Announcing STAR TREK: DTI and other CLB news
- Thread starter Christopher
- Start date
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The spring 2010 issue of Alternative Coordinates magazine, containing my short story "The Weight of Silence," has just gone online:
http://www.ac-mag.com/
There's a brief excerpt from the story here. The full magazine is available for $2.00, either online or in a print edition.
I've put up story discussion and notes on my site's Original Fiction page:
http://home.fuse.net/ChristopherLBennett/Originalfiction.html#TWoS
Last time, I held back a bit before posting the story notes, but this time there aren't any major spoilers in them.
http://www.ac-mag.com/
There's a brief excerpt from the story here. The full magazine is available for $2.00, either online or in a print edition.
I've put up story discussion and notes on my site's Original Fiction page:
http://home.fuse.net/ChristopherLBennett/Originalfiction.html#TWoS
Last time, I held back a bit before posting the story notes, but this time there aren't any major spoilers in them.
"No Dominion" is now online at DayBreak Magazine. Here's the direct link:
http://daybreakmagazine.wordpress.c...fiction-no-dominion-by-christopher-l-bennett/
Notes at my site:
http://home.fuse.net/ChristopherLBennett/Originalfiction.html#ND
http://daybreakmagazine.wordpress.c...fiction-no-dominion-by-christopher-l-bennett/
Notes at my site:
http://home.fuse.net/ChristopherLBennett/Originalfiction.html#ND
I just want to make it clear that "No Dominion" can be read absolutely free and in its entirety at the link provided.
Very interesting story.
^Thanks!
I'm honestly not sure how I was supposed to react to the Detective's speech at the end. To be perfectly honest, I came down pretty hard on the side of the murderer. The idea that his wife was basically revived with personality-altering brain damage, but no one found anything wrong with this, and society seemed to look upon these latter-day Phineas Gages as if they were perfectly fine and he was the one with the problem for not just going along with her (apparently evident) personality shift was pretty disturbing. Maybe he was just imagining it, though, and I'm making too much of a leap in believing that his wife came out of the operating room with the creepy Anna Sheridan thing going on. Given what was established earlier in the story, it doesn't seem like too much of a leap to say the person who comes out of the coffin isn't the one that went in. Which would make resurrection more of a ghoulish form of reproduction than truly life eternal. Zombies instead of babies.
Moving on, I was pretty repulsed by the notion that, once in prison, he'd be unable to decline medical treatment, and would apparently be reeducated to eliminate his attachment to mortality. Come on. He's a seventy-plus cancer-stricken widower who has the added bonus of seeing his wife walking around knowing she's not the person he loves anymore, just to twist the knife that extra bit more than nature, though red in tooth and claw, would find appropriate. If he wants to go, I think he's earned that right. His painful death being devoured by his own body should be punishment enough to satisfy the Detective. He shouldn't need to be brainwashed so he can see the light of reason and come around to her side. And that's what rehabilitation and psychological treatment would seem to entail in his case. He was moved to murder because someone he loved had been taken from him. It was an extreme case. He's not going to do it again, ever, any more than a guy who shot his wife's lover would be likely to become a serial killer. Treating him is therefore going to be one of two things; either pounding the serenity prayer into his brain with a mallet so he understands there are things he just can't fix, or convincing him that the popular view of immortality is the right one and he was mistaken to challenge it. Given her schadenfreude, I'm guessing I know which one the Detective was gunning for.
I have to wonder how the Detective would've reacted if her son had survived the car accident, but came out of the process like the old man's wife. I'm sure she'd currently say she'd gladly accept the consequence, but I'd doubt she'd be so sanguine if she actually went through raising an impostor in her son's body.
I recently read a Jack McDevitt short about a woman who was considering whether to get an immortality treatment for her child, and ended up coming to the same conclusion as the Detective. I'd walked away from the story with the opposite conclusion, and had to wonder if that was intentional, because the narration seemed to be pushing really hard on the woman being my viewpoint character. Now that it's happened here, too, I'm curious if I'm just really prejudiced against societies of immortals.
And I noticed that there were annotations halfway through writing this, but wanted to finish before I read them.
Okay, so I get the impression I took this as being a lot darker than was intended. I already had that idea from the prelude, but it's good to have it confirmed.
Moving on, I was pretty repulsed by the notion that, once in prison, he'd be unable to decline medical treatment, and would apparently be reeducated to eliminate his attachment to mortality. Come on. He's a seventy-plus cancer-stricken widower who has the added bonus of seeing his wife walking around knowing she's not the person he loves anymore, just to twist the knife that extra bit more than nature, though red in tooth and claw, would find appropriate. If he wants to go, I think he's earned that right. His painful death being devoured by his own body should be punishment enough to satisfy the Detective. He shouldn't need to be brainwashed so he can see the light of reason and come around to her side. And that's what rehabilitation and psychological treatment would seem to entail in his case. He was moved to murder because someone he loved had been taken from him. It was an extreme case. He's not going to do it again, ever, any more than a guy who shot his wife's lover would be likely to become a serial killer. Treating him is therefore going to be one of two things; either pounding the serenity prayer into his brain with a mallet so he understands there are things he just can't fix, or convincing him that the popular view of immortality is the right one and he was mistaken to challenge it. Given her schadenfreude, I'm guessing I know which one the Detective was gunning for.
I have to wonder how the Detective would've reacted if her son had survived the car accident, but came out of the process like the old man's wife. I'm sure she'd currently say she'd gladly accept the consequence, but I'd doubt she'd be so sanguine if she actually went through raising an impostor in her son's body.
I recently read a Jack McDevitt short about a woman who was considering whether to get an immortality treatment for her child, and ended up coming to the same conclusion as the Detective. I'd walked away from the story with the opposite conclusion, and had to wonder if that was intentional, because the narration seemed to be pushing really hard on the woman being my viewpoint character. Now that it's happened here, too, I'm curious if I'm just really prejudiced against societies of immortals.
And I noticed that there were annotations halfway through writing this, but wanted to finish before I read them.
Okay, so I get the impression I took this as being a lot darker than was intended. I already had that idea from the prelude, but it's good to have it confirmed.
^Glad it made you think, but you're definitely interpreting a lot of things more cynically than was intended.
Anyway, nice to be discussing my original fiction here, even if your interpretation is so different from what I intended. I guess dystopian SF is so ingrained into people's expectations that an optimistic story can be hard to parse.
