"The Author's Show"; Who's the Book For?

Recently, I had the pleasure and privilege of being interviewed by Don McCauley for “The Author’s Show” (you can find the interview at https://www.georgemoakley.com/new-events).

I was particularly impressed by the process. I was sent a set of potential interview questions to help me prepare. At first glance, they seemed simple, straightforward questions.

Then I started jotting down notes.

Here’s what I wasn’t expecting.

I wasn’t expecting these questions to inspire so much introspection about my writing and my novels.

With that in mind, I thought I should not only post the above link to the interview, but also offer distillations of some of the notes I wrote in preparation.

I was asked who I wrote the book for.

That’s actually an interesting question!

I wrote the book I’ve always wanted to read. If you’re like me, and you enjoy science fiction or monster stories, you’ll enjoy my books.

But I also have readers, and this really surprised me, that are NOT science fiction fans and still love the books.

Why?

I love a story that takes me someplace else. Makes me feel like I’m part of a different world.

Doesn’t have to be an alien world. Could be the samurai culture of feudal Japan or life as part of an organized crime family. Just take me to a different world and make it so vivid, so realistic, that I feel like I’ve really been there. Give me characters I grow to love, and miss when the story’s over.

If you want to be immersed in an alternate reality, you’ll like my books.

But don’t break the mood. I’m the kind of guy that watches a movie set it southeast Asia that gets distracted by actors walking by central American trees, or seeing some character tap a few keys and magically hack into a top-secret system.

That’s why I love hard science fiction. Everything about this story is as realistic and plausible as possible.

If you love hard scifi, like “The Martian” or the original “Jurassic Park”, you’ll enjoy my books.

If you like thrill rides, if you like plot twists that surprise you but make perfect sense in hindsight, and characters that prevail through not just strength but smarts, by solving a complex puzzle through science and critical thinking, you’ll enjoy my books.

Now, I must say, my books aren’t for the squeamish. The monsters are truly monstrous.

And when a younger reader expresses interest, I explain to parents that it’d probably be rated PG-13 or R for the intensity of the alien attacks. There’s some strong language, but not that much. When it happens, well, you’d swear, too!  And sexual behavior is referred to but not graphically described.

Short Term Pessimist, Long Term Optimist

It’s been months since my last blog post. I have excuses, of course. I’ve been crazy busy. “Tides of Eden” manuscript is finished and should be released in the fall, and I met lots of new readers through a variety of book events.

But, in addition to my excuses, I also have my regrets. For one, I recently realized I’d neglected to post anything about participating in a ‘Faith and Science’ event this past January at Pinnacle Presbyterian Church in Scottsdale, Arizona. Dr. Michael Hegeman invited me to be his guest for a discussion of ‘Faith and Science Fiction’ after reading “Kraken of Eden” (a recording of the event can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uZ2h-a2DOI).

At one point, Mike (Dr. Hegeman) brought up how the novel reflects back on the 21st and 22nd centuries, and I explained that I’m a near term pessimist and a long term optimist.

Let me explain.

I wanted to”Kraken of Eden” to be as plausible as possible in every way. My love of monster stories is always throttled by the implausibility of an alien with the digestive plasticity to munch our heroes, so I strove to describe a plausible alien ecosystem in which it makes sense for such a thing to evolve. I wanted to explore a culture that includes interstellar travel at relativistic speeds rather than faster than light travel. I modeled colonial population growth models.

You get the idea.

As much as I love science fiction, one of the many things these stories gloss over is why we’re out there in the first place. So, I applied what I’ve learned about strategic planning from my professional career.

Organizations of any kind, familial, professional, governmental, resist change. The bigger the organization, the greater the inertia. When you’re trying to convince an organization to make a profound change, you can talk all day long about the benefits. You can show them graphs and charts about return on investment.

And it’s possible, though unlikely, that you’ll see the organization change.

But if you REALLY want to motivate an organization to make a profound change, show them pain.

