Fiction
On the plane to Adelaide I read Peter Hamilton's Misspent Youth.
This book is very much at the "Social Fiction" end of the "SF" scale. Sure, there is new technology and it's set in the future, but the story is about people interacting with other people and their political and social environment. The new tech is really just a macguffin, and an excuse to make some social commentary, it could just have easily been unexplained magic, as in the Tom Hanks film Big, which is sort of the reverse of this story .
The basic story involves Jeff, a UK physicist (and, I think, a bit of a mary-sue) best known for his donation to the public domain of a high volume storage mechanism and distributed filing system that made copyright meaningless. This is not really explained and doesn't actually seem reasonable. We already have enough storage for almost everyone to hold the vast majority of copyright novels, and we have several anonymous file sharing networks, and the publishing industry hasn't collapsed, and doesn't seem likely to. Still Hamilton has never bothered properly explaining or making reasonable his tech before.
Much later after Jeff has remarried and had a teenage son by his new wife, the European Union choose him as the first subject of a rejuvenation technique which makes him, at eighty, physically twenty years old. Ostensibly so he can work on room temperature superconductors. But mainly as a political propaganda thing. His spin doctor is more a more important character than anyone else other than family and we don't really meet any other scientists.
I won't spoil the story with details, as it's a fun read, but basically he has a lot of sex with much younger girls and falls in love with one of them. The EU politics and riots are also fun, as are the acts of rebellion by various characters.
But the thing that resonated with me was the older man getting his oats. I'm not as old as Jeff was, and I haven't had any teenagers since I was a teenager, but the whole theme of getting younger and getting more sex seemed rather appropriate, given my recent discussions about getting mentally younger, and well, the other.
I feel this is an appropriate time to mention this article which I got to via a friend reading /., all about how ..it seems a growing number of people are retaining the behaviours and attitudes associated with youth. As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry."
Hmm, I wonder if this "evolutionary psychiatrist" has ever considered that perhaps "mental adulthood" is what causes death? Perhaps actually what is changing is that people are rejecting the idea that fun is something you can't have when you grow up, and are also rejecting staid conservative values, so this "evolutionary psychiatrist", pissed that he's missing out on all the sex, er, I mean, not getting any of the fun, is trying to insult us by saying that we ain't "adult".
Actually, what the research is really showing is that people are remaining adaptable and able to learn longer, perhaps because the modern environment requires this to be successful, so "mentally adult " in his definition is when you are static and can't learn any more. I'd call that dead, not "adult" and being unable to learn does not make you "wise" and "mature", as is implied in the article, it just makes you static and incapable of survival.
To get back to the book , while I don't want to reveal the plot, there are other similarities, in that my lover has been only one or at most two, steps removed from my eldest son.
Other than the resonance though, the book had a few flaws. While there was a lot of sex, it was all implied or covered in a single sentence. The author's overall tone wasn't sex positive, though there was some good humour.
Hamilton also had a jarring amount of exposition about history and technology and current political states, and there was no attempt to build it into the story at all, just blocks of direct author to reader exposition. In other words, though the story was interesting, and there was humour and interesting characters, Hamilton's tradecraft wasn't up to scratch.
I have read two author's called Hamilton recently, Peter, and Laurel K. Of the two, only Laurel approached eroticism, but her hero is a female human prude surrounded by non-human supernatural sextroverts, whilst she is striving vainly not have sex. She doesn't even consider masturbation, even when she's alone and horny. Peter's hero Jeff is quite normal in terms of wanting sex, though the implication is that sudden rejuvenation and the taking of Viagra is responsible for the hero having sex more than once a day!
Let me assure people that one does not have to actually be physically rejuvenated or taking Viagra to have sex more than once a day! Though for me at least after the third and fourth times it starts to get tiring, more from a cardio-vascular fitness point of view than anything else!
But Peter's writing is not erotic at all, and is quite adolescent in it's portrayal of sex, and the most risqué thing that happens is a threesome, and that's considered outré, although at least it shows normal women actually wanting sex on occasion.
According to the two Hamiltons, the sexually active are either supernatural monsters or gengineered. And even those don't masturbate or talk about sex in detail with their partners, contrary to research on real world sexual practices as originally carried out by the Kinsey Institute and Masters & Johnson.
So, I have come to the conclusion that my goal must to be write a science fiction or fantasy novel which has normal people being realistically sexually active, including masturbation. Obviously, one doesn't want to be gratuitous about this, but I feel there is a need for sex-positive normal people enjoying themselves and each other in all forms of fiction.
Too often people, especially women, who enjoy sex are treated as oddities. Just look at Desperate Housewives for example. The whole premise of the show is based around it not being normal for couples to have good sex lives or for women to enjoy sex. (at least thats what it seems like to me, from the few episodes I've watched)
Of course, one could argue that being sex-positive is non-normal in the first place, and I'll freely admit that I still have to try hard to overcome the sex-negative conditioning I have received over the years, but the best form of education is by example.
Anyway, I just thought I'd better pass on a couple of links from some people on my flist, in case other haven't seen them. Firstly, from trickofthedark who is in love with the concept, and for the vampire hunters amongst you, is the common garden flame-thrower available from Amazon.com for fifty bucks. I dare any ST to say I can't get a flame-thrower when I want one now! :)
And from mangee, 100 terabyte 3.5" disks based on atomic holographic storage. So when every portable device in the world has 100Tb of storage and is running Bit-torrent or something similar, will industries based on protection of copyright collapse or not? Which neatly ties in to the story I started this post discussing, so seems a good place to stop, like any old ourobouros wyrm would.