There's no "brainwashing" or zombification. That was one Luddite man's rather paranoid interpretation. The medical miracle that saved Sarah's life didn't reprogram her brain, it merely reversed her death. She lost memory because her backups failed, and thus, like anyone in the here and now who's suffered amnesia due to traumatic brain injury, she had to carry on without those memories. Conversely, if her backups had worked the way they were supposed to, she would've been essentially the same person she was before. So it's getting it backward to say that the technology is what changed her. The purpose of the technology is to preserve the mind intact; it was the failure of the technology that caused her to lose her memories and undergo a personality change.
And that certainly didn't make her less human. People who suffer traumatic brain injury and lose memory or personality are not monsters or zombies or "impostors," any more than somebody who loses an arm or a leg in a similar accident becomes a monster. And it's certainly not immoral for someone to continue living after such an accident. Yes, it changes you, but there's nothing evil about change. It's something that happens in life, something you accept and adapt to.
And when I said Trendler would be rehabilitated, I meant exactly what I wrote. It wasn't an Orwellian euphemism for some kind of sinister brainwashing. It's therapy, pure and simple. Helping him deal with his pain, trying to resolve the psychological problems that made him think premeditated murder was a valid thing to do under any circumstances. There wouldn't be any more coercion involved than there is in any other form of rehabilitative therapy. If he refuses to participate and help himself, there's not much they can do except keep him imprisoned. Because you're wrong -- someone twisted enough to rationalize murder once can't be guaranteed not to do it again. Killing Sarah/Isabelle wasn't an act of love, it was an act of xenophobia, bigotry, and selfishness. To return to my prior example, it was tantamount to murdering an amputee or a blind person because you believed they no longer had a life worth living. Trendler devalued Isabelle's life because it didn't fit his narrow definitions -- and more to the point, because she had a life that no longer gave him what he desired from her. And that is evil and sick and narcissistic, no matter how piously he rationalizes it.
And that certainly didn't make her less human. People who suffer traumatic brain injury and lose memory or personality are not monsters or zombies or "impostors," any more than somebody who loses an arm or a leg in a similar accident becomes a monster. And it's certainly not immoral for someone to continue living after such an accident. Yes, it changes you, but there's nothing evil about change. It's something that happens in life, something you accept and adapt to.
And when I said Trendler would be rehabilitated, I meant exactly what I wrote. It wasn't an Orwellian euphemism for some kind of sinister brainwashing. It's therapy, pure and simple. Helping him deal with his pain, trying to resolve the psychological problems that made him think premeditated murder was a valid thing to do under any circumstances. There wouldn't be any more coercion involved than there is in any other form of rehabilitative therapy. If he refuses to participate and help himself, there's not much they can do except keep him imprisoned. Because you're wrong -- someone twisted enough to rationalize murder once can't be guaranteed not to do it again. Killing Sarah/Isabelle wasn't an act of love, it was an act of xenophobia, bigotry, and selfishness. To return to my prior example, it was tantamount to murdering an amputee or a blind person because you believed they no longer had a life worth living. Trendler devalued Isabelle's life because it didn't fit his narrow definitions -- and more to the point, because she had a life that no longer gave him what he desired from her. And that is evil and sick and narcissistic, no matter how piously he rationalizes it.
Anyway, nice to be discussing my original fiction here, even if your interpretation is so different from what I intended. I guess dystopian SF is so ingrained into people's expectations that an optimistic story can be hard to parse.
But everyone else in the story seemed to think it was more than acceptable. I don't recall any mention of occupational therapy, or people being unable or unwilling to reintegrate into their old lives as if it were a heard-of thing. There actually isn't any exploration of Sarah/Isabelle taking on an assumed name, which strikes me as possibly being a very interesting aside. If practical immortality existed, it might be common for people to reinvent themselves just on a lark or out of boredom, even if they didn't have some complication with their old lives as Sarah/Isabelle did. And when discussing motives, the cops never even considered personality changes as a possibility.
But it's not something you just shake off like you stubbed your toe, either. The comparison reminds me of how, in the current wars, the death count is a lot smaller than it used to be, but the reason is that advances in battlefield medicine mean that soldiers are surviving injuries that would've killed them outright in prior wars. But the trade-off on that is seeing a lot more traumatic brain injuries, amputations, and PTSD than we had in earlier wars. It seems to me that this story took the first part of that, but glossed over the second, and that's what creeped me out.
I mean, when people have brain injury that alters personality, or retrograde amnesia, they aren't monsters, but neither does no one notice anything different. It seems that Sarah and Trendler didn't have any sort of post-recovery support (I'll come back to this), whereas in the modern day, there'd be plenty of occupational therapy and such. And that's when these conditions are the result of rare accidents, not anticipatable outcomes of common medical practice.
I mean, when people have brain injury that alters personality, or retrograde amnesia, they aren't monsters, but neither does no one notice anything different. It seems that Sarah and Trendler didn't have any sort of post-recovery support (I'll come back to this), whereas in the modern day, there'd be plenty of occupational therapy and such. And that's when these conditions are the result of rare accidents, not anticipatable outcomes of common medical practice.
That seems like a far more interesting premise than what happened here, which was a straightforward murder mystery dealing with depressingly straightforward people. Having slept on it, I'm thinking the reason I sympathized with Trendler is simply because he seemed the most three dimensional of the cast. Partially, that probably came from the old joke that in action stories, the bad guy is the protagonist, the person with a plan and a goal who's trying to get things done, but I also just found his backstory to be the most sympathetic. He's in love with this woman, but they're growing apart as he lets himself wind down while she begins chasing the dragon of youth. Well, that's not what they decided on. It isn't the life they wanted. Inertia manages to hold them together, even though they're clearly talking past each other. Then tragedy strikes. Not Sarah's death, but her secret Do Resuscitate order.
No. No, you do not keep that secret from your spouse. I'm not just talking on a trust level, though this seems about as clear as a secret bank account and set of fake IDs that she was planning to leave him. There's also the legal issue that, in some circumstances, the next of kin can overrule that sort of thing. I remember when I got my driver's license being informed that "Organ Donor" didn't mean a damn thing if my family didn't know that's what I wanted. What happens if her files are inaccessible for some reason, and Sarah's doctor takes Trendler's word that, as far as he knows, she still desired no extraordinary measures? Whoops.
