More Short Story Ideas
The Missing Masters of Civilization
Humans suffer from a serious design problem. Intelligence requires large heads. Skulls are rigid. Childbirth requires the head of the infant to pass through the mother's pelvis on its way through the birth canal. It is a tight fit, and making it less tight by widening the female pelvis results in adults less well designed for running hence, in the environment where we evolved, less fit.
We solve the problem by pushing as far as we can on each margin. Women have wider hips than men and run less well. Human babies are, by the standards of most other species, born premature, requiring extended care — compare a six month old human to a one month old kitten. The infant skull has design features that make it a little less rigid than it will be in the adult. And, with all of that, human childbirth, absent modern medicine, is still a difficult, dangerous and sometimes lethal process.
There is a solution to this problem that we missed in our evolution but some of our distant relatives found in theirs. Get the infant out of the mother's womb early by transferring it to an environment external to the pelvis but still internal to the mother, designed to shelter and support the infant until it is ready to face the outside world.
Somewhere out there is an intelligent species that followed the marsupial path. Their scientists, struck by the contrast between intelligent marsupials and unintelligent placentals, have reasoned their way to the explanation: On the path to intelligence, the placental design is a dead end. All intelligent species, everywhere, must be marsupials.
The intelligent marsupials, a century or two ahead of us in their technology, manage interstellar flight, start exploring. They discover other planets, other species intelligent and not, all of which fit their theory. Then they arrive at Earth.
The evidence is clear in radio and television broadcasts, cars, airplanes, skyscrapers, even satellites — somewhere on the planet there must be an intelligent species. The most visible species on the planet is placental, hence cannot be intelligent, presumably pets or domesticated animals, perhaps sub-intelligent slaves, of the dominant intelligent species.
But where is it?
Alternative Reproductive Patterns
Consider a lesbian couple which wants children and would prefer that they be as closely related as possible to both mothers. A number of future reproductive technologies have been proposed that would produce a daughter who, like the child of a heterosexual couple, gets half her genes from each parent.
A more modest version, a child with half his genes from one mother and a quarter from the other, is possible with current, indeed ancient, reproductive technology, by having one member of the couple get pregnant by the father, full brother, or son of the other, producing a child who is the son or daughter of one mother, the half sibling, niece, nephew, or grandchild of the other. I expect some couples have done it although I don’t know of examples.
Imagine a society, human or alien, for which this pattern is the norm, perhaps one in which behavioral differences between males and females make female/female couples work much better, especially for rearing children, than female/male couples. Reproduction in such a society might be arranged in a variety of ways. At one extreme, males could be entirely unpaired, save for occasional sex with their sisters' partners. At the other and perhaps more interesting extreme, the female/female couple is associated with a male/male couple made up of one brother of each of the female partners.
In this latter form, the children of the ff couple are as closely related to the male couple as to their mothers, with each child getting half his genes from one father, a quarter from the other. That suggests the possibility that mm couples might also be involved in child rearing. If the species does not nurse its young, perhaps male offspring go directly to the mm couple, female to the ff. If it does nurse its young, the same pattern could be established after weaning. Or if male/female differences in lifestyle make dealing with young more practical for males in one part of the year and females in another, the result might be a time shared version of parenting.
One feature of the sort of stable structure I have described is that all of a woman's children will be full siblings of each other since they will all be fathered by the same brother of her partner. This has the advantage of providing her daughters with full brothers to carry on the next generation of the system.
Mating now involves four people rather than two. A woman has to find a female partner for herself who has a brother compatible with one of her brothers. How practical this is may depend in part on family size, in part on how selective the mating preferences of both genders are. I started with the case of a lesbian couple in our society but in the fictional case homosexuality is optional. There might be sexual bonds in the ff couple, the mm couple, both or neither.
Popular Trash
The story starts with a successful popular author along the lines of Leslie Charteris (The Saint books) or Mickey Spillane. It gradually becomes clear that he is older than he appears — a lot older. He is an immortal or near-immortal story teller who, in order to conceal his nature, changes identities every fifty years or so. Given his particular talents, all of the identities are story tellers, details varying by the culture but always popular rather than literary.
The modern critics who scorn his work might be embarrassed to discover that the author they look down upon is, among many others, Homer. Also Chaucer. Possibly also Trollope who, on the available evidence, had access to a word processor, presumably hard wired into his brain.
A Novel Idea
The point of view is that of an alien who lives in a ship, a submarine that looks more like a flying saucer, with a population/crew in the hundreds or thousands. It is part of a large community of such ships dispersed through what one gradually concludes is an ocean of more than planetary size.
As the story proceeds, the reader gradually realizes that the ocean is ours, the ship a jellyfish. The crewmen are of near microscopic size, which explains why, from their point of view, the ocean is so enormous. They may not realize that humans, land based life in general, exist. They are, of course, aware of oceanic life, which provides both a danger and a resource for them.
The idea was inspired by the fact that some jellyfish look like spaceships, complete with flashing lights. In one variant of the story they are in fact spaceships, part of an interstellar civilization specialized to aquatic environments. That version might be aware of land based life, including humans, having observed them from space. They just aren't very interested, just as humans are not very interested in what lives in the deep ocean.
Preserving the Past
Someone comes up with a drug, or a technology, that gives the user perfect recall, the ability to rerun, in full detail, any part of his life. How would it get used?
One possibility is for self-education. Observing selected past experiences with a fifty year old mind and seventeen year old eyes might teach me a good deal about mistakes I had made, some of which I might still be making. It might provide information about what it was like to be seventeen useful in dealing with current teenagers, including my own children. In life as it now is, we get to see each episode only once. As any video game player could tell you, being able to play the same events over and over makes it possible to greatly improve your skill. In my hypothetical, unlike a video game, you don't get to try different tactics and see what happens[1] but you do get to see repeated replays of what you did the first time and the results.
Another possibility is entertainment. You can rerun, over and over again, your happiest, most exciting moments. Replace internet porn with memories of your first, or best, sex. Watch a reality show that was real, with yourself as star.
There is, however, a potential down side. After things go wrong, a marital breakup, a business failure, an election loss, it is tempting to go over it again and again, agonizing over what you did wrong and what you should have done. Now you can do it in living color. Forever.
The version of this scenario I have just described is probably impossible, since there is no reason to believe that a full record of my past is stored anywhere in my brain. But a different version, enabled by a different technology, might well come into existence in the not too distant future.
Consider a world with greatly improved surveillance, a much advanced version of video cameras on poles combined with face recognition software and database technology. In that world, David Brin's Transparent Society, everything that happens in a public place is recorded and findable. And once we have video cameras with the size and aerodynamic characteristics of mosquitoes, practically every place is public.
If the system is open access we are back with perfect recall. I am no longer watching my past life through the eyes of my past self but I still get to watch it.
I was born too early. But it might be reality for my grandchildren.
My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else
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The movie "The Man From Earth" is similar to your Popular Trash. An immortal changes towns every decade and works as a history prof who's been hiding his first hand knowledge of antiquity.
I like your author version, less discrete but more interesting stakes.
The last one was done in black mirror- the entire history of you, if I remember correctly