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 Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog