Artificial equations

[mrissa]

I know I'm post-y today. Sorry. I promise no more babbling on until I'm back from Michigan on Sunday. I'll have e-mail and internet access at our hotel, but I have no idea how much time I'll have. (markgritter and I are joining seagrit and various other NOLJ family members for my little brother-in-law Matt's college graduation. The PotUS will be the graduation speaker. I hope to have nothing whatever to say about that, but we'll see.)

Anyway: over at matociquala's, a bunch of us are talking about John Kessel and Ender's Game and many good things of that nature. Other people have had branching-off posts from it, too. I ended up saying this:

It's like "The Cold Equations." The author has set it up to make his point: the choice is deliberately impossible. In both cases, the author sets it up so that it feels to the reader like a natural thing, like "the world" has done this, but in fact it's not natural at all, it's extremely artificial, human-created.

I have grown extremely skeptical of situations where "the world" demands much of anything. Not that I think they don't exist, but that they are often used in authorial slight of hand, especially in spec fic where you have the choice of your worldbuilding. "The world" doesn't like magic-users: why not? More often than not because the author wants a disadvantage to magic use, or because the author wants to write about besieged smart people in disguise. And it's fine to do that, but it's also fine to criticize it, to say, no, human nature isn't like that: human survival does not rely on vicious abuse of a gifted little boy, and it never will. That will never be the only option unless we make it into the only option. I would like to have seen that recognition from Card, and I don't think it's in any of the books at all.

I wanted to put that where I could poke at it and see if anything else came out. Especially if some of you want to poke at it with me.

I also want to say that accepting things as "laws of nature" that are actually human decisions is responsible for a good deal of misery throughout history and into the present, and spotting it in fiction may well be a useful exercise, because we will need to keep spotting it in our lives. Finding a multiplicity of choices where we're handed two bad ones, or one, or none, is one of the things creativity is concretely good for. We're not excused from it just because it's easier to choose between killing the alien race and sacrificing ourselves than to see what other options might exist. Manufacturing things that aren't evil when we're handed the choice of the lesser of two evils: that's part of the job of being human. Sometimes we fail in it. But the effort is not optional.

Comments

Brilliant formulation

[(Anonymous)]

Hope you don't mind my commenting here. I just ran across the discussion my essay sparked and I have enjoyed reading it a lot. Some very cogent comments there, and I appreciate the intellect you all bring to bear.

I love your bringing up "The Cold Equations" and the way it confuses the Way the World Is or Laws of Nature with situations created by human decisions. Your formulation, "human survival does not rely on vicious abuse of a gifted little boy, and it never will. That will never be the only option unless we makit it into the only option."

I am too afraid that human societies keep choosing to create this option, and to insist that there is no alternative, and to justify it as good. That's one of the reasons I have so much trouble with Card's writing--because he speaks for a vision that is all too common, not just in our culture. It's profoundly wrong, IMHO, and a source of unending tragedy and a continued cycle of destruction.

J. Kessel

Re: Brilliant formulation

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Of course you're welcome to comment here any time. Thanks!

I think one of the things that made all this clearer to me was reading Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains. There's a passage where one of the earnest abolitionist clergy is making his argument, and it doesn't occur to him to consider that possibly dark-skinned people are not inherently better suited to heavy labor. Instead, the abolitionist argues that their skin color is a matter of environment, since the later generations of slaves are, for reasons he assumes are climatological and we know to be genetic, lighter-skinned than their ancestors. That someone on the correct side of the issue would accept those premises so thoroughly pointed out the importance of reframing these things to me.

(And, to say some of what I said to dd_b below, but more succinctly, I find the moral clarity of a writer who thinks it's worse to kill a little slip of a girl than a big burly man suspect at best. I mean Tom Godwin, although I think Card might wind up in the same camp if you pressed him.)

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

On a much smaller scale, I often remind myself and my friends that there are more choices than we necessarily see. We are never forced to do anything-- we always choose between things. "Oh, I had to go to this school and I hate it!" is really, "I decided to go to this school because otherwise my mother would have been angry at me for a long time and four years of misery is better than that." There's always some choice to be made, even when we don't see it.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

A joke I should probably print out and post where I'm likely to see it:

Construction worker opens his lunchbox. "Tuna sandwiches again! I hate tuna sandwiches!"

A workmate: "Why don't you ask your wife to make you something else?"

"What good would that do? I make my own lunch."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Umm. That's only funny if you don't respond immediately to the workmate by thinking, "Why would the workmate think his wife made his lunch?" If you don't assume it, the final twist is no twist at all.

