The mathematics and alternate meanings of "representation": Dead Lies Dreaming, by Charles Stross

 Enough real world craziness, time for a science fiction post.  Honestly, my latest read was not the greatest nor the most insightful book ever, but I'm just writing a science fiction post this morning.  Palate cleanser.  I am catching up a bit on The Laundry Files series, by Charles Stross.  I just got around to Dead Lies Dreaming, which Stross published in 2020.  This is now a long-running series with the following gimmick:  magic is real, and based on mathematical computation.  Some variation of that statement is given in nearly every book.  Essentially, if you prove certain postulates, that act opens the doors between universes and lets extra-dimensional beasties into our universe, allows you to "cast spells," and at the extreme end, lets eldritch elder gods into the world to do very bad things.  The British government created an agency to handle these threats-- the Laundry.  The series is something of a cross between The X-Files, H.P. Lovecraft, and Dilbert, with the initial main character, Bob Howard, going from IT guy to rookie field agent to, well, "the Eater of Souls."

Anyway, this is far into the series, and by this point, the British government has faced some very bad threats.  In order to deal with one extra-dimensional beastie, they handed control of the entire government to another elder god-- the Black Pharaoh, who is evil, but as evil goes in these terms, he isn't the worst of the worst, which is why they picked him.  He is referenced as, "the New Management."  We're dealing with what happens under the New Management.  Bob is off dealing with whatever the Eater of Souls is eating, his wife, Mo, is doing her thing, essentially running the Laundry, and various other previously introduced characters are engaged in other matters.  Dead Lies Dreaming starts us on some new stuff.

An old money billionaire, Rupert, had sided with one of the other elder gods, and he is trying to find a way back to power, taking down the Black Pharaoh.  In order to do that, he needs to get a copy of... fuck, it's basically the Necronomicon.  Klaatu Berada Nikto!  He tasks his secretary/henchwoman with finding it.  Coincidentally, the book is being held in a dream dimension, accessible by her family's dilapidated mansion, because her family has some fucked up magical history.  This requires her to deal with her brother, who has a weirdo fascination with Peter Pan.  Her brother, Imp(resario) has a gang of thieves who use their magic powers to pull off heists.  They engage in shenanigans to get a map to the Necronomicon, which leads into dream-London, and hijinks ensue.

Rupert is vile, he has this fantasy of himself as M, sending out "Mr. Bond" as his psycho hitman to run operations for him, and in Stross-ian fashion, it's all ludicrous.  Rupert loses, of course.  He's going up against the New Management.  He's gonna lose, but the Black Pharaoh doesn't even have to do anything.  Rupert just pissed off his secretary/henchwoman, Eve, so much that she, shall we say, was not truly loyal to him.  Anyway, the plot isn't what's interesting.

Let's think a bit about representation, in its many and varied forms and meanings.  When I read, say, N.K. Jemisin, or Nnedi Okorafor, I expect that I'm not going to be reading white people.  Why?  The authors aren't white.  Once upon a time, authors, particularly those who were promoted (especially in sci-fi) were white men, and that kind of sucked.  It meant that stories were told from limited perspectives.  Science works such that it doesn't matter who does the experiment, you get the same result, but literature doesn't work that way.  When Octavia Butler writes a novel, you get a different novel from Frank Herbert, and that expanded realm of perspectives is a valuable thing.

It is most easily visible in the basic demographics of the characters themselves.  An author will most commonly write a POV character that is, if not an author stand-in, then of a kind.  Similar.  Octavia Butler tended to write from the perspective of African-American women, as opposed to the white male perspectives of the earlier generation science fiction authors.  Why?  She was an African-American woman.  One value of an expanded pool of authors is an expanded pool of perspectives.  And unlike hiring discrimination, this is what we call, "legal," and totally cool.

Yet let's ask:  when you consider a pool of characters, what are the traits that you... "want?"  Notice those quotation marks.  Consider Richard Wright.  He stuck with me, reading him in high school.  OK, yes, someone assigned to me in high school was good.  I admit it.  There.  Are you happy now, Ms. Avery?  Actually, she was kind of cool.  Write about growing up as, as the title says, a Black Boy, and the cast of characters will not be a random sample of America.  It will not be "representative," in the statistical sense, of America.  Yet, the book will "represent" certain lives and perspectives.  See what I did there, with that word?  Multiple meanings.  Get where I'm goin' here?

