Perhaps I did a little better with the generation gap. Unlike authors of so-called “cyber-punk” stories, I just don’t find it plausible that undisciplined, hormone-drenched, antisocial young males will forsake thousands of years of fixation on muscular bluster and come instead to dominate high tech during the next century. Putting aside that unlikely cliche, I had some fun suggesting instead that the descendants of portable video cameras might be used as weapons by elderly committees of vigilance. The demographics in countries like the United States, Japan, and China do seem to point to a period some are already calling the “empire of the old.”
Meanwhile, in Kenya, the average age at present is just fifteen, and the birth rate skyrockets.
For some notions I owe a debt to other authors. I’ve already referred to John Brunner, whose award-winning novel Stand on Zanzibar was among the very best fifty-year projection novels of an earlier day. Likewise, Aldous Huxley’s work was inspirational.
The idea of a human “cultural singularity” — in which our power and knowledge might accelerate so quickly that the pace grows exponentially in months, weeks, days — making all current problems academic in a flash — is one that’s been brewing for a while, but was depicted especially well in Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Real Time. The notion of capital punishment by “disassembly” came from the novels of Larry Niven.
Many authors since de Chardin have written about the creation of some sort of “overmind,” into which human consciousness might someday either evolve or subsume. Traditionally this is presented as a simple choice between obstinate individualism on the one hand, or being homogenized and absorbed on the other. I have always found this either-or dichotomy simplistic and tried to present a different point of view here. Still, the basic concept goes back a long way.
The idea for depicting a space shuttle, crash-landed on Easter Island, was provoked by a Lee Correy science fiction story, “Shuttle Down,” which appeared in Analog Magazine a decade ago.
Likewise, much of the discussion of human consciousness was inspired by articles in respectable neuroscience journals, or cribbed from innovative thinkers like Marvin Minsky, Stanley Ornstein, and even Julian Jaynes, whose famous book on the origin of consciousness might well have made a splendid science fiction novel.
The Helvetian War, on the other hand, I can blame on no one but myself. (I expect it will probably cause me no little grief.) Nevertheless, for this book I needed some dark, traumatic conflict to reverberate in my characters’ past — as Vietnam, World War II, and the Holocaust still make contemporary folk twitch in recollection. It had to be something at once both chilling and surprising, as so many events over the last fifty years have been. (And frankly, I’ve had it with stereotyped superpower schemes, accidental missile launches, any other cliches.) So I tried to come up with a scenario that — if not very likely — was at least plausible in its own context. Then I chose to center it around a nation that’s presently among the very last anyone would think of as a serious threat to peace. I don’t know if it works, but so far it has rocked a few people back and made them say, “Huh!” That’s good enough for me.
Speaking of war — one reader asked why I barely refer to one of today’s principle concerns… the Great Big War On Drugs. Will it have been solved by the year 2038?
Well, not by any program or approach now being tried, that’s for sure. I’m not fatalistic. It makes some sense to regulate when and how self-destructive citizens can stupefy themselves, especially in public. Social sanctions have already proven more effective than laws at driving down liquor and tobacco consumption in North America. So much that distillers and cigarette makers are in a state of demographic panic.
But as for trying to eradicate drugs, right now we just seem to be driving up the price. Addicts commit crimes to finance their habits, and convey billions of dollars to pushers who are, inarguably, among the worst human beings alive. Anyway, it’s been shown that some individuals can secrete endorphins and other hormones at will, using meditation or self hypnosis or biofeedback. If such techniques become commonplace (as no doubt they will… everything does), shall we then outlaw meditation? Should the police test anyone caught dozing in the park, to make sure he isn’t drugging himself with his own self-made enkephalins?
Reductio ad absurdum. Or as Dirty Harry once said, we’ve got to learn our limitations.
Which only leads to a much deeper problem that has plagued society ever since before Darwin. That problem is moral ambiguity.
Every culture before ours had codes that precisely defined acceptable behavior and prescribed sanctions to enforce obedience. Such rules, whether religious, or cultural, or legal, or traditional, were like those a parent imposes on a young child. (And which children themselves insist upon.) In other words, they were explicit, clear-cut, utterly unambiguous.
Eventually, some adolescents grow beyond needing perfect, delineated truths. They even learn to savor a little ambiguity. Meanwhile, others quail before it… or go to the opposite extreme, using ambiguity as an excuse to deny any ethical restraint at all. We see all three of these reactions in contemporary society as individuals and governments are asked to wrestle individually with complex issues formerly left to God.
For instance, while some insist that human life begins at the very moment of conception, others ideologically proclaim it absent until birth itself. Neither extreme represents the uncomfortable majority, who — supported by embryology — sense that the issue of abortion is being waged across a murky swamp, bereft of clear borders or road signs.
More quandaries abound. Has mankind yet “made life in a test tube”? That depends on how you define “life” of course. By one standard, that milestone was passed way back in the seventies. By another, it was reached in the mid-eighties. By yet a third, perhaps it hasn’t happened yet, but definitely will soon.
As the aged grow more numerous in industrial societies, and as the power and expense of modern medicine grow ever more spectacular, the question of death will also come to vex us. We’ve already spent a decade agonizing over the terminal patient’s “right to die” if faced with the alternative of prolonged, painful support by machinery. A consensus appears to be coalescing around that issue, but what about the next inevitable predicament… when young taxpayers of the next century find themselves paying for endless herculean care demanded by millions of octogenarian former baby-boomers who outnumber them, outvote them, and have spent all their lives used to getting whatever they wanted?
What will it even mean to be “dead” in the future? Some predict it may soon be possible to cool living human bodies down to near (or even past) freezing, suspending life processes, perhaps so people could be revived at a later date. In fact, by primitive standards, it’s already happened — for example, in cases of extreme hypothermia. The can of worms this might open is boggling to consider. And yet, enthusiasts for this nascent field of “cryonics” answer moral quandaries and strict definitions of death by asking, “Why pass binary laws for an analog world?” (In other words, most moral codes say “either-or”… while the universe itself seems to be filled instead with a whole lot of “maybes.”)