As any good geologist will tell you, sometimes schist just happens.
I’ve been sick recently (I think my misadventure on New Year’s Eve may have come back to haunt me), so I made a conscious effort to get to bed at a semi-reasonable time. It’s nearly 5:00 AM and I’m still awake.
This bites.
Do you suppose Jeff Foxworthy is smarter than a fifth grader?
If you asked him, he’d probably immediately respond “No.” Then he’d come up with some reasons why he isn’t. He could probably then turn around and write a bestselling book of ways you can tell whether you’re not as smart as a fifth grader.
Then again, Bill Engvall has this pretty well covered already.
Back in 2006, I wrote about the events leading up to the proto-story Murder, She Caused. (I say “proto-story” because although there are a few paragraphs of dialogue, most of it’s just a summary of the idea for a story.)
One of the missing pieces of the story behind the story (would that be a meta-story?) is just how bizarre the conversation was that led to the idea of Mulder and Scully investigating Jessica Fletcher.
I have no idea how it progressed to a dead FBI agent (who eventually evolved into Fox Mulder), but the original conversation involved Kzinti roaming Cabot Cove. Come to think of it, I have no idea how or why the conversation started with the Kzinti; the need for an FBI investigation in Cabot Cove would be the more logical starting point. But no, the conversation started with Kzinti and ended with the FBI.
As I said, it was a bizarre conversation.
Because New Year’s Day was on a Thursday, lots of people took Friday off as well. My office was fairly empty on Friday; probably less than 20 of us on the entire floor. Likewise, there was pretty minimal traffic. (More than on Wednesday, but still, I managed to get to the office by 8:30.)
Monday’s gonna suck.
It’s now close to 6:00 AM (It took a while to find that video, you should watch it.) I’m still not sleepy. Perhaps I’ve had too much sleep the past few weeks?
This is why I part of why I don’t go to bed at what most folks would consider a normal hour.
One of the categories for this post is “Pointless Posts.” This may very well be the most definitively pointless post not only on my site, but on the entire Internet.
In the last sentence of the second paragraph, I complained that I was still awake.
Just in case you thought I was sleep-posting I suppose. (That would have probably improved the quality of the writing significantly.)
If memory serves, we actually had that discussion back during the days of USENET. I seem to remember seeing it posted to one of those oldtime newsgroups; it is, in any event, certainly more than 3 years old.
The discussion had its genesis in talk of the Ringworld and who built it. We came to an unshakeable conviction that the Pak Protectors merely found it and did not build it, and I think we even figured out a likely contender for the true architects, based on what Niven and others under his direction had revealed of Known Space. Alas, I can’t recall our chain of reasoning either, only that we considered it solid.
And that doesn’t explain how we got to Cabot Cove either, but I still to this day love the idea of kzinti running around that little New England town.
Yup, that’s all correct. Murder, She Caused first appeared on one of my web site in August of 1995. Slightly more than 13 years ago. (That particular web site, I think it was my old tripod account, was dismantled several years ago.)
The discussion and usenet post which inspired the story of Dana Scully investigating Jessica Fletcher took place in July of the same year. You evidently posted it to usenet in wee hours of July 20. When they bought out DejaNews, Google kept a copy of the post.
The event which I said took place in 2006 was the post in which I first revealed the meta-story.
Of course, now I’ve gone and told the story of how the story’s orgins were first revealed. This is now the meta-meta-story. (Or at the very least, a history of the history.)
Part of our reasoning regarding the Ringworld was based on the discovery of Newduvai. That was the zoo world where the kzinti locked up a captured human, who discovered a kzinti section of the world with intelligent kzinretti, and then, in a followup story, a collection of Neanderthals.
It was an easy leap from there to see a connection between this zoo world, and the Ringworld, which also functions as a zoo of sort, with lifesize replicas of a number of inhabited worlds from Known Space, including the Kzin homeworld, Mars and Earth, where the humans were unintelligent Pak breeders that Louis Wu referred to as trolls.
Our reasoning went that somebody created both worlds with the goal of studying the sentient species of Known Space. That seems like a Puppeteer sort of goal, but since the Puppeteers were only aware of the Ringworld and considered its origins and nature a mystery — as revealed in one of the “Man-Kzin War” collections — we eliminated them as contenders for its creators.
The Pak we eliminated, in part because of their inability to cooperate long enough to achieve such an undertaking, but also because they were evidently ignorant of space travel. Another point against their having built it is the lack of tree-of-life on the Earth map; Pak Protectors would have put tree-of-life there for the breeders. It’s more likely that Protectors discovered the Ringworld and spread their breeders across it, or that the builders put breeders there with a supply of tree-of-life, and the breeders reproduced and spread wildly.
I think we might have concluded that the Outsiders built the Ringworld, but I have no idea how the Outsiders would have accomplished something like that, considering how fragile they are.
Once you’ve read Fleet of Worlds, it becomes abundantly clear that that although the the Puppeteers don’t understand humans, they’re also historically too cowardly to attempt anything such as building the Ringworld.
I like the idea of the Outsiders being responsible for the Ringworld. I suspect it will cost you a trillion stars to find out why they did it though.
I imagine you’re correct, and since I lack Known Space currency in sufficient quantities, I suppose I will never find out, until and unless Niven reveals all in a future work. Given his general fatigue with Known Space, though, that seems unlikely.
What about the Outsiders makes you think them likely contenders for the role of Ringworld architects? They’ve certainly been around long enough to have collected Homo neandertalis specimens and put them on the Ringworld to study — they actually remember the Slavers and Suicide Night — but given that they’re made of ammonia (?) and shatter at the movement of air, I can’t see them building the Ringworld themselves. Whom would they have used as contractors?