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Books by the Author

#89: Novel Confrontations

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #89, on the subject of Novel Confrontations.

With permission of Valdron Inc I am publishing my second novel, Old Verses New, in serialized form on the web (that link will take you to the table of contents).  If you missed the first one, you can find the table of contents for it at Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel.  There was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; the last of those for the first novel is #71:  Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One, which indexes all the others and catches a lot of material from an earlier collection of behind-the-writings reflections that had been misplaced for a decade.  Now as the second is being posted I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, and perhaps in a more serious way than the previous ones, because it sometimes talks about what I was planning to do later in the book or how this book connects to events yet to come in the third (For Better or Verse)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them, or even put off reading these insights until the book has finished.  Links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters being discussed, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.

These were the previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts covering this book:

  1. #74:  Another Novel (which provided this kind of insight into the first nine chapters along with some background material on the book as a whole),
  2. #78:  Novel Fears (which continued with coverage of chapters 10 through 18),
  3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27),
  4. #86:  Novel Conflicts (which continued with coverage of chapters 28 through 36).

This picks up from there, and I expect to continue with additional posts after every ninth chapter in the series.

img0089Camp

History of the series, including the reason it started, the origins of character names and details, and many of the ideas, are in those earlier posts, and won’t be repeated here.

Chapter 37, Hastings 56

I needed to bring back the clue about the acorn.  It was going to be important in the third book, and so it needed to be remembered.  Using it in passing to get to the marble made sure it was mentioned without being emphasized.

The eyesight trick had a lot of uncertainty to it.  For one thing, it hadn’t occurred to me that the first thing she was likely to do was create light, and so all this preparation for fighting in darkness was unimportant.  Also, I thought I might use it in the end scenario, but I didn’t really have any idea how (and in fact I didn’t).  The whole black and white versus color thing was interesting to me, but not terribly useful but as a way of making it seem like something was happening while they waited.

Chapter 38, Kondor 54

The luck of the dice gave me a string of potentially disastrous situations, and the opportunity to have Kondor worry about whether he was ever going to reach civilization with his crate.

The idea that Kondor can tell himself he is not superstitious simply because in thinking about whether or not his emeralds were the cause of recent events he does not use the words “luck” or “curse” shows the shallowness of his antisupernaturalist views.

The customs problem was an afterthought, something to keep the story going.

Chapter 39, Brown 13

The camp routine was built from my own camp memories.

Bob is a conglomerate person, but somehow I think that John Walker is a significant part at least of his temperament.  But John is not terribly religious.

Bill always calls to mind Bill Friant, so he’s big, powerful, slow-moving, kind-hearted; I don’t know if Bill goes camping.  The pack was there so Derek could take it with him (remember, Derek needs a pack).

Pete isn’t anyone.  Neither is Ralph, although I knew a Robert Schwartz back in elementary school (in Scotch Plains, through the ’60’s) who may have contributed a bit to this one.

My mom always liked the copper enamel jewelry; I often wish I could make it at home.

I had briefly considered the possibility of the dungeon master killing the players, but it was so lame and unrealistic an idea I didn’t stay with it more than a few seconds.  However, it led to the idea of the anti-gaming kid doing it.  Also, I created the player interests to match the murders at this point–except for David, whom I had already created as a lifeguard so he could patch the tire.  The story characters were then matched to the game characters in a way that captured a bit of each personality (I thought) and also fit with the murders.  And I introduced Michael as the anti-gaming character.

The game is clearly Dungeons & Dragons, although it never says so.  Roll your own fate is more something we say in Multiverser games, but it applies here as well.

Mary Healy was the name of the old lady who lived next door to us in the ’80’s.  I think I took the name Marybeth from one of my wife’s high school friends I had met briefly but who was often in her stories.  She was just a name.

Having Derek learn to use a bow was supposed to open into the use of the weapon in the future, but the situation didn’t arise until the third book (and it only occurs to me now that it will).

Chapter 40, Hastings 57

The extended scripture from Romans 8 was thought too long to use in combat by the editor of the first novel; yet it was so strongly defensive I wanted to continue using it.  The solution seemed to be to run it against unrelated physical actions which would enable her to pronounce the words while fighting.

I had not decided whether another vampire should appear that night or not; but on reflection it seemed once they had prepared for it such an appearance would not add to the story.

Chapter 41, Kondor 55

The customs interruption was a sudden inspiration; it would help to have something go wrong, and this seemed ideal.

The difference between studying for credentials and studying for knowledge was something I learned in college.

Chapter 42, Brown 14

It seems to me that I went on a treasure hunt during an overnighter at a Y.M.C.A. day camp.  I remember the counselors went with us, and that there was a problem about the clues being in the wrong places.  I didn’t actually create counselors for this story, but these were older kids and it didn’t seem a problem to let them go on their own.

It was important that the boys were always separating when they ran from place to place, because it meant no one knew where any of them were at any moment.

Chapter 43, Kondor 56

I suppose that my ship-to-ship combat ideas are a combination of playing Pirates (a computer game) and watching a few swashbucklers like Captain Blood.

I don’t think I’d considered this as an opportunity to remove Kondor from this world right away.  It was more an afterthought once the combat began, that I could find a colorful way to remove him, and ultimately I’d gotten all I could from this scenario and needed to move forward.

In the early ’80’s during a D&D game, Bob Schretzman lent me a book about ships of this period.  I don’t remember much about them, but tried to put what I recalled to good use.

My father-in-law had a ring with a star sapphire which she remembered being silver; it was supposed to go to my wife after his death and she had wanted to give it to me on our twenty-fifth anniversary, but it was too small for my smallest finger and got put away to await a day when we could afford to size it (it turned out to be gold).

Joe is of course going through the stage two dream state as he comes into his next world; the imagery of the dead comes from his surroundings.

Chapter 44, Brown 15

Derek’s story was heating up, and Lauren’s was slowing down, so I jumped him ahead of her here.

Michael bringing the nurse is actually the first real clue to this mystery.  He was supposed to find the camp director, and let Bill get the nurse.  He brings the nurse because he knows that Bill is dead.

The mention of the defibrillator was difficult.  Derek’s story has to reflect Derek’s thoughts and observations, as it is from his perspective; the use of the proper name for the device in the direct narrative seemed to break that.  I tried to capture his perception by calling it a “portable electric shock thing” and then parenthetically stating that he didn’t know the name for defibrillator.

The mention of Pete playing the archer is another clue, pointing to the game as the motive.

Chapter 45, Hastings 58

Lauren’s story had a couple of serious problems at this point.  I couldn’t let her kill Horta, because she had already faced him in the future; I couldn’t let her kill Tubrok, because he was now my villain for the future scenario.  However, somehow I had to establish her as Laurelyn of Wandborough, Mystic of the Western Woods, so I couldn’t allow them to kill her, at least, not yet.  Thus I have them escape.

Lauren here invents a new psionic skill from consideration of two other psionic skills.  It is part of the process that makes her mind skills a bit more credible to the reader:  she doesn’t simply decide she wants to do something, she thinks through a way to do it.

When I created Garla at this moment I did not know what I would do with her in the future; I just needed a werewolf, and I needed a reason to put Lauren in a cave in the woods, and this did the job.

The cave was a sudden inspiration.  I was thinking at that moment in terms of a place for Lauren to wait; but I was also going to need a place for her to live for an extended time, to create the legend of Laurelyn of Wandborough I needed, and the cave suited that.

I hope these “behind the writings” posts continue to be of interest, and perhaps some value, to those of you who have been reading the novel.  If there is any positive feedback, they will continue.

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Bible and Theology

#88: Sheep and Goats

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #88, on the subject of Sheep and Goats.

Some years back I was again listening to a wonderful collection of Keith Green songs, but came to one I never much liked in which he plays the piano, cleverly retells Jesus’ parable of separating the sheep from the goats, and preaches a conclusion from it.  This time I asked myself why it bothered me, and it struck me that he had to be wrong:  what Keith was drawing from the story was not the gospel of Christ.  So I looked up the parable (it is in Matthew 25:31ff) and read it once again–and indeed, Keith had it wrong.  So, it occurred to me, did most of the people I had ever heard talk about it.

I talked about it in more than one venue, and got some interesting responses to what I taught, but it continued to nag me.  So I am now sharing it here, so more of you can read what the parable really says, instead of what so many seem to think it says.

img0088Flock

Let’s start with the way the parable is understood by too many people.  It appears that at the end of the world Jesus separates everyone into two groups.  He puts all the people who did good things over on his right, and all the people who did bad things to His left.  Then he says to the people on His right, “You people, because you did all these good things, I recognize that you are sheep.”  Those people say, “Thank you, Lord, yes, we worked hard to be sheep, and are pleased that you noticed.”  So the Lord says, “Come into the Kingdom, you’ve earned your reward.”

