According to the article, "the frog's metabolism slows to a crawl, and its body temperature drops to between 21° and 30° Fahrenheit (–6° and –1° Celsius). The amphibian's heart and brain cease to function." Further, according to the article, there are numerous examples of insects and turtles that also freeze solid and thaw again. Sperm and egg banks have been freezing living human reproductive cells for two decades.
So far, so good. No proof of the negative. I know that is not the same as proof but this lies at the very heart of believable hard science fiction.
Entry 1-255: September 6, 2013
No radio = mind-connected?
I was interviewed on KWOD blog radio the other day and a good portion of the conversation concerned the invention of the Vuduri society and the whole world-building thing. My claim then and my claim now is in the original, original version of Rome's Revolution there was no Overmind and no mind-connection. The Vuduri had the same traits they have now, colorless clothes, colorless lives, but it was just because their minds were elsewhere, not connected.
As I have stated in the past, my entire goal was to have a scene which everyone could relate to: where our hero, Rei, was on the airless moon of Dara, trudging through the crunchy surface, ready to release the VIRUS units and utterly depressed because the love of his life, Rome, was leaving and he would most likely never see her again.
Before I came up with the mind-connection which revolutionized Vuduri society, I did consider other alternatives. The first was the most trivial. The spacesuits did have radios but the one in Rei's spacesuit was broken. That seemed kind of boring and frankly artificial in that it was invented for the sole purpose of isolating him.
Another possibility was that he did have a radio in his suit but somehow it was not able to connect to Rome or the Algol for whatever reason. Not only did this seem artificial but also lame. Same thing goes for forgetting to take a radio that clips on to the suit.
Summarizing the above, we can only divide the possible versions into they had radios or they did not. Not having a radio in the first place is so wild and out there and it made the inherent drama completely organic. So given that one fact, it opened up the whole universe of the Vuduri and I think allowed for the creation of a fascinating and completely new culture.
Entry 1-256: September 7, 2013
Who lives? Who dies? Phillies!
As an author, I've tried to present a peaceful albeit odd view of the future. Life-affirming. But death is inevitable and so there are times when I have to kill off people. In Rome's Revolution, I had to wipe out basically all of mankind to get the Vuduri universe where I needed it to be for the story to begin. The event was called The Great Dying (I stole that from the dinosaurs) and is the basis of the plot behind The Ark Lords.
Of course, nobody minds when you kill off the bad guys (or things) like MASAL, Estar, Sussen or even the two guards holding Rome hostage while Estar tried to connect Rei. When Rei and Rome detonated Kilauea, while we didn't talk about it, we can assume all the Onsiras who were within the volcano died. Nobody mourned them.
Jack Henry's death in The Ark Lords, even though it was in the past (from Rei and Rome's perspective) was very dramatic, sad and yet necessary. To be a martyr, you must die for a cause.
There were a few people who we meet and they are already dead. Since this blog is all about insights, I thought I'd share where they came from. When I first wrote the original VIRUS 5 novel, I had no intention of a sequel. But I did wonder what ever happened to my heroes. So eventually, VIRUS 5, Book 2: Tau Ceti sprang into existence in 2005. Rei had this encounter with the Deucadons:
“Tell us somethin’ that proves ya are who ya say ya are,” said the third man.
Rei thought to himself for a minute then said, “The Phillies are the losingest franchise in professional sports history.”
The three men whispered among themselves.
“What’re the Phillies?” called out the first man.
“They are a baseball team. How could you not know that? How long have you guys been here, anyway?”
Of course, this was before the Phillies began their incredible modern run of success. Even so, I have always remembered players who hurt us in particular so when Rei and Rome go back to The Cathedral in Rome's Evolution, they have to read the names of the three cracked gray sarcophagi to see who was dead. The names were (David) Wright (Mets), (Juan) Pierre (Marlins although he did come to the Phillies later) and (Mike then Giancarlo) Stanton (also Marlins). So, while they were Phillies-killers during their stay in the majors, without malice, I got my revenge in end!
Entry 1-257: September 8, 2013
Copycat
My claim is that Rome's Revolution is an original work that examines our society and life in general by using the lens of science fiction to focus on particular characteristics. But at its core I freely admit that there are other science fiction stories where the hero (or villain) sleeps for a lengthy period of time until they awaken to take in the world around them. Here is a brief survey of selected literature and movies that overlap and where they differ. I will not invoke time travel if I can help it because at its heart, there is no actual time travel in my books.
"The Man Who Awoke" by Laurence Manning, written in 1933, was the story of Norman Winters. He was a rich guy and he wanted to see the future. So he built himself the equivalent of a bomb shelter, invented a stasis machine and slept in suspended animation, awakening at 5,000 year intervals until he gets to the year 25,000AD. Each age has some hallmarks and one included an age run by "The Brain" which was Manning's guess at a super-computer.
