Life and Living and Science Fiction

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is all about life and living. That’s the beginning, the middle, and the end of it. That all became clearer to me when I began thinking about writing a science fiction novel.

I’ve been a fan of science fiction ever since I learned to read.  I am from the age where we were still feeling the ripples from Sputnik and hard science fiction was the main attraction for nerds like me.  When I started writing, I decided I’d like to turn my hand to it, and when I was a kid, I wrote some really horrible science fiction short stories.  They don’t exist any more.

But now, having lived long enough to maybe know something, I’ve been thinking about writing a novel and have been reading a lot of science fiction novels in order to prepare for this.  I’ve read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy; I’ve read Iain M. Banks “Culture” books; I’ve read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s books; I’ve read Alistair Reynolds books; and, of course, The Expanse series.

All good. But...

They are good, but they get to a point where they use something akin to magic.  This is usually to circumvent the speed of light limit that would make travel between stars an affair that takes years.  The ones who keep the speed of light as a hard and fast speed limit then invoke something about freezing people while they travel through the depths of space.  That sounds plausible, but the truth of the matter is that if you can “wake someone up” after having frozen them for 20 years, you also have the power to raise the dead.

In addition, speeding a spaceship up to even a tiny fraction of the speed of light requires a tremendous amount of energy.  And when you get to where you are going, you have to slow down again.

All of this to say, I don’t find any of that plausible.

And I want to write something that is realistic.  Well, as realistic as it can be while still being science fiction.

All of this having been said, it brings me to an essay that Isaac Asimov wrote in 1960 which was titled “Stepping Stones to the Stars.”  It has been almost fifty years since I read it, but essentially he was saying we could gradually make our way outward to other stars through the Oort Cloud, which is a collection of icy bodies that surrounds our solar system.

In the setting that I am creating for this possible future novel, mankind would begin by setting up mining and industry on the moon.  We would then make space platforms for farming and other manufacture.  Then we would move out to the asteroid belt, out to the moons of Jupiter and the other outer planets, out to the Kuiper Belt, and out, as Asimov suggests, to the Oort cloud.

A key part of this that I brushed by pretty fast is the farming platforms.  Those will be key. And this is the part where I start talking about living and life.

Remember, it’s all about living and life.

Mankind cannot exist as a species in isolation.  We are part of a much larger, very tightly intertwined whole.  We are part of the tapestry of life.

So if we raise crops on space platforms, we will need the plants, of course.  But the plants will require soil.  Soil is not just rock, it has all sorts of organic matter in it.  Organic matter is a delicate way of saying poop.  For the poop you are going to need animals.  The animals will have their own particular needs.

All of this to say, you can’t just take up seeds to plant on a space platform.  You are going to have to take up a whole ecosystem.  You can’t just move Man into space: You have to move Life into space.

Space does not seem to be very friendly to life, at least not the sort of life we are used to having around us here on Earth.  Because of this, it seems to me, that if we ever really have a culture that does move into space, they will all have to be very mindful of Life.

It seems to me that they would all have to have a realization that it’s not just them.  Each individual is part of a larger, indivisible whole, that tapestry of life I was talking about.

But then I think no.

Because we are now living in space, but instead of a thin metal wall separating us from the vacuum of space, we have a thin layer of atmosphere.  Some do think about it, but most people just go on about our lives oblivious to the fact that we are dependent on other people, on other organisms, on systems and ecosystems that we simply take for granted.

In any case, I’ve been thinking about life and living and how it might manifest itself billions of miles away from the Sun, and how to set a story there.

Hope you are having a good summer.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Chisels and Philosophy

By Bobby Neal Winters

As those of you who follow this space know, I am now deep down the rabbit hole of woodworking.  So you can imagine how thrilled I was the other day when my grandson wanted to borrow one of my chisels.  I was thrilled, that is, right up until the point I discovered he wanted to use it to break open a geode.  

Now, one could, conceivably, use a wood chisel to break open a geode, but any woodworker reading that sentence just cringed. Wood chisels must be kept with sharpened, polished blades that can shave hair from your arm.  Such edges do not long survive repeated violent contact with stone.

Luckily the request was made over the phone because I myself visibly shuddered when I was asked.  I informed my daughter, through whom the request was conveyed, that it would be a sin to use a wood chisel in such a way. 

Different plans were made.

There are chisels for wood and chisels for stone. Who knows, there might be chisels that could be used for either, but not in my workshop.

Looking back on this, I ask myself why I had such a strong reaction?  Why would any serious woodworker have such a strong reaction.

