Wes’s Little Sci-Fi Novel
This page is sorta the literary equivalent of the Krispy Kreme doughnut shop, where curious and hungry observers can observe the synthesis process of those tasty toruses (tori?) through a shop window before they enter the shop to cough up a healthy $10 bill or so for the privilege of expanding their waistlines. I’ve been doing an enormous amount of writing over the past 15 years or so, some of which has actually managed to distill itself into book form. Much of this is history (as detailed in my history section), but there’s also a sci-fi novel in there. It’s a project I initiated a while ago and, somehow, after enough bleary-eyed stints at 3 in the morning, it’s approaching completion. I’ll be perfectly honest—I’ve never been anything remotely like an avid consumer of the sci-fi genre. When I do get the chance to curl up on the beach with a book, it’s usually a classic novel, or a biography, or history, or something technical (yes, I’m a bona fide gearhead). But I did dip into the genre a bit back in my young whippersnapper days and, like all my buddies, I always enjoyed checking up on the career of Captain Kirk and Picard on the Enterprise. (My TV-watching days subsided by the time that Babylon 5 and Voyager arrived on the scene, however.)
As a result, my own science fiction novel has a different flavor from most in the genre—its vehicle is a young engineer and there’s certainly a fair bit of technical detail here to help the plot along, but it also has a sort of sociohistorical milieu that relates a brief “history of the future” as related through dialogues among the main characters and descriptions of setting, for example. I’ve always been fascinated by history, by the way that our own little sliver of time relates to the vast ocean of recorded history, by the recurring themes in that history, by the way that history lives and breathes in influencing our daily lives—and how things could have turned out vastly differently. History often lurches chaotically and I don’t think that we can anticipate its trendline as well as we often believe, and so the future that I detail in my novel has a number of aspects that differ fundamentally from current assumptions, simply because in my own analysis of history (and the course of current events), I tend to find that the most important, most durable factors are also the ones most often neglected or ignored, the “sleepers” that don’t quite announce themselves until, out of nowhere, they arrive on the scene and shout their presence. So you’ll find the characters of the novel making frequent references to signal events in the past, including to our own time—always a cornucopious font for inside jokes and winking references.
- The book covers several years in the youth of a character named Jed “Wildman” Garcia, in about the middle of the 25th century (as reckoned on the earth calendar). There’s a third-person perspective, but the book basically hews to Jed’s vantage point, commencing at a university which Jed is attending (great plot device for laying out the ambience of the 25th century). Jed’s a major in “vacuum engineering” and he’s training for a career as a designer of “Heisenberg engines” for the Nakamura company—a 25th century version of Boeing or Lockheed Martin. Upon his graduation, Jed is recruited on a military reconnaissance mission, which serves as a combination of internship and a “tenure of service” to fulfill his obligations in return for the financial support he received for his university education. (Sorta a 25th century ROTC.) Jed was dispatched with a medical team to investigate a mysterious epidemic that is afflicting the population of the frontier settlements on the planet of Pitcairn, inducing bizarre neurological symptoms prior to a life-threatening blood disease. But Jed and crew are “shipwrecked” on an uncharted, surrealistic-appearing “proto-planetesimal”—a sort of synthetic planet—prior to their arrival. It seems to be abandoned. But something, some entity, is lurking there unbeknownst to them, an organized intelligence that they can’t see but can somehow sense…
SIB’s and SMIB’s
- As is generally the case in sci-fi novels and TV series, humans discover, soon enough, that they’re not alone in the galaxy. (And, let’s admit it, aliens are so much fun—heck, they keep legions of Los Angeles costume designers off the unemployment rolls.) They’re not nearly as common as is sometimes assumed by those who chant about “billions of earthlike planets” in the Milky Way, but there are a respectable number of them to keep things interesting—roughly 7,000 known intelligent species in the galaxy. All the humans and aliens need a general term to encompass, well, what they are, and so in the parlance of galactic and intergalactic travel, all of these species are termed “SIB’s”—“sentient intelligent beings,” signifying that they’re self-aware and conscious but also “intelligent” (the definition of which is, uh, variable). SIB’s can be carbon-based organic species (all of which evolved through some sort of natural selection or extraterrestrial seeding by another SIB), or silicon- or gallium-based beings originally designed as machines and robots, and then evolved into SIB’s, by the efforts of carbon-based SIB’s. Meanwhile, the subset of SIB’s that become spacebound and master the arts and sciences of spacetime travel, are promoted to “SMIB” status—Spacefaring Migratory Intelligent Beings. Roughly 900 of the 7,000 known SIB’s are also SMIB’s—a distinct minority (for surprising reasons—it’ll be in the book). Humans first became “truly spacebound” (in the sense of undertaking regular extraterrestrial explorations and movements) late in the 21st century, though the process didn’t really take off until some technological advances in the 23rd century.
