The diaper thing is rather icky, and in a way that codes not just “bizarre” but also “low-status”; I think you need to maintain finer control over how your character is perceived on page one, even if you start introducing things like that in chapter two.
Worldbuilding notes:
Once there is public knowledge that there aren’t going to be any more babies had anywhere, I would expect a stampede of adoption attempts, would-be parents going to outrageous lengths to obtain babies or at least children, from developing countries or foster care or something. This already happens, especially with overseas adoption—people pay huge sums of money for babies of dubious sourcing. Literally no one should have grown up in an orphanage or equivalent. Governments which have any degree of corruption at all should have found a way to take children from poor or otherwise marginalizeable parents and sell them to adopters. This will have led to some degree of racial diaspora, and probably a reduction in worldwide poverty, although doubtless it has also made a lot of poor/marginalizeable parents very very angry.
Abortion, and possibly also any pregnancy-risking behavior by pregnant women, may have become suddenly illegal in previously liberal areas. This would probably cause feminist backlash and/or a resurgence of anti-feminism, although that might die down after nobody else was getting pregnant. If there was a window of hope, during which it was thought that extravagant technical methods could salvage the possibility of childbearing, some number of women should have been able to retire on a single egg donation (unsure whether the same should apply for sperm donation), payment for which is customarily not contingent on the success of the donation for its intended purpose.
I expect cults hailing this as some sort of slow apocalypse. All over the place. Lotta cults.
Once everyone is convinced that birth control is unnecessary it could lead to some new wave of sexual revolution… and the greater spread of STDs.
A lot of industries would be hit hard. There would be simultaneously an unemployment problem and no obvious way for new young adults to divert their productivity to the moderately respectable occupation of stay-at-home parenting. This calls for some kind of economic restructuring, although it may not be properly underway by the time your story is set.
Without the infrastructure and spending needed to support children there would be massive economic changes. You would expect currently developing countries to be on a higher relative level, as they currently have bottom heavy populations, so would not be spending money on childcare and education, but would have a large population of young people capable of doing physical labour, which there wouldn’t be in many western countries, which would have a lot of elderly people to support.
One would hope the removal of childbearing would result in vastly increased equality for women, but the ability of humans to be irrational never ceases to amaze.
In general this sounds a bit like a sequel to “Children of Men.” Which I haven’t seen but am told depicts a childless society fairly well.
Stuff I mentioned on IRC: James P. Hogan’s Voyage from Yesteryear has a premise of a colony of people raised without older peers by magical unbiased narrow-AI robots that have an uncanny skill of not accidentally killing babies. They all end up perfect people in an anarcho-libertarian utopia where there is no money and you solve disputes by shooting people you don’t like. This might not be a good direction to take the thing.
Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End has a sideplot about what involuntary global childlessness does to society. The main thing in the book is weak newagey claptrap though, and the stuff about Earth is more of a “well, I guess that’d happen, maybe” footnote, not a detailed treatment.
The plot setup sounds like it could take the fast track to Aynrandsville if done poorly, by making the protagonist an unerring ideology mouthpiece. Otherwise it is a pretty interesting concept, and could go into a bunch of places.
The worldbuilding probably needs some thought. If we’re talking about basically the present day plus a decade or two, I’d expect a way lot of worldwide crazy leading up to figuring out the cure, and a pretty weird relation of the populace at large towards the kid, some of whom would have scary cults latching on to him, others would be sure that the Plague was engineered by the nation, which they happen not to like, that came up with the cure, and the kid’s a living symbol of the most successful ethnic cleansing in the history of world against them. That’d make the kids being out in the open a bit tense. (Bokurano has some examples of why having publicly known to be Really Very Important kids walking out in the open isn’t the best of ideas.)
There’s also the question of exactly how the kid’s going to end up a self-styled paragon of rationality. By default I’d expect him to be raised somewhat weirdly, and probably with a lot of resources at his disposal, but the default expected outcome would be just a self-indulgent average-intelligence teenager maladjusted due to the lack of a peer cohort. So there’s going to need to be some formative experience stuff that sets the kid on his way into trying to become a rationalist reformer. First thing I though of was that the cure would involve some kind of genetic engineering that makes the kid particularly sharp, but I’m not sure if this is necessarily a good idea.
Then there’s the thing that even smart 15-year-olds tend to see things pretty black and white and tend to swallow the bullet with oversimplifying extremism like hardcore libertarism, Stalinist communism or pipebomb the medical research lab animal rights activism. Making the 15-year old self-styled prophet of rationalism with the worldwide media machinery and probably several disturbed cults hanging on to his every word a sympathetic protagonist is going to take some work. That mostly reminds me of the definitely non-sympathetic main kid from John Brunner’s obscure Children of the Thunder. Was also reminded of Narutaru, which has the theme of teenagers getting alien buddies that function as superpowers, and then proceeding to be as spectacularly messed up as real teenagers tend to be and use the powers accordingly.
If we’re talking about basically the present day plus a decade or two, I’d expect a way lot of worldwide crazy leading up to figuring out the cure, and a pretty weird relation of the populace at large towards the kid, some of whom would have scary cults latching on to him, others would be sure that the Plague was engineered by the nation, which they happen not to like, that came up with the cure, and the kid’s a living symbol of the most successful ethnic cleansing in the history of world against them. That’d make the kids being out in the open a bit tense.
Present day + decade or two was what I was thinking about. And the point about them being in the open being dangerous is a good one, hmm. I was thinking about an option that when there start to be other kids, they would all be brought to live in roughly the same region.
At first I thought that this would be a) a good plot tool to give the main character access to the whole generation of kids so far b) plausible in that adults would want the kids to have company. I wasn’t sure of how realistic it might be that all the adults who did succeed in having children would relocate across the country (or across the world, even) to one place. But if they are actually in active danger from crazies, then it makes perfect sense that they would want to be somewhere where they’re protected.
And if all the kids so far are brought to one place to be protected, that will increase the “it’s a government conspiracy” rumors. Fits together quite nicely. I don’t want a situation where they’re all living in some state facility, though, or anything like that. Rather maybe a small town where they’ve all been brought (up), or something. Hmm. I wonder how to fit these pieces together best...
Also, if “the real baby boom” started about seven years after this kid when the cure was finally mass-produced, then most of the crazies may have calmed down already. ’course, that may in itself put pressure on the main character: how to train “his chosen ones” so that they’ll be able to influence all the other kids everywhere with his teachings, before he loses the first-mover advantage?
There’s also the question of exactly how the kid’s going to end up a self-styled paragon of rationality. By default I’d expect him to be raised somewhat weirdly, and probably with a lot of resources at his disposal, but the default expected outcome would be just a self-indulgent average-intelligence teenager maladjusted due to the lack of a peer cohort.
True. I was going to chalk it up to the lack of a normal peer group plus high intelligence plus unusual genetic personality traits plus stumbling upon books about rationality. That might still be a bit unlikely, but probably not suspension of disbelief -breaking enough for a novel. But then, it can’t hurt to at least imply that this was somehow caused by the disease / cure. Elsewhere somebody also suggested that the kids might have some physical characteristic marking them as different (say, six fingers in the left hand or something), to further increase their alienation from the previous generations. I may use that.
Then there’s the thing that even smart 15-year-olds tend to see things pretty black and white and tend to swallow the bullet with oversimplifying extremism like hardcore libertarism, Stalinist communism or pipebomb the medical research lab animal rights activism. Making the 15-year old self-styled prophet of rationalism with the worldwide media machinery and probably several disturbed cults hanging on to his every word a sympathetic protagonist is going to take some work.
This is very true as well. And it does create a certain dilemma: the most realistic option would be for the kid to swallow some oversimplified ideology and take it into an extreme. However, if I do that, readers will think this is an author tract promoting that very ideology. (I’ve seen reviews critizing MoR of this, even in cases where it’s in my eyes obvious that Harry is supposed to be making a mistake.) Somehow I need to make him plausibly swallow some such a bullet, because that’s what an overconfident kid rationalist with no guidance would do… but I have to make it clear that this is not the author’s endorsed ideology. Ideally also quickly enough that the readers haven’t had the chance to put away the book by then. Hmm.
