(Somewhat Spoiler Free)
If you want to read the story, rather than analyze it, you might want to just come back to this in a couple of years, at least closer to book three.
I had begun writing this serial web novel, I wanted to write about people as individuals, dealing with the influence of invasive culture. I wanted to focus on each individual as a singular conscious being, rather than on some omnipotent collective byproduct unified cultural consciousness. Finally, I wanted to deal with the individual notion of gender without constraint for the cultural misapplication of gender identity as it is shaped by the biases of any given ideology. This story I started to work on wasn’t going to be about war, or death and killing, and certainly not a traditional ‘hail the conquering heroes’ story line. Life bounces around, each person is such a powerful individual in their own right, I wanted my novel to feel like life, and for each person to be as real and interfaced with the story and their part in it as possible.
Because of this, I found myself fighting a war of words against the unintentional use of labels, many of which were abstract in notion. Some of the labels: android; nonhume; hume, for instance, were necessary but limiting. Some of the labels, such as straight, queer, lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, monogamous, and polyamorous, as well as their proposed slurs, parallels, synonyms and antonyms, simply confused the real power behind the person being described, and the entire concept of gender identity, as established in the normative labeling of people of choice, as well as ‘him’, ‘her’, and ‘it’ proved problematic. Humes, for instance, are by nature polyamorous creatures. We cannot, despite the biases of our culture, survive without each other, and we certainly cannot survive on the love of just one person.
I had intended to write a novel in which individuals were seen as units of pure social equality, despite their uniqueness, and because of it. My characters are all surviving as part of a standalone system around which competing systems of corruption, ignorance, and discrimination often interfere. These systems are local, national, international, and even trans-planetary in nature. A person, in the context of this novel, is any sentient being in which a sense of individual self exists. The uniqueness of person, therefore, is increased exponentially when nonhume sentient species and androids enter the picture. Whether that uniqueness is sexual, physical, or even specific in nature, I worked hard to address each person as an individual, and then allow that person to evolve and develop toward their inevitable selves.
Perhaps the most ambitious notion proved developing behavior of the less hume and completely extraterrestrial minds within the text. Redefining the hume biased perspective of the android, for instance, proved at times quite frustrating. Though we don’t have a true sentient android yet, it will only be a matter of time before we humes, lonely as a species, and lonely as individuals, seek out the common mechanical alliance by creating a kindred creature of metal and circuitry. It should not be surprising that our androids will, in many ways, be very much like us, and that alien androids would be more like the species creating them. In order for humes to relate to (hume) androids on any level, the typical android’s consciousness must, therefore, be patterned after a hume mind.
The problem arises with two realizations. The first is that even androids made by the hume race are not hume, and indeed, they will not think with the same forms of irrationality as humes. This is not to say that androids will not exhibit irrational behavior. Anybody who has owned a computer and watched it crash for no apparent reason, only to never have it crash again, knows the potential for irrational behavior in machines. Add sentience and the ability to form and defend an opinion and one can imagine the dangerous complications one might run into. How much emotion an android can experience, for instance, was one of the topics I tried to explore when dealing with various android minds. As androids can essentially self replicate (the biomechanical equivalent to cloning) or reproduce through interactions with one or more androids to produce a new android, it must be considered that androids are essentially, for the purposes of this novel, a divergent and living species, despite their origins. At minimum, they will have motivation to survive, improve upon, and carry on their own cognitive and engineered line, so there will be both conceptual self-preservation and procreation instincts.
Even should one choose to ignore the android’s basic drive to reproduce, we find ourselves with the potential for love between species. Can an android love a hume? If their mind is patterned after the mind of their creator, and they are often created to serve one specific hume, wouldn’t android love, however it is expressed, become inevitability? I found it more difficult to cross this path of special synthesis than I did to try to express the motivations of extraterrestrial and hume interconnections — especially when the nonhume sentience from off-world isn’t even a humeoid, and the only connection to the hume counterpart is an unexpected psychic link that occurred simply because the two grew to love each other at an early age, entirely through telepathic contact.