Let us explore this.

There is a mysterious relationship between Man and the World. Man has a power. It is the power of creation with the Word.

A scalpel lying on a table is just a shiny object by itself.  If a caveman were to walk into the room, he might be attracted to it because it was shiny.  He might accidentally cut himself with it.  Given time, he might be able to use it as a weapon or even a tool.

A surgeon, by way of contrast, could immediately use it to save a life.

What is more, if there were no scalpel, the surgeon, having been educated, would be able to take a piece of metal to a machine shop and have a scalpel made to his personal specifications and then use it to save a life.

When I try to imagine how our ancestors invented the knife, my guess is that somebody came upon a piece of flint that had been broken in some manner and discovered that some pieces were sharp.  She discovered that the flint shard could be useful in cutting things into smaller pieces.  Eventually it was discovered that you could break the flint yourself and form it into more convenient shapes: knives, axes, spearheads, and chisels.

At some point they quit thinking about these things as being just sharp pieces of stone, and put specific names to them.  With the name came a lot more than just a label.  The name comes with the idea of how to use it and various levels of skill in various different traditions, changing with the particular user.

I guess what I mean to say is that the name of an object points in two directions: one is to the object and the other is to the practice of using the object. I’m loading a lot on the word practice there because there are a lot of ways of doing anything.

I find myself as a member of a woodworking tradition that makes use of the chisel.  Within that tradition, importance is given to the chisel being sharp.  There are those who use whetstones, those who use diamond stones, and even those who use sand paper. During the course of a project, if I find the edge of my chisel getting a little dull I will stop and take it over to the leather strop to burnish the edge a bit.

Those particulars aside, in this sense a chisel lives in the people who know how to use it as much--or more--than it exists in metal.  A chisel is a human thing.  I began this article saying I was happy when I thought my grandson wanted to come into the honorable brotherhood of chisel users but horrified when it was the wrong kind of chisel user.

Well.

Well, today I will be making a trip to Home Despot[sic].  While there, I think I will go over to check the price of the stone chisels. It might not hurt to have one around.  And if someone learns how to use one tool, it might lead to using another.

Who knows?

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Three Rings

By Bobby Neal Winters

Man is a tool-making animal.  We have tools for everything.  We even have tools for contemplation.  Among those are the Borromean Rings.

For those of you who don’t know what the Borromean Rings are and would rather drive than look them up on Wikipedia, I suggest driving down Euclid Street on the block just west of Walnut.  That is where St. Peter’s Episcopal Church is.  

St. Peter’s is as lovely a little church as ever was.  It has two circular stained glass windows in the gables of its southern exposure.  The one on top features Borromean Rings.

They are a religious symbol, but they are also a mathematical object.  I’d never heard of them until I was working on my doctorate in topology and picking up a little knot theory as I went.  To be precise--and that’s what we mathematicians do--the Borream Rings are not a knot; they are a link.  They are a link, each component of which is an unknotted circle.  What makes them special to mathematicians is that no two of the circles are linked together.  It is only in their totality--with all three together--that they are linked.

As you might guess, it’s the last part that engages with religion. They are used as a symbol of the Triune God.  Each piece is a perfect circle which represents eternity.  The fact that the components don’t form a link when any piece is missing, symbolized the unity of the whole.

If you aren’t into church, you might be familiar with them from Ballantine Beer, which uses them as a symbol.  Ballantine Beer was bought by the Pabst Brewing Company and is still available.  So you can drink beer, get religion, and learn about math all at one time.

I’m thinking about the Borromean Rings now in connection with a woodworking project. I am making boxes.  And, of course, that is all any woodworker or carpenter does, but these are special boxes.  They are Bible Boxes.  The idea is that you make a box for someone to put their Bible into, a special Bible.  Maybe one that has been in the family for a long time and needs a bit of protection.

The Bible is a tool we use on our journey toward godliness. Even though we don’t worship the Bible--and we shouldn’t--we do revere it.  Reverence for an object requires mindfulness and taking care.

It occurs to me that I am using the word “Bible” in a couple of different ways here.  There is the Bible as the ancient collection of literature in the Christian Tradition, but there are specific copies of it.  You can’t put the first one in a box; indeed it has a long history of not being contained.  You can put the particular ones with memories and family histories in boxes.

In making my latest Bible Box, it occurred to me that I could decorate it appropriately.  I first had the idea of putting a cross on it--and I may eventually do this--but that seemed too simple.  I thought of maybe decorating the Cross a bit, fitting in INRI around the center.

