V for Victimhood

I envy all of you who may be reading this for the first time. Sad to say, it just isn't the same the second time around. Where a book like Dune only gains in the rereading, V for Vendetta relies too heavily on twists and sudden reveals, however dramatic they are, to be anywhere near as interesting after the first time. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to enjoy it once again with you.

The character of V is an interesting one, and I'm not referring to the man who was injected with chemicals at a concentration camp. I'm talking about the identity assumed by that man, which he then passes on to Evey. V seeks to create the land of Do-As-You-Please, a place where freedom is the watchword. We can only assume, lacking evidence to the contrary, that this is very similar to Heinlein's "rational anarchy." V doesn't pretty its political ideology with the throwaway word "rational," but the precepts are pretty much the same: everyone can do what they want, and things will just work out for the best. V effectively achieves its goals by destroying whatever bloated authority exists in society and then educating the remainder.

Disregarding the question of whether enforced anarchy is merely tyranny of another stripe, V fulfills a role much like Mike: its immense knowledge and power makes the anarchic revolution possible, and then it runs the risk of exerting too much control and making the revolution moot. However, Mike's friends recognized the danger of allowing him to remain in power. V, on the other hand, is portrayed as the perfect hero of a new age. Each book takes the cheap cop-out of showing how its idyllic society actually forms, but V offers a much more sinister expectation. What happens to the most capable being in an anarchic society? Well, if individuals behave rationally and attempt to maximize their self-interest, then eventually the entire society coalesces around that most capable being. V's ability to initiate change, immense knowledge base and mythical status mean that it must exempt itself from the day-to-day occurrences of the world it hopes to create.

The Future

Like a god unto men, it walked
Smiting all those who displeased
And we, in turn, were smitten
By its grace and the way it talked

In our poor judgment we followed
The creature so perfect and free
That promised us nothing but treasure
Yet all of its words were so hollowed

Those great men who seek to lead
Weaker men heed their words
But the stranger, dismayed, will cut
And the strongest among us will bleed

We return once again to our caves
Watching crabs gather on shore
To remember the days of society
And one day forget kings and knaves

That Good Old Frontier Spirit

I went into Manifest Destiny with one significant goal: learning why on earth we're reading it in a course about science fiction. Don't get me wrong -- I'm a great fan of American history (although I was very disappointed at the exclusion of my favorite president, the exemplary Chester A. Arthur), but I struggled to fit this book into my conception of science fiction.

To figure it out, I thought about the context in which we read the book. We read it as part of our two weeks of "Space as the Final Frontier," sandwiched between our viewing of "nervous liberals in space" in Star Trek: TNG. Then I saw that Bradbury's Martian Chronicles was under the recommended reading for this week, and its theme of transplanting behaviors (and ecology!) from a terrestrial to a Martian setting helped things start to click. Heinlein was frontier libertarians, and Star Trek is frontier psychiatrists. Manifest Destiny pulls it together by pointing out that no matter how you treat the frontier, it doesn't last forever. Our basic instinct when we see uninhabited space is to explore it, tear it from our imaginations and nail it down to lines on a map. Star Trek sort of sidesteps this problem by exploring an inexhaustibly huge galaxy (or sector, or quadrant, or whatever), so that its frontier can't really be used up in the show. The shadow of it remains, however, especially in episodes like First Contact, which demonstrates the sad truth that innocence once lost can never be regained; you can't civilize the frontier and expect it to hang on to "that good old frontier spirit."

Basically, I saw it as another explanation for why we read sci-fi at all. America has come a long way from its thirteen original colonies. Many of the obstacles to expansion seemed insurmountable, but one way or another pioneers found their ways across the continent in pursuit of their fortunes and the unstoppable American dream. Similarly, humanity won't be able to resist the vast, untapped resources space offers for long. It appears to me, then, that this is a matter of inevitability; we read and write sci-fi to gather and offer some sort of guidance on how the process should go when the time finally arrives for us to reach out and explore the stars. Humanity may spread and spread, and the idea of humanity extending from one edge of the universe to the other is an appealing one. The last point I want to make, then, is that Star Trek may be a fun trip, but eventually you run out of final frontiers. What do you do with yourselves when there's nowhere else to go? Are empires that cease to expand doomed to stagnation and eventual collapse? Either way, we're all headed to the same endpoint, as explored by Asimov in his short story The Last Question. That's why I argue that, cinematic deviance aside, the Star Wars universe represents an extraordinarily important exploration of galactic civilization; if all goes well, humanity's time on Earth represents only a short birthing phase in our overall history as a species. Just as a spaghetti Western can't give you much good advice on how to live in the American Southwest today, books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress can't advise you on how to live and act in a truly established interstellar setting.

