Welcome to Science Fiction

The Tyranny of the Imagination

2011-11-28T17:11:00.005-06:00

An important error of the modern age is that with so many people dreaming up so many things so often, we are apt to place our prejudice on the side of the human imagination.

7,000,000,000 minds work alongside our own. I forgive anyone who might catch themselves feeling that, freed from the shackles of reality and yet focused by the immediacy of the human condition, this increasingly-interconnected system of cogitation should be capable of exploring every possible avenue of thought, solving any problem, and predicting all that might be found in this single, predetermined (mostly) reality. Witness the generally-accepted Rule 34 as a contemporary and humorous example of our confidence in this regard. Indeed, I even find myself believing this once in a while.

We all know, when given half a second to think about it, that this just isn't true. The combined work of all the scientists in the world daily reveal details about our universe that we as a species have not comprehended before - indeed, some things are discovered which simply defy the powers of comprehension for most of us. Some might argue that there are people who may have conceived those things before, yet their thoughts are unknown to us because of the tyrannies of distance, time, language, attention, etc. A glance at the corpus of human fancy in the form of our species' literary traditions, up to and including all forms of story-telling - spoken, written, hypertextual, film, game, musical, theatrical, or otherwise - will reveal this supposition to be similarly false. Certainly a corpus this expansive should constitute a representative slice of human thought, yet from this very "wellspring," cliché and genre sprang; it has never created anything that did not have a human experience to back it up. Who imagined a world even as mundane as the inner realms of Jupiter before they were discovered?

Throw this much money, time, technology, and human creativity at a project, and you still end up in a mostly earth-like rainforest with humanoid inhabitants. Not only are we incapable, but oftentimes we are willfully cliché.

(exciting conclusion after the jump)

To say "truth is stranger than fiction" is practically a truism, and we should not fault ourselves for this - we must pay attention to some things while missing out on others, and in this way the most exhaustive human imagining of a world must still be forever more incomplete than the smallest environ one could care to observe in the real world. Like a graphical representation of Mandelbrot's set, reality is infinitely detailed; the rabbit hole is as deep as you have time to pour into it. No amount of cogitation over any amount of time can map it, because should you choose to contemplate infinitely with infinitely many cogitators, still the infinite of the real would surpass you by the inescapable inefficiency of your act. The meta cannot surmise its primary and the simulacra must have a degraded resolution compared to its original.

This is the tyranny of our imagination. It is a powerful boundary to a powerful force, but it is overcome not through the brute force assaults of millions of minds. Like many human problems, acknowledging our weakness is actually the first act in a drama ending with the transformation of a crucifixion into a resurrection.

The solution is always within our grasp - to imagine without using imagination, which is really less of a koan than it sounds (but I think this is a pretty way of putting things). Discovery picks up for us where pure imagination finds itself up against a wall - what we cannot intuit we can find in the infinite variety of the multiverse. This approach does have a caveat: if one is not careful, there is the risk that our imaginative limitations can limit our exploration here, too. As Rumsfeld said of epistemology, there are "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns," and so with discovery there are "Conceivable Conceptions" and "Inconceivable Conceptions":

Conceivable Conceptions - Those ideas which we can think about thinking of, or those discoveries which we can think about discovering.

Inconceivable Conceptions - Those ideas which we are incapable of thinking about thinking of, or those discoveries we are incapable of thinking about discovering.

Conceivable conceptions are the children of human-directed discovery; inconceivable conceptions are the result of serendipitous discovery. One example of this would be the discovery of penicillin. Serendipity escapes the tyranny of the imagination by causing us to consider things we cannot consider without prodding from experience, but which still lie within the realm of our ken.

It is a mistake to think that when and how this happens is down to luck, however. Using fractal geometries, chaos theory, the principle of evolution and genetic algorithms, and just plain getting out there and seeing stuff (and sometimes making it blow up just to see what happens), we can cause events that we did not foresee, which can in turn prod us onto the paths of totally inconceivable discoveries.

This still is essentially truism, but I plan to make a point with it. I believe it follows from all this that imagination and the scientific method are not the only valid methods of discovery available to us. These both work within the constrained space of the known unknowns and the conceivable conceptions, but to go beyond that the only ship that will carry us there is most aptly named Controlled Accident.

It follows that a methodology of productive and ethical accident should follow in order to make this form of discovery more productive for us than it has been in the past, but thus far it appears little thought has been put into it.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution & Rule 34 - Progress, Law, Science Fiction

2011-09-19T23:07:00.001-05:00

Over the past few weeks I have had the pleasure of completing both the new Deus Ex: Human Revolution, by Square Enix/Eidos: Montreal, and Rule 34, by Charles Stross. I can say unequivocally that both of these new releases were very good storytelling laid over very old plots, and as such they add to Science Fiction incrementally, but they do not open any new doors. They do, however, prompt us to look at the implications of a relationship between SF and an equally venerable subgenre of Mystery - the Police Procedural. What comes next involves spoilers. (TL;DR at the bottom as well)

The story of Deus Ex brings us to the early years of this century - just a little down the road. The world's geopolitical realities are entering a state of flux due to the financial breakdown of first-world nations, the rise of countries like China, the increasing power of multinational corporations, and the rapid pace of technological advances. Your main character, Adam Jensen, is a stock ex-cop type working for Sarif Industries, one of the world's most powerful biotech companies. This company is in the business of making "augmentations" - technological implants for humans that increase physical, sensory, and mental abilities at the cost of replacing the limbs/organs/nerves they are modeled on. When your girlfriend, the most brilliant scientist in the company, is kidnapped by a rival organization, you are recreated Six Million Dollar Man-style and tasked with solving the mystery of why she was taken. This you do, sneaking, hacking, blasting, and persuading your way through all obstacles to the revelation of one global conspiracy transfixed by the pettier aims of the corporations and twisted geniuses that fused their conflicting goals to its standard until the time was right to throw their respective wrenches in the gears.

There are two important points to make about this:

1. The game assumes the plot of a Police Procedural - the point of gameplay is to accomplish all the technical feats of the Procedure in order to solve the mystery, the perpetrators of which are more or less known at the outset (but not their motives). See Law & Order, CSI, Fringe, or a dozen other recent television shows for a recap of this genre's modern popularity. These modern Police Procedurals require the protagonist(s) to use advanced technologies to solve their mysteries.

2. This is laid on top of a totally standard cyberpunk setting - a dirty future in which power elites exert immeasurable, secret control, the wealth gap is huge, and those with the right connections and resources are able to act outside the law. Thus the entire game is rife with cynicism - to enforce the law in a lawless world, Adam must step beyond its pale, committing crimes to serve justice. The result is that, to maintain a coherent sense of good vs. evil, Adam Jensen (the in-world proxy for us, the audience) is forced to seek out his own idea of right and wrong as the ultimate measure of justice. Social "law" is replaced with individual "principle" as the arbiter of morality and ethics, and the game ends in a test of this transformation - it is Jensen the individual who must ultimately make the choice of how to spin the game's cataclysmic ending to the rest of the world, to essentially pass judgement on the events.

An insightful mind over at Rock Paper Shotgun sees in this computer game a relevant and powerful investigation of Digital Rights Management (DRM). The essential conclusion of his essay is that because one cannot trust people to misuse powerful technology, one cannot afford to let it be used without DRM-like controls to regulate and control its use. While I respectfully disagree (one could argue at this point in history that the only misuse of atomic weaponry occurred before its "DRM" was "cracked"), the point is taken - DE:HR is all about the control vs. the distribution of scientific know-how and the technology it spawns.

Taking this general thrust of the story and applying it to the problems with copyright infringement via lack of control and customer rights infringement via controlling DRM technologies is both apt and incisive, but the ethical conclusion reached by the author as a result indicates that the message the game delivers after the credits roll was not taken to heart.

This game is a prequel - that is to say, the events of its story occur before and inevitably will lead to a future set in stone by a past game (in this case, the original Deus Ex). And in case that message wasn't clear, no matter which decision Adam Jensen makes, after the credits one hears the voice of his genius girlfriend discussing the creation of a virus that will set in motion events leading to the world the first game imagined - a world in which technology continues to advance inexorably and uncontrolled. In other words, what Jensen decides is irrelevant to all but himself. DE:HR does not just allow the player to weigh the pros and cons of controlling or not controlling the spread of technology (which today and in future days will boil down to the control of information via DRM); in true noir style, it forces the player to accept that their individual decisions, even elevated by luck to the height of influencing the entire world's perception of a world-altering cataclysm, are meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Information conquers all, and if it is not allowed to spread, the situation is ultimately only temporary. If this is true, then the only beneficial purpose DRM and like technologies serve in the long run would be to slow the advance of technology to a pace we can understand and deal with. In the meantime, such controls will (as proven so devastatingly in the game) provide power elites many opportunities to oppress others.