Note that the main character isn’t necessarily intended to be fully sympathetic. He is a power-hungry narcissist, after all. Though not entirely unlikable either. Something like the natural combination of both the selfishness and innocence of childhood taken to a point where it’s kinda creepy and alluring at the same time. Or something. I have a strong intuitive vision of it, but have difficulty putting it into words.
True. I was going to chalk it up to the lack of a normal peer group plus high intelligence plus unusual genetic personality traits plus stumbling upon books about rationality. That might still be a bit unlikely, but probably not suspension of disbelief -breaking enough for a novel.
I think that you could also chalk it up to him being the only kid, and him being forced to socialize with adults, or at least people 10 years older than he is. He needs to get smarter faster than he normally would, because his peers are that much farther ahead of him.
And if all the kids so far are brought to one place to be protected, that will increase the “it’s a government conspiracy” rumors. Fits together quite nicely. I don’t want a situation where they’re all living in some state facility, though, or anything like that. Rather maybe a small town where they’ve all been brought (up), or something. Hmm. I wonder how to fit these pieces together best...
Just who gets to raise the kids and how is going to be of interest to a lot of people. I’d suppose that the default loving and well-meaning but slightly incompetent biological parents aren’t going to end up having a full say in the matter, someone with some serious political clout is going to end up running things, just from the fact that the power vacuum to fill is going to be rather huge. Also, the early kids are most likely going to have random young test subjects as the biological parents, while the later ones are more likely to be biological children of rich and influential people, although possibly with surrogate wombs.
Note that the main character isn’t necessarily intended to be fully sympathetic. He is a power-hungry narcissist, after all. Though not entirely unlikable either. Something like the natural combination of both the selfishness and innocence of childhood taken to a point where it’s kinda creepy and alluring at the same time. Or something. I have a strong intuitive vision of it, but have difficulty putting it into words.
Kinda sounds like what you’d get from mixing the three Wiggin kids from Ender’s Game into a single person.
One approach might be to play with reader anticipations, guess what kind of story they think they are reading, and repeatedly throw them by subverting the expectations. Another angle is to just try to very carefully make it look like things are unfolding from the in-story logic instead of enforcing plot twist X to illustrate didactic point Y.
Just who gets to raise the kids and how is going to be of interest to a lot of people. I’d suppose that the default loving and well-meaning but slightly incompetent biological parents aren’t going to end up having a full say in the matter, someone with some serious political clout is going to end up running things, just from the fact that the power vacuum to fill is going to be rather huge.
True. Hmmh. Another possibility I considered was that after the eight months that it takes for the feat to be replicated, the cure spreads pretty quickly. As a result, there isn’t a small cadre of kids for the main character to “train” in relative calm, but instead he just has access to a bunch of kids that happen to live near him and there are lots of others he has no direct contact with. I may go with that approach instead, if it starts to seem like that realistically there would be lots of interference in their daily lives by various power figures with vested interests. (While one could write a story about playing them against each other, having a kid beat experienced plotters and schemers stretches suspension of disbelief a bit too much. Plus it wasn’t the kind of story I had in mind.)
You (Kaj Sotala) may check out Brian Aldiss’ Greybeard. It deals explicitly with a childless society, albeit it is set multiple decades after the last birth and depicts a society that is very aged and mostly anarchistic (and thus it’s rather detached from your own milieu).
Come think of it, the whole setup somehow reminds me of John Brunner. Might want to read Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up for some dystopic social breakdown and memetic weirdness stuff. Children of the Thunder wasn’t a very good book IMO, those two should be significantly better.
AI and robotics researchers are going to have one hell of a sales pitch for funding while no-one is sure whether there are going to be any more biological humans ever. I’ve heard that Japan is already researching robots specifically for taking care of the aging demographic, but I don’t know how explicit or far-reaching the real-world plan currently is.
Geneticists are also going to get a big leeway for thinking outside the Sane & Ethical Box compared to business as usual, on the off chance they’ll come up with a cure. Or they’ll get lynched as plague-brewing witches. Or both. There might be some genuinely very shady business ethics-wise going around with the project that did come up with the cure as well.
I’m looking for ideas about ways to weave in LW content into the story. Suggest either biases that he sees for what they are, or biases that he ends up being guilty of himself.
Look for elegant and standard scenes to illustrate them. For example, illustrating the fundamental attribution bias could easily be done by having the protagonist run into someone who is rude, and then the narrator follows the rude person and the reader sees how the rudeness is just a passing problem and they were normal nice people.
Ideas about what a society would look like after ten years with no kids are also welcome.
After 10 years, when the protagonist is born, all the youngest kids are 10 years old so elementary school no longer exists. Growing up to 5, all the youngest kids are 15 years old, so middle school no longer exists. A few more years and high school will cease to exist. This implies that when the protagonist is 7 or so, many of his teachers can be expected to be high school or university teachers since everyone specializing in lower education has retired or found other occupations. Like Harry in MoR, this provides a plausible reason why your protagonist has been given a personalized high-level education and can identify as a rationalist.
If you’re interested in ‘what happens to the world’, you can focus on a lot of areas. For example, no kids for 10 years makes the demographics of an aging population vastly worse. I would expect to hear about major disruption in the bond markets as the drop-dead dates of various actuarial systems like Social Security (or entire nations like Japan) are suddenly jumped forward by a decade or more.
Speaking of Japan, that, South Korea, and China place heavy emphasis on testing. But what happens when a kid in the last cohort can decide to just not study hard and take the tests a year after his year-group? University selection systems are generally predicated on an ever-increasing student population; how do they react to a shrinking one with an abrupt cliff at the end?
Many vaccines are produced only for infants by for-profit corporations; what happens when there are no more infants whose insurance will pay for vaccination? Is the protagonist going to be un-inocculated or will he be using up a limited number of frozen vaccines or what?
FWIW, I don’t think the diapers is a good example. Urine may be safe enough, with modern ultra-absorbent linings, but you don’t want to cart around feces next to your skin for a few hours, much less sit on said feces or something. There are reasons animals abandon or bury their feces.
For example, no kids for 10 years makes the demographics of an aging population vastly worse. I would expect to hear about major disruption in the bond markets as the drop-dead dates of various actuarial systems like Social Security (or entire nations like Japan) are suddenly jumped forward by a decade or more.
These problems would happen eventually, but for the first 20 or so years after the end of childbirth things would actually be better, since people under 20 don’t work. The employment to population ratio would be higher without all of the non-employed kids around, plus more women would enter the workforce since they don’t have kids to take care of. Working-age people have to support both nonworking kids and nonworking elderly, so the serious demographic problems wouldn’t start until the missing generation became working-age. Before that, there would be disruptions from expectations of future problems and from drastic reductions in demand (for schoolteachers, diapers, children’s books, toys, pop music, etc.).
Some other problems that this society would have:
Men tend to date & marry slightly younger women, which means that the last couple years of guys (just before the infertility cliff) would be screwed. Perhaps some single guys 10 years older than your protagonist would turn their attention to his generation and compete with him for influence?
Some professions are highly dependent on getting work from a certain age range, and would be highly disrupted. Professional athletes are 20-early 30s in many sports, so when your protagonist is in his teens there would be a drop in quality, more older athletes sticking around, and a massive effort to find & train athletic teenagers to play sports. Actors are needed in various specific age ranges, so there would be a major demand for rare-aged people close to both ends of the gap (especially young-looking people born just before the gap and old-looking people just after the gap). In some professions like music, creativity and change tends to come from young people in their early 20s or so. Standard low-skill young people’s jobs like fast food would need to be filled by someone else.
Standard low-skill young people’s jobs like fast food would need to be filled by someone else.
Might have some interesting consequences if all of those ended up effectively automated away or people otherwise thought of ways around this. By the time the new kids grew up, there simply wouldn’t be many jobs suitable for young people left. (With even actors replaced by better CGI.)
Of course, rebuilding the industries that manufactured stuff for kids would probably provide a lot of employment, at least for a while.
Depends where it’s set. Andrew Wakefield’s fine work in this direction has already started breaking herd immunity in parts of London, for example (including the part I live in).
Don’t necessarily have an interest in focusing on much of the world for its own sake. This is a story about rationalists, not about all the possible social consequences of this event. But I do need to have an idea of what all changes would realistically have happened, so I can take them into account if necessary. Your points were excellent, thanks.
