There are, I think, a few basic safety rules which, if consistently ignored, will almost always provide would-be adventurers with sufficient diversion to create an exciting plot.
Rule number one: do not engage in archaeology. Do not fund archaeology. Above all, do not free that which has been carefully entombed. In most SF and fantasy settings, there were good reasons for entombment…and they still hold.
Indiana Jones did not manage to keep the Nazis from grabbing the Ark of the Covenant. No, the Ark protected itself. As you can see…
http://gph.is/1ceNIpJ
The upside of this experiment in archaeology was that the outcome was beneficial: pesky Nazis conveniently melted! This is not always the case. Angry gods are not always quite so particular about their victims; supernatural phenomena don’t care at all about good or bad. (I shouldn’t have to add this, but it’s 2018: Nazis are bad.)
In the future history in which many of Arsen Darnay’s Disco-Era stories1 were set, widespread use of nuclear power demanded a solution to the problems posed by radioactive waste. The solution: a nuclear priesthood conditioned (between incarnations) to find and guard radioactive materials. The result: an ever-renewed population compelled to seek out and hoard repositories of reactor waste. The toxic material kills them; they are reborn and return to their lethal labors: Lather, rinse, repeat. This is not the at all same thing as safely containing the stuff.
While the nuclear priests in Darnay’s books may have a legitimate excuse for digging up that which should remained buried, the wizard Bomanz (in the backstory to Glen Cook’s Black Company series) has no such excuse. Eager for knowledge, he explored the Barrowlands in which the Dominator and the Lady had been confined. He woke the Lady. To Bomanz’s surprise (but nobody else’s) it turned out that making psychic contact with beings known for their mental-domination abilities is a bad idea. After that, it was all over…well, except the screaming and the subsequent decades of war on an epic, continental scale.
Bomanz could at least plead that the effects of his error were merely regional, no worse in the end than a limited nuclear war. The humans in Christopher B. Rowley’s Vang series (Starhammer, The Vang: The Military Form, and The Vang: The Battlemaster) know that they live in a universe in which far more advanced civilizations have suffered abrupt, horrifying ends, in which weapons capable of snuffing out entire star systems were not sufficient to preserve said lost races. One might think that would instill profound levels of caution in human explorers.
One would be wrong.
At least Vang outbreaks are generally limited to individual worlds. The galaxy has over four hundred billion star systems. Losing the odd world here or there to a hegemonizing swarm is sad, but not that consequential in the grand scheme of things. Worlds may die but the galaxy goes on.
…Or at least it does unless one lives in the worlds of Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought. In that setting (as demonstrated in the novel Fire Upon the Deep) opening the wrong archived zip file can unleash extremely aggressive, extremely malevolent hyper-intelligent entities capable of commandeering entire civilizations in their quest to conquer and consume the whole of the galaxy. Even I (a perennial runner-up in the Darwin Awards) can understand that waking hungry gods with galactic reach is a bad idea. The researchers responsible for unleashing the Blight on the Milky Way knew that, but they experimented anyway. On the plus side, they died for their arrogance. On the minus side, so did billions of perfectly innocent bystanders.
Immediately defunding of every archaeology department and research program may not be sufficient to save us, because (as The Mummy films reveal) there are simply too many rich people with archaeological hobbies2. Perhaps we need obligatory archaeology prevention programs in school (like the drug prevention programs that have worked so well). Perhaps task forces should be roaming the world, shutting down illicit digs. Or perhaps we should just hope that civilizations will simply do a better job of disposing of their surplus existential threats than fictional civilizations ever seem to have done.
Or perhaps we really need do something about the advertising. The next time you are entombing an insufficiently dead eldritch horror, take a step back and ask yourself: “Is this giant, skull-encrusted pyramid sending the message I intend? Or is it simply a giant billboard that will attract adventurers for as long as it takes for the Horrors Hidden Within to be freed?” It’s just something we all ought to consider (but probably won’t).
1: Arsen Darnay books and stories set in a nuclear-priesthood world: Karma, A Hostage for Hinterland, “Plutonium,” “Salty’s Sweep,” and others.
