jeffy

Mother's Benefits become the means by which British governments provide British women with the same benevolent management Britain once provided to India, Ireland, and Africa.

Benefits by Zoë Fairbairns

“Terrain theory” advocates use an image of two goldfish bowls, one in which the water is green, and in the other the water is clear. It always comes with a slogan: “Don’t medicate the fish, clean the tank!” I’ve been staring at that image for a few days now because I knew there’s something wrong with it, but I couldn’t quite figure out what that something was or how to put it into words.

“Terrain Theory” is an “alternative model of health” promoted by the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The idea behind it is short, easy to understand, simple to the point of childishness, and utterly, fatally wrong: if you lived in a healthy world, you wouldn’t need vaccines and antibiotics.

But goddamn is that fish lonely.

Terrain Theory is presented as an alternative to germ theory; the essential idea is that human body is a “terrain” that hosts lots of other micro-organisms, and that illness isn’t the introduction of inimical organisms, it’s when the terrain becomes “unbalanced” in some way, making one exhibit symptoms.

Like all zombie ideas, this one has a clear grain of truth. A healthy gut is undistracted and can handle small incursions of foodborne illness without making you ill. A healthy immune system can fight off a lot of familiar diseases. (The word “familiar” there is doing a lot of work!) Strong muscles and bones make a healthy old age more likely. We take great pains to keep our food fresh, our water clean, and we’re slowly learning the necessity of keeping our air decontaminated.

But goddamn is that fish lonely.

The reason we do things like keep our food fresh and our water clean is because they can harbor dangerous bacteria and other germs. Infections are a matter of numbers and statistics: a small incursion of viri can be handled by your immune system, but if enough get into you, some will sneak past the guards and give you fever and chills and worse. A small amount of hostile bacteria in a dish too-long among the leftovers will die in your stomach acid, but if enough get into you, you’ll be spending tomorrow on the porcelain throne. That threshold is different for everyone, depending on a host of factors that depend on front-line defenses in your respiratory and digestive systems as well as the entire layered defense system of your bloodstream and tissues. (For example, I almost never seem to get foodborne illness, but my wife is much more sensitive; on the other hand, I seem to catch every virus my nose encounters, but she never catches the flu or a cold.)

Terrain Theory is the bizarre idea that at the microbial level, predator/prey dynamics don’t exist. That no invasive species would cause a boom/bust cycle inside your body, turning it into a battlefield as it seeks out its prey and the body fights back.

What makes the image so wrong is that the fish is lonely. It never sees other fish. It’s nowhere near its niche of evolutionary adaptation. They evolved to live in slow-moving streams in the mountainous regions of China, not pristine clean goldfish bowls.

You and I don’t live in a perfectly clean world. We’re not Howard Hughes, holed up in our air-filtered bunkers. We live among other human beings, some of whom will encounter other human beings that have diseases, and they may transmit those to us, via air, via touch, via intimacy. There’s only so much cleaning we can do in a day, and unlike RFK Jr. we can’t hire other people to do it.

What Terrain Theory advocates don’t understand is that there is no perfectly immune human being, not even close. At the microbial level all of nature is trying to figure out how to live within us or eat us, and they evolve one Hell of a lot faster than we do; we produce new offspring about three times in our lifespans, and each of those three has some shatteringly small chance to develop a novel immunity they might pass on to their children. Inside you, an average of thirty-five trillion bacteria are reproducing every three days, and every one of those has its own shatteringly small chance to develop into something deadly inimical… but you get 3 chances in 70 years and they get 70,000,000,000,000 chances every week.

What’s worse is that you can’t live without them. Some of those bacteria are actually as essential to your well-being, speaking of “terrain,” as mammals and birds are to the health of a forest. Microbiome gut bacteria help regulate blood sugar and bowel health, and I’m sure we’ll find even more functions they and we have evolved together to provide them with a mobile survival platform and us with a better immune system.

Terrain theory takes a single idea how we live healthier lives, “we should live with a reasonable amount of cleanliness,” and tries to claim that it’s the only idea. That somehow the microscope was not only unnecessary but an evil addition to our arsenal of tools with which we defend ourselves from sickness and death. Throwing out medication and vaccination as “dispensable modern inventions humanity never needed before” ignores the centuries of pain and suffering disease inflicted even on those warlords who kept for themselves the lion’s share of clean water and fresh food.

I’m not a monk. And, quite likely, neither are you. We eat, drink, breath, kiss, and even have sex with other human beings, and every contact gives the microbial world in which we live and of which we are hosts another chance at moving from one body to another. Terrain Theorists can avoid good food, good friendship, and good messy sex all they want, but they’re sadder– and sicker– people for doing so.

