Tuesday 2 October 2007

Pic of the day: Another day, another world!

Pre-Adamite worldbuilding

This is about an idea for a novel. I briefly considered it for this year's NaNoWriMo, but probably won't write it. If I get to write a novel this year, it should probably be my Lightwielder novel. But I want to write this down for the future, if any.

First, the basic premise is not new. It is in fact quite a few years old. I know this because it was the basic premise for my "dream game" Colonization. Now, geeky readers will remember Colonization as a game by Microprose, a follow-up to their megahit Civilization. It was published in 1994. My imaginary game must have been daydreamed before this, because I remember the irony of this game using the same name I had assigned in my mind to a much grander game. Thus I can date this idea to between 1991 (Civilization) and 1994 (Colonization), though the premise may go further back without me remembering it now.

I mention this because Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy was published in 2002-2004. In other words, I have not borrowed a cent from his writing. I doubt he has borrowed from me either… at the time, I was not widely read outside Norway. It also typically takes some years from idea to publication even for famous authors. But there is certainly a disturbing trend that I come up with ideas that people write, whether or not I have ever shared them with a soul. For instance I invented the essence of Dungeons & Dragons style role playing games in late preschool, early 1960es, whereas RPGs were not invented officially until the 1970es. Much as I'd like to claim some kind of cosmic bigwig status, a more likely explanation is that the basis for these ideas are floating around half formed in a lot of brains around the world, and will necessarily meet and combine in some of them. Most people just discard them before they even reach consciousness. Others, like me, develop them to a point but then shelve them. And a few actually do something serious about their ideas. These people then become known as creative geniuses, or worse.

The key ingredient in this case is the "many-worlds" hypothesis of cosmology, which has been around for a while and was used in science fiction even in my late childhood, ca 1970+. OK, perhaps the science fiction came first; I honestly don't want to look up more dates in Wikipedia tonight. Anyway the idea is that whenever a decision is made, the universe splits in two. One version where the decision goes this way, one where it goes that way. So if you decide to stop reading this entry now, there will also be a parallel universe in which you read it to the bitter end. It is assumed that not only human decisions, but quantum events such as the decay of a radioactive atom nucleus could trigger a new universe, although some claim that an observer is needed.

You may argue that the law of conservation of mass and energy prohibits this multiplying of universes beyond necessity. I never found out why it doesn't, but it wouldn't really matter. Even if reality is continually made thinner, nobody would notice as long as the proportions within each universe remained constant. Compared to the original universe, ours might be extremely wispy, but we would never know, since we will never be able to compare. Most likely there is another explanation though. (Not that it matters, since I won't even comment on whether I think it might be true. This is all about fiction, remember.)

***

My story begins when scientists make the implausible jump from mathematical abstractions to demonstrable algorithms. After all, this happened with atomic theory, which was pretty nearly as abstract to our ancestors a century ago. It didn't remain that way, you remember. What if the same happened to the multiverse?

For the sake of the plot, I will assume that you can't just randomly pick any little branch of history. This is to stop people from going to the classical Alternate History destinations, where Hitler won WW2 or the Confederate States remain free and carry the torch of civilization, or the Vikings settled America. For some reason, these make up an enormous amount of Alternate History. I have something else on the plate, though. So let us assume that there are certain "standing waves in the time stream" or something that makes a certain universe much easier to access than the rest. I'll think of the quasi-science when I need it. The point is, the world we first make contact with separated from ours about half a million years ago. No Hitler, no Vikings… and no Adam.

I use "Adam" here in the scientific jargon rather than the religious. Scientists often use the names "Adam" and "Eve" about the last common ancestor / ancestress of all living people today. The latest I have heard is that Eve lived 120-150 000 years ago, possibly a little more, while Adam may be much younger, perhaps 65 000 years. This is intriguing because it implies that there may be a biological reason behind the sudden explosion of culture after all. But the jury is still out. It could just as well be that the newcomer became such a cult hit because of a larger reproductive organ… all human races excel vastly over the apes in this regard. The truth is that we just don't know what made Adam such a cult hit. For the sake of the story, however, we will refer to the people between Eve and Adam as "preadamites", an originally theological term for the people where Cain found his wife and built a city. (He had just killed off his only known brother so it can be assumed that his relations with his family were rather strained. It seems unlikely that he could recruit enough of his sisters to build a city.)

So our common ancestor never happened. Culture never happened. The Neanderthals and the preadamites rule their original ecological niches. None of them ever get near America or even Australia. (No, Australopithecus never lived in Australia. No, really.) Most of the animals that went extinct over the last 50 000 years are still alive and well. All natural resources we have used up are also intact, but the price of transportation through M-space is too high to go mining for coal and ore. Catching a live mammoth, however… imagine the implications for science! Not to mention a live Neanderthal. Or a live preadamite… and this is where things get tricky.

What is a human? How do we react when facing our own image (or nearly so) but without the "spark"?

You can probably imagine the controversies. There are already in our world people who campaign for chimps to get human rights. In the opposite corner, there are those who only grudgingly accept that Negroes are probably real humans, just not quite as evolved as the British. It is not hard to guess what sides there would come down on. Then there are religious groups who want to send missionaries to the Neanderthals, and New Age groups that want to bring Neanderthal missionaries here. Few if any of these factions have any interest in facts. I'd like to portray the general upheaval and at the same time a group of actual scientists exploring "Earth-2" and observing the humanoids there, to contrast the raw reality they see with the projections that are bandied about home on old Earth.

But not this year.