Then he turns to the other group on his left, and says, “Because you did all these bad things, I recognize that you are goats.”  They replied, “Yes, well, we liked doing bad things, made an effort to be bad, and don’t really care what you think of us.”  So He says to them, “Go away, you deserve your punishment.”

If you think that’s what the parable says, I hope I can disillusion you of this.  It says something that is almost the complete opposite of that in the most important ways.

First, we got the part right that it is the end of the world and Jesus is separating everyone into two groups–but He does so strictly on the basis of whether they are sheep or goats, not on anything they do.  That is, like any shepherd with at least a day of experience, He can tell the difference between a sheep and a goat by looking at it, and doesn’t have to observe what it is doing.  In the picture above you can clearly recognize the goat in the bottom left corner foreground as distinctly different from the other animals in the flock, most of which are obviously sheep.  So he looks at each animal and puts it in the right group, sheep to the right, goats to the left.

Now Jesus talks to the sheep.  What He says is, “You know, I’ve noticed something about you sheep:  you are always doing all these kind things for me.  It’s as if you can’t help yourself.  You see people in need, and you reach out and do something.”  The sheep, now, reply, “What are you talking about?  We don’t remember doing anything out of the ordinary.  We just did what we did, what sheep naturally do.”  He says, “Yes, but what you sheep naturally do for everyone makes you the kind of creatures I want to have in the Kingdom, so come.”

It’s time to talk to the goats, and you know what He says, but you might still have it wrong.  He begins, “I noticed something about you goats, too.”  What He noticed about the goats, though, is not “You are always doing bad things.”  No, not at all.  He says, “You never showed Me any kindness.”  It was the absence of those kind acts that Jesus noticed.  And notice the reply:  they say, “We never saw You in need of any kindness.”  The goats aren’t cruel; they’re oblivious to the needs of others.  Those needs never come onto their radar.  It does not occur to them to do anything for anyone else.  It is entirely natural for them to be completely self-absorbed.  Then Jesus says to them, “Your attitude toward others prevents you from being good members of this Kingdom, so I’m going to have to send you away.”

The important point to notice here about both the sheep and the goats is that neither of them is trying to do what they do.  The sheep are acting like sheep, and the goats are acting like goats, and both are doing so completely oblivious to the fact that they are doing something unusual.  Sheep show kindness to others because they are sheep and naturally see needs and try to meet them; goats do not show kindness because being goats they are oblivious to anything that is not about them.  Neither is really aware of what he is doing; he does it because it seems the natural thing to do.  You don’t try to become a sheep by doing something; if you are a sheep, you act like one.

I taught this in a small worship service at the Ubercon game convention some years ago, and one of the attendees I’ll call Avian shared a story from her own experience.  She had been invited to what was something of a house gathering, possibly a meeting or something like a service, by a Wiccan.  She accepted the invitation, and arrived to find the home filled with people she didn’t know, but a hostess who was obviously rather sick trying to make everyone comfortable as they interacted with each other.  Avian immediately saw that the hostess was exhausted, struggling against some kind of head cold or allergies or something, and said, “You don’t look well.  Come on, show me your kitchen, I’m going to make you a cup of tea.”  She took the hostess into the kitchen, and with a bit of coaching on where to find things soon served her a cup of hot tea and sat with her to see what else she could do.

The others at the meeting were flabbergasted.  They asked why she was doing this.  She was confused.  “What do you mean, why am I doing this?  Why aren’t you doing this?  It seems the thing anyone would do, that this woman is not feeling well and she needs someone to help her feel better.”  They didn’t get it.  It strikes me that they were all goats, completely oblivious either that their hostess had a need or that they might want to do something about it.  Avian was a sheep, someone who sees a need and looks for a way to help meet it, because that’s what she thinks people do, because she is a sheep and that’s what sheep do.

Obviously at this point I can’t tell you to act more like sheep.  That would be putting us back to where we were with Keith Green’s error.  You don’t become a sheep by acting like one.  Either you are a sheep or you are not.  But Paul tells us that if anyone is in Christ he is a new creature, old things passed away and new things come.  That is, God changes us from goats to sheep when we look to Him to save us; part of being saved is being turned from our selfish self-absorption to see the needs of others.  We are changed by the renewing of our minds, by the softening of our hearts, by the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.  He teaches us compassion, gives us compassion, causes us to become sheep, and then we act like sheep–and probably don’t even realize we’re doing it, because like Jesus being moved with compassion we try to help.  Whether we give money or time or effort, we do so to meet needs we perceive, to make the lives of others better.  So let your guard down, let God give you that concern for others, and allow yourself to take the risk of becoming a sheep.

It will seem the most natural thing in the world.

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Law and Politics

#87: Spanish Ice Cream

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #87, on the subject of Spanish Ice Cream.

My sister has what I call a facility for languages.  She was, for a time, a United Nations translator.  Before she finished high school, she sometimes dreamt in French.  When she worked in Taiwan, sometimes people speaking with her on the phone would use a word she did not know, and when she explained in Chinese that her vocabulary was limited because she was an American, they would argue with her that she could not be an American because she spoke Chinese too well.  Her Taiwanese-born husband told us that we should ask her, not him, about Chinese pronunciation, because he had what he called the equivalent of a “Brooklyn accent” and her pronunciation was much better.  She also knows smatterings of Italian and I don’t know what else.

I do not have that.  Our parents spoke French at the dinner table not because they were French (my father was Nth generation Southern) but because they wanted to be able to discuss things in front of the four children without our understanding them.  I took two years of French, but when I get mail in French I reply Je parle un tres petit peux de français, and ask if they can send again in English.  I have written several articles which have been translated into French, and I can’t read them.  I remember fewer than a dozen words of Romanian from my three-week concert tour there decades ago (thank-you, you’re welcome, what does this cost), but I never knew more than a score and don’t know the syntax or grammar at all despite being rather good at the linguistic side of languages.  I struggle with Koine Greek to teach New Testament, have picked up a bit of church, law, medical, and logic Latin, know probably less Hebrew than Romanian (and to quote a character in my wife’s favorite movie, “Who would ever bother with Romanian?”).  Most of the Spanish I know I learned from not watching Sesame Street when the kids were watching it–numbers through ten, open and closed–plus a few words that I’ve picked up in funny stories.  I use to tell people that I couldn’t speak enough Spanish to say “I don’t speak Spanish” in Spanish.

In short, I understand that some people have trouble learning a new language.  I certainly do.  Fortuitously I speak what is one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world, and the language of my homeland, quite fluently.

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Leon’s Frozen Custard, in the south side of the city since 1942, has gotten in serious public relations trouble for what on the surface seems a very foolish reason:  the owner does not permit his employees to speak to customers in any language other than English.  Hispanics and liberals called for a boycott, but current owner Ron Schneider has stuck to his guns.  Not all of his employees are bilingual, and he does not want customers to expect bilingual service.  That’s the simple response; there are a lot of other reasons why an employer might have such a policy.

img0087Leon

The protestors are certainly correct that offering multilingual service is a competitive advantage.  I joke with the guy who is probably the best person for computers in the area, because he is co-owner of a small but busy shop that does mostly cellular phones plus computer equipment, and he genuinely is the only guy in the place who is not fluently bilingual (English and Spanish).  They hire no one out front who cannot deal with both the English-speaking customers who come from outside the small city because they know he’s the best and the local Latino population who come because they can ask questions and get answers without a language barrier.  It is an advantage for the store; it translates into a marketable skill for the potential employee.  I could not get a job there, even if I learned a lot more about computers and cell phones than I care to know.  Leon’s could attract more business by serving Spanish-speaking customers with Spanish-speaking employees.  That is a choice he makes.  On the other hand, he’s a landmark, and people in the suburbs drive into the city just to get his ice cream and sandwiches, and apparently hire him to cater weddings and parties.  More business is usually a good thing, but one weighs the costs against the gain in such questions.

The protestors are also right that they don’t have to buy ice cream there.  That’s a cost against benefit analysis, too, as their protest by boycott means they are sacrificing what some claim is the best food of that category in that area, accepting lower quality in the name of principle.  By the same token, though, doesn’t Leon’s have the right to establish the terms on which they will serve customers?  If they have to allow people to order in Spanish, why not Farsi?  Cantonese?  Japanese?  Russian?  Romanian?

If I were invited to sing in a Spanish-speaking church, I am not certain how I would handle that.  On the one hand, I am of the opinion that the lyrics to songs matter, and when I sing I want you to hear and understand the words.  On the other hand, I don’t think it would enhance the performance to have a translator standing next to me trying to repeat everything I sing in another language–even if he doesn’t disrupt my focus he’s going to be talking over the music.  I wouldn’t trust myself to try to sing a translated version of my lyrics–I might wind up calling myself a jelly donut, which does not put me in bad company but is still embarrassing.  You cannot expect everyone to speak every language, or do business in every language.  To do so is to demand that those who cannot speak multiple languages not be permitted to speak at all.