2: People who find one long-buried existential threat often acquire a curious taste for finding more long-buried horrors. That’s not helpful at all. See, for instance, Melissa Scott’s Order of the Air novels, which feature much millionaire-funded perilous archaeology.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviewsand Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
Sir Terry Pratchett once wrote that if there was a large red button somewhere clearly labelled ‘pressing this button will bring the apocalypse’ the paint on the sign wouldn’t have a chance to dry.
I am a non observant Jew but I knew opening the Ark was an incredibly stupid thing to do. Seriously, even my ancestors were scared of the thing and had a class of specialists to deal with it. IMO the Ark should stay lost.
I am currently reading WoT and The Aes Sedai who penetrated the Bore back in the Age of Legends definitely belong on this list of stupid savants.
I think you’re actually underestimating the death toll for the High Lab meddlers – it’s probably trillions (thousands of civilizations with billions of inhabitants). Much worse than case of the town that got destroyed when a burglar irritated a dragon.
I was watching an old Big Bang Theory episode the other day, and one of the plots of the episode revolved around Sheldon’s girlfriend upsetting him by telling him that Indiana Jones was completely irrelevant to the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark. What happened to the Nazis would have happened with, or without, Indiana Jones’ involvement. I never thought about it before but that’s totally true. Mind blown.
“Brand, God put that rock there for a purpose… and, um… I’m not so sure you should, um… move it…”
@3. That’s true except the arc still would have been in Nazi hands. A new group of Nazis could have learned from their mistakes and found new, dastardly uses for it. Jones being there meant it fell into the hands of the US government. Today we might think of that as just as bad but at the time, that was a much safer outcome.
The Ark would have been somewhere surrounded by dead Nazis and the only difference more Nazis showing up to try to experiment with the thing would be just how obese the local vultures got. The Nazis are treating the Ark like a programmable device where the trick is to work out what commands to give it when it’s actually a hotline to a powerful, easily annoyed god. It’s not quite as bad as dialing Cthulhu (because you cannot reason with Cthulhu), but it’s not a good idea to catch the eye of something whose idea of a moderate response is a wave of plagues or a global flood.
@5, The US government proceeds to lose the Ark in a vast warehouse which IMO is a very smart move.
Once the final draft comes back from my editor, today’s review on my site features people playing with the books in the Miskatonic U library. Because _that_ always ends well.
@6, Do not tempt the Lord Our God. Good advice from somebody who knew.
I actually have Miskatonic U. Library card. Never used. I’m not stupid or suicidal and I like to be able to sleep at night.
That’s true except the arc still would have been in Nazi hands. A new group of Nazis could have learned from their mistakes and found new, dastardly uses for it. Jones being there meant it fell into the hands of the US government.
Yes, exactly. Even if they couldn’t work out how to open it safely, a box that kills everyone within line of sight when you open it would have definite military applications.
The irrelevant-Indy film isn’t “Ark”, it’s “Crusade”, because there was no way that the Nazis were going to get the Grail out of the temple anyway. It couldn’t be taken over the seal, remember? If Indy hadn’t been there, either the Nazis would have run out of expendable Arabs before cracking the defences, or they would have cracked them (possibly with Henry Sr.’s forced help), grabbed the Grail, tried to take it out the door and died.
The next time you are entombing an insufficiently dead eldritch horror, take a step back and ask yourself: “Is this giant, skull-encrusted pyramid sending the message I intend? Or is it simply a giant billboard that will attract adventurers for as long as it takes for the Horrors Hidden Within to be freed?”
“This is not a place of honor. No highly-esteemed deed is commemorated here.”
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph241/dunn2/
See, I think the motivating force behind the Ark is smart enough to work out what the Nazis game plan is and punish them accordingly. Perhaps by turning every Nazi’s bones into cream cheese or something equally moderate.