Returning to the idea that this story is a Police Procedural in computer game format, I draw the conclusion that DE:HR is the kind of SF that says human laws will forever be subverted by technological advances. In other words, that at least social law is essentially in conflict with a law more like the law of gravity - Information spreads through social networks and cannot be stopped. I kind of like this because it would mean that Science Fiction is like some kind of cool subversive samisdat that abets an eternally-right revolution, but never mind.

This line of thinking terminates here, having arrived at Charles Stross's latest confection: Rule 34. If DE:HR sees Information forever subverting human law, Rule 34 finds a near future in which information's spread through social networks traps humanity inside its own laws, enforcing them with its own brand of justice. As expressly stated by characters in the book, the plot revolves around how a botnet essentially becomes a nascent Panopticon Singularity (there's also the fact that it becomes conscious in the process, but this worrisome leftover of wishful AI thinking can be left behind while still acknowledging the power of the idea: even as it says in the book, after a certain point, what does it matter whether a computer is actually aware?). Before we think Stross is deeply invested in the tinfoil hat market, however, it is worth noting that he has also created a more-or-less benign Panopticon Singularity in the form of the Eschaton from his first book, Singularity Sky - so the value of this occurrence is still up in the air as far as the author is concerned.

In any event, the point is that Stross sees emergent, inexorable technological advances as something that might actually enforce laws - although not necessarily our own - rather than constantly subvert them. In Rule 34, the plot again takes the form of a Police Procedural to make this point. Interesting...

Both works use the guise of a Police Procedural to investigate the Singularity. They come to opposite, yet apposite conclusions about the results of attempts to control propagation of information through social networks. Obviously a rich dialectic is to be found here, but I have neither the ability nor the inclination to enter into it. I wish only to note that a popular and successful vehicle for contemplation of the Singularity in SF seems to be emerging: the Police Procedural. It allows for a very direct confrontation between notions of the control/restraint of scientific advance and the promotion of free scientific advance, something which both stories seem to be ambivalent about.

Such a direct approach is indicative of the conscious effort both stories took to explore the dialectic, and that is something I think SF has been heretofore unwilling to do directly. Surely it has been dancing around the issue, or essentially dismissing the argument by making iconoclastic, sweeping claims about it, for decades. But now the genre is attacking in earnest, using fictional sleuths to unravel a hard real-world problem with a pop-culture story-telling mechanism. In short, it aspires to assert itself as the gateway to understanding for the masses.

I suspect that this trend, and its success, means anyone wishing to make it in SF in the years to come will have to be willing to grapple with, and even find answers for, some of the "hard problems." That means stories taking bigger risks, becoming more cerebral, and in general a revival of Hard SF. As an inevitable result, there should also be much more disagreement within the genre soon, even perhaps among the publishing giants. This sort of diversification and heterogeneity hints at a solution to the very problem DE:HR and Stross are grappling with, I think. The news couldn't be better, from my point of view!

TL;DR - SF these days loves Police Procedurals. It seems to be the MO for exploring the hard problem of technology: whether to control its advance or not. I think this means SF is becoming more willing to take risks and attack its biggest elephants in the room directly, although I'd be hard-pressed to guess why now. Not sure, but people on the Internet seem to actually be getting at least half the point now, which is better than could be said before. In any and all cases, I think this new diversification of the field is, like most diversification, a good thing.

The Most Worthy Achievement for Humanity in the 21st Century

2011-07-10T21:10:00.000-05:00

"The most worthy achievement for humanity in the 21st century that doesn't just fix problems we already have, but advances us further in civilization, will be what?"

I've heard this question before, and talked with several people recently about this idea, and it seems like a good one for lifting spirits, which is what we could all use every once in a while. These are things to look forward to in the years to come - if not in our lifetime, then within the lifetimes of our children.

I have created a poll on the side of my blog - I don't expect people to actually answer it because my blog has so little traffic, but it should serve as a useful reminder of this topic, because I think it is important to consider the good as well as the bad, ala the Shine Anthology, only less stringently utopian.

Take a look and let me know what you think, if you happen to venture here.

Green Future: Belated Review of Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl

2011-04-05T23:02:00.000-05:00

The Windup Girl came out in 2009 and won both the Hugo and the Nebula.

It is compared to William Gibson's work by critics in that it is grimy, noir-ish, and set in a near-future focused on a single type of technology - in this case, on "green" technology in a world that has passed through the nightmare side of global warming and the resultant economic collapse.

On the far side of this disaster (not so far away), Bacigalupi posits a world in which green technology is dominant - the combustion engine is replaced by wound-spring drives, genetic crop and animal engineering has made food companies the rulers of the nascent reemerging global economy, and anything that produces greenhouse gases is carefully circumscribed by law - including, apparently, anything remotely resembling the internet.

This means that manual and animal labor is back in style while green power generation catches up, which gives the whole book the cant of a story set in the industrial revolution, with very strong themes concerning class, racism, and wealth that are supplanted in the end by a transhumanist message: that humanity itself is probably broken, but that the windups - the genetically engineered versions of our own species rabidly hated in the book - are a possible means of salvation. This really means that the reader's exploration of this new industrial world is all for the sake of a tired conclusion with flaws already mentioned better elsewhere. But before I reach that conclusion -

Overall, I thought the book contained a welcome cynical look at the sustainability movement. Anyone who thinks that sustainability will not mean a certain level of sacrifice should read this book for a great vision of a world where this was not realized until too late. It also does a great job of imagining the geopolitics, people, and places of its world, although it gets a poorer grade for the technology. The tech is great for the most part, but it is difficult to imagine that the world would ever completely lose the internet, especially in an era bent on energy efficiency - so much of that is to be gained through networked communication and computing. Also noticeably absent from the plot is any mention of improving your basic human through medicinal, surgical, or any other means. I find it hard to believe that in a future where improved humans can be genetically engineered, science does not also understand how to improve the average human as well.

To get back to what I was coming to conclude before, it shows that The Windup Girl is a book bent on its transhumanist message - to the point where the worldbuilding and the storytelling ultimately suffers, if only a little. It was a fantastic read plot-wise (I won't reveal even one jot more of it than I have already given away here, which is precious little, actually), and I highly recommend it for anyone looking to see where the good SF might go in the next few years. The future is mostly plausible, nearby, and finely tuned between dystopia and utopia. Just don't expect its ultimate conclusion to provide anything new.

It is the getting there that counts, in this case.

Dragon Age II and the future of storytelling, character building, and chainmail bikinis

2011-03-20T23:22:00.007-05:00

An apology on behalf of the upper corner of my brain, where I presume my personified ability to write hides for long periods and feasts on Cheetos: yeah, sorry. Now, get back out here, you ungrateful tit! The meat, then:

Recently, I finished up with Dragon Age II, and I find myself increasingly amazed at the ability of some games to surpass their predecessors despite massive pressures to do the very opposite. I’ll get more into the specifics, but I have some general things that I keep coming back to. These all apply in varying ways to Science Fiction, which is why it matters here.

In many ways, of course, Dragon Age II (and its predecessor) grab from the standard bag of fantasy tropes, dragons being the least of them, Dwarves (dwarfs, depending on how much one reveres Tolkein) and elves, too, and their respective stereotypes. Now, this isn’t much of a problem when it comes down to it, because it can allow subtlety, relying on certain archetypes to take care of the atlas-like support while finer details are spun out, which I believes explains a lot of the recent explosion in fantasy – they all build on each other complementarily, much in the same way of ALL the MOVIES about PEOPLE IN LOVE, I mean, HOW MANY PEOPLE AND STORIES CAN THERE BE? Oh, well, I realize that the depth is hardly comparable, but you get the point; this is a maturing field, one that has built itself from the ground up and is just now starting to get going into real production.

There’s other parts of this grab bag that aren’t often used so well, though. (I would argue that DA II avoids these pitfalls, fortunately, but that’s for later) The Breast Plate and No Ugly People phenomena are alive and well still, for one. Fantasy literature covers tend to revel in this, with various ratios of smeared dirt to magic use to signal high/low fantasy, but some of the worst offenders are computer games. I stopped playing RIFT for this very reason, not out of any dislike for proper female proportions, but because a world of Victoria’s Secret models dressed as such causes major immersion issues. World of Warcraft used to be a major offender in this—every possible variation was to be seen, right down to an armor model that was basically two metal bowls and nothing much else—but as of late they’ve given female characters significantly more modesty (although the character models themselves are still, um, idealized.

I’ve told you all of that to tell you this: not breaking ground in realistic depictions of women within Dragon Age would not have been a problem. I’m jaded about that (although RIFT was a bridge too far for me) but then DA II shocked me out of my complacence twice before the first hour was up, and both times bucked the trend. First, the character I was able to make was…moderately realistic. Actually, I was able to make a face that I felt would not have been out of place in Peru, classical ‘moon-faced’ Native American, someone who I doubt would make the cover of Sports Illustrated no matter how svelte. Second, the first NPC to join your party is a lantern-jawed female who, nevertheless, isn’t really ‘butch’ in any way. Oh, and the armor covers them, you know, protecting and all that. Now, keep in mind that there’s still a fair amount of abstraction at work here, but these nods to realism worked on me, at least, and sucked me in as much as anything else.

