Author Topic: EP276: On a Blade of Grass  (Read 37354 times)

ElectricPaladin

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Reply #50 on: January 31, 2011, 12:18:10 AM
I really do like the ideas presented in this piece. I'm currently imagining a fantasy setting in which the magical powers are granted by a parasite infestation.
Like the Goa'uld?
Remember, any sufficiently advanced technology can be perceived as magic.

WARNING! The following will only be understood by Stargate fans.
Plus, without the Goa'uld one would not have Naqahdah in their blood and could not use the technology.
Granted the Goa'uld are referred to as symbiots, but only if you are a Jaffa. Otherwise the relationship is parasitic. True the host gains phenomenal strength and longevity, but the host is actually a prisoner in its own body, without control of anything. Thus rendering the relationship parasitic.
I am not a biologist, but iirc the definition of a parasitic relationship is that the host gains nothing, even loses from the relationship, and the parasite only gains. One could successfully argue that in the case of the Goa'uld all benefits to the host are superseded by the fact that the host has no control over the body.

On the other hand, from a Darwinian perspective, this could be considered a beneficial relationship. After all, from a biological perspective, "control of your body" doesn't really matter if your super strength and longevity lets you have tons of babies and conquer worlds.

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tinygaia

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Reply #51 on: January 31, 2011, 01:36:48 AM
This was an interesting idea. I came over here from Podcastle, so I've been remiss in my science fiction education and the idea of mind-altering parasites was a new one by me. I would like to say the idea did not leave me quivering in paranoia, but that would be a lie. Sure, my old lit theory professors would debate whether this was an actual "story," but it's a good piece of writing and it made me think anyway. Also, more kudos to Matt for the great narration.

Now I have a decision to make: I can look up the other parasites folks have helpfully mentioned in this thread, or I can take the blue pill and live a life less disturbed by creepy science...



kibitzer

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Reply #52 on: January 31, 2011, 01:39:57 AM
Now I have a decision to make: I can look up the other parasites folks have helpfully mentioned in this thread, or I can take the blue pill and live a life less disturbed by creepy science...

Blue pill!! Blue pill!!


goatkeeper

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Reply #53 on: January 31, 2011, 05:53:24 AM
... The story broke the rule of "Tell v. show."...

Hell, this story is one big EXAMPLE of how to "tell" and not "show".

God, rules suck.  We only really need a handful of them to get by, the rest always seem to fall on some convoluted bureaucratic spectrum between 'generally relevant/beneficial' and 'thinking hurt-- me follow blinking arrow now.'
Show vs. tell is a catch phrase that I'm convinced has ruined more good stories being read than bettered bad stories being written.  A novel, novella, short story, flash story--  no one-size catch phrase fits all.  You can get away with anything if you can get away with it. 



eytanz

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Reply #54 on: January 31, 2011, 08:34:00 AM
... The story broke the rule of "Tell v. show."...

Hell, this story is one big EXAMPLE of how to "tell" and not "show".

God, rules suck.  We only really need a handful of them to get by, the rest always seem to fall on some convoluted bureaucratic spectrum between 'generally relevant/beneficial' and 'thinking hurt-- me follow blinking arrow now.'
Show vs. tell is a catch phrase that I'm convinced has ruined more good stories being read than bettered bad stories being written.  A novel, novella, short story, flash story--  no one-size catch phrase fits all.  You can get away with anything if you can get away with it. 

The thing is, "show vs. tell" doesn't even apply here - to the degree that the rule is valuable, it applies to third person omniscient narrators, not to dialogue. Characters are always allowed to tell other characters stuff.



iamafish

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Reply #55 on: January 31, 2011, 09:42:59 AM
It doesn't even necessarily apply to exposition (although it does to a certain extent). It's mostly a rule against telling is what the characters are thinking and feeling and what the reader should be feeling. Sure this story could have worked by showing us how the parasites worked, but that would be an entirely different story.