This book is very much at the "Social Fiction" end of the "SF" scale. Sure, there is new technology and it's set in the future, but the story is about people interacting with other people and their political and social environment. The new tech is really just a macguffin, and an excuse to make some social commentary, it could just have easily been unexplained magic, as in the Tom Hanks film Big, which is sort of the reverse of this story .
The basic story involves Jeff, a UK physicist (and, I think, a bit of a mary-sue) best known for his donation to the public domain of a high volume storage mechanism and distributed filing system that made copyright meaningless. This is not really explained and doesn't actually seem reasonable. We already have enough storage for almost everyone to hold the vast majority of copyright novels, and we have several anonymous file sharing networks, and the publishing industry hasn't collapsed, and doesn't seem likely to. Still Hamilton has never bothered properly explaining or making reasonable his tech before.
Much later after Jeff has remarried and had a teenage son by his new wife, the European Union choose him as the first subject of a rejuvenation technique which makes him, at eighty, physically twenty years old. Ostensibly so he can work on room temperature superconductors. But mainly as a political propaganda thing. His spin doctor is more a more important character than anyone else other than family and we don't really meet any other scientists.
I won't spoil the story with details, as it's a fun read, but basically he has a lot of sex with much younger girls and falls in love with one of them. The EU politics and riots are also fun, as are the acts of rebellion by various characters.
But the thing that resonated with me was the older man getting his oats. I'm not as old as Jeff was, and I haven't had any teenagers since I was a teenager, but the whole theme of getting younger and getting more sex seemed rather appropriate, given my recent discussions about getting mentally younger, and well, the other.
I feel this is an appropriate time to mention this article which I got to via a friend reading /., all about how ..it seems a growing number of people are retaining the behaviours and attitudes associated with youth. As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry."
Hmm, I wonder if this "evolutionary psychiatrist" has ever considered that perhaps "mental adulthood" is what causes death? Perhaps actually what is changing is that people are rejecting the idea that fun is something you can't have when you grow up, and are also rejecting staid conservative values, so this "evolutionary psychiatrist", pissed that he's missing out on all the sex, er, I mean, not getting any of the fun, is trying to insult us by saying that we ain't "adult".
Actually, what the research is really showing is that people are remaining adaptable and able to learn longer, perhaps because the modern environment requires this to be successful, so "mentally adult " in his definition is when you are static and can't learn any more. I'd call that dead, not "adult" and being unable to learn does not make you "wise" and "mature", as is implied in the article, it just makes you static and incapable of survival.
To get back to the book , while I don't want to reveal the plot, there are other similarities, in that my lover has been only one or at most two, steps removed from my eldest son.
Other than the resonance though, the book had a few flaws. While there was a lot of sex, it was all implied or covered in a single sentence. The author's overall tone wasn't sex positive, though there was some good humour.
Hamilton also had a jarring amount of exposition about history and technology and current political states, and there was no attempt to build it into the story at all, just blocks of direct author to reader exposition. In other words, though the story was interesting, and there was humour and interesting characters, Hamilton's tradecraft wasn't up to scratch.
I have read two author's called Hamilton recently, Peter, and Laurel K. Of the two, only Laurel approached eroticism, but her hero is a female human prude surrounded by non-human supernatural sextroverts, whilst she is striving vainly not have sex. She doesn't even consider masturbation, even when she's alone and horny. Peter's hero Jeff is quite normal in terms of wanting sex, though the implication is that sudden rejuvenation and the taking of Viagra is responsible for the hero having sex more than once a day!
Let me assure people that one does not have to actually be physically rejuvenated or taking Viagra to have sex more than once a day! Though for me at least after the third and fourth times it starts to get tiring, more from a cardio-vascular fitness point of view than anything else!
But Peter's writing is not erotic at all, and is quite adolescent in it's portrayal of sex, and the most risqué thing that happens is a threesome, and that's considered outré, although at least it shows normal women actually wanting sex on occasion.
According to the two Hamiltons, the sexually active are either supernatural monsters or gengineered. And even those don't masturbate or talk about sex in detail with their partners, contrary to research on real world sexual practices as originally carried out by the Kinsey Institute and Masters & Johnson.
So, I have come to the conclusion that my goal must to be write a science fiction or fantasy novel which has normal people being realistically sexually active, including masturbation. Obviously, one doesn't want to be gratuitous about this, but I feel there is a need for sex-positive normal people enjoying themselves and each other in all forms of fiction.
Too often people, especially women, who enjoy sex are treated as oddities. Just look at Desperate Housewives for example. The whole premise of the show is based around it not being normal for couples to have good sex lives or for women to enjoy sex. (at least thats what it seems like to me, from the few episodes I've watched)
Of course, one could argue that being sex-positive is non-normal in the first place, and I'll freely admit that I still have to try hard to overcome the sex-negative conditioning I have received over the years, but the best form of education is by example.
Anyway, I just thought I'd better pass on a couple of links from some people on my flist, in case other haven't seen them. Firstly, from trickofthedark who is in love with the concept, and for the vampire hunters amongst you, is the common garden flame-thrower available from Amazon.com for fifty bucks. I dare any ST to say I can't get a flame-thrower when I want one now! :)
And from mangee, 100 terabyte 3.5" disks based on atomic holographic storage. So when every portable device in the world has 100Tb of storage and is running Bit-torrent or something similar, will industries based on protection of copyright collapse or not? Which neatly ties in to the story I started this post discussing, so seems a good place to stop, like any old ourobouros wyrm would.