Inside the bubble

A couple of nights ago, my wife and I watched the latest episode in the current series of Doctor Who, "Dot and Bubble."  [Nota bene: this post will contain spoilers -- if you intend to watch it, you should do so first, then come back and read this afterward.]

All I'd heard about it before watching is that it is "really disturbing."  That's putting it mildly.  Mind you, there's no gore; even the monsters are no worse than the usual Doctor Who fare.  But the social commentary it makes puts it up there with episodes like "Midnight," "Cold Blood," and "The Almost People" for leaving you shaken and a little sick inside.

The story focuses on the character of Lindy, brilliantly played by Callie Cooke, who is one of the residents of "Finetime."  Finetime is basically a gated summer camp for spoiled rich kids, where they do some nominal work for two hours a day and spend the rest of the time playing.  Each of the residents is surrounded, just about every waking moment, by a virtual-reality shell showing all their online friends -- the "bubble" of the title -- and the "work" each of them does is mostly to keep their bubbles fully charged so they don't miss anything.

The tension starts to ramp up when the Doctor and his companion, Ruby Sunday, show up unannounced in Lindy's bubble, warning her that people in Finetime are disappearing.  At first she doesn't believe it, but when forced to look people up, she notices an abnormal number of them are offline -- she hadn't noticed because the only ones she sees are the ones who are online, so she wasn't aware how many people in her bubble had vanished.  At first she's dismissive of Ruby and downright rude to the Doctor, but eventually is driven to the realization that there are monsters eating the inhabitants of Finetime one by one.

Reluctantly accepting guidance from the Doctor, she runs for one of the conduits that pass under the city, which will give her a way out of the boundaries into the "Wild Wood," the untamed forests outside the barrier.  Along the way, though, we begin to see that Lindy isn't quite the vapid innocent we took her for at first.  She coldly and unhesitatingly sacrifices the life of a young man who had tried to help her in order to save her own; when she finds out that the monsters had already killed everyone in her home world, including her own mother, she basically shrugs her shoulders, concluding that since they were in a "happier place" it was all just hunky-dory.

It was the end, though, that was a sucker punch I never saw coming.  When she finally meets up with the Doctor and Ruby in person, and the Doctor tells her (and a few other survivors) that they have zero chance of surviving in the Wild Wood without his help, she blithely rejects his offer.

"We can't travel with you," she says, looking at him as if he were subhuman.  "You, sir, are not one of us.  You were kind -- although it was your duty to save me.  Screen-to-screen contact is just about acceptable.  But in person?  That's impossible."

In forty-five minutes, a character who started out seeming simply spoiled, empty-headed, and shallow moved into the territory of "amoral" and finally into outright evil.  That this transformation was so convincing is, once again, due to Callie Cooke's amazing portrayal.

What has stuck with me, though, and the reason I'm writing about it today, is that the morning after I watched it, I took a look at a few online reviews of the episode.  They were pretty uniformly positive (and just about everyone agreed that it was disturbing as hell), but what is fascinating -- and more than a little disturbing in its own right -- is the difference between the reactions of the reviewers who are White and the ones who are Black.

Across the board, the White reviewers thought the take-home message of "Dot and Bubble" is "social media = bad."  Or, at least, social media addiction = bad.  If so, the moral to the story is (to quote Seán Ferrick of the YouTube channel WhoCulture) "as subtle as a brick to the face."  The racism implicit in Lindy's rejection of the Doctor was a shocking twist at the end, adding another layer of yuck to an already awful character.

The Black reviewers?  They were unanimous that the main theme throughout the story is racism (even though race was never once mentioned explicitly by any of the characters).  In the very first scene, it was blatantly obvious to them that every last one of Lindy's online friends is White -- many of them almost stereotypically so.  Unlike the White reviewers, the Black reviewers saw the ending coming from a mile off.  Many of them spoke of having dealt all their lives with sneering, race-based microaggressions -- like Lindy's being willing at least to talk to Ruby (who is White) while rejecting the Doctor (who is Black) out of hand.

When considering "Dot and Bubble," it's easy to stop at it being a rather ham-handed commentary on social media, but really, it's about echo chambers.  Surround yourself for long enough with people who think like you, act like you, and look like you, and you start to believe the people who don't share those characteristics are less than you.

What disturbs me the worst is that I didn't see the obvious clues that writer Russell T. Davies left us, either.  When Lindy listens to Ruby and rejects the Doctor, it honestly didn't occur to me that the reason could be the color of his skin.  I didn't even notice that all Lindy's friends were White.  As a result, the ending completely caught me off guard.  As far as the subtle (and not-so-subtle) racist overtones of the characters in the episode, I wasn't even aware of them except in retrospect.

But that's one of the hallmarks of privilege, isn't it?  You're not aware of it because you don't have to be.  As a White male, there are issues of safety, security, and acceptance I never even have to think about.  So I guess like Lindy and the other residents of Finetime, I also live in my own bubble, surrounded by people who (mostly) think like I do, never having to stretch myself to consider, "What would it be like if I was standing where they are?"

And what makes the character of Lindy so horrific is that even offered the opportunity to do that -- to step outside of her bubble and broaden her mind a little -- she rejects it.  Even if it means losing the aid of the one person who is able to help her, and without whose assistance she is very likely not to survive.

For myself, my initial blindness to what "Dot and Bubble" was saying was a chilling reminder to keep pushing my own boundaries.  In the end, all I can do is what poet Maya Angelou tells us: "Do the best you can until you know better.  Then, when you know better, do better."

