About "This Old Man"

This Old Man goes up over at Book View Cafe today. TOM was my first story about Old Man Hibbert. I like that character-- I've even written an unpublished 150,000 word novel in his world.

Post-apocalyptic stories are a staple in science fiction. I'm no different. My last sale to Asimov's was Jackie's Boy. Also a post-apocalyptic story. By the way, both Jackie's Boy and This Old Man take place in the same universe.

Same universe. Different apocalypses.

TOM is one of those stories I find hard to talk about. It's difficult to write about where the story came from without revealing too much about the story. It's better to read it.

I was certainly influenced by Laurie Garrett's book, The Coming Plague.

Looking for Life

One of the interesting things about life on earth is how it modifies the earth's surface. Oxygen, water and a host of carbonates and other compounds are directly the result of or considerably influence by living systems. A lifeless world has a different chemistry than a world with life.

Consequently, when we see odd things happening on other planets we immediately start to wonder if there are any kindred forms living out there.

There is, for example, methane on Mars. (And here.) Since it is readily observable in the atmosphere and it is just as readily destroyed it has to come from somewhere. Methane is one of the compounds in the atmosphere that suggest life-- at least, it suggests it on earth in the form of methanogenic bacteria. There are, however, other chemical processes that create methane-- iron reactions for instance. A new model of reactions actually destroy organic compounds (See here.) resulting in CO2 and methane.

Recently methanophilic bacteria were discovered in Canada. These bacteria consume methane and likely "breathe" sulfate. So, even if the methane on Mars doesn't come from life it could feed it. If the previously described reactions haven't destroyed them already.

But that's just life that approximates something we know.

Titan is a moon of Saturn. It has a dense atmosphere and liquid lakes if not oceans. The atmosphere is made up of nitrogen. It is filled with a dense fog of methane, ethane and other organics. It has wind and rain-- though what falls is not water but hydrocarbons. And it's cold. Very, very cold. Around -179 C (-290 F.) Water is never anything but solid. There is zero possibility of life on Titan.

Well, as we know it, anyway.

Turns out there should be more hydrogen and acetylene on Titan than there is. Some time ago, McKay and Smith suggested that a methane based life form, instead of a water based life form, could survive consuming hydrogen, acetylene and ethane. They suggested that the Huygens probe could give evidence of this by showing depletion of these compounds on the surface.

Now, it's been reported that there is not as much ethane and acetylene and more hydrogen than was predicted. The proposed chemistry is to combine acetylene or ethane with hydrogen, gain energy and excrete methane.

The hydrogen derives from UV exposure to methane, releasing the hydrogen and resulting in more complex hydrocarbons. The "lifeforms" would be reversing that process. (See here for another analysis.)

A difference between expected results and actual results is a long way from demonstrating life.

Which brings us to an important question: how do we demonstrate life? Out on these plants we don't have dogs coming around sniffing the equipment. And it's likely that if something did come around sniffing the equipment we might not recognize it as a dog or even be aware it was sniffing.

Some very smart people at the University of Buenos Aires have come up with a novel approach to the problem: an interesting use of a microbial fuel cell. An MFC converts chemical energy to electrical energy by utilizing microorganisms. Fundamentally, they view life as an organized set of redox reactions: reactions where oxidation of carbon to yield CO2 (oxidation) or the reduction of carbon to yield methane (CH4).

Oxidation is the loss of electrons or an increase of oxidation state.
Reduction is the gain of electrons or a decrease of the oxidation state.

The oxidation state is the hypothetical charge that an atom would have if all the bonds to the atoms were ionic. Ionic bonds are based on charge. Sodium (+1) binds with Chlorine (-1) to create salt. Sodium loses an electron becoming positive and and Chlorine gets it becoming negative. They attract each other and form a stable bond.

Usually, oxidation and reduction occurs simultaneously in a chemical reaction. One compound is oxidized at the expense of the other compound being reduced. These are called redox pairs. They are often sources of energy. Cellular respiration involves the oxidation of glucose and the reduction of NAD to NADH.