Suppose a book as N characters.  How shall an author fill the character...istics of that set of N?  To be as statistically representative of America (or in Stross's case, Britain) as possible?  To present the lives of those like the author, because those lives are not "represented" elsewhere in literature?  Those are different.  African-Americans are 13% of the population.  Sample randomly, and compose a cast of characters through random sampling, and you would have 13% African-Americans.  LGBTQ, about 5%.  Of course, within fiction, you don't have a random sample!  By that, I don't simply mean that the author invented the characters.  (Let's ignore historical fiction.)  Rather, I mean that you have violations of the independence condition.  Here's what I mean.

Your characters are connected to each other.  Character 1 is connected to character 2, so if there is a trait possessed by character 1, and the association between the two is of certain forms, there is a higher than baseline probability that character 2 possesses the same trait.  It would be nice if humans didn't self-segregate by race, but they do.  If character 1 is of one race, and character 2 is a friend of character 1, the probability that character 2 is of the same race is higher than that race's frequency within the population.  An ugly thing, but a true thing.

There are circumstances in which this would be less true, such as the military under a draft with no effective dodge, but basically, characters are not true random samples.  Yet they are samples.

So consider.  After that long ramble about math.

Charles Stross is a British techie.  He was a computer programmer before shifting to science fiction.  He's a schlubby white guy from the world of math, tech, computers 'n such.  When he wrote The Atrocity Archives, the first novel in the Laundry Files series, he made the main character... wait, are you ready for this?... Bob Howard.  A schlubby, British white guy from the world of math, tech and computers.  Wow!  What a stretch!  Stross is hetero, so Bob is hetero.  Bob lives the fantasy, and marries someone way out of his league, Mo.  This is all totally shocking, right?

So Bob is your main character for the series for a while.  Eventually, Stross starts to write novels from other characters' perspectives, like Mo, and some side characters introduced later.  But let's examine.  Bob is a straight, white guy in England.  Whom will he marry?  A straight, white woman in England.  The "straight woman" part is given by Bob being a straight man.  The "white" part is statistically likely but not logically necessary.  It may be noted that the UK has become more racially diverse, but it remains less diverse than the US, and people do tend to marry the same race, as an empirical observation, but I'll come back to this.  Regardless, once Mo is a main character, and subsequently a POV character, those traits follow from the selection of Bob as the initial main character.

Bob's ex-girlfriend, who is a POV character later on?  Well, Bob is a straight, white guy in England, which makes Mhari a straight woman, and by the numbers, she's probably going to be white (again, I'll return to this).  In either Mhari's case or Mo's case (ha!  Mo's case! get it? no? read the books), Stross could easily have written a non-white character, and today, would have, but he didn't.  He went literally by the numbers.  White as default.  The hetero thing?  Once you make Bob your POV character and expand, that's just what happens.  Mo and Mhari, his wife and ex-girlfriend are non-independent observations, in statistical terms.  Once you begin with Bob as a straight male, their characteristics are set, so having them as POV characters in subsequent books sets their orientation, and if you set their race by both baseline statistical frequency in the UK, and statistically likely pairing with your author-stand-in initial POV character, all branched out, Bob's your uncle seed.  That came out wrong.  But, if you know how random number generators work, that's kind of what I mean.  You have a complex formula that isn't truly random, you start with a seed number, and from that seed number, everything else that follows is deterministic.  Anyway, point being, start with Bob, who is basically a Stross avatar, and you wind up with a cast of characters branching out.

In Dead Lies Dreaming, Stross did a challenge-to-heteronormativity cast of characters.  Basically, start fresh so that he can have no clearly heterosexual characters.  Remember, he initially branched out from Bob, which created a seed issue.  Stross is not the only author to think of this, not even beyond LGBTQ literature where the whole point is the LGBTQ stuff.  Jemisin did it in her last book, The City We Became, which was practically unreadable, Sarah Pinsker did it in Song For A New Day, but she actually is gay.  Also, that book is really good.  Um... maybe take note:  if a straight author is doing it, it's just a virtue-signaling gimmick, but I'm getting to that.  Imagine if a white guy tried to write Black Boy.  You're cringing, right?  Time to cringe.

Anyway, here's Stross's new cast of characters.  Imp, the nickname of Jeremy, who leads a gang of four thieves, is either gay, or bi leaning gay.  Another member of the gang is Doc, who is functionally his boyfriend, and seems gay rather than bi.  That's two.  Note, though, the branching effect!  If you begin with Imp, that's different from beginning with Bob.  One leads to Mo/Mhari, the other leads to Doc, based on non-independently drawn samples.  See?  Statistical analysis is fun and cool!