Unlike a substantial subset of the sci-fi literature in this area, my aliens are not, as a rule, more intelligent, ethically advanced, technologically capable, just, organized, or peaceful compared to humans. I’ve always found this common notion of the “culturally superior alien” to be a sort of author’s idealization, a deep yearning for a better, more just, more perfect world than the rough-and-tumble realm that we encounter around us every day. I just don’t find this realistic; any aliens out there will have had to overcome the same messy, confusing, bloody challenges that we humans have, since the often blind and dumb processes of natural selection—and the accompanying challenges of managing people’s needs in a world of scarce and unequally distributed resources— are probably pretty similar everywhere. Thus humans and other SIB’s wind up exchanging war stories with each other—they all have violent, sanguinary, often tragic, frequently brutal histories on their home planets. FWIW, there’s a healthy amount of variation, but humans and alien SIB’s resemble each other physically as well. That’s because the evolutionary factors that enable intelligence tend to favor an offshoot of tree-dwelling, mammalian, large-brained, omnivorous, ape-like creatures across the board. But lest the aliens picture appear too white-bread, bipedally boring, there are also some reptilian, invertebrate, and amphibian SIB’s that evolved naturally.
GUPpy politics
- The SMIB denizens of the 25th century (the 25th century on earth, that is—other SIB’s have different chronological schemes) adhere to a loose “government” called the “Galactic United Polity.” It’s a sort of United Nations for space but, just as in our own time, there are incessant debates about its relevance. The different SIB’s more-or-less govern themselves and, since technology has allowed planets to be terraformed (or generated anew), for far-ranging spacetime transit to be effected, and for energy to be harvested straight out of the vacuum, SIB’s don’t clash with each other nearly as much as they did among themselves on their home planets. (Nonetheless, there is tension and there are some serious conflicts among them.) The GUP represents a loose collection of parliamentary bodies, treaties, legal standards, cultural universals, and commercial accords that help to resolve conflicts and minimize discord. But its enforcing authority isn’t too formalized.
Speaking in many tongues
- Since space has a plethora of, well, space, many terrestrial civilizations that had been moribund, are now healthy and flourishing once again. On several human-colonized planets, there are large nations where people once again speak Cornish, Scottish Gaelic, Navajo, Iroquois, Quechua, and hundreds of other languages of cultures whose very existence had been threatened on earth. The “American Indians,” especially, are no longer herded on reservations, struggling merely to subsist; they were among the first to undertake space colonization, and their cultures now thrive in numerous extraterrestrial locales.
Ni’ hanasu Panshuo?
- Speaking of language—there is a “lingua franca” among the various human extraterrestrial settlements, called the “Panshuo” (from Latin pan—“all”—and Mandarin Chinese shuo—“speech” or “speaking”). Yep, it’s an artificial language, a composite of numerous human tongues as they were spoken on earth at the time of the first settlements. It’s not composed equally of the different languages—the Panshuo is an amalgam of various languages roughly in proportion to their level of dissemination during the earliest settlements, but also incorporating what are considered the most expeditious, user-friendly elements of disparate important languages on earth. (There are some examples of the Panshuo in the book but, as you could probably surmise, it’s a mixture of the languages that yours truly has learned. I’ve tried to be diverse about it though; I’ve learned a dozen foreign languages in numerous speech families, so I’ve had the opportunity to compare them and gauge their relative assets and drawbacks as far as ease of acquisition. See my Language Section on this Website and you can get a sense of my wavelength when developing the Panshuo.) Thus, tenses, conditional statements, and subjunctive moods are generally provided by auxiliaries rather than inflectional endings, and the language is represented dually by alphabets (Roman, Arabic, Devanagari, Cyrillic, Korean, Vietnamese, and others) and ideographic Chinese characters. The adjectival system is analogous to the simple grammar used in Chinese; possessives follow the Japanese system; comparatives and superlatives follow Farsi Persian conventions; and so on. Also, the language is tonal.