"Far Centaurus" was a short story that I cited in an earlier post. It was about four guys (what, no girls?) who take 500 years to get to Alpha Centauri. When they get there, there are already people there from the (relative to them) future. Sound familiar? However, our astronauts smell too bad (I kid you not) to the people of Far Centaurus to be allowed to wander around the general public so they eventually travel in time and return to Earth just a year and a half after they left.
One of my favorite Star Trek (TOS) episodes was called "Space Seed" with Ricardo (soft Corinthian leather) Montalban as Khan Noonien Singh, a genetically engineered superman who was put in hibernation and left frozen is space until the year 2267 AD when he was discovered by James T. Kirk and the starship Enterprise. Sound familiar? This character was also the featured bad guy in the new Star Trek Into Darkness. Same back-story and same conflict with Kirk with a few notable and amusing differences.
One of my favorite movies is "Sleeper" which was co-written and directed and starring Woody Allen. It is simply meant as a parody of other science fiction movies and owes its lineage to a story written before by no less than H. G. Wells himself called "When the Sleeper Awakes."
We have seen plenty of frozen or suspended animation in movies from "2001: A Space Odyssey" to "Alien" to "Avatar" and the technique is in no danger of falling out of favor. In summary, the idea of falling asleep and awakening many years later is a staple of science fiction but so are love stories, revenge stories, thefts, war and so on. It's what you do when they wake up that is important.
Entry 1-258: September 9, 2013
Demolition Man
Synopsis: A man from our times is placed in cryo-hibernation and sleeps for many years. He is finally awakened decades later and finds the world has changed radically. He meets a girl from the future. They use an electronic device that goes on their head and it creates an intimate experience. Between the two of them, they are able to take on and defeat a grotesque evil that threatens their very way of life.
Sound familiar? It is not the plot for Rome's Revolution but rather the 1993 movie entitled Demolition Man starring Sylvester Stallone,
Wesley Snipes and a young Sandra Bullock. At first blush, the plot of that movie and my book seem so close that maybe there is a bit of copycat in there.
Let's look at it in a little more detail. First, Sylvester Stallone's character was frozen in cryo-prison because he was accused of a crime that he did not commit. My hero, Rei Bierak, was a colonist who was frozen and sent to the stars. Second, Stallone's John Spartan is awakened 36 years later to take on the super-criminal played by Wesley Snipes. My hero, Rei, was awakened 14 centuries later and has to fight off the Stareater but nobody knew it at the time.
What about my Espansor Bands? Surely they are too close to that portrayed in the movie to say they were different. Well, I wrote the first draft of VIRUS 5 in 1973 which included the scene with the bands, so I can safely say I got there first. The headgear, as presented in Demolition Man, are more like the orgasmatron in Woody Allen's Sleeper. In other words, the bands in Demolition Man were created simply for sexual pleasure. My bands were called "hearing aids for the mind-deaf" and the way they linked Rei and Rome was not supposed to happen. The bands were intended to be more like a walkie-talkie than an all-immersive experience. The co-mingling of Rei and Rome's souls should have been beyond the technology. Rome said it was a malfunction. I say it was destiny.
So, if you simply want to say all stories where people use a form of sleep or cryo-stasis to travel to the future, then Sleeper, Rip Van Winkle, Earth Abides and even Futurama are all the same thing. But what the future holds and how the people from our generation deal with what they find when they awaken provides the distinctive flavor of each of those works.
Entry 1-259: September 10, 2013
The Great Dying and the Post-apocalypse
The idea of a disease wiping out mankind and a new civilization rising from the ashes of the old is a classic theme in science fiction. In Rome's Revolution, the event was referred to as The Great Dying (the name given to the Permian-Triassic extinction that I stole from the dinosaurs) and was due to a man-made virus documented in the sequel, The Ark Lords.
A lot of post-apocalypse novels focus on nuclear war, natural disasters, etc. but I want to limit this discussion just to those where mankind is wiped out by disease. The most famous novel ever written about the subject and considered the standard against which others are judged is George R. Stewart's Earth Abides written in 1949. The hero's name is Ish Williams and the book deals with the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Society devolves into a mountain-man style of life with breathtaking speed.
Another famous book is I am Legend by Richard Matheson written in 1954. The original book had the hero as the only man left alive when disease had turned everyone else into vampires. It was made into a movie in 1964 and then again as The Omega Man with Charlton Heston in 1971. The affected humans were switched from vampires to zombies. The same technique was used in the 2007 version with Will Smith taking the lead. The title of this film was rightfully put back to I am Legend. The original book and movie dealt with "the last man on Earth" and the immediate aftermath of the disaster as well.
The immediate aftermath is not that interesting to me nor are survivalist novels. I haven't found too many books that deal with the exact time interval required to create a technology-based society that matches our exactly. That was what I set out to do with the Vuduri. I thought it would be interesting to look at a society which took a different path. Kind of a social A/B test. I was looking for kind of a Jetsons vibe but I wanted it to come from a different place.