Recently, my commute home was significantly delayed. Why, you ask? It seems that my local transit company will not allow passengers to board a train if that train is even slightly on fire.
Forcing me to use an alternate mode of transport, even though the seat on which I had my eye was in no way engulfed in flames—not yet, anyway—may seem like the greatest injustice in the history of the world. Not so. Nanny states are forever inflicting on their citizens health and safety standards, on the specious pretext that not dying is in some obscure way conducive to longer lifespans…
Science fiction writers have the courage to imagine better worlds, worlds in which people are free to make their own rational decisions, untroubled by intrusive regulations and, in some cases, the information necessary for due diligence. Consider these five rousing tales…
“The Dead Past” by Isaac Asimov (1956)
[First published in Astounding Magazine; collected in The Edge of Tomorrow, among others.] Historian Arnold Potterley is convinced that Cathage’s reputation for child sacrifice is the product of Roman propaganda. Access to a time-viewing chronoscope would allow Potterley to resolve the matter one way or another. To Potterley’s intense frustration, he cannot convince the relevant authorities to grant him access to any government chronoscope.
No choice, therefore, but to join forces with physicist Jonas Foster in a bid to build a private chronoscope. In short order, they discover that the government has withheld certain important facts about chronoscopes, including the ease with which private chronoscopes can be built. A golden age of time-viewing is upon humanity…whether that’s a good thing or not.
Counterintuitively, the government actually had a good reason to want to restrict access to chronoscopes. At least they managed to delay the uncomfortable adjustment period that will inevitably follow cheap, portable time-viewers.
Black Easter by James Blish (1968)
Arms manufacturer Baines presents Theron Ware with a simple task: use black magic to kill two men, including the current governor of California. This is but a test: Baines has a considerably more ambitious project in mind and wishes to see if Ware’s skills are up to the task.
Baines’ bold proposal is to summon all Hell’s demons to Earth for one single memorable night. The results will surely be highly informative! And if the hosts of Hell prove too disruptive, surely it will be as easy to dismiss them as it was to call them up. Right?
The bad news is that some unforeseen implementation issues are encountered during the latter part of the project. The good news—although not the Good News, biblically speaking—is that the ending provided Blish with sufficient scope for a sequel.
The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson (1976)
Psychology graduate student Grottwold is certain his marvelous device did not disintegrate laboratory assistant Angie. Grottwold assures Angie’s fiancé Jim that Angie has simply been teleported to another universe. Furthermore, Grottwold believes he knows how to retrieve Angie. Probably.
Step one: more judiciously using the same machine that (probably) didn’t disintegrate Angie, Grottwold will dispatch Jim’s mind to the wherever it was that Angie went. Once he locates Angie, all Jim need do is induce the proper state of mind to trigger Angie’s return to Minnesota. This sounds straightforward, but it fails to take into account certain unforeseen complications, such as Jim finding himself trapped in the body of a dragon.
The plot is driven in part by Jim and Angie’s struggle to find affordable accommodation, a problem that is definitively resolved by the end of the novel. The problem is two-fold: Minnesota rents are high1 and Jim and Angie’s wages are low. Presumably someone has addressed the housing issue in the decades since the novel was written.
The Silver Spike by Glen Cook (1989)
The Dominator, a vastly powerful, malevolent sorcerer, has been defeated. The Dominator cannot be killed. He can and has been sealed away in a silver spike hammered into the side of a divine tree. As long as nothing happens to the spike, the world is safe2.
Leaving a perfectly good silver spike imbued with pure evil stuck in the side of a god-tree is basically begging some visionary entrepreneur to retrieve and sell the spike. Just ask Old Man Fish, Tully, Smeds, and Timmy, who waste no time before launching what will be the boldest heist of their careers. Or at least the final one.
Readers might wonder if it would have been more prudent to place the Dominator in something more commonplace than a silver spike—a simple ring, say. However, the silver spike incident is the second time someone fiddled with bonds sealing the Dominator away. I would not be surprised if among the Dominator’s preparations was an ongoing spell compelling the weak-minded to free him.