Kanasta

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Reply #56 on: January 31, 2011, 02:39:03 PM
I liked the ideas in this story, but it didn't quite hang together for me. Surely parasites don't sit down and plan how to best get into a sheep's gut (or wherever their personal goal may be). Over time, evolution means that the parasites that are most successful at reaching their goal, breed more, and pass on their characteristics, etc. This development relies on success. These parasites have so far had one success only at getting humans eaten by Phages. How have they bred to this evolutionary stage? Or is the point just that they are very intelligent, self-aware and near immortal (because if they have to breed in an alien's stomach, this must still be the same generation that arrived here whenever), and have been stranded on Earth for hundreds of years trying to get back home (to a Phage's gut)?



Max e^{i pi}

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Reply #57 on: January 31, 2011, 03:29:20 PM
I liked the ideas in this story, but it didn't quite hang together for me. Surely parasites don't sit down and plan how to best get into a sheep's gut (or wherever their personal goal may be). Over time, evolution means that the parasites that are most successful at reaching their goal, breed more, and pass on their characteristics, etc. This development relies on success. These parasites have so far had one success only at getting humans eaten by Phages. How have they bred to this evolutionary stage? Or is the point just that they are very intelligent, self-aware and near immortal (because if they have to breed in an alien's stomach, this must still be the same generation that arrived here whenever), and have been stranded on Earth for hundreds of years trying to get back home (to a Phage's gut)?
It was these questions that prompted my original post. (top of this page)
I surmise that (based on the theory presented in the story) we are part of a macro-organism the size of the universe, or less ambitiously, we are living time at a far faster rate than other beings. In either case, the span of time that humanity has been around for is less than one generation for this cosmic parasite. In which case the people that got eaten by the phages have passed the parasite on to its next stage of life, and it can reproduce.

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Unblinking

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Reply #58 on: January 31, 2011, 06:47:29 PM
... The story broke the rule of "Tell v. show."...

Hell, this story is one big EXAMPLE of how to "tell" and not "show".

God, rules suck.  We only really need a handful of them to get by, the rest always seem to fall on some convoluted bureaucratic spectrum between 'generally relevant/beneficial' and 'thinking hurt-- me follow blinking arrow now.'
Show vs. tell is a catch phrase that I'm convinced has ruined more good stories being read than bettered bad stories being written.  A novel, novella, short story, flash story--  no one-size catch phrase fits all.  You can get away with anything if you can get away with it. 

Yes!  And the "rules" of writing, are not so much rules as "general guidelines to help noobs not sound like noobs", primarily to be more likely to push a story past the slush.  Pratt is no noob.  He knows how to write, and write well, and one benefit of having a well-known name and wide publishing history is that getting your name past slush is less of an obstacle.  I am certain that he knows these general guidelines, and has made the choices he made consciously.  This story wasn't amazing, but I'd say that's just because it wasn't my thing, not because Pratt has broken a rule that writers are bound by.
 



Dem

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Reply #59 on: January 31, 2011, 09:02:09 PM
Loving the debate about showing v telling, rules v noobie constrainers and the rest. What really matters is the skill of an author in telling a tale, however that is constructed. When you read it yourself, it tends to liven up if there's dialogue bumping it along. But if it's read - and who has not had a story read to them - it's about the telling and the teller, with dialogue taking second place. I often have a different view of a story depending on whether I hear it or read it and it's causing me to think about writing for podcasts as a different craft from writing for personal reading.

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Gamercow

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Reply #60 on: February 01, 2011, 02:40:47 AM
a little Gilbert Gottfried

That's exactly the voice I got, and I thought it was awesome.  Your reading, and the fact that it was Tim Pratt writing the story, made this more than just a glorified wikipedia post on parasites.  I did say to myself "Hmm, I wonder if Tim wrote this while Heather was pregnant?  Her doctor told them about toxoplasmosis, Tim went to the internet, got lost in one of those tv tropes/wikipedia/whatever rabbit holes that happens to the best of us Tim said 'Hey, that might make the basis for a good story',out came this story.  Not quite up to his usual great stuff, but not a bad story. 

