The Great Filter

There was a guest post at the Scalzi-blog that got me thinking again about secret histories.

It is such a tempting idea for the fiction writer. Say, a young archaeology student turns over the wrong rock and becomes privy to a dangerous secret. They've discovered something huge and ancient and exciting that explains so many things that were previously mysterious -- but also puts them in the sights of powerful and dangerous forces. The ordinary world is cracked by an out-of-context problem, extraordinary threats coming out of the cracks to be met by previously unlikely (or at least uncalled-for) acts of daring and heroism.

You get the best of so many worlds. The fun of the spoof explanation ("See, the reason the Archduke was assassinated was actually...") and the ease of being able to use the ordinary modern world as a backdrop even as crazy erupts.

There are, however, problems.

One is that most extant pseudo-histories -- Atlantis, Chariots of the Gods, and basically the most common format of such things -- are implicitly insulting both to ancient cultures and the people who study them. (I'm not, however, saying it isn't possible to make a pseudo-history that doesn't tie into existing colonialist, racist, and of course anti-scientific narratives. But if you make up your own totally fresh secret history, you lose the ability to reference all that existing material).

A bigger problem for the writer is that these existing ideas are broken. Von Danieken's stuff has no internal logic. It is destructively contradictory, to the point where you can't make a functional narrative out of it.

The biggest hole being the one that confronts every story hinging on a masquerade, a hidden world, a giant conspiracy; why doesn't everyone already know about it?

One is tempted to look at this as similar to the Fermi Paradox. Assume there is a secret history. Or worse -- if one is contemplating a series, or a particular kind of character or organization with a history of investigating these things -- multiple hidden parts of history. How did they stay hidden? What mechanism is acting to hide all the evidence?



I don't have any good ideas.

One idea is perhaps that whatever the secret history is, it is by its nature something that can be hidden. The problem with this angle of attack is it doesn't leave much of that fun, "this explains all of those...."

For instance; aliens have been visiting in their nearly-undetectable ships for years. Why do we see them now? Radar got better. What evidence is there from the past, once we know how to uncover it? Um...Tunguska? (always got to work that one in!) Because all those thousands of UFO sightings aren't going to work. If they are visible to a guy in a pick-up, they were visible to hundreds over that flight path. If the Air Force chased them in 1940 and talked about it over the radio, then the Air Force would have caught them by 1950.

Sure, you can come with arguments why one sighting is legit, but the obvious flaw didn't get exploited massively. But it very quickly becomes a house of cards (or a game of whack-a-mole; pick your analogy). The more they actually did, the more there are un-coverable clues, the more it begs the question why it is still a secret.

Another tempting explains-everything idea is that there is a secret cult that's been hiding all the evidence. Well, that's a hell of an efficient cult. And it also basically takes the one problem and turns it into two; now you have to hide the cult, too. (Or Men in Black, or Templars, or Warehouse Regents, or whatever).

I think what it comes down to for me is the disjunct between the very precise and subtle ways we are currently looking at available data all the time, and the level of obvious the clue has to be for our Joe Schmo hero to stumble upon it.  And the scale of what is being hidden if it is to be really exciting.

That's why lost civilizations, especially massive, technologically advanced lost civilizations that left clues in the writings of peoples centuries later (hint: Atlantis) bother me so much. If Plato knew enough about it to write about it, the Amarna letters should be going into exhaustive detail. If they were ruling the Aegean, we'd still be seeing remnants of their contribution to decorative arts among the folk cultures of the region (because that's how long decorative elements and scripts and patterns remain). And so on.

So the impossibly huge, impossibly competent secret organization hiding the big important secret is implausible and the really subtle, really easy to hide and did basically nothing interesting in the first place secret is unsatisfying. This can't be a one-axis problem, though. There have to be ways of going orthogonal to this. Ways in which something magnificent and world-changing is intrinsically unknown (until the appropriate moment) in a way that unfolds in a logically satisfying way from their premise.

Right?

So far the only glimmer of an idea I have is magical/metaphysical; something about the thing nobody is supposed to know about rewrites evidence or alters minds as a side effect. Like the gamified version of what H.P. was writing about; you see the Elder Gods and you go nuts -- thus fail to communicate their reality to anyone else. Or the timey-whimey version; there used to be a different reality, but time was altered or something in some plot-conveniently messy way that leaves fragmentary clues to be stumbled on.

The latter is in one way rather cute; it means you can have the rational cake and toss it, too, as people can very rightly object that the kind of wide-spread evidence doesn't exist.

But even if the mechanism is pseudo-scientific -- mutter something about intersecting branes or nanotech or destructive memes -- it just feels stupid as well as stupidly convenient.

Hrm.  Maybe the truly viable orthogonal approach is to discard the masquerade; that academia already knows about Atlantis, it is taught in schools and covered at excruciating length on the History Channel (not that it isn't already, mind you). And the McGuffin that drives the story is you've got a better bit of it than anyone else has up to that point.