Colin Barrett: Blog

Well, this is labeled science fiction, and not just for the time travel aspect. I know quite well that some few are pretty good at ferreting out lies they're told by others, though I've never been personally very good at this, but it certainly seemed like a trait I could plausibly assign to prehistoric humans who hadn't the distractions of us modern versions to contend with. So I did. It has the added benefit of giving Hugo a head start on finding his place in the contemporary world, which for a time stymied me a bit as I wrote this novel.
On anther topic, I might point out that this was written several years ago, so a few of my comments about homosexuality have got a bit dated. A few athletes have indeed come "out of the closet," as it were, and open homosexuality is now accepted in the military. High time for both, I'd say; I never have figured out why one's sex life should be a matter of public interest, much less concern. Isn't sex supposed to be a pretty private thing, unless one is actually in the porn industry? It always astonishes me how ready-even eager-far too many people are to make themselves busy in other folks' affairs.

Actually, I've read about rapes that occurred in just this kind of scenario.
Hugo's certainly right that he seems to have got involved in an inordinate amount of crime. There won't be any more of this; I'm not trying to start a fictitious crime wave. But both type of behavior are unfortunately pretty common in this day and age, and it didn't seem to me to be stretching coincidence too far to have a couple of these events in his first few months in the present day.
Don't, however, lose track of Linda's question. It'll become important as the story continues.

I mostly don't get into this in my fiction, but every once in a while I can't resist letting my characters talk about the stupidity that constitutes our national attitude, and legal policy, about drugs in general.
You'd think that we as a country would have learned something from our failed experiment with Prohibition, but it appears not. Insanity has been defined as repeating a particular behavior over and over again and expecting a different result. Well, outlawing one substance desired by significant elements of our population didn't work very well, yet we continue to pursue the same path with other such substances without regard to what happened before. And socially we disparage and even ostracize those who advocate a departure from this illogicality.
At the same time that I think our drug policies are a bit on the whacky side. I also have to recognize that those policies are ingrained in our laws, with penalties for those who don't comply. It helps that I don't personally have much interest in using drugs of any kind. My own reaction to marijuana is like Linda's, the few times I've smoked it in the past I just felt like dozing off and had no feeling of euphoria at all. But even if I liked it, I'd have to recognize, as does Hugo, that continuing to use it carries significant risks, and the game isn't really worth the candle. One may be fully convinced that conventional wisdom is badly flawed, one may even have evidence of this on one's side, but it still may be prudent to go along with the majoriy because they'll punish you if you don't. Some fights simply aren't worth fighting.

When I wrote this I gave a first draft to my sister to read. She objected vociferously to my postulate that early humans, pre-civilization, had anything even approximating agriculture, ever planted anything in the ground and tended it.. She still does, and I know I'm going beyond what received wisdom is about these people. But I'm not real good at receiving others' "wisdom" when it flies in the face of what I consider logic, and to me this does. I refuse, as you've already seen, to entertain the proposition that early humans were intellectually inferior to us modern folks; there's no evidence in paleontology that brain size or capacity has significantly changed since what I've set up as Hugo's time, and the capacity to think creatively and to learn shouldn't have changed all that much, either. Since simple observation would allow Hugo's compatriots to see the basics of plant reproduction and sustenance, and it's only a small step beyond to begin purposefully growing things in collective gardens. We're not talking beyond that; the inability of small groups to set up long-term settlements would preclude more than casual gardening. (There's a good bit more about this later in the novel, in some more detail.) But why should hunter-gatherer groups have been limited to what simply sprouted up by chance nearby?
I mean, when agriculture arose in greater concentration around 10,000 years ago or so, did it actually spring into being from nothing? Or was the notion of cultivating plants a long-standing and established one, which ultimately gave rise to fixed population centers as humans increased in number and required greater stability of food supply? I lean pretty strongly toward the latter, as this novel should tell you.
Hugo's good health, including dental, shouldn't be a huge surprise. Illness or a propensity toward it wouldn't have been a big survival trait in a time when the odds of a pregnancy producing, in time, a living adult were pretty damn small. So the fact that Hugo became a fully grown man alone says he had to be pretty healthy, and reasonably resistant to disease.

Is it really so far-fetched that ancient humans, just beginning their development as a social species, just starting to form lasting groups for living, would need to develop mechanisms for maintaining social order?
That's one of the postulates of the early human culture that I've created for the purposes of this novel, anyway. I've touched on this in passing before-the existence of hierarchies, the "ins" and the "outs" that play such a crucial role in societal relationships still today. Humans being humans, whether in prehistory or the present day, they seem to me likely to adopt similar structures to govern how they live together. In that sense I think it makes little difference whether you live then or now, you'll find yourself in basically familiar social territory. The specifics will vary pretty drastically, of course, but the underpinnings will be constant. Many individuals regard themselves as loners, but the reality is as poet John Donne saw it, that "no man is an island," and the interplay of the many people in ongoing contact with one another requires some form of structured regulatory constraint. So I think Hugo's tale is a realistic one.