I’ve still got a couple of politically oriented posts to write, including some self-examination on the whole civility thing from the past week, & another for a little self-assigned project to learn a bit more about the Tea Party movement as Tea Partiers themselves see it (rather than through the received wisdom I have from my usual sources in media & blogs) — as best I can.  But having stayed up late last night with a political post, I’m tired & too mindfried to even respond to comments; plus I’m in need out of political stuff for a few.

Time to get my geek on to the stuff I really want to do: write.  Too mindfried for that too, unfortunately.  So instead: just a relaxed little post about where writing has been this past week, if only to remind myself that I’m getting somewhere with it these days.

I’m in the midst of reading two books at once, both having to do with consensus & collective decisonmaking.  This is as background research for Cold & Long Dark — for the Consensus government I talked about in my Building Consensus post the other day.  One of the books I’ve been reading on my iPod while riding the bus with the Kindle for iPhone app — well, how I’m reading it is less important than what I’m reading: How to Make Collaboration Work: Powerful Ways to Build Consensus, Solve Problems, and Make Decisions by David Straus.  The other book, which arrived at my door maybe a week & a half later, is We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy — A Guide to Sociocratic Principles and Methods by John Buck and Sharon Villines.  I’d never heard of sociocracy before encountering this book.

Between the two of them, I’m learning one heckuva lot — & more often than not while reading, storymind is fully engaged, figuring out how to take this stuff & weave it in with what I already know about how the Consensus government of my story universe works.  But I’m glad I’ve already done as much thinking about Consensus before reading these books — because it’s already mine.  This reading is just to refine & expand my understanding, so it works better. I’ve got some other books on my “consensus” reading list too, but I’m not gonna list ‘em all now.

So, Friday night went out with my friend Marcia, & exercised her ears by blabbing all over the place in my story — from Oikos, the planet my characters are terraforming in Cold, & back 300 or so year to Mars, where the very important figure of Esti Gusev is born & spend the early years of her life.  And how she came to learn of Consensus by way of an earlier figure whose philosophy influenced its formation — who turns out to be none other (to my surprise) than the main character from my older novel-in-progress, Mistress of Woodland.  And then I took Marcia here & there, & found myself surprised at how well I know this story universe… even though there’s still lots more I need to know.  But wow, it was fun talking about it.

Then Saturday I went to Side Street & wrote.  Was working on a story called “Trading Shirts” from Cold that features Bai & Boleyn — same characters as in the story “Cold” that’s been published — & got a fair headway.  This was for a story contest that had a entry deadline Monday.  But I ended up deciding to hold that story for another online publication, & decided to dust off & revise a different story from even yet again a different project called Finer, which is a fairly basic (but I hope interesting) non-SF lesbian love story set in 1980 in a small town in northwest Montana — not much different from where I grew up.  Even to the aluminum reduction plant that the main character works in.

So got that finished. I think I may do more writing in the Finer world while I continue doing some of the research reading I’m doing.  Will see.  I still need to finish “Trading Shirts” too.

So that’s where that is.

About the pin

The “Write Hard Die Free” pin in the photo at the top of this post was designed by William Spear of Douglas, Alaska. That and other great pins are available at wmspear.com.

Related posts:

1. Writing life: Politics short-term & long-term
2. The Daily Tweets, 2010-04-15: Writing life
3. My October reading list

Consensus as the form of government in my fiction came about from a combination of personal experience with consensus used in a collaborative project (in this case, Wikipedia) & the influence of another science fiction story, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars).  I’m doing a lot of reading nowadays about consensus, collaborative decisionmaking, sociocracy, etc. as background research for my writing.  I’m also becoming convinced that those forms of decisionmaking are our best means of recreating our own society & government into one that really is of, by, & for the people.

But for now: just the story of how I decided on Consensus to begin with.

Storymind

When I first decided to write Cold for NaNoWriMo 2007, I didn’t know much at all about the government or society in which my characters lived.  I only knew that the story began with a question — What does cold feel like? — out of which emerged the story’s setting & first characters: a planet in the late stages of terraformation, and two young women, one who had never lived outside the enclosed habitats of her space-born society, & one who had.  These two characters, Bai & Boleyn, are the center of the story of Cold; but of course there is a world in which they live, a society in which they live, more questions to be answered.  For instance, how did Boleyn come to have experience outside the closed biosphere?  Okay, her family was exiled for a time to a remote facility.  But why?  How?  Where?  And so on.  Well, that’s storymaking, to me: it’s about asking a question, & trying out answers until you come up with one that you like, which will generate more questions, more what ifs.

I made the decision to do NaNoWriMo 2007 in about February of that year.  But I had to constrain myself from actually writing it until November, when NaNo actually began.  Didn’t stop me from thinking about it, though; & so what I call storymind became engaged pretty continually.  For instance, I remember walking across the UAA campus one day on a work-related errand. It must’ve been February or March, still winter, so I stuck that day to what we at UAA informally call the “spine” — the enclosed walkways that make it possible to walk most of the way across campus without going outside.  And I thought, hmm, wouldn’t the closed habitats on my story’s planet be build in a modular style, with closed in walkways like the ones I’m walking in now to connect them?  Why, of course they would. Thus in my storymind I began to design the structure of the enclosed community that I later named Turnbull, which is essentially a collection of several enclosed habitats called Commons that are connected together with “tubes” aboveground & tunnels belowground.

(Turnbull itself is named after Margaret Turnbull, one of the two astronomers who compiled the Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems (HabCat) to narrow down the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), obviously useful in the search for systems with potentially habitable extrasolar planets like the one my characters were terraforming. The other HabCat compiler was Jill Tarter, who was the inspiration for the main character in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, played in the movie by Jodie Foster.)

The battle of the Battle of Washita River

Cold wasn’t all I was thinking about over the course of 2007.  Life stuff, of course, including a trip to Seattle & Spokane to visit family.  Also, I got heavily involved in active editing of Wikipedia.  This began more-or-less by accident when I discovered that the Wikipedia article about the Dena’ina elder & writer Peter Kalifornsky indicated he was alive.  Hold on, I thought, didn’t I recall him having died sometime within the past few years?  Yep, about four years previously — so next thing I knew I was researching him, correcting the article, & doing even more research… on an article which even now I haven’t completed (!!!).  But I sure learned a lot along the way about Dena’ina language, culture, & history (Anchorage is situated in Dena’ina country) — some of which entered storymind to influence some aspects of Cold.  But of course I also got pulled to other Wikipedia articles, & pretty soon Wikipedia editing became a major focus that largely drew me away from my writing life (at least in terms of writing my stuff) until November, when NaNoWriMo helped me to break that fixation.  Nowadays, I do Wikipedia editing only here & there.  (Though it would really be nice if I finished that Peter Kalifornsky article!)

But my Wikipedia experience went into storymind too.  Of particular relevance: I got caught up in huge dispute on a particular article (the Battle of Washita River, if you want to know) with a certain editor with strong anti-Indian bigotry who wanted to paint the Cheyenne people in general & the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle in particular as unqualifiedly evil, & George Armstrong Custer (this editor’s personal hero) as unqualifiedly good & wonderful & perfect.  Never mind historical facts; & never mind Wikipedia policies of neutral point of view (commonly abbreviated in Wikipedia background discussions as NPOV), “no original research” (NOR), & verifiability — policies that are intended to protect Wikipedia’s integrity as an encyclopedia by founding its articles on reliable sources, verifiable facts, & neutral presentation of all sides of contentious issues instead of presenting only “one side of the story.”

Battle of Washita River as depicted in Harper's Weekly for December 19, 1868, three weeks after the event on November 27. Through Wikimedia Commons.

Dealing with this dispute was a big learning experience.  Given my lifetime of socialization in 20th & 21st century U.S.A., my first reaction in dealing with a clearly biased “one side of the story” breaker of rules was to look for an authority figure to whom I could appeal to bring this editor into line: Someone is breaking the law: where are the cops, the judges, can’t we ban this guy?

The closest thing you have to “authority figures” on Wikipedia are admins… but it doesn’t take long on Wikipedia to discover that an admin is not, in fact, a cop.  Wikipedia governs itself by processes of consensus: if you appeal to an admin about a dispute on an article, the admin isn’t going to automatically kick someone’s butt unless there are clearcut problems like edit-warring or personal attacks.  But if the disputes are over content & bias, the admin is going to advise you to discuss the problem on the article’s discussion page, & try to come to a consensus.  Yes, there we go: consensus, one of Wikipedia’s six core policies regarding personal conduct, which also include a demand for civility and no personal attacks, refraining from edit warring, welcoming everyone to edit (assuming they abide by Wikipedia’s core policies, including the conduct policies), & collaboration on, rather than individual “ownership” of, articles.

Okay, but we’ve got a content dispute with a biased editor here, & we’ve been told to take our dispute to the article’s talk page & come to consensus.  But what if agreement can’t be reached there?  Then there are additional processes used in Wikipedia through which disputes can be worked through, some of which might result in sanctions against problematic “I refuse to abide by Wikipedia’s policies” type editors (like the guy we were dealing with).  Our problem guy did get the occasional sanction for edit warring & personal attacks (as did one of the folks supposedly on the “right side” of the content dispute, who has since gone on to a long career in getting banned for incivility & edit warring under a variety of different sockpuppet usernames), but it took us a long time to bring the content dispute into some kind of control, just a couple of months before NaNoWriMo 2007 took me out of the Wikipedia biz.

If you’re curious, check out the Talk page & its archives for Battle of Washita River to see all the crap I & my fellow editors had to go through.  Especially see the RfC (Request for Coments) on the article itself & the related RfCs on our two problem editors.  (I’m the user Yksin.)  It took us two months to move from the article being locked down in a biased & inaccurate form to be able to edit it again after the disputes had been more-or-less settled.  It took a long time, but we did it right.  If you think I’m being a naive idealist when I talk about the need to be civil in discussing Sarah Palin, then read through this stuff, & try to convince me that civil, factual discussion doesn’t, in the end, win out over the kind of offal that our problem editors were continually unloading on us.  Patience helps.  I’m proud of the way I handled myself throughout.

