Science-fiction is a modern literary form which appeals predominantly to the modern western mind; which is to say the secular, material, predominantly liberal, civil consciousness of a modern society. The basis for that individual’s belief in the rational material worldview is the promise that the society she is a member of exists first and foremost to provide her and others with security, which should lead naturally to opportunity and eventual earthly fulfillment. This is not the primitive worldview. It is also not the criminal view of life.

The basis for much of my science-fiction and horror is the proposition that this modern civil relationship between the individual citizen and society is changing fundamentally to a postmodern life way in which society shall no longer provided this three-tiered secular paradise. Indeed the modern person’s life fits in with many mythological molds of the afterlife, with a ‘paradise’ beyond death promised to the faithful coming into currency alongside the rise of agriculture. The brief span that corresponded roughly with the last half of the 20th Century was a singular aberration in terms of the individual human’s relationship with the greater world.

The primitive lived in a world that promised his demise at every turn.

The agrarian and industrial person lived in a world dedicated to his enslavement.

As a science-fiction writer imagining a changed world I need to consider the primitive, and the agrarian/industrial, as well as the modern and evolving postmodern perspectives. In terms of aiding my understanding of the primitive perspective it has been my good fortune to interview hundreds of criminals, many uncaught, uncharged, unconvicted, and unknown to their would be civil masters for what they are.

In considering time travel through our time to access the past and the future [Paul Anderson introduced this idea of chaining time-travelers chronologically to minimize culture shock in his Shield of Time series and I have adopted it for The Sunset Saga] one must consider the criminal perspective. His perspective is most in sync with the primitive one, and significantly he is usually a he. Also, since the criminal world includes politicians, law-officers, government agents and the military, any attempt to understand the behavior of necessarily secretive time travelers wielding immense power is doomed to be inauthentic if it plays to the security-skewed and material-based civil ethos of modernity.

As a person raised with a modern vision, the reader has likely not grasped the nature of her postmodern predicament. To the traditional science-fiction reader of either gender the politician is your benefactor, the government agent your advocate, the law-officer your protector, and society your well-meaning mother.

The agrarian/industrial person was conditioned to regard the politician as his master, the government agent as his task master, the law officer his corrections officer, and society as a harsh and abusive step-mother.

The primitive on the other hand had a familial relationship with her tiny community, which was of great necessity, for all of society was within her line of sight, her ability to hear, crowded in a clearing or on a hilltop or clustered at the mouth of a cave. While to the modern mind society and the world is the same, to the primitive the world is the vast hostile zone beyond the firelight, beyond their tiny society. To the primitive every step beyond the protection of her band, of her men, is fraught with peril.

This is the criminal perspective. To the criminal the hunting matrix begins at her front door, or at the end of the street patrolled by the members of her brother’s gang set. Society is always trying to get her, and in the end can be counted on chewing her up and spitting her out the other end.

This is the perspective, of not only the criminal, but the politician, government agent, law officer, and military person as well, for their activities are all criminal according to their society’s own rules, and any person outside this four-fold nexus caught stealing [criminals often call it ‘taxing’], abducting and killing humans, would be so labeled.

So, even within the civil modern western society that is giving way to the postmodern matrix—whatever that may evolve into—there is a savage ecosystem where criminals act as scavengers and minor predators and the social hierarchy occupy the apex predation niche, ostensibly only preying upon the criminal. To interview the criminal and the law officer is to speak with a single oracle with two faces.

Below are two character sketches of criminals, one male, one female, who were born on the fringes of late 20th Century America, and how they viewed the world.

Shoey was inducted into a criminal organization at age 10, running numbers. He eventually inherited his older brother’s heroin distribution racket. He spent his entire life up to the night we met in a predominantly non-violent role outwitting and negotiating with unsanctioned criminals, and hiding and running from the sanctioned criminals. Eventually, when the police lieutenant who controlled heroin and cocaine distribution in the adjacent territory made a move for his territory, Shoey left the criminal life and disguised himself as a citizen, and pretended he did not know what undergirded society.

The difference between Shoey and a natural primitive may seem to be that Shoey had a non-violent social order to flee to. This he did have, this desperate outlet, to work as a slave for subsistence wages, wage-work having evolved directly from slavery and constituting a level of direct social pressure that unbroken people like Shoey experience as a kind of living death.

Primitives being pushed out of their home range by predatory enemies have often given themselves up as slaves to stronger peoples, such as the Tribes of Maryland fleeing the Conestoga’s in the 17th Century, and the Conestoga’s of the 18th Century when they were being hunted down by the Six Nations. Shoey died quietly in poverty, as did many a 19th Century reservation Indian.

Like Shoey, Kylie came of age outside the law, raised in the 1970s by her brother who was a cocaine dealer. She grew to hate the police after three officers staged a home invasion and tortured her brother. When he would not divulge the identity of his connection, two of the policemen raped Kylie repeatedly. Kylie was 14. After her brother’s death from a beating by police a few years later Kyle was not able to continue his operation as she lacked ‘the muscle’ to stand up to men.

Kylie went into prostitution on her own, without a pimp. This was a calculated risk. As she told it, “I’d rather trust my judgment not to get beat by a john and maybe killed than to know I was goin’ to get beat by a pimp. I was a coke slut and a bar whore. If I liked a guy, and he was hygienic, I would do him for coke. That was basically my version of a date—subsidized.

“Drinking was for setting up business. I never walked the street and did not have the connections to get set up as a call girl, so I worked bars where I had connections. The guy had to be a cut above the bar he was drinking at because I did not bring them home and he needed to pay for drinks, the room, and me. If the guy was decent I would blow him in his car—maybe a married guy strapped for cash—that kind of thing. I never wanted to be a home wrecker.

“I did screw up one time by stepping out back to talk with this one guy. He was cute and was a big guy—a boxer—and worked security for this bar. I figured he just wanted to see if we could work something out but he wanted to have sex right there—intercourse, on the parking lot! I don’t do that, so he raped me. It’s not like I could fight him or go to the cops. What really hurt about it is that I had liked the guy and was hoping maybe we could date, and he just used me—took what he wanted, didn’t even respect me as a whore.

“It only happened the one time. At least he didn’t try to make it hurt like the pigs did when I was a kid. That’s why I could never walk the streets—even with a pimp you’re blowing cops all night long and not getting paid. The one rape—bruised me on the inside…no way was that as bad as even one of the beatings I got when I was married to that fucking drunk…that was an every weekend thing for years. But when you’re outside the law you’re in the jungle—jus’ have to find a way to get home to your kids in one piece.”

Those were two sad stories. I knew and liked these people. They were kind and generous even to strangers. Shoey had a strict internal moral code that he adhered to despite being a prankster. I can still feel Kylie’s soft palm brush the knuckles of my writing hand as I notated, and she said, “Those are sharp—the kind that hurt.”

If you want to understand how a person functions who was born into a predatory worldview, and saw the world as a vast hostile hunting zone from the tenuous vantage of being the member of a small, beleaguered and short-lived family unit, you could do no worse than to see the world as our current version of the primitive sees it. What is more, if you had in your possession a set of time travel devices that could not be entrusted to the social hierarchy—and hence used militarily—who would you recruit to go back in time to talk Fletcher Christian into sailing through time instead of ditching the HMS Bounty on Pitcairn Island, that would have a better chance of achieving their goal without getting their throats cut, than Shoey and Kylie?

As to what the future holds for our kind, every time I try and predict it, the creeping sense that criminals of all stripes might be better able to adapt to what’s coming than those of us inclined to imagine it, intrudes, ominously.