In this case, though, the argument is made that Leon’s already employs some bi-lingual servers; the rule is that those employees who could talk with customers in Spanish are not permitted to do so.  What possible reason could there be for that?

There are quite a few possible reasons, actually.  We’ll begin with the one advanced by Leon’s’ owner, that he does not want customers to expect to be able to order in Spanish.  Not all of his servers can understand an order in Spanish, and if someone comes to the window and no one is working who can take a Spanish order, that customer has to be chased away; and if that customer does not understand enough English to understand that they cannot help him, that slows the line.  On those days, the line is further slowed by the fact that there will be numerous customers in it who cannot be helped because the servers cannot understand what they are saying, the longer line moves more slowly with fewer sales, and people driving by are less likely to stop to queue onto a long line, which is more lost business.  If Leon’s cannot serve you in English, you become a problem for the business, because they can’t serve you every time you come, and you’re scaring away real business by taking space in the line.

Of course, some days some of the servers can speak Spanish.  Why not just let them do so on those days?  Apart fromn the fact already noted, it is clear that not all of the servers speak Spanish.  If some of the customers expect to do business in Spanish, that fouls the queue when they reach the window and have to wait for the bilingual server to be available to help them while the English-speaking server is now trying to find someone else in the line who wants to order in English without giving anyone the feeling that the service is unfair.  Service is now inefficient again.

There is also the problem of management.  I don’t know whether owner Schneider speaks Spanish, but he probably does not make it a requirement for his management staff to do so.  Even the best of employer-employee relationships are a bit adversarial; your employer might be a friend, but he is not a buddy, and he is watching to ensure that you do the job right.  Customer service is a vital part of any business, and particularly in the food industry.  If I’m running the store, I want to be able to understand what my employees are saying to my customers, and it is important to do so for a lot of reasons–easily illustrated by giving a few ideas of things I do not want to hear my employees saying to my customers.

  • You’re ugly, go away.
  • Hey, can I see you Friday night?  Great movie showing, and a hot girl like you shouldn’t sit home alone.
  • That’s the large cone; pay me for the small, and later you can make it up to me.
  • You don’t want to eat here.  The food here isn’t worth what they charge; you’re better off at the place down the street.
  • My boss is a jerk and the pay is a joke, I’m quitting just as soon as I can find another job.
  • I hate this place and everyone who works here.  By the way, the AR-15 assault rifle I ordered arrived yesterday.
  • They’re going to make the deposit at three-thirty, and that blonde girl will walk across the parking lot to the bank across the street; you can ambush her by the clothing drop.

You get the point–or do you?  Remember, the store is responsible for what its employees say to its customers.  To exercise that responsibility, the managers have to be able to understand what the employees are saying.  In order both to meet the demands of the protestors and protect the interests of the business, Leon’s would have to fire any employees, and particularly any managers, who are not fluently bilingual–a mistake for any business that has been running so long, because they undoubtedly have some excellent and trusted people working there who would be out of work, and would create a lot of disgruntled employees and former employees.

And what happens when the immigrant Middle Eastern population insists that they should be able to order in Farsi or Arabic?

I saw the list a few years ago; I believe that official government publications in these United States come in over a hundred languages.  Every court of law in New Jersey has a Spanish interpreter on staff, and in most jurisdictions they earn their money translating for defendants who do not adequately understand English.

In the Roman Empire, every province had its own language, and people spoke that language with each other locally, much like Italian neighborhoods of the last century and Hispanic neighborhoods today, but on a larger scale.  Yet business was usually conducted in the international language Greek, and legal proceedings generally in the official language Latin, and almost everyone was tri-lingual.  There’s nothing wrong with being multilingual, and there’s nothing wrong with offering multilingual customer service to attract customers who do not speak English.  However, when we attempt to force people who do not speak a foreign language to use it in their business transactions, we are being unfair to someone.  The customer can always find a merchant eager to accommodate his language requirements to make a sale.  The businessman can only work in the languages he knows.  It is therefore the choice of the business what languages will be spoken in their business transactions, and if the customer doesn’t like it he can bring an interpreter or shop somewhere else.

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Books by the Author

#86: Novel Conflicts

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #86, on the subject of Novel Conflicts.

With permission of Valdron Inc I am publishing my second novel, Old Verses New, in serialized form on the web (that link will take you to the table of contents).  If you missed the first one, you can find the table of contents for it at Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel.  There was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; the last of those for the first novel is #71:  Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One, which indexes all the others and catches a lot of material from an earlier collection of behind-the-writings reflections that had been misplaced for a decade.  Now as the second is being posted I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, and perhaps in a more serious way than the previous ones, because it sometimes talks about what I was planning to do later in the book or how this book connects to events yet to come in the third (For Better or Verse)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them, or even put off reading these insights until the book has finished.  Links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters being discussed, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.

These were the previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts covering this book:

  1. #74:  Another Novel (which provided this kind of insight into the first nine chapters along with some background material on the book as a whole).
  2. #78:  Novel Fears (which continued with coverage of chapters 10 through 18),
  3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27).

This picks up from there, and I expect to continue with additional posts after every ninth chapter in the series.

img0086Ship

History of the series, including the reason it started, the origins of character names and details, and many of the ideas, are in those earlier posts, and won’t be repeated here.

Chapter 28, Kondor 51

I skipped Lauren in part because she was ahead of Kondor in stories and I’d already determined that he would be out of the next book; and in part because I’d created a cliffhanger for him and had a story idea pressing on me at the moment which I wanted to pursue.

One of the problems I had with the first draft of the first book was that Kondor’s atheism seemed to start when he encountered Lauren’s Christianity; I did a lot of rewriting to strengthen it earlier.  In this book I did not expect to repeat any of those arguments (been there, done that), but needed to keep his identity as an atheist solid as part of his character.  The debate about whether mythical beasts like sea monsters were a challenge to that belief helped in that regard.

Chapter 29, Hastings 53

Saying that Lauren learned many magics and became a powerful sorceress gave me options to use spells and psionic abilities in the future that had not been established specifically.

I needed to keep her distant from the core of the Arthurian legend as a way of explaining why she doesn’t appear in any of the tales.  She did not need to be entirely gone, just distant enough that no one would wonder that she wasn’t mentioned.

When I mentioned Morgana, I did not realize that she would reappear later in an unanticipated role.

By the time I mentioned the oak forest, I knew what the acorn was.

The healing magic was something she had not done previously, and thus an example of what she was learning.

The idea of having Horta accuse Lauren was a step toward establishing the confrontation I needed to have him kill her; having him flee would give me a viable reason to move Lauren from Camelot to Wandborough.

I chose Sir Sagrimore because he is a known knight for whom there are no familiar stories.  I guessed that in doing this I reduced the possibility that anyone would say I was not representing the knight’s character correctly, as they might with Gawaine, Galahad, Lancelot, Tristram, and other famous knights for whom stories are extant.

Chapter 30, Brown 10

It was during the readthrough of this section that I made a stone block out of the stone wall; it seemed to work better.

John Walker often says, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”  I’m not sure whether I ever heard it from anyone else, but it seemed to fit Derek’s situation.

I needed to make the trip take a long time through the swamp even though it could not be so far to the castle, because I needed Derek to be tired enough to fall asleep again.  I didn’t see a fight with a vampire as maintaining the mood of this story, although I wasn’t certain exactly how it would end next.

There was a stupid servant in the version of this played in the game, but he was not so deformed nor so stupid as this one I created.

“Morbius” is a nod to a Doctor Who episode in which some dying scientist has created a body in which he intends to put his brain.  It was the name of the madman, but from that also that of the animated body.

The conversation with the servant gives a lot of clues about the situation, although to some degree the world does not completely make sense.  I used his pauses as if to remember to suggest a number of ideas.  I have since run this world for players and had to expand on a number of aspects, but at this point this was the entirety of the world.

Chapter 31, Hastings 54

Lauren isn’t certain how to track Horta, and neither am I; but I’m also not certain what to do when they find him, so I’m exploring the situation while I look for answers.

It was established in the first book at some point that Lauren had always wanted to move to a more rural location and keep a horse.  It suggests that she is like the many girls who spend time with horses when young.

Lauren’s estimates of how long in the future various events will occur is very inexact; she does not really know what year it is now, only that it is anno domini.

Chapter 32, Kondor 52

There was a part of me that wished I had thought of this idea of trading food for emeralds sooner; but I resisted the urge to back-write it into the story because it didn’t seem realistic in my mind for Kondor to have thought of it sooner.  I thus committed myself to bringing him around the circuit again, and to creating interesting adventures to fill that time.

In-game, travel times are determined by die rolls and by travel (and port) events determined by die rolls.  I was deciding these things based on averages and ranges, and making them a bit shorter due to the fact that Kondor’s travel clock was a significant aid to navigation.

Chapter 33, Brown 11

Oddly, although I had decided that the mysterious host was a vampire, I had not determined how Derek was going to die–that is, the actual death moment escaped me.  Even when he fell asleep, I expected he would awaken and actually face the monster.  But having him not awaken was believable, and saved me the disadvantages of another fight scene.