Anyone who’s played Bioware RPGs within the last 15 years knows that one can expect a basic level of story competence that’s miles above most others, although this gap has been wider at some times than others. This game is no different, with the expected richness of character from damn near everyone, mature themes handled with care, and the standard assortment of emotions, but one thing stood out to me in particular. To be honest, it stood out to others first, but not in the same way…the Gamespot review puts it this way:

There's an odd lack of direction here. There is no overall sense of purpose, no main villain […] [T]he stakes are never clear because there's no central plot to pull you through. As a result, the story is scattered--a series of missions and events without a center. The most heartfelt moments come from peripheral tangents and side quests focused on individual party members, where you explore loss, love, and betrayal. Nevertheless, there's a discouraging lack of epic-ness and focus, and no final prize to set your eyes on.

This sounds damning, actually. It’s not a bug, though, but a feature. There’s no massive story because you’re the tale. It’s even a told tale, framed in the conceit of an interrogation of one of the characters after the fact, and the effect is that the entire game is basically side quests, which, when you take Gamespot’s words at their face, starts to sound like a pretty compelling game. That’s the real tale, and it’s a mark of how far games—and fantasy!—have come.

Once completed, I noticed something else about the game, or rather about myself. Once complete, I was done. Well, that sounds dumb, so let me rephrase: when I completed the game, I felt that I was satisfied that I hadn’t missed anything that would have significantly changed how I felt about the game. The game completed itself on its own time, but let me feel as if I had completed it on my own terms; this is no mean feat. To a degree, actually, I am loathe to replay it too soon, because so many of the characters and their relationships with you changed so significantly that it’s hard to see them in their early states. I returned to a savegame and betrayed one of the characters (a Sephiroth expy of sorts, brooding and maundering about fate) with the intent of exploring another path, but couldn’t, because it felt like I had just forcibly mangled the story that had already been told.

There’s much that’s new in this game, much that’s not, and much that tells of a grander future for the medium. It set many things into relief for me, and that’s something hard enough to do as of late. Dragon Age II is a glimpse of the future of computer fiction, you could say, and you’d be right, even it is just a game…the right blend of realism and abstraction, of embracing and rejecting canon, of guiding the player though a story that is nominally linear but doesn’t seem to be, well, more please.

Various Thoughts Brought on By Recent Reading and Writing

2011-01-19T00:29:00.001-06:00

I recently read William Gibson's Zero History. This book is fantastically-written and full of great ideas, much more SF book than Pattern Recognition, which while a fantastic book in its own right was more "literary," if you will (along the lines of Lord of the Flies). It is easily a match for the starter to its trilogy, and certainly much much better than Spook Country, which has thus far been the only mediocre novel I've ever seen William Gibson write.

The big ideas in this book are that you can destroy the world economy by knowing the order queue for everything on the market a little bit in advance, and that secret advertising is the best way to catch people's attention through a sort of reverse psychology of advertising that works only in a world flooded in advertising, where a lack of said substance causes the calloused eye of the consumer to pause and take interest. In examining this phenomenon, Gibson lays bare the reason that viral marketing works so well (when it works).

The big idea, though is the first that I mentioned, and while it is undeniably the better of the two ideas he has come up with, he spends precious little time on it in Zero History, and in general makes the book a stylistic and plot-driven success that nonetheless leaves behind a shadow of philosophical disappointment. The book dodges some of the hardest questions it raises, and it really seems to me like Gibson is willfully ignoring the singularitarian implications of his own imaginations. I mean, you write a book with a name like Zero History, stick a world-altering idea in it, and then avoid doing anything with it that might smack of singularity-esque prognostication? It seems like turning a blind eye to me, if there was ever a literary example of said feat. I can't help but think Gibson is opposed to this kind of thinking by some deeply-inborn atheism, but I wish he could look at the possibility from the detached perspective of a scientific observer of the phenomenon he foresees. There is at least the chance that what he speaks of in this book is going to be one of, if not the, drivers behind a material singularity. To go into it further here would ruin the book for those who have yet to read it, but the book does a pretty clear job of intimating where it might have gone had Gibson been more willing, so I'll leave any curious readers of mine to read the book for answers.

There was one other thing about the novel that got me thinking. It was, at its base, a Quest plot in many ways, but one that felt almost like all the physical moving about was secondary to the quest that was done online in the book. The whole idea of a Quest plotline becomes increasingly quaint in a global world such as ours, and even potentially dangerous. It's no far stretch to say that our cultural mindset in the West is deeply ingrained in a Quest sort of attitude - it permeates our greatest literature from Gilgamesh to Homer to Melville to L'Engle to McCarthy. It is in movies and books and computer games, so to say that the West thinks in terms of the Quest is like saying that dogs think it terms of food. Even as a generalization it is an understatement. Going a step further, it is not too far a step to say that all of human culture is heavily invested in the mindset of the Quest narrative.

The problem with the Quest narrative is that it is all about expansion; going elsewhere to solve your own problems, either within yourself or back at home. That's not sustainable thinking. There are other plots, some more sustainable than others, but it might be worth it to think about how strongly narratives structure the way we think about our lives and our future as a society. We can't afford to fantasize just about space travel, or travel to extreme areas of the Earth, or travel outside of society when disaster strikes, as potential solutions. They form a good part of what we want to imagine for ourselves, but it seems we could use a healthy dose of imagining about what solutions might exist if through bitter fate, we are forced to make do with what we have right here for the foreseeable future.

Hardware, Interface

2011-01-15T20:58:00.003-06:00

I am an enemy of the The Singularity.

Let me rephrase that slightly - I am an enemy of The Singularity as it is currently in vogue to imagine. I don't think that the singularity will be as dramatic, as life-changing, as flashy, or, most importantly, as soon as some people imagine. Kurzweil and those who look to him as a prophet of the future are looking too hard in the wrong place.

Computing is indeed expanding in power and decreasing in cost at a tremendous rate, along with the information that it has been made to handle. Problem is, these things expand at different rates: information is the elephant in the corner, and hardware the precocious child that everyone knows will succeed but no one quite knows how or when. Between the two of them lies the invisible aspect - the interface. In my view, this is where the singularity breaks down.

I believe that The Singularity occurs when hardware is indistinguishable from interface.

Computing power is needed to access information and to manipulate it; right now, the manipulation is being done by Google and Pixar and any number of high-powered computing/analysis firms). What Kurzweil's singularity does is move this computing power into our hands (actually, heads), along with both the tools to utilize it and be changed by it. Pretty heady stuff, actually, but I feel that it misses a critical juncture - how does it go smoothly from 'access Google from the refrigerator' to 'hey new drivers for my eye'? We've had keyboards for ages, mice for a long time, speech recognition is not quite there yet, and let's not even bother with video...and then look at the other aspect, delivery - just one path there, really, and that's screens. Small, large, flexible, they're still the same thing. This is not technology that is ready to be implanted into our bodies in 50 years.

Why, though, do we feel so close to the information? A keyboard is a keyboard, but we work around its limitations with fantastic ease, and screens are developing in ways and directions astounding and myriad. The thing that gets glossed over in talk of the imminent and inevitable Singularity is that our interfaces must change substantially for all of the things predicted to become true, and this is not going to happen any time soon. I think that it may end up happening later on, but only for certain values of X exceeding 100 years.

Notice, though, that I said 'things predicted.' I think that we need to look at the common car as an examplar - well, actually, not the car so much as our relationship with it. When driving, one more or less internalizes the car as part of the body. 'He hit me!' instead of 'He hit my car!', avoiding the feeling of barely controlling a massive chunk of metal, and jetting in and out of crazy traffic with many other peo - there I go again, internalizing. It is also completely physical, not at all any kind of wetware interface. Keyboards, multitouch interfaces, mice, all are physical in a similar way.

The extension of our selves that we feel when using these, when driving, that is what The Singularity ignores - we can almost achieve an end result of The Singularity already, sans wetware, sans ultra-powerful external computing. Until a paradigm shift - until something quantitatively massively different and better comes along, completely replacing what already exists, this key point will prevent The Singularity from occurring as some envision. It might not prevent another Singularity, one that is perhaps more subtle and less intrusive, but it probably won't lead to the Kurzweil Singularity or another kind of man/machine interface.

While I do believe all of this, here's the best part: there is always a chance of something from left field. Something may happen, or a development may occur, and suddenly we're sitting in the modified future in 50 years, reading this and laughing at my ignorance.