So then she comes back home, with the equivalent of some nonspecific brand of brain damage. I'd like to think that Trender was disturbed by something a bit more fundamental than Sarah not remembering which drawer was socks and which one was underwear, or having to start over the book she was reading because she didn't remember how it started. And, apparently, they had no therapist or case worker to help them adapt to the change in circumstances after the accident, judging from the fact that Sarah both elected to change her name and move to the opposite side of the planet rather than, say, divorce Trendler and move in with her sister in Minnesota or something, and, more importantly, that no one was looking for her. Unless there was some kind of Witness Protection-style program at work here, this seems like the sort of outcome your case worker would try to avoid. And her new life consisted of culturing bacteria, getting laid, and avoiding accumulating a past. This is the same woman who was married for, what, half a century, and at one point considered a life of defined beginning, middle, and end a fine idea, but now she's bound and determined not to so much as leave footprints in the sand? Something smells fishy in Onogoroshima, and I'm not talking about the tide.
That's what gets me. It seems like there are so many delicious complications and plots that this universe implies, but they're all being brushed aside or glossed over. Just like what I said earlier, about advances in battlefield medicine saving a lot of lives, but with the trade-off of more people coming home with permanent injury. Even if we stipulated that Sarah/Isabelle was a special case, and most people are revived with perfectly intact memories and personalities, Tamara repeatedly tells us that dying is pretty damn horrible, and seems to have a classic case of PTSD. Accidents happen, and if people are living indefinitely, eventually, they'll be in a car crash, or fall down the stairs, or get extremely sloppy with a power tool, and add another person to the ranks of the walking wounded.
And this isn't something personal like a broken heart, or a fight with a friend. You can not die and resurrect privately, and one would think any responsible institution would have free cake and grief counseling available upon discharge.
And if you get into the realm of recoveries that don't go as planned, like Sarah's, then there's no limit. There's problems with reintegration into your life if you, say, moved into a new town five years ago, and just lost the last six years worth of memories. Or maybe you're an athlete and suddenly became cross-dominant or your handedness reverses, and you have to relearn how to catch a ball. Or, you're a doting wife who suddenly elects to be a promiscuous college student. Add in the complication that all these people with irreversible brain damage are discharged as functioning adults, and it just makes things messy. Their loved ones don't need to give them full-time care, but they can't just go back to normal, either. So then you have the issue of how to help the wounded without either condescending to them or straight-up abandoning them and having them start over their lives from square one so they fit their new personalities.
I'm extremely interested in what might've happened between Trendler and Sarah in the time between her death and when she vanished. How was she different? What sort of support did they have from doctors and case workers? Why would she run away like she did, fear, love, or some third, unsuggested option? For that matter, what made her change her mind about the age- and death-retardant technologies? And while we're at it, what about Jason's father. Tamara never mentions him. Absentee? Sperm donor? Dead? Divorce after the accident? If so, was it because he blamed Tamara, or, worse, that he didn't, and maintained they'd made the right choice in living with risk?
There's got to be some mechanism in place to help people deal with all this stuff, but it doesn't appear in the story, which made Trendler attractive to me as the only person who noticed that anything could go wrong at all, even though the way he dealt with it was extremely inappropriate. To draw on your comparison once again, he may be passing judgement on whether one-armed people can live life to the fullest, but at least he's noticed the issue while everyone else is passing them screw-top ketchup bottles.
I'm also interested in the ways people would live even outside of how they'd react to their deaths. Would people habitually reinvent themselves every few decades as they got bored with their current lives? Would there be support groups for people who start having existentialist meltdowns when they realize they've just been cycling through age twenty-five to thirty for the past two centuries and feel like they've stagnated as a person? Or the reverse, would there be people who stayed strong and youthful, but still continued to age in mind, so they'd look twenty, but still be as mentally tired and frustrated as they would be at an unenhanced age ninety? How would they relate to people who didn't or couldn't participate and still aged classically? Tamara certainly resented the hell out of Trendler, but she had a lot of baggage.
No. No, you do not keep that secret from your spouse. I'm not just talking on a trust level, though this seems about as clear as a secret bank account and set of fake IDs that she was planning to leave him. There's also the legal issue that, in some circumstances, the next of kin can overrule that sort of thing. I remember when I got my driver's license being informed that "Organ Donor" didn't mean a damn thing if my family didn't know that's what I wanted. What happens if her files are inaccessible for some reason, and Sarah's doctor takes Trendler's word that, as far as he knows, she still desired no extraordinary measures? Whoops.
So then she comes back home, with the equivalent of some nonspecific brand of brain damage. I'd like to think that Trender was disturbed by something a bit more fundamental than Sarah not remembering which drawer was socks and which one was underwear, or having to start over the book she was reading because she didn't remember how it started. And, apparently, they had no therapist or case worker to help them adapt to the change in circumstances after the accident, judging from the fact that Sarah both elected to change her name and move to the opposite side of the planet rather than, say, divorce Trendler and move in with her sister in Minnesota or something, and, more importantly, that no one was looking for her. Unless there was some kind of Witness Protection-style program at work here, this seems like the sort of outcome your case worker would try to avoid. And her new life consisted of culturing bacteria, getting laid, and avoiding accumulating a past. This is the same woman who was married for, what, half a century, and at one point considered a life of defined beginning, middle, and end a fine idea, but now she's bound and determined not to so much as leave footprints in the sand? Something smells fishy in Onogoroshima, and I'm not talking about the tide.
That's what gets me. It seems like there are so many delicious complications and plots that this universe implies, but they're all being brushed aside or glossed over. Just like what I said earlier, about advances in battlefield medicine saving a lot of lives, but with the trade-off of more people coming home with permanent injury. Even if we stipulated that Sarah/Isabelle was a special case, and most people are revived with perfectly intact memories and personalities, Tamara repeatedly tells us that dying is pretty damn horrible, and seems to have a classic case of PTSD. Accidents happen, and if people are living indefinitely, eventually, they'll be in a car crash, or fall down the stairs, or get extremely sloppy with a power tool, and add another person to the ranks of the walking wounded.
And this isn't something personal like a broken heart, or a fight with a friend. You can not die and resurrect privately, and one would think any responsible institution would have free cake and grief counseling available upon discharge.
