Inside Job

[ArmillarySphere]

Inside Job (http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0604_5/insidejob.shtml), by Connie Willis (Hugo Award winner 2006)

Enjoy!

[krelnik]

Enjoyed it. Thanks for posting the link.

[JoeTheJuggler]

Is this the same author who wrote the novel about NDEs (had a Titanic theme in it--I think the title was Passages)?

[ArmillarySphere]

It's called Passage, and yes. I found it really unsettling, but YMMV.

[Alice Shortcake]

If, like me, you don't mind putting your brain into neutral to enjoy time-travel stories, Connie Willis' Doomsay Book is a good read.

[JoeTheJuggler]

It's called Passage, and yes. I found it really unsettling, but YMMV.
I found that one pretty compelling.

Inside Job didn't do much for me.


I have a minor complaint and a major complaint:

Minor complaint: the business about Mencken's spirit being unable to read. First, if his spirit retained his end-of-life infirmities (if it's somehow tied to the limitations of his body) it would be dead. Second, if his spirit was limited to his post-stroke aphasia mental abilities, I think he wouldn't have been so articulate.

Major complaint: this paints skeptics' behavior doesn't make sense, especially with regards to the ending. The same Catch 22 Mencken's spirit faced should have been faced by the living skeptics. If this really is Mencken's spirit being channeled, and a skeptic was faced with such incontrovertible evidence, wouldn't he be MUCH more interested in getting information from Mencken about how all this works? What's the "other side" like? How can you inhabit someone's body? Etc. It seems to me, busting a few con artists is pretty petty-minded when you're faced with such knowledge.

Apparently, in the universe posited in this story, there is a spirit or soul or something that lives on after death, and skeptics are merely dogmatists who really don't care about where the evidence might lead them.

[Jeff Corey]

Agree with your spoiler. Logically inconsistent.
This is not the type of scientifiction I like. I'll suspend belief for a while, but this one only makes sense if the Bard from Baltimore is still around.

[Vim Razz]

JoeTheJuggler,
With all due respect, your complaints demonstrate -- in classical form -- why technical types make such lousy romantics.The story is a classic Chandler/Spillane-style mystery boilerplate (including a number of hints to comfirm that point) with an ironic twist at the end (where the hero would normaly kill the sexy villain, proving how cold and hard he is) turning it into a modern mystery-romance (where the sexy villain turns out to be a sexy heroine, proving how clever and heartstruck she is) instead.

Resolving the Mencken point would have derailed the momentum, ruining the story. Rob and Kildy have to "run off into the sunset to fight the bad guys together" at the end. It's a love story; "running off into the lab to write a report together" is anticlimatic and boring!

[ExMinister]

Does kind of defeat the whole purpose of what he was trying to debunk. Fun to imagine something like that happening to debunk the frauds though, if you don't take it too seriously.

[krelnik]

Joe, you do have a good point in your spoiler. I hadn't really thought about that when I was reading, I guess my "willing suspension of disbelief" was in high gear.

Fun to imagine something like that happening to debunk the frauds though, if you don't take it too seriously.

I sometimes wonder about the reverse: what if someone COULD provide proof of the afterlife or some other crazy claim. Suppose they won Randi's $1 million.

Even if the claim was very narrow, what effect would that have on the skeptic movement as a whole?

--Tim Farley

[oldunbeliever]

A good story. IMO. I enjoyed it. It has all the elements a good story should have: interesting plot with unexpected twists, interesting characters, good writing, unable-to-stop-reading suspense. And it's fiction of course. While it may have some serious implications about the absurdity of certain pop fads, it is not a story about the after-life, or whether spirits are among us. It's just a fun story.

I'm always reminded in cases like this, where people get too serious about what is an enjoyable work of fiction, of Mark Twain's book about being a pilot on the Mississippi. There is a passage in which he describes the beauty of a sunset along the river, the dazzling colors, the restless waters, etc., etc. Then he says he can never enjoy such moments because he, as a pilot, has to worry about what that sunset means in terms of weather and river conditions.

Thus do we not enjoy the pleasures of a story like this because we are worrying too much about how logical it is, whether this characters would really have done this or that, whether the author crossed all the tee's and dotted all the i's.

Unless you are a pilot, enjoy the sunset; unless you are a literary critic, enjoy the story.

[JoeTheJuggler]

JoeTheJuggler,
With all due respect, your complaints demonstrate -- in classical form -- why technical types make such lousy romantics.The story is a classic Chandler/Spillane-style mystery boilerplate (including a number of hints to comfirm that point) with an ironic twist at the end (where the hero would normaly kill the sexy villain, proving how cold and hard he is) turning it into a modern mystery-romance (where the sexy villain turns out to be a sexy heroine, proving how clever and heartstruck she is) instead.

Resolving the Mencken point would have derailed the momentum, ruining the story. Rob and Kildy have to "run off into the sunset to fight the bad guys together" at the end. It's a love story; "running off into the lab to write a report together" is anticlimatic and boring!

I am a huge romantic! (I just saw Love in the Time of Cholera.) I also willingly suspend disbelief for fiction with supernatural themes--no problem.

Part of being romantic is putting myself in the character's place. (Even though I'm a pacifist in real life, I can get into self-righteous violence of an action movie or the heroic violence of an epic.) With this story, I couldn't do it. His motives no longer made sense. When I try to put myself into his place, it just shatters the fiction.