(NAD is nicotinamice adenine dinucleotide and is a coenzyme found in cells. It is built in cells for just this purpose.)

The point here is that oxidation/reduction reactions are a signal of respiration and are independent of oxygen or anything else. All that is needed is an electron source and an electron sink.

Which returns us back to Brazil.

The UBA team consists of two charged poles, an anode and a cathode, and a membrane between them. They theorize that any life form will use a redox reaction of some kind and it will involve freeing electrons and protons. The anode captures the electrons and the protons move through the membrane, completing an electrical circuit and generating current. They've now demonstrated it on several types of earth bacteria.

When we drop a UBA device on Titan, we might discover life when it turns on a light.

Book View Cafe News

Book View Cafe author Sarah Zettel has been nominated for the 2009 Sidewise Award for her novella, "The Persistence of Souls," from the collection THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY, Tales of the Steam Age, Vol. I, edited by Phyllis Irene Radford and Laura Anne Gilman.

THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY is an anthology of new fiction released in 2009 from Book View Press, the publishing arm of Book View Café, which is the Internet's largest professional authors cooperative. All the stories are set in a steampunk universe where the inventions of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage changed the world and Mary Shelly's tales of creating life were far more than a ghost story. Available exclusively as an ebook from Book View Press, the collection is part of the ongoing drive of Book View Cafe's professional authors to bring their work directly to the rapidly growing numbers of online and on screen readers.

Following on the heels of the success of the first volume, Book View Café will be releasing a second volume later this year: THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY VOL. II.

THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY can be purchased from the Book View Café bookstore here.

For more information on the Sidewise Awards, visit the Sidewise website.

All DIY All the Time

(Picture from here.)

Okay. Here's another links edition of things you can or might want to consider doing yourself.

Happy DIY Day!

Categorized for your enjoyment.

Tools & Fabrication

The RepRap Mendel
Lasersaur: Open source laser cutter
XY Plotter Pr0n

Mobile lab

Machines

V: Two-cylinder flame gulper

Bike rack hack

Scraper bike wheels

Bike from parts

Bike trailer

Fundamentally Cool
Musical Tesla coils

Screw chair

Transparent coin bank

Tellellated kirigami sculptures

Wayward calliope

Nailbanger

V: OK Go... underwater

World science festival

Golden venture folding

Body and Space Ornamentation

Spherical tab lampshade

Paracord ring

Kitchen and Food

Roast garlic

Nutella cheesecake

Health and delicious chocolate cake

Ketchup

Peanut chews

Kitchen tips

From scratch recipes

Grow your own cooking oil

Medium Projects

Simple storage box

Carving a spine hiking pole

Tealight spider

Designer lighting fixture

Popsicle stick guitar

Survival stove

Office stationary darts

Textbooks -> Minibooks

Workbench

Diddly bow electric slide guitar

Backyard theater

Desktop zen garden

Drop spindle

Wooden centipede pull toy

Kayak trolley

Garden and Home

Mini-greenhouse

Concrete tree rings

Sanitizer

Laying bluestone patio

Hammock stand

Solar parabolic cooker

Cold frame

Pallet house

Raised bed rotational garden

Mini hanging garden

Log cabin playhouse

Raised garden beds

Movable carport garden

Planters

Upcycles for the garden

Personal

Getting rid of sunburn

Mad Skillz

Magic tricks
Fixing broken pin badges
Gelatin for molds and prosthetics

Screen printing

Lost wax casting

On Writing: Character Integrity

(Picture from here.)

I think about writing a lot-- it's what I think the most about-- but I don't write about it much. I don't because I tend to think that artists talking about art is too often just self-aggrandizement. The work should stand alone.

But I've had enough discussions about such things lately I thought I'd put my thoughts down on electrons. If it works I'll do more of them.

In my fiction I've been working on something called character integrity for a while now, trying to understand what it means and how it works. It's related to something I've come to call writing honestly, which I'll come back to.