The Panshuo was invented partly to facilitate communication and assimilation of the colonists but also, frankly, to eschew the territorial and cultural wars that would almost certainly have resulted if different cultures had vied for linguistic dominance. The Panshuo is also what alien languages are translated into by default (each of them has its own “Panshuo” as well). In practice, though, as indicated above, different civilizations maintain their native tongues for communication within their own cultural spheres. The extraterrestrial settlements are essentially patterned upon earth’s nations at the time of the initial travel; thus there’s a “new Bolivia,” a “new Mozambique,” a “new Bhutan,” and so on, plus a collection of entirely novel nations emerging from an admixture of the ones on earth. Jed is a resident of one of the settlements initiated by citizens of the United States, so his native tongues are American English and Spanish. By convention, just as here on earth, people in the space settlements tend to learn the languages of other societies with which they trade and interact frequently. The most dominant languages among the extraterrestrial settlements, however, derive from East Asia. In this “future history,” the dynamic, technological economies of Japan, Korea, China, and other areas of Asia unify into a sort of cooperative which impels and supports the first space settlements. Chinese therefore has an especially heavy influence on the Panshuo, and a Japanese-Korean (yes, the two countries manage to overcome their differences) consortium, along with a major starbase launched by engineers from India, helps to fuel the rise of Japanese, Korean, and Hindi as prestige languages as well. In any case, the earth-originating SMIB’s don’t clash with each other too much over language and culture, since they’re able to forge stable civilizations in a large variety of solar-like systems. Furthermore, it’s fairly easy to learn and master a foreign language, since the SIB’s of the 25th century have access to…
Neuroimplantation and xenoneural devices—mind over matter
- Basically fancy terminology for cyborgish surgical implants which enable direct accessing of neural centers involved in rapid learning and memory. It’s as though new information can be “downloaded” directly into people’s brains. In practice, of course, even in the 25th century people have to cram for exams—even if information is stably introduced into the mind, folks still have to practice, ponder, dissect, analyze, and connect up the information which they learn, and mastering a foreign language still takes some effort. But fluency is available after merely about one earth-year of study. Another little twist on this topic: People have access to so-called “xenoneural devices,” which are effectively neural annexes or exterior brains. They don’t have the devices permanently attached but, after a period of training, they can temporarily “plug into” outside devices which enable them to tackle problems that would otherwise be insoluble to the human brain—they can visualize more than 3 dimensions, for example, and perform problem-solving with abstract mathematical systems too complicated for the mind without assistance. People who link to the devices report a weird experience, somewhat dreamlike, in which they can recall the rough outlines of their thought processes while “synced,” but have difficulty with the details, and can’t make heads or tails of their own handiwork unless they sync again.
Along similar lines, as people’s brains accumulate damage (the kind of oxidative, autoimmune- or microbe-mediated, accumulative mess that causes memory loss, dementia, Alzheimer’s, and other problems today), they’re also able to “transfer” their minds into silicon/gallium “holding tanks” (while their consciousness remains dormant) and then into a sort of pre-fab “neocerebral apparatus” (a blank-slated new brain, essentially), which the code from the holding tank “rewires” to approximate the original mind. This is an old and commonly invoked idea in the genre, the idea of “mobile minds,” and I’ve always been skeptical about the notion that a mind could be “copied” like a piece of software—I think it’s much more complicated than that, and involves extremely subtle physical processes that we’re only beginning to fathom at this point. One crucial point is that the “mind” is a dynamic entity, not a static collection of circuits, thus even within the “holding tank” the transferred mind is maintained in an active form (with low-level sensory input and motor output) and is fully functional; thus, the mind is in a state analogous to some of the deeper phases of normal human sleep. So in my novel, this technology is recent and incredibly intricate.