Wikipedia was a great experiential education for me in at least some of the possibilities of consensus.  It was also instructive about how “knowledge” is constructed.  I grew to have a great deal of respect for Wikipedia as a source of information — as long as you know how it works & how to evaluate the information there.  (I typically look not only at the articles themselves, but also their edit histories & talk pages.  But I also never consider a Wikipedia page the last word on a topic.  I still sometimes log in & correct typos or misstatements of fact, or to revert vandalism.)

If you’re interested in seeing how consensus operates in a huge collaborative project like this, you can do like I had to do: go into the behind-the-scenes of Wikipedia. See how editors & admins & bureaucrats (another level of Wikipedia adminship) talk with each other about articles & the processes by which articles are written.  Look at article talk pages & see how disputes over content are resolves.  Check out the process called Request for Adminship, or RfA by which admins become admins & bureaucrats become bureaucrats — which is partially what Cold‘s process of Examination is based upon.  There’s a lot there.   And it’s very geeky but also very cool.  I still think very highly of the numerous people who work really hard to make Wikipedia a good encyclopedia.

A constitution on Mars

Mars Global Surveyor image of Pavonis Mons, a broad shield volcano (similar to the volcanoes of Hawaii) located on the martian equator at 113°W. The volcano summit is near 14 km (~8.7 mi) above the martian datum (0 elevation); the central caldera (crater near center of image) is about 45 km (~28 mi.) across and about 4.5 km (~2.8 mi.) deep. Pavonis Mons is the site of a settlement in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Blue Mars where the Martian Constitution was written. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems via JPL Photojournal.

At the same time in 2007 that I got caught up in Wikipedia editing, I was following my friend Chris’ advice to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Hugo & Nebula-award winning Mars trilogy — Red Mars, Green Mars, & Blue Mars — because of one of its overall themes, the terraformation of Mars.  But, as I wrote the other day, I also discovered another them theme —

the long & arduous struggle of Robinson’s Martian colonists for freedom from the political & economic domination of Earth. Freedom not only from Earth’s numerous governments — but especially from Earth’s corporations, which have become so powerful that they are in many ways more powerful than governments themselves, both on Earth & on Mars.

The Wikipedia article about Kim Stanley Robinson observes,

Robinson’s work often explores alternatives to modern capitalism. In the Mars trilogy, it is argued that capitalism is an outgrowth of feudalism, which could be replaced in the future by a more democratic economic system. Worker ownership and cooperatives Green Mars and Blue Mars as a replacement for traditional corporations….

Robinson’s work often portrays characters struggling to preserve and enhance the world around them in an environment characterized by individualism and entrepreneurialism, often facing the political and economic authoritarianism of corporate power acting within this environment. Robinson has been described as anti-capitalist, and his work often portrays a form of frontier capitalism that promotes ideals that closely resemble anarcho-syndicalist and socialist systems, and faced with a capitalism that is staunched by entrenched hegemonic corporations. In particular, his Martian Constitution draws upon social democratic ideals explicitly emphasizing a community-participation element in political and economic life, while a persistent threat to social democracy is embodied by transnational corporations, the characteristics of which resemble those predicted by institutionalist and socialist economists such as Ted Wheelwright and Karl Marx.

It should be no surprise to anyone, given my already vociferous criticism of contemporary corporatism (not to mention the foolishness of granting corporations the legal fiction of “personhood”)  that I like this about Kim Stanley Robinson.  A lot.

Wikipedia goes on to say,

The environmental, economic, and social themes in Robinson’s oeuvre stand in marked contrast to the right-wing Libertarian streak prevalent in much of science fiction…  and his work has been called the most successful attempt to reach a mass audience with a left-wing libertarian and anti-capitalist utopian vision since Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed.

Ursula K!!!  What greater recommend could there be for Kim Stanley Robinson than that?  And The Disposessed is a great novel — thanks, Wiki editors, for the reminder to read it again. If all I am at the moment is a barely-published writer of only a couple of things here & there, still, let it be known — I aspire to stand in their tradition.

(Though I hesitate to call either of their visions as utopian.  I think societies such as they’ve invented are possible & desirable.  But it’ll take us to make them.)

By the beginning of the last book of Robinson’s trilogy, Blue Mars, the Martian colonists have finally succeeded in kicking the corporations off-planet (by means of the trilogy’s Second Martian Revolution in the year 2127); but in order to maintain their independence from Earth governments & Earth-based corporations, they decide they need to adopt their own constitution & government.  Thus, a congress is convened in a settlement at Pavonis Mons — one of Mars’ great volcanoes — where the new Martian Constitution is drafted, later to be ratifiied by 78% of Martians who voted (the novel says that 95% of eligible voters voted).  (Tip o’ the nib to MangalaWiki, a wiki-based encyclopedia on the Robinson’s works, which helped me keep my facts on track.)

Here’s where Robinson & Wikipedia collided in my storymind: the people who did the actual drafting of the constitution at Pavonis Mons worked collaboratively — &, of course, using computers. —

“At least the points are there to discuss,” Nadia said.  And along with them, on everyone’s screen, were the blank constitutions with their sections headings, suggesting all by themselves the many problems they were going to have to come to grips with: “Structure of Government, Executive; Structure of Government, Legislative; Structure of Government, Judicial; Rights of Citizens; Military and Police… [and so on]. (my paperback copy of Blue Mars, p. 125)

Later, after they complete their work, they attach all the numerous written documents & discussions that had been generated during the process for reference by courts, historians, & other interpreters who wanted a better understanding of the framers’ intent.  (Much as Alaskans can refer to the minutes of the Alaska Constitutional Convention in order to better understand the Alaska Constitution & its framers’ intent.)

And I thought, what if they actually used wiki-type software, similar to what Wikipedia itself uses,  to draft their constitution?  That way, there would always be a running record of the proceedings (at least, any that were in written form) — edit histories, talk pages to discuss differences & disagreements about difference, & to develop agreement & consensus — the full gamut.

I’m not sure exactly the moment this stuff germinated to such an extent that it fledged itself fully into my story’s Consensus government — but I had it by November 1, 2007, when I did my first day’s writing on Cold — the same writing that became, with not as many revisions as you’d think, the short story “Cold” published in Crossed Genres Issue #12 exactly two years later.

But come to think of it — there was also a third influence in the mix, which I’ll call —

Influence of the Self

— the Self in this case being myself & my beliefs, especially the content of my beliefs with regard to selfhood.

Best expressed by some of my writing about halfway into NaNoWriMo 2007, when I was reading Robinson’s The Martians, which collects a lot of stories & sketches related to his trilogy & its characters.  Among them were some pieces about the Constitution of Mars, with commentary from one of Robinson’s fictional constitutional framers. These pieces led me to additional thinking about Consensus in my story.  On November 19, 2007, I wrote in part,

Two chief principles exist in dialectic, as can be encapsulated in the statement held to by one of the spiritual movements within Consensus: Harming none, do as you will.  I think what I’m getting to is some of my own deepseated beliefs, which that statement plays a large part in.  Basically, whether at the individual level or the community and government level, the  principle of sovereignty over one’s own actions (“do as you will”, self-government) is always balanced against the the principle of nonharm: the recognition and respecting of the rights and autonomy of others.   Consensus has as one of its fundamental principles, which is legal, moral, and spiritual all at once, that the integrity of the Self is paramount, whether that Self be an individual or a body of individuals joined together into a family, a community, or a large body of society.  Violation of such integrity or wholeness through the causing of harm is conceived of, legally, as crime; morally and spiritually, it may be considered sin.  The principle is established in the very name of this type of government: Consensus, indicating the consent of those who make it up.  Government, rather than being something imposed, often coercively, upon the people by a hierarchy above them, is made up of all of the people in a very direct way.

Later that same day —

There is no such thing, in Consensus philosophy and culture, as a government separate from the people.  Everything begins with the Self, the first Self that is each individual human being.  Inasmuch as humans as biological beings are also social beings, Self is also expressed in the yearning for Other, which finds a home in relationship, each relationship or group of relationships themselves forming their own Selves: friendship, sexual pairing and partnership, family, community, Consensus.  Because all levels of society begin with that fundamental Self of each individual, therefore the Self is sacrosanct; its autonomy is the first building block of society.  To violate the Selfhood of an individual is like the breaking open an atom: it’s the beginning of destruction.  The Self, of course, is much more fragile than the atom: it took until the 20th century C.E. for humans to learn how to split the atom; but it didn’t take us long at all to come up with all manner of ways to cleave the human soul, and the chain reaction from that has never ended.  Only some have learned to restore it, only some have learned ways of living with one another in such ways that the violation of soul and Self isn’t inextricably a part of human education, of human “conditioning.”  Even the most intelligent and soul-preserving societies make mistakes.

Consensus begins by recognizing those two aspects of what it is to be human: Self, and Other, in which each Other is also a Self. Society, culture, government is nothing more and nothing less than the provisional solution humans have come to in any given time and place to balance between Self and Other; or shall we say, the multiplicity of Selves, each with its own sacrosanct Integrity.  Thus, the laws of Consensus begin with the laws intended to protect the Self at its most basic level, that of the individual.  Everything else flows upward from that.

And now here I am reading more about consensus & related ideas — collaborative decisionmaking, collective intelligence, sociocracy — all of which reflect the ethic that I was writing about: the idea that every individual has value, & that the integrity & selfhood of every individual must be protected.

But the books I’m reading are taking me even one step beyond that: recognition that each & every individual, without exception, must have a say in any decision that affects her or his life. Government not through the coercion of the powerful over the less-powerful, but government by the consent of all.

Not only are these books helping me to articulate this, but they’re also teaching me the techniques & strategies that can make it possible.  Both in my stories, & in the Real World of which we all are part.

Needless to say, I’ll be writing more about this.