And if you get into the realm of recoveries that don't go as planned, like Sarah's, then there's no limit. There's problems with reintegration into your life if you, say, moved into a new town five years ago, and just lost the last six years worth of memories. Or maybe you're an athlete and suddenly became cross-dominant or your handedness reverses, and you have to relearn how to catch a ball. Or, you're a doting wife who suddenly elects to be a promiscuous college student. Add in the complication that all these people with irreversible brain damage are discharged as functioning adults, and it just makes things messy. Their loved ones don't need to give them full-time care, but they can't just go back to normal, either. So then you have the issue of how to help the wounded without either condescending to them or straight-up abandoning them and having them start over their lives from square one so they fit their new personalities.
I'm extremely interested in what might've happened between Trendler and Sarah in the time between her death and when she vanished. How was she different? What sort of support did they have from doctors and case workers? Why would she run away like she did, fear, love, or some third, unsuggested option? For that matter, what made her change her mind about the age- and death-retardant technologies? And while we're at it, what about Jason's father. Tamara never mentions him. Absentee? Sperm donor? Dead? Divorce after the accident? If so, was it because he blamed Tamara, or, worse, that he didn't, and maintained they'd made the right choice in living with risk?
There's got to be some mechanism in place to help people deal with all this stuff, but it doesn't appear in the story, which made Trendler attractive to me as the only person who noticed that anything could go wrong at all, even though the way he dealt with it was extremely inappropriate. To draw on your comparison once again, he may be passing judgement on whether one-armed people can live life to the fullest, but at least he's noticed the issue while everyone else is passing them screw-top ketchup bottles.
I'm also interested in the ways people would live even outside of how they'd react to their deaths. Would people habitually reinvent themselves every few decades as they got bored with their current lives? Would there be support groups for people who start having existentialist meltdowns when they realize they've just been cycling through age twenty-five to thirty for the past two centuries and feel like they've stagnated as a person? Or the reverse, would there be people who stayed strong and youthful, but still continued to age in mind, so they'd look twenty, but still be as mentally tired and frustrated as they would be at an unenhanced age ninety? How would they relate to people who didn't or couldn't participate and still aged classically? Tamara certainly resented the hell out of Trendler, but she had a lot of baggage.
I don't think it was so much that I was looking for something dystopian. I mean, I normally come here to talk about Star Trek, for God's sake. It's just that I saw so many potential issues and complications in the universe that were commented on only by the antagonist, and aggressively ignored by everyone else. It gave the appearance of a whitewash.
I'm just going to encase the whole discussion in a spoiler box:
Think what was more than acceptable? That she suffered a tragic injury and lost her memories? Of course that's not "acceptable," any more than any other tragic injury is acceptable. But these things happen, even in a world with amazingly advanced medicine, and you adapt and move on.
It was stated in the story that it would take time for Isabelle to recover her memories and identity after the injury; I think it follows implicitly that therapy would be involved. And as for your latter point, I don't know what you mean. Sarah was willing to reintegrate into her old life, but Charles was too prejudiced to accept her, and so he drove her away.
They didn't need to. They tracked down the killer on the basis of a different motive and the evidence, once they knew what to look for. Then, once they had him in custody, he told the rest of the story.
Obviously that goes without saying. Again, Craig and Majid did explicitly tell Rosa Manzano that recovering from an event like this would change you and that it would take time and effort to recover. And that was in a case where she didn't permanently lose her memories. So I don't understand why you'd think the story suggested it would be easy.
Well, it didn't so much "gloss over" the issue of TBI as to present a future in which it's more easily cured. Similarly, amputations would be a fairly easy thing to remedy. As for PTSD, I think the whole story is driven by Tamara Craig's post-traumatic angst, as you yourself acknowledge below. So I wouldn't say it's glossed over.
I don't think that's true at all. Keep in mind that you're only hearing one side of the story. Of course there was post-recovery support, therapy, relationship counseling, and the like available, and Sarah would've tried to embrace it all, tried to make things work again between them, but Charles would've rejected it because he couldn't get over his superstitious belief that Sarah's recovery from death made her some kind of zombie rather than just a beneficiary of medicine advanced enough to cure injuries that were once irreversibly fatal. And because he rejected its value, he didn't bring it up when he was telling the story from his own biased point of view.
Perhaps that's a flaw in the story. Perhaps I made a mistake by not giving Isabelle a voice of her own, letting her tell her side of the story. But then, if Isabelle had been able to recover and testify so quickly, there wouldn't have been any need for the detectives. And I thought I'd made it pretty clear that Trendler was not a reliable narrator.
I don't know what you mean here. Sarah's memory loss was the result of a rare accident -- actually two simultaneous accidents, the aneurysm and the failure of her backup memory, making it an even rarer occurrence.
I'd say just the opposite. She wanted to stay with him, but she saw him drifting away because he was unwilling to take steps to prolong their time together. She probably kept the resuscitation order secret because she knew it would drive him away and she didn't want that. Yes, you make a good point that that was inappropriate, but it certainly doesn't make him any less of a murderer.
What disturbed Trendler was that she didn't die "naturally" at all. He believed reversing death was unnatural and immoral. And so when she was saved from an injury that would've killed her 20 or 30 years earlier, Trendler was unwilling to accept her as a "real" person anymore.
Their belief systems were just too fundamentally different. Case workers can't save every marriage, especially when one of the partners is so set in his beliefs that he can't even acknowledge his wife as a real live person anymore.
Sarah left and adopted a new identity because Charles' rejection made it too painful to stay in her old life. She'd lost so much of her memory anyway that she decided the better course to take was to start over, reinvent herself, focus only on the future. As you said, one effect of increased longevity is the opportunity for people to begin entirely new lives.
Only if you assume unquestioningly that accepting a short lifespan is the "right" belief. Why should it be? There was a time when the typical person was unlikely to make it to 30, when infant mortality rates were well over 50 percent as a rule. There was a time when a huge percentage of people who suffered significant wounds would lose their limbs or die from infection. People considered that normal, natural, the will of God, because they simply didn't think there were any other options. Then medicine came along and it turned out we didn't have to settle for that. Today, anyone who'd refuse medical care to their children, let alone prenatal care, would be considered guilty of extreme negligence and child endangerment. Anyone who'd refuse antibiotics after suffering a serious wound would be seen as suicidal. What was once considered natural and fated is now considered unacceptable, because it's now so easy to prevent.