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Mercurywaxing

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Reply #61 on: February 01, 2011, 04:56:11 AM
This story reminded me a lot of Radiolab's (factual) episode on parasites, especially the section called "The Scratch".  In fact, I kind of wonder if it inspired the story.

Here's a link to it:  http://www.radiolab.org/2009/sep/07/

I couldn't help but think that as well.

Really, this was not much of a story.  The issue wasn't that it broke "show don't tell."  There was no character arc, not conflict.  Or what conflict there was existed so far out on the edges that it hardly mattered.  Contained in the story was a great science idea but there was nothing behind it other than stating and clarifying the science.



Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #62 on: February 01, 2011, 05:40:30 PM
Here's an interesting blog post on yet another way parasites affect the behaviour of their hosts.  In some species of spiders, bacteria cause a greater proportion of a mother spider's eggs to be female than they would be otherwise.

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Umbrageofsnow

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Reply #63 on: February 05, 2011, 04:45:06 AM
I have to point out that the parasite is a lot more plausible than some of you seem to think.

It doesn't actually have to be extraterrestrial to make us want to go into space.  It just has to make us desire exploration and seeking new things and new places.  To go where no man has gone before, etc.

Such a trait could be desirable in any species that might have tightly defined territories, it could be evolutionarily advantageous to make people want to leave their normal territories.  And some species of ape are pretty territorial I think?

Damnit Jim, I'm a microbiologist, not a primatologist.  Once we talk about monkeys, I'm lost.

P.S. I am sort of *FORBIDDEN WORD DERIVED FROM THE SIMPSONS* on the story overall.  It wasn't a very good story I think, but the dialogue was snappy and it was blessedly short.  I won't remember this very well, but I didn't lose interest either.
« Last Edit: February 05, 2011, 04:49:54 AM by Umbrageofsnow »



Kanasta

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Reply #64 on: February 05, 2011, 07:07:48 PM
But wasn't the point that it was making us want to go into space in order to specifically get into the Phage's gut? Perhaps I misunderstood...



iamafish

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Reply #65 on: February 06, 2011, 12:42:15 AM
I think the point of making humans explore was to get it into some other animal's gut. The example in the story was exactly that, an example of this in action.


Scattercat

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Reply #66 on: February 06, 2011, 01:04:46 AM
I think the point of making humans explore was to get it into some other animal's gut. The example in the story was exactly that, an example of this in action.

And the reason that makes no sense is that we haven't had enough interaction with extraterrestrials for parasites to evolve to use both of our species as transmission vectors, hence my dismissal of the crazy parasitologist's hypothesis.



iamafish

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Reply #67 on: February 06, 2011, 02:11:03 AM
but it would still work with regard exploration on earth. Maybe the extend to which humanity is exploring in the story is too much for the parasite. It's being screwed over my its own nature combined with humanities capacity for intelligence. When working on species that cannot explore beyond their local area because they physically cant, the parasite is successful, but the fact that humanity is intelligent enough to break those usual bounds means that the parasite becomes less effective.

Of course I'm going off script a little with regards to the story, but I think the idea of a parasite that forces exploration is plausible. Perhaps this story simply failed to convey the idea accurately. I can't remember it ever being stated the extra-terrestrial exploration was the intention of the parasite, just exploration in itself.


Scattercat

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Reply #68 on: February 06, 2011, 04:33:48 AM
The idea of a parasite causing a particular drive in humanity is not impossible.  However, before we go looking for a parasite, we should rule out the possibility of an innate cause.  We don't need parasites to cause us to want to eat or mate, do we?  And it turns out there are quite logical reasons why an enjoyment of novelty would be helpful for an intelligent, hunting omnivore.  Therefore it's not a good point of research even if we limit ourselves to the strictly terrestrial.