I see I started quite the discussion lol. The government warehouse thing was brought up in the episode, but they dismissed it because Indy failed to take it to a museum like he was supposed to. Here is the entire plot from the episode about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfUUGrSMmxI
On a lower key end of the scale, there’s a small but memorable subgenre of SF about genealogical research that provides the researcher with information that they would rather not know, examples be “Big Ancestor” (which has not aged well) and “A Tale of the Ending”. Generally the issue is the researcher has a fragile sense of self-regard dependent on their ancestors being not as they actually were.
Why did that comment double post? Oh, well.
Come to think of it, tomorrow’s review also involves badly thought out tomb robbing, of the “discover an interstellar gate but not its phone book” variety. Never step through a portal unless you are sure it’s two-way.
On a related note, Simak’s Shakespeare’s Planet provides the useful lesson that if you’re exploring an ancient portal network the hard way and you find a node that won’t let you leave, consider the hypothesis that the reason there’s no exit option is because the network builder were trying to contain something.
I love archaeological SF. Often, it is entangled in a Big Dumb Object story, where no one is around to explain things to the protagonists.
And there was a black and white SF movie back in my youth, where a scientist intoned in the end, “There are some things that man was not meant to know.” Which, when I google it, turns out to be a theme used so much that it has graduated from quote to trope (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheseAreThingsManWasNotMeantToKnow).
Which raises the question of whether “Man” is inclusive or whether it’s specific to just men while women, non-binary and other persons are free to dabble in Krell technology, Yith diplomacy and interstellar travel.
Perhaps we need obligatory archaeology prevention programs in school (like the drug prevention programs that have worked so well)
This is your mind on archaeology…...
It would be nice if ancient civilizations could just destroy their eldritch artifacts rather than splitting them up and scattering them across the world.
A special tip of the hat to James Davis Nicoll for mentioning the works of Arsen Darnay, an insufficiently appreciated author. His wry little description in A Hostage For Hinterland of the protagonist’s little Nazi peccadillo is priceless.
@11, Give it up. Whatever we do our distant descendants WILL dig up radioactive waste just to see what we were so scared of. It’s our monkey ancestry, we just can’t leave well enough alone.
20: it has been long enough since I read the book in question I cannot recall what you are referring to.
On the other end of the scale is what I call the Voltron Scenario, where the scattered ancient superweapons end up being user-friendly and critically important to stopping an even greater threat.
People in the “Indy should have stayed home” camp always overlook the small matter that he showed up right when Toht was getting ready to torture the headpiece’s location out of Marion.
While we’re on the subject of ‘Indy getting involved didn’t change anything’, I might as well bring up something that seems to get left out – Marion. What do people think would have happened to her if Indy – or someone, at the very least – hadn’t gotten to her before, say, Toht did? Considering that Toht goes from zero to torture pretty quickly in the movie, that scenario would have ended badly for her, to say the least. (If Belloq gets sent, instead, I can see her getting away, considering how she outwits him in the movie.)
Edit: And someone points it out just as I post.
And since Raiders has been brought up, I might as well put forward an example that subverts the theme of this piece – Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. One of the game’s big plotlines involves the Ankaran Sarcophagus, an archaeological find that has caused Kindred all over the world to flip their shit because they think it holds an Antediluvian, one of the founders of the different Kindred clans. Doesn’t help that when you speak to the guy who found it, he mentions that the guy inside displayed some arguably vampiric tendencies.
As a result, several different factions have their own plans for it – the Giovanni want it to bring about their own plans; the Sabbat want it to keep it from being opened, thus preventing Gehenna (the end of the world); the Camarilla ultimately lock it in a warehouse (a la Raiders) for the same reason; and Prince LaCroix, your boss (whether you like it or not), wants to diablerise (drain unto Final Death) the Antediluvian inside for more power.
And yet, after much hilarity and bloodshed, is there an Antediluvian? Nope – turns out that it was just an actually-dead guy, all along. Except someone’s switched said mummy out for a batch of C4, meaning that anyone who opens it – even the player character – is in for an explosive surprise.