So why should it be any more right to assume that our current life expectancy is the only one we should settle for, or that it would be wrong for a future technology to cure injuries that would be incurable by today's medicine? History already shows that cultural expectations and standards about life and death can change with advancing medical science. Why assume that process won't continue into the future? Why assume the values of this tiny sliver of history in which we happen to live are the only true and right ones by default?
I also emphatically disagree that Isabelle was trying to avoid "leaving footprints in the sand." She wasn't looking back, no, but that didn't mean she didn't care about her legacy. As several characters in the story pointed out, Isabelle's work was potentially very important to the future of Earth and humanity. She didn't just go off to lead a frivolous and empty life, she chose to do something important with her second chance.
There's only so much you can do in a short story. Maybe I'll revisit the setting in other stories.
I think that's dwelling too much on the negative side of this. It also means less grief from the premature loss of loved ones, more time for people to achieve their dreams and goals, less physical deterioration and illness to worry about, more gifted minds working longer to solve the world's problems, etc.
This goes to the point Jetse de Vries made in his introduction to my story. There's never only one side to these advances. Too many stories paint increased longevity or immortality as either a pure good or a pure evil. Why can't it just be like everything else in life, something that has its virtues as well as its drawbacks?
And of course Tamara was wallowing in PTSD because it made her a good viewpoint character for the story. I thought it would be interesting to explore my optimistic future through the eyes of a cynic. That doesn't mean the world is full of "walking wounded." I'm sure that along with the other medical advances in this future, there are improved ways to treat psychological traumas. Tamara's just too busy beating herself up to avail herself of them. And even so, she's come out more optimistic than she likes to let on.
Okay, that's where you're wrong. The damage is hardly irreversible, and in most cases, with the appropriate backups, the memory loss is not irreversible either. Yes, going through a trauma is, well, traumatic, but that's always been the case. Getting a hernia operation or being in a non-fatal car crash is traumatic too.
And I have no idea why you're jumping to the conclusion that there's no treatment available for these issues. The whole premise of the story is that medical science has advanced to a degree far beyond present limits. Why wouldn't it be a given that psychological science is part of the same medical renaissance?
Remember the story is set less than 50 years in the future. Sarah and Charles get married no later than 2017, so it wouldn't even have been an issue for them at the time. As the technology advanced and death prevention became a realistic possibility, they discovered they had different views on it -- Sarah saw it as valid to use advancing medicine to preserve and prolong one's life and health, while Charles took a more traditionalist view. So she didn't actually change her mind.
I'm glad to hear it. That's a good incentive for me to write more stories in this setting.
Think what was more than acceptable? That she suffered a tragic injury and lost her memories? Of course that's not "acceptable," any more than any other tragic injury is acceptable. But these things happen, even in a world with amazingly advanced medicine, and you adapt and move on.
It was stated in the story that it would take time for Isabelle to recover her memories and identity after the injury; I think it follows implicitly that therapy would be involved. And as for your latter point, I don't know what you mean. Sarah was willing to reintegrate into her old life, but Charles was too prejudiced to accept her, and so he drove her away.
They didn't need to. They tracked down the killer on the basis of a different motive and the evidence, once they knew what to look for. Then, once they had him in custody, he told the rest of the story.
Obviously that goes without saying. Again, Craig and Majid did explicitly tell Rosa Manzano that recovering from an event like this would change you and that it would take time and effort to recover. And that was in a case where she didn't permanently lose her memories. So I don't understand why you'd think the story suggested it would be easy.
Well, it didn't so much "gloss over" the issue of TBI as to present a future in which it's more easily cured. Similarly, amputations would be a fairly easy thing to remedy. As for PTSD, I think the whole story is driven by Tamara Craig's post-traumatic angst, as you yourself acknowledge below. So I wouldn't say it's glossed over.
I don't think that's true at all. Keep in mind that you're only hearing one side of the story. Of course there was post-recovery support, therapy, relationship counseling, and the like available, and Sarah would've tried to embrace it all, tried to make things work again between them, but Charles would've rejected it because he couldn't get over his superstitious belief that Sarah's recovery from death made her some kind of zombie rather than just a beneficiary of medicine advanced enough to cure injuries that were once irreversibly fatal. And because he rejected its value, he didn't bring it up when he was telling the story from his own biased point of view.
Perhaps that's a flaw in the story. Perhaps I made a mistake by not giving Isabelle a voice of her own, letting her tell her side of the story. But then, if Isabelle had been able to recover and testify so quickly, there wouldn't have been any need for the detectives. And I thought I'd made it pretty clear that Trendler was not a reliable narrator.
I don't know what you mean here. Sarah's memory loss was the result of a rare accident -- actually two simultaneous accidents, the aneurysm and the failure of her backup memory, making it an even rarer occurrence.
I'd say just the opposite. She wanted to stay with him, but she saw him drifting away because he was unwilling to take steps to prolong their time together. She probably kept the resuscitation order secret because she knew it would drive him away and she didn't want that. Yes, you make a good point that that was inappropriate, but it certainly doesn't make him any less of a murderer.
What disturbed Trendler was that she didn't die "naturally" at all. He believed reversing death was unnatural and immoral. And so when she was saved from an injury that would've killed her 20 or 30 years earlier, Trendler was unwilling to accept her as a "real" person anymore.
Their belief systems were just too fundamentally different. Case workers can't save every marriage, especially when one of the partners is so set in his beliefs that he can't even acknowledge his wife as a real live person anymore.
Sarah left and adopted a new identity because Charles' rejection made it too painful to stay in her old life. She'd lost so much of her memory anyway that she decided the better course to take was to start over, reinvent herself, focus only on the future. As you said, one effect of increased longevity is the opportunity for people to begin entirely new lives.
Only if you assume unquestioningly that accepting a short lifespan is the "right" belief. Why should it be? There was a time when the typical person was unlikely to make it to 30, when infant mortality rates were well over 50 percent as a rule. There was a time when a huge percentage of people who suffered significant wounds would lose their limbs or die from infection. People considered that normal, natural, the will of God, because they simply didn't think there were any other options. Then medicine came along and it turned out we didn't have to settle for that. Today, anyone who'd refuse medical care to their children, let alone prenatal care, would be considered guilty of extreme negligence and child endangerment. Anyone who'd refuse antibiotics after suffering a serious wound would be seen as suicidal. What was once considered natural and fated is now considered unacceptable, because it's now so easy to prevent.
