On the third day of writing Long Dark during NaNoWriMo 2009 — which is to say, on NaNovember 3, 2009 — I made a surprising discovery: that another character of mine, from a completely different project that has nothing to do with terraforming or space exploration, was a historical figure in the Long Dark/Cold story universe.  The other project is Mistress of Woodland, a long-term project I began in 1998, which is a kind of fantasy/magical realism novel with lots of Finnish mythical content, and which originated as sort of a story way to deal with some hard stuff I was going through back then.

MoW’s main character, who in the novel is in something of the same circumstances I was in the Real World, is named Rachel.  And if Rachel is a historical character in Long Dark (and by extension Cold) — wooo, spooky — that means that, in a sense, I’m a historical character in my own novels.  Spooky spooky.  And … er… egotistical?  Umm… err… I think I’ll stick with spooky for now.

It all makes a certain kind of sense, anyway.  In my first day’s NaNo 2009 writing, I’d discovered a character named Mordecai, who in the early days of my invented society the Consensus of the Main Belt & Outer Solar System, or whatever-the-hell I’m calling it — the Consensus for short — had been a Consensus spy and “data thief” on the Moon.  That was, of course, before formal recognition by the inSystem governments of the terrestrial planets and Moon of Consensus independence and sovereignty, at which point Consensus had to pay attention to trade agreements covering such inSystem legalities as copyright. Mordecai appeared in my story telling a Consensus “data trader” in training, Louava who was on her way to Earth — and who was actually the protagonist of that writing — about how the philosophical basis of much of Consensus thought had to do with certain ideas about integrity.  Which were based, in fact, on ideas I’d started developing for myself on a discussion list I was on in 1998 where Mistress of Woodland was born.

Here’s an excerpt from my Mordecai writing from November 1, 2009, exactly as written.

Mordecai was a legend. He hadn’t been a data trader or diplomat: he’d been a spy and data-thief, back in the days before the governments of the Inner System had finally given in to the reality that the Outer System was no longer in their control – that if they wanted any of the riches of the asteroids or the gas giants and their moons, they were going to have to deal with the Consensus as a sovereign government. Mordecai, a Belter born and bred, had lived inside of Consensus thought all his life; but somehow, he’d learned how to pass himself off so convincingly as a groundbound that no one of the Moon – his main area of activity – had ever clued in to his real identity or origins. He’d inserted himself into [the base at thus'n'such place on the Moon] and used his position there [to steal all kinds of cool data that helped the Consensus in all kinds of cool ways – scientific info mainly, engineering stuff, perfections of CELSS and blah blah].

“How did I do it?” he asked them. “Mindfulness. In two aspects: first, there is mindfulness of who you are, as both an individual and as a member of Consensus. It’s something you can never forget, or you’ll cease to remember why you’re there, doing the work you’re doing. If you forget, that’s where the corruption begins: your purpose becomes confused, and merit begins to dwindle away. You understand this: integrity, a wholeness of self, is the very basis of our philosophy, whatever else your individual religious beliefs may be; and integrity is in ideal terms about having a clear hold always on who and what you are and what your relationship is to your family and friends, your Kitcheners and colleagues, all the consensuses of which you are a part including the overarching Consensus we all belong to – and also to your antagonists and enemies. Or, if you prefer, your relationship to those who have a different purpose than you do – those whose purpose goes crosswise to your own.

(Note: I typically use square brackets for placeholders when I don’t have exact words and would get hung up and slowed down in my writing to think of them in the moment.  Kitcheners in the Long Story/Cold story universe, are people who share a common kitchen as well as toilet facilities — – since in the artificial biospheres of outer space, it would be difficult and a waste of scarce resources to provide each and every nuclear family with its very own separate kitchen and toilet facilities. Thus a Kitchen is an important basic social unit, including typically about six families, about 20-25 people.)

Two days later, I was writing about a different character, Esti Gusev — & its through her story that I discovered my MoW character Rachel was one of the intellectual/philosophical forbears of the Consensus.  She was also important to Esti personally: it was in fact (I discovered with that writing) Rachel’s writings which led Esti to join Consensus, & ultimately end up on one of the ships crossing the Long Dark to another solar system where the terraforming project of Cold would eventually take place.

Thing is, in MoW I’d never given Rachel a last name.  She hadn’t needed one.  But now she did need one, because she was going to be quoted and otherwise referred to here & there in Long Dark and Cold.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out what it would be.

Meikäläinen

If you Google the word meikäläinen — you can just type meikalainen if you don’t know how to type an ä with the dots — the top search result you’ll get is a page from the Finnish Wikipedia for Matti Meikäläinen. If you ask Google to Translate this page, it’ll tell you its title means John Doe and will inform you in that special Google-translation-style of pidgin English the following:

John Doe is an example of a man, which can be used as a defendant or the owner of the legitimate example. It can also be used for the person whose identity is unknown or which is intended to be anonymous . An unknown woman is commonly known as Mary Doe. For example, the United States responsible appointments are John Doe and Jane Doe or John Smith.

In more fluent English: Matti Meikäläinen is used in Finnish, as John Doe is used in English, to designate an anonymous or unknown person, or can be used as a pseudonym for someone whose real identity must remain confidential, as in some legal cases; and can also simply be used as a depiction of the “typical Finn.”  As explained by user sakvaka at WordReference Forums,

Matti Meikäläinen is a very known person here in Finland. The name is associated with the “commonman”, somebody who can be anyone of us. It is used a lot in sample photos of credit cards and passports, in which real names and personal information must not be visible.

And later,

He’s just an average person, someone that can be anyone of us – just a normal guy.

The first names Matti and Maija are Finnish equivalents, respectively, of Matthew and Mary.  But the “surname” Meikäläinen is only used as a “surname” in this context: it’s not a surname that any real person has.

But meikäläinen is a real Finnish word — a noun derived from the Finnish pronoun me (English we) meaning one of us:

Onko hän meikäläisiä?

Is s/he one of us?

or, as sakvaka explains,

“something that originates from us”. “Meikäläinen kahvi on maailmankuulua” – Our coffee is world-famous. “Älä ammu häntä, hän on meikäläisiä” – Do not shoot him, he’s one of us.

So don’t be fooled by any of the numerous people named Meikäläinen on Facebook (many of them Matti or Maija as well) — these are folks who are preserving their anonymity.

As I decided Rachel wanted to do as well.  But more than that –

Rachel Meikäläinen

– picked that “common person” surname — obviously not her real surname, which I still don’t know what it is — because she identifies herself as of the common people, one of us — entirely fitting to how she’s viewed by Consensus some three or four or five or something centuries after her stuff is written.  As I told my friend Chris in an IM chat last November, “you know me … i need my words & names to really mean stuff….”

So now my main character from MoW has also become my vehicle for elucidating some of the philosophical stuff that was already implicit in this imaginary society of Consensus I was inventing anyway.

I think she’s gonna be a guest poster on my blog, too.  Because so much of her stuff about integrity and violation is relevant to the ways the Real World we live in screws with us too; & also how we keep it together.

Related posts:

1. Integrity, violation, healing
2. Writing life
3. The Daily Tweets, 2009-11-01: NaNoWriMo 2009 kickoff #2, the midnight write-in

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

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

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