For the most part, I couldn’t do it. There’s just too much overlap. All those superimposed colors turn the Venn diagram into a muddy gray disk. So, for the most part, I’ll have to fall back on alphabetical order when I thank Nick Alcock, Beverly Bambury, Hannu Bloomila, Andrew Buhr, Nancy Cerelli, Alexey Cheberda, Dr. Krystyna Chodorowksa, Jacob Cohen, Anna Davour, Alyx Dellamonica, Sibylle Eisbach, Jon Enerson, Val Grimm, Norm Haldeman, Thomas Hardman, Dr. Andrew Hessel, Keith Honeyborne, Seth Keiper, Dr. Ed Keller, Chris Knall, Leonid Korogodski, Do-Ming Lum, Danielle MacDonald, Dr. Matt McCormick, Chinedum Ofoegbu, Jesús Olmo, Chris Pepper, Janna Randina, Kelly Robson, Patrick “Bahumat” Rochefort, Dr. Kaj Sotala, Dr. Brad Templeton, and Rob Tucker. And some mysterious dude who only goes by the name “Random J.”
Some folks, however, went above and beyond in singular and specific ways. Dr. Dan Brooks ranted and challenged and acted as occasional traveling companion. Kristin Choffe did her best to teach me the essentials of DNA barcoding, although she couldn’t keep me from sucking at it. (She also fronted me a vial containing the refined DNA of a dozen plant and animal species, with which I washed out my mouth before submitting a cheek swab to the Department of Homeland Security.) Leona Lutterodt described God as a Process, which lit an LED in my brain. Dr. Deborah McLennan snuck me through the paywalls. Sheila Miguez pointed me to a plug-in that made it vastly easier to insert citations into Notes and References (I will understand if, after reading that section, you decide to hate her for the same reason). Ray Neilson kept me on my toes and kept my Linux box running. Mark Showell saw me working on a laptop that was literally held together with binder clips, and took pity. Cat Sparks moved me halfway around the world; she was the fulcrum that tipped the worst year of my life into the best.
Some of these people are meatspace friends; others are pixelpals. They’ve argued with me online and off, punched holes in whatever bits of Echopraxia leaked out during gestation, passed me countless references on everything from hominid genetics to machine consciousness to metal-eating bacteria. They are a small army but a very smart one, and despite my best efforts I’m probably forgetting some of them. I hope those I’ve neglected here will forgive me.
Howard Morhaim. After dealing with agents whose advice ran the gamut from Buy my book to I’ll only represent you if you write a near-future techno-thriller about a marine biologist, Howard told me to write what I was inspired to: selling it, he insisted, was his job. This might not be the most opportunistic attitude to adopt in a Darwinian marketplace, but man it was nice to run into someone who put the writing first for a change.
Ironically, my next novel is most likely going to be a near-future techno-thriller about a marine biologist.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
I am naked as I type this.
I was naked writing the whole damn book.
I aspire to a certain degree of discomfort in my writing, on the principle that if you never risk a face-plant you never go anywhere new. And if there’s one surefire way to get me out of my comfort zone, it’s the challenge of taking invisible omnipotent sky fairies seriously enough to incorporate into a hard SF novel. The phrase “faith-based hard SF” may, in fact, be the ultimate oxymoron—Clarke’s Third notwithstanding—which means that Echopraxia could be my biggest face-plant since βehemoth (especially in the wake of Blindsight, which continues to surprise with all the love it’s garnered over the years). And thanks to a lack of empirical evidence (as of this writing, anyway) for the existence of deities, I can’t even fall back on my usual strategy of shielding my central claims behind papers from Nature.
I can try to shield everything else there, though. Perhaps that will do.
I’m not dwelling too much on consciousness this time around—I pretty much shot my load on that subject with Blindsight—except to note in passing that the then-radical notion of consciousness-as-nonadaptive-side-effect has started appearing in the literature,[1] and that more and more “conscious” activities (including math![2]) are turning out to be nonconscious after all[3], [4], [5] (though holdouts remain[6]).
One fascinating exception informs Keith Honeyborne’s report on “Prismatics,” who nearly drown themselves to achieve a heightened state of awareness. The premise of Ezequiel Morsella’s PRISM model[7], [8] is that consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. (I have to point out that exactly the same sort of conflict—the impulse to withdraw one’s hand from a painful stimulus, versus the knowledge that you’ll die if you act on that impulse—was exactly how the Bene Gesserit assessed whether Paul Atreides qualified as “Human” during their gom jabbar test in Frank Herbert’s Dune.)
