Locked in Step

I've said it before and I'll say it again: genre labels continually get in the way of truly original work. When an author like Neil Gaiman produces something unclassifiable, it's hailed as a genre-bender that breaks the rules of archetype.

That's not intended as a dig at Gaiman (or any equally versatile writer) at all; I'm merely pointing out that the tropes of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror have become locked to the point that they're nearly self-parodies. Did anyone else spend any time in the NaNoWriMo genre lounges this year?

Rules exist to be broken. That was one of the principles upon which genre-founding authors built their work. Adventure with starships becomes sci-fi. Horror with a sci-fi backdrop becomes weird fiction. Fantasy with technological elements becomes steampunk. We label and classify original ideas like fruit, and before long they are templates for a legion of copycats.

But we really have nothing more than our baser primate instincts to blame for this. We tend to perceive the world as a series discrete entities, rather than changing patterns and drifting memes.

The take-home lesson is this: writers striving for originality should work among and outside of genres. In short, they should ignore them. I'm writing a coming-of-age dark fantasy murder mystery set in American suburbia. I'm not telling the story this way out of some sort of iconoclastic pretension, but because this is how it asked to be told. If you want to work within, for example, the epic fantasy sub-genre, and that's the best way of telling your story, then by all means, have at it. Just don't accept the fallacy that you need genre.

After all, every genre needed an original writer to create it in the first place.

Men of a Different Kind

Last week's post on the speculative biology of an annelid Jurassic ("Wormworld," as one commenter called it) triggered what was undoubtedly the most successful day this blog has ever had; in a 24-hour period, my traffic more than doubled. Darren Naish is right: speculative biology is like internet crack: read a few articles, post one, and you suddenly find yourself dreaming of nothing else.

So first off, let me say thank you to everyone who visited, commented, and linked to me, and particularly to Nemo Ramjet for generating wildly creative exponents of my ideas.

Here I am, trying to maintain a blog about literature and its motifs, and along comes reality to slap me on the ass. Who am I to argue? Here's another post about speculative zoology based on a long conversation I had with my girlfriend this weekend.

We begin at some point in the early Holocene. Alternate Earth has, by and large, developed the same as the one we know. There is one significant difference: the African plains never opened up quite as much as ours, the territorial and predatory pressure on Australopithecines was a bit lower within the abundant jungles, and, long story short, genus Homo never got around to evolving.

In the tropical seas, however, a different story is entering its first act. One species of dolphin, closely similar to our own Tursiops truncatus, settled in a sheltered bay that was home to a wide variety of coral shapes. The dolphins loved to play, and one day, a male snapped off a piece of ornate red coral in his beak. By now, the pod had learned that a delicious species of fish lived among the red coral, and they connected his possession with this knowledge: here was a hunter who had found food.

The others chased him through the reef, trying to steal the beautiful object for themselves. Even the females seemed fascinated by his possession, and he learned that he could surround himself with mates by displaying his treasure to them. He guarded the coral shard with his life, even setting it carefully next to him on a rock when he had to eat.

In short order, other males discovered for themselves how to obtain their own pieces of coral. As the dolphins spread throughout the bay, coral became a rare commodity, and those who could find more delicate or striking pieces would be rewarded with mates. Some dolphins discovered that they could, with great care, break off strategic bits of similar corals to make them resemble the corals where nutritious prey hid. Beaks became more delicate, corals were more precisely nibbled, and females became more suspicious of fraud carvings.

After only a few million years, the dolphins' beaks were lined with delicate feelers and manipulators, rather like the lips of a manatee. Two of these appendages were over twenty centimeters long, and were even tipped with a crown of tiny "fingers." Corals were now broken into the shapes of fish, or polished into smooth, flat circles against the rocks on the sea floor. Different females preferred different sorts of designs, so males would trade carvings, or even exchange them for food.

Dolphin sentience soon followed. The coral carvings became visual devices for sharing stories; first as crude word-pictures in the shapes of common objects, then as sheets or tubes punctured by tiny patterns of holes, resembling computer punch-cards. Dolphins already used a series of clicks and whirs; a little boost in brain power was all this communication needed to bloom into a full-fledged language.

