Colin Barrett: Blog

Haven't we all had those moments? We make a life-changing decision. It's well thought out, arrived at after extensive analysis and cogitation. We're very sure the right path has been chosen, and feel comfortable with our fully considered plans. And then the critical moment arrives, and the key and irrevocable first step is taken. All of a sudden we're beset with renewed doubts and fears. Can we step backward from this action that now seems so rash? What have we done?
I've certainly had such times in my own life. I remember quitting my job to start my own business, trading what at the time seemed to be a certain paycheck for the insecurity of having to generate my income by a swap of services for money. It meant that every day I had to return value for the fees I was paid, no longer could I rely on past performance to offset a "bad day." In a way that's a very rewarding challenge, but it's also a fearful one. I can also recall some other, similarly important personal decisions. Each time that initial move was dreadfully scary, prompting me to go back and again re-examine my premises no matter how thoroughly I may have already considered and evaluated every factor involved.
On another subject, the "survival-of-the-fittest" imperatives of human prehistory are well documented. One of the great luxuries that our social and technological development has afforded us is increased freedom from the consequences of natural selection. Today we can afford to override the choices that nature would impose on us, making the human decision to confer life where nature might have dictated death. It's one of the great rewards of social progress.

At the time I wrote this, the approach I've described to get Hugo a birth certificate would work; one Internet site advertised the service. I'm not sure if sites like that one are still in operation, but I suspect there's similar stuff.
Yes, I know quite well that it's possible to find infants who were already assigned Social Security numbers but then died in infancy, which is the method often used in fiction of this nature, but that's more problematic because of the age factor; I discarded the idea immediately. Hugo's about 26, which would today put his birth date at 1990 or so, and on-line (or even in-person) research wouldn't uncover such a deceased infant whose death hadn't been pretty fully documented.
I also wanted to be fairly vague about the methodology and not lay out a blueprint for anyone seeking to evade the law in this way, and yet be sufficiently specific to make my fiction as realistic as possible.
You know, I can remember a time in my life when identity wasn't so important as it is today. In the present day one can't really even walk the streets without ID that any law-enforcement official can inspect on demand. Hotels and motels won't rent without seeing identification, you can't open a bank account without it, children must show it to attend school, and it goes on and on. Back 50 years ago or so you could pass anonymously through life if you chose; today your Social Security identifier is your passport to living in American society. I understand it, I suppose, but I truly miss the old days when one's word and one's presence was enough to get along with.

These two chapters are short ones, I know. But they do have some points to make, not least of which is the artificial value of money. Hugo sees it, correctly, I think, as of value only for the worth of what it will purchase. Consider, in contrast, the common perception in our present world of money being of value for itself, independent of its purchasing power, but rather as a measure of its possessor's status in society, and therefore of an intrinsic worth which, rationally speaking, it does not have.
Oh, the Sherlock Holmes quote. It's from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four, which, if I recall correctly, is the very first of the long Holmes canon, introducing both Holmes and Dr. Watson to their public.

I expect some readers have been pretty dubious about Hugo's seemingly rapid acclimatization to the modern world. Well, I think the way he descibes it may explain a little. When one finds oneself in an utterly foreign environment, one two reactions are possible. One is simple panic, giving in to what amounts to a fear that's both irrational and functionally useless of what's different from what one's accustomed to; the other, far more useful, is acceptance and at least an attempt at adjustment. Too often I've seen people who give in to their trepidation and succumb to the former, but that isn't going to be very helpful; the latter is the only thing a reasonable person can do, and I prefer my characters to act as reasonable people.
I think I've described a sling pretty accurately. I remember messing about with one when I was a boy of perhaps 10-11. I never got very good with it, that takes more persistence than I was willing to invest at that age, but I could at least make a stone fly in the right general direction at considerable speed. By nature it's a one-shot weapon, but with practice one can reload "on the fly," as it were, without completely stopping the rotating motion. The most efficient method would be to drop the stone, with either hand, into the still-moving pouch, timing the drop to the motion. That's what I've postulated.
Thanks for the many positive comments, especially about the cave-dwelling. My sister, to whom I gave this to read shortly after I finished it, objected vociferously to that. She wants the cavemen of her own imagining hunkered down in the caves where she feels they belong. If there aren't any caves in the immediate area, she doesn't want prehistoric people living there, either.

Two things today:
First, alcoholic beverages. Distilling was of course a long way in the future in prehistoric times, but fermentation wasn't. It's a natural process, so it seems likely that early humans quickly discovered the intoxicating properties of such as fermented fruit juice, etc., and even ways of producing it deliberately. There's even a modicum of evidence of this during the earliest historic period.
Second, where did these early humans live? Popular thinking is that they made their homes in caves, and perhaps some did, but humans inhabited a wide range of terrain, whereas natural caves of any habitable dimensions are available only unusually and in limited areas. In addition, caves certainly have drawbacks as residential properties. There's some archaelogical evidence of constructed dwellings in some areas. And it would scarcely have been beyond their capabilities; I mean, even birds and some amphibians build nests, not to mention many mammals. I think of Hugo's people as sufficiently industrious to erect their own shelters, which should not have been a problem with societal cooperation.
Over the course of writing this I put a lot of thought into the living circumstances I felt were most likely for early humans. There's a good bit more of this toward the end of the story. Some readers have argued with me about some of my hypotheses that go beyond conventional thinking, and perhaps they're right. But I think there's enough rational support for my approaches that I can reasonably ascribe them to the prehistoric world of my imagining.