It’s a shame some expressions would be all squicky if I used them.

One that comes to mind is the instinctive, irrational and seldom realized idolizing cry of “Ohmigosh it’s N.N.! I love your work! I want to have your babies!”

(Well, that cry has other problems too; what if the target recoils and screams “You child kidnappers again? Guards!“, huh?)

Now, that “works” if the adorer is female and the (uh) adoree a male; but modify those and things won’t work well at all.

• Man to a man: “If I was homosexual and had a womb and all the requisite biological equipment, I would be deliriously happy if you impregnated me!” (Most probable answer: “Wait, what?” followed in some cases by “Let me ask my agent first.” or “Couldn’t you use some kind of a pouch?”)
• Man to a woman: “I adore you so much I would not mind if a cunning surgeon switched our genitalia and you made me pregnant!” (Probable answer: “Well, I would.”)
• Woman to a woman: “You, I and a sperm bank: what a dream it would be!” (Probable answer: “What a dream? Um, a bad dream?”)

Spare answers to most of the cases:

• “I don’t see how that would be biologically possible.”
• “Er, no.”
• “Okay; drop your pants and bend over.”
• “…and this is my life partner, Androgynia.”
• “I have been waiting for this.”
• “Hey, thanks for a nifty plot. Interested in co-authoring?”

Okay, that last one is much too improbable.

I wonder if there’s place for other extravagant expressions of utter adoration towards your favorite author/actor/august personage; such things are possible, but I haven’t heard them used.

• “If you were in a car crash, I would donate you my liver. Even if it killed me. I’ve already stopped drinking, just in case.”
• “I have made my flesh into a shrine to your genius. May I show it to you?”
• “I read on your blog you had a rash. I have very good skin. I want to give it to you. I’ve already reserved a plastic surgeon. Can I have your rashy skin, or do you want to keep it? I’m not greedy.”
• “Here’s my passport. I want you to have it so you have a secret identity. So if you need to leave the country after killing somebody, or something. Because if you did it, I’m sure they would have deserved it.”
• “Your books saved my sanity. Especially when you came to my dreams and spoke to me. Tell me; who do I dispatch of next?”

That is to say:

(Well, 23 days and 51 177 words, to be exact. Also a donation of $25.)

The monstrous product of mine was fun to write; and that was what I went in for. Now, since the thing’s in Finnish, it would not make much sense to share a chapter here — but since I’m in a jubilatory mood, I’ll throw a chapter at ya anyway. It’s the first one of the novel, and it is quite self-contained.

Since I’m feeling all flushed with some strange, unholy energy (Coca-Cola?), I put the same bit, roughly and quickly and almost sentence-for-sentence translated, after that. (Sentence-for-sentence is my excuse for the choppiness of the English version.)

So, feast your eyes on the weirdness that is the Finnish language: like backwards Latin with ten times the grammar!

* * *

1 : Probleema

Professori Taulupää huokaisi. Taas yksi taulapää opiskelija ovella koputtelemassa. Mitähän tällä kertaa? Kenties isosisko oli taas varastanut tietokoneen kiintolevyn, ja siksi matematiikan historian esseetä ei voinut vieläkään palauttaa.

Sisään astui naispuolinen, aran oloinen opiskelija. Tämä katsoi hermostuneena ympärilleen, nielaisi, ja sitten sanoi: “Anteeksi, mutta saako… äh, voiko tulla tyhmällä kysymyksellä vaivaamaan?”

Taulupään mielestä vastaus tähän kysymykseen oli jo melko selvä, mutta hän hillitsi halunsa olla eksakti ja pyysi tyttöä — naista? — istumaan.

Tämä istui, puristi toisella kädellä vihreän villapaitansa kaula-aukkoa, ja katsoi tiukasti Taulupään pöydällä olevaa artikkeliluonnosta. “Äh, siitä kyse. Nimittäin. Tarkoitan… äh, anteeksi, se Analyysin johdannon välikoe?”

Taulupää huokaisi. “Uusintatentti ensi torstaina?”

Tyttö katsoi ympärilleen rystyset valkeina. “En päässyt, äh, päässyt, tai siis, äh, tein jotain väärin?”

“Omasta koelapustahan sen näkee.”

“Mutta, äh, siis, että, anteeksi, mutta kun, niin, minun vastauksia ei ollut kansliassa pinossa!”

Taulupää huokaisi uudestaan. Juuri tällaisten tapausten takia hän oli hankkiutunut eroon koirastaan. Mitähän nyt oli tapahtunut? Olisiko tuulenvire vienyt tarkastettavana olleen paperin? Tai siivooja? Oliko hän käyttänyt sitä muistipaperina, tai nenäliinana?

Oli vielä flunssa-aika ja kaikkea.

Pitäisi pelata aikaa. “Hm, olisikohan se paperi unohtunut tänne — ” hän sanoi ja nousi etsimään. Helpompikin keino olisi: pyytää toista vain lähtemään, niin paperi löytyisi kolme sekuntia toisen lähdön jälkeen.

Tyttö hymyili yhtä vakaasti kuin vahanaamio ja odotti. Taulupää katsoi työpöytäänsä: papereita, artikkeliluonnos, kyniä, Unmöglichkeitin kirja, ja pieni japanilainen veitsi jota hän käytti kirjeiden aukaisemiseen.

Hm, olisi pitänyt laittaa nuo veriset talouspaperin palat jo roskiin tuosta veitsen vierestä. Saattaisivat vaikka pelottaa opiskelijoita. Mutta miten sitä muuten tietäisi että veitsi on terävä? Ja pieni tuska piristi kesken raskaan työpäivän.

Hyllyillä kansioittain kirjeenvaihtoa, mapeittain menneiden vuosien luentomonisteita, ja muutama poronluusta veistetty platoninen solidi.

Äh, Platonin kappale. Taas liikaa englanninkielistä kirjallisuutta. Pitäisi vaikka kuunnella radiosta, hm, vaikka liikennetiedotuksia suomeksi ettei menettäisi kosketustaan.

Menettäisi kosketustaan? Saattoiko suomen kielessä sanoa niin?

Suomen kielessä? Suomenkielessä?

Mistähän tällaisiin kysymyksiin saisi vastauksen? Yliopiston puhelinluettelo, ja siellähän se suomen kielen laitos oli, ja sen johtaja —

“Anteeksi?”

Taulupää hätkähti. Kuka tämä nyt oikein oli? Naishenkilö, istui tuolilla pöydän toisella puolella, vihreä villapaita, lyhyet tummat hiukset, huolestuneen näköinen.

Ei kai hänellä ollut tällaista tytärtä?

Ei. Eihän hän edes ollut naimisissa.

Ai niin! “Niin, hm, se koepaperi… olisiko se täällä… “

Molemmat läsnäolijat katsoivat yliopiston puhelinluetteloa hämillään; sitten Taulupää laski sen käsistään ja katsoi taas ympärilleen.

