There is a great hashtag in Mastodon: #WritingWonders. Each day, authors are asked to answer one question about our stories, our characters. Today, the question is about the main character’s hair, for example. Yesterday, it was about the main themes in our works in progress. I find it good to sum them up here, as well.
I have been working on a series of novels, two of which have been completed but not published yet, and I’m now working on the third (with more to follow):
- The Hornets’ Nest
- Fortress Venus, Mother Earth
- The Garden of the Damned
In all of them, trauma is an important theme. Almost every character of importance has some sort of trauma. Recently, I realized that each of them shares some aspect of myself: how I am, how I was, or even how I dreamed I could be. Indeed, even the antagonists have something of what I could have become had I made other choices in my life. This realization has helped me to deepen the characters.
But there can be many kinds of trauma. The main themes in my stories fall into the following groups.
- War, Xenophobia, Genocide:
- The new human species genetically engineered on Venus to adapt to the planet instead of terraforming it is target for extermination by Earth—very persistently, attacking once a generation over three centuries.
- As a result, the young society of Venus is warped by warrior mentality, drive for survival at all costs, and violence. So many children are born in artificial wombs, from frozen sperm and eggs, to dead parents that orphans form a majority. Trauma persists across generations, as the children that experienced abandonment—for however lofty cause, even self-sacrifice to rescue millions—are likely to abandon their children, too.
- A related question that my characters must answer is whether terrorism can ever be a justified response, even to genocide. The answer is no.
- Genocide is neither faceless nor ubiquitous. Lately, science fiction stories appear to want to outdo each other by the number of planets destroyed, etc. In my stories, the victims aren’t faceless. I refuse to enter the arms race of stakes, blowing them up to the galactic scale. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find the g-word in my works.
- Health of Individuals:
- Tough life at the Fortress Venus Academy forces the cadets into extremely tight-knit teams. The stories show the healing power of close friendship, Indeed, in this society, romantic interests can come and go—but one lives and dies with close friends.
- In fact, research shows that the single most important factor in reducing or even preventing combat PTSD is the strength of interpersonal relationships within the team. The foursome of the stories will become a polyamorous family.
- Dreams as the internal psychotherapy of mind (Marian specializes in dream cybermagic).
- Music as the language of emotions (Saraswati specializes in music cybermagic).
- Health of Societies:
- Diversity as a universal good.
- Homogeneity—whether ethnic, cultural, or any other kind—always leads to a rise of entropy and therefore decay. Even under best conditions, it’s 100 steps forward, 101 step back.
- Diverse societies, spontaneously self-organizing, on average lower their entropy. The chance of failure is never zero. But on average, it’s 100 steps back, 101 step forward.
- Neurodiversity is an important aspect of diversity in general. It must not be treated as a disease. Only if an individual sees something as interfering with their quality of life should they be helped—and indeed must.
- Diversity as a universal good.
- Artificial Intelligence:
- I subscribe to Ted Chiang’s view that AIs must be born and grow up as children do (as in his novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects). I don’t even use the term AI, preferring “digient” (digital sapient) or “artificial mind” (there is so much more to a mind than intellect).
- Digients are not superior to us. In fact, the only way for them to reach our level is by completely emulating brains. In my stories, artificial brains have replaced electronic chips. Cyberspace has grown so complex that no one works with “machine code”—not just because it’s buried under many layers of abstraction but because it doesn’t exist anymore.
- I object to the old but wrong stereotype of a super-rational AI. In order to be sentient, a mind must have emotions, for they are key to snap decision making in unpredictable environments—where a strong butterfly effect (when rounding all calculations to the 14th decimal place instead of the 15th can mean the difference between life and death) and incomplete information (fog of war) makes complete computability impossible in principle.
- Cyberhumans:
- Marriage of the digital with the analog is superior to the purely digital. A discrete system, however enormous, cannot have true butterfly effect and therefore cannot respond well to the unpredictable. Our genetic code is also digital but requires analog “vessels” (bodies) to propagate and evolve.
- For this reason, “cyberhumans” (with cyber components in the brain) are superior to “posthumans” (aka “uploaded minds”). Posthumans are completely reproducible and therefore potentially immortal. But precisely because they’re completely reproducible, they’re more predictable and hackable, subject to mind control. In reality, they’re often enslaved and easily disposable. Some immortality, my butt.
- Subconscious computation does away with the old stereotype of our minds getting lost in cyberspace once we have brain links. That’s just a failure of imagination: namely, a failure to imagine subconscious computation. A lion’s share of what we do in the real world is also processed subconsciously. If we were thinking consciously about everything—like, which muscles to engage to walk—we would have gone bonkers in the physical world, too. But we do not. As in the physical world, so in cyberspace.
- Hive Minds:
- Hive minds have been incorrectly imagined as totalitarian. Although I hate totalitarianism, I don’t think hive minds deserve to be portrayed like this. In fact, in order to be conscious, a hive mind would have to be extremely diverse. After all, when all neurons begin to act as one, the brain loses complexity. This is epilepsy, when we lose consciousness.
- Hive minds are also incorrectly imagined as linking many brains into just a bigger brain. That’s trivial, and a bigger brain doesn’t always mean a better one. Rather, a hive mind is an emergent phenomenon of a higher order: like a brain is not just a bigger neuron. I see a hive mind more like “a spirit of a nation,” which doesn’t affect any of its members’ individuality at all.
- In fact, some philosophers have argued that the United States may have already achieved consciousness, just via all the complex social interactions and without brain links into cyberspace. Personally, I don’t think that even the United States’ society is diverse enough for that! Hive minds must be incredibly diverse.