space most of the "grunt labor"--and more of the advanced processes than you might imagine--will be done the way more and more of it already IS, here on Earth: by robots. Robotic manufacturing processes are already essential to the current aerospace industry, and this trend won't go away. I examined this and related automation issues in a series of posts about the automation of labor that started last March. 

Who will manage, troubleshoot, and integrate those robots? That's the role for highly technically skilled and trained humans. Humans with master's degrees and doctors' degrees, sure--but also highly skilled technicians, to keep everything running as it should. We're already experiencing a critical shortage of skilled labor, and the push into space will only add competition to entice workers in this job niche.

Typically, competition for workers means good salaries, signing bonuses, enticements, and perks added to sweeten the offer. If you want a model for what the workforce of the future will look like, look at Silicon Valley and the current aerospace industry--not the coal mines and textile mills of yesteryear.

Skilled workers, designers, and more are needed to put Spacex rockets into orbit--and the need for such teams will only grow as human expand their enterprises into space.

Moreover, companies are going to have to treat their employees with respect, or those intelligent, educated people will find ways to organize for change, mutiny, or jump ship to sign on with a competitor. How has science fiction not figured this out yet?

IMAGES: Many thanks to Amazon, for the Leviathan Wakes cover image; the XKCD Web Comic, for the gravity wells size comparison chart; to Cerasis, for the photo of robots manufacturing something (I can't tell what, though, and Cerasis author Adam Robinson didn't include that information in the article); and to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, for the photo of the Spacex Team.

Recognize, accept--and celebrate!

The Artdog Quote of the Week

IMAGE: Many thanks to Healthy Place for this quotation from Audre Lorde and the image that sets it off so well! 

A glimpse from Capricon 38

The Artdog Image of Interest  

Paper sculpture by Jan S. Gephardt, as displayed at Capricon 38, in February 2018.

I'm in Wheeling, IL, for the weekend, at Capricon 38. So far, it's been fun. I'll probably have more thoughts about Capricon in future posts, but here's a look at my Art Show panel, as it appeared before the show opened.

IMAGE: I took this photo, in part for this blog post. If for any reason you re-post it, please do so with an attribution and a link back to this page. Thanks!

Challenging assumptions in science fiction: 2. Oh, the humanity!

This is the second post in a series that questions some basic assumptions that underly several classic science fiction tropes. To start from the beginning of this discussion, go back to last Wednesday's post.

Last week I took serious issue with the way the people running Ceres Station were doing their job in the must-read space opera Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey.

Apart from the abysmal law enforcement practices I discussed last time, I made a list of other outstanding reasons NOT to live on Ceres:

• Human life is apparently cheap, and easily squandered with no penalty. 
• Freedom of speech is nonexistent, and so is freedom of the Fourth Estate. 
• The nutritional base is crap. Seriously? Fungi and fermentation was all they could come up with? Readers of this blog don't need to guess what I think of this idea.
• Misogyny is alive and well, but mental health care is not.

I'd specifically like to take up the first point this week, because it's one of the great, universal "givens" in most science fictional universes: that humans will breed like rats, once we're finally unleashed like a plague on the universe, and that we'll mostly all live miserable, short, brutal lives under the heel of this or that authoritarian system. 

1973's Soylent Green created a what-if future (in this case, in New York City) overrun by excess population, as envisioned in both the movie and the 1966 book Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, which inspired it. Realities have changed since then, but the trope hasn't.

Yes, life is brutal, out there in the Mean Future, but it makes a handy low point from which Our Heroes can rise up and conquer whatever their particular nemesis is. And I suppose if that's the story you're writing, it certainly has a long and--sorry!--storied history as a canon trope in sf. 

But seriously. This trope treats human life like detritus, and the vast bounty of space like a zero-sum game. I personally do not see either of these things as inevitable, especially not in an in-system situation such as what we have in The Expanse. Let me explain.

First of all, where are all these people supposedly coming from? Six million on Ceres Station alone? Really? If you are going to treat human beings as if they’re worthless, this implies that there’s an endless, inexpensive supply of them, readily available. But would there be? 

This tiny person (fetal development at 16 weeks shown here) would really have a hard time surviving and developing properly in a space environment.

It's not as if we're going to be growing them like having litters of kittens out there on the Final Frontier. I mean, pregnancy would be a really hard thing to support in a space-based environment. Yes, I'm going to talk about matters that concern icky lady-parts (note, that's any lady-part NOT being currently utilized by a protagonist for coitus). If any of you guys can't handle it, you can skip down a couple of paragraphs.