But then I was inspired.

The Borromean Rings.  They were symbolic of the whole Bible, both Old and New Testaments.  They also had special mathematical meaning to me.  Wherever this box winds up, there will be that visible connection to the mathematician who made it.

Of course I’d never actually carved anything like that on a box before.  I’d put the first letters of my grandson’s first names on boxes I’d made for them, but this was a bit more complicated.

The first step in doing a carving like this on wood is realizing that there are ways to do it.  As a dedicated Okie, that is the first hurdle I always have to overcome. 

Given there is more than one way, you then need to pick one of them. (I follow the method of Mary May on YouTube.)  This requires special tools, yet another set of chisels.

Then you draw a picture of what you are going to carve on the wood you are using.  As these are circles, I used the dividers I have that help me to measure my dovetails to scratch the circles in the wood.

Then I started carving, after having sharpened my carving chisels.  You have to show them the proper reverence.

I actually carved three of them.  The second looked better than the first and the third looked good enough to use.

The box is almost done.  In fact, it could be called done now. I could plop an old bible from my mother-in-law’s family in it right now and be done.  There’s a little voice in my head that’s telling me to line it with velvet, so I reckon I’m going to have to do that.

Everything was easier when I was just making boxes to store my own stuff in.  This being reverent is hard.

While doing the Borromean Rings, I saw how I could do the Trefoil Knot, yet another symbol of the Trinity, so I’ve already started on that project.

I will say this: It has been a tool for contemplation.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Missing Submersibles and Mass Shootings

By Bobby Neal Winters

A few weeks ago, a small submersible vehicle went missing in the North Atlantic.  Aboard were a few people who were very rich, at least most of them.  At about the same time, a boat filled with migrant workers sank in the Mediterranean.

Guess which of these got the most intense coverage.

You don’t have to.  Even someone who pays as little attention to the news as I do couldn’t miss the coverage on the missing submersible.

There were many reasons for the asymmetric coverage of the two events.  One of these is that it is interesting when bad things happen to rich people.  Two camps separate out from the crowd immediately: Those to hate rich people and those who hold them in awe.

Another reason is that the missing sub had very dramatic connections such as cutting edge technology and the Titanic.  Had they been trapped on the bottom of the sea and rescued, one could imagine a movie.

But I think that the overriding reason it got more attention than the boat in the Mediterranean was the number of people.  We have the capacity to worry about a small group of people. Five or six people in a submersible; three people in an Apollo capsule; 30 men in a mine.

But Stalin was right about one thing: “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”

Once the number of people involved in a tragedy passes a certain threshold, we lose our ability to fully connect, to empathize.

When I thought about the folks in the submersible, I could imagine myself in there with them, being a part of that small group.  I could do this even though I am not rich--though to quote Dorothy Parker, I think I would be quite good at it. I could imagine myself being there because we humans are good at attaching ourselves to small groups.

To restate this, each of us can more easily see ourselves as a part of the story if the story has a particular character to it.  This is something that has been brought to bear on the problem of gun violence.

Before I go any further, I want to make it clear: gun violence is a problem; mass shootings are a problem; school shootings are a tragic problem.  All of that said, the political movement to reduce gun violence is being structured in a way that makes use of the way we emote.

When there is a school shooting, it is inevitably accompanied by discussion of gun control versus Second Amendment Rights.  Discussing things is good.  It’s better when they are discussed intelligently.

In recent years, there have been between 40 thousand and 50 thousand people a year killed by guns in the United States.  

This is a problem.

Only about a 10th of those are people under the age of 19.  Don’t get me wrong.  Even one dead child is too many.  But school shootings are not where the bulk of the deaths are.

Of the 48 thousand gun killings in 2021, 26 thousand of them were suicides.

This is a problem.

Now we don’t hear much about this from the press on a case by case basis and for good reason: Suicide is catching.  People in the wrong frame of mind hear about a suicide and it gives them ideas.  They see how to make themselves a part of a story.  This is especially a problem with young people.

Instead, we have chosen to have our conversation on gun violence whenever a school shooting or another mass shooting happens.

And we do need to talk about this because it is a problem, but as with suicides, this gives some people who are in the wrong frame of mind a story they can put themselves into.  You get more school shootings.

Given the density of guns in this country, I would despair of ever reducing the number to a safer level.

But there is most definitely a problem. 

I am one to try to light a candle as opposed to cursing the darkness.  Let me offer two ideas.

