Things Undone

by John Barnes

Overview

This story was tied for second (with two others) for the Sturgeon Award for Short Fiction; I have long since ceased to caper about chanting, "We're One Third Of Number Two!" It also made it into the Gardner/Strahan Best of the Year anthology. So it comes highly recommended by people who read an awful lot.

This was sort of a trial canter for several ideas that I know I'll be back to later (some of which I've been to a few times before): the mutability of memory, the awkwardness of remembering things that other people don't (or say they don't), the genuine alien-ness of people with various socially-isolating brain syndromes, are all in one complex. In particular, in most stories in which time travelers alter the past, either some time travelers are immune, or everyone's memory changes instantly; I wondered what it might be like for a mind to feel the world ghosting in over it, maybe taking months or years (an idea I sort of played with in Finity and am sure I will play with again).

Another one has been with me ever since I noticed what the copywriter had come up with for the cover of an S.M.Stirling novel: "Think about history. Imagine it's worse." That led me to an idea I'm still playing with: how much worse would history have to be for us to declare a do-over or a scrape-and-pitch, i.e. just decide, well, that was all wrong, let's do something else? Pick your favorite bit of horror out of the last few centuries, say, and imagine sending back a force whose job was to prevent or mitigate it. If it's big enough, most of us would either cease to exist or cease to exist as ourselves; but if it's bad enough, might it be worth it? And how bad and big, and what about all the people who are just blameless byproducts?

Another idea: "live and let live" is an old idea but its prevalence is very much modern. Ages ago I ran across what seems a truthful comment: if you brought a European forward from 1200 A.D. to the present, the most inexplicable thing about all our greatly expanded powers to him would be that we hadn't declared a crusade and use the atom bomb to reclaim the Holy Sepulchre. It's probably--well, definitely--a good thing that our ancestors didn't have all our capabilities; you can construct your nightmares here about what a society with airplanes, electric fences, behavioral conditioning, effective psychopharmacology, and poison gas might have done in the way of slavery or genocide, back when those were done with virtually no compunction.

What sort of modern world might grow in a society that poisonous?

And what if we were descended from them? What if we could then reverse things so we would only, in that revised world, have been as wicked as we actually have been? How many never-weres would be a fair price to move from deep to less-deep evil?

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013830738
Publisher:	Metrocles House
Publication date:	12/10/2011
Series:	John Barnes Short Story Collection , #6
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	225 KB

About the Author

My thirtieth commercially published novel will be coming out in spring 2012. I've published about 4 million words that I got paid for. So I'm an abundantly published very obscure writer.

I used to teach in the Communication and Theatre program at Western State College. I got my PhD at Pitt in the early 90s, masters degrees at U of Montana in the mid 80s, bachelors at Washington University in the 70s; worked for Middle South Services in New Orleans in the early 80s. I do paid blogging mostly about the math of marketing analysis at TheCMOSite and All Analytics. If any of that is familiar to you, then yes, I am THAT John Barnes.

Which, of course, is why you can find my blog at thatjohnbarnes.blogspot.com. On Twitter I am JohnBarnesSF.

There are also many Johns Barneses I am not. I am not the British footballer, the Australian rules footballer, the former Red Sox pitcher, the Tory MP, the expert on ADA programming, the biographer of Eva Peron, the authority on Dante, the mycologist, the travel writer, the guy who does some form of massage healing that I don't really understand at all, the oil executive, the film historian, or that guy that Mom said was my father. I do wish I'd written that book on titmice, though.

I used to think I was the only paid consulting statistical semiotician for business and industry in the world, but I now know four of them. So now I have a large market share of a growing field.

Semiotics is pretty much what Louis Armstrong said about jazz, except jazz paid a lot better for him than semiotics does for me. If you're trying to place me in the semiosphere, I am a Peircean (the sign is three parts, ), a Lotmanian (art, culture, and mind are all populations of those tripartite signs) and a statistician (the mathematical structures and forms that can be found within those populations of signs are the source of meaning). The branch in which I do consulting work is the mathematics and statistics of large populations of signs, which has applications in marketing, poll analysis, and annoying the literary theorists who want to keep semiotics all to themselves.

I have been married three times, and divorced twice, and I believe that's quite enough in both categories. I'm a hobby cook, sometime theatre artist, and still going through the motions after many years in martial arts.