Like many physical functions, human pregnancy and childbirth have evolved in a 1-G environment. Heck, we can't even maintain muscle strength and bone density in micro-gravity. Not to mention what space radiation can do to sperm or growing fetal cells (yeah, it's a good thing the squeamish folk skipped this paragraph). Ceres Station supposedly has a gravitation of about 0.3-G, which means mamas ain't havin' no (healthy) babies there.

Yes, all that.

I know I'm probably not the only woman who daydreamed, when I was 8 or 9 months along, of floating in micro-G, where my ankles wouldn't blow up like balloons and my kid's head wasn't squashing my bladder into a 1-cc-capacity pancake. But so far the science isn't encouraging. studies on animals show viability levels are lower, and serious abnormalities can develop. Given that kind of outlook, I'd choose put up with football-feet and micro-bladder.

Also, birth rates fall, even without the environmental difficulties, in more technologically advanced societies. We’ve seen that industrialized nations with access to good birth control (which you’d absolutely have to have, in space) historically show birth rates well below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman. 

Somehow, science fiction consistently misses this basic fact.

Over and over again, the effect proves true: Given education, vocational options, and control over their fertility, women choose to have only as many babies as they (a) have time to take care of, and (b) can afford. Gosh! Who could have seen that coming?!?

Thus, any model that assumes runaway population growth in an industrialized society is based on a seriously retro--and misogynistic--fallacy. Actually, I believe it's based on a flawed model promulgated in the 1950s-through-1970s. As far as I can tell, it has not been seriously examined in science fiction since then. I think it's time we did.

IMAGES: Many thanks to Amazon, for the Leviathan Wakes cover image; to The Ace Black Blog, for the still from Soylent Green; to WebMD for the 16-week-old fetus image; to MumBlog, for the "Pregnancy Symptoms" graphic; and to ValueWalk, for the fertility rate chart. I deeply appreciate all of you!

Unreasonable

The Artdog Quote of the Week

IMAGE: Many thanks to Brainy Quote for this thought from Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Improvisation on a classic

The Artdog Image(s) of Interest

Kehinde Wiley, Officer of the Hussars, 2007-Collection of the Detroit Institute of the Arts Museum

Today I get to feature one of my absolute favorite pieces by Kehinde Wiley, an artist I've been aware of, and admired increasingly, ever since I ran across one of his amazing portraits several years ago at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. That painting was part of a traveling exhibition, I didn't retain the name in my memory, and I haven't been able to scare up information about it online.

But periodically I'd run across another Wiley--and, as you can imagine (if this is your first Wiley, God bless you, now you know!), once you've seen Wiley's work you don't forget it. Recently, the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art acquired another Wiley, his painting St. Adrian. 

Wiley's Officer of the Hussars is based on another painting I've known and loved for years, The Charging Chasseur, or An Officer of the Imperial Horse Guards Charging, 1812, by Théodore Géricault. You may remember seeing a reproduction of the artwork (the Wiley, not the Géricault), if you've watched the Fox TV Show Empire.

I'm a Géricault  fan, too, not only for his dramatic compositions and masterful renderings, but because he liked exotic places and people who didn't all look just like him. At his best, he portrayed many of those "exotic" people as individuals.

I do tend to think Wiley improved on the original--but you can compare, and decide for yourself.

The Charging Chasseur, 1812, by Théodore Géricault - Collection of the Louvre, Paris.

You'll see more Kehinde Wiley art from me in the months to come, if all goes well. He's got so many wonderful paintings to share!

NOTE: While researching this post, I also discovered that former President Barack Obama shares my enthusiasm for Wiley's artwork: he recently chose Wiley to paint his official presidential portrait. It will hang in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, alongside an Amy Sherald portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama.

IMAGES: Many thanks to Deadline Detroit and Alan Stamm, for the photo of Wiley's Officer of the Hussars, and to Wikipedia for the photo of Géricault's painting.

Challenging assumptions in science fiction: 1. putting my foot in it

I'm probably going to get myself in trouble, writing this series.

Actually, I first began thinking subversive thoughts about the canon assumptions of sf decades ago.

But I wrote the basis-document for this series of posts last summer, while reading Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey (the pen name of co-authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck). It's the first novel in The Expanse series, which is the basis for the SyFy series of the same name.

First of all, let me say I enjoyed the book, and I do recommend it, although if I go into why the ending disappointed me, it'll involve spoilers--so I won't. Go ahead and read the book. Maybe what bugged me about the ending won't bother you.