With recent developments in molecular biology, a good chunk of the sci-fi genre also introduces pre-planned manipulation of the human genome (i.e. germline modification) and cloning in some form. I’ll have a separate essay in which I publish my own opinions of this issue in our real, unnovelized world, but my take on it is this—I suspect that it’s inevitable that humans will take control of their own evolution, a crucial component of which is, of course, variations in the genome. Devastating and economically devastating diseases will be eliminated, and a new pool of variation in various physical characteristics will be introduced. Nevertheless, I also anticipate (and hope) that people will cherish their humanity enough in its physical and mental incarnations (warts and all), and particularly the significance of human individuality and freedom, that they won’t tinker to the point that people are forced into a “Procrustean bed” of preplanned expectations. The humans of the 25th century would still be recognizable to the humans of the 21st, and there won’t be a Brave New Worldish dystopia in which people are locked into a perverse sort of genetic caste at birth. As a result, my own novel doesn’t emphasize the genomic manipulation thing too much; it’s in the background, but it’s not central to the heart of the story. Humans generally prefer to “alter” themselves with external devices (yep, all that cyborgery) that can be introduced or removed.
There are some SMIB’s, however, that have fundamentally altered their genomes, owing to an extremely violent past history involving bloody wars that killed billions. Deciding that their basic natures, having evolved millions of years ago in response to brutal conditions on their home planets, are not appropriate to the technological age, they modify themselves into new species—variants of the original. Earth also experiences cataclysmic wars in the 22nd and 23rd centuries—nuclear fusion becomes too easy (shades of cold fusion) and becomes a terrorist weapon which, along with a biological weapon called the “Thanatos virus” (an extremely lethal microbe with a high contagion index and long latency, making detection difficult), leads to disaster. Thus the “neospeciation” prospect is discussed at a Congress in the year 2275, but genomic modification does not proceed as much as in many other SMIB’s.
That prime directive thing
- As in Star Trek, the SMIB’s of the 25th century adhere to a sort of prime directive which restricts them from interfering with SIB civilizations that have not yet become spacebound. (As discussed below, non-SMIB SIB’s can’t detect SMIB’s because the communication and propulsion technologies use mechanisms other than electromagnetic waves, which could otherwise be detected by SIB’s with light, X-ray, and radio telescopes). There’s a massive argument about whether to intervene on a planet whose SIB’s are confronting imminent danger, however. The tacit rule is that a planet facing a “natural” hazard uncaused by the SIB’s themselves (e.g. an asteroid impact, outer core rupture, magnetic field shift, a lethal gamma ray shower from events in a nearby star system) can be “rescued” and transplanted, the reason being that a SIB’s accumulated cultural wealth cannot be “lazzed” back into existence. However, for SIB’s that endanger themselves by the short-sighted stupidity of weapons of mass destruction or ecological degradation, no aid is provided. The SMIB’s generally concur that, if a SIB does not learn how to restrain its violent and profligate impulses (whether this requires genomic modification or not), then it does not belong in space, where its propensities could constitute a genuine threat to peace. Fortunately, SIB self-destruction turns out to be uncommon; there turn out to be enough checks and balances in SIB societies that the damage from even the most serious incidents is cushioned, at least until the SIB becomes spacebound—though many SIB’s have spent millennia as semi-technological civilizations without reaching the point.
Damage control
- SMIB’s do not undertake dangerous experiments (especially those involving studies of “bound” elementary particles or virtual particles) anywhere near their home planets; there are designated “offsite laboratories”—basically little solar systems—where these are allowed. All SMIB’s have great concern about the potential for their experiments to induce a “phase transition” in the vacuum state to a lower energy baseline—which would threaten SMIB’s anywhere—and so all of these so-called nouveau mode experiments are conducted with hundreds of precautions that tend to limit, confine, and seal off damage that could result from a worst-case scenario. The experiments, for example, are conducted within a ring of a spacetime warping gravitational field to “crunch” a bubble that might result from a self-propagating rip of spacetime. Interestingly, the SMIB’s have never encountered this phenomenon, for understandable reasons—any universe that did allow them would probably be far too unstable too allow for star systems in the first place. As one of the characters in the book quips, “The best evidence of an Intelligent Designer for this cosmos is that the universe has fundamental features that protect us from our own idiocy.” Nevertheless, as a general tenet, SMIB’s all follow the principle of localization, which essentially motivates them to self-contain any phenomena that they might engender by their own actions—or that they might, in turn, encounter in their spacefaring voyages. The observable universe essentially becomes divided into “subuniverses” to them, which limit and cushion the propagation of matter, energy, and information from sector to sector, and they follow the Principle of Separation rigorously in this regard.
