David Brin's precision short story about epilepsy, auras, altered states, and space travel

Mar 16, 2002

David Brin is a scientist and an excellent writer. This precision short story is part of the collection River of Time.

This story copyright © 1987 by David Brin.

“Folks!” the bodyguard announced. “In moments Lasselovsky will be here. You all know what that means.” From my regular booth by the window, I saw several customers abruptly leave. The brave, or curious, remained. “He’s the Oldtime spacer who returned, but didn’t hide, right?” Sam, our bartender, asked. “Yeah, so don?t bother him! If anyone here strongly resembles someone from his past, and triggers a deja-vu attack, we could find this building on another planet…” Deja vu. I suppose everyone’s felt this clue to Time’s true nature. Epileptics once dreaded it as an “aura,” foretelling seizures. And historically, people feared epilepsy, never suspecting grand mal hinted a door to the universe. Today only Oldspacers suffer lingering aura shock. I hear neuroconvulsive hyperdrive is perfected nowadays. Modern pilots needn’t endure terrifying seizures to attain that special mental state which propels a spaceship starward. To modern spacers, induced deja vu is a key. To Oldtimers, though, it’s pure terror. “...sudden recognition could trigger a jump seizure. So don’t approach him. If he feels safe, maybe he’ll mingle…” Talky bodyguard. Most Oldtimers retreated to cozy surroundiings and stayed put. Ex-crewmates avoid reunions. Stubborn Lasselovsky, though, keeps moving. He’s a free man, so the authorities send bodyguards ahead to warn people. Time’s funny. It flows, then surges like a convulsion. I sit and wait, feeling the years. Through the window, I see a familiar face. “Captain…?” I should have left before this. Already my hands are shaking. Still, it is nice to see, again, the stars.

Keywords: | fiction | epilepsy | David Brin | altered states |
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Originally by John Scalzi. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Nov 25, 2001

Chocolate is God’s way of reminding men how inadequate they are. I am vividly confronted with this fact every time my wife and I go out to a restaurant. When it gets to dessert, my wife usually orders the most chocolate-saturated dessert possible. It’s the one called “Unstoppable Double-Fudge Chocolate Mudslide Explosion” or some such thing. I always wonder why anyone would want to eat anything that promises a catastrophic natural disaster in your mouth.

The dark brown monstrosity arrives at the table, and my wife takes the first bite. Before the fork is even removed from her mouth, a small moan escapes her lips. Her eyes, previously perfectly aligned, first cross slightly and then faze completely, pupils dilating in pure chocolate pleasure before the eyelids clamp down in ecstasy. The hand not holding the fork clenches into a fist and starts pounding the table. The silverware rattles.

After about six minutes of this, she finally manages to swallow the bite, realign her eyes, and take the next shuttle back from whatever transcendental plane she’s been visiting. Slowly, her sphere of consciousness expands to include me, her husband, her life-long mate, her presumed partner in all things ecstatic.

“Hey, this is pretty good,” she’ll say. “You want some?”

No, I don’t. I want nothing to do with an object that does to my wife in one bite what I’ve worked for an entire relationship to achieve. It wouldn’t do any good, anyway. Men just don’t have the same relationship with chocolate that women do. It’s not even close. I wandered around the office today and asked men — “Chocolate. Your thoughts?” — and the result was always the same. First, a confused look as to why they’re being asked about something so trivial, and then some lame, obvious statement “Uh…it’s brown?”

Ask women the same question, and you get responses like “The ONLY food group,” “ESSENTIAL to life as we know it,” and the ultimate casual swipe at every member of the Y-chromosome brigade, “better than sex.” Ouch. Some women will try to make up for that last one by quickly adding that chocolate is supposed to be an aphrodisiac.

Uh-huh. Chocolate certainly increases desire; problem is the desire is usually for more chocolate. The best a guy can do is buy a box of chocolates and hope he’ll be considered somewhere between the cherry truffle and the strawberry nougat.

Don’t get me wrong. Guys like chocolate just fine; it’s just not essential to life as we know it. Respiration is essential to life as we know it; chocolate is simply one of those nice little bonuses you get. We won’t usually pass it up if it’s offered, but I don’t know too many guys who would get substantially worked up if it were to suddenly disappear from the face of the earth (ironic in a way, as back in the days of the Aztecs, only men were allowed to have the stuff). When I eat a chocolate dessert, I enjoy it, yes. My world view doesn’t narrow to include only the plate that it’s on.