Gehenna: Death Valley by The Becka (2017)
Marcie’s cunning plan to ensure Anika and Max’s inevitable romance by inveigling Anika and Max to join Marcie, Lauren, and Sean on a road trip had but one small flaw. The romance is entirely evitable. Anika and Max feel no sparks.
A welcome diversion from an increasingly tense road trip appears in the form of a sign that reads “Private Property. No Trespassing. Violators! You Will Be Shot! Survivors Will Be Shot Again!” No reason to post such a warning if there weren’t something extremely cool on the other side of it. The quintet are determined to find out what that extremely cool something is.
To be fair to the other teens, it’s not so much that the quintet is intrigued by the sign. Marcie is. Marcie has many obvious flaws but unfortunately for her friends, she has one notable strength: she can be sufficiently persuasive that four otherwise sensible kids will follow her past that sign.
Science fiction and fantasy abounds in courageous individuals who do not allow regulations, common sense, or even a basic survival instinct3 to sway them. The above are but five. Feel free to make the case for your favourite examples in comments below.
- We don’t actually find out what a proper one-bedroom apartment would cost because Jim and Angie cannot afford one, but an uninsulated, disintegrating mobile home rents for about 80% of Jim’s pay. If Jim and Angie want food, light and heat, that will be extra. ↩︎
- Safe from the Dominator. This is a world oversupplied with dire occult menaces. ↩︎
- In my defense, I needed new glasses, I thought the raccoon was an unfamiliar, perhaps feral, cat, so why wouldn’t I try to pick it up and pet it? Aside from it not being a cat and not wanting me within arm’s reach, the plan was perfect. ↩︎
Yes, this is thematically related to why I didn’t get to see the Incredibles in a movie theatre:
Hope you got a rabies vax after tangling with the not-cat.
The wee creature was more nimble than I was misguided.
I did once walk into a young raccoon as we both rounded a blind corner from opposite directions but I didn’t try to pet him and he didn’t bite me. In fact, we became nodding acquaintances, I continued to not pet him whenever we crossed paths, and he kept not biting me. Good for me, because he grew up to be a raccoon of considerable size.
My closest call was when I accidentally cornered a skunk. The music I was listening to hit a pause just long enough for me to hear the desperate hissing, and the skunk was too young to spray me. Oh, and petting a sleeping squirrel could have turned out worse for me than it did, because it turns out the gloves I was wearing would not have protected me from a bite. But it didn’t bite me, so that’s OK.
Perhaps it is time to mention that attempting to pet a feral cat can be a good way to end up in the ICU if scratched or especially bitten.
Dunno about in the Great Frozen North, but down here in California, the parks periodically put up signs not to pet the squirrels… because they carry plague fleas.
True. I remember the first time I was told and I scoffed. I thought the plague had been eradicated . . . but of course the fleas didn’t know that.
Read “The Dead Past”, probably in that collection, in 6th or 7th grade. It really stuck with me. Asimov came up with some nifty plots and ideas, pity his prose rarely got past serviceable.
I remember trying to read the Dickson when it first came out. Bounced right off it, though I don’t remember why. That was a time when I would read anything put in front of me so it must have been either pretty dire, or too weird. For middle-school me anyway.
Nor, alas, did his characters frequently get past cardboard. . . . at least his human characters.
Generally true, but a little less so in that story in particular.
“To hell with quarantine regulations!” is a popular category. Surely nothing bad can come of letting a crew member come aboard with a strange creature attached to his face.
In fairness, the 2nd in command did try to adhere to quarantine restrictions. It’s just that another crew member had ulterior motives.
It’s always been my (totally unfounded) opinion that Damon Knight wrote “I See You” as a reply to Asimov’s “The Dead Past.”
Doctors Jekyll and Frankenstein, and that fellow Griffin were operating in a time well before anything resembling health and safety regulations, so I suppose their exploits don’t really count.
The entire Star Trek universe depends on the widespread, reckless use of Transporter technology that simply has to be killing off the person entering the chamber, and nobody seems to care, despite lots of lip-service to human rights and all that.