Related posts:

1. Good for my worldbuilding, bad for my world
2. Writing life
3. Terraforming notes

Mars mosaic from a compilation of images captured by Viking Orbiter 1. At center is the entire Valles Marineris canyon system, over 3,000 km long and up to 8 km deep. To the left are a volcanoes of the Tharsis bulge — Ascraeus Mons to the north, Pavonis Mons in the middle, & Arsia Mons in the shadow. Photo credit: NASA/USGS (via JPL Photojournal)

Worldbuilding, Wikipedia helpfully tells us, is

the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a fictional universe.

The Wikipedia article focuses on the creation of worlds & the cultures that live in them by writers of science fiction & fantasy — for instance, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth in The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings trilogy, or the planet Cyteen in C.J. Cherryh’s novels Cyteen and Regenesis, to name but a couple of my favorite imaginary worlds.

But to my mind, worldbuilding isn’t restricted only to completely imagined worlds & people — really, any writer of fiction engages in worldbuilding, even when writing the most mainstream fiction that takes place in a world looking “just like” the world you & I live in, because any fiction involves presenting the particular world(s) & worldview(s) of the characters that inhabit it.

As if you & I actually lived in the same world.  Because isn’t your worldview, no matter who you are,  so much different than mine?  Yet there are some things we can agree on, at least most of us can — if only that rocks are hard to the touch, & water is wet.  Consensual reality, it’s called.  And that’s the point, at least in these coupla paragraphs of this blog post: there are some things a writer can generally assume her audience is familiar with, so that she doesn’t have to explain them; but other things that exist outside your normal frame of reference — that she has invented — yeah, of course she’ll need to explain.  (Or show. As that familiar writer’s proverb goes, show don’t tell — though, as with all rules, there are exceptions.)  Mainstream fiction, so-called, differs from science fiction & fantasy mainly in how closely it adheres to consensual reality, how much worldbuilding it has to do.

I could go on a lot longer about my thoughts about the different types of worldbuilding in different types of fiction (or, arguably, nonfiction), but then I’d never get to the point of this post — which is my worldbuilding, & how the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC — along with everything else in U.S. & international law & custom that grants undue influence in how our governments & economies & lives are run to the fake persons known as corporations —  is really really really good for my worldbuilding.

But really really really sucko for the world I actually live in.

Good for my worldbuilding

Artist's conception of Mars in process of terraformation from Wikimedia Commons. Used in accordance with GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

In early 2007 I decided that to jumpstart my writing after “life,” as usual, had decided to interfere with it, I was going to do National Novel Writing Month that November.  The good people of NaNoWriMo itself suggest that it’s best not to do NaNoWriMo with a project one already has underway — which in my case would have been Mistress of Woodland — so I pulled an idea off the backburner of my mind & decided to work on a new project,  Cold, which would be about two young women on a planet in the late stages of terraformation.

I told my friend Chris about it, & he told me I should read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy — Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars.  My brother Dave had previously recommended those books to me too.  So, over the late winter & spring of 2007, I read them.

Good call, guys.

If I were to summarize the story of Robinson’s trilogy in one sentence, I’d say, It’s a science fiction story about terraforming Mars.  Hence Red Mars — what the colonizers of the planet find when they get there; Green Mars — how it becomes green with growing plants; Blue Mars — how it becomes a second blue marble in the sky, like our own Earth, rich with liquid water on its surface & in its atmosphere.

But really, that’s only one theme of the trilogy.  There’s also an ecological theme: is it right & ethical for us, humans from planet Earth, to remake another planet — even a presumably “dead” planet like Mars — into a second Earth?  And meanwhile, what’s happening environmentally on the real Earth? — climate change, global warming, melting of Antarctica, rising seas, continuing overpopulation & pollution… in short, planetwrecking, at least in terms of keeping it habitable for human beings & numerous of our fellow species.

There’s also a third dominant theme: the long & arduous struggle of Robinson’s Martian colonists for freedom from the political & economic domination of Earth. Freedom not only from Earth’s numerous governments — but especially from Earth’s corporations, which have become so powerful that they are in many ways more powerful than governments themselves, both on Earth & on Mars.

Sound familiar?

Robinson isn’t, of course, the first SF writer to extrapolate from the scary situation we’re already in today vis-à-vis corporate power into some even scarier futures, with megacorporations having for all intents & purposes replaced any semblance of government of, by, & for the people.  (Unless, of course, you persist in perversely insisting that corporations are people, like the U.S. Supreme Court does.)  The science fiction subgenre called cyberpunk comes particularly to mind.

My imagined science fiction future is already extrapolated from the present, & the power corporations have is part of that.  During NaNoWriMo 2007, for Cold, I started inventing a government called, simply, Consensus, which really is a government of, by, & for the people, but it was during NaNoWriMo 2009, for Long Dark, that I discovered how Consensus came into existence.  I was writing stuff in the same story universe as Cold, but about three centuries earlier in the timeline; there, it became more apparent that the Consensus government came out of particular (invented) historical circumstances: namely, a rebellion by people living & working in the Asteroid Belt & outer solar system against the tyranny & exploitation of corporations, which, as usual, cared more about the corporate bottom line than about the welfare of their workers & their workers’ families.

So you see, that’s what’s so great about the Citizens United decision, & other corporate-power related phenomena. Here’s another word for you: verisimilitude:  the appearance of being true or real. The more our public officials hand over the reins of government to corporations, the more plausible the story world I’ve built becomes.  Wow, thank you Supreme Court!

Except, uh… like I said.  This shit is —

Bad for my world

No, corporations aren’t the only things — er, I mean “people” — whose greed, thoughtlessness, short-sightedness, stupidity, self-aggrandizement, etc. etc., are bad for the world.  They’re just on the current cutting edge of it.  And the more we, or public officials supposedly acting in our name, hand political power to them, the more deeply cutting their edge is.  The Citizens United ruling is just another step in that direction.

And nice as verisimilitude in fiction is, what would be even nicer would be to live in a world in which, for instance, we could trust that our elected officials were really responsible to us, instead of to corporations whose paid propaganda (so called “free speech”) put them in office.

In May 2007, when I was an active Wikipedia editor, I spent lots of time researching the career of Tom Anderson — in fact, I wrote most of  the article about him in Wikipedia. Alaskans will recognize Tom Anderson as the first of our former legislators to be tried and convicted in the federal probe into political corruption in Alaska.  I wrote the article in my typically geeky, super-detail-oriented style, with lots & lots of cites… & it took a lot of energy & effort.  It’s certainly a lot more detailed article than you’re typically going to find in Wikipedia on a two-term state legislator, corrupt or not.

But for me it was well worth it, because compiling that biography, based solely on the written record (mostly articles from the Anchorage Daily News and the Juneau Empire) really brought home the lesson: whenever you bring corporate money into contact with public elections & officials, there are inherent conflicts of interest for those public officials which will erode their ability to serve the people who elect them. Sometimes, a public official will be so bollixed up by the conflict that they won’t even recognize it.  Tom Anderson’s case is particularly illustrative.

For example, consider this instance from Anderson’s career, involving his relationship to Northeast Community Council, the council for the same part of Anchorage that Anderson himself was elected to represent in the Alaska House of Representatives.  (Note that I’ve removed the citations contained in the article for ease of reading; see the article for citations.) —

Anderson played a significant role over two years from 2002 to 2004 in changing the composition of Anchorage’s Northeast Community Council to reflect more conservative political and economic views. Anderson encouraged friends and allies, including pastors and members of the locally influential Anchorage Baptist Temple, to pack the town meeting-style community council elections. By May 2004, six of the nine community council board members, including its president, were friends and political allies of Anderson. While Anchorage’s community councils have no real authority, they are influential with the Anchorage Assembly because, according to Dick Traini, then chair of the Anchorage Assembly, “they are the active people in the community that choose to be involved.” Community council involvement has been a first step in the political careers of several Alaska politicians.

In July 2004, Anderson was criticized in an Anchorage Daily News editorial for signing a $10,000 contract in 2003 with the Alaska oilfield services company VECO Corporation to consult “on local government and community council affairs.” Anderson had earlier told the Anchorage Daily News that he’d been approached by VECO after the end of the 2003 legislative session because it was aware he’d done similar consulting work before he became a legislator. He told the newspaper that most of his work for VECO was in seeking out civic and charitable events for the company to get involved in, and that he also monitored Anchorage’s community councils to see if there were zoning cases or other issues under discussion that might affect VECO. The newspaper noted that Anderson had received about $4,000 in campaign contributions from VECO employees or their spouses in the 2002 election that won him his first term in the Alaska House. By July 2004 he had received at least $3,500 in VECO-related contributions for his 2004 reelection bid.

Members of the community council later recalled Anderson attending all their meetings during 2003, and assumed he was attending as their representative in the state legislature. They did not learn he was there as a consultant for VECO until 2004, when his state financial disclosure form was filed with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, as required by law.

By the April 2006 election for Northeast Community Council, the effects of the 2004 takeover had been partially reversed, leaving the council nearly half and half liberal and conservative.

Indeed, who was Anderson representing when he attended community council meetings — his constituents in the Muldoon area of Anchorage (including my brother’s family)? or VECO, which was not only lining his pockets as a supposed “political consultant,” but also helped fund his election in the first place?  (Some folks might also have interest in the connection between Anderson & Jerry Prevo’s megachurch the Anchorage Baptist Temple.)

Here’s another instance, from a couple years later —

In July [2006] Anderson was hired by the Anchorage Home Builders Association for $2,500 per month. The following month he testified before the Anchorage Assembly in favor of two stores that Wal-Mart wanted to build in his legislative district. The Northeast Community Council opposed the stores. At the Assembly meeting, Assembly chair Dan Sullivan introduced Anderson as “Representative Anderson,” but Anderson corrected him, stating that he was at the meeting in representation of the home builders association, which favored the Wal-Mart stores.

Again, who was Anderson representing?  His legislative constituency?  Or the home builders association & Wal-Mart?  Obviously, he believed all that was necessary to keep himself in the clear, ethically, was to take off his “Representative” hat & put on his “paid consultant” hat, & magically the two roles would be kept completely separate.  Right.  Based upon the law as written, Anderson was not acting illegally.  But the presence of conflict of interest is obvious — however oblivious he himself was to it.