Everything else comes down to tricks and glitches. The subliminal “gang signs” Valerie programmed onto the Crown’s bulkheads seem a logical (if elaborate) extension of the newborn field of optogenetics.[9] The “sensed presence” Dan Brüks and Lianna Lutterodt experienced in the attic results from a hack on the temporoparietal junction that screws up the brain’s body map[10], [11] (basically, the part of your brain that keeps track of your body parts gets kicked in the side and registers a duplicate set of body parts off-center). Sengupta’s induced misiphonia is a condition in which relatively innocuous sounds—a slurp, a hiccup—are enough to provoke violent rage.[12] All of this was inflicted in the service of education, though: as Brüks points out, fear promotes memory formation.[13], [14]
Fear and belief can also kill you,[15] a trick used to good effect in certain religious practices.[16] And in case you were wondering what was up with the fusiform gyrus there at the end (a couple of my beta readers did), it’s the structure containing the face-recognition circuitry[17] we tweaked to amp up the mutual-agonism response in vampires. It’s part of the same circuitry that evolved to let us see faces in the clouds, involved—once again—in the evolution of our religious impulse (see below).
The brain’s habit of literalizing metaphors—the tendency to regard people as having “warmer” personalities when you happen to be holding a mug of coffee, the Bicamerals’ use of hand-washing to mitigate feelings of guilt and uncertainty—is also an established neurological fact.[18]
I pulled “induced thanoparorasis” out of my ass. It’s a cool idea, though, huh?
Back in Blindsight I laid out a fair bit of groundwork on the biology and evolution of vampires. I’m not going to revisit that here (you can check out FizerPharm’s stockholder presentation[19] if you need a refresher), except for the citation in Blindsight implying that female vampires were impossible (the gene responsible for their obligate primatovory being located on the Y chromosome[20]). More recent work by Cheberda et al have established a more general protocadherin dysfunction on both X and Y chromosomes,[21] resolving this inadvertent paradox.
1
D. M. Rosenthal, “Consciousness and Its Function,”
2
Asael Y. Sklar et al., “Reading and Doing Arithmetic Nonconsciously,”
3
Ap Dijksterhuis et al., “On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-without-Attention Effect,”
4
Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya, “Attention and Consciousness: Two Distinct Brain Processes,”
5
Ken A. Paller and Joel L. Voss, “An Electrophysiological Signature of Unconscious Recognition Memory,”
6
C. Nathan DeWall, Roy F. Baumeister, and E. J. Masicampo, “Evidence That Logical Reasoning Depends on Conscious Processing,”
7
Ezequiel Morsella et al., “The Essence of Conscious Conflict: Subjective Effects of Sustaining Incompatible Intentions,”
8
E. Morsella, “The Function of Phenomenal States: Supramodular Interaction Theory,”
9
Matthew W. Self and Pieter R. Roelfsema, “Optogenetics: Eye Movements at Light Speed,”
10
Shahar Arzy et al., “Induction of an Illusory Shadow Person,”
11
Michael A. Persinger and Sandra G. Tiller, “Case Report: A Prototypical Spontaneous ‘Sensed Presence’ of a Sentient Being and Concomitant Electroencephalographic Activity in the Clinical Laboratory,”
12
Joyce Cohen, “For People with Misophonia, a Chomp or a Slurp May Cause Rage,”
13
Rachel Jones, “Stress Brings Memories to the Fore,”
14
V. S. Ramachandran,
15
Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills,”
16
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee,
17
Mark Brown, “How the Brain Spots Faces—Wired Science,”
18
Simon Lacey, Randall Stilla, and K. Sathian, “Metaphorically Feeling: Comprehending Textural Metaphors Activates Somatosensory Cortex,”
19
FizerPharm, Inc. “Vampire Domestication: Taming Yesterday’s Nightmares for a Better Tomorrow,” 2055, http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm.
20
Patricia Blanco-Arias, Carole A. Sargent, and Nabeel A. Affara, “A Comparative Analysis of the Pig, Mouse, and Human PCDHX Genes,”
21
Alexey Cheberda, Janna Randina, and J. Random, “Coincident Autapomorphies in the γ-PCDHX γ-PCDHY Gene Complexes, and Their Role in Vampire Hominovory,”