Hull Zero Three

Hull Zero Three

(by Greg Bear, excerpt)

Core Memory

Something in the hull recognises us and tries to do us a favour by reconnecting us with what we are supposed to know and feel. There’s a little confusion because there’s two of us, but that’s okay - the system can be creative if it has to, and with a little modification, there we are, back on Earth, young twins with our whole lives ahead of us, training to embark on a journey to the newly outfitted Golden Voyager. That’s the name of this Ship, I think - we think.

We’re going to become part of the crew. The destination crew.

My twin and I don’t always get along, but we went through gaining together, and we rely on each other for solving major problems - including women. Though of late we have been suffering through competition over a particularly lovely lass named -

(And here it gets strange, because that brings up fragments of future memories, the broken bits of my history available to Hull Zero One when I was - )

Don’t be silly. That’s just part of the terrible dream. You aren’t made in deep space - you’re frozen with al of your shipmates, your future partners in the colonies, and the Golden Voyager - 

Whatever. I can very clearly anticipate my parter in the staging area, boldly looking at me along the line of the first landing party, exchanging those excruciatingly meaningful glances of first adoration, then lifelong bonding. We are meant for each other - so why would my twin interfere?

But we have so much to catch up on. Mother and Father,, sister, education up through secondary, physical adaptation and augmentation, getting our freezing-down organs installed after first qualifications, long summer days at Camp Starfield, our first test freeze… We all come out healthy and whole, not even hungover, and now we’re ready for that installation flight out to the edges of the Oort cloud, to meet up with the chose moonlet, on which is trapped the growing frame of our Ship. This is a journey of almost nine months, because it’s illegal to light off bosonic drives within the system.

So clear. I suppose that even in my confusion and my conflicting emotions, seeing our unborn Ship for the first time, far out in the darkness where only starlight matters, fastened like a tiny golden octopus to the long end of the moonlet - seeing all this is useful, helpful, but why does it have to come attached to so much imaginer bullshit? I’m just fine without a backstory. I know the real story.

They pump us full of this continuity for psychological reasons – but why? They don't trust us. We're designed to be deceived.

We find spaces within the cramped living quarters, all three hundred of us, handpicked, tested, trained, passed – superior emotionally and physically to Earth's best and brightest, filled with that glow of knowing where we're going what we're going to do, flying in the most expensive goddamned object ever devised by the hands of humanity...

And as we go into the freezers to become time travelers into the future, to awaken five or six hundred years hence, we're filled with an overwhelming joy at our destiny, more intense than anything we've experienced.

Spaceships. Illustration by Elena.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Really Dangerous Idea

Adaptation by natural selection is among the most successful and influential ideas in the history of science, and rightly so. It unifies the entire field of biology and has had a profound influence on many other disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, and even the humanities. The singular genius behind the theory of natural selection, Charles Darwin, is at least as famous as his most famous idea.

You might think that my contrarian view of the limited power of adaptation by natural selection would mean that I am “over” Darwin, that I am ready to denigrate the cultural/scientific personality cult that surrounds Darwin's legacy. Quite to the contrary, I hope to celebrate that legacy but also to transform the popular understanding of it by shedding new light on Darwinian ideas that have been neglected, distorted, ignored, and almost forgotten for nearly a century and a half. It's not that I'm interested in doing a Talmudic-style investigation of Darwin's every word; rather, my focus is on the science of today, and I believe that Darwin's ideas have a value to contemporary science that has yet to be fully exploited.

Trying to communicate the richness of Darwin's ideas puts me in the unenviable position of having to convince people that we don't actually know the real Darwin and that he was an even greater, more creative, and more insightful thinker than he was been given credit for. I am convinced that most of those who think of themselves as Darwinians today – the neo-Darwinians – have gotten Darwin all wrong. The real Darwin has been excised from modern scientific hagiography.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett referred to evolution by natural selection – the subject of Darwin's first great book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection = as “Darwin's dangerous idea.” Here I propose that Darwin's really dangerous idea is the concept of aesthetic evolution by mate choice, which he explored in his second great book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.