For centuries, the sea was filled with the rattling sounds of delphine shamans, telling tales of the dread land-serpents that dwelt in dimly-glimpsed forests and mountains. Good dolphin children were taught to pray to the All-Knowing One, who is somehow both a whole pod and a single dolphin, and who dwells forever in the sky-ocean, which is above the air-sky and rains its pure water into earth's tainted and sinful sea.

As time passed, the dolphins learned to harness the power of the currents, and of the steam vents that rise from the deep. They domesticated whales and used them to drag boulders up from the sea floor. With these, they built vast fortresses, so they could sleep and research in peace without worrying about predators, or competing pods, or roving bands of savage open ocean dolphins with their deadly packs of trained sharks.

When, at their height of their industrial age, dolphin scientists discovered the wheel, the exploration of land began. They understood terrestrial physics, and the plains soon rumbled as vehicles resembling steam-driven bathtubs lumbered across them. The beasts of the land were classified, its resources recorded and exploited, and its ecology put to use.

At the time of this writing, there has been much talk of establishing a permanent colony on land--probably near the southeastern tip of the Atlantic Continent. As always, though, politics get in the way. There are those who say dolphinkind has done more than enough to upset the natural order of the land. There are those who believe that much more efficient results will be achieved by building factories and airscrapers of metal and glass, which can only be made in open air, and transporting them to the sea.

Then there's the intriguing matter of the hominids, who seem to live in complex troops like dolphins do; some species even seem to have developed the rudiments of tool use. If dolphins were able to take some of the howling, leaping furballs into captivity and train them to write, they might learn a great deal about evolution, and the very nature of sentience.

The best motivation for moving onto land, though, can be summed up in one word; the word that pulled dolphinkind out of its primitive stupor in the first place: curiosity.

Well, there we have it. If no one quotes Douglas Adams in the comments, I shall be sorely disappointed. Images are, once again, from Worth1000.

Of All Possible Worlds

Devising alternate scenarios for terrestrial evolution is quite the fashion lately. I arrived at Tetrapod Zoology to find this post about two possible alternate worlds. Following a few links, I stumbled on these two posts from Dr. Vector, where he lays out two series of musings on the nature of speculative biology, and why it's important. Then I finished reading Nemo Ramjet's masterful All Tomorrows, which left me practically shaking with excited glee.

From a literary standpoint, speculative biology can be useful for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it should fill anyone with half an imagination with a tingling sense of potential. Second, it forces the writer to devise scenarios based on a concrete set of rules: the principles of natural selection, geology, and physics.

For all these reasons, and because I desperately miss writing wildly imaginative, non-narrative paragraphs for the sheer joy of it, I will now lay out my own attempt at an alternative course of evolution. I can rely only on my wide reading and limited, amateur expertise. My highest hope will be that someone might be inspired to sketch or paint something based on this world...or perhaps just leave a comment.

My imagined world diverges from this one at the end of the Permian, with the Permian-Triassic extinction event. In the world we know, most of the mammal-like reptiles were exterminated by this event; so were many arthropods and amphibians. In my scenario, however, the extinction (or series of events, depending who one reads) was still more devastating: it wiped out every tetrapod lineage that had crawled onto land, along with the vast majority of vascular plants. The land was returned to the algae, the small invertebrates, and the bacteria.

At the 250mya mark, the western coast of Pangaea is a rocky heath, covered with mile-wide mats of algae and endless swarms of flying insects. The only sounds are the lapping of waves and the buzzing of myriad tiny wings. It is almost unrecognizable as the planet earth.

As writers of these scenarios are fond of doing, I'll now take us all forward 50 million years.