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Pushing the envelope

Two nights ago, I watched "The Star Beast," the first of three sixtieth anniversary specials of my favorite show, Doctor Who.  As I might have expected, it was campy good fun, and featured the return of my favorite of the Doctor's companions, Donna Noble (played brilliantly by the inimitable Catherine Tate).

As I also might have expected, the howling from the right-wingers started almost immediately.

The problem this time is Donna's daughter, Rose (played by the wonderful Yasmin Finney), who is a trans woman.  The script looks at her identity head on; our first introduction to Rose shows her being taunted by some transphobic classmates, and there was a scene where Donna's irascible mother Sylvia struggles with her own guilt about sometimes slipping up and misgendering her granddaughter.  It was handled with sensitivity, and not with any sort of hit-you-over-the-head virtue signaling, but there's no doubt that Rose's being trans is an important part of the storyline.

Then later, one of the aliens in the episode, Beep the Meep (I shit you not, that's this alien's name), is talking with the Doctor, and the Doctor asks what pronouns the Meep uses, and gets the response, "My chosen pronoun is the definite article.  The.  Same as you, Doctor."

Which is a funny and poignant line -- especially considering that the Doctor's previous incarnation was female.

Well, you'd swear Doctor Who had declared war on everything good and holy in the world.

"Doctor Who has gone woke!" one ex-fan shrieked.  "I'm done with it for good!"  Another declared that Doctor Who "hates men."  Yet another made a whole YouTube video dedicated to the statement that the show had "set its legacy on fire."

To which I respond: my dudes, have you ever even watched this show?

Doctor Who has been on the leading edge of social acceptance and representation ever since the reboot in 2005.  Captain Jack Harkness gave new meaning to "pansexual" by flirting with damn near everyone he came into contact with, ultimately falling hard (and tragically) for a Welshman named Ianto Jones.  Freema Agyeman and Pearl Mackie were the first two Black women to play companions; Mackie's character, Bill Potts, was lesbian as well, as was the Thirteenth Doctor's companion Yasmin Khan (played by Mandip Gill).  Then there's the wonderfully badass Madame Vastra (Neve McIntosh) and her wife Jenny Flint (Catrin Stewart), who are in a same-sex relationship that is also an interspecies one.

Not only has this show steadfastly championed representation, its themes frequently press us to question societal issues.  It's addressed racial prejudice (several episodes, most notably Rosa and Cold Blood), slavery (The Planet of the Ood), climate change (Orphan 55), whether it's ever possible to forgive your sworn enemies (Dalek), the terrifying evils of tribalism (Midnight), how power eventually corrupts anyone who wields too much of it (The Waters of Mars), how easy it is to dehumanize those whom we don't understand (The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People), if vengeance ever goes too far (Human Nature/The Family of Blood), and the devastating horrors of war (The Zygon Inversion).

So it's not like the people running this show shy away from looking hard at difficult issues.  It's pushed the envelope pretty much from day one.

More to the point, though -- the most troubling part of all the backlash is the subtext of the whining about how "woke" Doctor Who is.  What they're saying is they want to be able to pretend that those who are different -- in this case, trans people, but more generally, LGBTQ+ individuals -- don't exist.  They don't want to be reminded that everyone isn't straight and White; even having queer folks or people of color appear on a show like this is "ramming wokeness down everyone's throats."

Well, let me say this loud and clear -- as a queer guy who was in the closet for four decades because of this kind of mindless, heartless bigotry: never again.  We will never again be silent, never again be shamed into hiding, never again pretend we're invisible, never again quietly accept that we don't deserve exactly the same respect -- and representation -- as anyone else.  I can only imagine how different the trajectory of my life would have been if there'd been these kinds of positive depictions of queer people on the shows I watched as a teenager; how dare you wish that fate upon yet another generation of young adults.

So if that makes you stop watching Doctor Who -- I think I can speak for the majority of fans by saying, "Oh well."  *shoulder shrug*  We don't need you.  However, it does make me wonder how you don't see the irony of calling us snowflakes, when you are the ones who get your knickers in a twist because of someone asking what pronouns a furry alien prefers.  

In other words, don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.  Because we LGBTQ+ people are here to stay, as are people of other races, ethnicities, cultures, and religions.  If you don't like that, you might want to sit and think about why you believe the world has the obligation to reshape itself in order to conform to your narrow-mindedness and prejudice.

As for me, I'm going to continue to watch Doctor Who and continue to enjoy it, and -- to judge by the great ratings "The Star Beast" got -- so are millions of other "woke" fans.

Deal with it.

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The Flannan Isles mystery

In the classic Doctor Who episode "The Horror of Fang Rock," the Fourth Doctor and his companion Leela investigate a malfunctioning lighthouse off the coast of England -- and find that it's under siege, and its unfortunate crew are being killed one at a time by something that appears to be able to shapeshift.

The culprit turns out to be a Rutan, an alien that (in its original form) looks a little like a cross between a giant jellyfish and a moldy lime.

The Rutans were attempting to wipe out humanity so they could use the Earth as their new home base, something that (if you believe classic Who) was the aim of every intelligent alien species in the galaxy and happened on a weekly basis, but for some reason this bunch of aliens decided the best place to launch their attack was a lighthouse out in the middle of nowhere.  Be that as it may, by the time the Doctor and Leela foiled the Rutans' evil plot, all the people in the lighthouse were dead and/or vanished, so this definitely stands out as one of the Doctor's less successful ventures (although he did save the Earth, so there's that).

There are two curious things about this episode that are why it comes up today.