We see this all the time. For example, some years ago, a number of large companies had significant accounting scandals, resulting in the passing of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002. Some years before that, a bank experienced a fire that destroyed key records, followed by a surge in companies investing in disaster recovery planning and infrastructure.

Technological upheavals are fascinating in this respect. Such upheavals bring competitive differentiation opportunities that cannot be ignored. Companies initially resist investment, then fear falling behind their competitors. Internal voices expressing concern about novel security attack planes are ignored until spectacular events inevitably happen, then get the funding they’ve been pleading for.

When you’re trying to predict when an organization will make a strategic change, you have to ask when it will hurt enough.

Which brings me back to being a near term pessimist and a long term optimist.

As I envisioned a future that would include “Kraken of Eden”, I wanted it to make sense that humanity has spread throughout our solar system and begun colonizing nearby star systems. Certainly, one can envision the excitement of discovery. The return on investment that could be realized harvesting natural resources beyond Earth.

So, why haven’t we built commercial facilities on the moon? Why haven’t we done more with Mars?

Of course there are technological hurdles to overcome and we can argue about whether the potential return on investment would be sufficient.

But as I pragmatically looked at what it will take for humanity to expand beyond Earth, I found myself thinking about pain.

The human population is growing unsustainably. As our numbers continue to grow, as we, collectively, move more and more people from poverty to a middle class lifestyle that has a significantly greater ecological footprint, we continue to replace non-human biomass with the biomass of humans and our familiars (e.g., pets, agriculture, and vermin) and continue to change the climate.

I realized that, if you’d asked me, say 30 years ago, what kinds of events would be so profound that they would, finally, motivate us to act, I would have listed things like recording, year after year, the hottest years on record. Measurable sea level rise. Desertification. Increasing frequency and intensity of storms leading to the proposal of Category 6 hurricanes. Significant and ongoing declines in worldwide insect populations. Coral bleaching and the level of oceanic warming we’re seeing around Florida. The inevitability of zoonotic transfer pandemics.

In other words, I would have listed things that have already happened.

So, when I say I’m a near term pessimist, I mean that I fear the next hundred years or so may be quite challenging. “Kraken of Eden” characters reflect back on mass extinctions, pandemics far worse than Covid-19, famine, drought, …

I fear we’re going to learn just how painful things will need to get in order to motivate real change.

But I’m also a long term optimist.

Because I believe that we will get through the next hundred years. I believe we will, finally, expand beyond our Earth, and that great wonders await us out there.

It saddens me to accept that, given current life expectancies, I won’t be here to experience it all.

The best I can do is write novels that are as plausible as I can make them, and experience the wondrous future that awaits us vicariously through my characters.

While they avoid getting munched, of course…

Of Snail Darters and Spotted Owls

At the risk of self-aggrandizement (not my intent; I’m proud of my humility!), I wrote “Kraken of Eden” with a commitment to plausibility that I believe is rare in speculative fiction, and I hope that my readers recognize and appreciate it.

That commitment included addressing why we’re out there in the first place.

Sure, we’ve seen speculative fiction include ‘pulls’ like mining projects.

But I’ve done a lot of strategic planning over the years, and one of the things you quickly learn is that ‘pulls’ may get you from ‘no’ to ‘yes, someday’, but nothing gets you from ‘yes, someday’ to ‘yes, TODAY’ like a good, solid ‘push’.

So, what will, finally, push us to initiate colonization beyond Earth?

I believe that ‘push’ will come from the dire consequences of our relentless population growth.

Some readers may remember the spotted owl controversy of the 1990s. Spotted owls of the Pacific Northwest were designated a threatened species, leading to legislation to protect the owls that, in turn, protected the forest, which impacted the lumber industry.

Spotted owls are far from the only species protected by controversial legislation. Another famous example was the snail darter, an innocuous little fish that blocked a Tennessee dam project.

There were, and still are, those that question the sanity of inflicting economic pain to protect these species. Who, they ask, really cares about an owl or a snail darter?