Three books new to me. All are fantasies, two are series.

Books Received, November 15 to November 21, 2025

I would definitely found an SF magazine.

Most mags struggle with handling submissions but I had a moment of insight: all I need to do is tell writers to send me _good_ stories. Their crap, they can submit elsewhere. Bang! Workload down by 99%.

A young scholar and his diverse companions are dispatched on an intelligence-gathering mission deep into enemy territory.

The Door on the Sea (The Raven and the Eagle, volume 1) by Caskey Russell

A park guide's life is upended by a pandemic and her charming, idiot son.

The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay

 tl:dr Silly body is silly.

I continue resting LIKE A POTATO. 

Whatever's going on in there, COVID (or something) has apparently been playing with the sliders and the lit-up buttons on my disabilities and chronic ailments. The good leg because the bad leg for several days. Really bad, pain-wise. Now that seems to be easing up a lot. The bad leg is doing something with sensations on the part of the leg where some nerve rerouting/regrowth happened after surgery 16 years ago; I did not need it to play with pins-and-needles, burning, freezing, and shocks on that leg below the replaced hip. Also, the sudden decrease in my hearing was distressing, though that seems to be mostly back where it was now.

Am using what skills I have to treat everything as temporary, and not decide This Is How It Will Be From Here On Out.  (Fibromyalgia has a ton of temporary things happening, at least for me, that seem like a Big Deal and then suddenly shift or go away.)

So yeah, silly body is silly.

Not as much pain in the temporarily bad leg today, so that is a huge win. I'll take it.

Does your body ever tell you something like "Augh, my toe is broken!" and then go "just foolin'! It's fine!" a while later?

"Could it be that (Superman) hides behind the darkest disguise of all? Could it be that he is a woman?"

"(...) What made you ask that?"

"Because he has compassion. He aids people in trouble. He helps the weak. "

It is possible the bad guy in The Secret of Superman has issues.

This new Yeld 2E Bundle presents the 2024 Second Edition of The Magical Land of Yeld, the all-ages tabletop fantasy roleplaying game from Atarashi Games about young heroes (called Friends) finding their way home.

Bundle of Holding: Yeld 2E

Civilization has crashed, humanity may be virtually extinct, but library books must be returned to their proper facility!

The Color of the End: Mission in the Apocalypse, volume 2 by Haruo Iwamune (Translated by John Neal)

Castaways are trapped in a terrible Randall Garrett story!

The Queen Bee by Randall Garrett

Along with a lot of the interwebs...

Not over this budget, anyway.

It boggles me that Canada had to endure 13 days of ambiguity about the budget vote. What next, an election cycle that lasts five whole weeks? The suspense would be palpable.

Scrappy scavengers in scrap-metal mech robots

Bundle of Holding: Salvage Union

The sights, the smells... the savings!!!

Five Reasons to Leave the House and Go Explore a Used Bookstore

2022: The British are heartened by Partygate revelations that the Tories celebrated in trust the gatherings barred to the rabble during Covid, the UK teaches the world a thing or two about political stability by going through three Prime Ministers in less than two months, and Queen Elizabeth II escapes the prospect of discovering how exactly the UK would continue its downward political arc.



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2022 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles
A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
A River Called Time by Courttia Newland
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley
Wergen: The Alien Love War by Mercurio D. Rivera

If I say I did not hear of something, it means that it is new to me. Did I not at least glance at the Clarkes in 2022?

 

William Alexander, Sunward. A charming planetary SF piece with very carefully done robots. Loved this, put it on my list to get several people for Christmas.

Ann Wolbert Burgess and Steven Matthew Constantine, Expert Witness: The Weight of Our Testimony When Justice Hangs in the Balance. I picked this up from a library display table, and I was disappointed in it. It isn't actually very much theory of the use of expert witnesses in the American legal system. Mostly it's about Burgess's personal experiences of being an expert witness in famous trials. She sure was involved in a lot of the famous trials of my lifetime! Each of which you can get a very distant recap of! So if that's your thing, go to; I know a lot of people like "true crime" and this seems adjacent.

Steve Burrows, A Siege of Bitterns. I wanted to fall in love with this series of murders featuring a birder detective. Alas, it was way more sexist than its fairly recent publication date could support--nothing jaw-dropping, lots of small things, enough that I won't be continuing to read the series.

Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays. Mostly interesting, and wow does she have an authoritative voice without having an authoritarian one, which is sometimes my complaint about books that are mostly literary criticism.

