The HW/PC Book Club (May-June) ("Thaw's Hammer") is now in session!

If you know the writer Robin Cook, he often writes about such dark medical conspiracies. It's certainly possible, especially with CRISPR (gene editing) technology. Our newspapers are full of sociopaths who harm others only for financial gain (they seem mostly to be in finance - Bernie Madoff, Enron, those who knowingly sold overvalued subprime mortgage-backed securities, etc.). I think Big Pharma has plenty of income potential without creating new monsters to destroy.

For me, as a writer, it is more interesting to explore the gray zone than the black and white. What happens when well-meaning people have conflicting goals? I also intentionally reversed the expected tropes - Raytheon, one of the world's largest weapons contractors, is aligned with the "good guys," while Libby, Tory, and the Green Club are the "bad guys." In Thaw's Hammer, everyone is acting righteously in their own minds. Libby and Tory have embraced an ideology called "Deep Ecology" (it's a real thing) that certainly sounds very righteous to anyone who cares about the planet. It gives their lives meaning and purpose. But their deepest convictions, justified by their success in putting measures in place to reverse global warming, ultimately collide with Jace's anthropocentric worldview. As opposed to Libby and Tory, ideologues who know what is right, Jace is wracked by doubt. He struggles to find meaning in the Universe, but his compassion for his fellow human beings drives him.

Redwing57 –

Good points in your post about the significance of control in so many situations.

I can't remember now when or where I came across this, it was probably decades ago by now, but it was something from a philosophy magazine essay I read once. The essay had taken on the formidable task of coming up with a single sentence that would "explain everything." It was, of course, just a kind of academic exercise, but what the essay talked about kind of struck me as thoughtworthy.

The thesis of the essay was that the dynamics of everything could be easily explained, not even by a single sentence, but by a single, simple phrase:

Power: who has it and who doesn't

That is, if we allow for all the possible definitions of the word "power" (another word for control, really), whether political, military, economic, social, biological, psychological, literary, linguistic, you name it, then this single, simple phrase covers all the dynamics of every possible existential situation.

Well, I don't know of that's entirely true, but the essay's underlying thesis, that issues of power and empowerment actually do cover an enormous number of existential situations, does seem to me to be pretty much true.

It does seem that so much of existence seems to involve somebody or something trying to get power (again, varying the meaning of that word power) in one way or another over somebody or something else.

Nietzsche addressed the issue of power at length in his writings, but, again, this underlying concept, the dynamic of power, appears almost universally in the thoughts of other philosophers and writers.

Maybe it's even a kind of ying-yang thing, the powerful over the powerless.

Maybe that old magazine essay was really on to something.

"We also have genetic instincts for altruism and cooperation, or we wouldn't have survived. We have developed cultural institutions that both increase our power and mitigate it … Our survival and thriving as a species depends on our ability to maintain that delicate balance."

Well said, TA, well said.

Your comments sort of remind me of that scene from the 1997 film "Contact," in which the alien makes a poignant but true observation about humanity's "dreams and nightmares":

/www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OTEygS02JY

Have you seen Daron Aronofsky's movie, Pi? It's a darkly surreal suspense thriller about number theory that may underlie all reality. It is based on the kabbalistic gematria that the 216-letter (Hebrew uses letters as numbers) name of God has the power to bring in the Messianic age and raise the dead.

Ditto what Redwing57 said.

If it's any kind of compensation, those who kill seals and whales die because of that.