The introduction of the summer camp world was from the outset intended to be a slasher movie story; but none of the details had yet been determined.

Chapter 34, Hastings 55

I created the comfort bubble with a view to using it in the climactic scenes.  Always there were things I did to prepare for the climax and things that I did to make the current scene work which I later found a way to use.  The comfort bubble was to save their lives and allow the denouement of the story.

When I wrote about Raal’s uncanny ability to spot the undead, I didn’t realize myself that it would lead to his ability to smell them.  But it made perfect sense for a werewolf to be able to smell decay in an undead body from quite a distance, and I needed a way for Lauren to do the same, so this developed from it.

Creating fight sequences is in some ways the most difficult aspect of the writing.  Each has to be distinct, using maneuvers and techniques in ways that don’t sound like she did this again; yet they must also sound consistent with all that has been done before.  It must seem like the same person involved in the battle doing the sort of things he or she usually does, but it must not seem like the same battle over again.  Thus I find myself mixing established bits with variations, and looking for reasons why that which was done successfully last time doesn’t get done exactly the same way this time.

Chapter 35, Kondor 53

The sextant is one of those things that I expect will eventually be useful; I just don’t know when.

I immediately recognized the tension involved in having a crate of uncut gems and a distant place at which to have them done.  It would become a nagging weight on Kondor, for a little while.

Chapter 36, Brown 12

I’ve actually never seen a slasher film.  I was not at all certain as I started how it should play through.  I needed characters and a relaxed atmosphere, and so I set about to create it.

A lot of my camp notes recall my days at Lebanon, a Baptist campground in New Jersey; but very little is even similar.  The bell was near the mess hall, there were separate boating and swimming lakes (but no docks on the boating lake that I recall), plenty of woods and trails, a barn where the craft department was, and two-way radios used to keep people in touch with each other.  Oh, and there was a chapel, and to a degree the major landmarks in my mind are roughly in the same relationship on the map as they were there–except that the cabins are in exactly the opposite direction, beyond the barn rather than beyond the mess hall.

Getting the tire fixed was a good excuse to keep Derek here.  I don’t know that I ever used the bicycle as a means of transportation in this book, and although I thought I might I had no specific case in mind.

Everyone in the game develops something we call a “philosophy of the verse”; eventually they start putting together an idea of what is happening and why.  Derek’s, so far, is that he’s comatose and dreaming.  This notion that he is using his expectations to turn the dreams to nightmares is a good step in that development, and it gives him reason to try to put the horror thoughts to one side for now.

Apart from the biblical reference, Shiloh happens to be the name of the next town over, and of a church there which runs a summer camp not far from here, although the camp is not called “Shiloh”.

David isn’t anyone I remember; he’s more a type of person who seems right at summer camp, a conglomerate of those modest leader types.  My cousin Ron probably contributed significantly here.

Mahwah is the town next to where my parents live.  I don’t know whether I’d mentioned it as his home before, but it seemed a good place for his origin.  Newark also is a city in New Jersey, but it happens to be one in Delaware as well, and I recall there being such cities elsewhere.

I hope these “behind the writings” posts continue to be of interest, and perhaps some value, to those of you who have been reading the novel.  If there is any positive feedback, they will continue.

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Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#85: Time Travel Coming on Television

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #85, on the subject of Time Travel Coming on Television

I got several notices from readers alerting me to something new in time travel coming to a small screen near you, and I paid little attention to them, I’m afraid.  For one thing, I don’t do analyses of time travel media other than movies, for reasons detailed elsewhere.  For another, at present I don’t have access to “regular” or even “cable” television–I watch DVDs, Netflix via an RCA Streaming device, and sometimes manage to borrow the equipment to Chromecast something from my office computer to the living room television.  For another–well, television series about time travel rarely work.  As a boy I enjoyed Time Tunnel, and I have the series on DVD, but for anyone who has any coherent theory of time it is a temporal nightmare.  I liked Se7en Days, and even used it as the basis for an example of a way in which the past can be safely altered.  However, ever since Star Trek:  Voyager delivered three temporally disastrous episodes in its first season, I have been extremely wary of any time travel television series, and for some combinations of these three reasons I never watched The Sarah Conner Chronicles or Continuum.

I’m still interested in time travel, though, and it seems that I got all these notifications of upcoming time travel television because there’s more than one show on the horizon.

img0085History

Sometime in 2016 FOX will be bringing a made-for-TV comedy movie under the title Making History (photo above).  The trailer looks highly entertaining.  I am considerably more forgiving of absurd temporal disasters in comedies because they’re supposed to be funny, and well done absurd can be funny.  In this iteration one of our primary characters, pretty much a failure in the present, has hopped back to the past and fallen in love with Paul Revere’s daughter.  Revere expected his daughter to marry the man of his choosing, and is so upset about this he fails to make his famed ride to warn of the approach of the British, and the Colonies are overrun.  Our bumbling hero returns to the present and persuades his history professor to come back with him to fix the problem, but the fact that the professor is black adds more complications to the situation.

It is, of course, absurd on its face:  once the American Revolution has been undone, the time traveler cannot return to the world he left behind, because it has been erased.  Yet it looks like a good foundation for a very funny story, and if after it airs I can find it somewhere I can watch, I’ll probably give you a more detailed account of just how disastrous it is.

Meanwhile, NBC is also getting into the act with a drama called Timeless, which is announced as a 2016 television series.  Here the story is darker:  some group has stolen a time machine and traveled to the past to alter American history in ways that are apparently significant to someone.  In the trailer, they are attempting to prevent the Hindenburg disaster.  Our time-traveling heroes are sent back to protect history, to prevent the changes.

We have previously noted the major problems with efforts to prevent changes to the past, particularly in our analysis of TimeCop as well as repeatedly in the Terminator series.  This can only end in temporal disaster–and since it’s a television series we can probably expect repeated disasters week after week.  On the bright side, it looks like a well-made well-acted action-packed adventure.  On the dark side, it appears to mix theories of time rather randomly–the very fact that a team has been sent to the past to prevent it from changing says it can’t be fixed time, but one of the time travelers reports having a copy of a document that another member of the team has not yet written.

To confuse matters, IMDb reports not one but two current movies under the same title, one released this year and another slated for next year.  Those might see analysis eventually, if I can get copies.

Also in production for anticipated release next year on ABC is a series entitled Time After Time based perhaps loosely on the movie of that name or the book on which that movie was based.  This is the story in which H. G. Wells has invented a time machine and somehow Jack the Ripper has managed to use it to escape into time, with Wells in pursuit.  Information is at this point quite sketchy.  The movie was good, but had a lot of temporal difficulties which a series promises to compound.  Still, it has some promise, depending on how it plays.

So time travel fans will have plenty to entertain in the months ahead.

As always, if you have questions about time travel stories you have seen, write to me (you can use the e-mail comments link below), assume I have not seen whatever it is you saw and give me details, and I’ll do my best to answer based on what you describe.  Meanwhile, if you want me to see these, you’ll have to use the Patreon or PayPal.me links to increase the support of this site to a level that can pay for such luxuries, or arrange to mail me DVD copies of them.  Thank you.

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Bible and Theology

#84: Man-Made Religion

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #84, on the subject of Man-Made Religion

A significant (at least to me) discussion was budding on a thread about something else on Facebook with Nikolaj Bourguignon and William Bing Ingram, and Facebook is already not a very good place for such deep discussions and the less so when they are buried in a thread about something else. So I am addressing it here, and if they’re interested perhaps we can discuss it on a new thread there or here.  (I know Nikolaj has a lot on his plate at the moment, so I’ll understand if he’s unavailable.  Everyone is welcome to join.  Initial comments here are moderated, so don’t expect that they’ll post immediately if you aren’t already an approved commenter on this web log, but I usually get to them pretty quickly.)

William suggested:

…one of the things about religion is that nobody ever discovers religion on their own; they always have to be told about it before they “suddenly” find religion.

This is unlike subjects such as math….

Religion is a completely man-made idea. I mean, consider early civilizations. They developed independent of each other and each one developed widely different religions. If there really was one true religion, each culture would have discovered the same one independently.

I take exception to that idea, and hope he will afford me the opportunity to explain why.

img0084Crucifix

It is certainly reasonable to reject religion for rational reasons.  It is entirely different to do so based on errors of fact, and that appears to be what we have here.

