PC230: Little Better Than A Beast

[kibitzer]

I think there's only two Tim Pratt stories I've really enjoyed and this wasn't one of them.

(FWIW, I loved "The Christmas Mummy" and "From Around Here", the latter about which I am seriously biased as I corralled a full-cast audio-productiuon of that one).

Not sure why but I didn't find any of the characters compelling. Not detestable or morally bankrupt or anything like that -- not compelling. I didn't care what happened to any of them. And I think I find "out of the ordinary" endings becoming a feature of Pratt stories so I'm both less surprised and less satisfied by them.

And what kind of solution is long-term incarceration anyway? That's little better than sending the Beast forward in time -- postponing the problem for someone else to deal with. I mean, look what happened with holodeck Moriarty!

[Unblinking]

I think there's only two Tim Pratt stories I've really enjoyed and this wasn't one of them.

I think there's only two Tim Pratt stories that I HAVEN'T really enjoyed.   

[Wilson Fowlie]

I'm not saying he's right. Or that Marla is right. I'm saying that according to their world view and their morals they are right.
And who are we to judge?

Whoa, wait, what?!

Everyone has that point of view - according to their own world view and values, what they do is right, to them. That includes Genghis Khan, Napoleon, the Columbine (and similar) shooters, abortion clinic bombers, Idi Amin, Joseph Stalin and Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Because they all had a world view and 'morals' that supported their actions. And therefore, we aren't to judge them?

Sorry, can't get there.

[ElectricPaladin]

I'm not saying he's right. Or that Marla is right. I'm saying that according to their world view and their morals they are right.
And who are we to judge?

Whoa, wait, what?!

Everyone has that point of view - according to their own world view and values, what they do is right, to them. That includes Genghis Khan, Napoleon, the Columbine (and similar) shooters, abortion clinic bombers, Idi Amin, Joseph Stalin and Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Because they all had a world view and 'morals' that supported their actions. And therefore, we aren't to judge them?

Sorry, can't get there.

Bingo.

I like to call myself "a moral relativist with balls."

Yes, the world is subjective and there is no absolute wrong or right.

Yes, I still think that I'm right and you're wrong. I can prove it, too. And if I can't prove it to you, and I think you're wrong enough, I have no compunctions about using the authority at my disposal to compel you.

Morality is relative. The world we actually live in is absolute.

[Scattercat]

Well, not necessarily.  Under the best theories at our disposal, the world we live in actually appears to be fields of probability interacting in unimaginably complex ways, and thus reality actually has wiggle room, of a sort.

[Wilson Fowlie]

Well, not necessarily.  Under the best theories at our disposal, the world we live in actually appears to be fields of probability interacting in unimaginably complex ways, and thus reality actually has wiggle room, of a sort.

Like.

[Devoted135]

Well, not necessarily.  Under the best theories at our disposal, the world we live in actually appears to be fields of probability interacting in unimaginably complex ways, and thus reality actually has wiggle room, of a sort.

And you teased us for discussing SOP naming protocols?

[Max e^{i pi}]

I'm not saying he's right. Or that Marla is right. I'm saying that according to their world view and their morals they are right.
And who are we to judge?

Everyone has that point of view - according to their own world view and values, what they do is right, to them. That includes Genghis Khan, Napoleon, the Columbine (and similar) shooters, abortion clinic bombers, Idi Amin, Joseph Stalin and Nicolae Ceaușescu.
Because they all had a world view and 'morals' that supported their actions. And therefore, we aren't to judge them?
Sorry, can't get there.

But all of the people that you mentioned are home sapiens sapiens. They are human beings like you and me. Their thought patterns are very similar to your thought patterns and mine. They may have had some kind of psychosis or some methodology for explaining, at least to themselves, why whatever theydo  is justified. And if we were to sit down with those people with an open enough mind we might be able to understand those justifications. Probably not agree with them, but at least understand them.
Furthermore, those actions all took place in a human culture, one which we (somewhat) understand, and which does have its own set of rules and morality code. Even if not everybody agrees to each and every one of the rules.
However, the people in the story are not humans. They don't live in a human culture and society. Their lifestyle and thought process is so far removed from our own that we probably can't even understand why they do things they do, even if they were to try to explain it to us.
For all intents and purposes, people with magical powers are not really human. More than human, less than human, neither more nor less just different from human... it doesn't matter. We can't hold them up to the same morality scale that we hold to ourselves.
Just like we can't judge chest-bursting aliens, we can't judge wizards. We're out of our frame of reference, we have no yardstick to measure them by. We're just too different.
And not different in the way that a libertarian is different from a fundamentalist. But different in the way that monkeys are different from whales.
There just is no similarity. They're both mammals, but that's about it.

