Parenting in an Evolutionary World

(Picture from here.)

Tomorrow we take our son to college.

Yes, it’s an emotional. We’re taking someone we’ve known for 18+ years, who has essentially been the center of our lives for all that time and putting them in an environment where we no longer have control. He has to sink or swim on his own. High school is more forgiving than college and college is more forgiving than the outside world. So this is a step that still is somewhat protected. That said, it’s still a step and a big one for him.

So, as I tend to do, I want to examine this in a larger context.

Humans are incredibly diverse. We have some common behaviors: religion (in its broadest sense), managing the relationships between men and women, rearing children, language, music. One of the common markers across all cultures is the transition from child to adolescent to adult. It can be as abrupt the onset of menstruation determining a woman is fit to marry or as long as going through high school, college, graduate school, internship and, finally, a job. But the passage is marked.

Evolution suggests that we express our heritage in our behavior and frame. The horse’s hoof is made of the same material as human fingernails, though its form is different. Even the furthest relatives to us, perhaps single celled eukaryotes and even bacteria, still use the same DNA that we do, though they use it differently. It shouldn’t be surprising that our closest relatives show common ground with us in their behavior and frame.

They mark the passage from child to adolescent to adult as well.

In general, chimpanzee community retain the male children while the females migrate away to join other groups. This isn’t universally true. Flo, one of Jane Goodall’s Kasakela community subjects, had several children both males and females. The males stayed with the community as expected but several of her daughters did as well. Flo’s status passed down through her offspring. Several of her sons and daughters gained high status in the community. All of them retained relationships with their siblings and their mother for the duration of her life.

Still, the transition is important. Chimps nurture their offspring for about five years. While the childhood phase passes after that there are often strong sibling relationships—similar to adolescent to child or adolescent to adolescent relationships in human families—for a long time after. Goodall talks about one of her subjects, Sniff, who at six adopted his little sister when his mother died. However, Sniff didn’t manage to get her the milk she needed and she died. Sometimes, adult females will adopt orphaned children. One wonders, then, if Sniff’s attachment to his sister was a help or a hindrance.

You can cast the same story into human terms: a young boy struck with grief at his mother’s death and holding onto his sister as his sole remaining family member. But the boy is too young to care for her properly and the community too disorganized to step in. Tragedy occurs. Would it be any less a tragedy for Sniff and his sister? I don’t think so.

I wonder, then, how the parents of the chimps that leave feel. There’s no direct way to determine the nature of the relationships between parent and child in the chimpanzee. We can infer relationships by how many times one chimp grooms another, how often they are in each other’s company. But we can’t tell if Flo is proud of Figan’s rise to prominence or if she might grieve the loss of a daughter when she leaves for a new community.

When we look at our relatives closely, a gulf opens up, made up of our inability to communicate directly and how we must guard ourselves from projecting human attributes on what is clearly something different. Not to say there is not common ground—there is enormous common ground. But when we try to apply things that are important to us—pride in our children, shame at past deeds, hope for the future, despair at our own inadequacy—these cannot be attributed to our biological cousins. Either there is no way to determine them or the context is too close to us for us to drill down to the common ground.

What would pride in your children feel like if you were a chimp? In what context could it be applied?

I don’t know the answer.

My son is a beautiful young animal. He’s smarter than I am and certainly stronger. I think he feels about things differently than I do. I was far more excited than scared going to college. But I had moved from city to city, state to state, all of my life. The transition from home to college was just a mark of geography. The confidence and skills had already been discovered.

He has had a different upbringing. He grew up in the same place, the same house, the same piece of land and town, from the day he was born. This is a much bigger transition for him. His skills at living outside the family and in a new place are untried and that makes him nervous.

I’m not going to hover over him. But I’m glad he’s only a couple of hours away. 

Consideration of Works Present: The Europa Report

(Picture from here.)

I haven't done much on films. There's no particular reason not to but I haven't.

I decided to do one on Europa Report because of the press associated with it and Interstellar. Namely, that both films purported to be as scientifically accurate as possible. (See here.)

In the case of Interstellar there's a lot of truth in that. After all, when you have Kip Thorne as a scientific adviser it's hard to go far wrong. The problem with Interstellar isn't the science in the film. It's the film itself-- but that's a topic for another post.