Haa!

Hyllyn reunalla oli uudehkon näköinen kansio, jonka selkämykseen oli vieraalla käsialalla kirjoitettu: “ympäriinsä lojuvat paperit.” Lupaava kansio, vaikkei hänellä ollutkaan muistikuvaa sen alkuperästä.

Ehkä siivooja?

Tai joku avulias jatko-opiskelija? Kuin vaikka, hm, Sukunimikö se oli se yksi… ei, se oli valmistunut jo, ja mennyt… jonnekin.

Taulupää pudisti päätään ja avasi kansion.

Mitä? Eikö hän ollutkaan lähettänyt tätä artikkelia Jour. Sci. Math. Acad. Res. Math:iin?

No, onneksi seuraava paperinippu oli hänen teräväkielinen protestinsa artikkelin huomiottajättämisen johdosta.

Ja seuraavana vihainen tiuskaus protestin huomiota jättämisestä… taas oli mennyt paljon hyvää närkästystä hukkaan.

Onneksi neljäs kirje ei sentään ollut kansiossa. Hyvä että jotain oli mennyt perille.

Ja siinähän sitä joku koepaperi olikin.

“Hm, olisiko se tämä — E. Sukunimi, Analyysi I:n ensimmäinen välikoe?”

Tyttö katsoi ympärilleen, mutta ikkuna oli lukossa ja ovi kiinni. “Sukunimi? Yliassistentti?”

“Ei sitten.” Niin, olihan tuossa päivämääräkin viidentoista vuoden takaa… vaiko kuudentoista? Mikähän vuosi sitä nyt…

Seuraava koepaperi. Milloinka hän oli tätä kurssia opettanut? Ja hirveä käsiala… mitä? Helsingin yliopisto?

Ai, sehän oli hänen oma koevastauksensa vuosien takaa.

Voi niitä aikoja. Silloin ei tarvinnut käyttöohjetta puhelinta varten, eikä silmälaseja —

Hm. Ei saisi antaa mielen harhailla. Seuraava paperi.

“Analyysin johdanto, ensimmäinen välikoe, Manuliisa Harkki?”

Tyttö nyökkäisi ja naurahti alistuneen masentuneena. “Minähän se. Tuliko yksi piste vaiko peräti kaksi?”

Taulupää hymyili — ilmeisesti se oli sovelias vastaele tuollaiseen äänensävyyn — ja katsoi paperia.

Jonka jälkeen hän mietti hetken, keksi mielestään soveliaan vastauksen, ja ojensi paperin tytölle: “Hm, no, tämä saattaa olla hyvinkin iloinen yllätys.”

Hän istui alas, ja tyttö katsoi paperia.

Taulupää hymyili hermostuneesti. Hänen olettamuksensa mukaan yllättävästi kokeesta saadut täydet kolmekymmentä pistettä olivat ilon ja, hm, niin sanotun huvin aihe, mutta tyttö vain katsoi paperia ja puristi villapaitaansa.

“Hm, eli taisitte saada täydet kolmekymmentä pistettä, mikä on käsittääkseni hauska ja iloinen yllätys. Että näin hauskasti kävi.”

Miksi tyttö ei nauranut?

Miksi tyttö sen sijaan vain puristi villapaitaansa entistä kovemmin, päästi oudon äänen, ja kaatui naamalleen pöydälle, päästäen oudon voihkaisun?

Tytön naaman alle päätynyt paperi värähti muutaman kerran, hengenvetojen tahtiin, ja sitten lopetti värähtelynsä.

Taulupää huokaisi ja sulki silmänsä. Tämä alkoi taas näyttää yhdeltä niistä ärsyttävistä tosielämän tilanteista missä hänen oletettiin jotenkin tietävän mitä tehdä, vaikkei sitä ollut missään koulussa opetettu.

Hän piti silmänsä kiinni ja mietti.

Ehkä tämä oli vain aistiharhaa? Sellaisen suhteen hän tietäisi mitä tehdä: olla hiljaa ja käyttäytyä normaalisti. Niin se psykologian laitoksen professorikin oli tehnyt, ja vasta kymmenen vuoden päästä olivat huomanneet ja vieneet pois.

Hän avasi silmänsä. Ei tyttöä. Tuoli pöydän toisella puolen oli tyhjä. Pöydällä ei ollut kenenkään päätä.

Pitäisi vain olla hiljaa, käyttäytyä normaalisti ja pysyä puruetäisyyttä kauempana jäniksistä, niin kaikki menisi hyvin.

Noin; asiat hallinnassa ja kahvitauon aika.

Taulupää nousi tuoliltaan, näki pöydän toiselle puolelle lattialle luisuneen tytön, ja kirosi hiljaa itsekseen.

Hän oli sittenkin järjissään. Ja juuri kun kaikki sujui niin hyvin.

Hän mietti hetken, mietti toisen, ja kirjoitti muistiin erään mieleensä tulleen matemaattisen kysymyksen.

Hän katsoi uudestaan pöydän taakse. Äh. Tyttö oli edelleen siellä.

Kauheaa. Kamalaa. Taas tällainen inhottava käytännön ongelma…

Tytön olkapään ravistelu ei auttanut: tyttö oli kuin luilla ja hiekalla täytetty säkki. Ei missään tapauksessa säkki jossa olisi kissoja tai mitään elävää.

Hengitystä ja muita elonmerkkejä Taulupää ei osannut ottaa. Hän mietti, ja sitten tarttui villapaidasta ja nosti tyttöä takaisin tuolia päin. Ehkäpä tämä toipuisi päästyään takaisin istuma-asentoon.

Noston puolivälissä tytön villapaita paukahti ja repesi. Taulupää, yksi luonnon luonnollisista väärinreagoijista, tarttui toisella kädellään ensimmäiseen löytyvään vielä tytössä kiinni olevaan vaatekappaleeseen, ja senkin revetessä huomasi seisovansa tytön päällä, puolikas vihreää villapaitaa toisessa kädessä ja tytön repeytyneet alushousut toisessa.

Hän mietti hetken sitä millaisen topologisen manööverin kautta oli tuohon toiseen vaatekappaleeseen tarttunut, mutta katsoi sitten jaloissaan olevaa puolialastonta tyttöstä ja kadotti ajatustensa punaisen langan.

Tyttö (Liisa jotain?) näytti nyt tajuttoman (kuolleen?) lisäksi pahoinpidellyltä, jopa päällekäydyltä.

Taulupää huokaisi ja huusi sihteerin apuun.

* * *

(Just one note about something I can’t quickly translate: the professor’s name, Taulupää, is a letter away from taulapää, “dried fungi firestarter dry stuff headed person”, a traditional word for a dunce; but the word taulu by itself is a common abbreviation of liitutaulu, “chalkboard”, meaning a blackboard, which are reasonable common round here. It’s all a plot of giving this character a faintly ridiculous name, and introducing him in such a fashion as I do, to make certain transformations all the more shocking.)