We immediately notice that the land is once more covered with foliage, albeit of a kind unknown to us. The trees resemble towers of kelp that have been squashed to stocky proportions, then scaled up to several stories tall. This is, in fact, what they are--not plants, but algae: Laminaria arbora, to be exact. The kelp colonized the seashores gradually, as they were deposited in increasingly shallow water, and ultimately transformed their holdfasts into sturdy land anchors. Their air bladders now serve an entirely different purpose: clusters of spores collect in the sacs, and are spread by flying insects. Algae have taken over the plant niche, and re-discovered a vastly alternative form of pollination.

Various herbivores have advanced inland as well. The initial colonists were of similar affiliation to the grazers of the Carboniferous: millipedes and amphipods from the intertidal zone. The latter grew into Birubius bovus; as their species name suggests, they resembled plump pill-bugs about thirty centimeters long, and grazed on the algal mats that covered the plains. Their lineage prospered for a few million years, but competition forced them into niches that pressured for reduction in size. Now they are about the size of field-mice.

After a few million years, these creatures became prey for crabs who developed lungs, like the coconut crab Birgus latro. A dominant predator in those crustacean halcyon days was Birgus ferox, a predatory crab the size of a basketball, with heavy claws capable of shredding the flexible carapaces of herbivorous arthropods. Several derivative species still prowl the seashores, but their kind has been ousted by new varieties of predators.

Around the time we know as the late Triassic, two groups made the leap from water to land. One was expected: the fish. Tetrapods were already poised to make the leap onto land, and the kelp forests were soon swarming with four-legged amphibians of every imaginable description.

A second group also moved inland: the annelids. Some species of polychaete worms began to breathe through their skin, colonized the seashore, and drove the lumbering amphipod herbivores out of their niche. The forests were filled with dazzling displays of colorful feathers as the worms adapted their mating displays for the land.

Some polychaetes found themselves well-suited for a predatory lifestyle, and began to stalk the smaller amphibians. A stroll across a forest floor may reveal a Nereis gnastholongi, a twenty centimeter-long polychaete furnished with an extendable jaw and a pair of large, high-set eyes, rooting in the soil for nests of the deep-red amphibian Triturus purpurea. To watch a pale, fat annelid devour a nest of terrified young amphibians whole, is truly the stuff of nightmare.

In a series of swamps down south, however, something very different was in store for the annelidae. One species, accustomed to life on land, developed a sac to store air for times when it would be drowned with water in the region's frequent floods. A worm could hold its breath, then release carbon dioxide, then take oxygen in again after the water had drained into the soil beneath. Ten million years later, the descendants of these worms were the first invertebrates to breathe with an analog of a true lung--actually, a lung for every body segment.

These many-legged worms soon grew to prodigious sizes, and their appetites grew in proportion. They bred much more quickly than most fish, and in vast numbers. Their nervous systems became more complex to enable them to better hunt their amphibian prey. For over a hundred million years, the dominant lifeforms on earth are air-breathing, segmented worms.

Some reduce the number of segments in their bodies, and lengthen their legs, in order to gain speed. Others slither along the ground like snakes, their legs atrophied. Some are herbivorous browsers, while others are fierce predators. A few begin to deposit a network of chitin within their limbs, creating their equivalent of a skeleton. Over time, this enables their bodies to grow even larger, and move even more rapidly.

In the upper Jurassic, a pack of Nereforme leonides charge across the algae-covered plains, looking like either giant eight-legged eels, or the sleekest, fiercest, most enormous tardigrades of all time. They are in pursuit of a Duochaeta splendens, a two-segmented herbivore with an elaborate, feathery sail on its back. They have broken it off from its family group, and surround it at the edge of a forest, flashing their multicolored feathers to coordinate the strike.

When the carcass is nearly picked clean, gangly newts covered with shriveled red skin will pick over the remains. There is no room for tree gliders or ungulates in a world where the descendants of tetrapods are the worms, and the descendants of worms rule the land.

I acknowledge that this is, at best, an amateur scenario, and would no doubt be much improved with the aid of actual evolutionary biologists. As an exercise in writing (or reading), I simply tried to make it as thrilling and unusual as possible, while grounding it in my understanding of sound biological principles. I would welcome comments or speculation of any kind, whether about my writing or my clumsy attempts at speculative biology.