In order to get at the science in Europa Report I'm going to have to talk about how the film ends. So, if you haven't seen the film and want to preserve your childlike innocence, leave now.

Okay? Then, let's begin.

Europa Report is about a manned mission to the Jupiter moon Europa. Since the entire thrust of missions looking for life in this solar system is founded on follow the water, Europa is a likely candidate. It actually has more liquid water than earth. (Here is a good description of NASA's proposed mission.) There's a fair bit of good science here along with a fair amount of drama put in for no good reason.

Quick plot summary: Europa One goes to Jupiter. After about six months of mission time they get hit by a solar storm knocking out communication. Two crew members go out to fix it, one gets killed by a plot device. The other one is haunted by guilt. Ship makes it into orbit around Europa and drills into the ice, releasing a probe. It gets disabled mysteriously. The ship lands. Crew drills through ice and gets samples: life. Biologist sees a light and must investigate in person. Ice breaks and she falls through-- camera suggests strongly she's been eaten or the equivalent. Ship tries to leave but engine malfunctions and the ship crashes back on Europa, cracks the ice and begins to sink. But the lone survivor manages to fix the communication before the ship sinks beneath the ice (and are eaten by something the looks like a tapeworm with a sea anemone for a head.) Earth receives communication and recognizes noble scientific heroes.

Now, as I said there's some good science in the film. Not great but good. There's a lot of false drama. By this I mean things that the filmmakers put in to keep our interest since the fact of finding life practically next door in the solar system won't hold us through the popcorn. Things such as the solar storm knocking out communication such that a person dies in the repairs, leaving the guilt ridden survivor there to send us a message in the end. Things like the ship missing it's landing spot. Or the engines failing on take off-- pretty much everything at the end.

Now, if you wanted to see this done right, watch Space Odyssey from the BBC. In that series the drama derives right out of what they're going through. For example, a man gets cancer from the radiation on the trip and can't use chemo since it will contaminate the water in the ship, poisoning his crew mates. Sure, a solar flare can happen. But the way they repair it, and how one crew member has to sacrifice himself for another is just bad mission planning.

You don't have to believe what is happening on the screen; you have to suspend disbelief. It's what makes the tag line for Christopher Reeves' Superman so irritation: "You will believe a man can fly." Well, no, I won't What I will do is suspend my belief that a man can't fly for the duration of this film. Didn't work for going back in time, though.

That's the problem with Europa Report: it doesn't have the courage of its convictions. I'm convinced the filmmakers initially thought we could cope with a dramatic film about science and then got scared and lost its nerve. I mean they made a lovely space suit. Europa is based on real imagery. The creatures they built could happen-- probably not on Europa, but somewhere. Weightlessness was based on actual weightlessness.

I can even suspend my disbelief that humans will ever get there. The only way we'll ever get to Europa is with robots.  Jupiter is a roiling sea of radiation and until China is ready, the rest of the manned space program is a joke. But enough of that.

I could have managed the false drama-- hey, I like a lot of films with predictable and tired drama. It's not a deal breaker. But Europa Report completely falls apart at the end.

Let's think about Europa for a moment. It's has a surface of ice on a body of water, probably with a rocky core. In a vacuum. The weight of the ice is pressing down on the water, right? There's no air pressure, right? What happens when the ice breaks? 500 km high geysers of water blasting into space. That's what.

So anyone breaking the ice to the water on Europa is blasted out into space. See a light shining through the ice? Unlikely the ice is transparent-- glacier ice isn't. Seems like there's an inherent selection against animals just hanging around on the surface. Besides which, I suspect that predators (And these were predators. No mistake.) would not dwell at the bottom of the ice flow. I mean it's possible if there were some sunlight getting through but I doubt it. I don't think there would be enough light and the places there were would likely be the ones most vulnerable to rupture-- the animals would run away rather than stay there.

A better way to do it would have been to can the false drama and get to Europa and build a mission base there. A pressurized bubble. Do all of the things you want to do-- false drama and all-- on Europa. Let's say the actually try to attract predators by mimicking the equivalent of sea weed or prey. Inevitably, they misjudge the situation (as they did in the actual film) and everyone dies but not before getting of the noble communication. That could have been good drama and good science.

I think people think of Europa Report as a good science film because it's so much better than so many others.

That's not a high bar. That's barely a paint stripe on the road.

Plutogasm

(Picture from here.)

