It sucks to be a predator
And you’ve got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. —Spike
Consider the vampire as a creature bound by the Law of Conservation of Energy.
According to the MadSci Network (how can I not trust these guys?), there are about 700 [kilo]calories in a liter of human blood. A vampire who sucks dry a human adult with five liters of blood is going to get 3,500 calories. One who believes in sustainable humaniculture, drawing at a rate no more than what the Red Cross recommends for whole-blood donors, will get half a liter, i.e., 350 calories, every other month.
So if the vampire needs 3,500 calories a day to sustain his or her undeath (more than the average human adult, but it makes the math easier, and heck, a vampire doesn’t spend all night sitting at a desk), he or she will need to either rotate among six hundred cooperative hosts, or take down one victim every day. In the latter case, even if every victim is consumed after he or she reproduces, and even if vampirism is the only cause of human death, we would need a population of at least ten thousand humans to carry each vampire. By comparison, in the classic study of population dynamics among moose and wolves, the moose-to-wolf ratio ranges from 15–50 moose per wolf.
Moose… hmm. What if we are dealing with emo-pires who refuse, on principle, to feed off another sentient species? It says here that “a 400 kilogram moose has a blood volume of about 32 litres”, so one moose could replace between five and six human hosts; a moose generation is only four or five years, so a stable population of ten thousand humans could be replaced by about a hundred and fifty moose—assuming, crucially, that the vampires would be just as successful at catching the moose as they would be at catching two-legged prey. So Maine’s population of 30,000 moose (according to Wikipedia) could support up to two hundred vampires, while its human population could support only a hundred and thirty.
Regardless of which scenario you choose, given how much impact a single additional vampire has on the food supply, it’s hard to see why any immortal vampire would deliberately turn a human.
If vampire-story authors would pay attention to these questions of population dynamics, they could enrich the genre.
One out of every four sentient species is a victim of domestic violence
I have seen various discussions online about colonialism, and of course, these make me think about colonialism in SF—especially the kind where our planet becomes someone else’s colony.
Stereotypically, in these kinds of stories, the aliens are either Bad Guys or Good Guys. If they are Bad Guys, they dominate the planet by sheer brute force, disintegrating anything that stands in their way until (in American SF) our plucky heroes find the aliens’ weakness and create a glorious victory for humanity, or (in British SF) everyone dies. If the aliens are Good Guys, then they are protecting us from the baser elements of our nature until we can rise to full membership in the galactic community. The problem with the stereotypical Bad Guy scenario is that historically, colonial regimes among humans never1 act purely with brute force; an effective colonial administration knows how to co-opt at least some of the natives. The problem with the stereotypical Good Guy scenario is that it uncomfortably resembles a justification for real colonialism: the aliens in these stories are, so to speak, taking up the little green man’s burden.
Thinking of Good Guy aliens made me think of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy (formerly titled Xenogenesis); I had read these books when they first came out around twenty years ago, and recalled them as a well-written and original take on the whole alien-invasion theme. The aliens in this series are the Oankali, who arrive on Earth shortly after nuclear war has wiped out most of the human population. Their schtick is to exchange genetic material with other species, so that the descendants of each contact with a new world acquire new traits. To this end, they scoop up as many nuclear-war survivors as they can and prepare them to become parents of human-Oankali hybrids. The main character of the series, Lilith Iyapo, is charged with training other humans to survive in Earth’s recreated wilderness and mediating between them and the Oankali. Over and over through the series, the Oankali remark on a “contradiction” built into the human condition: that we are both intelligent and hierarchical, and that without an injection of some Oankali genetics, this combination will doom us to self-destruction. So: Good Guy aliens. More or less.
I reread Dawn looking for stuff about colonialism, but what struck me about the book, instead, was the gender politics.
- Victims of domestic violence are frequently confined and stalked, unable to move freely, right? Lilith spends the first book on a spaceship and in the opening chapters, she can’t even open a door.
- Most of the humans that Lilith trains hate her for being a collaborator with the enemy. She refers to herself as a “Judas goat”, but I was reminded of a not-uncommon pattern in abusive families: Dad beats both Mom and the kids, but the kids resent Mom for not standing up to Dad.
