Psychology and Inscape

Louise Carey is author of the science fiction thriller Inscape. she has co-written two novels for Gollancz, The City of Silk and Steel and The House of War and Witness, as well as a graphic novel, Confessions of a Blabbermouth for DC Comics. She co-runs the Dungeons and Dragons blog Tabletop Tales. Louise lives in Welwyn Garden City with her partner.

When I started writing Inscape, I was studying Psychology at Oxford Brookes University. Some of the theories I was learning about—especially theories about child development and the bond between parent and child—made their way into the book in various shapes and forms.

Attachment Theory and Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis

Attachment theory is an area of psychology that focuses on infant development, and what young children need in order to grow up into emotionally and psychologically healthy adults. Attachment theory holds that children develop best when they have a secure, stable attachment to their caregiver/s. An attachment is a deep bond between caregiver and child, formed through the caregiver meeting the child’s needs, both physical and emotional, and making them feel safe. You can find more information on attachment theory here.

There is also some evidence that the reverse is true: children who grow up without a secure, stable attachment to their caregiver are more likely (though by no means certain!) to develop various psychological disorders and antisocial behaviour. This is Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis: being deprived of a maternal (or parental) figure in infancy can negatively impact a child’s development for the rest of their life. There has been a lot of research done on the effects of maternal deprivation in orphanages and other institutional settings where children are raised without parents. There’s more on Bowlby’s theories and research here.

Attachment theory and the maternal deprivation hypothesis were very much in my mind when I came up with the characters of Tanta and Cole. Both Tanta and Cole grow up in the institutional setting of the Ward House, a ‘factory farm orphanage’ where they are deprived of a parental figure to foster their psychological development. I was interested in what growing up in this setting would be like for them, and also what InTech, an immensely powerful corporation, might do to try and counteract the negative effects of such an upbringing.

Comments

The Meteorite Hunters - Joshua Howgego *****

This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geology tends to be one of the least entertaining scientific subjects but here (I suppose, given that geo- refers to the Earth it ought to be astrology... but that might be a touch misleading). Here, though, there is plenty of opportunity to capture our interest. The first part of the book takes us both to see meteorites and to hear stories of meteorite hunters, whose exploits vary from erudite science trips to something more like an Indiana Jones outing. Joshua Howgego takes us back to the earliest observations and discoveries of meteorites and the initial doubt that they could have extraterrestrial sources, through to explorations of deserts and the Antarctic - both locations where it tends to be easier to find them. I, certainly, had no idea about the use of camera networks to track incoming meteors, which not only try to estimate where they wi...

Against the Odds - John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin ****

The number of women working in STEM subjects has expanded dramatically, but as John and Mary Gribbin make clear, in the history of science this is a very recent occurrence. Here, they bring us the stories of 12 women, from Eunice Newton Foote, born in 1819, to Vera Rubin, born in 1928 - effectively covering nearly 200 years in that Rubin died as recently as 2016. There are some names that will already be familiar from popular science histories (and deservedly so). You will find, for instance, Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin represented. But there are plenty like Foote that few will have come across, including Inge Lehmann, Chien-Sung Wu and Lucy Slater. While arguably Foote is there primarily to demonstrate the difficulties she faced (her discovery of an aspect of greenhouse gas behaviour was independently bettered within weeks), the rest have all made significant discoveries or developments against the odds and often missed out the recognition the deserved. The most prominent ob...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Search This Blog