I just finished reading this latest installment. I was almost upset, that there was going to be such a sad ending involving Amanda. I know the wolrd isnt always happy and there cannot always be happy endings, but I can hope cant I?
Sorry, I didn't notice this post when you first made it.
Amanda Kraft, the Socialite, was already dead. Sad, but true. Her fate is my comment on drunk driving - particularly the part where it is compared to blindfolding yourself, spinning around, and shooting randomly into the street. I think that the "first time" penalty for driving drunk, particularly if you injure or kill someone, should be having your brain removed. After all, if you're a drunk driver, it's quite clear you aren't using it and never will.
Amanda Craft the Military Cyborg was killed in battle. Those things happen - the largest reason she was killed, however, is mentioned in the book: Centuries of shooting Xenofauna and doing science missions does not equate to centuries of practice at war. It was not intended to be a comment on war in any way - it's simply showing the magnitude of the Confederacy's separation from military and political realities. The larger emotion I wanted to engender with this character was simple pity, to magnify the larger issue of how she got that way. What is humane, when it comes to capital punishment? Is any capital punishment humane at all? Conversely, is life in prison humane? If not, why not? These are issues I hoped the reader would think about when they got to know the character, and saw how she ended up.
Amanda the AI, as she appears as a separate entity on Mars, is the "happy ending" that I had intended for the story. However, her existence plays into the larger story of Jovann, and the work of Transcendence that the Valhallans and Martians have been working on since book 4.
Note, however, that the Confederacy is not involved. Certainly, they got the same message that has been spread around on Mars and Valhalla. It's clear, though, that people of the Confederacy have different priorities. Particularly on Deneb-7, they are basically comparable culturally to modern Americans. Sure, there are people thinking about transcendence, today. But let's face it, it's not a topic of conversation that is anywhere near the radar level of most people. Most people are interested in having sex, getting drunk and gobbling junk food. Not necessarily in that order.
As my grandfather once said, "The problem with the common man is that he is so damn common." And he didn't mean "common" as in "lots and lots", he meant "common" as in "commoner or peasant." Most people don't care about higher social goals, the ultimate fate of humanity, or anything like that.
The ultimate problem, of course, lies in perspective - or, really, the lack thereof. Most people don't have the perspective necessary to see the larger picture. And, more to the point, most people simply don't WANT to see the larger picture. They have their own lives, they're quite content with them, thank you, please take your "big-picture-save-the-planet-feed-the-world-end-warfare-end-crime-stop-torture-hug-a-tree-save-a-whale-kiss-a-wombat" ass away from me, thanks. And, very often, those people who profess to see the big picture really don't - they have their own political agenda to push - and as such, the problems they scream about never are resolved in any way. The whales are never saved, the trees remain threatened, the cute fuzzy seal babies continue to be clubbed, and money continues to roll in by the billions to pad the pockets of the advocates who claim to be trying to solve all these problems but actually end up taking million-dollar vacations to Puerto Vallarta over the summer.
So, people lose interest. Entirely understandable. Let's be honest, not much any individual can do to save the planet, the planet is real big. I mean REALLY big. Big like if it was all one smooth ball and had a free food shack every mile or so along the equator, it would take you somewhere around two or three years to walk around it. Big. And my tossing my beer can into the bin marked "recycle" isn't gonna make any real difference. Oh, sure, if ten billion people do it, that's a lot of aluminum. That's the entire basis of these movements. But individually, one man don't mean diddly. And we know it. We can see it in the world around us. We wash our car, it immediately rains. We rake our lawn, the neighbor instantly covers it with leaves with his god-awful leafblower. Like building castles in the sand, we never seem to make any real, permanent difference as individuals, no matter how hard we try. Feed one starving child in Africa, another war breaks out and there's ten million more to feed. Meanwhile, his healthy parents hold their screaming, skeletal, bloat-belly baby up to the camera, because the real reason the child is starving is because the parents are eating what little food they have so they can survive and letting the children go hungry. After all, when you're poor, children are an expendable resource. And hey - if that kid can walk, there's a hundred Islamic militias more than willing to put food in his belly if he's willing to carry an AK-47 and shoot at government soldiers. Sometimes, they recruit the kids right out of the refugee camps, handing out food right alongside the Red Cross and talking about killing the Enemies of Allah in exchange for a full belly.