Fighting the good fight for skepticism despite the fact that you're knowingly making use of a supernatural phenomenon to do so isn't something I can throw myself into. Also, I think most skeptics would be thrilled at the prospect of real proof of something supernatural. So much so that busting a passel of con artists--especially realizing that other con artists will take their place or, indeed, the same con artists will resurface after being exposed ala Peter Popoff--would be a waste of time, even anti-climactic--compared to finding out whatever we can about how Mencken came to possess the medium, what life on the other side is like, and so on. That he didn't have ANY curiosity about those questions seemed uncharacteristic.

[sthomson]

To JoeTheJuggler:
Fighting the good fight for skepticism despite the fact that you're knowingly making use of a supernatural phenomenon to do so isn't something I can throw myself into. Also, I think most skeptics would be thrilled at the prospect of real proof of something supernatural. So much so that busting a passel of con artists--especially realizing that other con artists will take their place or, indeed, the same con artists will resurface after being exposed ala Peter Popoff--would be a waste of time, even anti-climactic--compared to finding out whatever we can about how Mencken came to possess the medium, what life on the other side is like, and so on. That he didn't have ANY curiosity about those questions seemed uncharacteristic.

Wait, wasn't the skeptic rushing down to Tennesee at the end of the story JUST for that purpose? (well, and for other things) To examine the phenomenon further? I mean, after Menken "proved" that he was really a ghostie or ghoulie, he didn't really have a chance to sit down for a long conversation over coffee.

As for the aphasia thing - yeah, it was silly, but it was a silly little story altogether. I can formulate a few ways that a brain disorder like aphasia would manifest in some imaginary afterlife.

[JoeTheJuggler]

Reply to sthomson:


Wait, wasn't the skeptic rushing down to Tennesee at the end of the story JUST for that purpose? (well, and for other things) To examine the phenomenon further? I mean, after Menken "proved" that he was really a ghostie or ghoulie, he didn't really have a chance to sit down for a long conversation over coffee.

But that happened only after he spent a lot of time and energy using the information that he obtained via paranormal communication with a dead person to expose all the fraudulent mediums who claim to be able to use paranormal communication with a dead person.

From the story, right after saying the protagonist was still skeptical about whether Ariaura was actually channeling Mencken:
We spent the next two months following up on all of them and putting together a massive special issue on “The Great Channeling Swindle.” It looked like we were going to have to testify at Ariaura’s preliminary hearing, which could have proved awkward, but she and her lawyers got in a big fight over whether or not to use an insanity defense since she was claiming she’d been possessed by the Spirit of Evil and Darkness, and she ended up firing them and turning state’s evidence against Charles Fred, Joye Wildde, and several other psychics she hadn’t gotten around to mentioning, and it began to look like the magazine might fold because there weren’t any scams left to write about.

Fat chance. Within weeks, new mediums and psychics, advertising themselves as “Restorers of Cosmic Ethics” and “the spirit entity you can trust,” moved in to fill the void, and a new weight-loss-through-meditation program began packing them in, promising Low-Carb Essence, and Kildy and I were back in business.

So there was a shift somewhere where he stopped checking out the leads given by Mencken in order to check out whether that was real to him using that information (presumably believing it is valid) to expose the various frauds and produce a special issue of his magazine.

He even raised the issue of prosecuting Airaura--an interesting thought, since she's the one medium he believes really channeled a dead person.

Frankly, I wouldn't have let Ariaura out of my site until I had some answers. It would be the biggest and greatest story of them all--not the rather mundane revelation that a bunch of hucksters are hucksters. It would also be the story I ran in the magazine. (Otherwise, he's a skeptical researcher with a serious file drawer bias. Publish the exposes, but keep quiet about the really big story??!)

[sthomson]

Reply to sthomson:


But that happened only after he spent a lot of time and energy using the information that he obtained via paranormal communication with a dead person to expose all the fraudulent mediums who claim to be able to use paranormal communication with a dead person.

From the story, right after saying the protagonist was still skeptical about whether Ariaura was actually channeling Mencken:


So there was a shift somewhere where he stopped checking out the leads given by Mencken in order to check out whether that was real to him using that information (presumably believing it is valid) to expose the various frauds and produce a special issue of his magazine.

He even raised the issue of prosecuting Airaura--an interesting thought, since she's the one medium he believes really channeled a dead person.

Frankly, I wouldn't have let Ariaura out of my site until I had some answers. It would be the biggest and greatest story of them all--not the rather mundane revelation that a bunch of hucksters are hucksters. It would also be the story I ran in the magazine. (Otherwise, he's a skeptical researcher with a serious file drawer bias. Publish the exposes, but keep quiet about the really big story??!)

right after saying the protagonist was still skeptical about whether Ariaura was actually channeling Mencken:

Exactly. He DIDN'T think she was channeling Menken. As he said earlier, it's nearly impossible to prove whether or not someone is channeling someone - that's why he didn't usually go after channelers. Maybe she was suffering from some sort of psychosis, or just wanted to get out of the business.

What was he supposed to do, publish, "Channeler gets in contact with Menken... I think... but my proof is sort of bad... but you have to trust me because I'm a skeptic! Come on!" We see those guys on the forum all the time - they're usually called trolls until they go home. Really, before the dude in Tennesee, the only story he had was "Psychic apparantly channels Menken, then comes clean and gives herself away during an event."