1 : A Problem

Professor Taulupää sighed. Once again a dunce of a student at the door, knocking. What would it be this time? Maybe the knocker’s sister had stolen the laptop’s hard disk or some similar thing, and thus the history of mathematics essay could not be returned.

A girl stepped in; young, shy, a student. She looked around, hesitated, and then spoke: “Er, sorry, but… ah, can I trouble you with a stupid little question?”

The answer to this seemed rather determined to Taulupää already, but he held back his instinctive accuracy and asked the girl — the woman? — to sit down.

She did, one hand squeezing the throat of a fluffy green sweater, eyes tightly on the draft of an article on his desk. “Ah, about that. I mean. I mean, ah, the Introduction to Analysis midterm exam?”

He sighed. “The repeat’s next Thursday.”

The girl looked around, knuckles white. “So I, ah, I didn’t pass? I mean I did something the wrong way?”

“Well, your paper shows that, doesn’t it?”

“But, ah, I mean, ah, sorry, I mean my answers weren’t in the stack that was in the secretary’s office!”

Taulupää sighed yet again. It had been cases like this that had forced getting rid of his dog. What could it be now? A gust of wind that lifted a paper when he did not notice? Or a cleaner doing the same? Had it used that paper for notes, or as a handkerchief?

It was the flu season and all. Oh heavens.

Playing for time seemed like a good idea. “Hm, maybe I have accidentally left the paper here somewhere —” he said, and stood up, looking around. Not that that was the easiest way: if he only asked her to leave, the paper’d be found three seconds after her departure.

The girl smiled, as stable and solemn as a mask of wax, and waited. He glanced at his desk: papers, the article draft, pens, Unmöglichkeit’s book, and a small Japanese sword he used to open letters.

Hm, maybe he should have put those bloodied bits of paper towel away from the knife. Who knows, they might disturb the students. But how else could you know the knife was sharp? And a spot of pain worked wonders to keep one awake, with heavy workdays and all.

Shelves groaning with collected letters, folder after folder of lecture notes of years long gone, and a few Platonic solids carved out of reindeer bone.

Ah, Platonic objects; that was what they were called in Finnish. Too much English-language literature again. He should listen, hm, listen to the radio, traffic announcements or the like, to keep from losing his touch.

Losing his touch? Could you say ”losing your touch” in Finnish, or was it just an Anglophone thing?

And could you say “anglofooninen” like he had just thought; or was that a naive translation error, too?

Was there any authority for questions like this? The university phone directory, and department of Finnish, and the chairman was —

“Sorry?”

Taulupää blinked. Now who on earth was this? A female person, sitting across the table, green sweater, short dark hair, a worried look.

He didn’t have a daughter like this, did he?

No. He wasn’t even married, for reality’s sake.

Ah, yes! “Yes, um, the… the exam answer sheet… could it be here…”

Both of them looked at the university phone directory for a little quiet moment, both equally confused; then Taulupää put it down, and looked around once more.

Ha!

A shelf held a newish folder that had the legend “papers found here and there”; promising, though the handwriting did not seem familiar.

Maybe the work of a cleaner?

Or of some helpful graduate student? Such as the, um, Lastname was the one with… no, that one had graduated already, and gone to… somewhere.

Taulupää shook his head and opened the file.

What? And so certain he had been he really had sent this article to Jour. Sci. Math. Acad. Res. Math.; oh dear.

Oh, at least the next piece of paper was his sharply worded note about ignoring the submission.

And the next was, also unsent, his angry protest of the unresponsive attitude of the paper… again wasted indignation.

Not all wasted, though; the fourth epistole on the subject had apparently been sent. Good that something had reached the target.

And here was the wayward exam sheet.

“Would it be this — F. Lastname, midterms of Analysis I?”

The girl looked around herself, worried, but the window was locked, and the door shut. “Lastname? Like, the associate professor?”

“Well, maybe not.” And the paper was, after all, dated fifteen years ago… or was it sixteen already? Or more?

Next paper. Now when on earth had he taught this particular turkey of a course? And what, the University of Helsinki?

Oh; it was his own answer paper from decades ago.

Oh, those times. One didn’t need a manual for a phone them, and one didn’t need glasses either —

Hm, no good letting your mind wander. The next paper.

“Introduction to Analysis, midterm exam, Manuliisa Harkki?”

The girl nodded with a despondent little laugh. “That’s me. Did I score one point, or maybe two?”

Taulupää smiled — he had been told it was the appropriate reaction to such a comment — and examined the exam-paper.

After this he thought for a while, came up with an answer he hoped was socially acceptable, and handed the sheet over. “Well, hum, this might be something of a rather happy surprise.”

He sat down.

The girl kept looking at the paper.

He smiled, feeling rather nervous. By all of his experience, a score of full thirty points, the maximum, was something to cause contentment and, hum, and this so-called happiness; but the girl just kept looking at the paper, clutching her sweater.

“So, ah, you scored thirty points out of thirty, with I think is a contentment- and happiness-filled surprise. Such a happy thing to happen.”

Why the girl didn’t show any signs of jubilation?

Why she just squeezed the throat of her sweater, knuckles white, and why a strange moan escaped her, and she fell on her face, groaning as it hit the table?

The paper on which her face had landed trembled once, twice, by her breaths; then it ceased to move.

Taulupää sighed (some days it seemed sighing was all he did), and closed his eyes. This seemed to be, once again, one of those immensely irritating real life situations where everyone by some perverse quirk of society expected him to know what to do, though no school or class had ever mentioned the matter.

He kept his eyes closed, and tried to come up with something.

Maybe this was just an illusion? Those he could cope with; all was fine if you just shut up and acted normal. The professor over at the department of psychology had done all well for a decade before people noticed and took him away.

Taulupää opened his eyes. No girl. The chair opposite to his was empty. No head resting on the table.

If he just stayed quiet, acted normal, and stayed outside a man-bite’s reach of rabbits, he would do all right.

Righty-o; all was fine and it was the time for some coffee.

He stood up; and doing so immediately saw the girl, on the floor, fallen to a heap on the other side of the table. He muttered a soft curse.

He was sane after all. And just when everything had been going so smoothly.

He thought for a moment; then for another; and then wrote down a mathematical question that occurred to him.

Another look to the other side of the table. Oh, bother; the girl was still there.

Terrible. Horrible. Again such a perplexing, disgusting practical problem…

Shaking the girl’s shoulder didn’t help; she was like a sack half-filled with bones and sand. In no way like a sack with cats or anything else living inside.

Checking breathing and the like were beyond his abilities; and coming up with nothing else, he grasped her sweater and heaved her up. Maybe a sitting position would help; sitting people were, as a rule, more often awake than people lying down.

Halfway up the sweater gave a crack and tore; and, being one of nature’s own and special people of the disastrous misreaction, he tried to keep her from falling, grasped what he could, and after two topologically rather confusing seconds found himself standing over the girl’s unconscious body, one half of a green sweater in one hand, and her white underpants in the other.

