Idea Garage Sale: Modern Megafauna

Today is Game with People Day, and today we play Cavemaster. I am about equal parts excited and apprehensive; as should be any person who tries to play a Pleistocene game with me.

People exist in this world who are doing practical work to restore the lost world of the Pleistocene. I've probably mentioned this here before, because reintroduction of megafauna and the return of mammoths, giant sloths, short-faced bears, et al., is naturally an attractive notion to me. I don't necessarily think such things are doable, or wise; but a project like the Pleistocene Park, dealing with the restoration of an ecosystem with the assistance of existing, rather than extinct, species has the potential to be fruitful in a lot of ways, and I'm all for it.

But the Idea Garage Sale isn't about practical plans; it's about spinning stories. And thinking about the Pleistocene, and Pleistocene Park, and megafauna, and so on, pulls me in a number of directions.

The first, of course, is backwards. The surface of possible stories set in the Pleistocene has barely been scratched, and I'm puzzled at myself that I haven't started my second one yet.

The second is forwards. Suppose megafauna and their ecosystems can be restored; and suppose that circumstances of human society allow them to be restored (which I am far from sure is the case) - how extensive can the restoration be? Are we talking one megapark in Siberia, tourism to which causes an unexpected economic boom? A few small patchy islands of pseudo-ecology run as theme parks in the most affluent nations? Modern technological society collapsing in on itself and providing room for the megafauna to reassert themselves from the small, tentative starts a few hyperspecialized scientists gave them?

And then there's sideways - alternate universes in which the end-of-Pleistocene megafaunal extinction did not occur. Aurochs still roam Europe; different species of probiscidea grace each continent, along with hundreds of dependent species (consider the insect life that mammoth dung could harbor!) and predators. Since in historical times industrialized hunting, farming, transportation, and harvesting of raw materials have been the chief culprits in major reductions in biodiversity, the implications for human history are numerous even if we assume that the end-of-Pleistocene extinctions weren't humanity's fault.

Jefferson had a reasonable expectation that the Lewis and Clark expedition might have encountered mammoths. What if they had?

What if the "Save the Woolly Mammoth" shirt I'm wearing now were a legitimate political slogan shirt rather than a joke?

How is African slavery different, if the economy enslaving the Africans is based on growing cotton in mastodon country? Could you grow cotton at an industrial scale in mastodon country?

How would the Spanish Civil War have been different if the Running of Bulls in Pamplona is a running of aurochs, with all the differences in circumstance that entails?

How is the history of the Iroquois Nation different on a continent that never had to do without horses, in which the top predator other than man is the short-faced bear? Or perhaps the American lion?

How does the timber industry accommodate the reality of the giant beaver?
I don't know about you, but my world-building disease is paralyzed by the sheer richness of the possibilities.

Idea Garage Sale: The Right Foot of Light, or Something Like That

Hi, y'all, there was computer crap and it was Game with People Day and I'm tired, so just real fast here's a high concept garage sale idea that came up at WorldCon.

You've read Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, right? (If the answer is "no," go read it as soon as you get off the net.) Personally I prefer Lathe of Heaven, but I'm the only one who does and that's okay. The point is -

Tell yourself the same story. With a human in the POV slot who isn't straight cis male. Any of the alphabet soup of alternate sexualities (and remember the A stands for Asexual, not "allies," don't be silly), or straight female, will do.

How does that kemmer scene on the ice work with the change?

Where does that take you?

Hey, It Works!

No, not the zipper (though I have now put in three in a row on the first try - it pays to do it again before you forget how); the Garage Sale!

Andrew May took the Mechanical Gorilla notion, merged it with the hoax Bigfoot killed on the side of the road, and produced a funny, pulpy tale of mad science, appropriately called The Mechanical Gorilla. Available in electronic format. Check it out.

I'm, like, a literary godmother, or aunt, or something.

My very favorite sentence, from sane-sounding scientist Dr. Azuma: "That would violate Cambridge Town Council's strict regulations vis-a-vis the utilization of combat robots in a peacetime urban environment." That's a whole lotta world-building, right there.

Idea Garage Sale: The Mechanical Gorilla

Sometimes, ideas just fall into your lap.

Fortean Times #294 arrived in my mail this week. In the "Strange Days" section, on page 8, is about a quarter column of story about how a man in Cambridgeshire, out walking his dog (there's dogs again!) found "a 15ft (4.6m) mechanical gorilla" with "a number of moving parts but ...in a poor state of repair, with many of its components badly rusted."