Population Issues on the Moon

I made a pretty big claim in class today -- that a society consisting of 90% women would quickly reach the equilibrium point of approximately 50% males and 50% females. I was able to find some research backing that up in the work of the primary sex-ratio scholars Fisher, Bodmer and Edwards (who argue that species will always lean towards 1:1 ratios of males to females as it offers the highest return on their energy investment in terms of reproduction). Feel free to look up their work on JSTOR. In the meantime, I decided to use arithmetic to help explain my principles.

To do so, we will first demonstrate how Luna likely functions in terms of population growth and sex ratios. Let's start with some basics. We know that, at the time of the narrative, Luna (or at least Luna City) is 90% male. To simplify things, we'll use population figures of 10 men for every 1 women, with a starting population of 100 men and 10 women. We'll assume that in Loony society, each woman takes at least two husbands, and each woman has at least two children. We'll also assume a 1:1 ratio of male to female births, and we won't take into account old age (meaning a member of any generation can marry a member of any other generation), but we will allow marriages to only occur once. Finally, we'll add 10 men and one woman to each generation to simulate the introduction of new convicts into the environment. It won't seem like much after a few generations, but I think a 10% increase in population at first is reasonable, and there's no reason to think it will increase any more over time. This will, theoretically, give us quite a long time before the population is brought to 50/50 male/female. Let's calculate a few generations....

Generation 1
Available Men: 100
Available Women: 10

Unmarried Men: 80
Male children: 10
Female children: 10
Male convicts added: 10
Female convicts added: 1

Results:
Total Men: 120
Total Women: 21
Percentage Women: 15%

Generation 2
Available Men: 100
Available Women: 11

Unmarried Men: 78
Male children: 11
Female children: 11
Male convicts: 10
Female convicts: 1

Results:
Total Men: 141
Total Women: 33
Percentage Women: 19%

Generation 3
Available Men: 99
Available Women: 12

Unmarried Men: 75
Male children: 12
Female children: 12
Male convicts: 10
Female convicts: 1

Results:
Total Men: 163
Total Women: 46
Percentage Women: 22%

Generation 4
Available Men: 97
Available Women: 13

Unmarried Men: 71
Male children: 13
Female children: 13
Male convicts: 10
Female convicts: 1

Results:
Total Men: 186
Total Women: 60
Percentage Women: 24%

And so on. I'll save you the tedium of the rest of the operations, but suffice to say that it takes 25 generations before hitting 40% women, and a full 200 generations before hitting 48% (by which point our total population is around 56,000, and equilibrium has already been well enough achieved -- trust me). Clearly, Heinlein's depiction of Luna City has it bad, but not so bad as he makes it seem...using my model, they go from 10 to 1 all the way down to 4 to 1 in just a few generations, and that's using very conservative estimates. My model also didn't include any individual woman having more than two children (which made the count take longer) or any men or women dying of old age (which shouldn't have effected the statistics anyway, since there was always a surplus of men in the gene pool). In other words, in a society without these limitations (like Heinlein's), there would be a lot more children, and therefore things would get corrected much faster. So while 10 to 1 males to females is pretty bad, it self-corrects relatively quickly.

My argument, however, was that a society of 10 to 1 females to males would reproduce and self-correct so quickly as to hardly matter. So let's flip my system on its head; 100 women and only 10 men. Each man takes 2 wives, each woman has 2 children. Every generation we'll add an extra 10 females and 1 male. Let's see how this goes down.


Generation 1
Available Men: 10
Available Women: 100

Unmarried Women: 80
Male children: 20
Female children: 20
Male convicts: 1
Female convicts: 10

Results:
Total Men: 31
Total Women: 130
Percentage Men: 19%

Generation 2
Available Men: 21
Available Women: 110

Unmarried Women: 68
Male children: 42
Female children: 42
Male convicts: 1
Female convicts: 10

Results:
Total Men: 74
Total Women: 182
Percentage Men: 28%

Unbelievable! I'll spare you the calculation...suffice to say that this model reaches equilibrium in just 7 generations, interestingly with a total population of about 7,000. In fact, this model reaches perfect equilibrium (exactly 50/50) in only 10 generations...which would have taken the first model over 50,000, more than all of human history has taken already! And that's assuming that each man takes no more than two wives, and each woman has no more than two children. If men take as many as 4 wives, you can reach equilibrium in 3 generations, or even 40% in only 2. And you'll STILL have a huge surplus of women. I think it's safe to say that equilibrium comes plenty fast in a society like that; men wouldn't be treasured articles of value for very long.

* These operations were performed using a program I wrote in QBASIC. If you'd like to see the code, please let me know and I could post it here. It's a very short program.