David Downing, Zoo Station. A spy novel set in Berlin (and other places) just before the outbreak of WWII. I liked but didn't love it--it was reasonably rather than brilliantly written/characterized, though the setting details were great--so I will probably read a few more from the library rather than buying more.

Kate Elliott, The Nameless Land. Discussed elsewhere.

Michael Dylan Foster, The Book of Yokai. Analysis of Japanese supernatural creatures in historical context, plus a large illustrated compendium of examples. A reference work rather than one to sit and read at length.

Michael Livingston, Bloody Crowns: A New History of the Hundred Years War. Extensive and quite good; when the maps for a book go back to the 400s and he takes a moment to say that we're not thinking enough of the effects of the Welsh, I will settle in and feel like I'm in good hands. Livingston's general idea is that the conflict in question meaningfully lasted longer than a hundred years, and he makes a quite strong argument on the earlier side and...not quite as strong on the later side, let's say. But still glad to have it around, yay.

Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker, The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics. Also a disappointment. If you've been listening to science news in this decade, you'll know most of this stuff. Osterholm and Olshaker are also miss a couple of key points that shocked me and blur their own political priorities with scientific fact in a fairly careless way. I'd give this one a miss.

Valencia Robin, Lost Cities. Poems, gorgeous and poignant and wow am I glad that I found these, thanks to whichever bookseller at Next Chapter wrote that shelf-talker.

Dana Simpson, Galactic Unicorn. These collections of Phoebe & Her Unicorn strips are very much themselves. This is one to the better end of how they are themselves, or maybe I was very much in the mood for it when I read it. Satisfyingly what it is.

Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. If you were hoping for a lot of detail on And Peggy!, your hope is in vain here, the sisters of the title are very clearly Angelica and Eliza only. Vaill does a really good job with their lives and contexts, though, and is one of the historians who manages to convey the importance of Gouverneur Morris clearly without having to make a whole production of it. (I mean, if Hamilton gets a whole production, why not Gouverneur Morris, but no one asked me.)

Amy Wilson, Snowglobe. MG fantasy with complicated friend relationships for grade school plus evil snowglobes. Sure yes absolutely, will keep reading Wilson as I can get her stuff.

Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe, A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression. This went interestingly into the details of what people were eating and what other people thought they should be eating, in ways that ground a lot of culinary history for the rest of the century to follow. Ziegelman and Coe either are a bit too ready to believe that giving people enough to eat makes them less motivated to work or were not very careful with their phrasing, so take those bits with a grain of salt, but in general if you want to know what people were eating (and with how many grains of salt!) in the US at the time, this is interesting and worth the time.

Alien invasion and the local Nazis complicate Pelham "Rat" Garfield's simple dream of being a successful pimp.

A Sweet Sweet Summer by Jane Gaskell

 

I haven't seen the copies of my new story in Analog (Nov/Dec 2025), but apparently other people have, so: "And Every Galatea Shaped Anew" is out in the world, ready to read if you can find it. It's the story of a technological boost--or is it a detriment?--to our most personal relationships....

Analog has been purchased by Must Read Magazines, and while some of us are managing to wrestle their contracts into shapes we're willing to sign, it's a new fight every time. I have another story with an acceptance letter from them, but at the moment I'm not submitting more. That makes me sad; I have liked working with Trevor Quachri since he became editor, and I liked working with Stan Schmidt before him. Analog was one of my BIG SHINY CAREER MILESTONES: that I could sell to one of the big print mags! And then that I could do it AGAIN! It's been literally over 20 years of working together, and now this. Trevor was not in charge of contracts at Dell Magazines, and he's not in charge of contracts at MRM. This is not his fault. I would like to keep being able to work with him and with Analog. (And with Sheila at Asimov's, and with Sheree at F&SF! Not their fault either! These are all editors I like and value, and one of the things that upsets me here is that they're in the middle of all this.) But the more MRM gets author feedback about best practices and refuses to take it on board, the less I feel like it's a good idea for me as an established writer to give the new writers the idea that this is an acceptable state of things.

So yeah, having this story come out is bittersweet, and I'm having a hard time enthusing about it the way I did about my previous publications in Analog--or my other previous publication this week. Maybe go read that, I'm really proud of it--and I feel good about the idea that newer writers will see my name in BCS and think it's a good place for authors to be, too. There are lots of magazines in this field that treat their authors with basic professional decency as a default, not as something you have to fight them for. I have kept hoping that MRM will rejoin them. There's still time.

Outgunned's task resolution system involves rolling six-sided dice and looking for sets.

Some explanation behind a cut.

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