Maybe we’re missing something. On the other hand, we don’t have to pick up our silverware from the floor after we’re done with our tiramisu. Life is about trade-offs like that. All I know is that come Valentine’s Day, chocolate will be among the things I offer my wife. I can’t truly appreciate it, but I can truly appreciate what it does for her. Which is close enough.

[Ed: I found this one day, and knew I really wanted to reprint it. I contacted the author, who graciously said that yes, I could reproduce it on my site. So if you, like me, want to have your own copy, ask the author. He’s very nice that way. Good on him.

And pass the chocolate.

Keywords: | women | men | John Scalzi | humor | chocolate |
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Cynics are secretly raging idealists. Don't tell anyone, though...

Aug 02, 2001

When reading my web site, you may think that I’m misanthropic - that is to say, that I hate people in general. Why do you always complain, you say. Why do you run a collab project like Slouching Toward Bethlehem when you seem to believe that no one can make a difference, you wonder. Wonder no more - you’ve hit on the secret of the Cynics.

Misanthropy is different from cynicism, but they are often confused. Basic definitions of the words don’t clear things up much:

Misanthropy /mis-AN-thro-pi/ n. hatred or mistrust of humankind
Cynicism /SIN-i-sis-m/ n. An attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others

Those two definitions seem to convey the same idea, but the key word is in the definition of cynicism. It’s defined as "an attitude". Cynicism is a defensive coping mechanism, not a bone-deep belief.

The Despising versus The Disgusted

Misanthropists, well, hate people. They dislike how people act, they dislike what people say, they dislike just about everything about people - both individuals and societies.  They don’t necessarily want to see everyone dead and societies washed away, but they’d rather not interact with them at all. Misanthropists don’t really believe that humankind is of much value. They don’t believe in anything like the redeemability of humankind. I can’t tell you much more about misanthropists because I amn’t one. (I don’t think that even the misanthropic bitch is a true misanthrope - what misanthrope would bother writing a web page as vituperatively entertaining as this one for a bunch of wastes of skin?) Cynics - true Cynics in the grand old tradition of Antisthenes, Diogenes, and Epictetus - are idealists who are rather disappointed in the world around them. We get mad, we rant and rave, we mutter unnice things about the oxygen thieves with whom we share the planet, but we still believe that people can change for the better - and tend to become . When we consciously stop and think about a situation, we will admit that we expect the worst behaviour of other people. But deep down, we really honestly believe that other people are noble and good, and will do the right thing almost reflexively. No matter how often we meet new people, go to new places, or encounter new situations, we believe that this time things will be better. You can almost see the cartoon bubbles coming out of our ears that read, "Oh, boy, this is going to be great! I’ll be with other people who want to do things right and want to make things better!" If you actually act in a highly honourable fashion and work with us, we cynics will respond with an almost puppylike enthusiasm. Like Agent Fox Mulder, we want to believe. Problem is, everyone is so busy living down to expectations that we…well…become rather embittered. This gets us into a boatload of trouble.

Oops, I did it again

When I started my contract with a chip manufacturing company headquartered in Burnaby BC Canada, I saw lots of areas where I could contribute toward making their human resources intranet run better-stronger-faster. I was anxious to work on their learning intranet, which they were just launching. I envisioned cleaning up their directory structure, making the sites easier to use and easier to maintain, and helping the folks in the cubicles learn the basics of editing the content pieces themselves so that they wouldn’t be dependent on a developer to make little spelling changes or minor text tweaks. Instead I ran headlong into a passive-aggressive wall of department director and the underlings who feared her. My advice was ignored time and again, and sure enough, they got feedback from the corporate IT group saying "This needs changed and this isn’t usable and this causes problems." You’d think that after being an IT contractor for just under a decade, I would have learned by now. But no. This is another of the hallmarks of a true Cynic. We don’t stop hoping and believing, no matter how many times we get schmakked in the face.

Keywords: | philosophy | misanthropy | Cynicism |
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I like my vacations unstructured and relatively inactive. Apparently, this is abnormal.