Urine may be safe enough, with modern ultra-absorbent linings, but you don’t want to cart around feces next to your skin for a few hours
True, but if he has to go to the bathroom every time he needs to take a dump anyway… It’s a behavior that’s expensive (diapers are not cheap! Where is he getting them from anyway? An old stockpile sold at fire-sale prices?), for minimal benefit, and clear social cost with the adults.
I would buy a signaling explanation, though, along the lines of: ‘when I was very young I didn’t see why I should learn how to use the potty, so I just kept wearing diapers; these days I do know, but I keep wearing them as a message to the oldsters: I’m not one of you, I’m one of the newtypes.’
(diapers are not cheap! Where is he getting them from anyway? An old stockpile sold at fire-sale prices?)
I was presuming that there’d be a lot of unsold ones left over from ten years before. Assuming they hadn’t been destroyed, of course. But even if they were, I’m presuming that the first family to have a kid in ten years would regardless be gifted with enough money that he could get a new brand-new gaming computer every day if that’s what he wanted. (Well, at least presuming that his parents let him use all that money.)
I would buy a signaling explanation, though, along the lines of: ‘when I was very young I didn’t see why I should learn how to use the potty, so I just kept wearing diapers; these days I do know, but I keep wearing them as a message to the oldsters: I’m not one of you, I’m one of the newtypes.’
Huh, I like this one. Actually, it could also be used to hint at his rationality not always being all that hot: even if he figures out that a previous behavior wasn’t really all that useful, he’d rather stick to it than admit being wrong.
I was presuming that there’d be a lot of unsold ones left over from ten years before.
Not necessarily. Remember my earlier point about the last cohort. Even if pregnancies stopped instantly, there are still 0-2 years’ worth of babies and kids who might use diapers—which is enough time to sell off the minimal just-in-time stocks and shutter the factories. But if you want to assume that, I doubt anyone will call foul on it.
Actually, it could also be used to hint at his rationality not always being all that hot: even if he figures out that a previous behavior wasn’t really all that useful, he’d rather stick to it than admit being wrong.
Yup. Either one (signaling or stubbornness due to cognitive dissonance) is more interesting and more educational and more plausible than just the dubious ‘it saves me time’.
You’ll probably want to have some basic picture of developmental psychology down cold. Young kids just plain can’t think sufficiently complex thoughts, and even kids at around 12 probably have some physical limits to the level of stuff they can comfortably work with, unless some kind of genetic modification is involved. And doing a first iteration of messing around with the genetic basis of developmental psychology that doesn’t have obvious unintended consequences is going to stretch credibility a lot unless it has a pretty good explanation.
Adolescent brains apparently aren’t quite completely wired either, so you might not get away with blaming just poor education on the thing with teenagers doing stupid stuff even if they’re smart. This is going to be a particular problem for a character who is supposed to be very proactive and basically running his own game against society at large, since the parts of brain that you need to run that sort of stuff are the slowest to mature.
HP:MoR gets away with this for being very up-front nonserious (and with some help from having a shard of an evil wizard’s soul stuck in one’s head, apparently), but a halfway realistic fiction would have a lot of hand-waving to do with eleven-year-olds having their shit together anywhere near as well as they do there. Smart kids can have brilliant moments, sure, but it’s the always-on big picture awareness thing they have that I’m not buying. At least unless evil wizard soul shards are involved.
This is the main reason why I’m starting the story off from a point where the protagonist’s 15. No way I could write a realistic 12-year old rationalist. :)
I read it in high school, and the opinion then was mostly “kids shoot aliens, fun”. Didn’t glom on to the genius loner übermensch protagonist like I was apparently supposed to. I did get the impression that the Wiggin kids had to be some kind of genetics experiment, since they didn’t really make sense as baseline human kids, but I’m not sure if the book was ever clear on this. They were acknowledged as some kind of special deal, but the idea might have been to just try to pitch them as precocious natural talent.
To be more precise, what was your opinion of the book’s portrayal of gifted children?
(I thought that the book made it clear that the Wiggin children were the beneficiary of, at most, selective breeding over a couple of generations—they represented the extreme end of the bell curve, but nothing beyond that, nothing actually superhuman.)
In the introduction to the book, Card writes:
For some people, however, the loathing for Ender’s Game transcended mere artistic argument … the criticism that left me most flabbergasted her assertion that my depiction of gifted children was hopelessly unrealistic. They just don’t talk like that, she said. They don’t think like that. … Yet I knew—I knew—that this was one of the truest things about Ender’s Game … Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along—the same person I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing Ender’s Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective—the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adults. … [T]he book does ring true with the children who read it.
To be more precise, what was your opinion of the book’s portrayal of gifted children?
It’s been too long since I read the book for me to have a very detailed impression, but I think it has pretty much the same problem I described earlier. It shows the gifted children being brilliant and deep all the time. Talented children can have frequent flashes of brilliance, but I’d expect realistic children to have a pretty wide variance in just how well they respond to a given situation that requires talented improvisation and to exhibit poor judgment, metacognition and situation awareness on just how they make use of their brilliant moments.
I haven’t interacted with talented children as an adult, so I’m not able to comment on how the actual ones act in the real world. I’m working from the cognitive science references I linked earlier and imagining what would happen if you’d take a regular kid and overclocked their CPU.
I’m not convinced by Card’s introduction though. It’s very hard to perceive and remember how your cognitive faculties were less developed in childhood. Once you learn something or become capable of thinking something, it’s hard to recall the mindset where you didn’t know the thing. Mostly you need to think around corners and try to think of the way you actually acted and reacted in the past. Are there people who don’t feel like they were persons with real emotions and desires as children, even if they were objectively pretty dumb as kids? And when do kids ever think of themselves as speaking childishly?
I loved the book in middle school. Like, it was one of my favorite books ever. I once reread it in the course of a few hours at a party that my parents took me to, it was that good.
However, rereading it in high school I was disappointed. It was less relatable, and at parts his victimization felt much more forced, and his intelligence more of an informed attribute. The plot seemed a bit more contrived, and I didn’t identify as much with the parts of me that empathized with Ender.
What I ultimately think was most condemning though, was the vacuousness of almost everyone else in the book. The bullies were clearly there just to be knocked down, and his friends (or “jeesh”) in the book were just in support roles. The bullies were indistinguishable from each other, as were the friends, and the whole book seemed set up to gratify Ender’s superiority.
It would actually be pretty interesting (but tangential to your main point) to address that issue—namely how a supersmart protagonist often wants to be the only motive force in the universe, but isn’t. Ender gets kind of pwned at the end of the book for failing to realize that, but its not particularly emphasized.
So I guess the take-home advice here is to have the other people in the story actually be other characters, rather than plot devices with names.
Count me as another one who liked the Bean series better. He seemed smarter, and less of his power was due to black-box people skills. Bean was a somewhat low-status, somewhat socially inept kid who used intelligence (and a willingness to break the rules) to succeed at what he did. And I liked the sections from the other kids’ POVs.
Ideas about what a society would look like after ten years with no kids are also welcome.
Do you know “Children of Men”? It shows a world after 20 years with no kids.
I never really stopped wearing diapers.
If he ignores all traditions, just because they don’t seem to make sense, it will get him into trouble. Reason as memetic immune disorder would be relevant.
Do you know “Children of Men”? It shows a world after 20 years with no kids.
I’ve heard of it, but I’ve gotten the impression that it doesn’t really make any attempt of being realistic. This may be wrong, though: I should check it out anyway.
If he ignores all traditions, just because they don’t seem to make sense, it will get him into trouble. Reason as memetic immune disorder would be relevant.
Although it’s not immediately clear to me how to fix it, I have to say that Chemical Y being released worldwide puts a considerable strain on my suspension of disbelief. I haven’t yet thought of a plausible explanation for how that might happen, and if it’s going to pass without explanation, it should be believable enough not to demand one.
“Released worldwide” may be a bad wording. “Put into use in product type Z” is more along the lines of what I had in mind.
Doesn’t need to have been taken into use all at once, either. There could have been, said, a pretty much worldwide adoption within a period of a couple of years as various national regulatory agencies approved it or whatever. This could actually make it more plausible that the chemical was the one suspected, if we presume that the countries that were hit by the plague first were also the ones that had been the first ones to approve the use of the chemical. (Partially this would have been an unlucky coincidence, partially because those countries happened to be more tightly integrated with each other and the plague spread more quickly between them.)
