Monday, November 28, 2005

My recent absence
Some of you may have noticed that I haven't been posting very much recently. Yes, I'm a bad blogger. Mea culpa and all that.
There is a reason, though. My fiction-writing muse seems to have returned, and knowing from experience that she could depart just as quickly as she arrived, I'm taking advantage of the inspiration and concentrating on my fiction for now.
Some of you may also have noticed an increasing obsession with Japanese pop culture (I'm trying to reign this in and not bore you guys to death with it too much). Again, there is a reason for this - the male lead in the piece I'm working on is Japanese. Which brings me to a favour I wanted to ask - is anyone who reads this blog at all familiar with Japanese culture? Has anyone ever lived in Japan? If so, I might want to enlist you as a beta reader at some point.
Also, since I note that we have a few sci-fi fans here, I have a hypothetical situation that I could use some input on. The story that I'm working on has somewhat of a speculative fiction slant to it. Specifically, it has a couple of lead characters who have exceptionally long lifespans and may in fact not be entirely human. I'm not talking about vampirism - frankly I think that whole vampire theme has been done to death recently, and I'm not remotely interested in going there. However, this does leave me with a bit of a problem, in that I have characters with unusually long lifespans and no easy, pat explanation for why that should be the case. So, the question is, if you as a reader were to run across that in a book would you feel the need for a pseudo-scientific explanation involving DNA,gene mutations etc? Or would you be able to accept the idea that the people themselves might not know the reason for their long lifespans? Would it really bug you if no clear explanation was given, beyond "there are a few of us who are this way, and nobody really knows why"? Or would no explanation be preferable to a crappy pseudo-scientific "explanantion" that doesn't really make any scientific sense anyway?
I'm at a point where I could probably cut out that element of the story or create some kind of work-around, but I don't really want to. I tend to think that my first instincts as far as how to structure a story are usually the right ones. It would be interesting to hear other people's input, though. So, any comments?

31 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pseudo-scientific explanation or no explanation for a long life span.

That depends on the tone and the setting you are planning: For futuristic (think Star Trek) or contemporary setting, the more (pseudo)-science, the better, for fantasy (think Star Wars) or historical (or starting from historical to contemporary) explanations might only detract form the story. The tone of the story is also a big consideration, or how big a part does the unusual setting and unusual stuff play, how much you want to focus on explaining that to the reader. Or is it simply presenting the setting world and all the mysteries in a matter-of-fact way, with no apologies (first person feel, the main character(s) knows how it works, and don't "talk" to the reader, nor does the author).

Okay. I admit: I don't have a clear answer, my aswer in short is "that depends". Or maybe to have an appendix where the meanings of stuff is really explained, a la Dune (especially if you plan to use the same setting again)?

FoolishOwl said...

I'm pretty weak on Japanese culture.

Now that I think about it, an awful lot of science fiction involves some premise about people with greatly extended lifespans.

The theory on aging I've heard is that it's primarily a matter of cells having some sort of mechanism to limit how many times they can reproduce or regenerate themselves, perhaps some sort of genetic ticker. On top of that, some body structures tend to just wear out, and they can't really repair themselves, given the way they developed to begin with.

I've read a few science fiction stories in which a premise was some sort of combination of hormonal or genetic therapy, combined with cosmetic surgery and other treatments, would effectively slow aging to a near halt, but a careful observer could tell that someone was physically older than they looked at first. In one of William Gibson's novels, a giveaway was wrinkled elbows, which people rarely went to the trouble of having cosmetic surgery to fix.

A benefit to that approach would be that anti-aging treatments would be imperfect, perhaps available only to the rich, and it would make sense that they didn't work well for everyone.

A simpler approach is some "magical" pseudo-science solution, like "anagathic drugs" that stop aging (without further explanation) or the all-too-popular "nanotechnology can do anything" approach -- although nanotechnology's getting to be an annoying cliche.

Anonymous said...


The theory on aging I've heard is that it's primarily a matter of cells having some sort of mechanism to limit how many times they can reproduce or regenerate themselves, perhaps some sort of genetic ticker.


Yes, that is it, though I cannot too remember the exact mechanism. Each progressive mitosis (cell reproduction) involves shortening of some amino acid chains that, when worn out, make it impossible for the cell to reproduce. What really boggles the mind about this is that there are cells where the mechanism is broken (there is no shortening): Cancer cells (the so-called HeLa-cells used in research all over the world are all from a cervical cancer(IIRC) of a woman named Henrietta Lacks). If we could (in progress of curing cancer, perhaps?) find a way to extract that characteristic tendency (immortality) to normal cells, without the high mutation tendency and uncontrolled growth, this would in fact mean effective immortality.

Octavia E. Butler in her excellent "Xenogenesis" -trilogy had something about the surprising properites of cancer cells, I recall (altough it was a very small part of the story).

Anonymous said...

I believe the "genetic ticket" people are most interested in is the telomere (spelled phonetically), which is a bunch of information at the tips of chromosomes that breaks up as people age. I believe Dolly the sheep, for example, had the shorter telomeres of an older animal when born, and exhibited age-related symptoms earlier than expected. Some sort of nanotachological or gene-therapy telomere repair might explain why people stay healthy longer in the future.

Thomas

Anonymous said...

Telomeres...
That rings a bell. Thanks Thomas.

Anonymous said...

If you add technical explanations, they'll take some of the focus off the characters - which is absolutely fine, if that's what you want the story to be (partly) about. If not, I'd say don't be afraid of presenting things without explanation, as long as they 'ring true' and there's internal consistency. The need to over-explain and tie up loose ends can be a big drag on good writing.

Cassandra Says said...

Hmm...lots of interesting input. Maybe it would help if I provided a bit more detail. Essentially, I have a handful of characters with unusually long lifespans (think 10 or less individuals). I can't totally remove this element, as the story is about two of those people, who are lovers. One of them is murdered, and then reborn/reincarnated/whatever you want to call it. She runs into her former lover and he immediately recognises her, but she doesn't remeber her previous life at all, other than in wierd repetative dreams that she has in which she's with a man whose face she never sees. So, the central element of the plot is the question of whether or not she will eventually remember her former life and therefore remember who the guy is. From his point of view, it's about whether it's ethically acceptable, or wise, to try to revive her memory. Given that she was murdered, he's not sure if it would be a good idea or if it would traumatise her too much, and there's also the question of to what extent it's morally acceptable to interfere in the course of someone else's life.
Does that help as far as deciding whether explanations are necessary? My thought was to go with the idea that the characters themselves have no idea why they live so long, or indeed how long they have. I'm trying to explore the idea of what it's like to feel alientated from the people around you, and also the ways in which people who feel that they don't quite fit in tend to form their own alternative "families".
Other than a few flashbacks and some musing about past events, most of the story will take place in the present, so it's really not futuristic at all, which is why I think that too much pseudo-science may be more distracting than illuminating.

Anonymous said...

Well, the sense of alienation might not come across very well with an explanation. Sounds to me you'd rather go with the no explanation, and from the synopsis it sounds like a good idea.

FoolishOwl said...

Bellatrys posted a link to a really good science fiction short story, in the context of a discussion of gender roles: It Walks In Beauty.

It's quite good, and especially interesting given the era it comes from. But the reason I mention it here is that it portrays a society strangely altered, without actually "info-dumping" about how this change happened. At the start of the story, it's quite confusing, but that actually is part of the design of the story.

One of the virtues of science fiction and fantasy is how it can be used to portray the familiar in an unfamiliar light -- something like what I imagine Bertolt Brecht meant about estrangement.

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