He gave a few thoughts to the exact operations that achieving this improbable state had required; but then his eyes were drawn to the now half-naked girl at his feet, and his thoughts gibbered and faded away.

Now the poor girl (Lisa, was it?) looked not only unconscious (dead?) but also assaulted, possibly battered.

He sighed, and called for his secretary.

* * *

Notes from translation:

It occasionally really helps when you have two sex-differentiated pronouns. In Finnish she and he both are hän; both alternatives give you narrative wiggle room, but going between them is a pain. (For the wiggling, contrast “he and she talked” to the Finnish equivalent which of necessity will be something like “the woman and the man talked”, and compare to all the clue-sentences of various mysteries which reveal only the sex of the person in question; and consider the narrative differences if because of a quirk of language even that was obscured: “have you seen him?” versus “have you seen that person?” — the most direct English-to-Finnish translation fix seems to be “have you seen that man?”, which really grates if done inexpertly.)

(Or consider that the title of the novel “She” couldn’t be in Finnish closer to the original than “That Woman”.)

Word counts are roughly 1000 words in Finnish; 1500 word in English. All the little “a”:s and “the”:s stack up.

Why yes, it’s bad poetry! Recoil in horror, people of taste! There’s a cannibal in the house!

A GOD-SHAPED HOLE

I don’t believe in a God-shaped hole
I don’t believe in a ritual-shaped hole
The mind is not a jigsaw, but an ocean
And waters echo the wild years of past
The savannah, the burrows, the dinosaurs
Reptiles, fish-things, slow first crawlies
And the nameless thing, the gradient,
The slow transition from non-life to life
And back from that: rude mechanics,
Gene programs, wild instincts, and then
Imperfect awareness by the crude ape-man
Growing sharper, a blade honed on the world
Diamond blade with a smear of carbon inside
Quick to assume minds, to see faces, to err:
There’s no God-shaped hole, no need for faith;
Just that desiccated cherry over the wound
Of origins not from creation but a slow rise
Of evolution, unjumping, imperfect, and blind.

And, seconds after finishing the above, I knew I needed to write the below:

A GOD-SHAPED VOLE

If you so wish to look at it
Both vole and God are our friends of old
Both an away-branching from our current state
Both statuesque beasts, entertaining antics;
But not ones to watch your kids, or your state.

Vole is a small furry thing, seldom seen;
Vole is a pest, a carrier of disease
(Rat is just the name for your neighbor’s vole)
Voles are critters gnawing at the edges,
Unless they are Giant Radioactive Terror Voles,
From Planet G-D, which I can see from my house;
I guess don’t need to repeat that for the other:
The difference is your professor of biology
Can show you a glass-eyed old stuffed vole,
instead of “voles are only a metaphor of life!”

Also, and this is fundamentally true,
Not fundamentalist, but fundamental —
“Most vole species are”, you will see,
“Virtually indistinguishable”, so there.
One small, furry; the other imaginary, baseless:
A god-shaped vole, seen all over the world.
A god-shaped vole, girdling the human race.

And — though this probably ruins what small effect these two nuggets have — that last line is really supposed to read “girdling”, as in “completely removing a strip of bark around a tree’s outer circumference, causing its death”, which is what voles do. (According to Wikipedia anyway; if the next post up on Boing Boing is “Internet hit by ‘vole girdling’ spam worldhacks; Vole-Girdling Co. Inc.’s IPs perma-blocked from Wikipedia, Merriam, Webster’s”, I may have cause for trouble.)

So, you just sit at your desk and then wham and you look at Notepad and scream “What have I done? What have I done? A God-shaped vole, oh, the humanity!“

And then you hit “Publish”.

And here’s a last bit that didn’t fit in:

If only there were volesteries,
And vonneries, and vole-thedrals,
and a Vole-Pope in a Vole-Can City;
Oh how nice and dandy life would be!

Naughty e-mail program.

Shows this much of a post title: “Your Amazon.co.uk order has dis”.

I spend the eternity between click and load trying to come up with any word that fits except “disappeared”.

Or “disapparated”. “Disembodied the handler”? “Discombobulated my mind”? “DISINTEGRATED LONDON”?

Then I see it’s “dispatched”.

“Your order has dispatched”? Either (or rather probably) this is postal-speak, the sub has surfaced and the like, or then you should say “Your order has been dispatched”, right? I don’t even know what an order dispatching itself is supposed to look like — an order exploding, or an order growing hair, or even disintegrating, yes; but self-dispatching implies autonomy that I won’t have in books I order. That’s for Evil Dead and Discworld!

Probably I’ll see my Amazon.co.uk order taking a smoke break and a glass of whiskey next. “Instead of books, we sent you this malignant dwarf; he dispatched himself. Shop again!”

A new study of war-related computer games finds they contain acts that, in real life, would be war crimes. As a consequence, a whole lot of people have taken their inner sniffy old lady for an outing.

Me myself I like my violent entertainment, and though in real life I’m the mildest person you’d ever meet, I say they’ll take my Derrick away when they pry it from my dead, cold hands!

Same for my Agatha Christies.

And Happy Tree Friends.

Don’t have many computer games at the moment, but if I had, no-one would regulate them out either.

Why, I even reserve the right to commit the ultimate horrible-bad thing in the eyes of these censor-happy loons, the right to seek out and consume detail-rich New Testament snuff porn, if I feel like it. I’m sure there’s fan fiction somewhere; please don’t give me links. I know the way to temptation and Rule 34 already.

(I don’t feel like that right now, but I reserve the right; it’s no-one else’s business and nothing that would drive me out seeking carpenters to crucify. (Come to think of that, isn’t tentacle porn the safest kind — I’ll be damned if I some deranged type can emulate that!) And if mere entertainment is denied, I can always go for fine art; the link is to something I find utterly inoffensive, and actually rather sweet; a judge in 1976 found it “blasphemous libel”.)

The report also suggests the games might be as kind as to point out the criminal aspects of the acts committed — I can’t think of anything reading that except a young gamer shouting “All in thirty seconds! Arson, Larceny, Double Homicide, Perjury, Property Theft and Triple Corpse Desecration with Libelous Blasphemy — woo! SUPER COMBO DESTRUCTION!”

(Then his friend says “Next, Misprision of Felony and Negligent Homicide! Gotta get ‘em all!”)

(Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

That’s a step away from a level-ending screen that reads “Crimes against humanity 14/26 DO BETTER NEXT TIME WORM” — which, while something that would be curious and fresh and harmless, isn’t what I gather these censorious types want.

* * *

And now for something completely different.

According to this nice little calculator, if the Sun was a centimeter across, the Earth would be a meter away, and the speed of light would be 2 mm/sec.

A light year would be 70 kilometers.