Better, but I would still be awfully suspicious if a chemical that was getting into humans’ bodies was being put into use worldwide without first being tested the hell out of to make absolutely certain it wouldn’t, say, destroy the reproductive capacities of people worldwide, or even just increase their risk of cancer.
If you look at the sheer number of probably-innocuous chemicals that are never allowed to be marketed in many countries throughout the world, I would have a hard time believing that anything would be adopted around the world while still being so ill tested that when a major new defect arises, it’s almost instantly considered suspect.
Of course, while I don’t consider myself an expert by any means, most readers may care less about chemical regulations than I do.
Oh, certainly it will have been thoroughly tested. But things that we thought were thoroughly tested have been known to cause problems before. And people are already afraid of chemicals. Take a panicked population looking desperately for an explanation, throw in a coincidence suggesting the chemical may be at fault, and you have a “the chemical did it” mass hysteria at hands. (Yes, the actual medical community will be less likely to buy that, but it will take a while before they can convince the general public that the public is mistaken.)
Yes, but are you aware of any newly developed chemicals which are introduced into the human body being released worldwide in a short time frame? Within a decade, for instance? I don’t know of any. Different countries have widely differing standards of approval, and just because something rapidly passes into common use in one country doesn’t mean it will ever be authorized in another.
The best mechanism I can think of at the moment that might justify this would be if the chemical was never intended to be released at all, and a process that was not adequately tested turned out to be releasing low levels of chemical emissions which were not easily degraded and accumulated in the environment over time.
The diaper thing doesn’t really work since kids are potty-trained by their parents before they are able to have much any say in the matter. At the time kids are old enough to express some clear personal preference, they don’t have ready access to diapers any more. I don’t think people really remember any of the time before they were potty-trained either.
Also, there’s the possibility of some parents being less in a rush to potty-train the kids if they think these might be the only kids they might ever have. There have been some real-life trends of parents finding it more convenient to potty-train kids later, see e.g. here. This is the way I treated the idea in Childhood’s End, an earlier flash-fiction story of mine that is based around the same concept, though there it was about the last pre-plague generations.
You may be right. I kinda like the idea because it’s a quick way of giving off the vibe of someone weird, plus it’s about the earliest event possible that I can think of that could’ve sparked off the “adults aren’t very sensible” notion. I’m not very sure on whether others get that same “weird” vibe as I do, though. I’m pretty sure this particular idea hasn’t been used before, but primary reader reaction to the idea might only be “ewwww”. Which wouldn’t exactly encourage them to keep reading.
I have heard mentions of previously potty-trained kids going back to diapers after the birth of a younger sibling, but then by that age there may be better ways of noticing their parents’ irrationality. (I was thinking that the main character would have a sister three years younger than him.)
For Y chemical, I recommend a vaguely biology-related real chemical abbreviation, something like DHBG (standing for 2,3-dihydroxybenzoylglycine, a chemical that might be used on crops).
He likes being independent, but his flaw is his narcissism and pride. He likes doing things differently from other people.
But the problem is that quite there are quite a few things that people do because they kind of make sense. Being different for the sake of being is going to mess him up. He’s going to seem rude, and will have unbalanced diets and whatnot.
Eventually, he realizes that even though other people have some arbitrary behaviors, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. He needs to find something to base his actions in that’s even more reasonable than conformity, and more universal than his whims. Something that guarantees improvement. So he uses rationality to guide his defiance, and somewhat mitigates his narcissism.
Just a question, what does he do about school/education?
Just a question, what does he do about school/education?
As gwern pointed out, there’ll probably be plenty of private tutors. He’ll probably want to figure out how to a) make sure he has more influence on the younger kids than the tutors do b) make sure “his chosen ones” have more influence on the coming generations by the time there are enough kids that actual schools start up again. Figuring out how to do that is definitely a good question.
I did consider that some sort of school reform movement may have realistically gotten traction while there were no kids in school and there was less inertia from established interests. “Now that we have the chance, let’s redesign the school system from the ground up to make sure that when we do have children again, they’ll have the best possible schooling.” He could try to nudge the debate into some direction, somehow.
I think this would depend a lot on whether anyone expected to have children again. It doesn’t seem to me that a society losing its children would start thinking in terms of education reform, automatically. Perhaps there would be a scramble when they realized the cure was going to work to cobble together a new schooling system, and so it would be a combination of reform, whatever they could throw together, and any special interests that managed to get their foot in the door. It seems to me that corporations/etc would jump to get their stake in the new children’s market.
I’m pretty sure that in this kind of a scenario, there would be massive amounts of hopeful thinking in the populace. It would also give part of the former teachers and pedagogical experts something to do in the meanwhile.
If it’s not critical to the plot, may I suggest making the protagonist female? There might be even more themes on social conditioning to explore that way.
I would recommend against it, unless the author is really really good at writing. General rule is “Write What You Know”—if you have grown up as a boy, let the protagonist be a boy.
I sincerely disagree with that. If writers lived by this principle, every protagonist would be the same gender, race, nationality, and raised in the same environment as the author.
In which case we’d never have many works that are now considered classics.
“Bad books on writing and thoughtless English professors solemnly tell beginners to ‘Write What You Know’, which explains why so many mediocre novels are about English professors contemplating adultery.”—Joe Haldeman
A lot depends on what I want to achieve with it as an author.
If I want to write a protagonist who is X in such a way that readers who are also X will feel like the protagonist reflects their experience, and I am myself not X, that’s very hard. If I’m not only non-X but also have minimal experience with X and I don’t involve any Xes actively in the writing/editing process, my chances of success are slim.
On the other hand, if I want to write an X protagonist such that readers who, like me, have minimal experience of X will recognize the protagonist as conforming to their existing model of what Xes are like (regardless of whether that’s true of the real world or not), that’s much easier.
Ideally, the author being really good at writing should be a prerequisite for producing anything considered a classic. Although in practice it’s not my impression that this is the case.
beaten Nanowrimo (event to write a 50,000-word novel in a month) on two occasions. Those “novels” were mostly pretty bad and didn’t actually get to the end of the story, but they did leave me convinced that I could finish a quality longer story given enough time and determination.
co-written maybe 1000+ pages worth of fiction with some friends, some of it rather darn good. It’s by its nature rather private, though, as it was never intended to be shared with others.
In the tangentially related books I haven’t actually read department, Beggars in Spain is about genetic engineering producing a new breed of children and the social disturbances this causes, Darwin’s Radio has a mystery virus that’s causing most pregnancies to terminate and the few remaining ones produce children that aren’t quite human.
Generally speaking, it’s more rational not to be too “rational” when you’re twelve. Does your protagonist have some reason to believe he’s overcome his overconfidence, is he hitting on the right ideas by chance, or is he wrong for a large part of his life?
And why exactly did you pick diapers as an example? Even if you restrict yourself to urine, as you suggest in a comment, there are solid reasons why this is a bad idea.
Does your protagonist have some reason to believe he’s overcome his overconfidence, is he hitting on the right ideas by chance, or is he wrong for a large part of his life?
Mostly happening to stumble across books about rationality. (I was playing with the idea of him having some specific book that taught him a lot, and then mention in the end notes that “this is actually a real book”, pointing to Eliezer’s book).
And why exactly did you pick diapers as an example?
Spur-of-the-moment inspiration. I thought it was at least different, but this was the first page of the first draft, which I wrote in about fifteen minutes. I haven’t analyzed it in depth. People seem to dislike it, which I suspected they might, so I’ll probably replace it with something else.
One aspect of the diaper thing is that it could easily be interpreted as your quirk rather than the character’s (even in some of these comments it sounded like you got the idea first then looked for a reason).
Besides, I (and it seems several others here) think the analysis isn’t just ‘weird’ or ‘low-status’, but incorrect. It sounds like it’s going to be important for this character to be pretty good at being right.
Anyway, will stop harping on about that.
I’m interested in hearing about how this develops. Do you have a notion of the key changes the character is going to implement in society?
Do you plan on maintaining the first-person narrative for the entire novel? If so, any particular reason? I’ve never written fiction, but I’ve heard authors opine that this is by far the most difficult perspective.