Thanks. I'm glad you were able to get past the penguins In fact, I was sort of hoping the reader would have sympathy for them because they are so darn adorable. I think that most villains in novels are governments, rich people, and big greedy corporations. In Robin Cook, it's usually Big Pharma and greedy hospitals. I think most movies that center on a political conflict put leftists as the sympathetic hero -- the man or woman of the people leading the people against all odds against fascist oppression is the trope of almost all hero stories (e.g., The Matrix, Terminator, Total Recall, Lord of the Rings, etc.) While it may seem loony to us to put the ecology of the planet before humans, there are many who would disagree. I hope it's credible that after global suffering from the destruction of coastal cities and farms, that ecology would become the Earth's #1 concern, and people would come to care about it very deeply. If anything, Green Club represents the conservative establishment in this post-Warming world - they pick all the world leaders and wield enormous influence. They are trying to maintain the status quo that they established. I never thought of it as a left/right conflict -- I'd have a hard time imagining Jace and Mirana as conservatives. I saw it more as a clash of the Gaia worldview with the anthropocentric worldview.

I very much agree with that! But, unfortunately, it's not just in literature. Idealogues have filters through which they see the world. They have to screen out facts that contradict their ideology in order to maintain their world view. In world history, idealogues were responsible for Communism, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the 30 years War, Imperialism, Aryanism, The Reign of Terror, ISIS, etc. The political philosopher Eric Voegelin coined a phrase "immanentizing the eschaton" to describe all such attempts to restore or make real any utopian vision. He warned that we must be vigilant against politicians who offer us a return to an imagined past greatness.

In this case, Deep Ecology, is an ideology that sees humans as the enemy against Gaia. They believe that humankind has upset the natural order and only reducing humankind to a "natural" ecologically balanced state will restore the delicate equilibrium. Green Club doesn't believe that the threat is real - it's all fake news on the part of Gaia-exploiters to them. I stress that Deep Ecology is a real thing that well-intentioned people believe in. Dan Brown's recent book "Inferno," is about an ideologue with a plan to permanently reduce human population by two-thirds in order to "solve" all the problems that overpopulation has wrought.

I know this is tragic, but I've FINALLY just ordered Thaw's Hammer on Amazon. Consequence of deviating from normal life (if you could call it that!) with a trip to the tropics and various other distractions, including the possibility of BCR for my DH. Anyway... I'm hoping it's better late than never for me, and despite being a nuisance by posting waaaaay too late, I'm still looking forward to a good ol' spooky read!! Sorry about my tardiness. Can't wait to get stuck in though!
BUMP!!!!!

I'm not going anywhere I hope you like it!

Jaybee-

Thanks for that great endorsement! Putting together the extensive footnotes was half the fun for me. One of the triggers for the book was the fact that there are no native placental mammals in Australia. The standard schoolbook explanation - that it was only Australia's isolation that spared its marsupials and monotremes from competition - seemed inadequate. Because of convergent evolution (e.g.,the tasmanian tiger - recently sighted!), there were marsupials every bit as fit for competition. Then there were placental mammal fossils found in both Australia and Antarctica from a time period in which they were joined -- so placentals had indeed made it there, but had died out for some unexplained reason.

That got me looking into the placenta itself. There are no slow evolutionary steps that explain it - suddenly it appeared on the scene. And it is genetically peculiar - it derives only from the male's Y chromosome, and although it is genetically alien to the mother, it is able to avoid all of her immune defenses and enlist a blood supply and take nutrients from her body, almost like a cancer. Indeed, its cells can cause a thankfully rare cancer, choriocarcinoma, in her body. Had a tamed oncovirus been incorporated into the male's Y chromosome and been passed along? What if it got switched back on?

Several Aussie friends gave me a hard time, but I was writing for an American audience (I actually could do an Australian edition) who are woefully ignorant of your wonderful country. Tasmania was important because I wanted to set the first outbreaks in remote and geographically isolated places. (But you are right that no one would say Hobart, Tasmania) i restore the soles on my 2 pairs of Blundstones and wear them all the time. I recalled that the factory, where I bought them, was on the way to Sydney airport - I wanted it to set off memories for Jace.

BTW- My nephew and his family have just moved to Sydney. His wife is with the State Dept. and had to get away from D.C. until the next election. They hope their 2 boys (age 4 and 2) will pick up Aussie accents. Perhaps that will give me incentive to return for a visit.