And — remember that the Sun’s a centimeter across, and the Earth is a meter away — a red giant star would be four meters across. Cor blimey, guv’nor.

I can somehow handle the idea that on this scale the closest star (Alpha Centauri) is 290 kilometers away; but to think that the galactic center is still 1.9 million kilometers away… sorry, my brain is broken again.

And don’t even think about how in addition to these few specks, all else is Emptiness.

Mohammed in a crapper*, that’s perspective. And there’s wordless horror in that cosmic awe, too.

* * *

* : What? I grew tired of “Christ on a crapper” and “Buddha in a pine tree”; to say nothing of “Zoroaster onna stick”, “Joseph Smith in a furry convention”, “Mother Teresa behind the glove compartment (soon a major Japanese horror movie)”, “Zeus in the pews”, “Torak at the urologist’s” and “Jim Jones in Guyana!” Varied blasphemous oaths, you know?

I’ve often heard it said it’s not OK for men to play God — to make new life and then abuse and kill it according to their whim, or to rule as they want over others without checks or balances or any law beyond their own whims and prejudices.

If it’s not OK for men to play God, why’s it OK for God to play God?

Just a thought.

* * *

Also, in a different sort of godplaying, finished the NaNoWriMo novel on Monday; or well, finished and finished — still have some 3000 words or so to plug in here and there, but am over the 50 000-word limit, and have written the “FIN” to the end of the file. (TeXnicCenter and MiKTeX is what I use; what ends with “doc” just means it needs doctoring into some better format.)

Feelin’ a little bit tired after that; but an average of 2100 words per day for 23 days is supposed to tire; an additional couple of hours staring at the screen (mercifully not usually blank) each day takes its toll.

Oh, and how the novel turned out? Well, it began with one plot; then lost it; then gathered clues and scenes and eerie intimations for 20 000 words; and then during the last 10 000 or so finally decided what it was all about. There’s going to be a lot of editing; won’t do to introduce characters and mysteries if you’re not going to explain them in the end.

Oh, the plot. Right. Well, in the most compact and bloodless way it turned out to be this: A graduate student discovers what happens when a “cult” of mathematics professors deludes itself thinking that their weird ritual-science pentagram-derived powers are proof for the existence of gods and souls. In Lovecraftian terms what they discover isn’t even Azathoth; but assigning names to it becomes the seed of their eventual downfall. Knew all the while it was a horror story; didn’t discover until the ending that it was a revenge story, too.

(“So, literary licence much?” — “Well, wrote in black-robed maths professors chanting ‘Euler Euler Euler’ in nameless cellars as something terrible rises out of the pentagram.” — “Okay.”)

Someone ought to found a magazine for graduate students of mathematics. And one of a special kind and slant, mind you. Not one of those that bend down (and over) in their willingness to cater even to the furry, unsophisticated high school-level reader — no, but one that embraced the patrician and vaguely disquieting in-group tribalism of those that are not yet Ph.D.:s, but are no more mortal men and women.

(As for those that scorn the “no more mortal” bit, consider this. As every elementary school student knows, once you’re an M.Sc. or the equivalent, you get a third eye. For those with teacher training it’s in the backs of their heads, and thus nothing behind them is missed; those going for research have it in the middle of the forehead, which accounts for the frowns and folds that gather there. And as you get nearer to a Ph.D., the changes grow more… disquieting.)

(And you thought the common condition of being a “chalkdust albino” was all due to busy blackboard-work and staying inside too much? You sweet innocent fool; imagine Wilbur Whateley and a naked mole rat and you will get as close as your puny mind can comprehend to the glorious terror of full doctordom!)

Anyway, here’s my idea.

* * *

News for TRIVIAL BEINGS

subtitle: “a magazine of the nondoctoral ones”

byline: “You say ‘This ain’t no news!?’ — I say this is news to me!”

Columns and regular features:

• Your Voyeristic Glimpse Into The Sordid Grad-Life of Another (“Graduate Student of the Month”, honestly titled)
• A Word from the Other Side (written by an actual, real, official Ph.D.; don’t worry, not your advisor and all the names in the anecdotes are changed anyway)
• Advice for Grad Lemma Slaves (agony aunt column, answering such dire questions as “Do professors ever sleep? If so, where? And do you really have to use wooden stakes?”, and “What is the meaning of life?” — the answers to these particulars are “No. See previous. Yes.” and “Lemmata.“)
• TA-be or not TA-be (stories from the pearls-and-swine trade as one side calls it, or the trade of mysteries for obfuscations according to the other; or the one-baboon-and-many-gerbils trade according to the side that is not involved)
• Tales of the Tenure Overlords (venting about the prof caste, the lecturer lot, the deathly docents of Mt. Doom, and the grantmasters of Yh and their foul geases and inquisitions of inconsequential trivia and miscellania)
• Encounters of the Nonacademical Kind (when the “real life” intrudes: parents, siblings, lovers, plumbers, and various other people who persist in the delusion that studying mathematics has something to do with mere calculation; also the recurring and recurring disaster of how you almost found an implicit formula for the transcendental approximation of the restaurant bill division function minimizer for all real-valued Lipschitz continuous order functions and for any rational number of orderers that was not an integer… and then you noticed everyone else had paid.)
• Noodling the Budget (culinary and monetary tips; also the occasional fashion tip, such as this: “During summertime wear a muumuu — you don’t need to wear a stitch of anything else! Imagine the savings on wear and tear!”)
• Things Fall Apart; the Lemma Cannot Hold (poetry corner; mostly unspeakable, the high point being “Shakespeare’s sonnets, redone as expressions of a function theorist’s frustration, pt. XVIII”)
• Asymptotically Towards the Doctorate (tales of procrastination; would most probably be the most lengthy column of these)
• 101 Ways to Prepare Noodles (self-explanatory, really; way #34 is “You gots a lake? Fine, you gonna eat lake-trawled noodles with healthy blue algae coating tonite! Here’s how, bub —”)
• Excuse-Fu (or the million ways of saying you spent yesterday playing solitaire without saying it; this zen column strives for morality in adversity and truth in equivocation, while still avoiding the blunt and ugly expression of the whole of it; also includes the occasional “What is truth anyway?”, examining what commonly used words and phrases really mean, and how you can use those real meanings to your advantage. “You will be lucky if you get him to work for you”, right?)
• Demo Vu (TA-help; named for that disquieting French-named feeling of “I have seen this problem somewhere before — aha, the sod’s still pushing out the same exercises he did when I had this course! Prior solution bonanza!”)

Well, one can dream, right?

And besides, a single visit to your library’s magazine section will show there are many, many periodicals much more curious than this one would be.

So, Pascal’s Wager. I am sure you know it, but here’s a formulation anyway:

If you erroneously believe in God, you lose nothing (assuming that death is the absolute end), whereas if you correctly believe in God, you gain everything (eternal bliss). But if you correctly disbelieve in God, you gain nothing (death ends all), whereas if you erroneously disbelieve in God, you lose everything (eternal damnation).