Anderson was ultimately convicted of seven counts involving extortion, bribery, conspiracy, and money laundering after taking $26,000 worth of bribes funneled by Anchorage lobbyist Bill Bobrick through a sham corporation that Anderson was supposedly “consulting” for.  The scheme was supposed to be for the benefit of a private prison company, Cornell, which was reportedly unaware of any of this; one of its employees, Frank Prewitt, was funneling the money as a confidential informant for the FBI.

I ran out of steam to write more detailed coverage on Anderson’s trial & its aftermath, but I remember quite well that his obliviousness to his ethical lapses extended into his public statements about his conviction.  He still (or so he claimed) believed he’d done nothing wrong.  Other former lawmakers convicted out of the same federal corruption investigation seemed similarly oblivious.  Vic Kohring, Ted Stevens (who in my opinion is guilty even if his conviction was set aside because of prosecutorial misconduct) — all of them claim I did nothing wrong — even Pete Kott still claims this in spite of being caught on camera taking a bribe.  I did nothing wrong.  They take it as a given that it’s okay to take money, gifts, not to mention campaign donations, which will now be supplemented by unlimited campaign advertising from corporations so long as the corporations like them.

A lot of members of the public take all this as a given too.  A lot of the public is going right along with the Citizens United decision, stating it as a great victory for “free speech.”  Uh, s’cuse me — don’t you mean paid-for-with-megabucks speech?

Why do they take it as a given?  Name your own theory, but here’s mine:

Most of us have become desensitized.  We’ve grown so accustomed to the power of corporate money in every aspect of our lives that we take it for granted.  It’s the famous “boiling frog” thing all over again.  Over the span of many years — more than a century, now — as our lawmakers & law interpreters (the courts) progressively hand more & more power over to corporations —

• corporate “personhood”
• privatization of government functions — e.g., prison privatization, use of  corporate private armies (mercenaries) like Xe (formerly Blackwater), etc.
• deregulation
• granting corporations “ownership” over segments of nature, like water, genes, microorganisms, etc.
• unlimited corporate “free speech”
• etc.

— we’re gradually, just like that frog, having the heat on us slowly turned up higher & higher & higher.

Okay, so the Citizens United case was a bit more widely noticed.  See how many people are looking around and asking, Whoa… how’d we get here? This is fucked up.

Most of us do know that something is wrong, but we can’t seem to agree what the problems are, & therefore their solutions.  And thanks to the power our government has handed over to corporations, they are free to use their “free speech” (that is, their money) to influence & distort our perceptions about what the problem is.  So we continue to point our fingers at the wrong causes,  propose the wrong solutions, fight about it all — & the heat keeps turning up, & corporations continue to enrich themselves at our expense, & accountable honest government slips ever further out of our hands.

Big Government (the kind the Tea Party folks don’t like) & Big Corporations are just two different faces of the same phenomenon: the fading away of democracy.  The replacement of government of, by, and for the people with government of, by, and for the powerful few in order to control & exploit all the rest of us.

You know what I’m saying — that psychopathy thing I talked about a couple of weeks ago with reference to corporations.   But y’know, psychopathic Big Government like, say Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin, or a theocracy like those which Christianists are aiming for — in which anyone who doesn’t agree to toe the line of whatever arbitrary set of rules established by whatever arbitrary set of preachers or priests who claim to hold the blueprints of the heavens of some arbitrary bully-god — none of that crap is exactly desirable either.

What is desirable?  Real democracy, of course.  Real government of, by, and for the people. Government in which every stakeholder has a say and every stakeholder’s rights are protected and honored. Every stakeholder means every single person (real persons, that is, not fake “corporate persons”) who has any stake at all in how we operate our society. Which is to say: every. single. one. of. us.

That’s not how the U.S. government was set to operate, unfortunately. Our Founding Fathers did their best according to their own lights, I suppose, but they left a lot of stakeholders out of the loop. Women. Slaves. Children. Etc. Some of these oversights have been partially corrected through constitutional amendments, but the fact remains that real franchise — real ability to have a say in how society operates, & to have one’s own rights to life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness — is still heavily restricted according to various kinds of status. Most of us still live under other people’s thumbs in one way or another. Some people win. Some people lose: their jobs, their homes, their families, their lives.

It’s just the way of the world, you say.  But why?  Is there another choice?

So here we are, back to worldbuilding

How can a society that is based on “some people win, and so does everybody else” be built?

That’s in essence what I’m trying to do in inventing the government of which my characters are part in Long Dark & Cold, which I named, simply, Consensus.

Notice that I said the government of which my characters are part.  Not, by which my characters are governed.  Because in this government, being a part of the government & being governed by it are one & the same thing.  Nobody is not a member of the government.  It truly is of, by, for the people.

Whoa, now, but wait a minute.  Isn’t that pretty damn unrealistic?  What about, y’know, that big word I used earlier?  Verisimilitude.

Well, that’s the thing.  I think it is realistic.  Not only that, but just as the corporate exploitation against which my characters’ ancestors rebel can be easily extrapolated from the stuff we’re already living with in the world we live in here & now, so can I extrapolate my society’s Consensus government from forms of governance that already exist & are used successfully in the world we live in here & now.  There are places, there are people, who are doing it now.

So nowadays I’m reading a lot about consensus, sociocracy, collective intelligence, & related ideas, on top of all the thinking & writing about this stuff I did on the fly during NaNoWriMo 2007 & 2009.  I’ll be writing more about this in other blog posts.

Meanwhile, may these ideas be the foundation of more worldbuilding in the here & now of 2010 planet Earth. I see little hope for the old tried & untrue methods of adversarial & often antagonistic systems of governance that we’re more accustomed to.  Health care reform debate, anyone?

How very pretty & hopeful our world looks out of the hostility & namecalling between political rivals these days.  Not.

Related posts:

1. Building Consensus
2. Toward a 28th Amendment: Corporations are not human persons
3. Terraforming notes

This is not actually my cover of the classic Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) album Buddha And The Chocolate Box originally issued in April 1974 when I was still in junior high. It is, rather, a simple observation of what I saw today, what in fact I see almost every Saturday, when I got to Side Street Espresso to write: a Buddha in the coffee shop. He’s been hanging out there for several months.

He weighs nearly 700 pounds and is about 40 inches tall (sitting, of course — I’m not sure how tall he’d be if he stood up), and he was handcarved of white-grey marble in the Quang Nam Province of Vietnam. He was purchased there and brought to Alaska by Suel Jones, a former U.S. Marine who fought in Vietnam.

Mr. Jones is offering him for sale for $3,500 as a fundraiser for Veterans for Peace, & I hope somebody will pick him up (being very careful of their backs, of course), because it’s a good organization — including veterans both male & female of all eras and duty stations from the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 to the conflicts going on now in Iraq & Afghanistan & everything in between — & it’s doing good work — drawing on the personal experiences & perspectives of its members to raise public awareness about the true costs & consequences of militarism & war, and seeking peaceful, effective alternatives.

Here’s a closer look at him.

You can see him for yourself at Side Street Espresso at 412 G Street in downtown Anchorage, phone (907) 258-9055. Side Street is open Monday through Saturday from 7:00 AM to 3:00 PM.

He’s so beautiful — if I could afford him, & had the space, I would bring him home myself. But at least I have this orange round-bellied little guy, who I picked up in the antique shop below my apartment when I lived in Seattle in the late ’80s. (I bought the oranges & cinnamon & beads considerably later.)

I was pretty tired this morning because I’d stayed up quite late, so I didn’t get much writing done today. Nor, I’m afraid, did Barbara — because I was gabbing away pretty heavily. About all kinds of stuff. I was tired, but I felt good, and the Vietnamese Buddha made me feel all the better, because the peace & balance within him was so demonstrative of the thing I was thinking about most as I talked, about Job — yeah, that one, the guy in the Bible — & his integrity— the integrity that he held onto all through the storm of his hurts, & the accusations of his “comforters” who repeatedly insisted that all the harms that had befallen him & his children were because of some sin they were sure he must have committed—but he hadn’t. He hung onto his integrity like someone holding onto a pole in the midst of a great storm, & ultimately the Voice from the Whirlwind vindicated him.

I look at the Vietnamese Buddha, sitting stately & serene & upright, & I think, were he beset by his own storms, that balance & integrity & inner peace would see him through, too.

Though the storm would probably mess up his clothes & his hair, at least if they weren’t made out of grey-white marble.

Well, Job’s been an important figure to me for a long time. I’ve got a couple of poems based on him, one of which — “Sermon” — I’ve posted here. I’ll have to find the other. Maybe some of the other stuff I’ve written about him too.

[Update 1/9/10: I've now posted the other poem, "Job 42.13."]

It has been a good day, despite my not getting as much sleep as I should, & despite it being quite cold — hovering around 0 degrees Fahrenheit today (-17 Celsius), depending on what part of town you’re in. This sweet little puppy tied up outside one of the shops on G Street near Side Street was shivering some in spite of its fur —

– but I was dressed well for the weather, & enjoyed my walk along 36th Avenue & C Street after I got done with my bank errand down on 36th (I took a bus there after Side Street). It was beautiful out. Here’s the pictures to prove it.

Besides, I was on my way to Barnes & Noble.

I wisely bypassed all the 30%-off copies of Palinocchio’s book of lies & got some books on Tibet & Nepal. Research, don’tcha know — environments with low atmospheric pressure (compared to sea level) are what I need to know about for the story I’m working on right now, which is called “Breathe,” & is about Pina Chomko, the first person in 3 centuries in the Project of which she is part to breathe the free, if thin, air of a planet. Cool stuff. Or rather, Cold stuff.

Then I came home and rowed for the first time since last May, lazy butt that I’ve been. Rowed 50K. Erg.

Feel great.

Related posts:

1. Side Street Mel
2. Side Street’s George Gee
3. I won’t abandon my integrity, even if you abandon me

My username on NaNoWriMo: yksin.