Wait!  Come back!

Anyway, the other two members of the gang are Del, a gay black woman (lots of intersectionality), and "Game Boy," an Asian trans boy.  Game Boy is under 18, and written essentially as a political cudgel rather than a fleshed out character, and I'm not actually sure that Stross has the laws and processes in the UK right.  Regardless, the point is that the gang is composed to be a challenge to heteronormativity.

As far as sampling goes here, Doc is a romantic interest for Imp, and if Imp is gay, then so is Doc.  Non-independent observation.  Then, you have two more members of the gang.  The writing concept for the gang is that they are very young, powered, LGBTQ nonviolent thieves.  Is there, like, a London Craigslist for that?  Game Boy has to be a runaway, and the process of finding Imp?  Um, Imp certainly would take Game Boy in, Del is about of an odd-one-out, but this is just kind of a group that begs the question of how it was composed.  The more societal disfavor there is against the LGBTQ, the more necessary it is for them to form their own communities, and the book presents one, but London in the 21st Century is not actually the kind of place where it's really all that hard.  Game Boy's family background is written as fable/horror story more than anything else, and the purpose is to convince you that those under 18 should be given access to hormones and medical transitioning procedures without parental involvement or consent, and you can go read about these issues elsewhere.  From a plotting standpoint, and from a statistical standpoint though, you have a group, the origins of which beg a bit of an origin story, in comic book terminology.

There's also a bounty hunter sent after them.  Del needs a girlfriend, so Wendy (yeah) has to be a gay woman, allowing them to hook up.  Anyone for Game Boy?  He's too emotionally stunted.  Nearly 18 chronologically, but emotional age, about 10.

Anyway, there's Rupert.  Villainously pansexual.  Imp/Jeremy's sister, Eve, seems basically hetero, but with all the sick shit Rupert makes her do, she is far enough from vanilla that she's something else anyway.  The only heterosexual character is "Mr. Bond," who is written as a caricature of every bigotry you can imagine, so over the top that even Stonewall would say, hey, Charlie, tone it down a bit.  Straining credulity here.

So there's your cast.

Consider the ratios, the issue of non-independence, branching and composition.  If you begin with Imp, and branch from him without going beyond empiricism, what kind of orientation ratio would you observe in this cast?  Imp gives you Doc.  Does that pair give you Del and Game Boy?  Conceivably, but it begs an origin story, because they are a gang of very young, powered, LGBTQ nonviolent thieves, and that's just so specific.  Powers are increasing in that world, 'cuz, but at 5% of the population, adding that as a criterion for gang membership means we need an origin story.  How'd Game Boy find Imp, or vice versa?  Del is the odd one out, so how did that happen?  That kind of stuff, because yeah, sure, once you create the Imp/Doc relationship that's non-independent, in statistical terms, and the more oppressive an environment, the stronger the incentives for LGBTQ people to form their own communities, but 21st Century London?  With every other condition for gang membership?  Origin story necessary, or it just looks like the group was composed for the purposes of it being all LGBTQ.

Then there's Wendy.  Wendy's orientation allowed her to hook up with Del, but that wasn't necessary.  It was an authorial choice in both instances.  Why did Stross make that choice?  Because the purpose of the cast was to challenge heteronormativity.  Why does Eve make a comment about Rupert and "rentboys?"  Same thing.  Rupert's pansexuality is a challenge to heteronormativity, in the context of this cast, but that doesn't at all follow from the branching.  Doc did.  Within the initial series of the books, Mo and Mhari did, but the construction of the cast in Dead Lies Dreaming did not follow branching or non-independence.  This was written intentionally to create a non-heterosexual cast as a challenge to heteronormativity, as though Stross were the first modern sci-fi author to think to do such a thing rather than jumping on a bandwagon.

Go read Sarah Pinsker, Tamsyn Muir, and a bunch of other authors who do it a) better, and b) because they're gay, and hence not just as some pandering gimmick.  Sorry.  Back on track...

In the initial series of novels, if you haven't read any of this, you might suspect that Stross just plain forgot to include any gay characters, and this is kind of an attempt to self-correct.  Right?  Actually... no.  Bob's housemates before he met Mo were a gay couple named after the famous Animaniacs lab mice.  Yes, really.  They're engineers who build scary, dangerous shit, they're hilarious, and they demonstrate the basic point that every math geek since the early 1990s loves Animaniacs.  Stross was including LGBTQ characters.  He just wasn't writing all-LGBTQ casts.