- Control of sexuality and reproduction is one hallmark of domination in male-female relationships, and indeed, the Oankali decide whether or not Lilith is fertile, without even asking her opinion.
And consider these quotes (page numbers are from the trade paperback edition of LB):
“We… do need you.” Nikanj spoke so softly that Joseph leaned forward to hear. “A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you’ve captured us, and we can’t escape….” (p. 153)
Isn’t that one of the classic excuses for sexual assault? “She was so attractive, I couldn’t keep my hands off her.” And savor the irony of humans trapped on a spaceship being told “you’ve captured us”.
…It reached out and caught his hand in a coil of sensory arm. “I won’t hurt you. And I offer a oneness that your people strive for, dream of, but can’t truly attain alone.”
He pulled his arm free. “You said I could choose. I’ve made my choice!”
“You have, yes.” It opened his jacket with its many-fingered true hands and stripped the garment away from him. When he would have backed away, it held him. It managed to lie down on the bed without seeming to force him down. “You see. Your body has made a different choice.”
…
“Let go of me.”
It smoothed its tentacles again. “Be grateful, Joe. I’m not going to let go of you.” (pp. 189–190)
Ten pages earlier, Lilith had intervened violently to prevent one human from raping another. In this scene, though, an Oankali commits what in a human-on-human context would be clearly recognizable as date rape, using the rationale he said no, but he didn’t really mean it—again, a classic—and Lilith just watches approvingly.
In spite of all this, the Oankali do come off as generally sympathetic characters. Perhaps they give me this impression because the human characters, throughout the series, are frequently brutal to one another—more often for the sake of conventional crimes (banditry, kidnapping, etc.) than over anything directly involving the Oankali. Like I said, the Oankali are Good Guy aliens. More or less.
PS: Butler also wrote a novellette, “Bloodchild”, that examines human-alien family dynamics from a different angle. I recommend the Lilith’s Brood novels, but I think “Bloodchild” is one of the finest SF stories ever written.
1 Well… hardly ever.
IMPORTANT BUSINESS PROPOSAL — BUY THIS BOOK
Every once in a while my kids get a book about Africa from the library, and invariably, it reinforces the image of the continent as one massive wildlife preserve with the occasional village. You’d never know from these books that, for example, Lagos and Kinshasa are among the largest cities in the world.
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, born and raised in Nigeria, the daughter of an accountant and a teacher, apparently had a similar problem. In this interview, she says:
Most of [the books I read as a child] were about African children living in mud huts and hawking oranges to pay their school fees. I read so many of these books that I began wishing my family also lived in a mud hut with thatched roof, and subsisted on proceeds from our yam farm.
She went on to write I Do Not Come To You By Chance, a novel about urban, internationally connected, 21st-century Nigeria. My children are about ten years too young to appreciate it, but you, Gentle Reader, are not.
The novel describes the coming-of-age of Kingsley Ibe, whose college-educated parents raised him to believe that hard work and a good education are his tickets to success and respectability. Except… in spite of his college degree and his excellent grades, Kingsley remains unemployed. As his family’s financial situation grows more desperate, his only source of help is his uncle, a high-school dropout who has become fantastically wealthy running 419 scams. Hijinks, as they say, ensue.
The novel hits almost all the right notes: the characters are engaging, the plot moves right along, and it is intriguing to see the whole world of Internet scams from the other side. The only place I lost suspension of disbelief is in a brief scene where Kingsley meets an old classmate who works in the United States, and rattles off the degrees that he and his American relatives have picked up. (A master’s in “Data Transmogrification” from Yale?)
I don’t know if this is the author’s intention, but I can’t help reading the novel as a commentary on itself. Given the asides that explain Ibo culture and Nigerian politics, Nwaubani appears to have written the book deliberately for a foreign audience. Unlike the 419 scammers, she gives us honest value for our money. But like them, she can prosper by presenting a certain image of her country to people much wealthier than her compatriots. So when her depiction of Nigeria rings true, is it because her depiction is true? Or is it because she tells me what I want to believe? I’m betting on “is true”, because judging from the interview I linked to above, people in a position to know what Nigeria is really like don’t see anything amiss in the novel. And if Nwaubani had wanted to use her literary talents to make a dishonest buck, she could have been a kick-ass 419 scammer.