It's no secret what's been on my mind for the last week.

Because of New Horizons, we have now seen Pluto. Up close. Personal. And with it's pareidoliac heart open to us.

Like every other one of these missions, it changes everything we know about the solar system and planets in general. 

Pluto's one of those odd little places in the solar system that I thought about but didn't really consider. Oh, yeah-- ninth planet from the sun, isn't it? (Not anymore, Chucko! Ha! Ha! Ha! -- Neil DeGrasse Tyson) Discovered by Clyde Tombaugh. Cold as hell.

I first started thinking about Pluto as a place when I read Have Space Suit, Will Travel. Which has Tombaugh Station on the Moon and some very cold and courageous action that takes place on Pluto. (I'll talk about that book someday.)

I thought about it again when I read Niven's World of Ptaavs. In that book, Pluto used to be a satellite of Neptune that was knocked into a circumsolar orbit by the impact of an alien ship a billion years ago. (I should do a consideration of works past on Larry Niven.)

And I've been thinking about it for the last year.

I have an odd take on these long term satellite missions. NASA can always get me to write my congressman or senator for any long term space science mission. Mercury? Go. Here's my check. Venus? Should have been there for the last decade. Take the charge card. Mars? Do you even have to ask?

That said, once launched, they only register a little bit in my day to day thinking. Until they get near their destination. Once they're in place, I can't get enough of them.

Now we have some lovely pictures and over the next year we're going to get some really good scientific data. 

But for the moment, we have to content ourselves with images.

And what images we have. There's the one above. But we've seen mountains of ice. Canyons on Charon. Both Charon and Pluto are likely active. How? Why? We don't know yet. Some think it's radioactive mineral decay. Or possibly a slow freezing ocean-- I like that one but I can't think for the life of me why an underground ocean on Pluto could remain unfrozen for long.

New Horizons runs on plutonium. (Cool, right?) It cranked past Pluto for one flyby at a blistering 14.51 km/s. How fast is that? 14,510 m/s. 60 mph is about 27 m/s. So it's 542 times that. It's about five times the speed of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. And it's been slowing down all this time.

NH launched at 16.26 km/s relative to earth but earth's motion gave it a boost to 45 km/s. It slowed down to 19 km/s by the time it neared Jupiter. Jupiter's motion brought it back up to about 23 km/s and from then on it coasted to meet Pluto.

Here's a picture of its trajectory. (See here.) I'd like to see it linger but you can see that would be hard to do. It would need a lot of propellant and power to turn.

It's now on its way to the Kuiper Belt running on about the same power as a nightlight. It was so streamlined for the mission that it's going to take another year and a half to get all that data back to us.

Which is fine with me. If it had been heavier it couldn't have gotten there as fast and a lot of the researchers might have died before ever knowing if the probe was successful. As it was, work was started on the probe in 1990 and launched in 2006. 25 years from start to finish. (There's a whole story of the stumbling drive to get it funded in the wiki article. Worth reading.)
Maybe it will meet other Kuiper Belt objects. We will see.

That said, New Horizons also saddens me.

We are really, really good at this. Think of Voyager. Think of Cassini. Think of Chandra. Think of Hubble. Think of New Horizons. We've sent out comparatively cheap robot missions. Sure, they cost more than a Buick. The Iraq War cost us between 7-10 million dollars a day. That's a New Horizons mission every 10 days. A Cassini mission couple of months. And we did that for years. We fight over pennies but are perfectly willing to toss billions down the drain.

But shake it off. Glory in the moment.

Okay. We've done the nine planets. (Suck it, Neil.) Where do we go next?

Robots on the moon building habitats is my choice. But a nearly permanent presence around Jupiter like Cassini would be nice.

Links:
io9's Pluto articles
New Horizon's future
Peaks on Pluto 
NASA's New Horizons Page

Addendum: FYI. Dr. Tyson is one of my favorite people on the planet. But I side with Stephen Colbert here.

Consideration of Works Past: Lord of LIght

(Picture from here.)

 

Long before Roger Zelazny was famous for the Amber series, he won the Hugo for 1967 novel, Lord of Light. 

Lord of Light is an odd story that blends Hindu mythology, Buddha philosophy, technical progress and science fiction. It’s structurally odd as well. It begins in the now time for the story, has an extended flashback, and then returns to the “now” for the rest of the story. The transition between parts is subtle and if you don’t catch it (which I didn’t initially) you can misinterpret the book considerably.