[redbird]

The assumption comes from the phrasing of the first line--it implies surprise, and complaining about what's in your lunchbox implies that someone else packed it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Probably that comes across in intonation. I know plenty of people who gripe about situations they brought on themselves.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes. And sometimes we need a reminder that the choices we make to make other people happy are still choices.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

This sounds like a rather twisted reding of "The Cold Equations", to me. I thought that story was a totally crushing comeback to the "wishing will make it so" school of plotting.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Totally crushing"? Umm. Wow, do you give it more credit than I do. What kind of a freakin' moron has that sensitive a system at all in the first place? You're going that far with no backup or possibility for it, and you have that little room for error? We had more room for error built into things that didn't go farther than the moon -- and not even that far! If you have that little room for error, you've already doomed yourself a rather large portion of the time. And if you have that little room for error and don't check the supply closet right before liftoff? You don't weigh the thing but instead take everyone's word for it that they've put in all the necessary stuff, taken out all the necessary stuff, and not gained five pounds? I mean, what if one of the techs left tools in there? What if there's a leak in the primary fuel tank? What if the "collapsible" little EDS ship is hit by a meteor and knocked off course? Entropy is a cold fact of the universe as much as gravity is.

The main character knows from the very beginning that he's dealing with another human being -- why? If this happens often enough with men rather than girls that he expects it, why don't they CHECK FOR IT BEFORE LEAVING? The stowaway girl knows where the pod is going but not how delicate the calculations are -- why? (Because she's a bubble-headed little girl, and if she was a big tough man, she'd have known the hard hard math? Or because they don't tell anybody how close they are to disaster? Heaven knows I wouldn't admit to it.) He can't throw out stuff -- the chair, the pen and pad of paper, the container with the vials in it, both of their clothes, the printer paper, something -- but he can let her sit around the ship for a goodly time before he absolutely has to let her go? Better to get rid of inanimate crap earlier. Or even animate crap -- you can't tell me an engineering type like that doesn't have at least a little knife, and better to throw hunks of girlflesh out the airlock with the chair and the clothes than the whole girl. But as we get the play-by-play of the main character's thoughts, it's all regret and no consideration. (I reread the story last night.) There's no, "What if I threw out the chair? No, that would only be X pounds. Well, what if I held the serum vials and maybe some of their packaging materials on my lap during landing and threw the larger container out with the chair and paper?" Not even, "Too bad I can't throw out x, y, and z." Just the consideration of the choices Godwin wants us to see: one girl's death or everyone's.

Certainly the laws of physics are not man-made: Godwin makes that obvious point rather clearly. And certainly wishing won't make everything come out smiley and happy. But if an engineering student handed in this design for a sophomore-level project, the kid would deserve to fail, because wishing that nothing will ever go wrong is also incredibly stupid, and making that wish will not make it so, either.

I think one of the reasons I start picking at the design choices is that the focus on "but she's only a girrrrrrrrl" pushes exactly the wrong buttons for me. It damages the story's credibility rather than turning up the pathos. And once it's already being totally idiotic in that direction, it's lost my suspension of disbelief in the direction of the engineering constraints.

[greatestofnates.livejournal.com]

I think there was a twilight zone version where they did throw out a bunch of stuff. But the pilot was played by a beefy actor - so I was thinking they should just cut off his leg and everything would balance out.

Anyway, I think this story falls into the tragedy category. Things are supposed to go wrong. Problem solver types need to turn off that portion of their brain while reading them.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't like it when authors instruct me to turn off portions of my brain. If things are supposed to go wrong, they are obligated to justify it to me: why is it plausible that this went wrong? There's a difference between a human-flaw tragedy and a nature-is-tough tragedy, and when you think you're writing the former, you need to be very careful not to write the former.

[greatestofnates.livejournal.com]

I look at it more as myth than scientific paper. Why does Achilles have a weak heel? His mother could easily have dipped him in the river a second time by the wrist and then he would be invincible. But an invincible warrior is not as compelling as one with a weakness. I don't think an author needs to justify everything before they get on with the rest of the story. But then again, I thought Dan Brown's Angels and Demons was cool.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

There's a pretty huge gap between justifying everything and leaving plot holes you can drive a truck through. The difference isn't between myth and scientific paper. It's between exercising moderate competence and insulting your readers. Some of the most mythically resonant stories written do not share the problem of shoddily crafted plot and character.

Notice that I'm not criticizing "The Cold Equations" on the basis of the propulsion systems of the large ships. That's the scientific paper criticism. This is basic story-construction.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about this in the shower, and I think one of the most frustrating things is that it would only have taken fairly minor modifications for me to accept "The Cold Equations" as a story about the laws of the universe not being designed for human convenience, rather than a story about bad design decisions leading to more bad decisions. Say there had been an auxiliary fuel tank and the main one had been holed by a tiny piece of debris. And say that the protag was already looking for things to jettison and had already come up with a pile of stuff and was looking in the storage closet for more. That would have convinced me that it was not a story about bad design and people who can't think outside their teeny little preconceptions, but rather about the laws of physics incluing both gravity and entropy.

(Also if he'd eased off on the "I'd happily kill a man -- love to, in fact! three or four men! lots of men! -- but a girl, oh, the horror" aspect. But that's generational, whereas the engineering stuff is just dumbassery.)