The first one is gun safety education.  It should be required before licensing for gun ownership.  Having a license to have a gun should be viewed as being as normal as having one to drive a car.  And before you go all Second Amendment on me, it says “A Well-Regulated militia.”  Having a license based on taking a class like driver’s ed is a part of being well-regulated.

The second one is that we need to do more with mental healthcare.  We need to normalize counseling. Having a healthy mind will lead to having a healthier body too.  But more to my point, it would reduce the number of people who are in a frame of mind that would make them more liable to commit either suicide or a mass shooting.

I don’t look for either of these to happen anytime soon because the political parties are more interested in short-time fundraising than long-term solutions.

But that is just my opinion, of course.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 The Words of a Sad Country Song

By Bobby Neal Winters

Music has an amazing power to move your emotions.  In my case, country music can have a strong effect on me.

The other day one snuck up on me.  It was a song that is at least a decade old that I’d never heard before. “If I Die Young” by the Band Perry came on:

If I die young, bury me in satin,/

Lay me down on a bed of roses,/

Sink me in the river at dawn,/

Send me away to the words of a love song.

Suddenly there were tears running down my cheeks and I was wanting to hold all of my daughters close.  I wiped my face, and I felt better, and the thing is, I hadn’t even realized that I’d needed a catharsis.

You need to have a catharsis every once in a while.  You need to bleed the sadness off.  If you aren’t careful, you might wind up in your garage drinking whisky and cleaning your gun when “Cats in the Cradle” comes on.

I’ve got certain songs that I will use to evoke certain moods.  “If I Die Young” is now on my list for when I need to cry. It joins “Red Dirt Girl” by Emmylou Harris, which can reach into my chest through my ribs and squeeze my heart:

She loved her brother I remember back when/

He was fixin' up a '49 Indian/

He told her,? Little sister, gonna ride the wind/

Up around the moon and back again/

He never got farther than Vietnam/

I was standin' there with her/

When the telegram come for Lillian/

Now he's lyin' somewhere/

About a million miles from Meridian

I’ve noted that a large number of the songs on my sad list are by women. I wonder if this is because the female of the species is around us for our most vulnerable moment?  They are there for us when we are born. They are there for us when we die. They even teach us how to use the toilet.  In doing this, do they learn the pathway into our hearts or do we, by virtue of having experienced them in these intimate times, learn to trust them with our pain? 

Am I just generalizing my own experience?  Do I just like women? Or is this just a sampling bias?

One thing they seem to have in common beyond being female is that the songs they write tell a story.  They are good at it.

They are artists who paint with words.  In “Ode to Billy Joe” Bobbie Gentry wrote:

And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas/

Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense,/

pass the biscuits please/

There's five more acres in the lower forty I got to plow/

And Mama said it was shame about Billie Joe, anyhow/

Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge/

And now Billie Joe MacAllister's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

I can see that. I’ve been at that table. I’ve passed those blackeyed peas.  I can smell the biscuits.  She puts me there; she makes me feel the pain; she convicts me of my sin.

To be sure, there are men who do this.  George Jones’ song “He Stopped Loving Her Today” (written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman) tells a story with amazing economy:

Kept some letters by his bed/

Dated 1962/

He had underlined in red /

Every single "I love you"/

I went to see him just today/

Oh but I didn't see no tears/

All dressed up to go away/

First time I'd seen him smile in years

But for every song like that, there’s one to match it that’s written by a woman.  And the women aren’t ashamed to be manipulative. Dolly Parton has exhibited this ability herself from time to time:

She was just a little girl, not more than six or seven/

But that night as they slept, the angels took them both to heaven/

God knew little Andy would be lonesome with her gone/

Now Sandy and her puppy dog won't ever be alone

It is easy to be cynical about this. Manipulating our emotions to sell a song, to make a dollar.  Catharsis for cash.  If so, I am okay with that, but then I don’t think there is anything wrong, per se, with sentimentality.

I’d mentioned George Jones above who owns “He Stopped Loving Her Today” by his interpretation.  To match this, Erinn Peet Lukes of the bluegrass band Thunder and Rain does a cover of Guns and Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine” that takes it to an entirely different place.  As she is a woman, someone, we--or at least I--have an easier time believing she’s singing about her own child.

As I’ve mentioned interpretation, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Patsy Cline. I don’t know whether she ever wrote a song or not, but she owns everyone she's ever sung.  

Anyway, I’ve been baptized in my own tears with the aid of these songs.  Even though I neither drink whiskey nor clean my guns in the garage, I should be safe for a while lest “Cat’s in the Cradle” should come on.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.