Character integrity is, simply, portraying a character in a story as a human being. Like most simple definitions, this is a lot more complex than it sounds.

For example, let's say you've created a really interesting universe with titanic deities, smarter and more powerful than humans in every way, that manipulate human beings without their knowing. Now, a story about such things needs a human being as a foil. But the titanic beings are manipulating human beings without their knowing. So, to have the human being the means by which the nature of the titanic deities are shown they have to interact with the human. So, now you're stuck. There are a few options:

1. You make the titanic deities stupider than the human so they can be fooled. (Wheel of the World books)
2. You make the titanic deities flawed or weak in some way the human can manipulate. (Lord of the Rings.)
3. You make the human special in some extraordinary way. (pretty much any fantasy you can find on the shelves)
4. You make the titanic deities human in some way to put them on even footing. (Lord of Light)

Sound familiar?

These can be, of course, combined. For example, if you substitute for titanic beings, adult powerful wizards, you have both #1 and #3 and get Harry Potter. If you take #4 out of the fantasy universe and put it in SF space opera you get Dune. All of these have been shown in Star Trek or Star Wars at one point or another. All of them are in heroic comic books all the time. All of them represent a compromise between what the author wants the character to do and what the character is capable of doing. There is another solution in this scenario: the human doesn't get to find out what makes the titanic beings tick.

After all, if these are superhuman titanic beings bent on manipulating humans for their own purposes, why should they reveal themselves to a lone human like an old Republic serial villain? Short answer: only because the author tells them to.

This brings us to the greatest enemy of character integrity: the author.

Any author worth his salt is going to want to write something that tells you something. It might be something as trivial as aren't submarines cool? (Tom Clancey, The Hunt for Red October) Or as profound as the drive that creates evil men can also in those men's redemption create greatness (Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination). But they want to tell you something. Characters are the fundamental mechanism by which these things are told.

(Not language. I have an ongoing argument with some colleagues that language is the fundamental thing in the story. I think so only in the same way that tires are the fundamental mechanism by which the road learns of automobiles. But that is another rant.)

A terrific example is Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Being a work of the 19th century, the example is not perfect. Still, Twain created a particularly limited narrator to view the world and show the things he wanted to show. Because of that, he was forced to present them to his narrator in a way the narrator would understand and appreciate. There's a section where Huck ends up with the Grangerfords, as sophisticated and genteel a family as Huck has ever met. He's quite taken with them and cares for them deeply. They welcome him with affection and take care of him. They are, as far as he can tell, the sort of people he admires. Yet, they have a characteristic that Huck can only view as a flaw regardless of how he attempts to overcome his prejudice: they are involved in a feud with another family and kill each other to the last man. Here's the critical point: Huck is just sick with what happens. But the Grangerfords are quite comfortable with it. To them, it is an honorable and just state. They feel they are doing something that is to be admired.

The integrity is shown that at no point do any of the Grangerfords think of themselves as villains or less than honorable. At no point does Huck love them any less because of their flaw. And at no point does Huck ever embrace what they are doing. These are full human beings with all of their differences and neither side is forced by the author to make a "point". They make whatever point they are going to make on their own.

If I were to write a story from Hitler's point of view I'd probably have him thinking of himself as a German patriot, an Aryan purist, trying heroically to defend the dwindling power of his people against a monstrous Jewish hoard. That's likely what he thought about himself.

The problem in the current culture is we have this idea that drawing a character with understanding implies acceptance and forgiveness. That is simply not true. If "to understand all is to forgive all", then we must change our common definition of forgiveness. Understanding does not imply forbearance or absolution in any way. Presentation of someone who is evil from their own point of view should not imply that the author subscribes to the point of view. It should be no surprise that one of my favorite Shakespeare plays is Othello-- the good man destroyed by his flaws-- even though Iago is one of the weaker characters-- he has no good in him.

So that's what I do: dwell on the character from the character's point of view even if the point of view is offensive to my own.

But if you want to write about flawless heroic characters challenging the odds for the right reasons and prevailing, that's fine. Go to it.

