Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut 46–On the Nature of Power
This is a comic I wrote in direct response to this series of comics in FreeFall. Eric Burns at Websnark wrote an essay once in which he said that part of why he likes FreeFall so much is that in spite of its goofy sense of humor, it’s fundamentally a Hard SF comic, built on that kind of world. For him, that’s a huge selling point. Now, I like FreeFall a lot, too. But elements that remind me of Hard SF frustrate me. Some, though certainly not all, Hard SF tends to have a certain pedagogic feel to it, as if we as readers are supposed to be learning about the joy of science by reading it. FreeFall definitely has this feeling quite a bit, with a number of strips that involve Florence explaining some scientific idea or other. That’s fine, and actually now that I think of it seems perfectly natural to me. My lovely girlfriend is a student of ecology, and we’ve been known to spend hours talking about sciencey stuff. But the problem comes for me when this “I’m teaching you things, dear reader” sense is applied to things with a kind of political angle to them–like nuclear radiation. There’s an attitude in some, and again definitely not all, Hard SF that because the writer knows science he (almost always “he”) knows better than the ignorant plebes about insert political issue. If they only knew about science, they would agree! It comes off as really condescending, and often misses the point of the political issue. I don’t really think that that’s exactly what’s going on here–although there’ve been other strips that suggest that people are afraid of nuclear radiation only because they were mislead in the past. I think it was more that the feeling was too similar for me and it provoked a response in comic form.
Part of it is that this particular issue strikes literally close to home for me. I live in Olympia, Washington now and I grew up in Boise, Idaho. While not the worst by far, both of these are areas that have and continue to be impacted by nuclear waste and nuclear testing. My high school chemistry professor used to talk about how he would sit out on the porch in Nampa, Idaho and watch the nuclear detonations–the light carried that far. Idaho didn’t get quite the dose of “downwinder” problems that Utah did, but it wasn’t unaffected. And in later years, it was used as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. Washington is perhaps even worse. Nuclear waste sits in unlined trenches at the Hanford site, and has for decades.
And guess what? Washington has one of the highest incident rates of cancer in the country, and the highest rate of breast cancer. Now, a scientist can’t draw a conclusion from that kind of data–there’s just too many variables. And that’s part of why science isn’t as useful to public policy as some science-types would like to think. Science is very slow to come to conclusions, and very equivocal about those conclusions when they finally come. For the advancement of knowledge, this is a good thing. But for taking action to fix problems even if there may not really be a connection, adhering to the rules of science can be counterproductive.
Anyway, that’s some of the overthinking I did before I wrote this four line comic.
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