Indy making no difference to the finale isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Because, in the film noir tradition, our hero is really, secretlly a committed loser, powerless to the forces around him. This is first demonstrated in the opening when he loses the idol to Satipo and then to Belloq, then repeated in the rest of the movie by losing the Ark to the Nazis and then to the US Government. Despite what the soundtrack is telling you in his brief moments of triumph, he isn’t meant to be a grand hero in the Star Wars mold, ending the movie with an awards ceremony (at least not in Raiders.) No, all the man in the fedora is left with is a drink with a dame—who can really hold her liquor!
And worse.
https://www.polygon.com/2015/8/3/9089181/indiana-jones-abusive-creep
@3 Without Indy, Marian gets murdered by the Nazis in her bar.
#27 — Creepy by today’s standards but not unusual for the era in which it’s set.
> On the plus side, they died for their arrogance. On the minus side, so did billions of perfectly innocent bystanders.
Given the nature of the Blight, I am not sure we can assume any of them were so fortunate as to die.
> It would be nice if ancient civilizations could just destroy their eldritch artifacts rather than splitting them up and scattering them across the world.
The anime Nanoha has its own problem with ancient, powerful, tamper-resistant, and poorly documented artifacts, called Lost Logia. The Arc-en-Ciel weapons of the Time-Space Administration Bureau are probably powerful enough to be in that class: one Plan B was to destroy Japan with a shot, so as to save the Earth. The Bureau can make them, so they’re not Lost yet, and some fanon has them as rather fragile as well as nuke-level secured, so that they don’t *become* lost.
>discover an interstellar gate but not its phone book
I’m betting Heechee.
The Inhibitors from the Revelation Space universe definitely belong on here. They leave traps (Turing tests) for archaeologists scattered across the galaxy. Proving sentience activates their elimination programming. Not to be outdone, Reynolds also has The Greenfly, a runaway piece of habitation technology which mindlessly converts the entire galaxy’s non-stellar mass into terrariums.
@17 An interesting interpretation! ;-)
@17: Okay, I know that it’s normally intended to mean ‘Human’, but I always secretly like the idea that it only applied to Cis Male Humans.
33: ObSF, Joan D. Vinge’s “Tin Soldier”, where men are incapable of serving as starship crews.
By pure coincidence, I just reviewed Skeen’s Leap, whose protagonist earns her living committing unsanctioned, profit-oriented, undocumented archaeology, AKA “grave-robbing.” She’s lucky enough to merely stumble through a gate she does not know how to reopen from the far side. Even luckier that the far side is not deep under the sea or in hard vacuum.
“Newton’s Wake” by Ken MacLeod is another example of the dangers of letting archaeologists loose on your planet.
1: I think Arthur C. Clarke once said if aliens didn’t care for us, all they need to is radio us blueprints for a doomsday device and a note beginning “Under no circumstances do the following.”
Dig up whatever you want, just don’t press the history eraser button you fool.
31 & 36
I was coming to mention the Inhibitors and had forgotten about Newton’s Wake.
It’s also a plot thread in The Quantum Thief trilogy as the various powers try to figure out what happened to Jupiter.
Very enjoyable article.
Glad someone mentioned The Bore from WoT. And, that The Black Company got a mention. There was also the data eater from the Atrocity Archives, and the Thing in the Pyramid, also from The Laundry series. And the effect ofusing black magic from the MHI series. And Tinsori Light (and other “Befores”) from the Liaden universe. And, of course, looking for the One Ring.
I love that you mentioned The Black Company series. I haven’t seen a reference to that series since I first read it 20 years ago!
@1 Yeah…. But I’m pretty sure the one who discovered the Bore in the first place was insane anyway so…
A trope of such stories is the person who does the disturbing is often one of the victims. (Particularly if they were warned but didn’t listen.) If they don’t die right away, they die near the end after trying to leverage the discovery for personal gain.
An example I haven’t seen mentioned yet: Iain Banks’ Culture book Matter.
More examples: many Doctor Who stories. I haven’t counted them but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was one “digging up what shouldn’t be disturbed” story per season, maybe more, from the second Doctor onwards.
This is also pretty much every one of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos stories (although to be fair, in a lot of cases in those stories if you don’t go digging up the past, the past will come and dig you up).