Yes, really. And it's nothing new, either. People think this is some kind of new song that's never been sung before. It's not, this is a very old song that's been sung since the time of the caves. What made the original "Hansel and Gretel" tale so frightening to our medieval ancestors was that for them, it wasn't just a story - it was a fact of life.
No, really. In the middle ages, the time period 'Hansel and Gretel' originated, it was a fact of life. Run out of food? No way to get more? No choice - the kids get the shaft. Makes an easy way to keep them in line when times are good, too. "Be good, you little brat, or it's off to the forest with you!" It worked, because they knew it could happen, it was a simple fact of life back then. And in Africa today as well as other parts of the world, people still live like that, because they are poor as dirt. So, you have healthy parents holding their sickly, dying kids up for the cameras, because they're eating the food and letting their babies starve.
Cruel? Sure, easy to say when you're a typical American and your belly hangs so far over your belt you look like a beached whale and you've never gone hungry a day in your life. But they don't have a Mickey-Dee's down the corner they can pop over to anytime they got a few bucks in their pocket and notice they're a tad peckish. They want food? They either grow it or shoot it. And if there's nothing to grow and nothing to shoot, they starve. But if mommy and daddy starve themselves to feed their children in that situation, they all die, because the kids can't gather food at all. So, when food is short, the parents eat, and the kids starve. Cruel? Yes. Damn straight. Life is cruel. Particularly for people who don't live in a nation with cheap electricity, running water, two cars to every family and a refrigerator full of junk food within arm's reach that's slowly helping them build up a good layer of arterial plaque for that inevitable coronary they've waited to enjoy. In many parts of the world today, and in most parts of the world in the past, starvation wasn't unusual, it was eating regularly that was unusual.
Seriously. Starvation has been the normal human experience for the vast majority of human history - starting back with homo habilis. Hard for people to believe once they have the ability to reach out their flabby little fingers, pick up a phone and have fast food delivered to their home any time of the day or night in half an hour or it's free, but it's true. Haven't you ever noticed that you never feel 'full' until after you have eaten *more* calories than you actually need? Your body is *designed* to lay on fat, so that you'll at least have a chance to survive when food is scarce. That's why the biggest cause of death in America is heart disease caused by overeating. Overeating being defined as eating more calories than you actually expend getting food. And since in our technologically advanced society you burn more calories scratching your ass than you do actually getting food, you get fat. Starvation is normal. Eating regularly and getting fat and dying of diabetes is actually something new, historically.
So, when the food goes away from war or plague or drought or whatever, the kids are expendable. You can always have more when there's food again. And we see the starving babies, we donate the money to help them, and next week, there's more starving babies. It never ends, because the problem isn't solved with money, or high technology, or any simple solution we can watch unfold in a 60-minute evening news broadcast while we suck down a beer and pat our fat little bellies. It's solved by the hard solutions of getting entire nations of people to stop killing each other over tribal, religious and cultural differences, getting generations of farmers to actually use crop rotation rather than working the soil to the point where it stops producing and all their topsoil blows away in the next windstorm, and getting poor ass-backwards countries to stop empowering facist dictators who are more interested in Rolls Royce cars and Rolex watches than feeding the people of their nation and trying to build an infrastructure and economy.
So, we try and try and try to make a difference, but finally realize nothing really makes any difference and the problems never go away no matter what we do because these problems aren't ever going to be solved by sending a five-dollar check to some advocacy agency in California who's using the money to launder their latest investments in poppy production in Afghanistan. In the end, we kind of shrug our shoulders and go "eh", and change channels to watch "fear factor" so we can enjoy a rush of shadenfreude from watching some poor shmuck eat earthworms and lose out on the big prize so he goes home with empty pockets and a belly full of wiggly things.