First, a little world building.

The colony ship Star of India lands on a lovely world. The local inhabitants are incorporeal and have no actual form but are not higher beings. They took along with their transition all of the ego, anger and greed of their former lives. They resented the incursion onto their world and the colonists and crew had to fight for their place in it. During this process the crew discovers that the world or their journey or the time aboard ship—something—has released some latent powers within them. These powers allow them to tame their world. In so doing, they become like unto the gods of Hindu mythology. They retain this power and retard the growth of the rest of the world, keeping their authority to themselves.

All this happens long before the book opens.

And it opens with one of the stellar openings of science fiction: “His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could.”

Bang! You’re not in Kansas anymore.

Everything I love about Roger Zelazny is in this novel. Big action. Lovely prose. Self-involved characters. Bifurcated lines where the thread goes one way and ends up another: "Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming."

The story is a familiar one in science fiction. The authority is suppressing technological innovation for the populace’s own good. A reformer arises (or revolutionary. It works both ways in SF) to put things right. Hilarity ensues.

Except in this case the authority are those who can make a good philosophical case for being gods: they have taken on symbolic qualities of mythological beings with physical attributes as well. Who is to say their feet are clay?

Well, Sam thinks he is and there lies the tale.

Sam himself has such attributes but rejects godhood. Instead, he brings up Buddhism as a reform and makes it stick. There are a lot of such things: the philosophy of being, the nature of death, the aspect of divinity. All while making a pretty rousing tale. 

This isn’t Zelazny’s only foray into mythology and science fiction. There was This Immortal (1966), Jack of Shadows (1971), a science and fantasy morality tale. The Francis Sandow tales: To Die in Italbar (1973)  and Isle of the Dead (1969), and Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969). Except for This Immortal, they were later than Lord of Light but LOL was such a ground breaker that I don't think the others  measure up. 

The difference here is in the mythology. This Immortal is Zelazny's take on Hercules and merely hints at the underlying story. It's pretty much straight science fiction. While in the Sandow stories Zelazny creates his own mythology and in COLAD he uses Egyptian mythology. In LOL he seems to take the philosophical underpinnings seriously. Perhaps this is because Hinduism and Buddhism are living religions. I have no idea if the book is true to the spirit of Hinduism or Buddhism. I’m guessing probably not. 

However, the characters take their roles seriously. There is no real magic in the novel but there is advanced technology that people view as magic and as extensions of their divine personas. The "gods" consider what it means to be the incarnation of a mythological character and they (and Zelazny) manage the duality of underpinnings of a real world SF and the overlay of the imagined fantastic. 

This is a delicate balance that few have managed successfully.

The book has stood up well over time in part because Zelazny didn’t bother to trap himself with gadgets. The technology is cloaked in mystery so we never get a chance to check the wheels of the carriage too closely.

And it has a come from behind ending that I never, ever expected. 

It has a lesson for writers in it as well. Once a writer decides a set of guiding principles, those principles have to be present in all levels in the work. There is a fractal nature to writing in that the same principles that govern the overall structure of the novel must also guide the minor interactions. 

A good example of this is the “magic” element in LOL. At no point in the novel is it ever magic at all. Zelazny always keeps one foot on the ground. One of the main characters, Yama, the God of Death, talks about the original inhabitants of the planet that most call demons in this vein:

“If by 'demon' you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span, and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape - then no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect. ... It is not a supernatural creature.” 

“It makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.”

Neither, I suspect, did Zelazny.

Consideration of Works Present: Station Eleven

(Picture from here.)

This is the first of a new set of Considerations: contemporary works. Why I'm doing this is discussed here. On with it:

It’s a curious thing to feel alone in the wilderness for so long and then find a companion.

Let me explain.

We all have favorite authors. People we can always turn to and read for enjoyment or understanding or technique. I have those: Mark Twain, Alfred Bester, Clifford Simak, William Faulkner, Earnest Hemingway.

Still, years ago, when I was first forming an idea of how stories worked and how I wanted to make them, I ran into John Dos Passos’ Manhatten Transfer. It made a huge impact on me though it was some time before I could articulate it.

I’m one of those people that rip through an author when I find them and Dos Passos was no exception. This culminated in reading ChosenCountry, which I’ve talked about in great length here.

