Writer, Interloper

I finished narrating my audiobook version of The Control Problem. It was fun and terrifying, sitting in a studio booth while a nice stranger instructed me to speak quieter or LOUDER and 'please, one more time, the stomach growling'.

While I slowly descended into madness at every verbal tic and slur and stutter coming out of my flawed mouth, I realized I was saying some Big Words.

Proprioception, adversarial audio, and bioluminescence.

Do I have the right to use these words? What is it that gives someone that right?

I do have the right, of course, because I do it. But when I imagine actual EXPERTS in history of medicine, or multiverse theory, or artificial intelligence perusing my fun little scenarios? Yeah, then I consider walking into the woods.

At the end of the day, I do my best and it isn't half bad. I love to research things. I may not understand this stuff on first pass, so I go over the material two or three more times, and read other books and articles and watch videos and listen to interviews. Once I feel like I understand what I'm reading, I make up some shit around the concepts. It is still fiction. I don't intend for people to use my books on their own as educational material.

When I finish the actual last version of the book, I end up with lots of left over information. This was especially true for The Control Problem. One of the abandoned little facts was called The Carrington Event.

Ah, The Carrington Event. Yes, that does sound like a fin de siècle novel of social upheaval, family drama, and personal despair. No, friends, it is not a book. It is an event from 1859 that is truly scary shit if it happened now.

The event, the greatest geomagnetic solar storm to have occurred in the past 200 years, is named after a dude named Richard C. Carrington (1862-1875). He was an astronomer who is famous for his sunspots research, yet failed to get a promotion and it ruined his life. His wife died from a drug overdose, he died ten days later from a "brain hemorrhage". Academia has always been an abattoir for the human spirit, apparently.

The geomagnetic storm that bears his name lasted from August 28th through September 3rd. It knocked out most of the world’s telegraph lines, a big but not monumental disruption. Luckily, we hadn’t invented a global, potentially catastrophic dependency on electricity yet.

Fun little anecdotes abound. People reading by the evening light! Folks in Florida enjoying the aurora. Compasses spinning at random. Roosters acting like it was dawn, all through the night. The mortality rate of roosters during this event was probably pretty high, now that I think about it.

These solar storms are purportedly a once-in-500 year event. We have GOES satellites looking out for dangerous flares and utilities have Plans and Procedures for mitigating effects so we should just chill. Unfortunately, some of us have experience with power companies and their inability to operate in regular weather, let alone in a solar storm.

No, in these situations, I generally trust insurance companies, and Lloyds of London’s Solar Storm Risk Analysis (now nearly 10 years old, so, grain of salt, etc) estimates severe damage to transformers in the United States, particularly in the Atlantic corridor. They indicate there may be difficulty in acquiring replacements. Anyone who tried to get toilet paper in March 2020 probably can see how that would happen. It predicts an extended power outage is likely, affecting between 20-40 million people, that may last five months. FIVE. MONTHS. Fun times!

I know I said this is the fun part of writing and it is! I like to learn about scary things, fun things, confusing things, really just about everything (except for board game rules, that is a lifelong struggle). I hoard my knowledge and compare other disasters against it. It comforts me.

While I may not have used The Carrington Event in The Control Problem, I know it now and may use it later. Maybe I’ll add it to another book, or borrow the name for a decadent novel that explores the radical departure of norms of yesterday. Fair to say we all have first hand experience of social upheaval.