Certainly it is true that there are many religions all over the world, and they have often been at odds with each other concerning which is the truth.  However, it is important that we grasp those arguments.  When Missouri Synod Lutherans argue with Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, the points at issue are generally about what is appropriate in church services; they agree on much much more than that on which they disagree.  When Missouri Synod Lutherans argue with atheists about the existence of God, the Lutherans are much closer to the Baptists, the Catholics, even the Muslims, than any of these are to the atheists.  Theologians often talk about the case of the single iota of difference–from a church split that happened largely over whether the right word was homoousios (“same substance”, used in the Nicene Creed and adopted by the western Christian church) or homoiousios (“similar substance”, used by Eusebius of Caesarea and considered the better choice by the eastern Christian church).  After all, if I say that the paint color we chose was lavender and my wife says it was lilac, apart from the fact that I suspect she would be right it doesn’t really prove that we didn’t choose a paint color.  It only means that we disagree in the minutiae.

It will also certainly help if we recognize that nearly all religions can be divided into the ethical portion, the spiritual portion, and the ritual portion.  Certainly they are all different in all three portions–but it must be noted that they are not really so different as we might expect.

Looking first at the ethical portion, we find that there are universal principles underlying all religions from all over the world.  I recommend the appendix in C. S. Lewis’ wonderful book The Abolition of Man, in which he details many of these principles and demonstrates their presence in religions from every continent over many centuries.  We might suppose that the sanctity of life and the protection of property were obvious, but loyalty to family over strangers, obligation of hospitality to strangers, sanctity of marriage, protection of the weak and particularly of children, deference to elders, sacrifice of self, and quite a few other less obvious principles are well represented universally.  The specifics of how these are applied from one culture to another certainly varies, but the ethic itself seems to be universally understood, and discovered by peoples throughout the world.

The ritual aspect is certainly far more varied, but even here we have some haunting similarities.  Nearly all religions recognize some significance in sacrifice.  Nearly all include feasts but also fasts, self-deprivations of some sort and celebrations of some sort.  The rest is generally application of culture and human abilities–the inclusion of music, chanting, speech, body positions indicating deference, and many other aspects which develop.  Modern sociologists are intrigued by the concept of the creation of a “sacred space”, a collection of ritual which humans use to divide part of life from everything else, which is found universally and involves ritual.  It seems that we have all discovered the same thing, and applied it in different ways.

The spiritual portion is the most difficult, but to some degree it also has shared elements.  As noted, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Polytheists, Jews, and many, many others all agree that there is some kind of spirit world, a God or gods; we are all much closer to each other than any of us are to atheism, despite how very different we are from each other.  The atheist would claim that our diversity comes from the fact that we are all inventing ideas to explain realities that we did not understand, but fails to account for the similarities between those ideas.  Certainly in some theologies the gods are like super-people, and in others they are so far beyond our reality as to be unlike people at all.  Some see the afterlife as a lot of individual people continuing an earth-like existence, others see it as everyone losing his selfhood and becoming part of one selfless unity, and others–religious people who believe in a spirit world–see no afterlife at all.  Yet this is the area in which we have the least information, because any of us who might have gone and returned have failed to bring back anything all of us accept as proof.

Except that this is where the Judeo-Christian concept of revealed religion becomes involved.  Unlike so many others, the scriptures of the Jews and the Christians present themselves as historic documents recounting events in the lives of real people, who reportedly interacted with representatives of God.  All those efforts to figure out what the spirit world is like were doomed to failure without information from the spirit world, but Christianity claims that it was provided.  If so, then the Christian faith has an advantage:  first-hand information.

What is the more interesting about this, to me at least, is that what the Christian faith claims as revealed religion seems to be saying that everyone had it partly right.  God is not a monolithic being, but He is a single being with a complex existence best described as three people perpetually interacting with each other.  (There are spirits who are not God nor gods, but in some sense greater than humans, who interact with God and possibly on occasion with humans, and not all of them are friendly.)  The reality of the polytheists contains some truth but not all the truth.  The opposite reality, that God is vastly incomprehensible and beyond anything we would understand as a person also contains some truth but not all the truth.  The image of the afterlife as many individuals living together is affirmed, but so is the image of everyone joined in one entity (the body of Christ).  It tells us that so much that we guessed about the spirit world is true, but not exclusively true, and gives us an image that is barely comprehensible of a place that by definition ought to be completely outside our experience or understanding.

C. S. Lewis seems to have become a Christian (he was an atheist) in large part because he saw that the Christian message provided the critical piece of reality that united everything.  I see some of that sometimes, and I see it here:  if the Christian concept of the spirit world is correct, all the other attempts to understand it are partly correct, capturing some aspects and missing some.  It also suggests that none of these religions are “made up”; they are, in fact, all glimpses of a reality–something akin to the poem about the blind men and the elephant, written to express a similar idea, but when the poem says that the blind men are describing something they have never seen, it fails to recognize that they have experienced something, and so are accurately describing part of something.  That seems to be what is happening in the diversity of religions:  We have all (generally if not individually) experienced something and attempted to understand it.  The fact that we understand it differently does not mean we did not experience the same thing–any more than the fact that Aristotle’s physics is significantly different from that of Galileo and Newton, and Einstein’s different again, does not mean they all lived in different universes.  They simply did not notice the points that others did.

I have other reasons for preferring Christianity, but they are beyond the scope of the present discussion, which is really about whether the diversity of religions proves they are all “made up”.  I think that you can’t support that conclusion on the evidence.

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Bible and Theology, Law and Politics

#83: Help! I’m a Lesbian Trapped in a Man’s Body!

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #83, on the subject of Help!  I’m a Lesbian Trapped in a Man’s Body!

The new view of sexual identity has me examining myself, and wondering if I have been misunderstood all these decades.  I have always perceived myself to be a boy (well, I grew up to be a man, I think), but perhaps that’s only because in those years everyone assumed that if you had male, er, parts, you were male.  We did not then understand that you could really be one gender inside and a different sex on the outside.  Now, apparently, we do, and that might really change things for me.  I might be a girl.  I have the attestation of most of my peers in my elementary school, who repeatedly asserted that I was a girl:  I ran like a girl, fought like a girl, threw, batted, kicked, did everything like a girl.  And I liked to sing–how girly, to like music class.  I might have had a boy’s body, but I didn’t use it like a boy; I was obviously a girl hiding in a boy’s body, pretending to be a boy.

Yet even then, I was always attracted to girls.  Starting in second grade I had a terrible crush on Christina Newcomb (I’ve always wondered what became of her).  By fourth grade I was spending a lot of time at her house down by the brook on Broad Street up near Lambert’s Mill Road.  She was particularly fond of The Beatles, and had a stack of Beatles cards between three and four inches thick.  There were other girls who caught my attention before that, and many more thereafter–moving away from Scotch Plains separated us, although our relationship had fizzled by then.  No other boys were attracted to girls–in fifth grade they used to dare me to wait for her outside the school and try to kiss her, which is what I wanted to do anyway so I usually took that dare and listened to their peals of disgust when I succeeded (although at least as often she ran away laughing).

So then the conclusion is inescapable:  if I am a girl, as all the boys thought, I must be a lesbian.

img0083Scouts

I think this understanding might have changed my youth significantly–maybe not then, when people always thought that someone in a boy’s body was a boy, and to be a girl you had to have a girl’s body.  But Society has recognized, now, that this is not always the case, and the Girl Scouts of America are doing their level best to keep up with progress:  you can be a Girl Scout if you are a girl on the inside, even if you, like me, are trapped in a boy’s body.  I can’t tell you how much different my teen years might have been had I actually been able to go camping with the Girl Scouts instead of the Boy Scouts.  Not that I don’t treasure the hundreds of miles of canoeing and hiking, the places I saw and things I learned in scouts, but really, every Boy Scout I knew wished we could go camping with the girls.  I certainly saw advantages to the idea.

So I think were I that age today I would simply explain it to them.  I’m not really a boy, I’m a girl in a boy’s body, but I’m attracted to girls, so that makes me a lesbian.  Trapped in a boy’s body.  I should be allowed to be a Girl Scout.  From what I understand of their present policies, I think they would agree and let me go camping with the girls.  I think we would have a wonderful time–and since I am, after all, a lesbian, I can’t promise that other things wouldn’t happen on those camping trips, since I would be bound to find all those girls attractive, and particularly whoever wound up as my tent-mate.  She might find that she, too, is a lesbian, attracted to another girl, at least when the girl in question is trapped in a boy’s body.  I know some girls are uncomfortable, being naked around a lesbian, but it might be different if the lesbian has the body of a boy.

I won’t say more about that, because I’m sure there are millions of Boy Scouts wishing they had already thought of this.

I expect that some of the parents would object; parents can be so old-fashioned, insisting that their children be protected from such situations.  They don’t understand that the world has changed, that what you are on the outside is meaningless, it’s the person on the inside that counts, even for such matters as which bathroom you should use, which Scouting organizations you can join, for what social services you qualify, and everything else, really.  If I say I am a lesbian inside a man’s body, how can anyone argue with that?  It could well be the real me.

And if it would have gotten me into those Girl Scout tents, I could have been very comfortable with that idea.