So why should it be any more right to assume that our current life expectancy is the only one we should settle for, or that it would be wrong for a future technology to cure injuries that would be incurable by today's medicine? History already shows that cultural expectations and standards about life and death can change with advancing medical science. Why assume that process won't continue into the future? Why assume the values of this tiny sliver of history in which we happen to live are the only true and right ones by default?
I also emphatically disagree that Isabelle was trying to avoid "leaving footprints in the sand." She wasn't looking back, no, but that didn't mean she didn't care about her legacy. As several characters in the story pointed out, Isabelle's work was potentially very important to the future of Earth and humanity. She didn't just go off to lead a frivolous and empty life, she chose to do something important with her second chance.
There's only so much you can do in a short story. Maybe I'll revisit the setting in other stories.
I think that's dwelling too much on the negative side of this. It also means less grief from the premature loss of loved ones, more time for people to achieve their dreams and goals, less physical deterioration and illness to worry about, more gifted minds working longer to solve the world's problems, etc.
This goes to the point Jetse de Vries made in his introduction to my story. There's never only one side to these advances. Too many stories paint increased longevity or immortality as either a pure good or a pure evil. Why can't it just be like everything else in life, something that has its virtues as well as its drawbacks?
And of course Tamara was wallowing in PTSD because it made her a good viewpoint character for the story. I thought it would be interesting to explore my optimistic future through the eyes of a cynic. That doesn't mean the world is full of "walking wounded." I'm sure that along with the other medical advances in this future, there are improved ways to treat psychological traumas. Tamara's just too busy beating herself up to avail herself of them. And even so, she's come out more optimistic than she likes to let on.
Okay, that's where you're wrong. The damage is hardly irreversible, and in most cases, with the appropriate backups, the memory loss is not irreversible either. Yes, going through a trauma is, well, traumatic, but that's always been the case. Getting a hernia operation or being in a non-fatal car crash is traumatic too.
And I have no idea why you're jumping to the conclusion that there's no treatment available for these issues. The whole premise of the story is that medical science has advanced to a degree far beyond present limits. Why wouldn't it be a given that psychological science is part of the same medical renaissance?
Remember the story is set less than 50 years in the future. Sarah and Charles get married no later than 2017, so it wouldn't even have been an issue for them at the time. As the technology advanced and death prevention became a realistic possibility, they discovered they had different views on it -- Sarah saw it as valid to use advancing medicine to preserve and prolong one's life and health, while Charles took a more traditionalist view. So she didn't actually change her mind.
I'm glad to hear it. That's a good incentive for me to write more stories in this setting.
I use Safari, and it was only updated to actually handle spoilers properly on this board in the last week or so. I've generally avoided using the tags until now, so I didn't actually know you could quote within them. Sorry. Let's just hit the high points.
I didn't really get the impression he was enough of a bigot to just throw her out sight unseen, like the parents in that Babylon 5 episode, "Believers." And I don't fully understand why, because I can remember him foaming at the mouth about overpopulation and Big Brother Watching Your Birth Control. I guess I just bought his story. Seeing someone you love changed from some external influence, trauma or alcohol or something, it is devastating. Since they're not broken, they don't need you to take care of them. They're just different.
I suppose I sympathized with him a bit more than intended.
Well, he was either imagining a change in her or he wasn't. The fact that her implants didn't work as advertised are a point in his favor, as is what you say down line about her memory loss making it just as easy to start from scratch as to continue from her old life.
Well, there are other ways to explore that then just having her wake up and tell us. I'm starting to think Sarabelle was a weak link in the story. She had a job, a friend, and a stalker, and her estranged husband said that after she died, she was creepy, but we can't take his word for it. Maybe mention some habit Isabelle had, visiting the cafe for coffee an hour after lunch or something, and having Charles later mention that Sarah did that, as a clue that more of her survived than he let on.
In fact, and I realize this is next to impossible in a science fiction setting with DNA testing, photographs, and medical records but it might've been helpful if they deduced Sarah and Isabelle were the same person based on their personalities and habits as related by others.
I'm not saying they should've saved the marriage, just that the way there seemed to be no information on her prior life in Isabelle's record made it seem like no one was looking after her. Either she changed identities legally, in which case the police would've known about it, or she did it illegally, in which case someone would've tried to find her, especially someone who was professionally obligated to her wellbeing. Domestic troubles and memory-loss preceding a disappearance would seem to prompt further investigation.
But doesn't that count as a point for Charles' opinion, in the abstract? If she's lost so much memory that family, friends, jobs, and old haunts have no hold on her, doesn't that make the revival sort of pointless? I mean, here we have a clinically dead person. Not someone who's had a head injury and wakes up not knowing who he is, but a corpse. An ex-Sarah. She wakes up with only 10% of her memory. Or, let's say 0%, to make the argument cleaner. A blank slate.
Well, hell. Now we've got this brand-new person, who wants to take over this other person's life, just because she looks like her. That's no good. So she changes her name and starts a new life. There's enough brain recreated that you probably can't even be sure that it's a continuance of Sarah's core in Isabelle. What's the point? We've taken a dead body, woken it up, and made the survivors feel bad and the formally deceased feel worse. Well, I hope you're happy, science.
Which leads to an interesting question of medical ethics. Would doctors continue a revival even if there was a 100% loss of memory and personality?
What, I can't question a massive shift in behavior unless I think it was from "right" to "wrong?"
Because no one commented on it. Certainly, no one sympathized with Charles, or noted that these things happened, or even that these things didn't happen. There's a certain principle of mediocrity at work here. We've got two separate motives. One, Charles is prejudiced against life extension, and two, Sarah's resurrection was botched. You could probably do the same story if only one of these was the case, and it might've worked better. As it is, the one Tamara seems riled by is that Charles is a luddite, whereas the one I was riled by is that Sarah and Isabelle were fundamentally different people whom Charles was, apparently, expected to treat exactly the same. Or utterly differently. Whichever.