For Y chemical, I recommend a vaguely biology-related real chemical abbreviation, something like DHBG (standing for 2,3-dihydroxybenzoylglycine, a chemical that might be used on crops).
That might get more people to cough up the $3 for a copy, just to see if it’s really as fetishy as it sounds. “Come for the diaper-wearing protagonist, stay for the story.”
Alternately, this post could be taken as evidence that I should never do advertising.
Eh, works for me. I guess the question is how weird you want your example to be. If you’re losing audience due to excessive weirdness, then I suppose you’re being less effective than you could be, even if it is a good example of a way someone with relatively little indoctrination might end up. It seems clear to me that while someone in your character’s situation wouldn’t end up with that particular oddity, ey probably would have some feature at least that weird/absurd/repelling. I guess it comes down to 1. the question of accuracy versus transmittability 2. what the next best thing to demonstrate weirdness is 3. how hard it is to make the idea less unpleasant to your readership.
I vote for replace. I find it too heavy-handed as a way of characterization and I actually don’t think that diapers are that comfortable or practical for an older kid who could take care of himself.
The diaper thing is rather icky, and in a way that codes not just “bizarre” but also “low-status”; I think you need to maintain finer control over how your character is perceived on page one, even if you start introducing things like that in chapter two.
Worldbuilding notes:
Once there is public knowledge that there aren’t going to be any more babies had anywhere, I would expect a stampede of adoption attempts, would-be parents going to outrageous lengths to obtain babies or at least children, from developing countries or foster care or something. This already happens, especially with overseas adoption—people pay huge sums of money for babies of dubious sourcing. Literally no one should have grown up in an orphanage or equivalent. Governments which have any degree of corruption at all should have found a way to take children from poor or otherwise marginalizeable parents and sell them to adopters. This will have led to some degree of racial diaspora, and probably a reduction in worldwide poverty, although doubtless it has also made a lot of poor/marginalizeable parents very very angry.
Abortion, and possibly also any pregnancy-risking behavior by pregnant women, may have become suddenly illegal in previously liberal areas. This would probably cause feminist backlash and/or a resurgence of anti-feminism, although that might die down after nobody else was getting pregnant. If there was a window of hope, during which it was thought that extravagant technical methods could salvage the possibility of childbearing, some number of women should have been able to retire on a single egg donation (unsure whether the same should apply for sperm donation), payment for which is customarily not contingent on the success of the donation for its intended purpose.
I expect cults hailing this as some sort of slow apocalypse. All over the place. Lotta cults.
Once everyone is convinced that birth control is unnecessary it could lead to some new wave of sexual revolution… and the greater spread of STDs.
A lot of industries would be hit hard. There would be simultaneously an unemployment problem and no obvious way for new young adults to divert their productivity to the moderately respectable occupation of stay-at-home parenting. This calls for some kind of economic restructuring, although it may not be properly underway by the time your story is set.
Thanks, very good points.
I’ll probably replace the diaper thing with something else. ’twas an idea I thought might work, but seems like it won’t.
Possible replacement things: http://www.cracked.com/article_19121_7-basic-things-you-wont-believe-youre-all-doing-wrong.html
Without the infrastructure and spending needed to support children there would be massive economic changes. You would expect currently developing countries to be on a higher relative level, as they currently have bottom heavy populations, so would not be spending money on childcare and education, but would have a large population of young people capable of doing physical labour, which there wouldn’t be in many western countries, which would have a lot of elderly people to support.
One would hope the removal of childbearing would result in vastly increased equality for women, but the ability of humans to be irrational never ceases to amaze.
In general this sounds a bit like a sequel to “Children of Men.” Which I haven’t seen but am told depicts a childless society fairly well.
Stuff I mentioned on IRC: James P. Hogan’s Voyage from Yesteryear has a premise of a colony of people raised without older peers by magical unbiased narrow-AI robots that have an uncanny skill of not accidentally killing babies. They all end up perfect people in an anarcho-libertarian utopia where there is no money and you solve disputes by shooting people you don’t like. This might not be a good direction to take the thing.
Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End has a sideplot about what involuntary global childlessness does to society. The main thing in the book is weak newagey claptrap though, and the stuff about Earth is more of a “well, I guess that’d happen, maybe” footnote, not a detailed treatment.
The plot setup sounds like it could take the fast track to Aynrandsville if done poorly, by making the protagonist an unerring ideology mouthpiece. Otherwise it is a pretty interesting concept, and could go into a bunch of places.
The worldbuilding probably needs some thought. If we’re talking about basically the present day plus a decade or two, I’d expect a way lot of worldwide crazy leading up to figuring out the cure, and a pretty weird relation of the populace at large towards the kid, some of whom would have scary cults latching on to him, others would be sure that the Plague was engineered by the nation, which they happen not to like, that came up with the cure, and the kid’s a living symbol of the most successful ethnic cleansing in the history of world against them. That’d make the kids being out in the open a bit tense. (Bokurano has some examples of why having publicly known to be Really Very Important kids walking out in the open isn’t the best of ideas.)
There’s also the question of exactly how the kid’s going to end up a self-styled paragon of rationality. By default I’d expect him to be raised somewhat weirdly, and probably with a lot of resources at his disposal, but the default expected outcome would be just a self-indulgent average-intelligence teenager maladjusted due to the lack of a peer cohort. So there’s going to need to be some formative experience stuff that sets the kid on his way into trying to become a rationalist reformer. First thing I though of was that the cure would involve some kind of genetic engineering that makes the kid particularly sharp, but I’m not sure if this is necessarily a good idea.
Then there’s the thing that even smart 15-year-olds tend to see things pretty black and white and tend to swallow the bullet with oversimplifying extremism like hardcore libertarism, Stalinist communism or pipebomb the medical research lab animal rights activism. Making the 15-year old self-styled prophet of rationalism with the worldwide media machinery and probably several disturbed cults hanging on to his every word a sympathetic protagonist is going to take some work. That mostly reminds me of the definitely non-sympathetic main kid from John Brunner’s obscure Children of the Thunder. Was also reminded of Narutaru, which has the theme of teenagers getting alien buddies that function as superpowers, and then proceeding to be as spectacularly messed up as real teenagers tend to be and use the powers accordingly.
Present day + decade or two was what I was thinking about. And the point about them being in the open being dangerous is a good one, hmm. I was thinking about an option that when there start to be other kids, they would all be brought to live in roughly the same region.
At first I thought that this would be a) a good plot tool to give the main character access to the whole generation of kids so far b) plausible in that adults would want the kids to have company. I wasn’t sure of how realistic it might be that all the adults who did succeed in having children would relocate across the country (or across the world, even) to one place. But if they are actually in active danger from crazies, then it makes perfect sense that they would want to be somewhere where they’re protected.
And if all the kids so far are brought to one place to be protected, that will increase the “it’s a government conspiracy” rumors. Fits together quite nicely. I don’t want a situation where they’re all living in some state facility, though, or anything like that. Rather maybe a small town where they’ve all been brought (up), or something. Hmm. I wonder how to fit these pieces together best...
Also, if “the real baby boom” started about seven years after this kid when the cure was finally mass-produced, then most of the crazies may have calmed down already. ’course, that may in itself put pressure on the main character: how to train “his chosen ones” so that they’ll be able to influence all the other kids everywhere with his teachings, before he loses the first-mover advantage?
True. I was going to chalk it up to the lack of a normal peer group plus high intelligence plus unusual genetic personality traits plus stumbling upon books about rationality. That might still be a bit unlikely, but probably not suspension of disbelief -breaking enough for a novel. But then, it can’t hurt to at least imply that this was somehow caused by the disease / cure. Elsewhere somebody also suggested that the kids might have some physical characteristic marking them as different (say, six fingers in the left hand or something), to further increase their alienation from the previous generations. I may use that.
This is very true as well. And it does create a certain dilemma: the most realistic option would be for the kid to swallow some oversimplified ideology and take it into an extreme. However, if I do that, readers will think this is an author tract promoting that very ideology. (I’ve seen reviews critizing MoR of this, even in cases where it’s in my eyes obvious that Harry is supposed to be making a mistake.) Somehow I need to make him plausibly swallow some such a bullet, because that’s what an overconfident kid rationalist with no guidance would do… but I have to make it clear that this is not the author’s endorsed ideology. Ideally also quickly enough that the readers haven’t had the chance to put away the book by then. Hmm.
