5.9 KiB
Peter Watts' Rifters Trilogy exemplifies Rat Fic rule #2 [spoilers]
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Author: u/callmebrotherg now posting as /u/callmesalticidae*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3rzbx5/peter_watts_rifters_trilogy_exemplifies_rat_fic/
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Score: 29
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Created: 2015-11-08T06:29:55
Post:
Rule #2:
Any factions are defined and driven into conflict by their beliefs and values, not just by being "good" or "evil".
The Rifters Trilogy is, in brief, about the accidental release of βehemoth, a microorganism capable of outcompeting and destroying the rest of the biosphere. This is by no means the only major plot line, and it certainly doesn't touch on the themes of the book, but if you want a one-liner then there you go.
It is the first series I've found where someone contemplates killing 2.5 billion people without this being a moral event horizon.
Peter Watts has this to say about this work in general:
You won't find any Goldman-Sachses in my work. No Dick Cheneys or Osama bin Ladens either. Nobody starts wars under false pretences to enrich their buddies in the oil industry; nobody justifies mass murder by invoking the divine... I can't write real villains.
"There are no real villains in Wattsworld," he says elsewhere. In fact, most of the major characters in the Rifters Trilogy are trying to save the world. And yet he not only manages to get his characters in conflict with each other, he manages to get characters who have the same goals and even roughly the same ideals about how to achieve those goals in conflict with each other.
The problem (for them, anyway) is that, while there are no villains in Wattsworld, nobody knows this. In Starfish, Patricia Rowan tries to kill half a dozen people as part of containing βehemoth, and she can't tell them that this is what she's doing because they're all psychologically-disturbed and she knows that they wouldn't trust her. When they find out, they react exactly as she thought they would, and assume that this is just an attempt by corporate monsters to clean up some toys that aren't useful anymore.
When she considers the possibility of killing 2.5 billion people, it's only to save literally the rest of the biosphere, not just humans but every single living thing, down to the littlest microorganism. But barely anyone trusts her, and when the story shifts to the point of view of other characters, they distrust her for what seem to be entirely reasonable causes (just as she distrusts them for what seem to be entirely reasonable causes).
And in the real world, the one that isn't written by Peter Watts, you do have people whose goals are inimical to yours. That usually isn't so in Wattsworld, but the inhabitants of Wattsworld don't have the luxury of knowing that they live there and what its rules are. They think that they live in our world.
In summary, I recommend Peter Watts' Rifters Trilogy not just as a good piece of rational fiction in general, but as an example of how to set a group of characters at odds with each other without even having to give them different value systems: keep them from knowing that they share the same value system, and then let their rational distrust of each other do the rest.
Comments:
u/psychothumbs [+12] (7 hours later)
Rifters is a great series! I remember I read the first one after randomly checking out of my local library as a kid, and I think got my hands on the second as well, before getting confused and distracted and never finishing the series. More recently, and as a more conscious Peter Watts fan I read all three and am glad I did.
I highly recommend anybody thinking about trying Watts out give a listen to this faux-evil-corporate presentation he did about domesticating vampires to use their abilities to our advantage.
It's about 20 minutes long, and I think it's great. If you agree, Peter Watts is the author for you should check out the novel that the above ties in with, available free online: Blindsight
u/OutOfNiceUsernames [+3] fear of last pages (8 hours later)
Sounds like something that would make me very frustrated because of its closeness to Poor Communication Kills and Cassandra Truth. I am not saying that the characters’ actions wouldn’t be justified, just... I’d quickly become a nervous wreck reading about them.
u/Transfuturist [+3] Carthago delenda est. (12 hours later)
You spoiled Starfish...
notices spoiler tag
Oh, never mind.
Anyway, I would say their values are at odds. You think that upon the situation being explained to them, the Rifters would just agree that they had to die?
u/callmebrotherg [+1] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (a day later)
Most of the characters, not all of them. For example, the whole situation with Achilles in Behemoth would never have happened if Alice had just trusted the corpses, or at least Rowan.
And if the team responsible for training the smart-gel in Starfish had been let in on its purpose, then they might have foreseen the problems before Yves Scanlon did.
The rifters themselves may have gotten pissed at being sacrificed for the greater good, but then again, the reason that they had to be sacrificed was because they couldn't be trusted to react well. Ken Lubin and others were cleansed of Behemoth, so that could have been done if the Grid Authority had felt that was a safe course of action.
At the very least being upfront about it might have had an effect on the whole Meltdown Madonna thing. Clarke was pissed at the beginning because she misunderstood the GA's motives. She got pissed about other things, granted, but she only found out about them because she was already on the warpath.