Which pill do you take?

Posted on by wreichard with 7 Comments

When you chose the yellow pill, you had high hopes of becoming a spy, or a gossip columnist, or just the world’s greatest saleswoman. The thought of doing any of those things sickens you now. There is too much anguish in the world already. You feel like any of those things would be a violation. You briefly try to become a therapist, but it turns out that actually knowing everything about your client’s mind is horrendously countertherapeutic. Freud can say whatever he wants against defense mechanisms, but without them, you’re defenseless. Your sessions are spent in incisive cutting into your clients’ deepest insecurities alternating with desperate reassurance that they are good people anyway.

via …And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes | Slate Star Codex.

I have no idea what this means, but it’s a lot of fun.

  • jaed

    Someone should nominate that for a Hugo! <ducking>

  • Lord Darque

    I have seen similar things. Mostly they show me that people are oh so cynical and that they think nothing positive ever really works out. Give people great powers and they will end up just as unhappy as everyone else.

    Kinda sad really. It is not hard for me to see very positive outcomes for each pill. But I suppose they require people to be able to think outside of the box to match their new abilities.

    • jaed

      Hmm. I think one aspect of the matter is whether the outcome startles you or makes you think, or whether it’s more or less what you expected once you read the premise.

      That’s very dependent on the surrounding culture. In an era where most fiction is very positive, showing the negative outcomes of all these (seemingly) wonderful powers might do that job for a story. On the other hand, in an era where everything is cynical and hopeless, showing the joy and power (and showing the characters using these things wisely) might be just the surprise needed to make a good, memorable story.

      Consider “The Cold Equations”. The startler in that story is when he doesn’t come up with a plan to save the girl, something based on his knowledge of science and engineering. But to have that reaction, you need to have read a lot of Golden Age SF so you know what expectations the story is setting you up for. If you haven’t read many engineer-saves-the-seemingly-hopeless-day-through-skill-and-courage stories, you will come to the ending and it will fall dead for you. Klunk. And you’ll merely have increased your hopelessness level a little. On the other hand, if you have read a lot of Golden Age stories, and therefore you’re expecting the story to be one shape, and suddenly the girl goes out the airlock… it’s like stepping on the step that isn’t there. “What? What? Wait a minute…you were supposed to save the girl! She’s supposed to live! What the hell just happened?” That shock is what makes the story so memorable.

      Now consider “The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere”. I have other arguments with this story, but the major one is that it is unchallenging in all ways to preconceptions. (The water had potential, but it turned out not to be an SF element – just a little frosting of fantasy. As far as the story structure is concerned, it might as well not be there.) The social mores are utterly present-day and conventional. “Gay couple, one of them is worried about how his parents will take it. OK, they’ll visit the parents, the boyfriend will be a big hit with them, and after a little family conflict, they’ll come around and welcome the boyfriend as a son-in-law, thus showing that they really are good people… OK, did I get it right?” Yes.

      For whatever it’s worth, I liked the little Six Star Codex story because the ending made me think “I did not see that coming when I read the first three paragraphs of this.” Surprise me, for God’s sake.

      • http://williamcreichard.wordpress.com wreichard

        Really interesting reply. I also like surprise like that, and part of the art definitely comes in holding my attention long enough to reveal it. It has to be deliberate enough not to seem accidental, but not so deliberate that it’s clunky or predictable.

        Did you see the movie “Kingsman”? It did some really interesting things with Samuel Jackson’s character that way, I thought. Some pointedly unexpected things. Not sure what I thought of it ultimately, but it definitely seemed like he was saying, I’m not going to play a character a certain way just because that’s how it’s _supposed_ to be. I heard him talking about his character in Django (which I really liked) and it was somewhat the same. Both characters were kind of uncomfortable…but maybe that’s part of the point? Not sure. But interesting.

  • jaed

    I haven’t seen it but I’ll see whether I can catch it somewhere. Or get it on Amazon streaming if all else fails. 😉

    One thing I forgot to mention in my novelette of a comment, that I think also touches what Lord Darque says: if you (as an artist) believe your cultural mileu is overly optimistic, then you’ll naturally tend to make your art pessimistic and dark in order to surprise the audience.

    But if you’re wrong about that – if the art of your culture is already pessimistic about human nature, disdainful of the ordinary people of that culture, and dark or (at best) ironic and “edgy” – then pessimistic art is just giving people more of the same thing they’ve seen all their lives, and you’ll be boring them (as well as depressing them). Irony and anomie aren’t a surprise any more when they’re the cultural water everyone swims in.

    I think it’s clear from how the mass audience reacts to optimistic portrayals that this is the case for our culture at this time. Artists tend to be all we-must-subvert-the-illusion-of-goodness. But that’s been the fashionable attitude for going on a century now; it pervades art, art criticism, and attitudes toward art. Sad endings are “deep” while happy ones are “shallow”. Heroic characters are required to have a dark secret vice, and if they don’t they’re “one-dimensional”. The destruction of a character is interesting, and the building up of a character is boring. Romantic stories are mere mind-candy; stories about the ugliness of life are worthy.

    And by now, most people are so hungry for joy that they’re hugely enthusiastic when they come across a movie or book that gives them heroes, unsullied ideals, and triumph over adversity. Science fiction gave us that. As recently as the 70s it was common to find optimistic attitudes, strong ideals, and genuinely good characters treated non-ironically and without condescension. The loss of that joy is a driving force for an awful lot of people who say things like “I’d stopped reading new SF a while ago… it just wasn’t the same any more.”

    • jaed

      (And I seem to have written another novelette in your comments section. Sorry about that. 😉

      • http://williamcreichard.wordpress.com wreichard

        No apologies needed–the thoughts are appreciated! Will be chewing on them for a bit–thanks again.