Note that the main character isn’t necessarily intended to be fully sympathetic. He is a power-hungry narcissist, after all. Though not entirely unlikable either. Something like the natural combination of both the selfishness and innocence of childhood taken to a point where it’s kinda creepy and alluring at the same time. Or something. I have a strong intuitive vision of it, but have difficulty putting it into words.
I think that you could also chalk it up to him being the only kid, and him being forced to socialize with adults, or at least people 10 years older than he is. He needs to get smarter faster than he normally would, because his peers are that much farther ahead of him.
Just who gets to raise the kids and how is going to be of interest to a lot of people. I’d suppose that the default loving and well-meaning but slightly incompetent biological parents aren’t going to end up having a full say in the matter, someone with some serious political clout is going to end up running things, just from the fact that the power vacuum to fill is going to be rather huge. Also, the early kids are most likely going to have random young test subjects as the biological parents, while the later ones are more likely to be biological children of rich and influential people, although possibly with surrogate wombs.
Kinda sounds like what you’d get from mixing the three Wiggin kids from Ender’s Game into a single person.
One approach might be to play with reader anticipations, guess what kind of story they think they are reading, and repeatedly throw them by subverting the expectations. Another angle is to just try to very carefully make it look like things are unfolding from the in-story logic instead of enforcing plot twist X to illustrate didactic point Y.
True. Hmmh. Another possibility I considered was that after the eight months that it takes for the feat to be replicated, the cure spreads pretty quickly. As a result, there isn’t a small cadre of kids for the main character to “train” in relative calm, but instead he just has access to a bunch of kids that happen to live near him and there are lots of others he has no direct contact with. I may go with that approach instead, if it starts to seem like that realistically there would be lots of interference in their daily lives by various power figures with vested interests. (While one could write a story about playing them against each other, having a kid beat experienced plotters and schemers stretches suspension of disbelief a bit too much. Plus it wasn’t the kind of story I had in mind.)
You (Kaj Sotala) may check out Brian Aldiss’ Greybeard. It deals explicitly with a childless society, albeit it is set multiple decades after the last birth and depicts a society that is very aged and mostly anarchistic (and thus it’s rather detached from your own milieu).
Come think of it, the whole setup somehow reminds me of John Brunner. Might want to read Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up for some dystopic social breakdown and memetic weirdness stuff. Children of the Thunder wasn’t a very good book IMO, those two should be significantly better.
Thanks, I’ll check those out.
AI and robotics researchers are going to have one hell of a sales pitch for funding while no-one is sure whether there are going to be any more biological humans ever. I’ve heard that Japan is already researching robots specifically for taking care of the aging demographic, but I don’t know how explicit or far-reaching the real-world plan currently is.
Geneticists are also going to get a big leeway for thinking outside the Sane & Ethical Box compared to business as usual, on the off chance they’ll come up with a cure. Or they’ll get lynched as plague-brewing witches. Or both. There might be some genuinely very shady business ethics-wise going around with the project that did come up with the cure as well.
Look for elegant and standard scenes to illustrate them. For example, illustrating the fundamental attribution bias could easily be done by having the protagonist run into someone who is rude, and then the narrator follows the rude person and the reader sees how the rudeness is just a passing problem and they were normal nice people.
After 10 years, when the protagonist is born, all the youngest kids are 10 years old so elementary school no longer exists. Growing up to 5, all the youngest kids are 15 years old, so middle school no longer exists. A few more years and high school will cease to exist. This implies that when the protagonist is 7 or so, many of his teachers can be expected to be high school or university teachers since everyone specializing in lower education has retired or found other occupations. Like Harry in MoR, this provides a plausible reason why your protagonist has been given a personalized high-level education and can identify as a rationalist.
If you’re interested in ‘what happens to the world’, you can focus on a lot of areas. For example, no kids for 10 years makes the demographics of an aging population vastly worse. I would expect to hear about major disruption in the bond markets as the drop-dead dates of various actuarial systems like Social Security (or entire nations like Japan) are suddenly jumped forward by a decade or more.
Speaking of Japan, that, South Korea, and China place heavy emphasis on testing. But what happens when a kid in the last cohort can decide to just not study hard and take the tests a year after his year-group? University selection systems are generally predicated on an ever-increasing student population; how do they react to a shrinking one with an abrupt cliff at the end?
Many vaccines are produced only for infants by for-profit corporations; what happens when there are no more infants whose insurance will pay for vaccination? Is the protagonist going to be un-inocculated or will he be using up a limited number of frozen vaccines or what?
FWIW, I don’t think the diapers is a good example. Urine may be safe enough, with modern ultra-absorbent linings, but you don’t want to cart around feces next to your skin for a few hours, much less sit on said feces or something. There are reasons animals abandon or bury their feces.
These problems would happen eventually, but for the first 20 or so years after the end of childbirth things would actually be better, since people under 20 don’t work. The employment to population ratio would be higher without all of the non-employed kids around, plus more women would enter the workforce since they don’t have kids to take care of. Working-age people have to support both nonworking kids and nonworking elderly, so the serious demographic problems wouldn’t start until the missing generation became working-age. Before that, there would be disruptions from expectations of future problems and from drastic reductions in demand (for schoolteachers, diapers, children’s books, toys, pop music, etc.).
Some other problems that this society would have:
Men tend to date & marry slightly younger women, which means that the last couple years of guys (just before the infertility cliff) would be screwed. Perhaps some single guys 10 years older than your protagonist would turn their attention to his generation and compete with him for influence?
Some professions are highly dependent on getting work from a certain age range, and would be highly disrupted. Professional athletes are 20-early 30s in many sports, so when your protagonist is in his teens there would be a drop in quality, more older athletes sticking around, and a massive effort to find & train athletic teenagers to play sports. Actors are needed in various specific age ranges, so there would be a major demand for rare-aged people close to both ends of the gap (especially young-looking people born just before the gap and old-looking people just after the gap). In some professions like music, creativity and change tends to come from young people in their early 20s or so. Standard low-skill young people’s jobs like fast food would need to be filled by someone else.
Excellent points.
Might have some interesting consequences if all of those ended up effectively automated away or people otherwise thought of ways around this. By the time the new kids grew up, there simply wouldn’t be many jobs suitable for young people left. (With even actors replaced by better CGI.)
Of course, rebuilding the industries that manufactured stuff for kids would probably provide a lot of employment, at least for a while.
If people are generally vaccinated, then I think he could get by on herd immunity.
Depends where it’s set. Andrew Wakefield’s fine work in this direction has already started breaking herd immunity in parts of London, for example (including the part I live in).
Don’t necessarily have an interest in focusing on much of the world for its own sake. This is a story about rationalists, not about all the possible social consequences of this event. But I do need to have an idea of what all changes would realistically have happened, so I can take them into account if necessary. Your points were excellent, thanks.
He could just use them for the urine.
True, but if he has to go to the bathroom every time he needs to take a dump anyway… It’s a behavior that’s expensive (diapers are not cheap! Where is he getting them from anyway? An old stockpile sold at fire-sale prices?), for minimal benefit, and clear social cost with the adults.
I would buy a signaling explanation, though, along the lines of: ‘when I was very young I didn’t see why I should learn how to use the potty, so I just kept wearing diapers; these days I do know, but I keep wearing them as a message to the oldsters: I’m not one of you, I’m one of the newtypes.’
I was presuming that there’d be a lot of unsold ones left over from ten years before. Assuming they hadn’t been destroyed, of course. But even if they were, I’m presuming that the first family to have a kid in ten years would regardless be gifted with enough money that he could get a new brand-new gaming computer every day if that’s what he wanted. (Well, at least presuming that his parents let him use all that money.)
Huh, I like this one. Actually, it could also be used to hint at his rationality not always being all that hot: even if he figures out that a previous behavior wasn’t really all that useful, he’d rather stick to it than admit being wrong.
Not necessarily. Remember my earlier point about the last cohort. Even if pregnancies stopped instantly, there are still 0-2 years’ worth of babies and kids who might use diapers—which is enough time to sell off the minimal just-in-time stocks and shutter the factories. But if you want to assume that, I doubt anyone will call foul on it.