Since I am a graduate student of mathematics, I am not equipped to leave utterances like this alone; and thus, a bit of probability tomfoolery to torture this anyway silly argument follows.

First, some horrendous simplification. Let us consider a system where one can believe in any one of gods, or disbelieve all of them. Let us further say that either any single one of these gods exists and the others do not; or then no gods exist at all.

Let us suppose for simplicity’s sake that the existence of any particular one of these gods is equally probable, and that probability is denoted by , while the possibility of all these gods being fictious is . Naturally, . (We will return to this, later.)

Now, let us suppose (we do a lot of supposing, don’t we?) that the choice to believe any particular one of these choices has consequences wholly determined by that choice; and particularly that we can assign some numerical values to the desirability of the end results of “not believing in a god that exists” (, trad. “Hell”), “believing in a god that exists” (, trad. “Heaven”), “not believing in a god when there is none” (), and “believing in a god when there is none” (). Here zero denotes the consequences of atheism being true, while G stands for the existence of some god; and please note that we assume that since there are distinct and different gods, the adverse outcome of one of them being real occurs to all atheists — and to all who believe in any of the other gods!

(I apologize for that exclamation mark. Traditionally, exclamation marks and mathematical symbols co-occur only in crankery of Timecubical dimensions.)

For “simplicity”, we assume all these outcome-values are positive; the indubitable negativity of the various Hell-scenarios and lives wasted in futile worship will be handled with a minus sign.

Having introduced all this notation, we can say that the expected value of atheism, , is the sum of the probabilities of the various outcomes multiplied by their assigned “values”, and can thus be written as:

,

while the expected value of believing in one of the gods, or , is:

.

Now Pascal’s idea was that one should believe in God, because the latter of these values was inestimably greater, or ; but please note that his simple system contained only atheism and one possible God (or ); while this system, and the reality it in its crude way emulates, contains several; in this case the indeterminate amount .

If we try to simplify the expression , we note that because of our symmetric assumptions (“all gods are the same”), the multiplier disappears, and after some trivial formula-juggling we are left with this:

,

or

,

that is to say that that (and thus any) particular brand of theism is more profitable than atheism if the previous inequality is true. Assuming we are science-literate people momentarily afflicted with the probability-assigning disorder, we can agree that the probability of god’s existence () is not a big number; and being mathematics-literate, we can agree that the rational part of the right-hand side is by necessity something very small, the absolute values of eternal bliss and eternal torment being of necessity more than the rewards of one life well spent, or the losses of one wasted in futile rituals. Since the probability of anything (say of no gods, or ) is a number between zero and one (mathematically but not realistically including both), the right-hand side is something small as well.

Thus, naively, it seems the problem in insoluble: two very small numbers, and no way to see which is smaller.

To escape this, we make more perilous assumptions, and especially notice that, unlike with Pascal, this “belief in god” is actually “belief in a god”, namely one of the gods assumed to be choices. Let us assume that the ratio of “earthly outcomes” to “divine outcomes” is some very small number , where is a positive integer. (See first endnote for why this number is not zero.) Let us also assume that for any of the gods the probability of that god’s existence is some very small probability . (See second endnote for matters implicit in this.) Since for the probabilities of gods or none the equality holds, we can say that .

Thus, our result becomes

,

or, simplified,

.

What does this mean?

Well, bad news for the theists that wish to use this kind of argumentation, frankly. For theism to be “more profitable” in this crude sense, the above inequality has to hold: and as long as the combined probability of all gods considered () is a very small number (and as a probability it is naturally below one), the bracketed part of the right-hand side is very close to one; and in this case, as there are several gods to be considered (), theism immediate becomes the less attractive of the two general alternatives. (Though if in Pascal and in a particular movie series “there can be only one”, or , the gamble is profitable in the crude sense described above.)

So there: with these particular assumptions, in this particular model of the problem, Pascal’s Wager is bullshit.

It naturally is so in any context; but in this particular one, it is so by mathematics even allowing that the basic probabilistic nature of the thing is tenable.

* * *

First endnote. The non-infinity of heaven.

Some may quibble that I have missed the entire point of Pascal’s Wager (as I have) with the statement that “Let us assume that the ratio of ‘earthly outcomes’ to ‘divine outcomes’ is some very small number , where is a positive integer”; and insist that since the joys/griefs of Heaven/Hell are infinite in duration and magnitude, the number should not be very small, but actually zero.

I don’t think that’s justified. (Also, it would wreck my argument.)

The number is taken to be the ratio of “how preferable is an atheist’s life, and how horrible a life, your only one, wasted in futile rituals” to “how preferable is Heaven, and how horrible is Hell”. This author thinks there’s something quite horrible in wasting one’s only life, and something very valuable in using it well if that’s all one has; and, being of mathematical bent, the author also wishes to note that the mere fact that Heaven or Hell last forever do not mean their “preference value” (a made-up term) is infinity, no matter how much Pascal opined it to be: after all, one may, just as one solitary example, easily choose an always positive function whose integral from a zero point all the way to infinity is still a limited number, and not infinite.

That is to say,

,

and because of that Heaven and Hell don’t impress me much. Suck on that, Blaise Pascal.

* * *

Second endnote. On the choice .

If we choose instead, we arrive to the inequality

,

which immediately illustrates the problem of that choice: the simple addition of a god, no matter how curious, makes any theism a better bet, which is absurd! (Whether at this point in this kind of a tomfoolery the word “absurd” has any meaning is left to the reader.)

Indeed, the choice made in the main article () is better precisely since it (sort of) assumes that the various inferences for the existence of (some) god, and against atheism, are “shared” by the various possible divinities, much in the same way that Ken Ham and Harun Yahya use the same bogus arguments, and more devious theologians give “proofs” for some god, but not for any particular deity. Thus the simple invention of yet another god does not mean that the probability of atheism’s truth is automatically decreased.

If we assume that as in this endnote, we only need to follow that with “we assume gods”, and theism is immediately true!)

Finally: the sharp-eyed reader may have noticed the two separate introductions of the number into the logic above. This is purposeful, of course: partly to get at the desired pro-atheistic conclusion (hey, at least I’m honest!), and partly to illustrate that if the ratio of mortal and divine outcomes is somehow “commeasurable” to the probability of some divine reality, Pascal’s argument is in trouble. (And if the theist counters with the “Heaven and Hell are of infinite worth and horror!” canard I don’t see any reason why the atheist could not answer with the equally absolutist “The probability of any god existing is zero, so fuck you too!” retort; things will proceed by their own weight from there.)

Different choices and simplifications will of course lead to different outcomes; but given the fatuity of the argument in the first place, this has been more a mathematical diversion than any serious atheological piece.

(Of the three below, the first I will get back to; the second I don’t know about, and the third, probably not. The fourth type of unfinished series, as regards where I stopped in it, is of course the case where you reach for the next book and hear it hasn’t been published yet; see Scott Lynch, Patrick Rothfuss, etc. etc.)