The point is, no one really establishes the context of these in the larger world. I seized on the failure of Sarah's backup, which no one sympathized with (especially the effect on the survivors of the not-deceased), which suggested that this was not uncommon, and that either it was accepted practice to humor the affected, or, as I saw it, the individual's spark had been devalued in such a way that no one really cared if someone turned different because of a bad backup. Similarly, I suppose if one seized on foaming-at-the-mouth portions of Charles' confession, they might think it wasn't unheard of for people to specifically attack the revived for philosophical reasons, the futuristic equivalent of bombing an abortion clinic.
I think it might've been more interesting, and certainly more straightforward, if only one of these was the case. Either Charles was a luddite and Sarah's secret revival worked perfectly, but he was so hung up that he imagined the she wasn't brushing her teeth like she used to or something and drove her away, and then ultimately tracked her down to put her back in the grave where she belonged, with all of her side-effects being in her head. Or, something closer to my first reading, where Charles didn't have any objections to the new technologies, but Sarah's backups shorted out and she woke up a different person with a swiss-cheese memory. He'd have felt betrayed by the world, having been convinced that technology made them safe only to find that, in his case, the person he loved had been taken from him and returned altered, which could be more devastating than losing her outright (I'm thinking of a quote credited to Emerson, "Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest"). She leaves, for the same reasons the canonical Sarah does, and he ultimately tracks her down because he thinks her survival was a failure and doesn't want this strange person going around in his wife's body pretending to be her. Or, maybe even more interesting, he kills her hoping another glitch will happen, and her personality might reform again, but closer to the original.
That was considerably less concise than I'd hoped setting out.
I wasn't sure either, but I tried it and hit "Preview Post," and it worked.
I guess that's good. It means the character was richer than I expected.
As with most things in life, it's not so binary, and the answers lie between the extremes. There was some change, but he made a far bigger deal out of it than was warranted. He blew the change out of proportion and took it as "evidence" that she was some kind of artificial homunculus inhabiting his dead wife's body. Which is a misunderstanding of the technology; since the backup memory failed, what memory remained came from her surviving natural brain tissue, though perhaps with a little technological help to restore damaged connections.
I don't think that's true. I'm sure automobile airbags fail in rare cases, but that's hardly a point in favor of not using airbags at all. The same goes for life-saving medicines and operations, for fire alarms, for military body armor, or for anything else whose purpose is to protect life or health. Nothing ever works 100 percent of the time, but that isn't a reason to be against using it at all, especially if it's a reliable means of saving lives.
And I didn't say her memory loss made it "easy" to start from scratch. I said Charles' intolerance made it too hard for Sarah to continue her old life, so she made the surely difficult choice to leave him and make a clean break.
I just didn't think the question of how much she'd changed was a critical issue here. No matter how much she changed, it would not justify his conclusion that she needed to die rather than lead a life that didn't conform to his wishes and hopes. Regardless of how much Isabelle Warner was like or unlike Sarah Trendler, she was a fully realized human being with a worthwhile career and an active social life and a bright future. I thought that in itself would make it clear that Charles was wrong to dismiss her as some kind of zombie.
A fair point, and maybe I should've considered that question. I did write this story on something of a tight deadline, so maybe I didn't explore every possible side facet of the situation. Of course, this is pretty much a short story, so I didn't have room to go into depth on a side issue like the details of her departure from her old life. But I probably could've done a better job thinking it through.
How is saving a life ever pointless? Are you saying that if someone suffers severe and permanent amnesia, they should be euthanized? I can't imagine how that could ever be morally justified. And this is a case where, unlike a severe amnesia sufferer, the patient is fully capable of forming new memories, developing a new, complete personality, and leading a full life as a fully functional human being. Maybe she won't be the same human being as before, but I can't imagine how that makes her less deserving of existence than any other human being.
That's completely misconstruing the situation. She was only a "corpse" in the sense that she suffered an injury beyond present-day medicine and lacked respiration and brain activity for a certain amount of time. Today, someone who's clinically dead for a few minutes can still be revived and go on to lead a reasonably normal life. By the time of the story, medical science has advanced to the point that that interval has grown longer, increased to a few hours. That's all. Someone from a couple of centuries ago might look at our ability to revive someone who's been clinically dead for two minutes and see it as reanimating a corpse, but we'd dismiss that as superstition.
In short, the definitions of death you're using are no longer clinically valid in the timeframe of this story. The goalposts have been pushed back, just as our present-day medicine has pushed them farther back from where they were centuries ago. People in the story still call it death, but that's more a vernacular usage, and one I played up because I couldn't resist the sci-fi weirdness of having people say things like "As soon as I heard she'd died, I knew she'd be blaming me when she woke up."
Sarah probably lost nowhere near as much of her memory as you suggest. What she retained was probably closer to 80 or 90 percent than 10. Charles claimed she'd become a different person, but as we know, she'd been growing away from him even before the aneurysm, so he may have simply blamed that on her revival after the fact, rewritten history in his own mind. People do that.
The only reason returning to her old life didn't work was because the man she loved was no longer willing to share that life with her.
I'm not sure that's medically possible. But a human being has a right to live, regardless of whether they used to be a different human being. What if a woman dies in childbirth? Her mind is gone, but in a sense, her flesh lives on as a blank slate. Doesn't that child have the right to exist regardless of the fate of the parent?
No one commented on the airplane Tamara took to get from Brisbane to Onogoroshima, but that doesn't mean she swam.
Well, they were cops, and he was a murderer. Not the kind of scenario where you expect sympathy.
All Charles was expected to do was not murder her just for not living up to his expectations. If all he'd done was argue with her or write her out of his will or run against her for public office or something, then you'd have a point. But he attempted an act of premeditated murder. Whether she was the same person or a different person doesn't affect the immorality of that murder by the slightest degree. She was still a person.
All I can say is, these characters are cops. It's their job to deal with situations where things go wrong. So the fact that they would take something in stride doesn't mean it's routine as far as people in general are concerned. Imagine, say, a story about NTSB inspectors investigating a plane crash. Plane crashes are rare events, but the investigators probably wouldn't waste time expressing shock that such a rare thing had happened; they'd just get on with the investigation because it's their job to deal with such things when they do happen. Similarly, even in a world that was mostly peaceful and optimistic and healthy, there would still be the occasional things that went wrong and the occasional people who did bad things, and the cops would have the responsibility to deal with it. So a story from the perspective of cops would take them far more in stride than a story from the perspective of civilians would. That doesn't mean the cops' focus on the seedier side of life reflects the way things are in the broader world. I mean, the perspective on New York City that you'd get from watching a season of Law & Order: SVU would be far, far seedier and more disturbing than the perspective you'd get from actually living there for a year.