Yup. Either one (signaling or stubbornness due to cognitive dissonance) is more interesting and more educational and more plausible than just the dubious ‘it saves me time’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_diaper
You’ll probably want to have some basic picture of developmental psychology down cold. Young kids just plain can’t think sufficiently complex thoughts, and even kids at around 12 probably have some physical limits to the level of stuff they can comfortably work with, unless some kind of genetic modification is involved. And doing a first iteration of messing around with the genetic basis of developmental psychology that doesn’t have obvious unintended consequences is going to stretch credibility a lot unless it has a pretty good explanation.
Adolescent brains apparently aren’t quite completely wired either, so you might not get away with blaming just poor education on the thing with teenagers doing stupid stuff even if they’re smart. This is going to be a particular problem for a character who is supposed to be very proactive and basically running his own game against society at large, since the parts of brain that you need to run that sort of stuff are the slowest to mature.
HP:MoR gets away with this for being very up-front nonserious (and with some help from having a shard of an evil wizard’s soul stuck in one’s head, apparently), but a halfway realistic fiction would have a lot of hand-waving to do with eleven-year-olds having their shit together anywhere near as well as they do there. Smart kids can have brilliant moments, sure, but it’s the always-on big picture awareness thing they have that I’m not buying. At least unless evil wizard soul shards are involved.
This is the main reason why I’m starting the story off from a point where the protagonist’s 15. No way I could write a realistic 12-year old rationalist. :)
What was your opinion of Ender’s Game?
I read it in high school, and the opinion then was mostly “kids shoot aliens, fun”. Didn’t glom on to the genius loner übermensch protagonist like I was apparently supposed to. I did get the impression that the Wiggin kids had to be some kind of genetics experiment, since they didn’t really make sense as baseline human kids, but I’m not sure if the book was ever clear on this. They were acknowledged as some kind of special deal, but the idea might have been to just try to pitch them as precocious natural talent.
To be more precise, what was your opinion of the book’s portrayal of gifted children?
(I thought that the book made it clear that the Wiggin children were the beneficiary of, at most, selective breeding over a couple of generations—they represented the extreme end of the bell curve, but nothing beyond that, nothing actually superhuman.)
In the introduction to the book, Card writes:
It’s been too long since I read the book for me to have a very detailed impression, but I think it has pretty much the same problem I described earlier. It shows the gifted children being brilliant and deep all the time. Talented children can have frequent flashes of brilliance, but I’d expect realistic children to have a pretty wide variance in just how well they respond to a given situation that requires talented improvisation and to exhibit poor judgment, metacognition and situation awareness on just how they make use of their brilliant moments.
I haven’t interacted with talented children as an adult, so I’m not able to comment on how the actual ones act in the real world. I’m working from the cognitive science references I linked earlier and imagining what would happen if you’d take a regular kid and overclocked their CPU.
I’m not convinced by Card’s introduction though. It’s very hard to perceive and remember how your cognitive faculties were less developed in childhood. Once you learn something or become capable of thinking something, it’s hard to recall the mindset where you didn’t know the thing. Mostly you need to think around corners and try to think of the way you actually acted and reacted in the past. Are there people who don’t feel like they were persons with real emotions and desires as children, even if they were objectively pretty dumb as kids? And when do kids ever think of themselves as speaking childishly?
I loved the book in middle school. Like, it was one of my favorite books ever. I once reread it in the course of a few hours at a party that my parents took me to, it was that good.
However, rereading it in high school I was disappointed. It was less relatable, and at parts his victimization felt much more forced, and his intelligence more of an informed attribute. The plot seemed a bit more contrived, and I didn’t identify as much with the parts of me that empathized with Ender.
What I ultimately think was most condemning though, was the vacuousness of almost everyone else in the book. The bullies were clearly there just to be knocked down, and his friends (or “jeesh”) in the book were just in support roles. The bullies were indistinguishable from each other, as were the friends, and the whole book seemed set up to gratify Ender’s superiority.
It would actually be pretty interesting (but tangential to your main point) to address that issue—namely how a supersmart protagonist often wants to be the only motive force in the universe, but isn’t. Ender gets kind of pwned at the end of the book for failing to realize that, but its not particularly emphasized.
So I guess the take-home advice here is to have the other people in the story actually be other characters, rather than plot devices with names.
Did you read Bean’s parallel novel?
Yeah.
I liked that one more actually, but I haven’t reread it recently.
Bean seemed waaaaay smarter (and less mopey) than Ender when I last read it, but I’m not sure how well his thinking was shown.
The other characters in it had far stronger personalities than in the Ender series, though.
Count me as another one who liked the Bean series better. He seemed smarter, and less of his power was due to black-box people skills. Bean was a somewhat low-status, somewhat socially inept kid who used intelligence (and a willingness to break the rules) to succeed at what he did. And I liked the sections from the other kids’ POVs.
Do you know “Children of Men”? It shows a world after 20 years with no kids.
If he ignores all traditions, just because they don’t seem to make sense, it will get him into trouble. Reason as memetic immune disorder would be relevant.
I’ve heard of it, but I’ve gotten the impression that it doesn’t really make any attempt of being realistic. This may be wrong, though: I should check it out anyway.
Ah, excellent reminder! Thanks.
If you want a description of the actual state of the world, read the book rather than see the movie...
I’d be especially interested in what happens when he tries to influence people. It should be quite a learning experience for him.
Although it’s not immediately clear to me how to fix it, I have to say that Chemical Y being released worldwide puts a considerable strain on my suspension of disbelief. I haven’t yet thought of a plausible explanation for how that might happen, and if it’s going to pass without explanation, it should be believable enough not to demand one.
“Released worldwide” may be a bad wording. “Put into use in product type Z” is more along the lines of what I had in mind.
Doesn’t need to have been taken into use all at once, either. There could have been, said, a pretty much worldwide adoption within a period of a couple of years as various national regulatory agencies approved it or whatever. This could actually make it more plausible that the chemical was the one suspected, if we presume that the countries that were hit by the plague first were also the ones that had been the first ones to approve the use of the chemical. (Partially this would have been an unlucky coincidence, partially because those countries happened to be more tightly integrated with each other and the plague spread more quickly between them.)
Better, but I would still be awfully suspicious if a chemical that was getting into humans’ bodies was being put into use worldwide without first being tested the hell out of to make absolutely certain it wouldn’t, say, destroy the reproductive capacities of people worldwide, or even just increase their risk of cancer.
If you look at the sheer number of probably-innocuous chemicals that are never allowed to be marketed in many countries throughout the world, I would have a hard time believing that anything would be adopted around the world while still being so ill tested that when a major new defect arises, it’s almost instantly considered suspect.
Of course, while I don’t consider myself an expert by any means, most readers may care less about chemical regulations than I do.
Oh, certainly it will have been thoroughly tested. But things that we thought were thoroughly tested have been known to cause problems before. And people are already afraid of chemicals. Take a panicked population looking desperately for an explanation, throw in a coincidence suggesting the chemical may be at fault, and you have a “the chemical did it” mass hysteria at hands. (Yes, the actual medical community will be less likely to buy that, but it will take a while before they can convince the general public that the public is mistaken.)
Yes, but are you aware of any newly developed chemicals which are introduced into the human body being released worldwide in a short time frame? Within a decade, for instance? I don’t know of any. Different countries have widely differing standards of approval, and just because something rapidly passes into common use in one country doesn’t mean it will ever be authorized in another.
The best mechanism I can think of at the moment that might justify this would be if the chemical was never intended to be released at all, and a process that was not adequately tested turned out to be releasing low levels of chemical emissions which were not easily degraded and accumulated in the environment over time.
Books I haven’t read but Adam Cadre has: How not to write didactic fiction starring a close-knit group of children united by a charismatic leader in a post-apocalyptic setting. How not to write didactic fiction starring an individualistic visionary thinker going against the grain of established society.
The diaper thing doesn’t really work since kids are potty-trained by their parents before they are able to have much any say in the matter. At the time kids are old enough to express some clear personal preference, they don’t have ready access to diapers any more. I don’t think people really remember any of the time before they were potty-trained either.