Did I say a couple days ago that a bunch of books including Spaceflight Life Support and Biospherics by Peter Eckart (Microcosm, 1997) that cover topics I need to know a bit more about to write the story universe of Long Dark & Cold were on their way to me & should be here by Wednesday?

Why, yes. I did. “Sublight,” quoth I, “but still pretty damn fast.” In fact they got here a full day ahead of Wednesday.

Given the importance of biospherics to the story universe I’m writing, I’ve temporarily set aside Centauri Dreams, which I’m about one-third of the way through, & started in on Eckart’s book.  So far I’m finding it even more helpful than I thought it would be, & I’m not even into the CELSS stuff yet, other than whatever I gleaned on a fast page-through before sitting down to read it properly.

Some historical background: biospherics as a name for the study of closed ecological systems was first discussed in July 1987 at the First International Conference on Closed Life Systems hosted by the Royal Society in London; & was adopted unanimously by delegates from Russia, the European Space Agency, the United Kingdom, & the U.S. at the Second International Conference on Closed Life Systems in September 1989 in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. (p. 2) Eckert’s book Life Support and Biospherics, published in 1994, was the first book that summarized knowledge on the topic; Spaceflight Life Support and Biospherics, published in 1996, is an update of that book.

What I didn’t expect is that a book on spaceflight life support would begin with a chapter talking about the fundamentals of the first biosphere, Earth itself.  But get into it: it makes sense.  It’s Earth’s ecological characteristics that any life support system will have to imitate to a lesser or greater degree.  Traditional spaceflight life support systems — physico-chemical systems — are on the lesser end of the scale: while they are well-understood & (relatively) easy to engineer, they don’t replenish themselves, & require an umbilical cord of resupply to keep their occupants alive. Greater: well, that’s where you’re getting into closed ecosystem life support systems (CELSS).  I’ve tended to think of them as being closed in the sense of them being inside an enclosure of some sort — a spaceship, a space station, a habitat on the Moon or Mars — but I’m starting to get that Eckart (& others who study this stuff) especially mean closed in the sense that they’re self-sustaining: ideally speaking, they don’t require inputs from outside themselves.

So far, best I can tell, the only truly closed ecosystem life support system we know of that’s really worked has been Biosphere 1: the Earth.  Experiments like Bios 1, 2, & 3 or Biosphere 2 have been just that: experiments to refine our knowledge — one day, it’s to be hoped, we’ll know how to build a small spaceship or space-colony-sized CELSS that will work.  Of course, my story universe assumes that we do.

Now, again, I’m early in the book — haven’t gotten to the CELSS chapters, not even to the physico-chemical LSS chapters — heck, haven’t even gotten to  the end of the Earth as an LSS chapter.  But there I was sitting on the bus today on my way from work to my dental appointment, & Eckart reminded me of a fact that I first heard so clearly stated by the Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki: most of what keeps us alive on spaceship Earth, we get for absolutely nothing.  Eckart:

In fact, man is able to breathe, drink, and eat in comfort, because millions of organisms and hundreds of processes are operating in a coordinated manner out there in the environment.  Life support is provided by a vast, diffuse network of processes operating on different time scales.  Unfortunately, there is a tendency to take nature’s services for granted because no money has to be paid for most of them. (p. 13)

But once you decide you want to take a big jump out of the gravity well, you can’t take any of it for granted.  Not least because it costs a lot in money, energy, work to rocket one’s way up into outer space, & to rocket everything one needs to keep one alive up as well.

It’s really pretty sobering when you think about it.  How much we get for free, just because nature is kind enough to provide it.  Next, notice how increasingly services that are given freely — that are part of the Commons belonging to all of us — are being claimed as property by this or that human entity, & especially, in recent years, by the fake persons known as corporations.  Patenting seeds? Patenting the human genome? Claiming intellectual or other property rights over stuff they didn’t do diddly to develop?  What bollocks.

That political element of the division of nature into property & my rejection of treating corporations as legal persons do have a part in what I’m writing.  But even more pertinent at the moment: the simple fact that in outer space, you can’t take life support for granted.  All my characters from Long Dark and Cold have lived — up until the moment that they successfully terraform the planet (still without a name, still just called XXXX) in Cold — in a situation wherein they’re unable to take life support for granted.  Even once CELSS has been developed to the point of making long space voyages possible, those systems will always need constant monitoring by humans or their tools (computers, AIs, whatever): intervention in thought & deed, if not by way of CARE packages or an umbilical cord or resupply from Mother Earth.

Such thoughts popped a lot more quickly into my head on the bus today than it took to write them up just now.  And so I quickly found myself thinking about Pina Chomko.

Pina Chomko is a character I invented two years ago during NaNoWriMo 2007 for Cold.  She’s important: not only as one of Bolyen Maheshwari’s most influential teachers & mentors, but also in her own right as one of the first inhabitants of (damn, I really need to give my planet a name!) XXXX.  She’s an ecologist — more specifically, a planetary ecologist: & that’s pretty kooky really when you stop to consider that she was born in a spaceship or space station aloft; all her ancestors to 5 or 6 or 7 generations back also lived in spaceships or other closed habitats; & she never set foot on a planet until she was upwards of age 25.  Until then, all her knowledge of a planetary ecology was theoretical stuff that came out of books (or, more properly, Library) or came from other people whose whole knowledge came out of books/Library.

She has never been able to take life support for granted.  Her dream is to do so.  To seed the planet & let it grow not under her watchful eye.

Next thing you know, I was laying back in the dentist’s chair thinking about Pina Chomko & how I’m going to fill out her story.

It’s not easy to write a story when you’ve got two people’s hands in your mouth.  But I made some good headway.

Related posts:

1. Biospherics
2. Eating (& breathing & crapping) in outer space
3. Terraforming notes

Sphagnum moss, sundew, & other plants in the muskeg of the Alaska boreal forest: A teensy part of the biosphere. Will any of this come with us into outer space?

My username on NaNoWriMo: yksin.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about my preliminary research on closed biospheres (see “Eating (& breathing & crapping) in outer space,” 9/29/09).  This research was for a story I was working on, which has now become my project for NaNoWriMo 2009: Long Dark, about the people making the long journey between the stars to colonize another solar system.  One of the planets in the destination solar system, in the process of terraformation, is the setting of my 2007 NaNoWriMo project Cold, from which comes the story “Cold” which will be published on November 1 in Crossed Genres Issue 12.  Both Long Dark & Cold involve a space-based society that has been lived for generations in closed habitats — so the closed biosphere stuff is pretty darn important.

By the time I completed that previous post, I had learned a couple of new closely-related acronyms I hadn’t known before —

• ECLSS = Environmental Control and Life Support System
• CELSS = Controlled (or Closed) Ecological Life Support Systems

— but I was still a little fuzzy on the difference between the two of them.  But thanks to the powers of “Click to Look Inside!” on Amazon.com, I was able to take a peek into a book that has answered that question — The Moon: Resources, Future Development and Settlement, 2nd ed. by David Schrunk, Burton Sharpe, Bonnie L. Cooper, and Madhu Thangavelu (Praxis, 2007).

Here’s one of the key passages, which also teaches me a new term — biospherics:

Biospherics is a newly-evolving discipline that studies and emulates the environmental, ecological, and life-support system of planet Earth.  Advances in biospherics show much promise in the development of CLSS [I think they meant to write CELSS here] that can be applied to long-duration habitats on the Moon, and eventually Mars.

By introducing biological systems such a plants and animals into a cycle that resembles an ecological system on Earth, a symbiotic, balanced, and efficient ECLSS can be evolved.  Such systems can be designed to regenerate food supplies (something that physico-chemical systems do not do) through complex feedback loops that are being developed and tested now with encouraging results.  The result is a system that can imitate the functions of the Earth by regenerating the air, water, and food within the enclosure with only minimal additional input.  Such a system is referred to as a sustainable ecological life-support system (SELSS).

Current experimental life-support systems show promise but are quite complex in their layout and function, and their performance has not been consistent.  However, as experience with these systems increase, so will reliability and ease of operations.  The long-term goal of the ECLSS community is to produce a fully-closed system that can regenerate all of the water, air, and food without adding anything to the system after startup.  This ideal system is often referred to as the closed ecological life-support system or CELSS. (p. 102)

So it appears that in the lingo of space exploration, CELSS is a subset of ECLSS, with the latter term used for the life support systems developed for space exploration in general, & the former for those that are, ideally, self-sustaining, like real biospheres.  But of course, in reality, even a physico-chemical system (the type of ECLSS that human-occupied spacecraft so far have used) is dependent upon full-scale biospheres, because such systems can’t sustain life for very long without continual replenishment: they’re good only for short missions and/or close-by missions (like the International Space Station), to which new supplies can be ferried.  As Schrunk et al., write of physico-chemical systems,

They are dependable, show highly predictable behavior, and are rather easy to operate. However, for permanently-manned lunar bases, the material resources needed to operate such systems must be replenished at considerable expense. (p. 102)

And my characters, of course, are living much further out from Earth than the Moon.

Schrunk et al. say more about CELSS in their appendix on human factors in lunar settlement:

A CELSS is, in theory, a completely-closed system wherein continuous waste-recycling and regenerative systems provide 100 percent of the food, water, and breathable atmosphere in a psychologically-acceptable human environment.  In practice, a completely-closed system is not possible, because some loss of resources (such as leakage of oxygen and water out of the habitat) is inevitable.  The goal, then, of CELSS is to approach, as closely as possible, a condition of self-reliance for humans on the Moon, where a minimum re-supply from Earth is necessary.

The goal of self-reliance will be much more achievable for a lunar base than for an Earth-orbiting station because the lunar base will have access to local resources, such as water and oxygen, that are not available in Earth orbit.  Furthermore, the Moon has a gravity that simplifies waste management, food preparation, and water purification procedures, and the lunar electric power grid will provide the lunar base with power.

