In memory

For a Canadian, being in the US in the runup to Veterans' Day is sort of weird. Remembrance Day is always a fairly low-key and somber affair, so watching downtown Washington prepare for a gigantic rock concert to honour veterans was sort of surreal. It's all part of the way that the military is a much more visible and integrated part of American society than it is in Canada, but it's also because the U.S., of course, has two holidays to fill the roles played by our one.

As odd as the result may seem to me on Veterans' Day, I like the idea of having two separate holidays. That's because while it's absolutely important to pay tribute to veterans and their service and sacrifice, I often find that comes at the extent of one of the original purposes of the holiday -- back when it was still called Armistice Day -- which was to mark the end of war, to not just honour but also mourn the lives lost, and to loudly say, "Never again."

Like everyone my age, I grew up in the shadow of war, one that hung over our heads for a generation. We need to remember that that war didn't happen, in large part, because we didn't let it happen: because we marched and advocated for peace -- a part of the story that we've mostly allowed to be left out. At the same times as we honour those that fought for us, we also should remember what we won by the wars we didn't fight.

Spoiler Space: "Public Safety"

This is the story of mine that's closest to being really science fiction, in the sense of “fiction about scientists.” The reason that may not be immediately apparent is because the people who are actually doing science here are not the good guys but their only briefly-glimpsed antagonists.

Fiction, including SF, has a fraught relationship with science in general and scientists in particular. The image of the “mad scientist” has been around since the genre arguably was born, with Frankenstein, and for about a century after that most scientists were of the mad and evil (or at least misguided) variety. While we think of our time as being one of change, the change we experience is mostly from a state of affairs that didn't exist for very long – 78s to LPs to CDs to MP3s and so on. The 18^th and 19^th centuries saw real change, with communities and ways of life that had existed for hundreds and even thousands of years coming to an end. (This process is still happening, though it's at its tail end: my wife's grandfather started out working a mixed farm with horse-drawn tools – Mennonite farmers bought them at the auction when he died.) So it's not surprising that writers of the time viewed science and technology with suspicion, and were more worried about the risks of change than the possible rewards.

Both the 20^th century and the United States were a lot more friendly towards technological progress, though, so in Golden Age SF we see the birth of the scientist hero, who saves the day by his knowledge, practicality and engineering skills. The funny result of this was that while there were still mad scientists – the trope was too vivid to die – they basically stopped being scientists in any real way. Unlike Doctors Frankenstein and Jekyll, they were more interested in money, conquest, or simply sowing fear than in actually doing science (or else it was their less-intelligent assistants who were the villains.)

Getting back to this story – I was going to do it sooner or later – for a long time I had wanted to write something where a mad scientist did real mad science, an experiment that could only be conceived of and carried out by someone who had no respect for life or law. This idea dovetailed with two other things: an interest in the crazier side of the French revolution – a side which manifested itself, ironically enough, as a literal worship of Reason – and a New Yorker article that showed how flawed the “science” of fingerprint identification was. A visit to New Orleans helped to pull everything together and I had my idea: a society convinced that it was the most advanced and rational in history, blind to the degree to which its meticulously-worked-out beliefs were based on false premises, and prey to those that took its values to their logical extent by carrying out experiments completely free from conscience or compassion. Mad scientists, in other words, not mad because they lacked reason but because they had nothing but. The 19^th century created the mad scientist; if the 20^th century is anything to go on, though, we may have more to fear from the sane ones.

It's appropriate to be posting this on Canada Day, since this story has more Canadian in-jokes than any other. I'll leave the rest of them for you to spot, but most obvious is the character of Commandant Trudeau, who was named after the Prime Minister of the same name -- a figure who loomed large over my childhood and who had “reason over passion” as a motto (which also appears in the story, in Latin form.) Trudeau really did look a fair bit like Julius Caesar, or at least like the way Uderzo drew Caesar in Asterix.

Sources:

Michael Specter. “Annals of Crime: Do Fingerprints Lie?” TheNew Yorker, May 27 2002.

Most of the other research I did this one came from online sources that I forgot to document, on topics such as the Jacques Hebert and the cult of Reason, how a turn-of-the-century electric battery would work and how one might sabotage it if one had a desire to, and of course the French Revolutionary calendar. Converting the day on which the story ends to our own calendar reveals a mildly amusing in-joke, though the last line of the story likely gives it away.

#SFWAPro

Spoiler Space: "Another Country"

I spent a lot of time wondering how to write about refugees. I was a high school teacher for about ten years, and during that time I taught a lot of Somali students (there's a large Somali community in Ottawa.) What I found was that there was often a big difference between how the boys and girls did in school: the girls, typically thrived, seeming generally happy and well-integrated and often excelling academically; the boys, on the other hand, quite often seemed as though they weren't really there – they weren't discipline problems, generally, but they were very disconnected from school both socially and academically. There were probably a lot of reasons for this, but I think one of them was that they had different feelings of what was expected of them: the girls were allowed to succeed, but among the boys there was a sense that there being in Canada was only temporary, and that succeeding here would be almost a betrayal of their duty to eventually return home and rebuild their country.

I wanted to explore this dilemma – the tension between wanting to succeed in your new country and your duty to your home country – but but I felt uncomfortable writing about Somalis (or any group of real-life refugees) for a number of reasons: partly because I didn't feel it was my story to tell, but also because I wanted to write something that was more broadly about the personal question than this specific situation. It wasn't until I read Robert Charles Wilson's A Bridge of Years, in which a man from our time seeks refuge in the 1960s – and a soldier from a dystopian future flees to our time – that I got the idea of reversing that and having the refugees come from the past. Even after that, though, the story was slow to come, and it was only when I realized that Geoff should himself be a prefugee that it finally came alive for me. (I had to fudge my Latin a bit because of that: “Galfridius” is not a real Roman name but a latinization of the name Geoffrey. I also fudged the whole verbs-at-the-end-of-sentences bit, which wasn't actually how Romans talked but gave the prefugees a distinctive speech pattern and was a bit of an in-joke for fellow Latin students.)

Sources:

Paul Veyne et al, A History of Private Life, Volume 1: From Pagan Rome toByzantium.

The “mice” dish really exists; I got it from Jane Renfrew's Roman Cookery, but you can get a recipe at http://eirny.com/2013/03.

All Latin in the story comes courtesy of Mr. Savage's Latin class at Glebe Collegiate Institute though, as always, any mistakes are my own.

#SFWAPro

The forest for the trees

Aeon Magazine has an article currently online by Hugh Thomson called "The Sherwood Syndrome" that got me thinking a lot about forests. Thomson points out that contrary to popular belief, England has not had a significant degree of forest since the Bronze Age. He quotes from Oliver Rackham's book The History of the Countryside: "Even in supposedly backward counties such as Essex, villa abutted on villa for mile after mile, and most of the gaps were filled by small towns and the lands of British farmsteads." This is, of course, contrary to the idea that the "true" England -- represented by figures like Robin Hood or the Green Man -- resides in the forest. It's a fascinating article, and it immediately got me thinking about some possible implications Thomson doesn't explore: for instance, was the idea of their own country as having been virgin forest until relatively recently a factor in why the English believed, contrary to all evidence, that North America was fundamentally empty? (Compare English to French settlement patterns, for example, or the fact that even today the sophistication of states like the Iroquois Confederacy -- which significantly influenced the development of the U.S. Constitution -- is absent from the popular imagination.) Is it part of why we here in Canada, one of the most urban countries in the world, still think of ourselves as being engaged in a struggle with a vast wilderness? That's not even to mention its effect on fantasy literature, both in the UK and North America, which is something I'm going to have to take awhile to think about.