Life Imitates Art

As I've been watching news coverage on the flu outbreak, I immediately started thinking of John Ringo's recent biothriller, The Last Centurion. Of course the situation isn't exactly the same, since in our world the flu outbreak is following a major economic dislocation caused by the mortgage meltdown, but it still is enough to give me chills.

However, some people on Baen's Bar have been suggesting that the quick response by public health agencies indicates this isn't going to be the Big One, but that will come from some unexpected quarter while we're distracted with something else. Or worse, if this outbreak is successfully contained, we could get a "cry wolf" effect that will actually impair people's readiness to respond properly when it really comes.

New Directions for the Legacy of the Aldenata?

The e-ARC of Eye of the Storm, John Ringo's latest addition to his Legacy of the Aldenata series. From some of the things the Barflies have been saying on Baen's Bar, it looks like he's taking the series in a completely unexpected direction.

The original books all focused on the war against the Posleen, a race of ravenous centaroids who stripped whole planets the way locusts do a field. The side trilogy he wrote with Julie Cochrane dealt with the covert war against the sinister manipulations of the Darhel, a race of thwarted warriors who instead focused their aggression into legal shenanigans, with the intent of enslaving every other race in the galaxy. The novel The Hero, which he wrote with Michael Z. Williamson and was set about a thousand years after the Posleen attack on Earth, implied that the intervening years were filled with battles against old-style Posleen, along with a new race known as the Tselk who might or might not be allies of the Posleen.

But from what I'm hearing on Baen's Bar, it looks like Ringo's tossed out the continuity he's created in The Hero and gone in a completely unexpected direction to introduce a completely new enemy from another dimension. We'd gotten one surprise at the end of Honor of the Clan
when the Himmit rescuers of the O'Neal Bane Sidhe referred to their rescue craft as being a battleship of the Himmit Empire. Of course the Himmit were always mysterious, right from the very first book when we were told that they were not among the original races of the Galactic Federation, but had come later, after the Aldenata had vanished. There had been some speculation when Honor of the Clan came out about the nature of the Himmit Empire -- whether it was hidden beyond the boundaries of the Galactic Federation, or somehow within it. But now I'm wondering if the Himmit are from this other universe from which the new, bigger, badder, Bad Guys are coming from.

I'm going to be very interested in seeing exactly how Ringo's handling this. I've seen far too many authors of long-running series getting into the trap of feeling they have to top themselves with bigger new ideas in every successive novel, until it feels like they're just dialing the volume up louder and louder. Other times an author's efforts to add new things into an established series instead end up losing track of the elements that brought readers to it in the first place.

Can We Move To the Adventure Part?

Recently I've been reading John Ringo and Travis S. Taylor's Claws that Catch, and I've been feeling rather frustrated with it. Already I'm at the hundred-page point and we still haven't gotten into space. To me, it seems like there's way too much "housekeeping" stuff going on and it's getting in the way of moving on to the real story.

I'm also finding that I'm unsettled by one major character's bubbly new wife. Not so much that she's happy to be supporting her husband's career -- there really are some people who are happiest when facilitating someone else's success -- but that it is presented as though it were the only valid model for a married woman. We never see any examples of a dual-career couple or one in which the man supports his wife's career. Thus there seems to be an unspoken message that this is the way women ought to arrange their lives, rather than just what worked for one person.

When I consider some of the other books that John Ringo has written recently, it almost seems as though he thinks that we are soon going to be facing some kind of social upheaval that will lead us to fall back onto the traditional hierarchical family in which the adult male is the most important person and everyone else is expected to defer to him and work to support his success, even to the despite of themselves. To be true, there is a rationale behind this sort of arrangement -- the adult male body generates higher levels of testosterone, which translates into greater upper body strength. And frequently in belt-buckle-to-backbone situations that additional muscular strength can translate into an important survival edge for the entire group, which means that it is important to keep it at its peak.

However, it can be rough on the people inside those bodies, for the simple fact that we are individuals, not widgets stamped out in a factory all alike. As roles become increasingly rigid and prescriptive, people who do not fit neatly into them come under increasing pressure, often disproportionate to the actual need to have everyone fitting tightly into their assigned roles. The role becomes an end unto itself, rather than a means to the end.

In the long run, emergency arrangements have a nasty habit of surviving the emergency. For instance, long after the Great Depression was over, my grandmother continued to carefully save and reuse little squares of aluminum foil. The habit had become ingrained in those tight years, and even after she had adequate money, she continued to do so.

When we go from the scale of individual habits to that of social expectations, things can get even worse. Making a virtue of necessity often ends up with the virtue surviving long after the necessity has gone away. This is especially true if it should become enshrined in tradition and given moral force. For instance, the feudal privileges granted the nobility in Europe made sense in the chaotic century or two immediately after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire made sense, because it freed up their time and energy to protect the people who needed to spend all their time and energy producing the food that would keep everybody alive. But by the time society changed such that those arrangements were no longer necessary, they had become so customary that questioning them was met with intense hostility. To suggest that the nobility should pay taxes upon their wealth was seen as an affront, a diminishment of the dignity of their elevated standing in society. Thus many of these privileges survived well into the modern era, to the point that they were actually a drain upon society instead of helping to support it.

And quite honestly, there is in John Ringo's portrayals of gender relation a certain hint of the nobleman annoyed at those "uppity" commoners questioning traditional feudal privileges and duties.