The CELSS concept may be divided into four components: biological (plant growth) and inorganic food production; food processing; crew space; and waste processing.  In addition to maintaining the proper oxygen-bearing atmosphere, the major challenges to CELSS on the Moon are the provision of food for the crew and the management of wastes. (pp. 390-391)

And from there into a description of the four components. (Compare with the four compartments of the MELiSSA loop of the European Space Agency’s Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative (MELiSSA) project, described in the “Eating (etc.) in outer space” post. Those four compartments match up with just the “waste processing” and “food production” components  of the whole CELSS system.)

A good point there about how difficult it would be (outside a true planetwide biosphere like Earth) to have an ideal CELSS: even the best designed airlock in the world will let escape a few molecules of air with each use; over time, those losses would accumulate enough to have an impact on the CELSS’s ability to sustain itself.  So, nice to be in a place which, even if it doesn’t provide the full panoply of resources that Earth itself does, can replenish enough of them to keep the denizens of a closed habitat reasonably healthy.  That’s what last week’s so-called “moon bomb” was about: NASA’s Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is a prospecting mission. They’re looking for water (or more specifically, water ice, which they already exists on the Moon), without which lunar exploration (or settlement) would be prohibitively expensive.

My story will of course assume that such problems have been solved: it’s set in a story universe in which the Moon has been settled, Mars has not only been settled but actually terraformed, & humans also inhabit closed habitat settlements in the asteroid belt & on some of the various moons of the gas giants.  But I’m also supposing that some progress in improving CELSS systems can yet be made, which is central to the concerns of one of my main characters, Jyoti.  I’ve described her as a farmer —“A farmer, that is, in outer space terms: someone whose entire occupation is directed towards the healthy sustenance of humans living in closed biospheres in various size ranges,” as I wrote in the “Eating (etc.) in outer space” post.

But she’s also a farmer on a mission: a generations-long mission to another solar system, & in the long in-between of the 4+ light years separating our native solar system from the one she & all her people are headed towards, they’re not going to have anyone to turn to if, for instance, they have some kind of nutritional deficiency in their diets.  Living in the Belt, one could presumably still get (if at enormous costs) foods imported from Earth or (the terraformed) Mars to add variety to the diet & to address deficiencies: no such luck when one is on a starship moving at an incredibly high velocity  (sublight, but hey: even 10% the speed of light is pretty damn fast!), that no CARE package from home can hope to catch up with.  So Jyoti, as one member of the Consensus of outer-space farmers of which she is part, is all about ensuring that they’ll have everything along that they’ll need for the generations of the passage & their descendants, the generations that will actually settle the new system.

In Schrunk, et al. I found this note:

Experiments on Earth have demonstrated that the caloric requirements of one person can be satisfied by the wheat output that is grown on an area of approximately 20 square meters (Salisbury and Bugbee, 1985).  For a lunar base of 50 people, the area of lunar soil under cultivation would need to be 1,000 square meters; a wheat field of one square kilometer could theoretically support as many as 50,000 people. (p. 390, note 7)

Very useful info, that.  But that’s just wheat, and, as any nutritionist knows,  Man & woman does not live by carbs alone: we also need fats & protein.*  And we need particular kinds of carbs, fats, & protein, not to mention minerals & vitamins & other micronutrients — at least if we want to be healthy.  So it seems to me that one of the great challenges to space exploration would be in designing CELSS systems that offer not just basic sustenance that even carbs-in-a-box, Big Macs,  & Pepsi Cola provide in a (very bad) way, but healthy sustenance over a long period of time.

So thank you for this new word: biospherics very much captures what I mean.  Jyoti & company need not just a basic life support system, but a complete biosphere. A smaller biosphere, to be sure, than our birthplace Earth: but an entire one all the same.

Besides, this new word has given me a new search term, which has already landed me one great find: a book I probably would have missed otherwise, Spaceflight Life Support and Biospherics by Peter Eckart (Microcosm, 1997). More than a decade old… but I reckon it’ll still give me a better background than what I have now.  I found a few other books too that cover topics I need to know a bit more about to write the story universe of Long Dark & Cold, including Schrunk, et al.’s, Moon book.

They’re on their way to me right now — should be here by Wednesday.  Sublight, but still pretty damn fast.

The expanding reading list: it’s not like I’ll get ‘em all read before NaNoWriMo starts on November 1. But it’s not like the whole thing will get written in November, either.  Both the reading this month, & the writing next month, are just front-end loading.  But lots of fun.

* Grateful acknowledgment to Deut. 8:3, Matt. 4:4, & Luke 4:4.

Related posts:

1. Taking life support for granted
2. Eating (& breathing & crapping) in outer space
3. Terraforming notes

My username on NaNoWriMo: yksin.

This is my reading list for the rest of this month: front-end loading in preparation for NaNoWriMo 2009. [Note 1] Overly ambitious, I know: how can I possibly read that much in the time I’ve got left to me this month, on top of (1) working a fulltime job; (2) doing some major work on my website; (3) getting my apartment in comfortable shape for both winter & writing?

The answer, obviously, is: I can’t.  But hey, I’ll give it a go with what I can go with.

Anyway, some of the books are more for backup reference than anything.  I certainly don’t have time to read two complete astronomy textbooks, or some of those others bottommost on the pile.  It helps that I have some slight background in astronomy — it was in fact my first major in college, true story, before I switched over first to studio art & finally religion.  (Eclectic, much?)

Most of the books obviously are about space exploration — mainly the kind of stuff that’s actually in reach in the next century or so given the technology we have at hand now.  And some of that stuff I’ve already read bits & pieces of, such that I already have some nicely hazy ideas about the progress that already counts as history to the characters of my projected NaNovel this year, Long Dark.  [Note 2]

A couple of the books — Terraforming: The Creating of Habitable Worlds by Martin Beech and Winter World: The Ingenuity of Winter Survival by one of my favorite nature authors Bernd Heinrich (some of his other books are important background to another important project of mine, Mistress of Woodland) — are relevant more specifically to my 2007 NaNovel Cold, which is the NaNoWriMo project I definitely want to create as a full novel. Cold follows the lives of two young women, Boleyn Maheshwari & Bai Wang, on a planet in the late stages of terraformation.  (Its first chapter is being published as the short story “Cold” that will appear in Crossed Genres Issue #12, scheduled for release on November 1.) It’s possible that some of my writing next month may take place on the planet itself, but at the moment those books are of a lower priority than some others.

So is Carl Sagan’s The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God which is placed in the pile mostly as a reflection of my sensibilities about the relationship between science & religion — which is to say, a very close one.  And one which is reflected also in the sensibilities of many of my characters, whose approach to the universe they live in is, in fact, both scientific & religious, containing the appreciation & awe for the unending mysteries that are always before us. Because, as I’ve long thought, no matter how many questions are answered by science, there are always questions beyond them.  That, in my view, is both the true attitude of science, & the true attitude of religion.

(You might surmise from this that I am no fundamentalist. You would be correct.  My religious confession: God is the universe & everything in it.  And also, except when it begins a sentence, god starts with a lower-case g.  Because it’s not just floating around with a big white beard in the sky somewhere: it’s everywhere, both within you & outside you.)

Life in Space: Astrobiology for Everyone by Lucas John Mix and Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources by M. Kat Anderson — interesting mix there, eh?  Both are important to my interest in how life works on a planet but also to Jyoti’s lifework as a “farmer” in Long Dark.  Or that’s how I see it.  (And tip o’ the nib to Ptery, who suggested Tending the Wild‘s relevance to my story.)  Here’s how I think it: I’ve read a lot about human nutrition, thanks to my efforts to avoid progressing from insulin resistance/prediabetes to full-fledged Type 2 diabetes; & one thing I’ve learned is that the human organism doesn’t function well on a completely industrialized diet of carbs in a box & other processed or industrially farmed foods.  Even a great food source like salmon: wild salmon is much healthier, with a better omega-3 fatty acid profile, than farmed fish.  (And wild salmon populations are under incredible stress right now: just check out what’s going on these days among the Alaska Native villages of Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta right now, where they can’t get enough food for winter because of low salmon runs.)  — So how, then, does a human population that lives entirely in closed ecologies in outer space keep themselves nutritionally healthy?  Jyoti’s insight: there needs to be some kind of wilding of their food sources, even in such completely artificial environments.

What about Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries by Arend Lijphart?  I bought a used copy of this book last year because it has a lot of info about consensus styles of government — in fact is, broadly, a comparison of consensus & majoritarian styles of democracy.  Reviews of it at Amazon.com are mixed, but it’s one of the few sources I could find to help inform me & help me better develop the governmental form I chose for the space-based society my characters live in.

On the basis of governmental form alone, in fact, I could add a rereading of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy — Red Mars, Green Mars, & Blue Mars — & the related The Martians. In fact, those books would all be on the pile in my photo too, if I could’ve found ‘em last night.  These books were already important to my Cold & Long Dark projects as a marvelous depiction of the terraformation of Mars, which is why I first read them in early 2007.  But what I didn’t expect when I first sat down to read them is that another theme which wound through them, of the political struggle between the corporation-dominated governments of Earth & the Mars colonists who wanted control of their own destiny, would prove so influential to my thinking about how the society in which Boleyn Maheshwari & Bai Wang live runs itself.  By fortuitous circumstance, I spent a big chunk of my time in 2007 as an editor on Wikipedia articles, & thanks to some difficulties with a certain few problematic editors there, I had to go behind the scenes to learn how to navigate Wikipedia’s structure for batting doofuses into line & otherwise governing itself: a process of consensus that I found eerily similar to how Robinson’s Martians ultimately wrote their constitution. — And hence was the Consensus of Cold born.  Fascinating, eh?  I should dig up some of the backgroundy writing I did about that during NaNoWriMo 2007 when I was first formulating my ideas based on those to influences, & post it here.

Centauri Dreams by Paul Gilster.