Never a wasteland

2011-01-07T16:40:00.002-06:00

At a loss of what to write, I turned to my library. Here, then, is a relatively new book of mine: Land of the Dead, by Thomas Harlan. Not at all what it sounds like, fortunately; no zombies here. Instead, think Alternate History Space Opera...it's easier than you might think. I'll cover that later.

In any case, this is the third of a series, long-delayed and indifferently touted as such, much to its loss, I think. There's a lot in this book that I feel comes directly from the previous books, less in information than in tone and feeling, and given the dense nature of the universe it inhabits, you need as much guidance as it can spare. Even in the first book in the series, Wasteland of Flint, you the reader are tossed into a universe in media res, a universe that never quite stops grinding on around you.

The basics are thus: the Aztecs dominate the world, and have done so for many, many years. At their side are the Japanese--forced from Japan by a successful Mongol invasion--in what seems to be an unequal but still potent partnership. Countries never formed, or were conquered in their infancy, and the last remaining forces of the European world are either subjugated, destroyed, or on the run and fighting a hopeless guerrilla war. These books take place long after, when this world is reaching out to a small interstellar empire, and keeps bumping into things far larger and far older than it, and no less dangerous despite being the artifacts of long-gone precursors. There's other things hinted at, and internal issues of politics and religion, but the most dangerous things are also the oldest...

Given any thought, the alternate history is an essential part of the tale, despite it being something that could have taken place in a more normal universe with a more normal Earth. Not so much the external events, of course, but the interpretation of them, an obsession not with science but with science as a tool of mysticism, science that is no less advanced than perhaps ours would be, but functions with a distinctly unobtrusive edge. You end up feeling that these Aztecs would make spacecraft-temples designed in the styles of their ancestors, complete with torches and incense and everything short of sacrifices.

I am pretty sure that Thomas Harlan is not the originator of the alternate-history-future-SF genre, but it's not one that has a massive library behind it. The concept is heady and the execution excellent, as Harlan explains a lot but gives both subtle and unsubtle pointers towards what he doesn't tell. As I said, this is a universe already in motion, and he uses this conceit like a bludgeon when he must, to accent the utter inevitability of some of his situations, In the same vein, you are often left with a sense that there is a lot of detail missing from your abbreviated view, that the stereotypes that you see are not all there is to see, which I think is used mostly to provide what the writer might not have, filling in the gaps, as it were. It gets used a lot to fill in characters, I feel, as the characters are often relatively flat and simple. It's the situations that matter, ultimately.

The touch of the author is heavy and light, stiff and flexible, all in the right places. If only more could capture me in this way.

The novellas of Scalzi and Sanderson

2011-01-02T08:43:00.005-06:00

Novellas are suddenly (for certain values of suddenly) back into vogue. I've recently read two such, both SF of the spaceship variety--well, wait on that characterization. One was Brandon Sanderson's Firstborn, the other John Scalzi's The God Engines, and while both involve spacecraft, one is nominally fantasy. It's really something of switch between the two, as Sanderson is the fantasy maven, tapped to finish the Wheel of Time series, and Scalzi was the presumptive heir to the Heinleinian military SF crown until people realized that he is far more his own author than just another Starship Troopers clone manufacturer, but each works in its own way.

Reading a novella is not quite the same as any other format, a problem that exists for me simply because I don't get nearly as many of them, or perhaps I just don't see them. The way I tend to read--that is, exceedingly fast, with multiple re-reads and a lot of internal glosses--they are closer to a short story than a novel, consumed in a single sitting, although not necessarily absorbed as such. Now that I've had a chance to absorb both, however, I have some things to say.

Firstborn

Except, if Dennison was a god, his specialty certainly wasn’t war.
His education kept him from making any disastrous mistakes, but before long, the battle had progressed to the point where it was no longer winnable. His complete lack of pride let him order the expected retreat.

The theme, as with any Sanderson book, is personal development. The main character never really gets any better at commanding starships, but he develops as a character and as a man, quickly, but not too quickly, realizing where his true talents lie. Sanderson's style is simple and easy to read, with hidden depths that he uses to tuck away clues for his inevitably logical and satisfying Reveal; I suppose that the main theme of this story is "if you suck at commanding spaceships, don't command spaceships!" but Sanderson makes it feel like a revelation of stunning power. Don't think that I am being glib--he does this while making the reader satisfied at being led along by the nose willingly. The mystery isn't enough to really keep anything concealed, but for the sake of the tale, it is rewarding to ponder nothing except that which is right before you.

So I like it. But does it work as a novella? The answer lies in the definition of a novella, which really seems to me to mean "longer than a short story" or, maybe slightly more accurately, "really long short story". Accepting THAT definition, then, yes, it's an excellent story that fits its assigned length almost perfectly, although the lack of any real denouement makes it feel slightly rushed. This isn't a type of story, in Sanderson's hands, that differs in any real way from a short story, mostly because he wrote something that many would classify as fantasy in space, bypassing the love of detail that SF authors usually have for a focus on events and individuals. It's self-contained and almost exactly as long as it needs to be.

Free version here

The God Engines

Where either the gods or their followers would go from there was another matter entirely. The inner city of Bishop's Call was sealed by The Lord Himself, a mosaic ring of first-made iron circling it. No enslaved god, weakened and stripped of its native power, could hope to pass. Nor would The Lord's followers approach the ring, although for another reason entirely. While even the smallest nugget of first-made iron could bring a man more copper than he might see in a year, stealing iron from the Sealing Ring condemned the thief to have his soul consumed. Death beyond death.

No way around it--despite starships, this is fantasy. Scalzi is not Scalzi here, which is all the more amazing and perhaps a little expected from him. You could perhaps ferret out that he normally writes SF, given his focus within the story on things military and communication and, sure, starships, but his writing in this is far more that of a new author than the confident voice we see in his other works. It's refreshing.

It's also, however, what holds this story back some. As a newcomer to fantasy, and, more importantly, as an infrequent writer of short stories, his voice seems to have adapted better to the long form tale, rather than the compression of a novella. I think that if he had made this as an Old Man's War story, it would have worked gloriously well, simply because of his comfort, but as it is, I ended up feeling that there is a lot of glory in here that was stifled because of the format. It didn't compress perfectly, leaving novel-like sections interspersed among the short story-like sequences.

Don't get me wrong, though, this does what fiction ought: make you boggle a bit and want to perhaps set it down to ponder the implications of what you've just read. The fact that it made me want to read it rather as a novel is a triumph in itself, and maybe suggests that I am just grousing.

--------------------

Given a sample size of two, then, the Novella might as well not exist. Firstborn is closer to the short story end of the continuum, and The God Engines sits much closer to an actual novel; both tales work, but Scalzi's desires to be a novel far more than Sanderson's wants to be a short story.

Why, then, did they release them in these forms?

Authors have to eat, you know, and I think this relates exactly to said consumption. The novella--not a novel but more than a short story--is a good, substantial freebie, while also retaining worth as a product for sale. Scalzi's is not free and probably will remain so, but the price is less than that of a true novel, and its cachet of being his first effort at Fantasy makes it worth the risk for the devoted fan. Sanderson's is free, although I bought it on Amazon for $0.99 for my shiny new Kindle, which wasn't a ripoff in the slightest, given how much I love his writing. The profit here I think lies in the fact that Sanderson knows who butters his bread, and allowing Tor to expose people to his skill was worth spending some time on.

The novella, then, is an experiment, an attempt to branch out to new things, or an attempt to reinforce the old. It's an artificial definition in many ways, but at the least, they're easier to consume, easier to expand, and easier to sell, all of which tell me that, with the rise of the ebook, we might see more of them from established authors.

Fictions in Fiction

2011-01-01T18:08:00.005-06:00

Everyone loves being lied to--but they hate it too. Take a look at the second word in this phrase: Science Fiction. For the blind, that's 'Fiction', which means 'falsehood', among other things. We can make it almost as pejorative as we want, going perhaps with 'lies', or simply leave it at 'not real'--the point is that everything we read and see within our chosen literary field that is not explicitly nonfiction is an untruth.

Obviously, this isn't much of a problem.

I would say that when I read a book, or even watch a series, I substitute logic for 'truth', accepting the overall falsehood of the work to float on its own logical raft. It's not a perfect substitution; I've never really felt lied to, but rather felt misled, like it took me down a path that wasn't real, or maybe required a couple of leaps that were too hard to take, but within a work that flows consistently, the illusion can hold remarkably well. When you can start to make predictions and judgments about characters, and begin to predict what they will do next, the chain is complete, and you know with great certainty that that which is not logical is probably illogical within the world of the work, rather than an oversight. (perfect is unattainable; ask any Wheel of Time fan what happened to Asmodean and you might see where this breaks down)

However, just because something is logical doesn't mean that it is necessarily correct. Stories need bad guys, and bad guys have serious issues with truth-telling, so how can they lie without misleading the audience? Here I tend to have the same issue that everyone else does: when a character says something, when the author describes something, it is automatically assumed to be true by the audience. To be honest, sometimes it's just plain the fault of the creator: they thought they were clear, they thought it was obvious. As all readings are equally valid--not correct, just valid--it can be said that the reader/viewer is never at fault, although we know this is an abstraction that falls apart upon reading a dedicated forum. Sometimes, the work is blatantly lying to you.