So now, consider the "representation" question.  In a cast of N characters, how many LGBTQ characters "should"... weird word... there be?  Should, statistically?  Should, ethically?  Based on what ethic?

If we're thinking statistically, that depends.  If you are writing a book set in the Castro District, probably way more than 5%, right?  If you are writing a "random sample," then 5%, but no sample is random, which is a point I am making!  If we introduce an ethical dimension, what ethic?

Fun story.  Are you familiar with Joe Haldeman's The Forever War?  Great book.  Quick version:  a character in the future fights in a war spanning millennia because of time dilation.  You see him training in the barracks in the near future, and then way, way in the distant future at the end of the war against misunderstood aliens.  Part of what happens is that early in the book, the world is overpopulated and under-resourced, so the government basically turns people gay for population control.  (This is a Vietnam-era thing, and it's actually pretty far left.)  Anyway, I gave this book to an ultra-wokestir, who didn't read a full description, but was reading the barracks stuff, and asked... where are all the gay people?!!

Now, this was amusing on multiple levels.  There was the main plot point, but beyond that, if all you read is modern stuff like this Stross thing, you are accustomed to very LGBTQ casts.  But if you think statistically, remember 5%.  So I went through the math for our wokestir.  Out of any group of 20 characters, on average, only one should be expected to be LGBTQ.  But wait... remember our standard in the social sciences?  p<.05?  How large does a random sample-- like a draft-- have to be before you really say, hey, wait, where are all the gay people?  Here's the formula:  1 - (.95^n)  = p.  You don't cross below the .05 threshold until n = 59.  And that only gives you one, which is the loneliest number!

Statistically, how large would a cast of characters have to be before, sampled randomly, you would suspect shenanigans for not observing a trans character?  Trans is a broad label, but for the sake of some numbers, let's go with .5%.  1 - (.005^n) = p.  Um... 139.  If you're reading, and you see no trans characters, statistically you should not think anything is amiss until you get to 139 characters by the rules of hypothesis testing.

OK, now if you read sci-fi and fantasy, you see way more LGBTQ characters than statistical representation.  To some degree, this is who the authors are.  See, for example, Tamsyn Muir, Arkady Martine, and many others.

But that's not the only meaning of "representation."  A character who "represents" a group.  Why is Game Boy there?  Game Boy is there to make an ideological point, representing not only a group, an intersection, but a policy argument relating to that group.  Think about 139 characters.  Go ahead.  Try!  Start listing.  (I really wished that had been 140!)  If one thinks, OK, trans characters and then decides that the numbers should reflect statistical proportions within the population, the result is rarity, and the decision to have Game Boy represent that issue, community, position and so forth is based on a belief that such can matter beyond numbers.

Consider.  I often assign Buchanan & Tullock's The Calculus of Consent, as a vital piece of scholarship, and often misunderstood.  The central observation made by Buchanan & Tullock is that the only decision rule that does not run afoul of small-d democratic principles is unanimity, because everything else is exploitable and inevitably leads to exploitation.  Even 100%-1.  Consider:  would you accept peace and prosperity for all, should it cost the infinite torture of one?

Well, it's just one.  I'm not the only person to conceive of this hypothetical.  Buchanan and Tullock were just the ones who elaborated on the math.  Unanimity is the rule that structurally solves the problem.  In the context here, if you accept the validity of the question, then you accept the premise that the needs of Spock's one can outweigh the needs of literally everyone else, so yeah, maybe you actually should write beyond statistical representation, and represent smaller categories that would require 139 independent observations before you hit p<.05.

I've already said that I don't think Game Boy is a very well thought-out character.  More political cudgel the fully realized, compelling, three-dimensional person, and frankly, I think that Stross failed to write Game Boy as actually masculine rather than just emotionally stunted (unless he was going for too emotionally damaged for any real sense of gender).  That said, the question of adolescents, gender dysphoria, parental rights and medical transitioning is one worthy of writing.  It is the subject of political debate, and actually, Stross had written about this kind of thing more intelligently, and earlier than anyone else, in Glasshouse.

But what seems to be important right now is the set.  The numbers.  That constraint.  In Dead Lies Dreaming, Stross is concerned with the numerical characteristics of the cast, beyond even the seed effect of Imp.  And Stross is not the only one under this constraint.

Music.  The great trumpet player, Ron Miles, passed away.  Here he is with Otis Taylor, on "Mama's Got A Friend," from Below The Fold.