Chosen Country was the book I read that finally formed the core of what I wanted to do with longer works.

John Dos Passos used a technique that is not terribly in fashion these days. He used multiple points of view to explore something larger than any combination of characters could explore on his own. This meant that the reader was an accomplice in the act of the novel. Kurt Vonnegut said it succinctly, if somewhat disparagingly, on the first page of God Bless You Mister Rosewater: "A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees."

John Brunner tried this technique in Stand on Zanzibar but I don’t think he fully captured it.

I’ve written several books but only two have seen print: Caliban Landing and Slow Lightning. Both take little swats at the technique in that the larger story is intended to be in the mind of the reader but only partially grasped by the characters in the work. Nearly every novel I’ve written since has been an attempt to grasp this nettle. This might have something to do with why they aren’t published.

So I picked up StationEleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

This is a novel about a disease driven apocalypse. It plots the course of its characters from just before the apocalyptic event, through its aftermath to a relatively calm point later in time. It's a little cozy, I admit. It gets through the rough part and stops just before the left over relics of the past civilization begin to decay. It's an interesting apocalyptic arc-- not the one I'm most interested in, myself. I like somewhat later, after all the crash and fury when the relics themselves are becoming useless and people must come up with new solutions. But that's not the point and not the reason this novel is interesting. She has brought the Dos Passos technique into the 21st century.

Somewhere about half way through the novel I realized what she was attempting. My first thought at the end was: My God. She did it.

The problem in adapting the Dos Passos technique to a more modern audience is character. Dos Passos did a good job painting the environment his people worked in, what they did, the social environment they worked in and their motivations. But the style of the times did not delve deeply into psychological presentation the same way modern fiction does. Dos Passos largely wrote before Norman Mailer, Philip K Dick or Margaret Atwood.

Not to say he didn’t do good characterization. He did. But the nature of characterization has changed since then.

There has been an attempt over the years to attempt something called a braided novel. This looks similar to the Dos Passos technique but is not quite the same thing. The difference lies in the larger story. In a braided novel, a common story is told across common points of view. In a Dos Passos novel, there is no common story. There is a telling, to be sure. But it’s about something other than a story. Manhatten Transfer is about New York City. U.S.A. is about America. Chosen Country is about the nature of love. But there is no common story linking the characters in any of the novels.

For example, one might tell the story of the American revolution through the eyes of multiple characters. The revolution itself has a story: it has a beginning, a middle and an end. The characters are different perspectives on the story of the revolution. That’s a braided novel.

But stories are not the only kind of organizing principle around which people collect. Cities, countries, theoretical physics, also collect people. Refusing to push the organizing principle into story form and letting the characters follow their own path and then letting those paths speak to some larger issue is a different kettle of fish.

As I said before, Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic novel where the population of the world is devastated. It begins with a death on stage a couple of weeks prior to the disaster and ends thirty years later. It follows about a dozen or so characters through the process. Some characters interact. Some have common history. Some do not. Some disappear mysteriously like so many other dying people in the book. Some never realize their connections. They do not know the story. Only the reader knows the story.

Mandel is talking about loss and recovery, disaster and adaptation, but none of the characters knows more than their own slice of the tale. After all, most of it happens after the loss of any possible distance communication between them. Consequently, their connections must remain mysterious to one another.

But not to the reader.

This was the Dos Passos genius that Mandel seems to be channeling. To tell individual stories that, through the braiding speaks to the larger idea. The threads are disconnected from one another and broken in time. Some directly tend to reflect what Mandel’s interested in. Some reflections are harder to see.

Go read it.

The Minority Politics of Puppies

I haven't had a blog show up for a bit. I've written more than one post but discarded it. Either it didn't say what I wanted to say or it said it with too much vitriol or it didn't make the situation better. Finally, I decided to just flounder on-- which is sort of a pattern of my life.

What I'm speaking of is the gaming of the Hugos by Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies. To describe it briefly, a group of people who feel recent Hugos either overrepresent people who aren't white and male or are too literary bought a bunch of WorldCon pre-memberships and dominated the nomination process with books they feel need to be nominated. If you want to read more about it, see here, here, here and here. I find it dispiriting to read about.