Feb 15, 2001

Why is it that vacations are usually more stratified and planned out than a standard work week? It would seem, logically, that a vacation should be a restful time of leisure and calm. So why is it that vacations often cause as much stress as filing your federal taxes? People seem to have this concept that on a vacation, you need to be constantly Going Somewhere and Doing Something. It’s just wrong to sit still and be quiet for longer than three hours — then, by Mum And Apple Pie, you’d better be off to your next event, or you’ll waste your vacation time! But isn’t that the point of vacation time? To be still if you want? To go places if you want? To do nothing if you want? To waste it if you want? Or are we all so structured and strictured that we can’t function without some kind of externally imposed routine?

In the modern age of automation when people might work ten or twenty hours a week,
man for the first time will be forced to confront himself with the true spiritual problems of living!

I remember vacationing in Panama for Christmas 1991, during the time when the Panama Canal had been given to the Panamanians but the Canal was still being managed and run by American personnel. My then-boyfriend and I flew down, stayed with his parents for ten days, spent three days at the San Blas Islands (I recommend that anyone who visits Central America go scuba diving off the San Blas Islands - it’s gorgeous), and then flew home. I didn’t really care about seeing the native market, or buying gold jewelry, or heading into the mountains to browse at a craft fair. I just wanted to walk around, relax, and spend time with my boyfriend and finally see the place where he grew up. I vividly remember looking out the bathroom window every morning and seeing the blue-black clouds from the morning rains, and the bright green hills in front. I remember the flight to the San Blas Islands, and how small the island looked when we came in for a landing. I remember meeting his aunt and cousins at a family dinner. I remember meeting the marmalade cat from the next yard over, who came into their back yard every afternoon and purred like he was trying to loosen his skeleton. I loved my time there. Apparently, though, many of them thought that I was unhappy because I didn’t express any interest in doing these various things. My mother was hit by some bug — I believe it is commonly called "competition with the sister". Every Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving, as well as a few other days each year, the two families would gather at one house or the other for a family evening. I dubbed these "Happy Family Memories": Thou Shalt Be Happy Or Else, God Dammit. My cousins heard about my term, and called these little get-togethers "Hideous Family Memories". There was inevitably tension at these get-togethers, but it was the weeks of planning that preceded the events that were the true hell. Mum would gradually become more tightly wound (as would everyone in our house, and probably in theirs, too), and she’d start getting snappish. Then came The Day Of Reckoning. Get a decoration theme ready. Dress nicely. Set the table with the nice dishes. Clean the whole house. Clean it again. Okay now, this is family. They’ve seen us ill. We’ve seen them ill. The kids have seen each other bruised and banged up from playing. Why are we acting as if they’ve never seen the house with a tiny bit of clutter before?!?? Eventually Mom outgrew this phase. I had moved out of the house by then. Funny how life works out like that… Let me say how much I love my family. Really, I do. But sometimes they drive me so crazy. Then I get out into the Real World (™) and find that other people aren’t much better. Don’t misunderstand me. Sometimes I like running about and doing things. But that’s usually when I’ve planned for that type of vacation. When I met up with the Lexxians in Halifax, the group of us walked all over the place. We went to local plays, we walked up and down the wharf, we checked out the last days of the Busker’s Festival (this in addition to the convention-like stuff). But I didn’t tour the Citadel. I never visited Peggy’s Cove, nor do I particularly care to. To paraphrase what many said when James Cameron’s "Titanic" hit the theatres: "It’s a cove. Get over it." If I were a Nova Scotian, I might feel differently. As it is, I don’t really much care. The beaches on the west coast of the continent are nicer anyway (snark). And we don’t have to worry about freezing to death after four minutes in the water (snark snark). I’d rather spend time talking with the people, or sleeping in, or loafing about — all things I can’t do when I’m at home and in the middle of a work week. Stop for a minute and think. When was the last time you just…did…nothing? And I’m not talking the kind of nothing that people often do at large corporations when someone further up the decision-chain is stopping things. I’m talking about just sitting and being quiet. Relaxing. Having yourself a little Zen moment. (Sleeping when you’re ill doesn’t count.) Or pretty soon, you’ll start needing vacations from your vacations.

Keywords: | stress | relaxing | free time | family |
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