But I find the idea boring.

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Wall of Idiots
The Debt Peonage Society: 2005 description of what should have been repealed when the crisis hit

Links of Interest
DIY Repair of a Nuclear Turbine
Doctor Atomic and here.
Captain Disillusion
Catfish Tastes Human Flesh!
Kentucky Space
The Beautification Engine
Monkey Waiters
House of Mirrors. House of Windows: Clarence Schmidt

Consideration of Works Past: Chosen Country

(Picture from here.)

(Review here.)

(Odd little YouTube on this here.)

Chosen Country, by John Dos Passos, is a unique book in my experience. It is a love story where the actual love story events occur in the last sixty pages of the book.

The lovers are Jay Pignatelli and Lulie Harrington. The book follows them through their the various intersections of their lives showing the evolution of their character until, when the love story is actually presented, it is inevitable. It's not that these two are destined to be with one another. It's that their lives have been so shaped by their experience and American society that when they are both ready and come together their love and marriage are an inescapable consequence.

It's a beautifully realized book. The characters are wonderful and the insight into the first part of the American century is stellar.

There are a couple of things that were important to me about the book. The first idea is how Dos Passos tells a story through many points of view and many characters. This is Dos Passos technique. But Chosen Country is a sweet encapsulation of this technique.

There is a deeper component to this technique. Dos Passos is, in my opinion, more aware of how the reader is experiencing the book than most writers. It's practically a necessity based on the technique. The effect of the book on the reader depends on a particular perception of the constellation of characters-- the books effect exists independently from the individual characters, scenes and words. It is the cumulative effect of the book that Dos Passos is driving for.

Of course, all writers strive for the same sort of cumulative effect. But in most works this derives from a single climax set of scenes where the particular plot points are explicitly resolved. Dos Passos, in Chosen Country, demands that the reader carry these plot points along, marked as the reader proceeds, on his own. Then, the reader has them all connected in his mind before the climax occurs. No restatement happens. The plot points or character points are often not even referenced. Such and such a thing happens and the reader, holding the rest of the cards that directly or indirectly reference these points, responds.

Compare, for example, the climax scene in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, when Ma Joad tells her daughter to nurse the dying father in the train, saying, in effect, that this is what they must do to survive. There are all the accoutrements of loss around them: the abandoned train, the lost family, the dying man, backing up what Ma Joad says. It's all right there in front of the reader. Many things resonate in the reader's mind-- Tom Joad running off, the loss of other family members, etc., but they resonate with something that's right there on the stage in front of the reader. We see Ma Joad's conclusion and empathize with her thoughts and emotions.

In Chosen Country, it's very different. Neither Jay nor Lulie have any inkling how their lives have built up to the moment they are in love-- that's something only the reader can know since only the reader has seen all of the events leading up to this moment. They only know what they can see. It is the reader and only the reader who sees everything in the novel. There is no Ma Joad telling the reader what has happened and how to feel. There is only Jay and Lulie who have come together and are part and parcel of the world they have lived in. Therefore, the reader has no example to empathize with but must in fact appreciate and empathize with all that has happened within the novel itself.

Imagine how exciting this was to read for the first time. There are almost no modern examples of this technique-- possibly Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner or Make Room, Make Room, by Harry Harrison. (There may be more I'm missing but they are not common.)

I've tried more than once to do it but it's escaped me.

American Exceptionalism

(Picture from here.)

Good article here on how our "liberals" and "conservatives" compare to Britain's.

If you wade through the videos surrounding the Texas school book disaster (see blog entry here) you'll eventually find a couple of videos touting American exceptionalism. One of the speakers actually said they didn't want negative things said about the USA since it would "impact the student's view of American exceptionalism."

I am reminded of an old cartoon that I saw years ago-- and which I could not, unfortunately, find. The image was of a collection of animals: monkey, giraffe, wolf, dog, fish. All thinking: "And God created giraffe in his own image." "And God created wolf in his own image."

You get the idea.