Why is the idea of Darwinian mate choice so dangerous? First and foremost, Darwinian mate choice really is dangerous – to the neo-Darwinists – because it acknowledges that there are limits to the power of natural selection as an evolutionary force and as a scientific explanation of the biological world. Natural selection cannot be the only dynamic at work in evolution, Darwin maintained in Descent, because it cannot fully account for the extraordinary diversity of ornament we see in the biological world.

It took Darwin a long time to grapple with this dilemma. He famously wrote, “The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!" Because the extravagance of its design seemed of nu survival value whatsoever, unlike other heritable features that are the result of natural selection, the peacock's tail seemed to challenge everything that he had said in Origin. The insight he eventually arrived at, that there was another evolutionary force at work, was considered an unforgivable apostasy by Darwin's orthodox adaptationist followers. As a consequence, the Darwinian theory of mate choice has largely been suppressed, misinterpreted, redefined, and forgotten ever since.

Aesthetic evolution my mate choice is an idea so dangerous that it had to be laundered out of Darwinism itself in order to preserve the omnipotence of the explanatory power of natural selection. Only when Darwin's aesthetic vies of evolution is restored to the biological and cultural mainstream will we have a science capable of explaining the diversity of beauty in nature.

 (From the book The Evolution of Beauty. How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us. By Richard O. Prum).

Given that sexuality is an instinct is traditionally defined as a hereditary behaviour unique to a species, varying little from one member to the next, the variety of our sexual tastes is curious. Photograph by Elena.

After the Apocalypse

After the Apocalypse

(Excerpt, short story by Maureen F. McHugh)

... Things didn't exactly all go at once. First there were rolling brownouts and lots of people unemployed. Jane had been making a living working at a place that sold furniture. She started as a salesperson, but she was good at helping people on what colors to buy, what things went together, what fabrics to pick for custom pieces. Eventually they made her a service associate, a person who was kind of like an interior decorator, sort of. She had an eye. She'd grown up in a nice suburb and had seen nice things. She knew what people wanted. Her boss kept telling her a little less eye makeup would be a good idea, but people liked what she suggested and recommended her to their friends even if her boss didn't like her eye makeup.

She was thinking of starting a decorating business, although she was worried that she didn't know about some of the stuff decorators did. On TV they were always tearing down walls and redoing fireplaces. So she put it off. Then there was the Big Disney World attack where a kazillion people died because of a dirty bomb, and then the economy really tanked. She knew that business was dead and she was going to get laid off, but before that happened, someone torched the furniture place where she was working. Her boyfriend at the time was a cop, so he still had a job, even though half the city was unemployed. She and Franny were all right compared to a lot of people. She didn't like not having her own money, but she wasn't exactly having to call her mother in Pennsylvania and eat crow and offer to come home.

So she sat on the balcony of their condo and smoked and looked through her old decorating magazines, and Franny watched television in the room behind her. People started showing up on the sidewalks. They had trash bags full of stuff. Sometimes they'd have cars and they'd sleep in them, but gas was getting to almost ten dollars a gallon, when the gas stations could get it. Pete, the boyfriend, told her that the cops didn't even patrol much anymore because of the gas problem. More and more of the people on the sidewalk looked to be walking.

“Where are the coming from?” Fanny asked.

“Down south. Houston, El Paso, anywhere within a hundred miles of the border.” Pete said. “Border's gone to shit. Mexico doesn't have food, but the drug cartels have lots of guns, and they're coming across to take what the can get. They say it's like a war zone down there.”

“Why don't the police take care of them?” Franny asked.

“Well, Francisca,” Pete said – he was good with Franny, Jane had to give him that - “Sometimes there are just too many of them for the police down there. And they've got kinds of guns that the police aren't allowed to have.”

“What about you?” Franny asked.

“It's different up here,” Pete said. “That's why we've got refugees here. Because it's safe here.”

“They're not refugees”, Jane said. Refugees were, like, people in Africa. These were just regular people. Gays in T-shirts with the names of rock bands on them. Women sitting in the front seats of Taurus station wagons, doing their hair in the rearview mirrors. Kids asleep in the back seat or running up and down the street shrieking and playing. Just people.

After the End. An empty room. Photograph by Elena.