While I’m sure conservationists care about each species, the reality is that protecting such species is often but a means to an end. The spotted owl, for example, lives in old growth forest, but there isn’t a legal structure available to protect old growth forest. But the endangered species act does facilitate protecting an endangered species, and if protecting an endangered species protects an ecosystem, then the most expedient way to protect an ecosystem is to protect an endangered species that relies on that ecosystem.

Those that wonder why we should care about spotted owls might now say, fine, if it’s not about the owls, then why should we care about the ecosystems?

In 1798, Thomas Malthus published his ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’, pointing out that human population grows geometrically while our food production grows arithmetically.

He predicted catastrophic ramifications in the near term, including famine.

But his timing was poor. The catastrophes he predicted didn’t happen, largely due to improved food production resulting from agricultural advances and the Industrial Revolution. The result was lasting popular ridicule of Malthus and, to a degree, a lasting skepticism about the consequences of human population growth.

But it’s worth stepping back to consider his observations on a grander scale.

Consider a hectare of pristine wilderness. Consider the biodiversity of that hectare. How many plant and animal species live out their lives in that hectare? What is their net biomass?

Now, imagine it cultivated. Biodiversity is significantly reduced to the crop species we’ve planted and the very limited number of weeds and vermin that manage to evade our advances in herbicides and insecticides, targeted fertilizers, and crop strains whose productivity and resistance to pests are improved through selective breeding and even genetic engineering.

So, yes, Malthus failed to predict agricultural advances that continue to allow us to produce more nutrition per hectare than he ever imagined.

But at what cost?

Let’s consider two ecosystem qualities related to biodiversity.

As biodiversity decreases, so does stability. If a hectare is cultivated to grow a crop, and that crop is impacted by disease or adverse environmental conditions, that hectare’s biodiversity will crash.

As biodiversity decreases, so does carrying capacity, the amount to biomass an ecosystem can support. Carrying capacity increases with biodiversity, so while increasingly sophisticated agricultural methods produce more food per hectare than Malthus ever dreamed, the overall biomass of each hectare is reduced.

A hectare of high rise residential buildings may contain a lot of biomass in the form of humans and their familiars (e.g., pets, potted plants, and vermin), but every gram of that biomass is supported through the conversion of land to agriculture and every hectare of land converted to agriculture reduces the biodiversity, biomass, and stability of that land.

If we could presume that carrying capacity were a constant regardless of biodiversity, then we could assume that increasing the human population would come at the expense of competing species. Every additional gram of human biomass would be one less gram of wildlife, wildflowers, etc.

But if carrying capacity decreases with loss of biodiversity, we compound that impact. Every additional gram of humans and our familiars comes at the cost of more than a gram of other living things.

As our population grows, as we convert more and more wilderness to agriculture and urban development, we are not only replacing more and more non-human biomass with human biomass, we are also reducing the carrying capacity and ecological stability of an ever larger percentage of our world.

And this effect is compounded when societies achieve the otherwise admirable goal of lifting people from poverty to middle class lifestyles that have dramatically higher ecological impacts.

So, while Malthus failed to appreciate the near term implications of the agricultural advances of his time, he wasn’t wrong when he pointed out that we are on a path that is not sustainable.

In “Kraken of Eden”, our heroes look back on a history that includes dire consequences during the 21st and 22nd centuries. Consequences we are already witnessing. Mass extinctions. Climate change. Increasingly severe weather. Famine. Drought. Pandemics. As one character says, we realized that, if we didn’t take steps to reduce Earth’s human population, Earth would do it for us, and quite unpleasantly.

I can remember, over the years, conducting strategic planning workshops and raising an important question when attempting to predict when an organization would make a major change in their strategic direction.

I asked, “Does it hurt enough yet?”

I have no doubt that humanity will, as described in “Kraken of Eden”, spread through our solar system and then nearby stars.

I have no doubt that, when we do, we’ll work to restore the Earth as best we can, but how long it will take, and how different a restored Earth will be from the one that nurtured our species, will depend on the level of pain required to finally push us to the stars.