Now, if we had a subsection of the population showing abnormal or pathological preference for novelty - say, refusing to eat the same food twice, or being unable to remain stationary long enough to mate successfully - at that point we might start positing outside causes and trying to look for them.  However, there would have to be a specific population; individual weirdness is impressively variable, and there's always the possibility of good old homegrown psychopathology.

Basically, if we know there is a parasite, we can try to determine what effects it has (toxoplasmosis), and if we see truly aberrant behavior, a parasite might be one of the theories we posit to explain it ("Hey, that ant is climbing grass stems instead of going home for the night.")  Neither of those fit the parameters of the parasitologist's theory in the story, and thus I was dissatisfied with the plot qua plot, since the entire story is just the explication of this unsound theory and then a vaguely suggestive ending.



iamafish

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Reply #69 on: February 06, 2011, 04:48:51 AM
agreed. It's an overcomplicated explanation to a phenomenon that needs no such explanation.


Kanasta

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Reply #70 on: February 06, 2011, 04:24:48 PM
but it would still work with regard exploration on earth.

How? By enough humans getting eaten by tigers or another type of predator?

What I don't like about this type of "Just-So" story is that it helps spread a rather distorted view of evolution - that it is a kind of variant on Intelligent Design. There is no intelligence behind evolution; those that are best suited to their environment survive longer and breed more and therefore pass on more of their characteristics, which therefore over time, become more common. When I was a kid I found evolution really hard to understand because it was explained in terms like "The giraffe evolved to have a long neck so it could reach the leaves on high trees" and I would ask "But HOW does the giraffe know to grow its neck longer?". It doesn't know; it's just the ones with shorter necks are more likely to die from starvation and less likely to breed. To me, this story relies on a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of evolution.



iamafish

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Reply #71 on: February 06, 2011, 09:31:49 PM
Could you explain how the story relies on such a distorted view (not saying you're wrong, it's just that I'm a history student, so science isn't my strong point)


Umbrageofsnow

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Reply #72 on: February 06, 2011, 11:14:16 PM
Could you explain how the story relies on such a distorted view (not saying you're wrong, it's just that I'm a history student, so science isn't my strong point)

I'm willing to say he is wrong actually.

Also, humans don't need to be eaten, such a parasite could evolve out of a need for humans to poop further away from home, for example.

Kanasta has the proper view of evolution, and I likewise am frequently annoyed by people assuming there is an end goal or plan beyond have-more-sex and make-sure-your-babies-survive-to-have-more-sex.

But the story, and the concept of this hypothetical parasite are compatible with this correct view of evolution.  As I tried to point out above, the parasite doesn't have to actually be driving us into space.  An efficient parasite doesn't kill the host, but keeps it alive long enough to spread.  Too many parasites in one host are more likely to cause illness (they compete for resources within the body), so a parasite that is the first of it's kind inside a give host individual has an advantage over a parasite inside a host with others of its kind, as that animal will be able to carry more of that parasite, drop more eggs that match its exact genetics, while not being much more likely to die.

So it is to the benefit of parasites to spread into as many new individuals as possible.  Which is why most tend to get pooped out as larva, rather than living fat and happy in one animal for all time.  Lots of hosts is a good plan.

We know that several parasites are able to influence motivations and tendencies and various mental functions of their hosts.  An advantageous (for the parasite) change to host behavior is just as selected for as anything else.  So if exploration could be advantageous as I pointed out earlier, then it could very well be selected for.

I don't recall the story informing us that the parasites were extraterrestrial, just that the drunken parasitologist thought their purpose was for us to end up in alien stomachs.  But that doesn't need to imply design.  I've heard plenty scientists anthropomorphize the shit out of things they know aren't sentient.  Up to and including the desires of electrons.  I took it as just a thing he said.  The parasites don't need to have planned for this, that is just the desire they ended up looking like they caused.

Weird reasoning I guess, but it really didn't strike me as preplanned.