The first is that during its premier broadcast, on November 22, 1987, transmission was suddenly interrupted and replaced by a signal showing a guy wearing a Max Headroom mask babbling about random stuff (including his opinion of "New Coke" and the television series Clutch Cargo) and finally ending with him getting spanked on the bare ass with a flyswatter while a female voice shouted, "Bend over, bitch!"

The source of this transmission -- which I swear I am not making up -- was never identified.

The other strange thing about the episode is that it's based on a true story.

Well, not the green jellyfish alien part, but the mysterious deaths/disappearances from a lighthouse part.  On December 15, 1900, the steamship Archtor was near the Flannan Isles in the seas off the Outer Hebrides and noticed that the lighthouse on Eilean Mòr, the largest island in the chain, was not working.  They reported this to the authorities, but bad weather kept anyone from investigating until eleven days later.

When they got there, the lighthouse was abandoned, and the three crew -- James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald McArthur -- were all missing.

There were plenty of signs of recent habitation -- unmade beds, lamps cleaned and refilled, and so on -- but no indication of what might have happened to the crew.  The lighthouse logs indicated nothing amiss other than some inclement weather, which is hardly unusual off the coast of Scotland in winter.  It must be mentioned that there had been extensive storm damage downslope from the lighthouse; a metal storage box thirty meters above sea level had been broken open, presumably by the surf, its contents strewn, and an iron railing set in rock was bent nearly flat.  Robert Muirhead, superintendent of the Northern Lighthouse Board, said some of the damage was "difficult to believe unless actually seen."

Still, it's presumed that the three missing men -- all highly experienced lighthouse operators, who had been on the job for years -- would have known better than to go out and walk the beach in the middle of a December storm.  The lighthouse itself was undamaged, so whatever killed its keepers seems to have taken place outside the building.  Muirhead's conclusion was that they'd gone out to try to secure the metal storage box that was later found damaged, and a rogue wave had swept them away.

There are two problems with this explanation.  The first is that there was only one missing set of oilskins, implying that two of the men went out into a raging winter storm in their shirtsleeves.  The second is that the worst of the damage seems to have happened after the lighthouse was abandoned; it was already not operating on the 15th, and the serious storms (the ones that prevented anyone from investigating for a week and a half) didn't start till the 16th.  It's possible they were killed by rogue surf and/or bad weather, but this doesn't really answer all the questions.

So of course, this didn't satisfy most people, and that's when the wild speculation started.  Sea serpents, an attack by the malevolent spirits of drowned sailors, abduction by foreign agents, and even that the three men had absconded so they could take up new lives elsewhere.  A logbook surfaced claiming that there had been a devastating storm lasting four days -- from December 11 to December 14 -- bad enough that all three men had "spent hours praying" and Donald McArthur, an experienced lighthouse keeper, had "been reduced to helpless crying."  The weirdest part about this bit is that contemporary weather records show no indications of an intense storm during that time -- as I mentioned, the seriously bad weather didn't really start until the 16th -- and certainly if there'd been a gale bad enough to trigger fits of weeping in a veteran seaman who was safely inside an extremely sturdy building on dry land at the time, someone on one of the nearby islands would have mentioned it.

However, the veracity of the entries has been called into question, and some investigators think the entire thing is a fake.

Then there's the fact that McArthur himself was said to be "volatile" and to have a bad temper, so another possibility is that there'd been a fight -- or perhaps a murder -- and after dumping the bodies into the ocean, the guilty party had thrown had thrown himself in as well out of remorse and guilt.  However, there was no sign of any kind of altercation inside the lighthouse, and no notation in the (real) records left by the keepers that anyone had been acting out of the ordinary.

So we're left with a mystery.  Three men in a remote lighthouse off the coast of Scotland vanished, and despite a thorough investigation at the time and a lot of speculation since then, no one has been able to figure out why.

Me, I'm voting for the Rutans.

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Virtue signaling

Well, I once again broke the Cardinal Rule of the Internet, namely: don't argue online with strangers.

This time, the source of the argument was the one and only television show I really obsess over, which is Doctor Who.  On Saturday, we watched the eagerly-awaited New Year's special, "Eve of the Daleks," and (IMHO) it was fantastic, easily one of the best in the last three seasons.

It was not only a nifty story with some really funny moments (especially from the character of Sarah, played with deft wit by the Irish comedienne Aisling Bea as the weary, snarky owner of the self-storage facility where the entire episode takes place), but it featured a revelation that got the fan base buzzing.  About 2/3 of the way through, we find out that the Doctor's companion Yaz (played by Mandip Gill) has fallen in love with the Doctor (currently in a female incarnation, played by Jodie Whittaker).  The scene is sweet and subtle, and Mandip Gill does a beautiful job expressing the painful difficulty many LGBTQ people have in admitting who they are (as Yaz says, even to herself).

While it was a wonderful scene, to many Who fans it was hardly a surprise; there have been clues throughout the last two seasons that Yaz was falling for the Doctor.  Having it confirmed, however, was nice, and for queer fans of Who (myself very much included) it was a welcome sign of acceptance and representation of LGBTQ identity.

But then the backlash started.

I'm sure you can imagine it, so I'll only give you a handful of examples:

• Of course Chibs [showrunner Chris Chibnall] had to take the opportunity to ram his woke agenda down our throats.  I don't know why we can't just have a good story for a change.
• Oh, god, here we go with the fucking virtue signaling.  The characters have to tell us what we should think, feel, and approve of.
• If Yaz and the Doctor kiss, I'm done.

My responses were pretty much what you'd expect, and their responses to my responses also pretty much what you'd expect.  Nothing much accomplished, but I've been stewing about it ever since, so I thought I'd write about it here.