[Scattercat]

Why does the ability to do magic make someone not human, but the power that comes with massive wealth or at the head of a dictatorship doesn't?  If the power to hurl fireballs makes one inhuman, surely the power to have, say, ten random people off the street shot to amuse you does, too.

[Max e^{i pi}]

A definition of what makes you human is a pointless argument in semantics.

But just as our thought patterns today, when we live in a world immersed in technology, would be unfathomable to a swine-herding serf from the ninth century, so too would those of a magically advanced (like technologically advanced) society be to us.
"Indistinguishable from magic" works both ways. Our technology looks like magic to the serf, and it has shaped our society and ourselves so much that we may not be able to understand how he thinks, and certainly won't be able to understand how we think. So too, a society that is advanced magically would shape and form their thought patterns so that we would be unable to understand them.

[Scattercat]

I disagree.  Human nature is human nature; I've never read a history book and gone, "My God, what would possess them to do THAT?"  Even cultures that are very different from my own and involve values I emphatically do not hold (raiding/looting adventurers a la Vikings, or feudal Japan), I can still *understand* the drives.  As I am today, I wouldn't disembowel myself with a dull katana to clean my family's honor, but I can understand the concept of honor in that context, and I understand attachment to family and altruism; I can follow the logic of a man who made such a choice and confirm that it is internally consistent.

Your hypothetical serf might not ever be able to earn his electrician's license or lecture on the structure of the atom, but I bet he'd be able to understand a nuclear disarmament treaty and why one might be necessary.

(Not to mention that you introduced the discussion of relative degrees of humanity, so claiming it as a derail is a trifle disingenuous.)

[Max e^{i pi}]

Your hypothetical serf might not ever be able to earn his electrician's license or lecture on the structure of the atom, but I bet he'd be able to understand a nuclear disarmament treaty and why one might be necessary.

Perhaps. But could you explain to him the concept of intellectual property rights? Can you make him understand why people would be forced to pay millions of dollars for copying lines of code? Or what that code is and how it works and why some people think it needs to be protected by law?
Probably not. Those are all very new concepts, and strongly grounded in our information-based society.
So too I can't be expected to understand what it is that motivates magicians. If our society is information-based, theirs is magic-based. They may have their own codes and rules and regulations regarding magic and the use of it that I can't be expected to understand, since I don't live in such a society.

And speaking of derailing, my original point was that perhaps these people see mental illness as a crime (or vice versa) and therefore are perfectly justified in doing what they did. In a magical-based society, where one's mind is the most powerful weapon there is, perhaps they need to be extra careful of mental illness. Or perhaps their worldview is structured so that to commit a crime is to be mentally insane.

[Scattercat]

I'm confident that, once I explained to the serf the basic functionality of things like the internet and so on (and I don't argue this wouldn't take a long time), that I could also explain why there is a fight about intellectual property.  I'm not saying I'd convince him to start his own PirateBay or something - in fact, I expect someone from that time period would think the whole mess was very silly and would insist that paying for anything that isn't a "real thing" is foolish - but I think I could at least explain what the various sides believed in such a way that he could understand it.

As far as the idea that this world has criminalized insanity, well, one would think, given that a non-magical author is writing this story for non-magical readers, that were such specific mores intended to be encoded as part of that culture, they would be demonstrated or elaborated upon in some way so as to make them less jarring.  We've seen many stories featuring cultures with wildly different ideas of propriety and appropriate responses, but I don't see anything in this story suggesting that its intent was to explore that sort of alternate worldview; Marla seems very grounded in the "real world," as far as such matters extend.

[Unblinking]

People are people, magic-using or not.  And this particular world is not terribly far removed from ours, using magic in the way that technology would be used in ours, so they don't even feel very foreign.

[Fenrix]

Well this isn't the discussion I expected to find. In the intro I understood that this was a YA story, and as such, characters and motivations tend to be flattened into a single theme. I would have really like to see more from Malkin. Since he's so smart, I would have expected that he withdrew to a conservative mental distance then worked to build political ties and regain his rightful office. But this isn't Game of Thrones. Sit on the porch and relax a bit, y'all. You're gonna make yourself sick if you stay stressed out like this.