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I kept wondering why, if the tolerances were so low, wasn't the ship virtually molded around the pilot? Things are that tight and you have a ship with a storage closet big enough for a person to hide in?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Exactly. He wasn't even making a very good try at it.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Sure, the details aren't all right. I agree the tolerances are smaller than I'd have thought they should be. But so what? That's what they're given to be. If you want to reject the story on those grounds, that's fair enough. But if you accept those details, you're pretty much stuck with the conclusion.

And yes, the age of the story shows in some other areas, like the angst about killing the girl.

People are *still* having angst about killing the girl, so far as I can see; that's why I consider it such a crushing argument. People *still* are rejecting it out-of-hand, mostly.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, that's my point: sometimes it's important to reject stories on the grounds that the "impossible" moral question they think they're asking is not the one they're actually asking.

I agree that Marilyn had to go out the shoot once all the other mistakes had been made. I wasn't even sorry to see the little twit go. But Godwin seems to want me to think that hers was the only mistake and the rest was just the laws of the universe, the cold equations of the title, and he didn't put nearly enough thought into the details for me to buy that.

People broke it.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I also want to say that accepting things as "laws of nature" that are actually human decisions is responsible for a good deal of misery throughout history and into the present

Even beyond that--accepting things as "laws of nature" and using that as an excuse not to do anything is responsible for a good deal of misery. I read a book arguing for a federal living wage law, and whatever its weaknesses (dismissing a counterargument with "I'm assuming universal health care," for example), one particular sentence has stuck with me. Paraphrase: "Even if 'the law of supply and demand' is the same kind of law of nature as 'the law of gravity,' we would do well to remember that we figured out how to build airplanes and fly."

Saying something is "a law of nature" and expecting that to win an argument, like saying something is "unnatural," generally is a statement about people's set agendas than any kind of actual empiricism.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

We're not excused from it just because it's easier to choose between killing the alien race and sacrificing ourselves than to see what other options might exist. Manufacturing things that aren't evil when we're handed the choice of the lesser of two evils: that's part of the job of being human. Sometimes we fail in it. But the effort is not optional.

Right. And what I don't understand is, if it is considered noble and admirable to sacrifice oneself by refusing to do one evil thing, why isn't it considered more noble and admirable to *risk* self-sacrifice by *risking* failure at manufacturing a non-evil solution? Is it because martyrdom is only attractive if one gets to know that's what one is doing?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Right: martyrdom has to be on purpose. Except when it doesn't.

Um. All this gets very complicated.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I've noticed those things myself, and it's something that always rang false for me about Ender's Game as well. This may well be because I read EG when I was fully adult so the "Yeah, the kids are badass and the grownups can't handle it!" part of the appeal never kicked in. :)

In those instances where I have proposed something like that (be it in my own pitiful writings or RPG game scenarios or whathaveyou) I always try to have a clear reason why, even if it never comes up. "The world" may distrust magic users, but it's because of a long-ago series of wizard-despots, or a charismatic religious leader who convinced people it involves humping demons or whathaveyou.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

One of the things that bugged me about the western Fantasy genre while growing up is the very Puritan prejudice against actually allowing magic to work to make genuine, positive changes in the lives shown in stories. There's always a catch, a drawback that makes magic backfire and at best allows things to return to the status quo. I think this is absolutely a prejudice on the part of the writers.

In the Arabian Nights sequence there were plenty of stories in which people profited through use of magic and went on to lead decent, rewarding lives, involved in their families and communities. This suggests to me that the bias is plainly cultural, and more Judeo-Christian than Islamic.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I call those Death of the Magic stories, but I can come up with enough counterexamples in Western fantasy novels that I think it varies on an author-to-author basis, though some cultures, subcultures, and personality traits probably encourage it more than others.

It's hard for me to see things like that as Judeo-Christian when I've been hip deep in folklore that involves Icelandic Christian priests who were also said to be sorcerers. Not the norm, sure, but also not out of the realm of the possible. Christianity has existed in and coexisted with a lot of other cultural factors.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I guess I haven't seen enough of the counter-examples.

And maybe I'm too influenced by the fantasy that was on TV when I was growing up. (I liked them a lot, but Jeannie and Samantha were nothing but trouble and 'The Twilight Zone' was preachy, and of course the paradigm for tv shows at that time demanded that the status quo be preserved.)

I'd like to see more of the stories where magic has positive, useful effects in people's lives.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I should start a list.

[14cyclenotes.livejournal.com]

I found your journal by lucky chance. Would you mind if I add you?

BTW, I spent several years of my childhood in Grand Rapids, MN (up near Bemidji, about 50 miles south of Winnepeg). I now live in San Jose, CA. I thought you might find that amusing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Add away! Glad you feel the chance was lucky.

You know what I miss about San Jose? Garlic fries from Gordon Biersch. Mmmmmmmmm.

[blzblack.livejournal.com]

Interesting post.