What gets me is it's gotten to be that any time some bigot sees something in a movie, television show, or book that pushes the cultural envelope, it's labeled as "virtue signaling" or "wokeness," and forthwith dismissed as a manipulative attempt by the writer to force an agenda.  They seem to see no difference between LGBTQ people and minorities appearing in a work of fiction, and a deliberate attempt to push an opinion -- as if merely being visible is an affront to their sensibilities.

I've run into this repeatedly myself, as an author.  I have been asked more than once why the characters of Dr. Will Daigle (in Whistling in the Dark and Fear No Colors) and Judy Kahn (in Signal to Noise) were written as LGBTQ.  I used to answer this question by going into how I create characters, but I finally ran out of patience -- now my tendency is to snap back, "Because queer people exist," and then watch the person squirm (which, at least, most of them have enough self-awareness to do).  Not once have I ever been asked why (for example) I made the character of Seth Augustine (in The Snowe Agency Mysteries) 100% straight.

Straight, apparently, is the default, and anything else is due to the author trying to make a point about how virtuous and woke (s)he is.

This is reminiscent of the furor that surrounded the choice of actress Jodie Turner-Smith (who is Black) to play the lead role in Channel 5's miniseries Anne Boleyn.  It wasn't historically accurate, people said; the real Boleyn was (of course) a White Englishwoman.  Conservative commentator Candace Owens, who never can resist an opportunity to throw gasoline on a fire, said that she had no problem with a Black Anne Boleyn "so long as the radical left promises to keep their mouth shut if in the future Henry Caville [sic] is selected to play Barack Obama and Rachel McAdams can play Michelle."

Which isn't just tone-deaf, it's a false equivalence ignoring the fact that for decades -- in fact, since the beginnings of cinematic history -- filmmakers have been doing exactly that.  Take, for example, the evil Chinese mastermind Fu Manchu, who has been played in movies and television by a long list of actors -- Christopher Lee, Boris Karloff, Warner Oland, Harry Agar Lyons, Henry Brandon, and John Carradine, to name a few.  Notice anything about this list?

Not one of them is Chinese.  In fact, Fu Manchu has never been played by a Chinese actor.

John Wayne played Genghis Khan in The Conqueror.  Yul Brynner played King Mongkut of Thailand in The King and I.  Laurence Olivier played Othello in the 1965 movie adaptation of the play.  It's not a thing of the distant past, however.  In 2007 Angelina Jolie played (real-life) Afro-Cuban journalist Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart.  Johnny Depp played Tonto in the 2013 movie The Lone Ranger -- although the character of Tonto isn't exactly a realistic portrayal of Native Americans anyhow, so maybe that one shouldn't count.  Worse, in 2016 White actor Joseph Fiennes played Michael Jackson in the movie Elizabeth, Michael, and Marlon.  Going back to Doctor Who, there's the 1977 episode "The Talons of Weng Chiang," which is not a bad story at its core but is rendered unwatchably cringe-y by White actor John Bennett's attempt to portray the Chinese bad guy Li H'sen Chang, and a script that bought into every one of the ugly "sinister Asian devils" stereotypes in existence.

What about the recent turning of the tables?  Could it be that some of the inclusion and representation, and some of the casting choices, were made as a deliberate attempt to prove a point?  I guess, but then you'd have to demonstrate to me how you knew what the intentions of the writers are.  If you don't know the writers made those decisions based upon a desire to appear "woke," then it's hard to see how you'd distinguish that from simply representing the diversity of people out there.  Or, in the case of Turner-Smith's portrayal of Anne Boleyn, that she was the best actress for the role.

But back to Yaz, the Thirteenth Doctor, and "Eve of the Daleks."  I've yet to hear anyone come up with a cogent reason why Yaz shouldn't be a lesbian.  And as far as Chris Chibnall's alleged attempt to force a "woke agenda" on us, allow me to point out that Doctor Who has been at the forefront of representation pretty much since the beginning of the modern era in 2005, with people of color playing major roles (to name only two of many examples, Freema Agyeman as companion Dr. Martha Jones, and Pearl Mackie as companion Bill Potts -- who was also queer).  The character of Captain Jack Harkness (played by John Barrowman) gave new meaning to "pansexual" by flirting with anyone and everyone, ultimately falling hard -- and tragically -- for a Welshman named Ianto Jones.  My favorite example, though, is the relationship -- not only queer but inter-species -- between the inimitable Silurian Vastra (Neve McIntosh) and her badass partner Jenny Flint (Catrin Stewart).

So if you don't like representation, stop watching the fucking show.  Because it's here to stay -- as it should be.

And I, for one, will cheer loudly if Yaz kisses the Doctor.  High time that happened.

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One of my favorite writers is the inimitable Mary Roach, who has blended her insatiable curiosity, her knowledge of science, and her wonderfully irreverent sense of humor into books like Stiff (about death), Bonk (about sex), Spook (about beliefs in the afterlife), and Packing for Mars (about what we'd need to prepare for if we made a long space journey and/or tried to colonize another planet).  Her most recent book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, is another brilliant look at a feature of humanity's place in the natural world -- this time, what happens when humans and other species come into conflict.

Roach looks at how we deal with garbage-raiding bears, moose wandering the roads, voracious gulls and rats, and the potentially dangerous troops of monkeys that regularly run into humans in many places in the tropics -- and how, even with our superior brains, we often find ourselves on the losing end of the battle.

Mary Roach's style makes for wonderfully fun reading, and this is no exception.  If you're interested in our role in the natural world, love to find out more about animals, or just want a good laugh -- put Fuzz on your to-read list.  You won't be disappointed.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Fictional friendships

I learned a new term yesterday: parasocial relationship.

