In the comments of a recent essay of mine, dlomax commented on my observation that “there is no lawn so large as to lack at least one person demanding other people get off it.” He wrote:
“I think we might have just witnessed the creation of Nicoll’s Law.”
Alas, there is a compelling reason why that cannot be Nicoll’s Law.
Anyone who writes or writes about SFF for any length of time is likely to document consistent patterns. Framed correctly, these become easily cited rules of thumb1. I am no exception. The No Lawn Large Enough rule cannot be Nicoll’s Law because there is already a Nicoll’s Law.
In fact, there are a few Nicoll’s Laws2, at least three of which are worth mentioning. Well, three was good enough for Clarke and Asimov.
In reverse order of the likelihood that I will encounter them, the top three Nicoll’s Laws are:
Nicoll’s Law
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any (online forum) thread that begins by pointing out why stealth in space is impossible will rapidly turn into a thread focusing on schemes whereby stealth in space might be achieved.
There are two reasons for this. First, if one grants that stealth in space in the conventional sense is very difficult to achieve, it eliminates many beloved stock plots3. Therefore, there is incentive to ignore the issue or find innovative methods around it4.
Second, it is human nature that when one is told that something is impossible, one starts to look for ways in which that impossible something can be achieved. This human quirk put humans on the Moon! It also routinely kills people as they encounter the limits imposed by natural law.
Nicoll’s Law is probably just a subset of a habit I snarkily called SF’s Lysenkoist Tendency: when actual, tested science contradicts some detail in an SF story, attack the science5.
The Rusting Bridges Rule of Space Exploration
No matter how effective your space program was, one can always imagine how the program could have been much, much better.
This takes its name from Larry Niven’s classic All The Bridges Rusting. In that story, humanity had by 2018 had dispatched not one but two crewed missions to Alpha Centauri. You’d think that would be cause for jubilation but it wasn’t. The culprit is human imagination.
No matter the achievements of the space program you have, whether it is having explored every planet with space probes or having reached nearby stars, they will always fall short of what might have been accomplished by the space programs you can imagine. Imaginary programs aren’t limited by issues of politics, funding, or engineering.
The Purity of the English Language
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
[I didn’t do spell-check in 1990 and misspelled rifle as riffle in the original. Also, I do not mean to cast any aspersions on sex workers in any way—I’m casting aspersions on the cultural preoccupation with purity, which is as ridiculous in speaking about language as it is in any other aspect of life.]
That is really more of an epigram than a law6. Consistency is not my strong suit. Nevertheless, if someone is familiar with my work, odds are what they’re familiar with is that quotation. There is a “but” that I will get to.
The prescriptivist sentiment that provoked my comment—that English is an unchanging, perfect edifice passed down since time immemorial, to whose rules we must all adhere without exception—is a long-standing one. So is the sentiment that such prescriptivism provokes from anyone even remotely familiar with English’s past, which is a sarcastic belly-laugh7. The phrasing is all mine.
The “but” inserted two paragraphs above deserves its own pithy corollary: if some nobody happens to say something memorable, that something will very quickly be attributed to a celebrity. It is easier to imagine a famous person said something catchy, than it is to accept the same from a game store owner from Kitchener, Ontario.
In this case, the attribution is often to someone else. Many someones. So many someones.
The list of people to whom the quotation has been attributed includes Booker T. Washington, a 19th century painter also named James Nicoll, Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk, and more recently, Terry Pratchett. On that last I am happy to say the misattribution is due to over-eager fans, NOT the Pratchett estate. For what it’s worth, the author I had in mind when I wrote that epigram was Mark Twain.
- Few of my observations are supported rigorously enough to justify the term “law”… but heck, law uses a lot fewer keystrokes than “general tendencies I have mistaken for natural law, because I don’t know the meaning of confirmation bias.” ↩︎
- I have left aside some of my advice that is not applicable to SFF, advice such as “If you notice you are regaining consciousness, bleeding profusely, and/or are on fire, take a moment to assess recent decisions to see if there was something you could have done differently.” Now that I look at that written down, I wonder if maybe I should add “If so, actually do that something different next time.” Also, if the issue is bleeding, apply pressure. ↩︎
- Re: stealth in space, mystery writers were confronted with an even more vexing challenge when cell phones came along. Many stock plots depending on communication being difficult don’t work if everyone has a phone in their pocket. The short-term result included a flurry of fictional cell phones whose battery life made the flashlights in Half-Life look long-lasting. The internet presented similar challenges, because now information that used to require legwork was just keystrokes away. ↩︎
- In Glen Cook’s Passage at Arms, for example, stealthy “Climbers” hide in “null,” greatly reducing their cross-section in this universe. The catch, and it is one that shapes the plot, is that Climbers can only radiate heat through that minute cross-section, which means heat management is a potentially lethal issue in stealth mode. ↩︎
- Which in turn is just a specific case of people and organizations rejecting science because they don’t like the answers it provides. ↩︎
- What would have been a good law is “spell-check before posting, not after.” What I actually did back in 1990 was worry about the spicy phrasing, as I was not sure obscenity was allowed on the internet. ↩︎
- See, for example, H. Beam Piper’s quip from 1964’s Fuzzy Sapiens: “And you know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids in the Ninth Century Pre-Atomic, and no more legitimate than any of the other results.” ↩︎