Shame on me?  Is that because you think I’m mocking a very serious matter, that someone could be one gender inside and a different sex outside, and ought to be treated as the kind of person he or she supposes him- or herself to be?  Or is it because you actually do think that girls and boys are different because of biological and physiological characteristics defined by their bodies, and society needs to make that distinction for the protection of its girls and its boys?

I think those peers of mine were wrong, that I was never a girl at all, as much as I was different from them.  This business about really being the other gender on the inside has nothing to do with biology or psychology; it has everything to do with gender stereotypes.  We think some man might be a woman inside because his interests go in directions more common to women–because we have created definitions of male and female “personality types” and then tried to fit people into them.  We persuade people that they are really not the gender of their body’s sex because their character does not fit our stereotypes, and they believe us.  Boys will be boys and girls will be girls, and we need to recognize that the first difference is biological.  Otherwise we lose some basic structures of human interaction, and face some serious social problems.  From there, we need to understand that a man does not have to conform to what we think are manly traits, nor a woman to womanly traits, and understand that bodies are sexually defined but people are individuals.

Without that, talk of sexuality devolves into this kind of nonsense.

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Books by the Author

#82: Novel Developments

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #82, on the subject of Novel Developments.

With permission of Valdron Inc I am publishing my second novel, Old Verses New, in serialized form on the web (that link will take you to the table of contents).  If you missed the first one, you can find the table of contents for it at Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel.  There was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; the last of those for the first novel is #71:  Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One, which indexes all the others and catches a lot of material from an earlier collection of behind-the-writings reflections that had been misplaced for a decade.  Now as the second is being posted I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, and perhaps in a more serious way than the previous ones, because it sometimes talks about what I was planning to do later in the book or how this book connects to events yet to come in the third (For Better or Verse).  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them, or even put off reading these insights until the book has finished.  Links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters being discussed, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.

These were the previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts covering this book:

  1. #74:  Another Novel (which provided this kind of insight into the first nine chapters along with some background material on the book as a whole).
  2. #78:  Novel Fears (which continued with coverage of chapters 10 through 18).

This picks up from there, and I expect to continue with additional posts after every ninth chapter in the series.

img0082Camelot

History of the series, including the reason it started, the origins of character names and details, and many of the ideas, are in those earlier posts, and won’t be repeated here.

Chapter 19, Hastings 50

The discussion of magic raises interesting theological issues.  God forbids the kind of magic that calls on spirits other than Himself to work miracles.  The “other kind” of magic, the type in which rituals control supernatural energy directly, simply does not exist.  Yet if it did, there is no argument against its use that does not also apply to technology.  Either God permits us to impact events in the world, or we are wrong to do so; means are a separate issue.  (I address these issues in several of the articles in the Faith and Gaming series at the Christian Gamers Guild website, also available in print.)

I hadn’t really thought about how Lauren would be involved in bringing Arthur to power; these things sort of developed through asking myself what I would do.

Sometime before I began writing the second novel, I knew that Horta and Jackson were both going to kill Lauren at different times–Horta in her Merlin visit, Jackson in the Bethany visit.  I’m not certain when it came to me, but it seemed the route to take.  It also gave meaning to their reluctance to trust her in 2005.

Chapter 20, Kondor 48

I don’t think I’d realized when Evan was shot that Kondor would become the doctor; but the idea worked.

It may seem odd that Joe argues against his own promotion, but ultimately he is really out of place in this world and there are still a lot of things he does not know about how to do medicine on the ship.  I wanted to have to persuade him, because he’s aware of his own shortcomings in that regard, but he really is the best man for the job.

I think that the mention of the lack of a watch that kept time on a ship reminded me, first, that Joe had that travel clock that should run adequately well on the ship, and, second, that such a clock, set to the standard time in Sardic, would be an incredible navigational aid.  I did not at this point know I was headed that direction, but the clock was going to get me there.

Chapter 21, Brown 7

The floor plan in this house owes something to that of my parents’ house in Ramsey; but it has a very different feel in several places.  It’s a bit distorted, too, but I didn’t expect the reader would sense that–or if he did, it would add to the eeriness of it all.  Derek starts upstairs in a left rear bedroom; but there are only windows in the back, so there’s probably another room beyond that.  In addition, the hall continues past that room, again suggesting at least one more.  He makes a left, putting the rear of the house on his left, and walks straight down the hall.  There is another door before he reaches the stairs, and I envision at least one on his right.  But, rather incongruously, the stairs seem to continue straight in front of him.  Yet when he falls down them, he rolls straight toward the front of the house–somewhere he’s made a right turn, yet the hall was always straight.  He lands on what I envision as a flagstone front hall, he notices a lightswitch but not a door.  He now makes effectively a right, headed back parallel to the hall but closer to the front of the house, which is now on his left.  This carries him through the living room, which is open to the hall, and then through the arch into the dining room, which is in the left rear corner of the building–but again, has no windows to the side.  My parents’ house is so designed downstairs, but that the front hall is enclosed and the door quite obvious.  Derek seems to have traveled farther upstairs than down, but he is clearly at the end of the house downstairs, when he seemingly was not when upstairs.  Again, it is the layout of the kitchen and dining room from their house:  the table is beneath the hanging light fixture, a picture window on the rear of the dining room, and a door to the kitchen more toward the living room.  Beyond that door, the kitchen area is largely to the left, much as described, with the refrigerator to the right, and a counter extending into the center of the room to separate the dinette.  At this point the model diverges, as we have reached the line of the stairs and seemingly the edge of the house.  I imagine a basement stair behind a door to the right at the far end, and perhaps another door straight ahead to something else, but in the model there’s a door in the far corner across the dinette which leads to a screen porch.  Derek never sees that far, but is driven back into the kitchen.

Breaking up the journey into pieces let me decide things as they happened and avoid bogging down with planning part of the journey that would never occur.  It also allowed for more tension, as I could consider everything that could go wrong with each bit and then make the move, and then consider again, thus giving the feeling of creeping across the set.

It was then time to do something with all that tension.  Up to now it’s possible that it’s all in Derek’s mind, and as long as it is there, it is a mood built on uncertainty.  The revelation that the ghost is real is a fright, in some ways breaking the mood by confirming our fears.

Chapter 22, Hastings 51

Tubrok came into existence entirely because I needed a reason why Merlin had not killed Horta.  A more powerful enemy seemed the best idea.  Once I had thought of him, I began to get the idea for the grand conclusion of the third book.  That is, I had already determined that Lauren, Bethany, Slade, Shella, and Derek were going to be together fighting something in the vampire world in the future, but now I knew what.

Lauren overlooks the fact that the Horta she sees here will be more than a millennium older when she fights him in the future; she is estimating his power based on her memory of a greatly strengthened future version of him.  Thus Merlin is not so worried as she is.

Tubrok’s strategy came largely from extrapolation from Gavin’s, figuring out what a vampire might try to do to further his own ends in that milieu.  I later saw something similar in the television series Being Human, but that was years after I wrote this and it wasn’t quite the same.

There is a sense in which Lauren has created a predestination paradox by mentioning the sword in the stone:  she has brought from the future an idea that she got from history.  However, we know that she is not from this universe, so it’s not really a problem—we just need to figure out how such a story came into existence in her world, and since we know the story exists we know it can come into existence without the suggestion from the future.

What Merlin teaches Lauren here is something we learned to call SEP invisibility.  It stands for “Somebody Else’s Problem”, and is a sort of psionic trick that doesn’t make you invisible but puts you beneath the level of notice—the way you walk around people on the sidewalk without really seeing them.  Lauren and Merlin do not vanish, but they pass unnoticed because they’ve persuaded the minds around them that they’re not important, not worth noticing.

I back-wrote that teaching moment after the book was finished, because I needed Lauren to have that skill when she arrived in the final world of the book.  I added her using it several times in earlier chapters to get it there, this being the first.

Chapter 23, Kondor 49

The problem about leaving Doctor Evan in Durnmist had two levels.  One was that I needed to figure out what job Kondor would do on the next route, and I didn’t really see continuing the Kondor as Doctor bit too much longer; the other was I needed a plausible reason to keep Evan on the ship if Kondor wasn’t going to be the doctor.

I hadn’t considered what would happen when Kondor got to New Haven; but I thought I’d get things pointed in the right direction for that.

Joe knows the route from having worked the other Mary Piper.  Captain John would assume he just found out from being aboard the ship.

Chapter 24, Brown 8

I had no idea how Derek was going to die in this world; but once the battle got fierce, it was just a matter of playing both sides and seeing what I could cause to happen.

The bit with the glass shards is I think a wonderful poltergeist effect.  They should be falling with him, landing around him.  Instead, they pause in the air high above him, and then target him in rapid flight as projectiles.  I don’t know whether it comes across, but I didn’t want to be too technical about it.

Chapter 25, Hastings 52

The argument about vampires led logically to one of those most difficult questions:  how can you prove that something does not exist?  I particularly like the notion that these magical creatures could exist unknown to her.  I think most people take too much on faith, and don’t realize they’re doing it.