A Song of Ice and Fire

Well, read A Game of Thrones over one winter holiday. (Christmas break, Celebration of the Birth of the Most Sacred Tarja Halonen, whatever.)

The book being huge, decided to have a break before the next part, and eventually read A Clash of Kings during the summer holidays some six months later.

Found this a working system; scheduled A Storm of Swords for the next winter holidays… and then blew it; had something else to read; forgot; and found myself geographically separated from the physical book for a long while after that, never quite able to remember to pick it up.

Currently am troubled by the choice of whether to recap the first two volumes by the handy-dandy abbreviation work of others; or whether to read them again. Basically it’s a problem of “This will be delicious because of its faint familiarity, and all the little details you forgot!” versus “This will be exquisite because of its virginal newness, and the turns you never foresaw!”, and as agonizing isn’t my cup of tea, I defer the decision of where to dive again into the bloody and glorious tale.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

Borrowed the first volume from a library; read it; hated it.

A few years later happened across the first two trilogies in a used book shop; bought them on a whim, sure my bad experience had been just childish incomprehension. Some time later read the first volume; still hated it. (Gawd, the whiny flaccid thing!)

Am working up the conviction that the next time, really, the next time I’ll “get” the book. (If not, I’ll probably “throw” it.)

Sword of Truth, and other series

It starts like this: you read the first book and like it.

(Well, actually with the Sword of Truth it started with the third book, Blood of the Fold; for some reason, probably temporary derangement, I picked it up from a library and read it first. Soon after, insomnia and diarrhea figured heavily; not as a result of the reading, I hasten to add, but just because of the stresses of student life and my cooking. A lot of the book was read after midnight in a small room on a throne of ivory — but maybe this is not what you wanted to hear.)

Then you immediately borrow the second book, and like it as well.

A week or a few weeks later you go through the third (maybe for a second time, as the case may be); you like it, but not quite as much as the first two.

Then you have a bit longer break, then finally get around to reading the fourth, and it’s okay.

And eventually dagnabbit the library’s copy is taken by someone else when you’d like it, or you get lost reading something equally captivating for a longish time; and then you find yourself with the next volume in your hand, standing by the library shelf, and thinking: “I have no fecking idea of where I left the story.”

I think the last one of Goodkind that I read was Soul of the Fire, the fifth book; was years ago, it was. Would have to reread the first five to get at the last six. Don’t know if I ever will.

(Also, some say the books degenerate towards the end; can be. I don’t know. But I never had any trouble with the much-mocked “evil chicken”, and found the philosophical ideas — apparently Goodkind is an Objectivist, about whom I know little, and less of it is good — more entertaining though not better than the constant bland unthinking niceism that much of fantasy tends to go by. It’s nice to have something different, even if that difference means the main character is something of a dick.)

(Don’t believe the “but he’s presented as an idolizable hero!” bit either — I idolize who I want to. People can read the Old Testament for pleasure, too, even while recognizing the main character is a dick operating in a world of twisted horror. Indeed, there must be plenty of popcorn-worthy horror movies in the Good Old Book. And as for moral outrage, well, imaginary people have no rights.)

(Curiously though, even if I had no problems with taking a feces-spurting heroine-menacing evil incarnate chicken seriously, I have never been able to read anything about Tolkien’s swan-shaped ships without grimacing. And yes, I see the comedy potential in the evil chicken, but I think a reader of any unusual fiction has to learn to avoid the culturally instinctive cheap laugh. Not to mention that laughing at the fact that’s “it’s just a chicken!” is a bit like laughing that “it’s just a ring, your silly hobbits” — the point being that it’s not very useful to take all the realistic and sarcastic baggage along to a different world.)

(And then there’s the question of how good a writer Goodkind is, but what do I know about that? Others can judge that, and do, but I’m content to be amused by whatever I find appealing in my appalling ignorance of style and form.)

(How on earth did I drift into writing paragraph after paragraph of excuses for something I read years and years ago and barely even remember and certainly shouldn’t opine anything about?)

(Ah well.)

(One final thing: Felt obscenely nice to type “Terry Goodkind’s Chicken of Evil” into the Google search box to find a quote of that bit. If that was a movie title, I’d watch it.)

Well, this is a nightmare place of traditional dimensions. Some 3.9 kilometers of rock above you; the air around you hot and dark; the rocks crushing you in 50 degrees Celsius hot or more. Some 800 kilometers of caverns and tunnels crawl everywhere, striking downwards like an inverted tree of one thousand knife branches; thousands and thousands of people shuffle tired here and there working, ever going deeper.

The name of the place is the TauTona (“Great Lion”) gold mine, in South Africa, or rather under South Africa. Pretty much a place I do not want to go to.

Imagine an underground earthquake causing a collapse about a kilometer above you; the electricity goes, and you can just wait as your lamps fail, and as your air conditioning fails and the temperature creeps up from merely hot to uncomfortable to worse, to 55 degrees Celsius; as you wonder how long your air will last; and for all you know there may be several kilometers of collapsed rock between you and anyone that can help you out.

Actually, don’t imagine that. May cause loss of sleep. Try to imagine something more cheerful. Um, like…

Well, the first thought that came to my head was a plot for a novel. One day there’s something that the people deep down in the mine think is a quake or a collapse above them; they lose all contact with the ground level, and after sitting very still and breathing very quietly for a few hours decide that they want out, weak rock above or no. Going up they still fail to re-establish contact with the ground level, but find only minor rockfalls and similar problems.

(Or maybe they have to walk the whole way up through the smaller shafts because the lift has broken, raining a few kilometers of glistening and thundering steel cable on the heads of those waiting for it?)

Something terribly wrong upside, though, and they don their breathing apparatuses as they go upwards because the air doesn’t seem to be getting any better. (Caveat: I have no idea if they use such in such mines, but dramatic licence and marginal plausibility and all that.)

They — and depending on the kind of a story this would be, this “they” would be a night crew of a few dozen, or the whole complement of a few thousand; and forget not the panicking and hysterical and reluctant ones — they finally get up, and find that something a whole lot worse than a rockfall or earthquake has taken place. Through careful building it is horrifying yet not altogether surprising that the ground level has been replaced by a smoking ruin — buildings blown away, everything covered by soot, skies black, everything gone, all living things not dead but disintegrated by fire and wind and worse.

No, not by a nuclear war! That’s the nightmare of yesterday, and no doubt has been done like this already, probably several times. (Though someone should crank out a short story of the typical action mold but different resolution: a submarine receives orders to launch nukes; origin of orders dubious, HQ impossible to contact; a grimly obeisant captain overpowered by a non-apocalyptic crew who doesn’t want to start the end of the world; sub surfaces in New York harbor, finds the world has actually been destroyed by a nuclear war. Orders were genuine after all. Ha-ha; in your face you moderate people, you.)