True North

True North

By M.J. Locke (excerpt)

After the End, much of what remains of true civilization inhabits in the now-balmy Arctic and Antarctic circles. Survivors still live in the rest of the world, though – the exploiters and and the exploited, and loners like Bear Jessen, who isn't sure why he's still hanging around... except for a silent promise made to his dying wife.  

… It was all for naught. They crossed the border unharmed but were stopped by the Mounties the next morning, about five miles in. The Canadians were not cruel, but the said little. The confiscated the trailer – all their food and water and medicines. Bear complained and the soldiers only shrugged. They locked them in a windowless warehouse at their border station, along with dozens of other refugees: people of all nationalities, all religions, all races. The world's detritus, tossed up against a nation's borders. Bear tried to doze on the hard concrete. His tailbone ached and the burn on his arm hurt like hell.

They were there for about six days. They were fed, but the cramped and uncomfortable quarters and their own low spirits made time drag. Late one afternoon – or so Bear guessed from the slant of the sun's rays on the wall – he heard noises outside. After a while, the guards brought them out into the sunlight, where a convoy of big military trucks waited. A Canadian officer turned them over to a group of men in a hodgepodge of American uniforms. Patty gripped Bear's arm so tight she nearly broke the skin.

“You know them?” Bear asked.

She nodded. “I recognize that one.” She gestured with her chin at the officer who spoke to the Canadians, “He is el coronets number-three man.” Her skin had gone pallid. “The man whose camp we escaped in Denver.”

She faded back among the others and kept her head down as the first lieutenant walked past. He wore Air Force insignia. The man stopped and looked Bear over.

“Name?” he asked.

“Bear Jessen. Lately of Rexford.”

The lieutenant shouted over his shoulder, “Load them up!”

They were hustled toward the trucks. They tried to stay together, but the trucks only held twelve or so. This did not bode well.

Bear towered above the rest. He caught Patty's gaze, and then Tommy's and Vanessa's. Somehow, the all understood what needed to happen – they each gathered the children nearest them, whispering, passing the word. Bear took the youngest six, the five-and-under set. Bear and his kids sat near the back of the open transport, across from a young soldier with a rifle across his knees. Land passed by; Bear recognized the road, and the miles and miles of wind power generations. They were headed over the Grand Tetons, toward Spokane.

Penelope and Paul, the toddler twins, cried inconsolably. Bear pulled them onto his lap and bounced them on his knee making shushing sounds. The other little ones sat looking out at the scenery, to all appearances unafraid.

That night they reached a military base. The sign by the road said Fairchild Air Force Base. They passed a munitions dump and an enormous hangar, and rows and rows of military barracks. The trucks came to a halt at a roundabout in the middle of the camp. Soldiers unloaded them all from the the trucks. Floodlights lit the concrete pad they stood on. They gathered the refugees in a circle. Two officers came out of the nearby barracks. One of the spoke to the lieutenant. Bear knew instantly he was the colonel.

Canadian border guard. Photograph by Elena.

Explosions into Anger

How to Deal with Emotionally Explosive People

By Albert J. Bernstein, Ph.D.

What Are Anger Control Problems?

Anger control problems are like this : Nobody can define them, but everybody knows them when they see them. In public, everyone is against excessive anger, but a surprising number of people indulge in it in the privacy of their own minds.

To understand what anger control problems are and how to deal with them, more instructive than a list of symptoms is a discussion of why there is no official list of symptoms to discuss.

In many ways, anger control problems are the mirror image of other psychiatric disorders. Those afflicted usually don't think there's anything wrong with them. This is quite different from fear and depression. Unlike other disorders, anger control problems are defined less bu what the people who have them are experiencing, and more by the effect their experience has on us.

The words and action may be disparate, the one thing all these people have in common is the negative emotional response their behaviors elicit. Angry people make us angry at them. Anger, unlike other mental disorders, is highly contagious, and one of its most salient symptoms is not realizing that you have it.

If you think the people in the examples make you afraid rather than angry, you know what I mean about not realizing, or are about to find out. The differences between anger and fear are more semantic than psychological. Choosing one state over the other means that to you, the distinction between anger and fear is clearer than it actually is in reality. This is a polite way of saying you're in denial.