I think the reality is closer to the first position. Yes, she lost some memories, but not remotely as much as you're assuming. She was still basically the same person. Heck, I've forgotten a lot of my childhood and high school experiences, since a lot of it sucked, but that doesn't mean I'm a totally different person, at least no more than any of us becomes a different person over time. Sarah's memory loss was just more abrupt.
I suspect that Charles' reaction to her memory loss was as narcissistic as the rest of his thinking: that is, he couldn't accept her changes because she'd lost a lot of her memories of him and their experiences together. She no longer related to him the way he was used to, so from his self-centered viewpoint, she wasn't the same person anymore.
I'm reviving this thread because I've forgotten to mention that my new novelette "Home is Where the Hub Is" is now available in the December 2010 Analog, which should hopefully still be on some bookstore and newsstand shelves. Failing that, it's available as an e-book at the following sites:
Fictionwise
Barnes & Noble
Sony Reader Store
It doesn't seem to be out yet for Kindle, but it should be eventually.
---------------------
Meanwhile, here's some DTI: Watching the Clock discussion reposted from my blog:
DTI copyedits
Pocket Books has apparently switched to an electronic process for copyediting, so instead of getting the marked-up pages shipped to me and sending my corrections by e-mail, I’ve instead been e-mailed the edited manuscript in .doc format. By using MS Word, something I normally don’t do, I’m able to “Track Changes” and see all the edits that have been made (with notations in the margin in red), with the option to accept or reject changes. Also, my own changes are marked in the margin in blue. It’s kinda neat, and I guess it’s more efficient. I went through the marked copyedits pretty quickly, but I still need to take the time to read through the whole thing more carefully.
I also got sent the style sheet, which is a reference document that lists, among other things, the spellings of all the proper names and specialized terms in the book so they can be kept consistent. Since DTI: Watching the Clock is such a complicated book touching on so many different characters, events, times, and concepts both established and original, the list of names for things, people, and places on DTI’s style sheet is a full ten pages long, single-spaced.
Just to whet your appetite, here’s a sample from the “places” section of the style sheet, covering the letters E through I (plus the page number of the first appearance of each name in the manuscript):
Ten of these are locations where scenes are actually set (though there’s some overlap, obviously); the other seven are only referenced. Which are which? That would be telling…
A note on the title: Apparently the full title to be printed on the book’s cover and title page is Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock. However, it’s listed on the Simon & Schuster site and on Amazon.com as Star Trek: DTI: Watching the Clock (which is off by one colon from what I’ve been using, Star Trek DTI: Watching the Clock). So it looks like the two forms are equivalent and interchangeable, with the abbreviated form being preferred for talking/writing about the book but the spelled-out form used on the book itself. Although I don’t yet know which form will be printed on the spine of the book. I wouldn’t be surprised if they used the shorter form to make it fit better. (I know I’ve seen that done in some case, the full name on the front cover and the acronym on the spine, but I can’t remember what book that was. Maybe it was a video or CD instead.)
Fictionwise
Barnes & Noble
Sony Reader Store
It doesn't seem to be out yet for Kindle, but it should be eventually.
---------------------
Meanwhile, here's some DTI: Watching the Clock discussion reposted from my blog:
DTI copyedits
Pocket Books has apparently switched to an electronic process for copyediting, so instead of getting the marked-up pages shipped to me and sending my corrections by e-mail, I’ve instead been e-mailed the edited manuscript in .doc format. By using MS Word, something I normally don’t do, I’m able to “Track Changes” and see all the edits that have been made (with notations in the margin in red), with the option to accept or reject changes. Also, my own changes are marked in the margin in blue. It’s kinda neat, and I guess it’s more efficient. I went through the marked copyedits pretty quickly, but I still need to take the time to read through the whole thing more carefully.
I also got sent the style sheet, which is a reference document that lists, among other things, the spellings of all the proper names and specialized terms in the book so they can be kept consistent. Since DTI: Watching the Clock is such a complicated book touching on so many different characters, events, times, and concepts both established and original, the list of names for things, people, and places on DTI’s style sheet is a full ten pages long, single-spaced.
Just to whet your appetite, here’s a sample from the “places” section of the style sheet, covering the letters E through I (plus the page number of the first appearance of each name in the manuscript):
Ten of these are locations where scenes are actually set (though there’s some overlap, obviously); the other seven are only referenced. Which are which? That would be telling…
A note on the title: Apparently the full title to be printed on the book’s cover and title page is Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock. However, it’s listed on the Simon & Schuster site and on Amazon.com as Star Trek: DTI: Watching the Clock (which is off by one colon from what I’ve been using, Star Trek DTI: Watching the Clock). So it looks like the two forms are equivalent and interchangeable, with the abbreviated form being preferred for talking/writing about the book but the spelled-out form used on the book itself. Although I don’t yet know which form will be printed on the spine of the book. I wouldn’t be surprised if they used the shorter form to make it fit better. (I know I’ve seen that done in some case, the full name on the front cover and the acronym on the spine, but I can’t remember what book that was. Maybe it was a video or CD instead.)
^ If the DTI is based in Greenwich, I will be very pleased indeed... ;-)
That would be most ironic.
In fact, DTI Headquarters is situated so that the Prime Meridian passes right through the middle of the director's desk. It's about a kilometer north of the Royal Observatory, just outside of Greenwich Park. I initially planned to put it in the Observatory itself, but then I realized a major tourist attraction wouldn't be the best place to put the offices of a high-security government agency.
And no, that would be the exact opposite of ironic, BrotherBenny. Irony is when something is the reverse of what would be expected or appropriate -- like, say, if the headquarters for the Department of War were located in Gandhi's birthplace. Greenwich is the most appropriate site possible for the DTI, and is therefore the least ironic site possible.
And no, that would be the exact opposite of ironic, BrotherBenny. Irony is when something is the reverse of what would be expected or appropriate -- like, say, if the headquarters for the Department of War were located in Gandhi's birthplace. Greenwich is the most appropriate site possible for the DTI, and is therefore the least ironic site possible.
I hope Dulmer and Lucsly bump into Luke and Maria in Ealing.