Most authors don't have problems with this, however, or they wouldn't be selling their work. They get around it and work with their audience, either through a character's actions or thoughts, or, when working with a limited omniscient perspective, simply informing the audience. Some authors are good enough that they can get away with lies that aren't lies, truths cloaked in distraction that are later revealed. That last part is a real deal-breaker sometimes...leave too big a lie unrevealed or cloaked in subtlety, and you can lose the audience. It doesn't even have to be all that important to be a distraction, either, so the better creators generally adopt a policy of either being explicit about the solution or about the lie.

There's another kind of lie out there, though, and this one is the most maddening for the creator simply because it's virtually impossible to catch: What Happened To The Mouse? To quote:

A "What happened to the mouse" occurs when a minor character, action, or very minor plotline is suddenly dropped for no apparent reason, without resolution.

The audience will sometimes focus on the smallest, most inane things, and decide that they are critical to the understanding of the plot, and when they don't get resolved--mostly because they're, you know, irrelevant--they get thrown for a loop. I tend to fall into this a lot, because I get distracted and start to construct my own logical framework sometimes; I presume others have the same issue.

When it comes down to it, I like being lied to when I read or watch; it makes me feel, well, normal, normal in the sense of participating in the world of the work and walking alongside the characters. Just as we lie to ourselves, to be part of a living, breathing world, the characters of a book, series, or movie need to lie as well...or at least seem to.

Fringe Screens Well, with a Demographic of One

2010-12-31T14:14:00.005-06:00

Fringe, currently surging along in its third season, is one of the best shows I have seen, ever, and certainly the best on US television in ages. Its dominance is not universal; indeed, I enjoy it so much because it provokes within me the same warm fuzzies that I get from some of the better anime series...but don't let that sell anything short. Fringe is a series that rewards my particular brand of obsession with ever-increasing levels of conspiracy, science-fiction-ish-ness, and drama.

My comparison to anime is well-advised. The great downfall of the serious American drama series has been, to my lights, an utter failure at long-term story arcs. Star Trek never managed more than a half-hearted effort, even given DS-9's workmanlike writing, and X-Files (Fringe's closest relative) muddled itself so badly that it was worth watching for the one-off Monster Of The Week episodes alone. Anime, however, has served as a refuge for those who like their melodrama serious and long-form, not dependent on making each week a self-contained triumph. Fringe looks to this method, building slowly in the first season what later is utilized in the second and third, and hardly ever resorting to a pure MOTW episode.

Anime conventions don't overwhelm the show; in fact, they don't manifest much at all outside of the use of serious drama and a story arc. The relationship drama, as a matter of fact, is all-american, and surprisingly subtle in places, avoiding Unresolved Sexual Tension and mostly steering clear of feeling forced. Ultimately, as many conventions are avoided as embraced. Character-building is consistent, with only a few minor derailments here and there, and interfaces well with the story.

Ah--the story. Classic SF themes, with genetic monsters, space things, time travel, and, most importantly, alternate universes. It's complex and usually subtle, and even the laughably conventional parts are handled with aplomb, concentrated as they are in MOTW sequences. A little consistency goes a long ways, though, and here is the strength of the series, iron at the core of a story that could suffer immesurably without proper attention. The logic is consistent, the handwaves consistent, the characters consistent--all combine to make a series that I consider to be a new pinnacle.

All that said, though--the series isn't over with. It could end poorly, it could be canceled and THEN end poorly, it could be canceled and end well, or, worst of all, it could be canceled and just stop with an unresolved cliffhanger. I've almost caught up to this season, and it lose track would be terrible.

As an aside, post script, whatever...this ain't Lost. It's not a single season of action spread out over as many as could possibly be justified, it's not a show that depends on obfuscation to seem mysterious, and it certainly isn't an extended analogy for death and purgatory.

Change: Our Concept of It, and It's Relationship With Science Fiction

2010-11-17T12:17:00.001-06:00

As the title may reveal, the concept of change and its complex interrelationship with Science Fiction is a topic worthy of a dissertation in Literature or Psychology.

On the one hand, we know from psychology and cognitive science that the human mind perceives change oddly. Such lacuna as Change Blindness and our terrible faculty for perceiving the passage of time (1, 2, 3) suggest that we are not particularly good at it.

This has huge implications for Science Fiction, a genre having to do with change and produced by creatures who perceive it so selectively. The difference between the present we live in and the future we write about is a function of the change that we predict will take place in the space of time between then and now.

One of the consequences of our peculiar biases is already well-noted by some within the science fiction community: that stories which predict the very distant future are difficult write. Cognitive Science explains this phenomenon: because we are poor judges of the passage of time, we have an inferior faculty for judging precisely how long certain changes will take to occur. Some measurements, like Moore's Law, help us to overcome certain aspects of our psyche's bias, but in order for such measurements to be found they must be based on current and past trends. Future change that is emergent, that arises out of the continued iteration of present circumstance as it reaches a tipping point, can be imagined, but not measured empirically. You might be able to measure it to a degree, by comparing it to an analogous event that happened at some point in the past and which is measurable, but no analogy is as good as the real thing, as it were. Thus predictions about changes in the future which have not even begun yet are bound to be made very inaccurately by beings who have a poor sense of the time it takes for changes to occur - namely, human authors. The further into the future a story tries to go, the more emergent changes will accumulate, and the further off-base the prediction will go.

There have been several narrative responses to this difficulty. One seems to be a proliferation of stories about apocalyptic futures, where a single catastrophic event makes everything simple because it reduces the future to a state in which the world has essentially been before, such as the dark ages. Because of the length of time historically involved in bootstrapping human civilization out of such a condition (thousands to tens of thousands of years), this narrative strategy allows writers to recreate the world in a new image and yet simultaneously as a plausible future. The downside to the strategy is that it does not allow us to see where humanity will go if we manage to stay the present course.

The knee-jerk reaction has been to refocus the lens of SF's glass onto near-future and even past-future events via the proliferation of Cyberpunk, Steampunk, and other, similar subgenres. This reaction was largely beneficial, because it has made it clear that near-future prediction carries its own dangers (also possibly rooted in the nature of the human psyche, but that requires another article) while simultaneously spotlighting the potential usefulness of successful SF predictions to the general public in a short amount of time.

Other responses include writing about other worlds and species instead of humanity, attempting mid-distance prediction that, through its plot, intends to focus on only a certain part of humanity's future (such as warfare or the future of a certain colony), or focusing exclusively on craft (character development, plot, style, etc. at the expense of actual prediction). None of these are detrimental to the genre; they expand its horizons, provide unfocused peeks into the future, and improve the subject's standards. They are all, however, methods of hiding from what was once one of the primary functions of the genre - the prediction of the distant future.

The inability of writers past and present to reliably predict more distant futures points to an essential lacuna in our abilities of foresight that we cannot overcome simply through a clever plot device or statistical reasoning. I believe the question that this poses - should we even try to predict what we cannot predict well? - should be answered in the affirmative, however.

What methods then, should a writer choose to tackle his own brain's weakness head-on, are to be employed? In ballistics, when accuracy is not possible, the solution may be found in the size or number of rounds thrown down range. A larger round - or a more expansive, sweeping story - may provide such robust results that even a near miss effectively hits the target. Scattershot - or more stories in general - ensure that at least one of the rounds is likely to succeed in touching the bull's-eye.

So, the relationship between our concept of change and the genre of science fiction seems to be obvious: to overcome our inherent weaknesses, writers will need to write more boldly, and write more, than authors of other genres. The debate will continue to center around where to give in quality to make up for this higher requirement. Much of modern SF believes that quality has won; that the reader wants a good story more than a good prediction. But to believe that is to ignore that the reason a person reads science fiction is because they want a good story about the future. Prediction is required, and so the conflict is intrinsic to the genre and thus irreconcilable. Indeed, the genre's nature may well be defined by this fundamental conflict.

10 Great but Forgotten SF Films

2010-10-26T17:15:00.017-05:00

This doesn't exactly mesh with what I want this blog to be about, but it's been quite a while since I've had time to post something, and I think this might generate some discussion topics for future blog posts. The reason being is that these films stand out to me in one way or another, yet are not so lauded by the public at large (even when compensating for their status as sci-fi movies, which tends to limit social awareness to begin with in my subjective appraisal).

Without further ado, the list, in no particular order:

Hiatus

2009-09-27T21:13:00.002-05:00

It looks as though I, the last active poster on this blog, am going to have to put the site on hiatus until the school year is done. Anyone who happens across this site can expect posting to resume circa May or June of 2010, sometime after my wedding and honeymoon conclude (priorities, you know!).