The picture that goes with the news story is very sad, as is the treatment of the find as the discovery of a garbage dump in an inappropriate location. It's tolerably obvious that this is either (and I admit this is not likely) a deliberate pirate art installation or (and I think we can all agree that this is hands-down the likeliest option) the tragic remains of either the villain or the hero in a monumental battle of good vs. evil.

Also, somewhere in this is someone Japanese. Fifteen-foot mechanical gorillas are surprising in a British context, but routine, almost quaint, in a Japanese one.

Figure out which side the ape is on, and whether it's the same side as the person who built it - and whether the person who built it is an elderly mad scientist or a kid with big eyes and a small mouth - and you're underway.

Idea Garage Sale: Miracles, Mistakes, and Lies

I'm tired of leafing through my old notes; fortunately, I got a Fortean Times this week. FT 289 (the people on the newsgroup are already discussing FT 290, but they're mostly British and can get it regular mail, while my issues have to hitch a ride on a tramp steamer or something) contains, on page 10, in a "Back from the Dead" round-up article, the story of an Argentinian woman who was told her premature baby was stillborn. Twelve hours later, they decided they wanted to say good-by properly, so the hospital staff pulled the frost-covered body out of the morgue drawer. Her mother touched her hand, and the baby opened her eyes.

Woah. As a preemie, she still had only a 10% chance of survival, but that's plenty enough to start off with.

But we also get, on the same page, a Chinese case of an eight-month preemie declared dead at birth, on the grounds of no breath, no heartbeat, and a purple color. However, the child's aunt insisted on seeing the baby, which was handed to her in a "yellow plastic bag." In addition to being alive, the baby was a boy, not a girl as originally declared. Tracking down further news stories on the web, we find that this baby wasn't even found in the morgue, but in a restroom where someone had absentmindedly left him! The family is suing and large numbers of people have been sacked, reprimanded, etc. Not surprisingly.

The hospital staff in the second case has a plausible excuse for the sex change, in that there's still a strong preference for sons over daughters in China, and the nurses thought it'd be less of a blow to lose a girl than boy. Still...my goodness... you put these two together...

The Baby in the Yellow Plastic Bag could be dystopian science fiction, with the baby being a natural gender-switcher in a society in which flexibility is the key to survival. Or a grim realistic novel about modern poverty. Or a mystery, with the stillborn baby swapped out for a live one - by whom? Why? Or a legal thriller, with the baby's misdiagnosis revealing layer after layer of malfeasance that it's in Someone's best interest to cover up. Or a religious novel - the Argentinian baby was named Luz Milagros, Light Miracle, for obvious reasons. Or horror - the baby's body is alive, yes, but that's not the baby's original spirit in there. Or paranormal, as the baby's early NDE and imperfect separation from the spirit realm grants her supernatural powers. Or...

Yeah, the problem with this one is to stop having ideas!

Idea Garage Sale: The House Divided

The left side of the brain has established a tyranny over the right. Even dream memories are brutally suppressed. Denied normal channels of communication, the right hemisphere takes its only remaining option and attacks the res tof the left-dominated body, confusing signals so that the individual, caught in the middle of this, has difficulty functioning physically.

When you start dividing the brain up like this, you get a staggering cast of characters without leaving the protagonist's head: left and right; conscious and subconscious; id, ego, superego; animus/anima. If the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa, do we normally have two subconsciouses and two memory banks? Based on the experience of epileptics whose connection between the hemispheres is severed, probably. The simplistic popular conception of the right hemisphere as "creative" and the left as "logical" is not accurate - one can, after all, be creative without violating logical principles - but it is true that creativity without communication (the left brain's province) is pointless, so putting all this into the body of a driven overachiever who buys into that false dichotomy would be a logical way to go.

This is a scary idea, all that activity going on without the person we would recognize as the individual even knowing it. And how would it play out for the story? Hypnosis putting the left hemisphere to sleep and allowing the right to voice its grievances?

I came up with this idea years ago while fishing for a way to use my particular health problems (which have to do with my ears and sense of balance, not my brain, as it turns out - though I can be monumentally stupid when I'm having gravity problems, which is one reason I have long blog hiatuses during bad periods; nobody needs to see that) for a story, but the amount of research it would involve, into a fascinating field which is, let's face it, still in its alchemical phase of development is intimidating even to me. I would want to have a solid grounding in basic neuroscience before I even attempted it, and that takes me out of my comfort zone.

You could, of course, skip the research and do a Hollywood blockbuster using the simplistic popular conceptions. If you wanted to. I guess.