Fun with eschatology
- Every sci-fi novel needs some ingredients from the “totally wild and crazy idea” cabinet, and perhaps the central one in my novel concerns the penchant for SMIB’s to make new universes. That’s right—SMIB’s generate new spacetimes on a regular basis. This is an idea that I’ve cobbled together from the work of Edward Harrison, Lee Smolin, Alan Guth, David Bohm, Heinz Pagels, John Gribbin, Max Tegmark, Ernest Sternglass, and several others. The crux of the idea is the following. Different “universes” are constantly budding off from others as a natural process—it’s a variant of the inflationary cosmology as depicted by Guth and Linde. When a new universe emerges, it does not occupy the same phase space as its progenitor—it simply expands out into a novel “dimension,” one might say. (According to both General Relativity and the Quantum Theory, space itself is a quantifiable “substance” that is expanding. People often inquire, then, “expanding into what”? The space is not expanding into anything, expanding into “another space”—an expanding spacetime just “is,” a sort of logical entity that does not interfere with other spacetimes. This is incredibly difficult to explain, but essentially, they occupy entirely discrepant logical spheres, and an expanding spacetime is fundamentally an independent entity. Thus, when new spacetimes bud off, they too become entirely independent of their predecessors.) SMIB’s gradually grasp this phenomenon and subsequently utilize it themselves.
SMIB’s are able to generate novel universes without too much difficulty, and the neouniverses come in all shapes, sizes, and theoretical descriptions. Some of them closely parallel our known universe, with a more-or-less linear time progression following the unfolding of three spacetime dimensions (a superstring theory principle) and the assumption of a spacetime geometry with low curvature. Some of them are filled with time loops (oh, you’d better believe these become interesting). Some of them do not have time at all—their initial state is eternal, something analogous to the afterlife realms of ancient religions. These static spacetimes do evince a sort of “pseudotime” in that its inhabitants sense a sort of experiential progression in their conscious minds, but fundamentally, the base status of these new cosmos (including the conscious minds of their initial inhabitants) do not ever change. Some universes have entirely discrepant physical laws from our own. Some possess entirely different forms of matter and energy. Some are constituted of so-called “pure information” (“mind without matter”). The generation of neouniverses occurs through the propagation of a singularity (of various types) that quickly buds off, and intrepid members of the SMIB communities (“singularity adventurers”) sometimes enter through the singularities themselves, into the new spacetimes.
Interestingly, the SMIB’s have found that some (though not all) singularities result in a sort of “duplication” of the neouniverses, one of which is actually accessible to members of the progenitor universe—and the other which is not. Even though the progeny universe is entirely independent from its progenitor, it is possible for a SMIB explorer from the progenitor to “tunnel” into the neouniverse, a process which, although it does involve a temporary information transfer (in the person of the SMIB), does not actually “causally alter” the neouniverse through changes in its matter, energy, or physical laws. SMIB explorers can enter a neouniverse, then return and report on what was observed, but the explorers are limited in what they can actually do during their sojourn, and they can’t stay for long. In a manner analogous to the way a particle can tunnel through a barrier in quantum physics, an explorer who has tunneled into a neouniverse can “borrow” a confined time window to stick around, but this window is inversely proportional to the “energy” which they carry in (i.e., what they can do and see in the neouniverse). SMIB’s who venture into the “eternal neouniverses” described above report an experience analogous to people who have attached themselves to xenoneural implants (described above)—a weird sort of dreamy state in which they can recall details, but they recall feeling “out of body” in the neouniverse. They knew that time (and their own consciousness) wasn’t changing in the neouniverse, but they somehow felt that to be “normal” while they were in the neouniverse. There are ways to permanently transport folks to a certain subset of existing neouniverse (echoes of the old penal colonies of Australia and French Guiana—but on a spacelike scale), but this is usually eschewed since it’s easier to send the folks to a new one.