Writer’s trance
After a long long hiatus, I am using some of my Copious Free Time for writing science fiction. Not wanting to repeat the mistakes that I saw in a certain Internet imbroglio last year, I am also trying to give myself a better multicultural education, and one of the first books that came to hand was called, natch, Multi-Cultural Literacy. In one essay from that book—“Tlilli, Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink”, by Gloria Anzaldúa—there is this passage:
When I create stories in my head, that is, allow the voices and scenes to be projected in the inner screen of my mind, I “trance.” I used to think I was going crazy or that I was having hallucinations. But now I realize it is my job, my calling, to traffic in images. Some of these film-like narratives I write down; most are lost, forgotten. When I don’t write the images down for several days or weeks or months, I get physically ill….
I believe this is the sensation that, in the fanfic community, is known as “plotbunnies”.
Art for the country’s sake
In some parallel universe with slightly better taste than our own, this is the cover art for the May 2010 issue of Fortune, and this is the design for United States paper money.
Crossing genres
I saw a woman on the bus tonight reading Aprenda Inglés con la Ayuda de Dios [Learn English With God’s Help]. It makes sense that someone would come out with such a book; after all, los hispanohablantes should learn to read the Bible in its original language.
An incisor-lickin’ good movie, with a message for our times
Recently, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a leader in the Jewish Renewal movement, encouraged “fellow-seekers for peace and healing of the earth” to see Avatar, James Cameron’s film about native resistance to a resource-extraction conglomerate, and to connect that film with the upcoming Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shevat.
In the same vein, I encourage my environmentally conscious readers to go out and see Daybreakers, this year’s big-budget movie about vampires who combust rather than sparkle.
Daybreakers is set in a future where nearly every human being on earth has become a vampire, but now a blood shortage is putting their eternal lives at stake. Just like overfishing has ruined the stock of North Atlantic cod, ten years of growth in the vampire population has reduced the human population to a minute fraction of its former glory, and even with advanced technology sustaining humans in blood-farms, there is not enough left to slake the planet’s thirst. The main character, a hematologist for a sinister vampiric megacorporation, is trying to synthesize artificial blood that can mitigate the need for human stock, but as his experiments result in failure after failure, bloodlust-driven civil unrest becomes more and more of a threat.
One might ask: how on earth did these vampires let the situation get so far out of hand? Couldn’t they have, for example, ensured that a healthy breeding population of humans was kept alive in some kind of nature reserve? But of course, future generations will probably ask similar questions about our own environmental catastrophes, in which our own short-term hunger is blinding us to the long-term needs of our planet. The vampires of Daybreakers, thus, reflect our own selfish desires back to us, and the movie teaches us a valuable ecological lesson: manage your stocks of edible wildlife, or they will manage you.
PS: Speaking of blood-sucking: eleven dollars for a movie ticket?!
Robes in the ’hood
The Harry Potter series was partly inspired by a peculiarly British literary genre: stories of boys’ adventures in public1 school. If J. K. Rowling had been American, perhaps she would have been inspired by a peculiarly American sort of educational drama, and come up with this.
1 George Bernard Shaw once remarked that the US and Britain are two nations separated by a common language. A British “public” school is an American “elite private” school. Also, a British “boot” of a car is an American “trunk”, British “trainers” are American “sneakers”, and a British “hat” is American “underpants”. OK, I made that last one up.
via a comment in slacktivist
I’ve got bad news and good news
The bad news is, if a certain industry rag can be trusted, jobs in the information technology sector suck.
The good news is, if a certain job-search site can be trusted, jobs in just about every other sector suck worse.
via Crooked Timber and Hacker News
“I never drink... soda.”
According to the NYT, Scholastic is reissuing its Baby-Sitters Club series, a line of novels for tween girls that ran for 213 titles and sold 176 million copies. Girls who devoured these books during the 1980s and 1990s now have children of their own and, as one bookseller put it, the rebooted series would sell “really well to the girls who aren’t quite ready for vampires and particularly to the parents of the girls who aren’t quite ready.”
I see some great potential for crossover fanfic here.