Also, I think people are underestimating the intelligence and cleverness of peasants. To wit:

ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake, [angels sing] her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. [singing stops] That is why I am your king!

DENNIS: Listen -- strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

ARTHUR: Be quiet!

DENNIS: Well you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

ARTHUR: Shut up!

DENNIS: I mean, if I went around sayin' I was an empereror just because some moistened bink had lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!

ARTHUR: Shut up! Will you shut up!

DENNIS: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.

ARTHUR: Shut up!

DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! --- HELP! HELP! I'm being repressed!

[kibitzer]

ARTHUR: Shut up! Will you shut up!

DENNIS: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.

ARTHUR: Shut up!

DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! --- HELP! HELP! I'm being repressed!

That exchange is one of my favourite comedy pieces EVAH!

(Also, The Argument sketch is just brilliantly witty. I'm gonna stop now before the thread devolves further away from the topic and proves Godwin's law)

[girlwithsixarms]

I'm a rather late to the party, but after reading through the thread, I wanted to jump in with my two cents.

This was my first exposure to Marla Mason, so I might be reading too much into the setting, but I'm inclined to come to her defense. The means in which Marla neutralized Malken were questionable, but but I think her reasons for doing so might have had some validity. Aside from his other flaws, Malken's first priority seemed to be convening all of the magicians to take power from Marla rather than to address the issue of the Fellport beast - that right there gives Marla a leg up on 'protecting the city' in my book.

Aside from that, I don't think it can be taken for granted that Marla would be able to prevent Malken from taking power. It's mentioned pretty early on that Granger, despite being inbred to the point of mild retardation, is guaranteed a permanent council seat and since Marla's dagger of office is an item of power, it's possible that things like Granger's seat are also assured by powerful magical means rather than pure politics. Given that, Malken might be able to unseat Marla fairly easily and then use his power however he wished. Given his priorities and that he all but promised to make Marla his concubine, I can't really blame her for wanting to prevent that from happening.

As for Marla taking out Malken in a magical duel, I don't think she could have. She talked about time magic being serious juju and (I believe) admitted that she wasn't able to do it herself, so it's possible that Malken may simply have been more powerful than Marla and her only option was to get the jump on him with something quick and dirty.

I don't believe that Malken was a racist, chauvinistic asshole because he was simply a product of his times. It's mentioned that his contemporaries thought he was rather terrible, both in accounts and as ghosts. Other people mentioned that Marla may have taken Malken out because of his potential to do harm to the modern population of the city and I think that's a valid position. I also think that it doesn't really matter that Marla was a woman, Malken seems the type to reclaim power in Fellport regardless of who's in charge and he just seized on Marla's sex as the easiest and most obvious (for him) justification to do so.

So no, what Marla did wasn't right, but it was (to my mind) reasonably justified.

[danooli]

girlwithsixarms, you've hit the nail on the head.  Each nail, in fact.  I hope you pick up the books, because they really are a whole lot of fun.  Maybe even two lots. A Kickstarter for the eight installment was funded in a day and a half, just this week!  There are tons more short stories too, and each Tuesday, Tim Pratt is posting a new one on his website. Here's this weeks, which was the first. http://www.timpratt.org/?p=1628

[Max e^{i pi}]

And speaking of derailing, my original point was that perhaps these people see mental illness as a crime (or vice versa) and therefore are perfectly justified in doing what they did. In a magical-based society, where one's mind is the most powerful weapon there is, perhaps they need to be extra careful of mental illness. Or perhaps their worldview is structured so that to commit a crime is to be mentally insane.

Remember this? It turns out that the author himself holds just such a speculation.

The Blackwing Institute didn’t treat diseases of the body, but it contained the diseased in mind — specifically wielders of magic who became a danger to themselves, and others, and occasionally reality. The Institute was funded by prominent sorcerers, who recognized madness as an occupational hazard, and knew they might find themselves in need of treatment some day too.

BBCode is being stupid so I'll post the link to the source of that quote here and not in the quote tags.

[childoftyranny]

At this point I'm mostly impressed by the amount of discussion this story provoked, after listening to it I simply moved on as Marla is basically a type of hero I don't find interesting, the kick-assery sorts tend to leave me looking for another hero.

The most interesting thing I see looking back is that I totally overlooked how terrible the way Malkan being locked up really was, in hindsight I can see a lot of offense to take but I really just read him as a "person-to-be-hated" in the story, which is perhaps unfair.