I think Holly Lisle said it best…”Never dig up the bones of the past–because the past never dies, and it resents being buried!”
I thought I saw that a new Black Company book was coming out?
Yes, new Black Company this fall, although it’s going to be set early in the series timeline — between Black Company and Shadows Linger, maybe?
If you watch the Indiana Jones movies in chronological order — Temple of Doom (it’s a prequel), Raiders of the Lost Ark, Last Crusade, and Crystal Skull — we see Indiana Jones trying to repeat his incidental success from Temple of Doom in three situations where he leads the villains to the mystic objects they’re seeking in order to save a significant person from his past and dire events are averted only because the mystic objects protect themselves.
Any criticism of Indy’s role in Raiders applies to his role in the other two movies, and possibly even Temple of Doom, since the Sankara Stones protect themselves at the very end. To quote Ian Fleming: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
Much of Neal Asher’s Agent Cormac series and James S.A. Corey’s Expanse novels deal with the results of humans messing around with long-buried alien biotechnology.
There is one good series about archaeology that comes to mind – Jack McDevitt’s Academy series of books where even though people die by doing stupid people things during the archaeology, it eventually leads to enough clues to save the galaxy, and Earth, from swarms of clouds whose sole purpose seems to be destroying the infrastructure of technological civilization. Best of all, archaeologists never did release any eldritch horrors.
@10,
But the power unleashed by opening the Ark was not indiscriminate: only the nazis were killed. Let’s set up a hypothetical experiment:
Nazis bring Ark to a death camp. Open it. All the guards die. Entity controlling it finds the nazis are much, much worse than pharaoh, who was enslaving* the Chosen People, not actively exterminating them. This would annoy G-d, who was, demonstrably, not to be trifled with. Since His reaction to the enslavement of the Hebrews was pretty drastic, starting from the merely annoying, rising to the famine-inducing (locusts) to near-exterminatory (death of all first born children), one could expect something drastic and quick as a first warning, like all the Einsatzkommando or nazi hierarchy immediately dropping dead.
——————————-
* Slavery, per se, didn’t seem to annoy G-d; the Hebrews kept slaves. It was enslaving the Hebrews that caused the annoyance.
@52/swampyankee: I’ve always found it implausible that the Nazis would search for a Jewish artifact at all. I can rather see them going after Thor’s hammer or something.
Yeah, because if there’s one thing the Norse gods are noted for, it’s their moderate reaction to people who pester them.
@54/James Davis Nicoll: They would have expected the Norse gods to side with them, of course.
@53,
Pretty much all the gods tended to react badly when annoyed, and were never too happy to find they’re being manipulated.
@54,
I’m sure they would be absolutely certain the merged Vani & Aesir would be on their side. The flaw in this logic is, of course, that it seems that the Norse gods were rarely on one side of anything, even Ragnorok. Also, of course, the people of modern-day Germany had no more real affinity to the Norse gods than did, say, the Danes or Norwegians.
We’ve wandered enough that it’s now appropriate to mention David Brin’s “Thor Meets Captain America” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Meets_Captain_America
Here are two more suggestions for coping with nuclear waste:
1) Use Thorium instead of Uranium. It’s a way cool invocation of the Marvel ‘verse and is significantly easier to manage.
2.) Introduce to radioactive sites the black fungus (which may or may not be either Wangiella dermatitidis or Crytococcus neoformans) that was discovered “eating” radiation at Chernobyl.
But the power unleashed by opening the Ark was not indiscriminate: only the nazis were killed.
I’m not sure there’s enough evidence to say one way or the other. Indy seemed pretty convinced that everyone who looked at the Ark would be killed (hence “close your eyes!”); he also warned Sallah never to touch the Ark. He’d have known that the Ark kills everyone who looks into it indiscriminately – guilty or innocent, Jew or Gentile – because he’d be familiar with 1 Samuel vi:19.
MOON OF ICE by Brad Lineaweaver covered the Nazi’s attempt to Do Something Interesting with the Spear, which some of them actually wanted to do.
But yes, don’t ring the silver bell. Jadus will be happy, but nobody else will be.
@60
Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.