The motivations of an advanced nonhume species is often assumed by writers to be very much biased like a hume mind, as if any living, sentient being would have the same motivations as a hume trapped on a planet with other humes. Having already addressed this weakness with androids, it is not surprising to find the problem further compounded when no real hume element can be put into the character. It would be highly unlikely that ‘aliens’ would evolve on worlds that humes could survive on without some considerable adaptation, either through technology or genetics, and it would be a far stretch to assume that they would evolve cultures that used the same collective and oppressive strategies currently employed by hume corporate governments to maintain a colossal status quo among their kind. It is doubtful that even a hume-like extraterrestrial sentient species would share any of the basic hume motivations at all, and perhaps even more doubtful that a hume-like alien would evolve in the first place.
As the characters developed and grew, and their relationships evolved, other problems began to arise. Some characters love more than one person, some more than one gender, and some characters even love more than one species. Swift’s species doesn’t even define the emotion of love in hume terms, and there is no concept of monogamy amongst Swift’s species, nor polyamory as humes would define it. Nor are the Bugs swingers, for that matter, as their sexuality is not tied to rigid gender, and as, for the best part of the definition, their species hasn’t a dual gender biology. Some characters have undefined or evolving relationships. All these relationships, these connecting interactions between hume, inhume, and extraterrestrial species, between lovers of varying gender and gender identity, all that proved so necessary for the psychological survival of the characters, is constantly stressed by those seeking control of resources and power.
When reading this serial, consider that there are forces within the various cultures of humeity that seek to define what is properly ‘you,’ what is properly ‘I,’ and what is properly ‘them,’ to limit individual behavior, to establish a normative ‘us’ to the exclusionary of an unwanted ‘them.’ They determined who you were before your mind even developed, before your mind decided whether you would like boys, or girls, whether you felt yourself to be a ‘boy,’ a ‘girl,’ or something else entirely. They determined who the ‘them’ was, and who the ‘us’ should be, and what they would be allowed to look like, think, and do. They who define the ‘us’ and the ‘them’ resist change to the point that individual ‘you’ cannot exist in a separate state. ‘They,’ in trying to make ‘you’ an ‘us’ may choose to define you through surgery, depending on where you’re at: They might choose to cut your genitals to look a specific way, because you were born physically a boy, say in the United States, or a girl, such as is still practiced at the time of this writing in many parts of the world; Be born somewhere in between boy and girl, and in some countries you might find yourself facing a knife that will sterilize you of one aspect of gender, even at the cost of your own physical orgasmic pleasure and genetic continuance.
Your skin color, your sense of gender both physical and sexual, your personal sense of cultural existence, and your ability to question all of it, is put in constant check by a system that wishes to extract from you the resources it needs for continued perpetuation of other people’s dreams. ‘They,’ after all, are quite hume and therefore are primarily concerned with the perpetuation of themselves. These other peoples’ dreams are so fragile, apparently, that they have little room for acceptance of those not born in a condition of normalcy and compliance, nor can their dreams survive in a world where appearance, personality, and gender, both preference and physiology, can survive outside the cultural norm.
Consider that who you are now, as opposed to who you want to be, was determined by your specific culture and society long before you were ever born, and that your personal dreams, if they deviate from what is expected of you by society, might cost you food, shelter, association, life, livelihood, and very often love. If you had no influence from those sources of conformity, if you could live isolated with a small handful of loyal friends who understood you and accepted your rational and irrational states, and did not care about how society would attempt to define you, would you, by choice, remain who you are now? If you did not have to conform with, say, the work dress code, because there was no dress code, would you dress more fashionably, would you wear pants every day, a skirt? Would you show up in clothes at all? Would you only have one lover? If you had more than one lover, would they both be the same sex, or outwardly express the same gender? If conformity is hume nature, then what about creative thought? Where does our need to self-express come from, and why is it so necessary for us humes to repress it?
Working forward, I found myself unable to answer these questions, but merely to ask more as I worked on the characters in this story. I had hoped, somehow, to create some sense of closure on hume behavior and the global hume condition. What I ended up doing was writing about characters who have no real concern for the global condition, because their frame of reference is so much more broad than the cultural influences of just one world. So as a writer I ask you to take the middle ground and read this piece, as it evolves, and as it is intended: for the sole enjoyment of reading a compelling story with equally complex characters. Characters with hang ups and responsibilities far more complex than most of us would ever know.