Until then, readers - write your lives in the pages of life well, for who knows who may read them.

Long Bets - There will be a Chernobyl National Park by 2035.

2009-08-31T00:21:00.001-05:00

Long Bets - There will be a Chernobyl National Park by 2035.

The minipost - to what extent are our predictions self-fulfilling? We already can see that they reflect the hopes and fears of some people at a given point in history, but how often do predictions such as the one above materialize their own truth, and to what extent does this phenomenon place responsibility in the lap of the speculative author?

It seems to me that the author must not be fettered by any restraints save those of their own personal design, but I also think this is the trivial problem the question raises - most people would agree.

The more troublesome knot is to what extent we should factor our own storytelling into our own telling of what the future might be like? If humans dream of interstellar empires and imperialist wars, they will probably get them if it proves possible. If we envision a future in which our technology escapes our control, it will happen. Except that we have already begun working on imagining futures in which we avoid this fate - the process is recursive, a cultural engine regulator. It obfuscates causation - and so our own storytelling about the future proves to be one of the fog banks obscuring our proper understanding of it.

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Mainstreamin' it!

2009-08-21T13:27:00.004-05:00

So this past week I got my hands on a copy of Regina Spektor’s new CD Far (By the way is it a good one so feel free to check it out). And one of the songs on the album got me thinking.

I listened to this and wondered, will true science fiction always have only a relatively niche following due to the fact that mainstream depictions of it seem to be such simple caricature of the genre. Now, this song is not really all that simple in its message; but it seems to me that most mainstream representations of Sci-Fi are very stunted and tell the same story.
Of course this is the nature of the mainstream. As the large river of culture that it is, it is bound to water down everything it touches. And that serves an important function of broadening the experience of the people of our culture, but what about depth? In an age where less people are reading this stream may introduce people without the reading background to have a caricatured view of the genre as a whole.
So is mainstream media a blessing or curse on the real cultures that it tries to reproduce? The answer may be somewhere in the middle I guess, but as less people have the attention and discipline to read great depths of a culture I have a feeling that the mainstream is washing away the banks of culture more than it may be cutting away some depth.

Toward Accurate Definitions of Near and Distant SF

2009-08-12T22:53:00.004-05:00

There's been quite a bit of debate lately in the SF community over a perceived lack of effort on the part of SF authors to tackle the "difficult" problems of both "Distant-" and "Near-" Future science fiction. The most amusing thing about this debate is that proponents of both complaints argue that their preferred chronological measurement is the harder of the two to handle.

On the one hand you've got people like William Gibson, whose prose retreats toward the event horizon of the present as the supposed coming singularity gathers momentum, lamenting the "rate of change fog" that clouds his ability to see further into the future. On the other, you've got people like Jetse De Vries, who not long ago complained that authors are hiding in the comfortably distant corners of the future timeline, refusing to close with the present due to the supposed danger of making predictions which stand a good chance of being proven untrue and thus making the work irrelevant.

They're both right. Gibson and authors like him get around the problem of making unlikely predictions that could be proven false by making few or no predictions in the realm of pure science. When it comes to technology, they can make plenty of important and non-trivial predictions which, if proven untrue, are more easily forgiven because natural laws do not impede the possibility of their being "true" if things had gone a little differently.

Authors that write distant-future SF - like Charles Stross - get around the problem of predicting what came after Singularity generally by supposing that baseline humans also succeeded in surviving the ordeal (and Singularity gives them lots of room to play with unfounded concepts of godlike AI, posthuman beings, etc.). Thus they can continue to write narratives and make predictions meaningful and possible based on extrapolation of human history. They don't have to worry about what would concern beings vastly more intelligent than humans very much, because these beings are not the protagonists of their stories.

Both strategies can be seen as "cowardly" in that they avoid certain aspects of the future in order to retain relevance/verisimilitude, but far be it from me for an unpublished, unprofessional author such as myself to criticize the imperatives of people who make part of their living from a fickle and over-saturated market. Instead, I wish only to provide an additional framework for understanding the compartments of the SF genre. Add "Technological" and "Scientific" to "Near" and "Distant" SF, and you have a more meaningful division of the genre. Unfettered by the restraints of time, these new labels allow us to see more clearly what a so-labeled work is predicting - new applications of already-known science, or new discoveries/applications of postulated - but as yet unproven - science.

After all, I would humbly submit that the interest of most SF consumers in reading about author's predictions is not so much "when" they are supposed to come true, but "how" they will come true (not to mention why, where, and whence). The glory of 2001: A Space Odyssey's predictions for AI, space travel, extraterrestrial intelligences, and the true origin of human consciousness is not diminished by the fact that the supposed year has passed. It remains, in all its terrible wonder, because of how Clarke (and Kubrick) told/showed how they will come to pass, whenever they do.

Miasma? I Think "Potpourri" Sounds Friendlier

2009-07-25T14:42:00.004-05:00

If nanomachines are the dangerous grey goo of the physical, then websites are undoubtedly the grey goo of the informational. And, just as dangerously, they sometimes get people thinking in the right directions...

Which is why you should visit these places:

h+ Magazine Editor's Blog - A blog attached to a zine about the merging of SF and the now.

Shine Anthology Weblog - About optimistic SF (seemingly concerned with near-future varieties).

The Speculist - A blog about... speculation, really. Plenty of multimedia to sink your teeth into, by the looks of it.

Gravity Lens Weblog - A veritable forest of quality links, all served up with very little overhead. Great reading on a slower mobile connection.

Robotic Technology Incorporated - Everything this company wants to do is made of win. Pay special attention to the EATR tech, which is getting some press recently: Story 1, Story 2

And you have to love this quote from one of their recent press releases: "We completely understand the public's concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission."

Worldbuilding: the Hidden Subgenre?

2009-07-15T22:42:00.026-05:00

One of the things that you realize after you read/watch/play/create alot of SF is that plot, characterization, message, and imagery are all great, but if you don't have a nifty setting it just seems like a rehash of something else that probably did it better years before.

This makes sense from the standpoint of Lit Crit - there are only a certain number of plots and they have been categorized, analyzed, and grouped. Same goes for characters - if you don't believe me check out TVTropes.org. As for the message, SF seems to be especially undiversified in that area. Sure, it does a heck of a job investigating nuanced questions of ethics, morality, theology, philosophy, and the sciences via the quasi-magical deus ex machina of Technology, but the fact that it reuses that deus ex machina so often means that some messages inevitably reappear far more often than we would like as consumers or creators of the genre.

In particular, I'm thinking of the dichotomous Technology Is Evil / Technology Is Good message. It sounds like what it is - works of SF inevitably seem to take the stance (implied or overt) that the technology enabling the situations discussed is either Good or Bad. This pratfall can be, and sometimes is, avoided by artists who take care to show that the enabling technology of their work can be used for Good or Bad by Free Agents, but we are speaking in generalities for now, and generally speaking, SF work can be split into these two camps - a fissure that often runs along the similarly deep divide between utopian and dystopian SF.

That leaves imagery and setting. Imagery is great, but what does it usually rely on? The sweeping vistas, vast stretches of time, and colossal armadas made possible by the SETTING. So if you are looking to liven up your SF, you look for a good setting.

The process of constructing this setting is known, in the parlance of the people who do these things, as worldbuilding - and it is a lot of fun. So fun, in fact, that many artists fail to ever begin their actual narrative and instead get stuck in a kind of obsessive, recursive loop.

Take, for instance, Dinotopia, by James Gurney. This series of books and its accompanying website together construct the universe of an undiscovered island of Earth where humans and intelligent dinosaurs live in harmony. A strange excursion into utopian worldbuilding, the Dinotopian universe is especially notable because most of the books that comprise its canon do not so much center around a narrative as they do around a detailed depiction of this setting. Certainly, a simple plot develops and runs to its conclusion, but one gets the sense after reading these books (and looking at their astoundingly detailed illustrations and diagrams) that the story was merely an atrophied vehicle to drive the exploration of the universe. Indeed, it seems possible that if Gurney had thought he could flaunt convention so completely, he might have eschewed the narrative entirely without significant damage to the power of his art.

Don't go thinking this is a fairly unique phenomenon either: other artists, even communities, have put narrative in the backseat while their encyclopedic dialectics working out the innards of a world that never was go for a drive. Orion's Arm, an online community dedicated to creating an SF universe with transhuman elements as plausibly as possible, is one example of a particularly long-lasting community of worldbuilders.