Besides a nuclear armageddon is small potatoes to what I have in mind — a cosmic catastrophe! Take up Phil Plait’s Death from the Skies!, and pick anything that can scour off everything on Earth to the depth of a few kilometers. Not something that just wrecks the atmosphere, or smashes Buenos Aires; no, something that cauterizes the whole planet! (Dubious plus side: no lingering radiation — if at all possible — so our plucky “survivors” will keep on being the last living things on a dead world until they starve or go mad.)

Now, if one was writing something like this as a short story, it would end in that realization; the problem would be finding a non-hokey way of communicating just what had happened. (“Suddenly Norm recalled talking to his astronomer brother in Brighton the night before. Clyde had been going on about some supernova candidate or the other…”)

If, on the other hand, one was doing this novel-length, it wouldn’t do to do 300 pages of heroic upward struggle, and then end on such an alien note. But what then?

Here my memory of astronomical disasters fails me, but even if the event was short and only one half of the planet was scoured, the remaining half wouldn’t be in any condition to send help soon; see the problems of having half of the Earth’s atmosphere pretty much blown or broken away, winds, storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, and similar little things. So no rescue.

There might be other survivors, maybe in relatively nearby mine shafts; looking for them could occupy some time, at least if you pulled the obvious string of “But my wife’s down there! Unless she was cremated along with Cape Town!” — but after that the only possible other survivors would be deep sea divers, who wouldn’t add much to the story except a functioning vehicle. (Though I have no idea what my vague blast would do to the oceans, and whether that could be survived by water or by the sub. And would Catastrophe-X break water into highly flammable hydrogen and monstrously fire-enhancing pure oxygen? Oy vey, Hindenburg Atlantic!)

Starting a civilization all by themselves would be both doughty and futile: something that fries everything down to the depth of a few kilometers won’t leave any plants or animals alive. Not even tardigrades. (Assumption, to be fudged in some way: Wouldn’t be very story-conductive if they were met coming up by a fall of molten lava coming down; one would have to devise a disaster that left some non-molten ground to walk on.)

Then again, maybe one way to go is to give them something that remains. The obvious choices would be a) something inexplicable, and b) a military installation of research into implausibly advanced science. (“The third day — by their clocks anyway — up from the depths, Zuma and a couple of his gang came running to the camp, telling there was something weird a few kilometers to the west, behind the slag hills: a hemisphere of smooth, unburned rock bulging up from the ground, as if the stone around it had been blown away by the end of the world, but it had been kept whole by some sheltering force, stretching outwards half a kilometer from some underground point zero. Either worst or best of all, Zuma told the assembled survivors that there seemed to be an entrance of some sort atop the unnaturally geometrically simple shape; a cut-off lift shaft into something that had been deep underground, or something like that.”)

(Yeah right original — a General Products hull by a different name.)

Come to think of that, the military survivors could be used to drop some heavy infodumps on just what had happened upside: CNN on the coffee room TV in the deep underground bunker, and the sudden news update on weird astronomical and atmospheric phenomena, quickly cut off by the atmosphere’s tumultuous demise; military emergency broadcasts just long enough to tell that all shit indeed breaketh loose, and does so all over the world, and mankind uses its last few moments for going crazy; and nations cry as by the unstoppable rotation of the Earth ever new areas are brought under the searing fire from space; and then silence, then hours and hours of shivering inside an opaque sphere that shouldn’t be that way unless the very powers of hell and heaven are battering at the world outside. When the military and scientific personnel finally get to peer out, they find that outside their safe haven all has been eaten away, even solid rock to a depth of a few hundreds of meters, leaving them stranded inside a hemispherical hill centered on their marvelous and diabolical device.

The problem here would be that such utter destruction would make rebuilding things nearly impossible (Well, there’s that seed vault in Spitzbergen; luck going there over boiled-away seas), and as the event had been an astronomical (and astronomically unlikely!) accident, there would be no space alien invader to fight, defeat, and avenge one’s world on; or to beg for help.

Watching the survivors disintegrate, lose hope, and starve to death wouldn’t be very entertaining either. (Well, it would be, up to a point. Especially when they realize the atmosphere is so degraded that climbing up a hill is enough of “Into Thin Air” for suffocation!)

It would seem that only really outre resolutions or continuations would work after that — an alien spaceship arrives to make a first contact but finds the planet much more vacant than it expected (much tragedy and some comedy there); some force or entity arrives to conscript the choiceless survivors into its time- and space-spanning plans (As apparently in “Air Raid” by John Varley: passengers of doomed airliners stolen to become far-future colonists); or something like that.

Going wild and introducing a time machine (!) in the military compound would be useless for heroics: you can’t save a world from something like what happened! “Quickly! Get everyone and everything of value at least five hundred meters underground!” I won’t even discuss harebrained plans of putting something between the Earth and the blast; what would be big and hardy enough, and movable? Supposing the origin-point (star?) of the disaster is very far relative to solar system distances, you’d need something almost Earth-sized to have Earth in its shadow to keep it from frying — you’d need a movie for that to fly! (“My brother Clyde has been working on something called red matter — and he has a space shuttle!”)

Then again, if one suffered the time machine, there would be a really bleak ending in the survivors all jumping decades into the past, determined to keep quiet and live their lives out in the last years of the planet Earth; they can’t save it, but at least they can have some fun in the world while it still exists. (And end the novel with the narrator saying “So this is the story of my life; how about yours? And oh, don’t make it longer than three months, five days and seven-odd hours.”)

Since a time machine smacks of cheating (time machines are like God: suppose one, and paradoxes abound!), something else would be a more realistic (though less striking) ending — preferably something else than “And then they all died THE END”.

If one wanted to really hurt the reader, the story would have the narrator putting down the book he’s been recounting this centuries-old account from, and while around them a second civilization spreads, a child would ask: “But Grampa, how did they survive after that? How did they become us?” — and Gramps would, as the readers howled in inarticulate rage, end the book with a wink and a “well, that’s a story for another day, little one.”

Then again, I think (have it; haven’t read it yet) The Fog by James Herbert is a fairly apocalyptic story that largely consists of inventive ways people can die in very special circumstances; you could play the star disaster idea like that, and end it like Dr. Strangelove: valiant bungling tries, but no dice. (“So what’s the book about?” — “It’s about how everyone dies.” — “What, everyone?” — “Yes.” — “Please don’t say you laughed reading it.”)

Then again, it is well said that wild ideas are easier than their execution; and I know I know so little about astronomical events, deep mining, human psychology and similar necessary subjects that it doesn’t make sense for me to go about trying something like this. And thereby, and with too much fanfare, have the idea if you want and run with it, you whoever you are; I don’t intend to use it.

But what was I saying? Oh yes, a four-kilometer deep mine. Pretty scary, if you ask me. And please don’t note the above plotting came about from the words “imagine something more cheerful”; I kind of failed there.