Is there a single Marvel or DC superhero or villain who wouldn’t run afoul of one or more government agencies that regulate air travel, nuclear power, firearms, chemical toxins, or psychiatric test protocols? I doubt it.
The canonical explanation of transporter function coverts the body to a matter stream which is then transmitted to the other location and reassembled. There is no reason to think of that as killing anyone.
Generally if you disassemble a person’s body, it kills them, because life/consciousness isn’t a property of the individual particles, it’s in how the particles are put together into patterns. So what requires continuity is the pattern, not just the particles. Here’s my old blog essay arguing why transporters do allow continuity of self if it’s assumed they’re based in quantum teleportation:
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/on-quantum-teleportation-and-continuity-of-self/
You might find that a lot of people don’t agree with that (I’m not necessarily one — I just suspend disbelief — but I used it for the post because there is no shortage of commentary along those lines).
E.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
Bizarre formatting bug in the link for ‘Griffin’. Oh, well.
I just looked at the first appearance of a certain sneaky Norse god alongside Thor in Marvel Comics, Journey Into Mystery 85. He was trapped inside a tree after some previous misconduct until someone would shed a tear over him. Briefly, he cheated.
Side comments in the Silver Spike seem to indicate this is not the first Dominator to imprisoned using one of those magical trees/forest. Since these trees are sufficiently magical that they don’t spread on their own, this leads to the possibility that Dominators are merely the means used by the Trees to propagate themselves.
Sort of. Old Father Tree and the Sapling are implied to be interdimensional demonic entities, there are no nondemonic entities in the Black Company series, that happen to be relatively benign by the standards of the series. They’re still not good though. They’re parasites that when planted start to slowly warp reality on that world until it becomes almost completely hostile to native life. Their ability to seal extremely high magnitude wizards like the Dominator is useful to people and that makes mortals willing to plant the things on their world. There’s no indication that they actually need a Dominator to propagate though. It just provides a good excuse.
Quite a lot of sf seems to exist solely as a screed against regulation.
Not enough sf writers have seen people maimed by machinery operated without regard to safety regulations.
I had a friend who worked in a felt factory who quit the day he discovered the three guys who had had his job before him all lost a hand to the machinery he was working with. That was the 1970s so different safety regulations.
There was a short story, “Study in Still Life” by Eric Frank Russell, involving a bureaucratic mess and how a bright and tricky underling solved it. A man on a distant planet had requisitioned a radiation device for sterilizing insects; the req was going to be left unfulfilled because a superior officer had requisitioned whisky of some type. The bright and tricky underling modified the radiation device requisition and got the device delivered. Most of the story was tracking the requisition through layers and layers of bureacracy.
I’d actually like to see a Hollywood / Black Mirror version of The Dead Past that ignores Asimov’s suggestion that any government would protectively restrict this tool rather than horribly abuse it, and dives fully into the implications.
In the story, it’s clear that the government does secretly use it, but it’s insufficiently tyrannical to use it to its full potential.
I’m also regularly reminded how much the government agent’s “goldfish bowl” predictions re personal privacy came true sans time viewers, via ubiquitous cameras and social media.
In Heinlein’s Requium, a character deals with the regulations that he had previously imposed. In The Green Hills of Earth, the protagonist cites regulation to serve his purposes.
In <Em>The Dead Cat Tail Assassins</em> by P Djeli Clark, it the protagonist is in a bad odor with her Goddess because she killed a guy, <em>without being paid for it</em>. Then it gets worse, because she doesn’t kill someone she was hired to kill. Her only hope is convincing the Goddess of Knives that the client is actually the one who broke her rules, and thus should be the one to pay the penalty.
thank you so much for posting
Mikes Vorgosigan (Lois McMaster Bujold) always feels regulations and sense apply to everyone but himself.
The Retief novels are all basically clever man outwitting the horrible bureaucracy rules.
“The Cold Equations” comes to mind here also
Thanks for this article, it really made me laugh!