Oh, and any parasite with enough distribution through our population to effect the growth of civilization wouldn't cause deaths or extremes of behavior or whatever as Scattercat suggested is silly.  If we are that highly infected, how would we see it as extreme.  It would just be that normal was much less adventurous than the human average appears to be.  Maybe extremes would have cropped up in Mesopotamia or a cave somewhere, but certainly not noticeable today.  And likely such a drive would have been helpful to humans too (societally if not geneticall), right up to the point where we got eaten by aliens.

Sure, it is a simpler to assume humans evolved that drive on our own.  But maybe parasites made it stronger.  Or maybe this makes a better story.  I don't know that I'd have given this guy funding if I were on the NSF board, but I don't have the problems with the story a lot of you guys seem to.



Kanasta

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Reply #73 on: February 06, 2011, 11:20:58 PM
Sure, what I mean is, the real life parasites don't get together and plan how to make an ant climb a blade of grass, then mix up some chemical in a lab that makes ants more adventurous. A creature with a parasite in them may be affected in many ways, I guess it's something to do with biochemical interactions but I don't know the actual mechanics. But having a foreign organism in you is going to have some kind of effect.
For example, there's a parasite in Africa called the guinea worm that infects people via drinking water. People get infected when they drink standing water containing a tiny water flea that is infected with the even tinier larvae of the Guinea worm. Over the course of a year in the human body, the immature worms pierce the intestinal wall, grow to adulthood, and mate. The males die, and the females make their way through the body, maturing to a length of as much as 3 feet, and ending up near the surface of the skin, usually in the lower limbs. The worms cause swelling and painful, burning blisters. To soothe the burning, sufferers tend to go into the water, where the blisters burst, allowing the worm to emerge and release a new generation of millions of larvae. In the water, the larvae are swallowed by small water fleas, and the cycle begins again when someone collects drinking water from the river.
The guinea worm didn't plan to cause great pain so that the host had to seek relief in a river. But the worms that reached adulthood at a smaller size probably caused less pain. So maybe their larvae would just be wiped away when the blister burst, and they wouldn't always get the chance to reproduce. SO only the larger ones got released into the river, and reproduced, generation over generation passing on their attribute of being large and painful, until you get a worm that changes people's behaviour in an obvious way, by causing them so much discomfort that they are forced to go where the worm "wants" them to. But it didn't plan it. It gradually evolved to have that effect on humans.
For this story's premise to work, generations and generations of humans would have had to be infected, some of them been eaten by aliens, some of them not eaten and their parasites died, some of them eaten by predators not quite so welcoming for the parasites to reproduce in, and the most successful parasites (whose host were eaten by aliens) would have reproduced the most, then the parasites from these aliens reinfected more humans etc etc.

PS Looks like I was writing this at the same time of  Umbrageofsnow! I would agree with what you, apart from this story (to me ) says that the whole point is getting the humans eaten. Maybe it isn't but then if it isn't it's a bit of a boring story! I actually prefer the story about the parasites plotting to get humans eaten by aliens, it just bothers me on a scientific level. *sigh* I liked this story until I thought about it too much, now I just don't know...  ::)
« Last Edit: February 06, 2011, 11:30:57 PM by Kanasta »



Umbrageofsnow

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Reply #74 on: February 07, 2011, 01:15:35 AM
Three cheers for overthinking things to death!  It's my specialty. 

It is kind of neat if they plan things.  You know this whole thing would work out if we were to assume sufficiently anthropomorphic aliens.  What if we have a Star Trek-like progenitor race, which, once upon a time effectively seeded the galaxy with similar life?  (It's a common justification for using Forehead Aliens on TV).  And what better kind of citation is there?

If enough species had related brain chemistry, then either the parasite could be seeded through space deliberately, either to attract food or to encourage expansion by the progenitor race, or it could have evolved such a cycle given sufficiently many inhabited worlds and a means for ending up floating free in space again to colonize new ones.  (Assuming enormous timescales).

My attempt at justification.
« Last Edit: February 07, 2011, 01:18:45 AM by Umbrageofsnow »