Even more popular universes are not immune to this sort of fiction. Star Wars features such books as The Illustrated Star Wars Universe and The Star Wars Essential Guide series. While these books use the material which fleshes out the traditional narrative expressions of their universes as a starting point, much of the information contained in these volumes is either assumed, deduced, induced, or entirely fabricated. Jumping onto this trend's bandwagon are books like Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, by Newt Scamander (aka J.K. Rowling), and The Dune Encyclopedia, edited by Dr. Willis E. McNelly. It would seem that if a universe is inviting enough, there is a market made up of people who simply want to explore its niches and unmapped territories, to make it even more "real" in their minds by learning new details. After all, as any good lier knows, the least questioned stories are generally the ones with more consistent details. To achieve verisimilitude, a facsimile must be nuanced. The real world is complex, and so are the best of our fantasies.

I must confess I am not an unbiased witness - even as children my brother and I created our own fantastic universe, which you can view in this slideshow here (be sure to access the speaker's notes by opening it in a new window using the button on the lower left of the player and then clicking Actions. They provide much-needed explanations for the odd illustrations):

The point then, as it seems to be now, was to create a platform for an infinite variety of narratives to take off from in the mind. Thus in its way, the worldbuilding mode is more versatile and free than even the novel or the non-sandbox computer game. These media cannot rove over the countryside of a newly-imagined universe without considerable difficulty, because they are constrained by the rigid train-tracks of a narrative plot that must show only what is relevant to progressing the storyline if it is to maintain proper pacing and keep the reader's interest. Although many of us love the discursive examinations of esoterica found in books like Moby Dick, this sort of sidetracked writing style is often criticized. It appears ill-fit with the narrative it purports to uphold. It might often do better liberated from the shackles of its parasitic narrative structure.

In a round-about way of argumentation, I suppose I have been attempting to point out that this uniquely postmodern mode of fictive artistic expression deserves recognition as a subgenre within SF & Fantasy. Worldbuilding is a natural and valid mode in and of its own right, and offers opportunities to artists that no other present medium seems prepared to provide.

Cataloguing Our Predictions & Bets

2009-07-11T12:23:00.003-05:00

This doesn't really count as a post, but I felt the need to make a quick note of it after Geoff's last post.

The Arena for Accountable Predictions: Long Bets is a website so obviously in tune with the spirit of this blog that I'm not sure how I forgot about it until now. It too shall join the RSS links to the side of this site.

A prediction that I find completely unlikely and would bet against if I had the money? Prediction 241: The End of State Sovereignty by 2030. World governments are probably much harder to get rid of than we think, or even impossible. This person's idea of a historic trend toward larger and larger forms of government is flawed; the nation-state is dissolving and will be replaced, if it ever truly is, by corporate entities.

A significant Bet that I would back? Bet 20: By 2020 the USA will no longer be the worst contributor to Global Environmental Degradation. Obviously China and India are going to oust us from this one. China is addicted to coal and to a certain extent, you cannot avoid degrading the environment with such high population densities/numbers. Unless I am more forgetful than I think, the People's Republic has already passed the states in terms of CO2 production. The voracious industrializing appetite of billions attempting to sustain a western vision of life will prove the most damaging phenomenon of the early half of this century short of grey goo, and the autocratic government of China at least will prove an impediment to its correction. War may follow.

Predict, then Verify

2009-07-09T12:47:00.004-05:00

Heinlein is very much a connection between the past of SF and the current age. He certainly seemed to be aware of this, or at least aware of the need for his work to reflect not a realistic present but a shaped future; to wit--even his most militarist, political, technologically steered work in Starship Troopers spends an inordinate amount of time dwelling on the effect of situations upon people. (According to Wikipedia--yeah, I know--John Steakley wrote Armor because he felt that there wasn't enough action in Troopers...and note that Armor is not of the classic age of SF; see what I mean about RAH being a connection?) Almost everything he wrote had this kind of vague forward thinking mentality, futuristic in structure for reasons of setting the stage. (See All You Zombies--)

It is interesting, then, to read what he actually thought the future might hold. In Expanded Universe, in "Where To?", he expounds upon a set of predictions made initially in 1950, updated in 1965, and then updated once more in 1980. He attempts to analyze the actual process of prediction, and explicitly states that an exponential path for the future is the most likely...but that a conservative, timid path is almost always what is chosen. I can't look at all of his predictions, but some of them really stand out to me:

circa 1950 "Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door-C.O.D. It's yours when you pay for it."
--It's heartbreaking to see his pessimism on this point by 1980, especially as it has largely been justified since. He maintains some confidence, though, mostly in the space programs of other nations, to the point of expecting some other nation to step into the gap. Have they? Not since then; maybe they might be starting, but the world has failed RAH in this regard.

circa 1950 "Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure."
circa 1980 "Most of this can be covered by one sentence: What used to be concealed is now done openly. But sexual attitudes are in flux; the new ones not yet cultural mores. [...] the current flux of swingers' clubs, group marriages, spouse swapping, etc., is, in my opinion, fumbling and almost unconscious attempts to regain the pleasure, emotional comfort, and mutual security once found in the extended family of two or more generations back"
--Not a typical SF author, indeed, but this prediction would not surprise anyone familiar with his work. Is he right? Not sure about this, but I think that this view wouldn't seem out of place today.

circa 1950 "We'll all be getting a little hungry by and by."
circa 1980 "Not necessarily. In 1950 I was too pessimistic concerning population [...] But no one in the United States should be hungry in 2000 A.D.-unless we are conquered and occupied."
--He was very much a man of his time, but he saw it for what it was later, where others didn't.

circa 1950 "Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple inquiries, and transmit vision."
circa 1980 "This prediction is trivial and timid. Most of it has already come true and the telephone system will hand you the rest on a custom basis if you'll pay for it. In the year 2000, with modern telephones tied into home computers (as common then as flush toilets are today) you'll be able to have 3-dimensional holovision along with stereo speech. Arthur C. Clarke says that this will do away with most personal contact in business. I [...] disagree with his conclusion; with us monkey folk there is no substitute for personal contact [...]"
--Once again, a man of his time and undoubtedly a writer of his time, but his realization of the 'timidity' of the prediction is accompanied by more of his sociological insight. We still don't have 3-dimensional holovision, but everything else, pretty much; it's technologically timid in the same way, but just happens to be right.

circa 1950 "A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity."
circa 1980 "I stick by the basic prediction. There is so much work going on both by mathematical physicists and experimental physicists as to the nature of gravity that it seems inevitable that twenty years from now applied physicists will be trying to control it. But note that I said "trying"-succeeding may take a long time. If and when they do succeed, a spinoff is likely to be a spaceship that is in no way a rocket ship-and the Galaxy is ours!"
--Always the optimist, he cannot pass up a chance to cheer lead for his preferred future, even while hedging. I think, however, that he falls down some here, mostly because he hits the frontiers of science that are suddenly, as of today, more poorly defined than ever. Control of gravity is as far away now as it was then; we just want to understand it!

More than any of his fiction, these predictions give us insight into Heinlein's mind, and consequently the predictive power of current SF writers. He stumbled across reality when it came to mobile phones and arrived at the present state of science through a simple lack of progress. His predictions when it comes to family and sexual freedoms are, however, about as good as it gets, in my opinion, which is utterly unsurprising, and may actually be an artifact of his libertine vision of the future rather than any predictive ability. I think that the surface lesson to learn here is that we don't live in RAH's future...and his future can still be THE future.

Canon

2009-07-08T08:35:00.002-05:00

In stumbling across Wikipedia, I happened upon the page for Irulan Corrino, and noted something that was a little baffling to me: the Dune Encyclopedia is apparently not considered canon for the series. (Canon mostly means "the official version," at least when it comes to what the author(s) say(s) actually happened in their universe) This was a bit of a disappointment to me, mostly because the Encylopedia is one of the most fascinating pieces of in-universe detail that I have ever seen--it handles things with a respect that usually only reality engenders, providing backstory for the entirety of the universe of Dune, 'past' and 'present.'

Fortunately for me and my piece of mind, exactly who declared it non-canon was not Frank Herbert. He apparently did not feel constrained by it, and did not hesitate to write whatever he wanted to, later, but he apparently approved of it at publishing, writing a foreword praising it. It was only later declared non-canon after the new series, starting with Dune: House Atredies. This made me feel a lot better: I really did not like those books, despite whatever use of notes from Frank Herbert they used.

I thus felt that I could ignore the 'true' canon. It's not as if I have any legal obligation to adopt it--as a consumer, I am welcome to be as irrational as I want, as long as I acknowledge the authors. To me, these new books took the characters as they were in Dune and pasted them callously into the past, never giving them enough room to breathe, which is, to me, very much the opposite of Herbert Sr.'s careful pace. To them, the Corrino Emperors were always impotent bunglers; the Butlerian Jihad was always a simple rebellion; thinking machines were always just mechs.