The issue of whether Lauren can use magic to do what she thinks God wants done is a difficult one altogether, and worth bringing up again.  Merlin’s answers are useful; they make it easier to build a diversified sorceress who is yet something of a prophetess, because there’s no conflict between the magics she uses and the mission she pursues.  The answer to the problem seemed to lie in whether there was a difference in kind between doing what you think God wants done and doing it by magic, or whether that was only a difference in style.  I think this conversation, although it didn’t fully convince Lauren, fully convinced most readers.

The idea that criminal accusations had to be made in the king’s courtyard at noon was something that easily sounded right and made it impossible for vampires to make use of the legal system.  I liked it.

Chapter 26, Kondor 50

Oddly, I turned the loop around in my mind when I wrote this.  I somehow envision the ship going east through the northern latitudes at the beginning of the route and then returning west closer to the equator.  The fact is that the major currents do exactly the opposite, going west near the poles and east near the equator, and they do so precisely because of the direction of rotation of the planet.  The only way I could maintain my circle and have it fit with known laws would be to put the major settlements in the southern hemisphere–one too many things to try to explain to the reader.  Thus this passage is always jarring to me, because I expect Kondor to be going east and he claims to be going west.

I might have included the clock bit because my wife is related to the Harrison clockmakers of England, and that might include the John Harrison who solved the longitude problem by building a clock that kept time at sea.  I saw the special on A&E, but now can’t remember whether I’d come up with the idea before that (based probably on some of James Burke’s shows) or because of it.

The GSPS thing was a throwaway.  Not having Bob Slade in this book, I didn’t have the usual anachronistic comments he makes, but Joe sometimes made them as well, so I let him make one here.

I think I was using the game mechanics from the Mary Piper world again to generate events; sea monster is such an event, and dropping a sea serpent into the story here was a fun idea.

Chapter 27, Brown 9

E. R. Jones had run a world for my eldest when he was first playing in which there was a castle in the midst of a swamp, the castle inhabited by what was not so obviously a vampire and his mildly deformed idiot servant.  This world was inspired by that, but all the detail was invented.

I did a lot of camping in my teens, but by the time I was in my twenties I’d had enough of “roughing it” and have not done any tenting since, although I once went to a festival in a pop-up camper.

The mosquito was, I think, prefiguring the real villain of the world.

I mentioned the need for a larger pack, but had not yet solved it.  When I introduced the characters in the next world, I created Bill specifically to be the source of the backpack.

The block was originally a wall; but the wall bothered me.  It couldn’t really look big enough to be mistaken for a cliff and be far enough to take that long to reach.  I changed it on my read through from wall to block, hoping that would work better.

I hope these “behind the writings” posts continue to be of interest, and perhaps some value, to those of you who have been reading the novel.  If there is any positive feedback, they will continue.

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Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#81: The Grandfather Paradox Problem

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #81, on the subject of The Grandfather Paradox Problem.

A friend who was playing Multiverser with me before we were on Facebook tagged me in a post about a time travel video, in which someone offers a scientific solution to the famous Grandfather Paradox:  what happens if I travel back in time and kill my own grandfather before he has children?  As the cartoon below shows, if you did that, you would undo your own existence, and if you undid your existence you would not be able to travel to the past and do that.

There are already quite a few links in this page, and there undoubtedly will be quite a few more before we’re done, so I recommend ignoring them all until you’ve read the page, and then deciding whether there are any you particularly want to pursue.

img0081Ducks

The video inappropriately seems to suggest that this is “the scientific” answer and therefore the true one.  That’s careless.  It even recognizes the alternate dimension solution, dismissing it as “boring” (because it just avoids the paradox)–and we agree that it’s a poor solution, because whether we are speaking of parallel dimensions (a vast, possibly infinite, set of dimensions which have always existed) or divergent dimensions (the creation of new branching universes caused by the arrival of the traveler), it is not time travel.  The video ignores other solutions, such as The Novikov Self-consistency Principle (in essence a fixed time theory solution which asserts time travel is only possible in universes in which the past is immutable).  It also ignores replacement theory; we’ll get to that.

If the video is confusing to you, don’t be embarrassed:  it’s a confusing theory.  I think it’s the theory behind Dr. Manhattan’s perception of the world in Watchmen:  it isn’t exactly that all possible worlds exist, it’s that they all co-exist within a single but complex spatio-temporal space.

One of the problems of divergent dimension theory is the question of where all the matter and energy originate to create another identical universe.  That is, if you have a matter replicator on the order of Star Trek:  The Next Generation, and you want to create a cup of tea, you need as much energy as you would obtain from the nuclear annihilation of an identical cup of tea, plus a bit more to operate the machine.  If you want to create another identical universe, you would need to consume all the matter and energy of the original universe plus probably a bit more to do the work.  Assuming you could do it, your original universe would have ceased to exist anyway.

    There are a few other problems with this.  Since you had to use some of the energy to perform the process, you wind up with a slightly smaller replacement universe; and assuming that you have a time traveler who left that other universe, either he was destroyed when that universe was (creating the paradox we are attempting to avoid) or his matter and energy are not included in the total (shorting us yet a bit more).  But those are extra quibbles.

If you maintain a divergent dimension theory idea without time travel, that is, that every choice, every possible occurrence, creates two universes, in one of which the event happened and the other it did not, you multiply this problem exponentially, since for anything I could be doing right at this moment there exists a universe in which I am doing that, and for everything you could be doing there exists a universe in which you are doing that, and as long as what we might be doing is compatible those two lists are multiplied–I do thing A while you do thing A, I do thing A while you do thing B, I do thing B while you do thing A, and by the time we get to four possible actions for two hypothetical people we have sixteen universes, and we have only gotten started.

The theory behind the solution offered by the video attempts to resolve that issue, and in a strictly theoretical way it does so rather cleverly.  There are not innumerable copies of me; there is only one.  That one individual exists as a bundle of matter and energy across all the many dimensions, and is doing all the different things he might be doing.  My consciousness only remembers those events which are sequentially chained in the history of what I am aware of doing at the moment–I have no awareness of what I am doing or what I ever did in those other dimensions, but it is still me doing it.

The idea sprang from the problem addressed by that famous feline Schrödinger’s Cat.  Because of some other theories in quantum physics the state of an unstable atom was viewed as problematic.  It might decay at any moment, and therefore it might have decayed since you last looked.  Someone (his name is not as famous as Schrödinger’s) proposed that the answer to this was that the atom existed in both a decayed and an undecayed state, and when you looked at it you determined not exactly in which state it was but rather in which universe you were observing it.  Until you looked, it was both decayed and undecayed, and the act of looking determined the state.  Schrödinger said that this was absurd, since if that were true he could set up an experiment in which a cat who would die the instant a specific atom decayed would be both alive and dead until someone checked, and since the cat cannot possibly be both alive and dead the theory is nonsense.  However, the theory was immediately defended with the assertion that what Schrödinger claimed was impossible was actually the reality, that the cat actually is both alive and dead until someone looks and discovers whether we are in a dimension in which it is alive or one in which it is dead.

I don’t know that Schrödinger was persuaded, but the idea took hold and expanded, attaching to events that were not in any obvious way connected to the uncertainties of subatomic decay:  suddenly anything that might have happened has happened, and all of us are both alive and dead, sitting in church and visiting a brothel, fabulously famous and desperately destitute, at the same time.

I have problems with that; I have addressed them on other pages.  The present video does not venture there–it only discusses the notion that two such states could exist simultaneously, one in which my grandfather lived and led to my existence, the other in which I killed him, and so the fact that I both do and do not exist at this moment because of a future action I will take in the past is not a problem.

I still see it as a problem.  Let’s get at it, though, by noting that I have a brother.  (In reality I have two, and a sister, and a batch of cousins, nephews, neices, and cousins-once-or-twice-removed who might also be affected, but let’s stick to one brother.)  We have talked about the problem of having a brother in multiple dimension theory before, but it’s a different problem in this version.

The problem is that when I kill my grandfather, I also rather inadvertently also kill my brother’s grandfather.

My reality is convoluted, but it is comprehensible.  There is a reality in which I exist up to the moment–let’s call it “today”–when I leave for the past, and after that–“tomorrow”–I no longer exist because I left and never returned.  There is another reality in which I was never born, and so “today” I do not exist and never existed, and that’s confusing–but tomorrow is somewhat simpler, because tomorrow I still do not exist because I never existed.  In my experience, therefore, I both exist and do not exist today, but tomorrow I simply do not exist.  Reality is unstable for a while, but then we might suppose that it stabilizes “today” when I leave for what we will call “yesterday”, stretching the term about a century to when my grandfather was a child.

What, though, of my brother?  There is a reality in which he exists “today”, and since he does not leave to go back to “yesterday” he, in that reality, still exists “tomorrow”.  Yet since I went back to “yesterday” and killed our young grandfather, there is a reality in which he was never born, either.  My reality stabilizes into a universe tomorrow in which I do not exist–but his reality never does so.  From the moment I either do or do not kill our grandfather, he either does or does not exist, and that never changes.