Also, there’s the possibility of some parents being less in a rush to potty-train the kids if they think these might be the only kids they might ever have. There have been some real-life trends of parents finding it more convenient to potty-train kids later, see e.g. here. This is the way I treated the idea in Childhood’s End, an earlier flash-fiction story of mine that is based around the same concept, though there it was about the last pre-plague generations.
You may be right. I kinda like the idea because it’s a quick way of giving off the vibe of someone weird, plus it’s about the earliest event possible that I can think of that could’ve sparked off the “adults aren’t very sensible” notion. I’m not very sure on whether others get that same “weird” vibe as I do, though. I’m pretty sure this particular idea hasn’t been used before, but primary reader reaction to the idea might only be “ewwww”. Which wouldn’t exactly encourage them to keep reading.
I have heard mentions of previously potty-trained kids going back to diapers after the birth of a younger sibling, but then by that age there may be better ways of noticing their parents’ irrationality. (I was thinking that the main character would have a sister three years younger than him.)
For Y chemical, I recommend a vaguely biology-related real chemical abbreviation, something like DHBG (standing for 2,3-dihydroxybenzoylglycine, a chemical that might be used on crops).
A quick suggestion on how to show biases...
He likes being independent, but his flaw is his narcissism and pride. He likes doing things differently from other people.
But the problem is that quite there are quite a few things that people do because they kind of make sense. Being different for the sake of being is going to mess him up. He’s going to seem rude, and will have unbalanced diets and whatnot.
Eventually, he realizes that even though other people have some arbitrary behaviors, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. He needs to find something to base his actions in that’s even more reasonable than conformity, and more universal than his whims. Something that guarantees improvement. So he uses rationality to guide his defiance, and somewhat mitigates his narcissism.
Just a question, what does he do about school/education?
Something like this was what I had in mind, yeah.
As gwern pointed out, there’ll probably be plenty of private tutors. He’ll probably want to figure out how to a) make sure he has more influence on the younger kids than the tutors do b) make sure “his chosen ones” have more influence on the coming generations by the time there are enough kids that actual schools start up again. Figuring out how to do that is definitely a good question.
I did consider that some sort of school reform movement may have realistically gotten traction while there were no kids in school and there was less inertia from established interests. “Now that we have the chance, let’s redesign the school system from the ground up to make sure that when we do have children again, they’ll have the best possible schooling.” He could try to nudge the debate into some direction, somehow.
I think this would depend a lot on whether anyone expected to have children again. It doesn’t seem to me that a society losing its children would start thinking in terms of education reform, automatically. Perhaps there would be a scramble when they realized the cure was going to work to cobble together a new schooling system, and so it would be a combination of reform, whatever they could throw together, and any special interests that managed to get their foot in the door. It seems to me that corporations/etc would jump to get their stake in the new children’s market.
I’m pretty sure that in this kind of a scenario, there would be massive amounts of hopeful thinking in the populace. It would also give part of the former teachers and pedagogical experts something to do in the meanwhile.
If it’s not critical to the plot, may I suggest making the protagonist female? There might be even more themes on social conditioning to explore that way.
I did consider this, but the protagonist’s pretty strongly male in my mind.
I would recommend against it, unless the author is really really good at writing. General rule is “Write What You Know”—if you have grown up as a boy, let the protagonist be a boy.
...Eh.
I sincerely disagree with that. If writers lived by this principle, every protagonist would be the same gender, race, nationality, and raised in the same environment as the author.
In which case we’d never have many works that are now considered classics.
“Bad books on writing and thoughtless English professors solemnly tell beginners to ‘Write What You Know’, which explains why so many mediocre novels are about English professors contemplating adultery.”—Joe Haldeman
A lot depends on what I want to achieve with it as an author.
If I want to write a protagonist who is X in such a way that readers who are also X will feel like the protagonist reflects their experience, and I am myself not X, that’s very hard. If I’m not only non-X but also have minimal experience with X and I don’t involve any Xes actively in the writing/editing process, my chances of success are slim.
On the other hand, if I want to write an X protagonist such that readers who, like me, have minimal experience of X will recognize the protagonist as conforming to their existing model of what Xes are like (regardless of whether that’s true of the real world or not), that’s much easier.
Oooh, burn!
Ideally, the author being really good at writing should be a prerequisite for producing anything considered a classic. Although in practice it’s not my impression that this is the case.
Calcutta is called Kolkata since 2001. Yet, I am attached to an old name too.
Kaj, do you have experience finishing stories? I thought of writing a story myself, but haven’t.
Ah, thanks. I wasn’t aware of that.
I’ve
finished some short stories, but they’re mostly all very short.
beaten Nanowrimo (event to write a 50,000-word novel in a month) on two occasions. Those “novels” were mostly pretty bad and didn’t actually get to the end of the story, but they did leave me convinced that I could finish a quality longer story given enough time and determination.
co-written maybe 1000+ pages worth of fiction with some friends, some of it rather darn good. It’s by its nature rather private, though, as it was never intended to be shared with others.
In the tangentially related books I haven’t actually read department, Beggars in Spain is about genetic engineering producing a new breed of children and the social disturbances this causes, Darwin’s Radio has a mystery virus that’s causing most pregnancies to terminate and the few remaining ones produce children that aren’t quite human.
Darwin’s Radio is largely tangential to this thread… the story doesn’t address the sociological implications of the resulting children at all.
Generally speaking, it’s more rational not to be too “rational” when you’re twelve. Does your protagonist have some reason to believe he’s overcome his overconfidence, is he hitting on the right ideas by chance, or is he wrong for a large part of his life?
And why exactly did you pick diapers as an example? Even if you restrict yourself to urine, as you suggest in a comment, there are solid reasons why this is a bad idea.
Mostly happening to stumble across books about rationality. (I was playing with the idea of him having some specific book that taught him a lot, and then mention in the end notes that “this is actually a real book”, pointing to Eliezer’s book).
Spur-of-the-moment inspiration. I thought it was at least different, but this was the first page of the first draft, which I wrote in about fifteen minutes. I haven’t analyzed it in depth. People seem to dislike it, which I suspected they might, so I’ll probably replace it with something else.
One aspect of the diaper thing is that it could easily be interpreted as your quirk rather than the character’s (even in some of these comments it sounded like you got the idea first then looked for a reason).
Besides, I (and it seems several others here) think the analysis isn’t just ‘weird’ or ‘low-status’, but incorrect. It sounds like it’s going to be important for this character to be pretty good at being right.
Anyway, will stop harping on about that.
I’m interested in hearing about how this develops. Do you have a notion of the key changes the character is going to implement in society?
Do you plan on maintaining the first-person narrative for the entire novel? If so, any particular reason? I’ve never written fiction, but I’ve heard authors opine that this is by far the most difficult perspective.
I think it’s easiest, myself. I get to develop a single voice and get comfortable with it.
Intuition. It just feels like the most natural approach for this particular story.
For Y chemical, I recommend a vaguely biology-related real chemical abbreviation, something like DHBG (standing for 2,3-dihydroxybenzoylglycine, a chemical that might be used on crops).
Okay, poll: does anyone actually like the diaper thing, or should I just replace it with something else?
Replace. A protagonist that often smells of urine is not compelling.
At the very least, not as the selling point. If this thing is going to get distilled into a single image, “diaper fetishist” probably shouldn’t be it.
That might get more people to cough up the $3 for a copy, just to see if it’s really as fetishy as it sounds. “Come for the diaper-wearing protagonist, stay for the story.”
Alternately, this post could be taken as evidence that I should never do advertising.
Eh, works for me. I guess the question is how weird you want your example to be. If you’re losing audience due to excessive weirdness, then I suppose you’re being less effective than you could be, even if it is a good example of a way someone with relatively little indoctrination might end up. It seems clear to me that while someone in your character’s situation wouldn’t end up with that particular oddity, ey probably would have some feature at least that weird/absurd/repelling. I guess it comes down to 1. the question of accuracy versus transmittability 2. what the next best thing to demonstrate weirdness is 3. how hard it is to make the idea less unpleasant to your readership.
I vote for replace. I find it too heavy-handed as a way of characterization and I actually don’t think that diapers are that comfortable or practical for an older kid who could take care of himself.
My daughter got to hate them all by herself and was enormously pleased to have sufficient bladder control not to need them.
An external catheter I could understand, but wearing soiled diapers sounds really uncomfortable.