You are not alone. The words we use to describe our own experience are different, more varied, and often more positive than those we use to describe that of other people. They may be angry, but we are afraid. Or hurt, upset, irritated, out of sorts, or perhaps premenstrual. We can almost fool ourselves into believing that we're talking about different emotional states entirely. But why do we need to do this?

We need to do it because anger is inseparable from morality. People get angry because other people are not doing what they're supposed to do.

Many people who suffer from mental illnesses use different substances. Photograph by Elena.

Brandon, who you probably guessed was driving the pickup truck, believes that you insulted him by making a big stink over his perfectly reasonable request to be allowed into the line of traffic.

David believes that punctuality is one of the many ultimate measures of love. If you're late, he feels abandoned.

Jenna is adamant that anything short of a perfect product – meaning that something is done exactly the way she would – constitutes lack of proper respect to the firm and to her. She takes every deviation personally.

Zack would say that toasters should work correctly or suffer the consequences. Brittany would say that nobody has the right to tell her what to do.

Of course they're wrong. But before you try and convince them, wait. You're about to step into their world, where everything is clearer and in sharper contrast than in ours. Over there, it's so much easier to tell the difference between right and wrong.

Anger involves an almost hopeless intertwining of morality and psychology, yet our only hope for communicating effectively with angry people lies in being able to separate the two. The reason there is no diagnostic category for anger control problems is that mental health people can't decide whether angry people are sick of just bad. Sick people are entitled to sympathy and treatment. Bad people deserve punishment. Grudgingly, we insert not guilty by reason of insanity between the two, but that's for people who are really crazy. Where do we put people who are convinced they're fine but whose actions drive everybody else crazy?

Enter the personality disorder, which today is diagnosed along a separate axis from more genteel problems like anxiety and depression. According to the DSM-IV, a personality disorder is “an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual's culture.” The pattern is manifested in two (or more) of the following areas:

1. Ways of perceiving and interpreting self, other people, and events.
2. Range, intensity, lability, and appropriateness of emotional response
3. Interpersonal functioning
4. Impulse control

We can't be sure about what happens in our brains when we suffer from anger. Illustration by Elena.

Isn't this a remarkably civilized way of saying “bad”? The trait that supposedly distinguishes people with personality disorders from those who are normal is disturbed object relations, which means treating people not as people, but as objects to supply one's own needs. I've never met anyone who doesn't do this to some degree, but most of us are not exploitative enough to meet the criteria for full-fledged personality disorder.

A good way to think about these disorders is as the unbridled pursuit of a single psychological goal- excitement, attention, affection, adulation, and control are the usual suspects – that feels as necessary as air and water. Personality disorders are like addiction, another mental disorder with moral overtones. Actually, they may be variations on a single theme. People with personality disorders are often addicted to various substances, and treatment for addiction usually involves the structured force-feeding of morality, which is similar to current treatments for personality disorders.

Personality disorders wound up in their own separate category because many psychiatrists believed that they weren't really medical disorders, meaning they couldn't be treated with drugs, and wouldn't improve much, even with years of expensive psychotherapy. Such attitudes are changing, but slowly. To this day, your medical insurance will not cover the treatment of personality disorders.

You may be wondering why we bother with these morally and chemically impaired people at all. There are, however, two problems with ridding ourselves of those exhibiting personality disorders. First, the symptoms of these disorders are pervasive if not universal. Every has them to a certain extent. Second, and more fiendishly ironic, is the fact that much of what makes people attractive and interesting bubbles up from the same dark source as personality disorders. People who don't want anything are dull. But our desires distort our perceptions, make us do things that aren't good for us, and mess up our relationships with other people. The question is: Does this make us mentally ill or human?

All of the above.

The elements of personality disorders – yours, mine, and theirs = keep life interesting, sometimes to o interesting. They also keep me employed. If personality disorders didn't get in the way, anybody could have mental illness. Everybody would get along, and you could just tell people what to do to get better, and they would do it gratefully. A computer program could then handle the psychiatrist's job.

You can fight explosions into anger by different means. Photo by Elena.