It means "a strong, one-sided social bond with a fictional character or celebrity."  I've never much gotten the "celebrity" side of this; I don't, for example, give a flying rat's ass who is and is not keeping up with the Kardashians.  But fictional characters?

Oh, yeah.  No question.  I have wondered if my own career as a novelist was spurred by the parasocial relationships (now that I know the term, dammit, I'm gonna use it) I formed with fictional characters very early on.  In my first two decades, I was deeply invested in what happened to:

• The intrepid Robinson family in Lost in Space.  This might have been in part because I had a life-threatening crush on Judy Robinson, played by Marta Kristen, who is drop-dead gorgeous even though in retrospect the character she played didn't have much... character.
• The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise.  Some of the old Star Trek episodes are almost as cringeworthy as Lost in Space, but when I was ten and I heard Scotty say, "The warp core is gonna blow!  I canna stop it, Captain!  Ye canna change the laws of physics!", I believed him.
• Carl Kolchak from the TV series The Night Stalker.  Okay, so apparently I gravitated toward cringeworthy series. 
• Luke Skywalker and his buddies.  I'll admit it, I cried when Obi-Wan died, even though you find out immediately afterward that he's still around in spirit form, if Becoming One With The Force can be considered an afterlife.

Books hooked me as well, sometimes even more powerfully than television and movies.  A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, The Lathe of Heaven, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Chronicles of Prydain... I could go on and on.  Most of which caused the shedding of considerable numbers of tears over the fate of some character or another.

More recently, my obsession is Doctor Who, which will come as no shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia because I seem to find a way to work some Who reference into every other post.  Not only do I spend an inordinate time discussing Doctor Who trivia with other fans, I have found a way to combine this with another hobby:

I made a ceramic Dalek, Weeping Angel, and K-9, which sit on my desk watching me as I work.  I'm careful not to blink.

The reason this comes up is a paper in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships that looked at these parasocial relationships -- specifically, whether the COVID-19 pandemic had weakened our relationships with actual people, perhaps with a commensurate strengthening of our one-sided relationships with fictional characters.  

The heartening results are that the pandemic hasn't weakened our bonds to our friends, but there has been a strengthening of bonds to the fictional characters we love.  So, real friends of mine, you don't need to worry that my incessant fanboying over the Doctor is going to impact our relationship negatively, unless you get so completely fed up with my obsession you decide to hang around with someone who wants to discuss something more grounded in reality, like fantasy football teams.

"The development, maintenance, and dissolution of socio-emotional bonds that media audiences form with televised celebrities and fictional characters has long been a scholarly interest of mine," said study author Bradley J. Bond, of the University of San Diego, in an interview with PsyPost.  "The social function of our parasocial relationships with media figures has been debated in the literature: do our parasocial relationships supplement our real-life friendships?  Can they compensate for deficiencies in our social relationships?...  Social distancing protocols and quarantine behaviors that spawned from the global COVID-19 pandemic provided an incredibly novel opportunity to study how our parasocial relationships with media figures function as social alternatives when the natural environment required individuals to physically distance themselves from their real-life friends...  [The research suggests that] our friendships are durable, and we will utilize media technologies to maintain our friendships when our opportunities for in-person social engagement are significantly limited.  However, our favorite celebrities and fictional characters may become even more important components of our social worlds when we experience severe alterations to our friendships."

Which I find cheering.  The pandemic has forced us all into coping mode, and it's nice to know that the tendency of many of us to retreat into books, television, and movies isn't jeopardizing our relationships with real people.

So I guess I'm free to throw myself emotionally into fictional relationships.  However much they cost me in anguish.  For example, I will never forgive Russell T. Davies for what he did to the beloved companion Donna Noble in the last minutes of the episode "Journey's End:"

That was just not fair.  I can't even look at a still shot of this scene without choking up.

Be that as it may, it's nice to know I'm not alone in my fanboy tendencies, and that by and large, such obsessions are harmless.  Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go work on my ceramic replica of the TARDIS.  Maybe I can install a little speaker inside it so when I press the button, it'll make the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh noise.  How cool would that be?

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As someone who is both a scientist and a musician, I've been fascinated for many years with how our brains make sense of sounds.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the point that our ears (and other sense organs) are like peripherals, with the brain as the central processing unit; all our brain has access to are the changes in voltage distribution in the neurons that plug into it, and those changes happen because of stimulating some sensory organ.  If that voltage change is blocked, or amplified, or goes to the wrong place, then that is what we experience.  In a very real way, your brain creates your world.

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week looks specifically at how we generate a sonic landscape, from vibrations passing through the sound collecting devices in the ear that stimulate the hair cells in the cochlea, which then produce electrical impulses that are sent to the brain.  From that, we make sense of our acoustic world -- whether it's a symphony orchestra, a distant thunderstorm, a cat meowing, an explosion, or an airplane flying overhead.

In Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World, neuroscientist Nina Kraus considers how this system works, how it produces the soundscape we live in... and what happens when it malfunctions.  This is a must-read for anyone who is a musician or who has a fascination with how our own bodies work -- or both.  Put it on your to-read list; you won't be disappointed.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The moral of the story

I was asked an interesting question yesterday, that I thought would make a great topic for this week's Fiction Friday: does a good story always have a moral?