Finally, at the top of the pile: the book I’m about a quarter of the way through now, Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration by Paul Gilster.  I think I first learned of this book through Gilster’s blog of the same name, which I found during preparatory research for my abortive NaNoWriMo attempt last year.  My principal area of research then was the search for exoplanets — that is, planets in solar systems other than our own — & in particular the search for extrasolar terrestrial planets located in the the habitability zones where the temperature would be neither too hot nor too cold (amongst other things) to support Earth life.  I was, of course, in a headlong hurry at the time — NaNoWriMo, & prep for it, tends to be like that — & my main interest at the time really was to develop a nomenclature for the planet my Cold characters were terraforming.  (Can you believe it? — even now I don’t know the planet’s name: so far, I just call it XXXX.  But that’s hard to pronounce.)

My reasoning was that in our own solar system, features on the Moon, Mars, etc. are frequently named after astronomers & other scientists involved with space exploration; thus, wouldn’t it be logical that at least some of the settlements or features on XXXX would be named after scientists who played important roles in the exploration of other solar systems?  (Hence, the settlement where Bolyen & Bai live in Cold is named Turnbull, after Margaret Turnbull, one of the two astronomers who compiled the Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems (HabCat) to narrow down the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), obviously useful in the search for systems with potentially habitable extrasolar planets like XXXX. The other of these astronomers is Jill Tarter, who was the inspiration for the main character Dr. Ellie Arroway in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact & portrayed in the movie “Contact” by Jodie Foster. Tarter is probably another name I’ll be using.)

But Centauri Dreams & my other space exploration reference books & blogs & websites are also, of course, important front-end-loading for other reasons.  How else, besides reading stuff like this, am I going to have the faintest chance of giving some scientific believability to the story universe my  characters inhabit?

By now you should see that I have a pretty complex lot of stuff I want to somehow blend into what I’m writing.  It gets pretty overwhelming.  Which is part of why Long Dark is shaping itself in my mind as a series of vignettes, short stories, & background writings: because I can’t sew it all into one now.  In fact, it’s needed work to help me, I hope, sew Cold into one later.

How much later?  Hard to say.  Cold & Long Dark are October/November projects.  (Pretty appropriate tittles, both of them, for going into the long cold Alaska winter, don’thca think?)  In December, I’ll be picking up work on Mistress of Woodland again, which is just as complex in its own way.

Part of why it takes me so long to finish a damn thing.

Notes

1. Translation of NaNoWriMo for those who haven’t read my previous posts on the topic: National Novel Writing Month, an annual event wherein scads & scads of people throughout the world — national in this case meaning the nation of truly crazy writers — who spend the month of November churning out 50,000-word “novels” which may or may not be remotely publishable by the stroke of midnight that turns November 30 into December 1.  Please join us!
2. I use even the term NaNovel very loosely: Long Dark, which takes place in the same story universe as my 2007 NaNovel Cold, will most likely be a series of vignettes, roughly written short stories, background pieces, etc. over the timeline of the story universe.  I imagine any “final” projects coming out of it as being short stories & appendices to my biggest project in this universe, the novel-in-progress Cold.

Related posts:

1. October plans
2. Taking life support for granted
3. Biospherics

Canadian dogwood, October 2006

October.  Change of season; change of gears.

I wrote sometime back about how, despite my intention that this would be primarily a writer’s blog, I’d also become an occcasional political blogger. By the time I wrote that post, I’d already written about the nomination of Wayne Anthony Ross to be Alaska attorney general (remember lima beans?), lots & lots about the battle for the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO 64, a thing or two on the adventures in falsehoood-telling of “Dr.” Jerry Prevaricator, & several posts about about Sarah Palin’s 2 million dollar meme regarding ethics complaints (my most visited posts to date).  Since then, I wrote a lot more about AO 64, its passage by the Anchorage Assembly & veto by Mayor Sullivan, about the Miller v. Carpeneti lawsuit to interfere with the processes of judicial selection mandated by the Alaska Consitution (now being appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals), then the True Diversity Dinner, & most recently the struggle of workers at the Hilton Anchorage for a fair contract.

Whew. That’s a lot of politics.

Change of season, change of gears. And that means, amongst other things, that the political stuff — well, it won’t be going away.  But it will be more occasional.

National Novel Writing Month

Right now there’s a bunch of us gearing up for the month-long writing frenzy known as National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I first did NaNoWriMo in 2007 as a way to get my writing momentum back after the slowdown caused by — well, life.  Death. And so on.  So: did a NaNovel called Cold that, being something written in a headlong hurry, is far from finished as a publishable novel. But there was some good stuff, & I like the story.  Last year I started NaNoWriMo again but was forced to stop midway through by new life events.  But nothing’s stopping me this year.  And once November’s done, I plan to maintain momentum. Complete those projects, complete others.

So here’s my plan for October: in preparation for this year’s NaNovel, I’m gonna be doing a heavy load of reading on space exploration, terraforming, CELSS (Controlled or Closed Ecological Life Support Systems) blah blah — & blogging about it & other stuff having to do with the premises of what I’ll actually be writing in November.  Kinda like I did the other day, with my post Eating (& breathing & crapping) in outer space — hopefully entertaining, if not to everyone’s taste.  I’ll also be working offline to get my place sorted out, all nicely feng-shuied for writing & plain old living.  I originally vowed to get it done before the snow flies… whaddaya reckon? — but I’m gonna try.  I’ll also be trying to sort out this website a bit more to serve the purposes I have for it.  It might get messy here & there as I work on redesign.

And in November: write write write.

Mel the disheveled but victorious writer at a write-in one night before the end of NaNoWriMo 2007

With Phil Munger & Janson Jones outside an Assembly hearing this summer, the first time I met either in person.

When Phil Munger of Progressive Alaska made it to the Snow Goose last Friday at the tail end of the True Diversity Dinner, I told him that I’d been simultaneously sad & happy a month ago when he announced he was going to be blogging a lot less — sad because I think his has been an important voice in the progressive blogosphere in Alaska, but happy because he was going to get back to his music.  He needs music, & music needs him.  And that’s the way it is with me & writing, too.  Besides which, neither of us is exactly apolitical in how we approach our art.  — At any rate, I told him: but here we both are, still writing all kinds of political posts! & we laughed.

But I think he might be starting to keep his promise to devote more time to his musical composition. I sure hope so.  As for me: back into storymind.  It’s a very good place for me to be.

I’ll still be an occasional political blogger.  But writing my own stuff is where my spirit lives.

Oh yeah.  And that story I talked about in that science research geek post, the one called “Long Dark” I intended to finish & submit to Crossed Genres? Wasn’t far enough along with it to have any chance of finishing it by the deadline on September 30.  Bummer.

But I was able to take the first day’s writing from my 2007 NaNovel Cold, dust it off & revise it, & submit it as a short story instead.  And I’m very well-pleased with the result.  So are my friends I’ve shared it with who’ve come back with comments.  I hope the editors of Crossed Genres like it as much.  And if they don’t — well, heck.  Maybe I’ll post it here.

I feel like a writer again.

The “Write Hard Die Free” pin in the photo was designed by William Spear of Douglas, Alaska. That and other great pins are available at wmspear.com. Mine was given to me by my brother Mark & sister-in-law Linda as a gift some years back. I’m about to order another: somehow mine fell off my hat in the last few days.

Related posts:

1. About "Cold"
2. My October reading list
3. Cold, the blog

In between doing my job, helping in what ways I could with the True Diversity Dinner, reading Max Blumenthal’s book Republican Gomorrah around his visit to Anchorage last weekend, & the other stuff happening recently….

I’m also trying to get a short story written for submission to the LGBTQ issue of Crossed Genres.  (See my earlier post about it.)  It’s due by the end of the month.

That means by tomorrow. Still don’t know if I’ll make it.  And sure, I’ve thought of giving up — even thought of just tossing this post, which I started last week before I was interrupted by events.

But as I’ve said before, I had no intent in starting this blog to be a political blogger.  Politics is, for me, this nasty thing that comes down the pike & forces you to pay attention to it, because otherwise it’s other people messing with your very right to earn a living, have a home, be able to take care of yourself & your family & friends, or live your life according to your own purposes in life. So you do it, even when it takes you away from the life that you were trying to lead, because given a choice they’re not gonna let you live it anyway. (Think: James Dobson. Jerry Prevo. Sarah Palin.)

Still, my intent in starting this blog was: my writing. And right now, the politics has me burnt out.  So I’m taking time out from any political stuff that’s been weighing on me, & doing something the feeds my spirit.  Which is to write my stuff.  And so this lunchtime, finish this post.  And tonight: work the story.  Even if I don’t finish it on time.

[Update 10/3/09: Didn't finish the planned story on time -- so submitted something else instead, which was in fact accepted for publication in Closed Genres Issue #12 (the LGBTQ issue) due out in November.  Huzzah!]

Farmers in the sky

Turns out that I’ve had to do a bit of research for “Long Dark” — which is the working title of my story.  “Long Dark” has as its setting one of a small flotilla of starships — generation ships, as they’re often called in science fiction — that are setting out from our solar system on a multigenerational journey to colonize another star system, including to terraform at least one planet.  (The very same planet which is the setting of my November 2007 NaNoWriMo novel Cold.)

Heinlein’s classic boy’s novel about farming on the Jovian moon Ganymede

One of my main characters for “Long Dark” is Jyoti, a woman who grew up in the asteroid belt & went on to become a farmer.  A farmer, that is, in outer space terms: someone whose entire occupation is directed towards the healthy sustenance of humans living in closed biospheres in various size ranges.  I doubt farmer is an occupational title used in the human spaceflight programs at NASA, the European Space Agency,  or other space agencies (though I must mention Robert Heinlein’s 1950 novel, Farmer in the Sky, which I’m sure I read as a kid).  But in my story I’m positing that humans have had permanent closed habitat settlements on the Moon, asteroids, space stations, etc. for a pretty long time (Mars, too, but according to my story, Mars has now been terraformed), & that they’ve adapted a lot of everyday terrestrial lingo to their everyday extraterrestrial lives, even if farming in a closed habitat among the asteroids will look very different from what my great-grandparents did in Missouri & Finland, or what anyone does nowadays whether they’re Farmer John or anyone using the products of (the truly evil) Monsanto.