In between the squees of delight and the nitpicks, however, I began to form a stronger and stronger opinion, the longer I read: I would absolutely hate living on Ceres. And I bet everyone else would, too.

Why? Because that is a massively dysfunctional, dog-eat-dog society. I’m looking at Ceres, as portrayed in LW, and seriously—that place is a hellhole no Chamber of Commerce PR campaign could pretty up! So why would anyone willingly choose to go there, see what a sorry excuse of a place it was, and then fail to either leave, or work to make it better?

This is not even close to being an exhaustive collection of all the corporations with their eyes on a profitable future in space.

That the cops are run by a corporate contractor is not a stretch, given that we already have corporations leading the way into space, private contractors covering security for more and more corporate and government entities, and for-profit corporations such as CoreCivic run many of our country's prisons, for well or ill.

GRS (Global Resource Solutions) provided security for the State Department in Benghazi; ACADEMI is better known by Blackwater, its former name; SOC works for the US Departments of State, Energy, and Defense, as well as corporations; Constellis is the parent company of the security firm Triple Canopy. CoreCivic is a private prison management company you might remember better as Corrections Corporation of America.

But the clowns and cowboys who pass for law enforcement on Ceres have no concept of professional law enforcement best practices whatsoever. They make some of our more troubled contemporary police departments look like models of even-handed social justice. Even worse for the good people of Ceres, no one in a position of leadership seems interested in requiring them to step up.

Other outstanding reasons NOT to live on Ceres?

• Human life is apparently cheap, and easily squandered with no penalty. 
• Freedom of speech is nonexistent, and so is freedom of the Fourth Estate. 
• The nutritional base is crap. Seriously? Fungi and fermentation was all they could come up with? Readers of this blog don't need to guess what I think of this idea.
• Misogyny is alive and well, but mental health care is not.

To paraphrase, Ceres ain't the kind of place to raise your kids--at least not the version of it we see in Leviathan Wakes.

Now, I totally understand that sometimes in a story things have to get pretty dark before they get better. The principle of contrast for emphasis is important in most art forms. But I also have begun to get eternally weary of the same not-necessarily-well-founded assumptions being trotted out without all that much examination in novel after novel.

How could such an epic fail of a so-called society as the Ceres of Leviathan Wakes sustain itself? I mean, outside of the canon tropes of SF? Realistically, not too well, in my opinion.

I'll get deeper into my reasons in upcoming posts. But people, please! We're writing science fiction, here. Can't we imagine anything outside of that same predictable rut?

IMAGES: Many thanks to Amazon, for the Leviathan Wakes cover art. 
I am indebted to the following for the logo images used in the Aerospace Logos montage: to Wikimedia Commons for the Spacex logo; to Stick PNG, for the Boeing logo; to LogoVaults for the Orbital Sciences Corporation logo; and to Space Foundation, for the Sierra Nevada Corporation logo. 
I am indebted to the following for the logo images used in the Security and Prisons Logos montage: to LinkedIn, for the GRS logo; to IDPA, the International Defense Pistol Association, for the ACADEMI logo; to SOC for its logo; and to Constellis for its logo. 
Finally, many thanks to Science Versus Hollywood, for the still image of Ceres Station from SyFy's The Expanse. 
I appreciate you all!

Celestial trifecta

The Super Blue Blood Moon did not look like this from the second floor bedroom of our Westwood, Kansas home. There were branches. There were other houses. It was setting (at totality) about the time the sun was coming up on the opposite horizon, so we only got to see the Frog eat the Moon, but then he ran away with it, below the horizon.

This moon looks way cooler than ours did--but I'm still glad we got up for it

It was still totally worth getting up for. For one thing, it wasn't cloudy! We had a total eclipse of the sun in the Kansas City area last August, and it was totally socked in and raining at totality, where we were. So we saw it get dark. We saw the 360-degree sunset. But we barely got to use our solar sunglasses at all.

Somewhere up there a solar eclipse was happening. Very frustrating.

The cloudy "wrap-around" sunset, mid-afternoon August 21, 2017, taken without the proper filter so it doesn't look as red as it did in real life.

I've been pretty busy, these past few weeks, but some things just must be taken time for. The main thing I've been doing is making a final push to finish my novel. If all goes well, I'll be done by Sunday with this part of the writing.

And presumably, the Frog will give us the Moon back tonight.

IMAGES: The gorgeous photo of a previous (September 2017) Super Blue Blood Moon, by real NASA-affiliated photographer Dominique Dierick, is courtesy of Sky News. Thank you! The two "Alleged Eclipse" photos are ones I took last August with my trusty iPhone 6, at my friend Marna's farm.