For my own part, as a writer I want to be invisible. The facts of my race, gender, sexual orientation and political point of view should have no bearing on the reader's appreciation of my work. That my heritage and point of view informs my work is unarguable. That it be used to judge my work is unconscionable. If a person of color writes a bad book, it's a bad book. If a white person writes a bad book, it's a bad book. If a literary person writes a bad book, it's a bad book. If a hard SF engineer writes a bad book, it's a bad book. Ideology does not drive my nominations or my vote. If my inclination results in a literary nomination, then it should be the nomination of a work I admire.

So the Hugo nominations were gamed. It's sad but not surprising. It's no different from what the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (locally and fondly known as the Bagworm) tried to do to Antelope, Oregon. It's not a lot different from the way people of an ideological persuasion try to game political primaries.

This process is not new. Part of it goes back to Bidwell Wheeler and the Prohibition Movement. Wheeler realized that elections were usually very close: 49-51 sorts of things. That meant if you controlled enough votes to swing elections you possessed far more power than your numbers would suggest. Once Wheeler showed how this worked, it was taken up by many groups. In recent times, as the number of participating voters declined this mechanism has become far more effective.

Enter the internet.

One of the things instant and vast communication triggers is the ability to electronically mobilize quickly. This has a corollary that marginal groups (such as the puppies) can get their act together and pool resources. No one needs to have an in-person meeting in order to mobilize money and effect.

One does need not to attend a worldcon for the Hugo nomination to go forward. Consequently, those who have an axe to grind can do so with just the spending of a small sum and an investment of a paltry bit of time online. Since the goal is nomination and not winning, and the nominating mechanism is based on the numbers of submitted nominations, it's fairly easy to game the system and nominate what a marginal group desires. Investment is low and return is high.

And it completely defeats the purpose of the Hugos-- or any such nominating procedure. It gets worse as barriers are placed into the process. Most primary nominations are done in a polling place. American primaries don't get nearly the press that full elections do in the same way off year  elections don't get the same press that presidential elections do. So if one compares voter participation for presidential elections to off year elections to primaries, then it starts with the max and whittles down to the primaries. Since the primaries determine who is standing for the actual election (as the Hugo nominations stand for the election of the award) the candidates are often in the position of representing the more radical base that vote in primaries than the electorate as a hole. As we see happening now in the Hugos.

The voting statistics for Hugo nominations look suspiciously like American voting statistics (See here.) in that significantly fewer people nominate than vote. Consequently, it is ripe for the sort of marginal politics I've been describing.

Any democratic system can be rigged this way. You can argue political parties are just means by which like minded people can game the system-- which is often a comment made by small political parties. And they are right. We see some of it with niche politics but more on the right than the left. One wonders what the world would look like if some of the parties I like (such as the Greens and others) took the Wheeler lesson and started running with it.

To paraphrase Edmund Burke, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for the good to do nothing.

The problem then becomes what is the right thing to do about this.

I'm not going to Spokane so I won't see the outcome in real time. Many have said they'll vote no award. The perpetrator of Sad Puppies says that a no award process will result in repercussions from his group. To me this lays bare his motivations. He set up a situation within a democratic framework and is unwilling to abide by a possible result. I only wish elections had the same possibility.

Regardless, a no award solution might work this year but it won't work in the future. If this continues we'll see different groups trying similar techniques and then we have War of the Splinter Groups-- which pretty much is the national sate of America right now. I suppose it's not surprising that an American worldcon reflect America but it's still sad.

As I understand it, it takes two successive worldcons to implement a voting change. So I expect significant political machinations and rhetoric over the next two years. A couple of solutions have suggested themselves to me:

1. Nominations be only by memberships that imply actual attendance.
2. Nominations be determined to be valid only if the nominators actually end up registering at the convention. (This would have the effect of delaying the ballot until the actual worldcon, but so what?)
3. Decreasing the barrier entry so that anyone can nominate easily. But then confirm the nominations by attendees. (Again, delaying final ballot but so what?)

I'm not a regular con attendee so I need to find another way to not do nothing. My plan is to start talking about more recent books. Books I think deserve an award nomination. Some have gotten them already-- Mandel's Station Eleven has been nominated for the Clarke Award.

The idea is if I put out what I think are legitimate award nominees, perhaps I can in some small way combat the evil I'm seeing.

I dearly hope the Hugos are salvaged lest they become as devalued as American political elections.