Hugo Nominee: The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere (Mild spoilers)

[jack]

http://www.tor.com/stories/2013/02/the-water-that-falls-on-you-from-nowhere

The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere is one of the hugo nominated short stories. It's about the family problems of a man, his other half, and his chinese-american family, in a world where water falls on you from nowhere whenever you lie.

What I liked about it is that it embraced a bold premise that most authors wouldn't have thought of, that this water suddenly appeared. And it didn't waste a lot of time making up implausible excuses for where it came from, but dwelled on the characters interactions in this world.

I liked that it touched briefly on the limits of the water -- it can be cold and intense enough to be dangerous, but not usually; evasions and near-lies come close to triggering it, bigger lies get more water. Equivocations produce an unbearable urge to clarify. Enough that you know what you need to know for the rest of the story, but not enough that you're inclined to nitpick. I thought that was a very good example of how to do worldbuilding, without too much or too little worldbuilding.

However, it seemed to miss out a lot of obvious questions like, imagine how much criminal trials would change if you can just ask if someone's guilty? And you have to have mats and towels everywhere. How much politics would change if you know everyone is going to keep their oaths to the letter and not fudge. How much advertising, medical research, teaching, would all change if no-one could equivocate. The novel The Truth Machine, dealt with a lot of those questions, not perfectly, but more than most other books I've read. I think it's fine that TWTFOYFN deals with family life not public life, but it seemed like a hole to me -- I'd have been happier if there was some throw-away line justifying my head-canon, either that things massively changed, but without going into detail, or that it could be fudged in some way that made it unhelpful for premeditated lies.

I liked the family life story, it was engaging and a bit moving, many of the little details added up well.

I felt it fell a little flat that the family story was resolved without the water being massively influential, it felt like each was a background to the other, but they didn't have to be in the same story. Or did I miss something?

Comments

[simont]

everyone is going to keep their oaths to the letter

Not having read it, does this necessarily follow? Oathkeeping isn't quite the same deal as truthfulness, particularly if the means of enforcement is a soaking at the moment of speech. Because when you tell a lie, it's clear that the morally bad act (if you consider it such) is at the moment of speaking that which you know to be false; but an oath can be a statement of completely sincere intent at the time it's spoken, and the morally bad act comes a long time later when (if) you break it.

Of course if you got drenched at the moment of breaking the oath, that would be an incentive to keep it. But if the water instead appeared when people made oaths, then it would either have to constrain itself to punishing only the ones whose authors already knew they were going to break them later, or else it would have to have foreknowledge – and aside from all the usual time-paradox dangers of the latter, it seems to me that the effect would not be that everyone would keep their oaths so much as that people would refrain from making any in the first place unless they were really exceptionally sure of themselves. (Which you might still see as a positive effect, but it's not the same positive effect.)

[jack]

Sorry, I glossed over the details there. I agree that if at the tmie you made your oath in good faith but by a later time you fell into temptation later[1], at neither time would you be directly caused to be drenched. But I imagined a lot of people committing political suicide with press conferences like:

Q. Have you ever used your official powers to break the law for because you thought it was the right thing to do?
A. No.
Q. Have you ever used your official powers to break the law for financial gain?
A. No.
Q. Have you ever used your official powers to break the law out of lust?
A. No comment.

:)

[1] Which probably isn't always the case, but is often.

[simont]

I suppose in that situation the skilled politician looks ahead by a few more moves and answers "no comment" to all the questions, on the basis that at least that gives less detailed information to their enemies.

More generally, I'd imagine that a strong culture of refusing to answer would be a natural consequence of a visible indication of lying.

In the story, has this watery effect always existed, or has it come into existence only recently? In the latter case, you could certainly imagine a lot of people committing the kinds of dishonesty common in our own society and getting amusingly caught out, and then a difficult adjustment process while people gradually figured out what the sensible strategies were, but in the former case you'd expect society to have evolved all along with the right defence mechanisms (perhaps, for instance, a greatly strengthened culture of no obligation to answer to give people a fighting chance at privacy) and the interest would be less to have a laugh at the expense of (analogues of) real-world liars and more to imagine what such a very different society might end up looking like.

[jack]

I'd imagine that a strong culture of refusing to answer would be a natural consequence of a visible indication of lying.

I agree, and I think people would learn, partly, to cope with awkward truths in place of white lies, and partly, when to deliberately extend and accept ambiguity by allowing hedged answers.