Are we getting the picture, yet?
Sounds like a simple problem: Hungry baby in Africa? Hey, stuff a Big Mac down the kid's throat, done. But, that doesn't solve the problem, because the real problem is a lot more complicated than that. The kid is starving because his parents won't feed him. They won't feed him because they barely have enough food for themselves and if they feed him and starve themselves, he can't gather food so they all die. They're short of food for any one of several reasons: War, Drought, Poor Agricultural Practices, Opressive Governments... Sometimes all of the above. None of these problems have easy solutions, and some of them (like Drought) have *no* solution. But, that's not what the advocacy groups tell us. You've all seen the ads on TV. "Why, just five dollars will feed a starving child in Africa for a year! If we can get everyone in America to donate five dollars..." So we donate, and the kids get food. Yay! Then tomorrow, there's more to feed. Huh? Wait... I thought we fed those kids! Yep, we did. These are more. And more, and more, and more...
A narrow perspective is normal. Most people don't want to see the big picture, because the big picture is almost never pretty to look at, they can't really change it if they don't like it, and anything they try to do, good or bad, doesn't have any lasting long term effect - the problems they tried to solve are still there the next day, no matter how hard they work. We've had a "War on Drugs" since the seventies. Still got drugs. We've had a "War on Poverty" since the sixties. Still got poor people and homeless. We had Greenpeace and the Sierra Club telling us the world was doomed back in the sixties and seventies. They still say it's doomed, today. And then, of course, there was Prohibition. Sounded like a great idea at the time - no more drunken men beating their wives and kids, no more accidents from drunk driving, and a lot more. Yay! But, it didn't work. And worse, it ended up bringing in scads of money to the fledgeling Mafia families in this country, and empowering them to the point where they became a permanent part of American society that is just never, ever going to go away. From the perspective of the typical person, the problems everyone screams about just don't go away no matter what we do or how hard we try, so the typical person eventually loses interest.
Life doesn't have simple solutions. Many problems in life have no solution. So, ordinary people just lose interest.
Sure, there are some of you who never lose interest. You keep on fighting the good fight, trying to make a difference no matter how infeffectual your efforts may turn out to be. More power to you, we need dreamers in the world. But most people aren't dreamers, most people are just ordinary people.
See what I'm getting at, now?
Good. Well, in the Pandora's Box universe, things are the same. Asimov's First Law of Futurics: That Which Is Happening Will Continue To Happen. Oh, sure, in their time, they've solved a lot of problems that we have, today. As was explained in the Fourth Book, many of the social problems we have today, they dodged in the future, simply because they didn't inherit their society from ancestors stretching back tens of thousands of years, they built it from scratch on each world when their colony ship arrived. Poverty, hunger. internescene warfare... A lot of really persistent problems were eliminated. But, they have their own problems that are just as annoying and just as persistent. Like bigotry, which forms a recurring theme in book four. And, because these problems just won't go away, people tune out just as often.
And so, in the Confederacy, we have basically ordinary people who have ordinary perspectives on life. Not broad-thinking dreamers whose vision encompasses all, just ordinary folks. They don't see the big picture because they don't want to. It's ugly, they know they can't change it, so they don't wanna know. Yes, they've heard of the idea of transcendence from the Martians and the Valhallans. And there are some in their society who are thinking about it, and what it would entail. The majority, however, just don't care. They have their own little lives to lead.
Yet, it's been mentioned in Book 4 that the Ministry of Faith has been working to raise the social consciousness of the people of the Confederacy. It's a slow process, and most people just don't give a damn, but it's being done. Is it possible for them to produce an individual with a broader perspective that might actually make a difference in their society?
Well, when book 6 comes out, buy it and find out. ;-)
I am very glad to hear this. Please keep in touch. =)
More PB books coming soon, finished book 6 today, am now in the process of polishing it.