All photos used are from Worth1000.

The Dawn of Fear: Part II

If you haven't read Part I, I'd encourage you to at least skim it, since it opens by outlining the goals of this series of articles. In brief:

The observations of these three disciplines [literature, mythology, and biology] as they analyze the world have led me to the realization that they are all inextricably intertwined, and that a careful study of each one will provide critical clues in regard to the other two.

But enough self-promotion. After this, it's all original material.
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We know that in the early days of hominids such as Homo robustus and Homo ergaster, our ancestors were in direct competition with other family groups, as well as other species which we might call "semi-human." I use this term not to describe them as incomplete or unfinished, for they were surely as well adapted to their environment as any other organism on earth. I mean only to imply that while we Homo sapiens were still casting off our collective birth caul (so to speak), numerous other species thrived, and while they were almost like us--but just different enough to provoke a reaction of repulsion and fear.

But what of the other threats in our world; those dangers that date back to our even more ancient origins? There was a time when we were in greater peril from birds, snakes, and even insects, than from any other tribe of men. It is these phantoms that I wish to explore. This article will turn from the world of man to the realm of the alien, and delve into what exactly horrifies us about those creatures that seem somehow unnatural.

A major difference between vertebrates and invertebrates (aside from the obvious) is the remarkable diversity of uses for limbs that can be found in various phyla. As Stephen Jay Gould is fond of commenting, it's the use of legs as mouthparts that causes us to view insects and chelicerates as repulsive. A similar explanation could be offered for the limbs that eels and snakes lack, or for the mind-boggling range of limb possibilities in the mollusca.

While it's easy enough to manufacture just-so stories about the horror aroused by contemplating such radical discrepancies in appendage form and usage, I prefer to take what I perceive to be the most direct route, and explore the relationship between us and these creatures.

The feud between vertebrates and our mortal enemies, the chelicerates, dates back to the seas of the Ordovician period, when the ancestors of the gnasthostomata, such as ostracoderms, were preyed upon by great nautiloid molluscs and eurypterids. I'm not suggesting that some sort of ancestral memory has permeated our fears across several geological epochs; I'm merely establishing that from the earliest days of vertebrates, we have been food for such creatures.

Several hundred million years later, primates swung through the jungle and leaped across the African plains, pursued by giant birds and pythons whenever they touched the ground. From the dawn of sentient thought, we have feared birds of prey, but we have held a more potent and deeper-seated fascination with the serpentine.

Millennia before the priests of Ba'al and Osiris, the first known human worship sites venerated snakes and snake gods. It remains unclear why our ancestors would have chosen these creatures as objects of worship, but nevertheless, the motif of the great serpent manifests itself across the globe in the forms of Jormungand, Apep, Leviathan, and dragons before they grew wings and legs. For as long as we can trace, man has, by turns, worshiped, hated, and feared the snake.

The slithery undulation of the snake and the multi-legged alien-ness of the spider are blended eerily in the octopus and squid. Tentacles are not only a feature of numerous historical monsters, but a common motif in the writing of the great authors of weird tales and proto-science fiction stories (not to mention the unorthodox sexual fetishes of certain countries). The appendages of molluscs are devoid of joints and fingers, yet grip and manipulate objects with a dexterity nearly matching our own. What are we to make of such inscrutable cleverness?

In writing, we are constantly seeking to strike a balance between cultivating an atmosphere of familiarity, and exploring concepts, locales, and experiences entirely unique. In horror writing, especially, the author aims to develop a sense of security and comfort, then violate its taboos and conventions through an irruption of malign forces.

For this reason, the uncanny valley and the utterly alien can serve a cooperative purpose, if put to use properly. A human character with scaly skin beneath his coat may seem a bit melodramatic, but such images build on fears deeply and instinctively rooted in our distant past. What we accept as human delineates a narrow range of possibilities, and by violating those in creative ways, the writer can tap into a truly primal source of repulsion.