That’s very dramatic when we consider him; he is quite obviously impacted by whether or not I killed our grandfather.  Yet it is not just whether or not he exists tomorrow; it’s whether we have existed in these intervening years, and what the shape of the future will be hereafter.  We always discuss this as killing a grandfather before he has children, but that means there is that intervening generation–in which one of our parents was never born.  Reflect on it and you’ll recognize that no matter what happened between your parents, their lives would have been very different had they never met, and if one of them had never been born, they would never have met.  I have elsewhere written about the genetic problem.  Note that had our mother not married our father, she probably would have married someone else; and whoever that was probably actually did marry someone else in this reality whom they would not have married had they married Mom.  That ripples through hundreds, possibly thousands, of relationships, displacing couples and altering the identities of a large segment of the next generation which in turn multiplies the impact, as the couples marrying in that generation are altered by the fact that thousands of them were never born, replaced by thousands who were born instead.  So it is not just my brother and I who both do and do not exist; it is thousands of others whose births will be prevented if my mother marries someone other than my father.

And when we reach the end of that bit of twisted time in which there are two different realities, one in which I live and leave for the past and the other in which I am never born, we have two worlds that are so completely different that it becomes utter nonsense to speak of them even as parallel.  The counterpart for my brother Roy Young is probably someone like Vinnie de LaRosa, who also exists in one dimension but not in the other.  The world has been so altered by this one event that the two versions can never converge to the same future.  “Tomorrow” can never be unified.

At that point, whether we say that there is a diverging universe with its own history beginning from the moment of my arrival in the past or that there is only one universe in which the same matter is configured in different ways in various histories which diverge from each other becomes a matter of semantics which solve nothing.  It is divergent universe theory with a lot of smoke and mirrors to make us think it is something else.

Meanwhile, the same action–killing your grandfather–in replacement theory causes an infinity loop.  In essence, there is an original history in which my grandfather lived and I was born, and I departed for the past ending that history, and as I arrived in the past I erased the original history and began writing a different single history of the world in which my grandfather died young and I was never born; then at the moment I fail to travel to the past, I remove myself from the past (the exact reason the grandfather paradox is a problem) and create a history in which I am not there, my grandfather lives, and ultimately I am born–the original history restored, leading to my decision to travel to the past.  Those two versions of history repeat, each causing the other, perpetually; “tomorrow” never comes, because it can only exist as a single universe with a single set of people and events if it has a single unified history in which all causes and effects are found.

So the video suggests an interesting idea that ultimately is not different from the divergent or parallel dimension theory it begins by dismissing.  It is not really something different.

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Law and Politics

#80: Environmental Blackmail

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #80, on the subject of Environmental Blackmail.

Augustine has been quoted (by C. S. Lewis, somewhere) as claiming to be “one who by writing profits and by profiting writes.”  I have that experience as well.  I had been musing on a completely different subject (for the Christian Gamers Guild Bible study) and suddenly saw how it applied to the massive global warming controversy, and thus I am writing about that here.

First, let me establish a few bona fides.  I am indeed a somewhat conservative moderate, but have also always been involved in environmental issues.  As a Boy Scout I cleaned up and repaired trails and wilderness areas as well as working with early recylcing efforts, collecting paper, glass, and aluminum in a time when it was voluntary and someone had to make an effort to make it happen.  I am in favor of policies that really do improve the environment; I am not in favor of policies which severely impact other areas of life such as economic growth but whose benefit to the environment is at best minimal or dubious.  I also favor policies that would shift the costs of environmental impact to those responsible for it–if the “cost” of a product includes that it damages our waterways, that cost ought to be covered in the sale price.  However, I also think that there is a great deal of alarmist talk in this field (see mark Joseph “young” web log post #45:  The Math of Charging Your Phone for an example).

img0080Earth

I am old enough to be skeptical of current scientific opinion simply because it is current opinion, and the fact that it is scientific does not much improve its credibility.  I remember when we were all being moved away from butter to healthier margarine for the sake of our hearts, and now it seems that margarine is much worse for our hearts and we should prefer butter (or some other heart-healthy spread).  Smoking was once encouraged for its supposed antibiotic and antiviral effects, and it was a slow road to persuade everyone that it was a major health problem.  The majority of scientific opinion has often been wrong in living memory, and it is a fool who believes that because he has corrected certain errors in his thinking he must now be completely right about everything.

I am also not so foolish as to be persuaded that all the scientists on one side of the issue and none of those on the other side have a vested interest in the outcome.  That is, we are told that those of the minority opinion, those scientists who either do not believe that climate change is occurring or do not believe that human activity is a significant factor in it, are largely funded by industries who want the outcome to support their continued exploitation of natural resources, and thus that their research is tainted.  We are not told that those who believe human activity is creating climate change which will occur on a rapid and global scale at devastating levels are largely funded by environmental groups who want more money invested in environmental activities, and thus also have an economic interest which potentially taints their research–not to mention that they get publicity and sell books and media based on it.  That blade cuts both ways.  Besides, saying that oil companies support scientists who agree with the position that benefits them (or that environmental groups do likewise for those whose work benefits them) is a bit like arguing that the resurrection of Christ must be a lie because everyone who claims to have seen Him after His resurrection was a believer:  if you actually knew you saw Jesus alive after you knew He had been executed, could you reasonably not become a believer?  It is quite natural for groups with an interest in the outcome to fund those who appear to be producing data that supports their preferred outcome, and to promote that data which does; that is equally true on both sides of this debate.

I think that there is evidence of climate change.  I think that it is a bit less clear to what degree it is because of our contributions rather than because of natural climatic shifts.  The fact that it cannot be demonstrated that we are having a serious impact on the environment is not, to my mind, a sufficient reason not to take steps to reduce our impact on the environment; it is sufficient reason not to do so in ways that are going to strangle an economy that desperately needs to grow and create jobs.  Some are arguing that jobs now are not as important as the future state of the earth, but they have jobs now and probably are not in much danger of losing them.  It can as easily be argued that the state of the environment in a century is not going to matter much to people who starve and freeze and die of heat stroke today because of a collapsing economy.  (Minimum wage increases will not help this; the only way to increase everyone’s share of the pot is to make the pot bigger.)  We must take reasonable steps to improve the environment; we must not take unreasonable ones.  Our debate, then, comes to identifying those reasonable steps.

My complaint, though, is that in the current debate the threat of global warming is being used as a weapon to promote environmental policy and quash intellectual exploration.  I am particularly concerned, because it is not clear to me whether human activity is impacting climate, and it is also unclear that any such impact is negative.  In 1991, the science fiction author trio of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn wrote a Prometheus Award-winning novel entitled Fallen Angels in which an essential element of the premise was that the world has been headed into an ice age for several hundred years which has been kept at bay by humanity’s production of greenhouse gases warming the planet, and that were we to stop that production we would within a very few years see glacial sheets descending southward on the continents of the northern hemisphere.  The appendix in that book explained this in some detail.  A Nova production a few years later explained how greenhouse gas levels fluctuated naturally, through a process in which rain washed carbon gases from the atmosphere, briefly became dilute carbolic acid, and either soaked into the ground and released the gases back into the atmosphere or landed on calcium-based rock usually upthrust by contintental drift, creating calcium carbonate that washed down the waterways to settle on the bottoms of seas and oceans out of the environment for centuries.  All of that is complicated, but the gist of it is that there was then–about twenty-five years ago–perceived to be a real danger, scientifically, that a significant reduction in the human production of greenhouse gases would result in a catastrophic climate shift.  Now we are being told that the failure to reduce the human production of greenhouse gases will have such a result.  Forgive me for feeling like this is the fad of the moment, like whether I should be eating butter or margarine.  I accept that there might be a problem, and it might need addressing.  I object to the hyperbole.

For example, there was a terrible storm on the east coast in 2012 known as Hurricane Sandy, a category 3 storm.  We were told that it was a harbinger of worse storms to come–but it was not as bad a storm as Hurricane Katrina, a category 5 storm in 2005.  The destruction from Sandy was because a rather ordinary storm was funnelled in an extraordinary way so as to be focused into a very narrow highly populated area.  The storm itself was not so severe; it was the vulnerability of the target that made the difference.  We have records of hurricanes using modern rating systems going back perhaps one and a half centuries, and there was a category 5 storm in 1928 and another in 1932.  Storms are not getting worse, and we’re not having the severe ones more frequently.  New England’s blizzard of 1978 was unprecedented and has not been matched since.  Yet every time something happens with the weather that people don’t like, the specter of climate change is paraded to scare us into environmental consciousness.

Scare tactics do work on some people, but intelligent people usually respond negatively to them.  Let’s address our environmental concerns sanely and sensibly, and stop trying to incite people to extreme action which might have worse consequences than what we already fear.

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