I’m a big reader & watcher of science fiction, but most SF whose characters range around in spaceships, both in print & on screen (TV screen, movie screen, computer screen, whatever), tends to neglect looking very closely at how food is produced or even, for that matter, how a breathable atmosphere is maintained, or how waste is handled.  I’m not complaining about that — story is story, & writers need to move with it, even if it means assuming that certain problems have matter-of-factly been taken care of that are actually pretty damn complex & are far, at this point, from solution.  Nonetheless, the science geek part of my mind (which is a roommate of the prosody geek, religion geek, & various other geek parts of my mind) has often quietly winced when, for example, a Raptor from Battlestar Galactica opened up for extravehicular activities with no airlock to keep the Raptor’s air supply from being frittered away into vacuum. Same with the launch tubes when Vipers were sent out, aircraft-carrier style, for a battle against Cylon raiders, or were used to “airlock” collaborators or prisoners.  And food — the entire fleet could resupply their food stocks by mining a algae planet for a couple of weeks — but methinks that, to maintain health, a human population will need much more variety than what algae alone can supply, no matter how much you process it.

You’ve gotta know I love Battlestar Galactica.  Again, the writers & producers of that show had certain problems that they needed to solve for the purpose of the story that they were telling; other problems they had to pass by.  And that’s fair & necessary.  But my story has a different set of issues & problems.  Especially since Jyoti’s interest in the best practices to sustain a healthy human population across the Long Dark between stars — & then in the various closed biospheres that even those occupied with terraforming will need to live in until they can establish a health planetwide biosphere on a previously lifeless planet — turns out to be a central compelling feature of who she is as a person.

I don’t actually intend to write a hard science geek story — the human drama between Jyoti & my point-of-view character Esti, & the response each has not just to the prospect, but to the reality, of leaving humanity’s birthplace behind for the remainder of their lives, is most important to me.  Besides, while I’ve got that science geek portion of my mind, I’m not enough of a scientist to bring off a true hard science geek story. Nonetheless, I reckoned I needed to have a least a passing acquaintance with the  science that actually exists in our Real World to as background to writing whatever I must write about the discipline practiced by Jyoti in my story, & upon which everyone she knows depends.

Turns out most of my work last week — when I wasn’t being political — was in the area of research, just to have a basic understanding of what kind of science is out there about closed biospheres, which is the kind of habitat everyone in the story universe of Cold & “Long Dark” lives in for many generations from the moment they leave Earth (or any terraformed environment — again, I’m positing that by the beginning of “Long Dark,” Mars has already been terraformed) .

Honey buckets

I started with Wikipedia articles & went from there.  I’d heard of Biosphere 2,  a closed ecosystem experiment in Arizona that ran two missions in the early 1990s with mixed success, both in terms of ecological health & the health of the small human society living within in.  The second mission ended early because of funding issues or disagreement or something.  There have been other closed ecosystem experiments, notably BIOS-3 at the Institute of Biophysics in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, then part of the Soviet Union.  Wikipedia has a brief article on closed ecological systems that lists some other related experiments & articles.

One I find pretty interesting is a European Space Agency research project called Micro-Ecological Life Support Alternative (MELiSSA). Visiting MELiSSA’s website, one can learn about the four compartments — the Liquefying Compartment, the Photoheterotrophic Compartment, the Nitrifying Compartment, and the Higher Plant Compartment — which are intended to permit, in the website’s words, “the recovery of edible biomass from waste, carbon dioxide and minerals, using light as source of energy to promote biological photosynthesis.” The waste they’re talking about here includes human waste (faeces, urea) along with paper, the nonedible products of the higher plant compartment (straw, roots), and non-edible microbial biomass.  Putting it crassly: that means starting with crap & pee (& other nonedible biomass) to, ultimately, make food.

The crass part of my mind (lives across the hall from all the geeks) is delighted: it knows that melissa — which is, after all, my name — means bee or honeybee: so what better name for a project that makes food from what’s first dropped into a honey bucket?

But of course, the entire process researched in the MELiSSA project is simply a smaller-scale version of what happens in Earth’s biosphere to begin with.

MELiSSA loop: The four compartments of the cycle in the European Space Agency's Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative project

CELSS

There are a couple of similar terms (with accompanying acronyms) which are relevant — Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) and Controlled (or Closed) Ecological Life Support Systems (CELSS).  Best I can tell at this point, ECLSS most commonly addresses the life support systems already used in human space flight, but isn’t necessarily the true closed-system biosphere that would actually be required for long-term missions to Mars, the asteroid belt, or further out in the solar system, much less all the way out to the Oort Cloud or to another solar system.  In any case, it’s the literature on CELSS, of which MELiSSA would appear to be a specific case, that I’m finding most pertinent.

Not that I have time to read a lot of it at this point.  Just enough to at least get some lingo.

A couple of websites are currently proving helpful:

• Space Colonies and PERMANENT. PERMANENT is a website that, per its introduction, is about “developing outer space on a very large scale, rapidly, by using materials already in space — asteroids near Earth and/or lunar material — instead of expensively blasting up from Earth all the materials used in space.After all, the Europeans who settled America didn’t bring their bricks and cement from Europe” — the Space Colonies pages have some basic info about CELSS. Turns out there’s a project to built a CELSS habitat in Alaska. (But it’s got funding issues.)
• Archive of Center for Research on Controlled Ecological Life Support Systems (CELSS) at Purdue University 1990-1995.  Includes some brief essays based on early 1990s science on CELSS systems concepts written for a general audience (that’s me!).  Here’s a small schematic of a CELSS system from that site:

CELSS schematic from former CELSS research center at Purdue University

So.  Like I say, even the science geek in me isn’t going to be enough to get all the science right, but at least I’m getting sort of a background.  Jyoti, of course, will be well-versed in whatever’s the state of the art for her time, which is going to be far in advance of what we know now — but I don’t need to know all she knows to write her character.  Some of what I know interests her is the expansion of the variety & diversity & even wildness in the systems she takes part in designing, which are — as Esti (my POV character) states it — necessary not only for physical but also spiritual health.

I’m positing that the Asteroid Belt & Outer System people have developed their own Consensus-based government by this point (a governmental system which I already put a bit of thought to in writing what I’ve written so far of Cold).  They trade with the Inner System (Earth, Mars, etc.)  —importing biostuffs & financing its settlements as well as the extrasolar expedition Jyoti & Esti are on — through mining plus the considerable riches of helium-3 found in the atmospheres of the gas giants, which according to previous research I’ve done is a pretty darn swell energy source — making these Outer System settlements, as one of my source put it, a sort of “Persian Gulf in the sky.”

But as they leave System, they won’t have Earth or Mars to import varietal foodstuffs & other biological products from.  Which makes the development of  variety/diversity/wildness of extraspecial concern for the long trip across.

Related posts:

1. Taking life support for granted
2. Biospherics
3. Terraforming notes

So far the most detailed work I’ve read on terraforming in SF literature has been Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy — Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. Just read them this past spring, tuned into them by a friend (Chris?) after I told him about what I wanted to write this November. That helped quite a bit, giving me a basic idea of some of the processed that might go into the terraforming of a planet. Though when I think back on the state of my knowledge before I read those books, I knew a bit already, just from all the other SF books I’d read. And while not a scientist, I’m not exactly ignorant of a few basics either. A geology class I took backwhen was a big help, not to mention the research I did for a poem I wrote called “Spiritus Mundi” which is in part a sort of a shorthand description of what geologists believe went into the formation of the Earth’s lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere — rock, water, wind — all of which are necessary for the support of the biosphere —life — & with it the noosphere — the realm of humanity.

My premise for the planet on which Cold is set is that it was a lifeless planet in a solar system some many light years from our own, that exploring humans or perhaps robot ships run by humans had come across & deemed capable of being engineered through terraforming to support an Earth-compatible biosphere. Another premise is that it’s now sometime later, decades & perhaps even a century or two later, & the terraforming project is far advanced, such that there is now breathable air on the planetary surface, & it’s increasingly filled with life. But it’s still a tad cold. And most of the humans who now live down on the planet are part of a culture that has for centuries lived within protected habitats: the spaceships that got them to this solar system, the ships or space stations they lived in while they mined the system for the metals & minerals needed for some of their work, the habitats on the planet itself where they lived as the work proceeded.

I.e., a project like this would be a big damn project, would take a long time, & would have a huge impact on the structure of the human society that was actually working on it. The project would, for these people, be their society & culture, & it would be a society & culture that had little trust for the open spaces outside the enclosures of a spaceship or space station or habitat, because open space in outer space is unbreathable vacuum, & open space outside a habitat on a planet undergoing terraforming might have an atmosphere composed of the wrong sorts of gases for a human or other earthly animal to breathe. The safety procedures that started just as commonsensical rules for the humans who first left Earth but knew what out-of-doors was like would become, in time, institutionalized & internalized as being the very nature of things by later generations who had no experience of breathing open air. So when the time eventually comes that the whole goal of terraforming is reached, a lot of the members of that society are going to be too damn scared to walk out of the habitat without a breather.

Change comes with the next generation, with its youth. That’s why the main characters of Cold are young.

But back to terraforming. I don’t want to have to know everything about it. But I do need to know just enough to get me by. Such as what kinds of occupations might people hold in a society that is completely geared toward such a project.

Enough for now. Another of this post’s purposes is to test out the method I intend to use in November — writing in Google Docs since I can do that from both my own laptop & from my computer at work (during lunchtimes only, of course) without having to email files back & forth to myself — & then, when I get done with a day’s writing, to publish it directly from Google Docs to the blog. Of course, I could always do the writing directly in the blog, but it doesn’t count the words like Google Docs does. Right now I’m at… 870 words. Whoa. That would be more than half my daily quota of 1,667 if this was November! Hey, this might be possible after all!

Related posts:

1. NaNoWriMo 2007: What I'm gonna write & how I'm gonna write it (the origin of "Cold")
2. Taking life support for granted
3. Eating (& breathing & crapping) in outer space