My contention is even stories that are purely for entertainment still often do have morals.  Consider Dave Barry's novel Big Trouble, a lunatic romp in south Florida that for me would be in the running for the funniest novel ever written.  Without stretching credulity too much, you could claim that Big Trouble has the theme "love, loyalty, and kindness are always worth it."  Certainly the humor is more the point, but the end of the story (no spoilers) is so damn sweet that the first time I read it, it made me choke up a little.

Another favorite genre, murder mysteries, could usually be summed up as "murdering people is bad." 

But that's not what most people mean by "a moral to the story."  Generally, a story with a moral is one where the moral is the main point -- not something circumstantial to the setting or plot. 

The moral is the reason the story was written.

I'm a little ambivalent about overt morals in stories.  I've seen it done exceptionally well; Thornton Wilder's amazing The Bridge of San Luis Rey is explicitly about a man trying to find out if things happen for a reason, or if the universe is simply chaotic.  His conclusion -- that either there is no reason, or else the mind of God is so subtle that we could never parse the reason -- is absolutely devastating in the context of the story.  The impact on me when I first read it, as an eleventh grader in a Modern American Literature class in high school, turned my whole worldview upside down.  In a lot of ways, that one novel was the first step in shaping the approach to life I now have, forty-odd years later.

If I can be excused for detouring into my favorite television show, Doctor Who, you can find there a number of examples of episodes where the moral gave the story incredible impact.  A couple that come to mind immediately are "Midnight," which looked at the ugly side of tribalism and the human need to team up against a perceived common enemy, and "Silence in the Library," with a subtext of the terrible necessity of self-sacrifice.

But if you want examples of bad moralistic stories, you don't have to look any further.  In the most recent incarnation of the Doctor, the episode "Orphan 55" pissed off just about everyone -- not only because of the rather silly cast of characters, but because at the end the Doctor delivers a monologue that amounts to, "Now, children, let me tell you how all this bad stuff happened because humans are idiots and didn't address climate change."

So what's the difference?

In my mind, it all has to do with subtlety -- and respect for the reader's (or watcher's) intelligence.  A well-done moral-based story has a deep complexity; it tells the story and then leaves us to see what the lesson was.  Haruki Murakami's brilliant and heartbreaking novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is about what happens when people are in a lose-lose situation -- and that sometimes a terrible decision is still preferable when the other option is even worse.  But Murakami never comes out and says that explicitly.  He lets his characters tell their tales, and trusts that we'll figure it out.

Bad moral fiction -- often characterized as "preachy" -- doesn't give the reader credit for having the intelligence to get what's going on without being walloped over the head repeatedly by it.  One that immediately comes to mind is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which is so explicitly about Big Government Is Bad and Individualism Is Good and Smart Creative People Need To Fight The Man that she might as well have written just that and saved herself a hundred thousand words.

I think what happens is that we authors have an idea what our stories mean, and we want to make sure the readers "get it."  The problem is, every reader is going to bring something different to the reading of a story, so what they "get" will differ from person to person.  If that weren't the case, why would there be any difference in our individual preferences?  But authors need to trust that our message (whatever it is) is clear enough to shine through without our needing to preach a sermon in a fictional setting.  Stories like "Orphan 55" don't work because they insult the watcher's intelligence.  "You're probably too dumb to figure out what we're getting at, here," they seem to say.  "So let me hold up a great big sign in front of your face to make sure you see it."

A lot of my own work has an underlying theme that I'm exploring using the characters and the plot, but I hope I don't fall into the trap of preachiness.  Two of my most explicitly moralistic tales, the short stories "Last Bus Stop" and "Loose Ends" (both available in my collection Sights, Signs, and Shadows), are about the fragility of life and how we should look after each other because we never know how long we have -- but I think in both cases the moral comes out of the characters' interactions organically, not because I jumped up and down and screamed it at you.

But it can be a fine line, sometimes.  Like I said, we all have different attitudes and backgrounds, so our relationship to the stories we read is bound to differ.  There are undoubtedly people who loved "Orphan 55" and The Fountainhead, so remember that all this is just my own opinion.  

And maybe that's the overarching moral of this whole topic; that everyone is going to take away something different.  After all, if everyone hated explicitly moralistic stories, the Hallmark Channel would be out of business by next week.

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One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

 

The necessity of representation

This past weekend, I got into two apparently unrelated conversations with online acquaintances that at their basis amount to the same thing.

The first revolved around the one and only television series I am at all dedicated to, which is Doctor Who.  I've been a near-fanatical Whovian since my wife persuaded me a few years ago to watch a selection of iconic episodes like "Blink," "Silence in the Library," "Turn Left," and "Empty Child," resulting in my being hooked for life.  The conversation I got into, which honestly crossed the line into a heated argument, had to do with the choice three years ago of Jodie Whittaker for the Thirteenth Doctor, replacing Peter Capaldi (and a string of eleven other white males stretching back to the series's beginnings in 1963).

The topic came up because of rumors (thus far unsubstantiated, as far as I've seen) that Jodie Whittaker may be leaving the show at the end of this season.  I mentioned how disappointed I'd be if this was true, and how much I liked her portrayal of the character -- that she'd be in my top three Doctors ever -- and this brought up the same "the Doctor is male" nonsense I first saw popping up all over the place when she was chosen.

The choice of a woman, this fellow said, was "virtue signaling."  So, actually, was the choice of an American-born Black actor (Tosin Cole) to play one of the Doctor's current companions, Ryan Sinclair, and British people of Indian descent both for another companion, Yasmin Khan (played by Mandip Gill) and also the most recent regeneration of the Doctor's arch-enemy, the Master (played with brilliantly insane glee by Sacha Dhawan).  The whole thing, said the man I was talking to, amounted to the writers of Doctor Who saying "Look at us, how enlightened we are, having a bunch of people of different races in prominent roles."