Since we know, by Special and General Relativity, that time is relative depending on the state of motion and gravitational field experienced by an observer, the “singularity generation events” which carry SMIB’s into neouniverses are referred to as “miniapocalypses.” That is, time (at least, the time domain of the SMIB) ends whenever SMIBs pop through the singularity; their associated time domain in the progenitor universe is terminated, being transferred into the neouniverse. Since universe-budding is a natural process, some SMIB’s with a historical inclination have also attempted to exploit this as a means to rediscover historical events, about which information was lost in the original universe but which are, essentially, “archived” in progeny spacetimes. There has been limited success with this, but research is ongoing at the time of Jed’s mission.
Perhaps the most fundamental law of physics, as recognized by the SMIB’s, is the principle that distinct spacetimes occupy entirely different logical spheres from each other and are independent. This is practically a metaphysical (ultraphysical? darn Greco-Latin prefixes) law—it’s an immutable rule of logic. One can’t speak of a “population” of universes and, even though SMIB’s will speak of a “multiverse,” this is an essentially undefined and undefinable term. Even though SMIB’s can traffic (to a limited degree) among different universes, neither they—nor anyone or anything else—can ever alter a different universe from the “outside,” since a neouniverse is “causally disjoint” from any other universe once it is formed. Essentially, in accordance with an idea of the quantum physicist David Bohm, the most fundamental quantity of existence is a sort of implicate “intelligence” which can manifest itself in disparate forms. As Max Tegmark has suggested, physical existence of a logically possible universe is essential. The implicate intelligence “just is,” and it manifests in part as distinct spacetimes, some of which evolve in a timelike fashion.
Pit stops at the matter-smithing station
- Another wild-and-crazy idea here involves an energy supply for 25th-century SMIB’s. The basic idea is the following. You’ve probably learned from incessant drummings-in during physics and chemistry classes, that mass and energy (or “mass-energy,” ever since Einstein’s mass-energy equivalency equation) are conserved, the most fundamental law of thermodynamics and one of the foundation stones of physics in general. Right? Wrong. This may sound surprising but, if you study General Relativity closely, you’ll find that mass-energy is in fact not conserved—or, more precisely, it makes no sense. Why? It’s because mass-energy conservation is meaningful only for flat spacetimes. As soon as a spacetime region assumes curvature, mass-energy is not conserved—which is the case for our universe. When we speak of mass-energy conservation, we’re actually referring to a sort of idealized, infinitesimal slice of a curved spacetime which appears flat. As soon as we hit the curves, there’s no longer any conservation. Heinz Pagels describes this lucidly in his book Perfect Symmetry, and also discusses how this notion has been incorporated into some theories of cosmogenesis—“virtual particles” can spontaneously pop into existence in a flat spacetime and curve it, thereby enabling a matter generation process that runs away with itself.
The SMIB’s of the 25th century have learned to exploit this process to their advantage, curving regions of flat spacetime so that they spontaneously generate further curvature and “smith” mass-energy into existence. This is utilized for many of their ships. Nonetheless, the process, as handy as it may be, is also quite inefficient and difficult to utilize since it depends on a probabilistic quantum tunneling process (of the virtual particles) to occur. Thus, in practice, most ships use other methods of propulsion, “refueling themselves” at the smithing stations only in emergencies, when other power sources have been exhausted. SMIB’s have also conducted experiments on utilizing the expanding spacetime itself as an “engine,” although these efforts have met with limited success.
Cows and chickens and
turkeys, oh my!
- The diet of people in the 25th century doesn’t differ tremendously from that of our own time, though there is one major discrepancy: All of their meat is produced by a process called “Comengineering” (abbreviation for “comestibles engineering”). Comengineering is a means of producing the muscle tissue—which constitutes the meat we eat—directly in a laboratory using a dish of cells, transduced with DNA sequences to generate an enzyme profile which endows the ultimate product with a specific “flavor” (focus-group tested, of course), and then impelled to undergo a sort of specialized developmental program to become the muscle. The developing muscle assumes its proper shape and size by being fashioned around an exterior “scaffold”—much like tissue engineering today. The inhabitants of the 25th century are particularly proud of this invention, since it enables them to optimize their diet without having to slaughter livestock. As one of the characters in the book remarks, “it’s a way of getting your steak without going through the cow.” Incidentally, the companies that run the “mills” for producing these foodstuffs are the descendants of those that sell their wares in the meat sections of the supermarket today. Not only is this process inexpensive compared to traditional methods; it fulfills people’s earnest desire to meet their dietary needs without harming their animal cousins, for whom they have developed tremendous respect as they have become spacebound and, consequently, come to identify with the natural diversity on their home planet.