But it still seems like, everyone would prefer politicians who make SOME bold claims unhedged.

has this watery effect always existed, or has it come into existence only recently

Fairly recently, but not immediately. I got the impression of a couple of months to a couple of years. Enough that everyone knows how it works, but little enough that people have roughly the same instincts they do now -- we haven't had a whole generation grow up without knowing what a lie is.

[simont]

But it still seems like, everyone would prefer politicians who make SOME bold claims unhedged.

I'm sure that, other things being equal, they would. But at what cost, if other things are not equal? It might very easily turn out that the kind of people who could hand-on-heart swear to all sorts of awesome-sounding manifesto promises and remain completely dry were strongly correlated to the kind of people who wouldn't be all that competent at putting it all into practice once in power, and/or who had overlooked some really important undesirable consequences of their idealistic promises. So after a while you'd learn to prefer politicians who made less outstanding claims and hedged a bit more, as the best balance between having good intentions and actually delivering what they intended...

[jack]

Yeah, I expect a reasonable amount of hedging (for lots of game-theory reasons why a little bit of deniability can make negotiations work better.)

Something like "I may have to make compromises, but I genuinely care about getting what benefits I can for people in situation X." That's fine.

But I think many politicians have to promise things which they'd like to do if they had infinite money, but they know that they're pretty much going to have to renege on. If every party says "we'll cut taxes and raise spending and reduce the deficit" it ought to be obvious they're all lying, but it's useful to know which parts they're genuinely committed to..?

[ewx]

I think the 'no comment' would fall foul of the equivocation rule...

[jack]

Oh, hm. I implicitly assumed that would only catch things which were deliberately ambiguous, in a misleading way. Not that it would force you to answer, and prevent you not answering. But I don't know how much of that was in the story and how much was my expectation.

Now I look, it seems that they only described the urge to respond when you said something like "this sentence is false", I don't know if that covers usual equivocation or not: I guess maybe usual equivocation would produce mild dampness, if it was true but you deliberately left out the important information...

[eudoxiafriday.wordpress.com]

Er, major SPOILERS below!

I really liked the story (read it after a CGM mentioned it in an email). It didn't bother me that the full consequences of it hadn't been explored. For me the recent introduction of the water covered that enough - say it's been around for 3 months, yes there are probably a bunch of journalists having an extremely entertaining time being able to suddenly access all sorts of stuff they couldn't before; it's probably not been around long enough or proven trustworthy enough for anyone to be thinking about using it in courts - and the main character (biotech engineer preoccupied with his own issues) not commenting on this stuff.

I think the water is massively influential in the family story but that doesn't necessarily come at the climactic moment, so I can see why you felt differently. I think the huge influence of the water is that it enables Matt to admit to himself how much he actually loves Gus and is committed to Gus - which he wasn't really admitting to himself and therefore couldn't process / wasn't able to face bringing up with his family. Matt can stop twisting himself in circles and being partly trapped because the water acts as an external validator to sort his internal landscape out. (I also think it's significant that it falls when his sister claims that Gus will cheat on him (and that it's telling that Matt knows that and reacts without hesitation).)

I think the structure of the story (with the kind of anti-climax at the end, because most of the significant stuff happened earlier) reinforces the theme of the story. Matt thinks/fears that his parents will have a huge negative reaction to him coming out, and then everything's scary and his sister goes off on one and he's convinced it's all ruined and ... actually, his parents are totally cool and incredibly supportive. Oh. That was unexpected. Huh.

[eudoxiafriday.wordpress.com]

Whoops, should have proofread: "the main character ... not commenting on this stuff seems perfectly reasonable to me."

[jack]

"the main character ... not commenting on this stuff seems perfectly reasonable to me"

Maybe. I don't think it's completely implausible, but it sort of jars me out of the story that what I expected to be a major revolutionary shift had been completely unnoticed. A throw away half-sentence like "politicians started issuing major press releases in text" or "it wasn't clear if it was going to affect the political order" might have defused the problem, just to show stuff was going on, prominent in the press, but no-one was taking it seriously yet, would have made the story seem a lot more interesting to me.

it enables Matt to admit to himself how much he actually loves Gus and is committed to Gus - which he wasn't really admitting to himself

That's a really good point. I think I'd been assuming he would obviously figure that out -- even if he was scared of ever saying it, that sooner or later there'd be a prospect of losing Matt and he'd realise that couldn't let him go, even if he couldn't verbalise that. But I may be too optimistic or too unobservant of human nature, I know lots of couples do drift along with one party never able to get themselves together enough to make a serious commitment, and sometimes drift apart again. (Especially if he can't shake the idea his sister his selling that his parents will never approve.) I'm not sure it's sufficiently clear, but maybe it was important, I'm not sure...