My response was that Doctor Who has long been on the cutting edge of representing people of all configurations -- three early examples being in 2005 the character of Captain Jack Harkness giving new meaning to the word "pansexual," two years later the Tenth Doctor pairing up with Dr. Martha Jones (Freema Agyewan) as companion, and a bit after that, the fantastically badass couple Vastra and Jenny, not only a lesbian romance but an interspecies one.

Nope, he said.  That was virtue signaling too.

At that point I told him I thought all he was doing was making excuses for maintaining the illusion of a straight white male hegemony despite the fact that it doesn't accurately reflect the reality of who is actually out there, and he told me to "fuck off with my leftist agenda" and the conversation ended.

The other, marginally less frustrating conversation centered around my novel released a year ago, Whistling in the Dark.  I was asked a question about Dr. Will Daigle, one of the main characters both in this book and in its sequel Fear No Colors (scheduled for release in March).  The reader said she liked the character just fine, but why did I "choose to make him gay?"  It had nothing particular to do with the plot, she said; nothing he does in the book couldn't equally well be done by a heterosexual person.  Then she asked the question that made me realize immediately the parallel with my earlier discussion with the disgruntled Doctor Who fan: "Did you feel like you had to include a gay character to be politically correct?"

Whenever I'm asked about why I wrote a character a particular way, my usual reaction is to say, "I didn't make the character that way.  The characters come to me the way they are, and I just write it down."  But I realized that the reader's question went way deeper than that, that she wasn't asking me why I gave the character of Aaron Vincent green eyes or the character of Rose Dawson long gray hair she wore in a braid.  She was asking me about inclusion and representation, not just how I visualize characters.

So I said to her, "Okay, tell me some reasons why Dr. Will shouldn't be queer."  And she sputtered around a bit and said, "Well, I didn't mean that, of course."  But having already had my blood pressure spiked by a bigot earlier that day, I decided I'd made my point and withdrew from battle.

I found the whole thing profoundly frustrating, both because of the self-righteousness of the people I was talking to (especially the first one), and because they were seemingly blind to two things.  First, representing diversity isn't just "nice;" it's reality.  As far as the choice of Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor, I'm reminded of the wonderful quote from the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "When I'm sometimes asked, 'When will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]?' and I say 'When there are nine,' people are shocked.  But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."

Second, representation is important.  How many of us have looked up to characters from fiction, especially ones we found as children, and formed our attitudes of what is right and wrong, normal and abnormal, acceptable and unacceptable, based upon their actions?  Being a white guy I can't speak to the racial and sexist aspects of this, and wouldn't presume to claim a visceral understanding of those perspectives; but as someone who is queer and who hid it (literally) for decades, I can say with some assurance what a difference it would have made to me if there had been positive LGBTQ role models in the books, television, and movies I'd been exposed to when I was a teenager.  Honestly, the only LGBTQ character I can remember from those days is the character of Jodie Dallas (played by Billy Crystal) from the brilliant sitcom Soap, but those of you who recall the show will probably remember that Jodie's homosexuality was almost always played off as a joke -- it never came up in any other context than generating a laugh.

Hardly something that would establish queer identity as normal and positive in the eyes of a bisexual fifteen-year-old boy growing up in a conservative, religious culture.

Myself, I've had just about enough of the phrases "politically correct" and "virtue signaling."  In what context is it wrong to avoid being offensive, to include people of all races, ethnic origins, religions (and lack thereof), and sexual orientations?  To create fictional characters who represent the length and breadth of diversity that actually exist in the world?  To break stereotypes like "white men have to be in charge" and "queer people should stay hidden"?

If you want to ask why when the time comes the Fourteenth Doctor should be played as (for example) a Black lesbian woman, you better be prepared to answer the question of why the character shouldn't be.

Anyhow, those are some early-morning thoughts about representation and inclusion.  I wish I'd thought to say all this to the people I was arguing with, but I tend not to be a very fast thinker (thus would make a lousy debater).  It took me a couple of days to let it all stew, and I decided instead to write about it here.

But maybe I'll send a link to this post to my two adversaries, if later on I'm feeling like kicking a hornets' nest.

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What are you afraid of?

It's a question that resonates with a lot of us.  I suffer from chronic anxiety, so what I am afraid of gets magnified a hundredfold in my errant brain -- such as my paralyzing fear of dentists, an unfortunate remnant of a brutal dentist in my childhood, the memories of whom can still make me feel physically ill if I dwell on them.  (Luckily, I have good teeth and rarely need serious dental care.)  We all have fears, reasonable and unreasonable, and some are bad enough to impact our lives in a major way, enough that psychologists and neuroscientists have put considerable time and effort into learning how to quell (or eradicate) the worst of them.

In her wonderful book Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, journalist Eva Holland looks at the psychology of this most basic of emotions -- what we're afraid of, what is happening in our brains when we feel afraid, and the most recently-developed methods to blunt the edge of incapacitating fears.  It's a fascinating look at a part of our own psyches that many of us are reluctant to confront -- but a must-read for anyone who takes the words of the Greek philosopher Pausanias seriously: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know yourself).

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Remnants of forgotten civilizations

As silly as it can get sometimes, I am a dedicated Doctor Who fanatic.  I'm late to the game -- I only watched my first-ever episode of the long-running series four years ago -- but after that, I went at it with the enthusiasm you only see in the born-again.

The best of the series tackles some pretty deep stuff.  The ugly side of tribalism ("Midnight"), the acknowledgement that some tragedies are unavoidable ("The Fires of Pompeii"), the Butterfly Effect ("Turn Left"), the fact that you can't both "play God" and avoid responsibility ("The Waters of Mars"), and the terrible necessity of personal self-sacrifice ("Silence in the Library").  Plus, the series invented what would be my choice for the single most terrifying, wet-your-pants-inducing alien species ever dreamed up, the Weeping Angels (several episodes, most notably "Blink").

So it shouldn't have been a surprise when Doctor Who got a mention in this month's Scientific American, but it still kinda was.  It came up in a wonderful article by Caleb Scharf called "The Galactic Archipelago," which was about the possibility of intelligent life in the universe (probably very high) and the odd question of why, if that's true, we haven't been visited (Fermi's paradox).  Here at Skeptophilia we've looked at one rather depressing answer to Fermi -- the "Great Filter," the idea that intelligent life is uncommon in the universe either because there are barriers to the formation of life on other worlds, or that once formed, it's likely to get wiped out completely at some point.

It's even more puzzling when you consider the fact that it would be unnecessary for the aliens themselves to visit.  Extraterrestrial life paying a house call to Earth is unlikely considering the vastness of space and the difficulties of fast travel, whatever the amazingly-coiffed Giorgio Tsoukalos (of Ancient Aliens fame) would have you believe.  But Scharf points out that it's much more likely that intelligent aliens would have instead sent out self-replicating robot drones, which not only had some level of intelligence themselves (in terms of avoiding dangers and seeking out raw materials to build new drones), but could take their time hopping from planet to planet and star system to star system.  And because they reproduce, all it would take is one or two civilizations to develop these drones, and given a few million years, you'd expect they'd spread pretty much everywhere in the galaxy.

But, of course, it doesn't seem like that has happened either.

Scharf tells us that there's another possibility than the dismal Great Filter concept, and that's something that's been nicknamed the "Silurian Hypothesis."  Here's where Doctor Who comes in, because as any good Whovian will tell you, the Silurians are a race of intelligent reptilians who were the dominant species on Earth for millions of years, but who long before humans appeared went (mostly) extinct except for a few scattered remnant populations in deep caverns.

Last year, astronomers Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank, of NASA and the University of Rochester (respectively), considered whether it was possible that an intelligent technological species like the Silurians had existed millions of years ago, and if so, what traces of it we might expect to find in the modern world.  And what Schmidt and Frank found was that if there had been a highly complex, city-building, technology-using species running the Earth, (say) fifty million years ago, what we'd find today as evidence of its existence is very likely to be...

... nothing.

Scharf writes:

[Astrophysicist Michael] Hart's original fact [was] that there is no evidence here on Earth today of extraterrestrial explorers...  Perhaps long, long ago aliens came and went.  A number of scientists have, over the years, discussed the possibility of looking for artifacts that might have been left behind after such visitations of our solar system.  The necessary scope of a complete search is hard to predict, but the situation on Earth alone turns out to be a bit more manageable.  In 2018 another of my colleagues, Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, together with Adam Frank, produced a critical assessment of whether we could even tell if there had been an earlier industrial civilization on our planet. 

As fantastic as it may seem, Schmidt and Frank argue -- as do most planetary scientists -- that it is actually very easy for time to erase essentially all signs of technological life on Earth.  The only real evidence after a million or more years would boil down to isotopic or chemical stratigraphic anomalies -- odd features such as synthetic molecules, plastics, or radioactive fallout.  Fossil remains and other paleontological markers are so rare and so contingent on special conditions of formation that they might not tell us anything in this case. 

Indeed, modern human urbanization covers only on order of about one percent of the planetary surface, providing a very small target area for any paleontologists in the distant future.  Schmidt and Frank also conclude that nobody has yet performed the necessary experiments to look exhaustively for such nonnatural signatures on Earth.  The bottom line is, if an industrial civilization on the scale of our own had existed a few million years ago, we might not know about it.  That absolutely does not mean one existed; it indicates only that the possibility cannot be rigorously eliminated.

(If you'd like to read Schmidt and Frank's paper, it appeared in the International Journal of Astrobiology and is available here.)

It's a little humbling, isn't it?  All of the massive edifices we've created, the far-more-than Seven Wonders of the World, will very likely be gone without a trace in only a few million years.  A little more cheering is that the same will be true of all the damage we're currently doing to the global ecosystem.  It's not so surprising if you know a little geology; the current arrangement of the continents is only the most recent, and won't be the last the Earth will see.  Because of erosion and natural disasters, not to mention the rather violent clashes that occur when the continents do shift position, it stands to reason that our puny little efforts to change things won't last very long.

Entropy always wins in the end.

The whole thing puts me in mind of one of the first poems I ever read that made a significant impact on me -- Percy Bysshe Shelley's devastating "Ozymandias," which I came across when I was a freshman in high school.  It seems a fitting way to conclude this post.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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As technology has improved, so has our ability to bring that technology to bear on scientific questions, sometimes in unexpected ways.

In the fascinating new book Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past, archaeologist Sarah Parcak gives a fascinating look at how satellite photography has revolutionized her field.  Using detailed photographs from space, including thousands of recently declassified military surveillance photos, Parcak and her colleagues have located hundreds of exciting new sites that before were completely unknown -- roads, burial sites, fortresses, palaces, tombs, even pyramids.

These advances are giving us a lens into our own distant past, and allowing investigation of inaccessible or dangerous sites from a safe distance -- and at a phenomenal level of detail.  This book is a must-read for any students of history -- or if you'd just like to find out how far we've come from the days of Heinrich Schliemann and the excavation of Troy.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]