- A corollary to this: A number of planets have been set aside as “shrines” for animals like cows, chickens, turkeys, pigs, rabbits, deer, fish, and other creatures which have traditionally served as food sources for human populations in the past. (Alien species have done the same with their equivalents.) The shrines are maintained by “monks” and “nuns” who have dedicated themselves to the protection and well-being of the “sacred creatures” on these shrine planets, which are zealously guarded from predators and disturbance of their habitats.
- On top of this, the spacebound SIB’s of the 25th century frequently undertake “Lazzing” campaigns. “Laz” is short for “Lazarus,” the Biblical figure raised from the dead, and when the denizens of 25th century society “Laz” a species, they’re restoring it into existence from extinction. Scientists of the time rely on an assemblage of fossil record data, collected genomic information, and deductions based on mutation rates and phenotypic features of extinct species, to reintroduce them. As you can surmise, this means that Jurassic Park has become a reality—all kinds of planets house dinosaurs, woolly mammoths, passenger pigeons, wild bison, and all manner of flora and fauna that disappeared from earth centuries ago. Besides being integral to the plot and background of this novel, the lazzing allows for a virtually infinite variety of cool storytelling opportunities for all the sequels (“Tom, didn’t I warn you about those saber-toothed tigers?”)
The tortoise and the light beam
- Any self-respecting sci-fi novel these days has to include a mechanism for faster-than-light (FTL) travel. Otherwise, it’d be awfully boring turning the page to read about yet another decade of hibernation by the main characters as they traverse light-year long distances. Now, I should note here, in our current understanding of physical science there is no known mechanism to propel FTL travel, at least in a classical sense. There are FTLish phenomena—quantum nonlocality, superluminal tunneling velocities of particles through a barrier, tachyons (which are consistent with the General Relativity equations), the velocity of spacetime during inflation, wormholes, spectral excitation of particles by photons transferred over spacelike distances, and the like. However, none of this actually implies FTL movement in the sense of Captain Picard’s flagship traversing through space at Warp 6. Nevertheless, it’s not too difficult to piece some semi-plausible-sounding method to enable it in a science-fiction novel. Isaac Asimov actually refused to introduce FTL in his books, but most authors in the decades since he’s written eschew this practice and even regard it as a bit ludicrous. The whole point of sci-fi, after all, is to think outside the box, imagining some state of physical affairs that, to our contemporary minds, would (per the apt description of Arthur C. Clarke) appear virtually “magical.” So it is with FTL. Again, based on what we know about Relativity and the Quantum Theory, it wouldn’t be too lucrative to invest in warp drives anytime soon. But I do need a plot device to enable the same drunken captain to wind up in bar fights on successive days on opposite sides of the Milky Way (add the usual disclaimers here about the non-simultaneity of time by relativity).
Here’s how the SMIB’s manage the FTL thing: They simply “tunnel” themselves into spacelike geodesics which aren’t restricted by relativistic causality. Just as radio waves, microwaves, gamma rays, and ultraviolet were unknown and undetectable by humans until Maxwell and Hertz’s work on electromagnetic radiation in the 19th century, SMIB’s in the 23rd century discern the existence of a “subspace” domain (I know, I know, “subspace” has been used, but darn is it a useful little term) involving tachyon-like particles that travel at various integer multiples of the speed of light c. Recall, from Special Relativity, that the constancy of c essentially delineates a basic characteristic of the classical vacuum—its permeability and permittivity to electromagnetic fields. When a particle tunnels into subspace, however, it’s entering a domain in which the basic “vacuum properties” differ from those of the classical vacuum, and thus the permeability and permittivity also vary. The SMIB’s have means to boost the probability of a tunneling event and to carefully regulate the destination of a tunneled object when it “reenters” the classical vacuum from the domain in which it’s tunneled. Thus, it’s feasible to rapidly move over spacelike domains without posing any difficulties for causality and all those weird time-travel paradoxes that tangle up many a sci-fi book.
Well, that’s all for now. I’ll be back with updates and, soon enough, the book will be available for your very own hot hands.
-- Wes Ulm
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