Why, then, does canon matter? I listen to what my favorite authors say because, well, they're my favorite authors. Most of the time, they come up with things that I could never imagine; that's why I read them. It's when I can easily come up with something more...interesting that I begin to lose faith in the primacy of the author's opinon. It's only the text that matters, not what anyone says afterwards. Fiction is not a narrative of what happens elsewhere, but instead exists entirely within the pages of the book. Once words are written, edited, and published, there is nothing that the author can do to further change them--their characters are what they are, speak what they speak, and generally exist only ever in the mind of the reader. There is no objective reality of a book.

I've had several rather intellecutally violent discussions with others who acted as though there was some independent reality within the pages of a book, where things can only be taken wholly or not at all. I would suggest that these are the people to whom canon is prime, to whom only the author can define what they read, because the author's vision is more important. I simplify, of course, and sneer a little as well.

What to take from this? I'm not sure at all, but it serves to highlight my occasional disconnect from other readers. When looking at SF as a whole, maybe, we need to keep in mind that what we see as readers searching for the future, it may not be what the author sees.

Maybe.

In Soviet Russia, worker lead you!

2009-07-03T13:00:00.003-05:00

Since SF society has come up, I feel the need to look closer at the aspects of what I have read, and maybe introduce some of my favorite books as well.

The issues that fiction of any kind faces are issues of precognition - nothing in the future can be known, and, since people tend to overestimate effects in the near future and underestimate them in the further future, we end up with a variety of societies that are all very interesting and all likely wrong. Infinite variations on the "In the future, everyone will...." theme, commonly built upon the personal preference--or personal fear--of the author. Heinlein's future, as addressed before, is often one of enlightened, individualist, psychologically stable polyglot adults, which very much reflects his views; Alan Moore always manages to work in the triumph of his brand of anarchy over the illiberal fascist governments of his nightmares; and Iain M. Banks writes of the new liberal frontier of free love, infinite free time, and acceptance of everything in his Culture books.

Banks in particular is worth spending time on. I adore his books, despite his absurd Scots liberalism, precisely because his society is so complete, and utterly dependent on his technologies; it literally could not exist today, at least not on Earth. Murderers are punished by drones that follow them around passively for the rest of their life, more or less sentencing them to a lifetime--a potentially infinitely extended lifetime--of being socially outcast, as everyone knows exactly what that drone means. Work does not exist, and everyone has infinite free time to spend doing almost literally whatever they want. Actually, work does exist, but only because people need to feel useful, and so, the great AIs that run everything cheerfully run about the galaxy with 'crews' and poll them constantly as to what to do next. Voting is done by those who are directly affected by whatever is put to a vote, and the only failures of the Culture are caused by ignorant meddling in societies that they fail to understand.

I refer to him because of this: there are no 'laborers' in the Culture. AIs have rights even while being potentially godlike in their power, and create machines and processes at the drop of a hat, and in the time it takes for it to drop, that care for everything. This is admittedly where technology becomes very much a front for magic from the modern human perspective, but I feel that it illustrates an important point--that labor is nothing more than Work, which is the amount of energy needed to accomplish something. With virtually infinite power at their hands, the Culture needs no laborers. One AI ship in particular spends its time recreating vast, historically accurate panoramas of ancient battles with the (waivered!) bodies of hibernating individuals within its holds, and is particularly proud of its solution to simulating smoke--using a repulsor field on each individual particle!

We, on the other hand, certainly will not be facing this particular form of utopia any time soon. That said, we do have steadily increasing amounts of energy available, and steadily decreasing amounts of laborers are needed. American farm production manages to increase even while the number of workers in it decreases drastically; the number of people it takes to make a car, and the time it takes to do so, have both decreased greatly from the days of Ford...all because labor that once was done by men can now be done by the intelligence of men, though machines and innovation. The Culture remains distant, of course, because at certain points manpower is still more cost efficient than mechanical labor, but the thought is there. Banks' genius lies not in predicting the future, but instead in extrapolating along an exciting path.

Heinlein's ideas in Stranger in a Strange Land are still rather strange to us today, but in different ways. His larger message is perhaps not so strange, though, in the light of what happened in the 60s and 70s, and his work in Starship Troopers, while very much outwardly perpendicular to Stranger, follows a similar path, where what was controversial then is perhaps not so much now. Alan Moore's visions of the future are nothing if not 'wrong;' he himself has stated that V for Vendetta was based on a somewhat gloomy prediction after the election of Thatcher and a right-wing government that he sees as being overly pessimistic and reactionary, but even then, his vision has aspects that delve into the very matter of the soul, and extract meanings that can be taken on a small scale. Banks, well, he wants most of what the Culture stands for, and while his future is not THE future, hopes that he can spread his general ideas when they are ripe for being spread.

The Possibilities and Realities of SF

2009-07-02T14:03:00.002-05:00

Science fiction does not predict the future. At least, in my experience it does not try to predict what might happen as much as say what is in the realm of possibility. And even this only comes with a lot of assumptions about the foundations of what is really possible. It is popular culture that takes many of these ideas and runs with them. This is why in the 1950’s we were supposed to have helicopters to drive to work. Currently there is debate about when we will have singularity, or a dyson sphere. I would make the argument that we, as a civilization, will never accomplish anything close to this. The reasons why are simple; first, these SF ideas never look at the real big picture with society. And secondly, they rarely look at the big picture of science.

So to begin, human society is a complex and unpredictable beast. We tend to be nationalistic, irrational, and selfish. But what is more important than this is that modern human society has settled itself into a cycle of consumption. What I mean by this is that it is in every nation’s interests to always have a growing birth rate in order to produce more people who will then consume goods which can be produced. This is the engine of the world economy. It is based on growth without end. The only reason why we were able to survive to produce more than six billion people is due to the invention of artificial nitrogen in the 1920s. That single invention increased the ability of the land to produce the food required by today’s population. But this system does not work on the same function of growth without end. There is still a set limit of how much food the earth can produce. Of course, water is another major concern. There is a finite amount, and even in this country we are starting to see the affects of water shortages. A few years ago two states started fighting over water rights of a shared river. And according to USA Today, (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-01-26-water-usat_x.htm) we are going to see worse before long. Add to all this ideas of a world of governments sworn to try and keep only their own populace alive and we have a powder keg. The world will not achieve SF levels of technology because it would require us to change our self serving set of morals which include the idea that maintaining human life is a high priority.

And of course this does not even begin to describe the hurdles that socioeconomics play into this tangled web of humanity. The world has a class system. And this system does not allow for everyone to be equally prosperous. With only a few exceptions (Sweden being one), this system does not allow for the government to function with the idea of moving everyone forward together. Economic progress comes at the price of widening the gap between rich and poor. If this is the case than there is little political room for abandoning the poor, because it is both heartless and foolish to do so. The foolishness comes from the fact that any economy (SF or otherwise) will need laborers to create goods. I would argue that the world of SF would not be possible without first advancing the world into a level, and educated playing field. Good luck with that.

Secondly, SF likes to ignore some key scientific facts in order to put forward a big idea. Again this is a product of popular culture. The fiction is allowed to do so, it’s fiction; there should be a level of suspension of disbelief. But these ideas are then treated as possible by the media who disseminate this information to the public. But the media doesn’t exactly think that the viewing audience is “Science Savvy,” so things are left out and then forgotten in any debate about plausibility. A good example of this is the Dyson Sphere (or shell or ring or whatever you like). It just can’t happen, even if we ignore the immense logistics of putting such a structure in place it won’t work. This is for one simple reason: Solar flares. The huge ejections of matter and energy can knock out satellites orbiting the earth. The only thing that is protecting our own satellites now is the earth’s magnetic field. Even assuming that satellites could survive a solar flare from one AU away, they would need to produce a massive magnetic field to protect them. This alone would negate any energy gains made by the satellite.

SF is fine for fiction. But in the real world, little of it is really possible. I find this is due mostly to the fact that the ideas of SF are too big for their britches. To us as readers, these ideas are sexy. They are made to be. But if we are to talk about what is possible let’s be frank, the big sexy ideas that fix everything and make the world a better place are never going to happen.

Biology In Science Fiction

2009-06-30T15:15:00.018-05:00

So it is taking a bit longer than I had hoped to get what I needed out of that last poll. Make sure to supply your own opinion, and bring your friends here too!

Today: a mashup of stuff related to one of the most current sciences in science fiction: Biology. This stuff is everywhere - from the heated evolution vs. creationism debate to the moral quandaries we face concerning abortion, cloning, stem cell research and genetic manipulation, to the world-arresting problem of global warming and the fantastic possibilities in exobiology that are emerging as we discover more about the planets of other stars and even our own planets and moons.

But I'm not actually going to talk about any of that. If you want to keep up with that battery of essential information (and so much more!) you can head over to Biology in Science Fiction, an excellent blog that is dedicated to just that topic. It even has a bookstore. From now on, it will have a link aside this blog, amid a (hopefully) ever-growing collection of like-minded observers.

In the information age, perhaps the most important/interesting Big Idea to come out of Biology is the theory of evolution through natural selection. Not only does it provide much of the supporting framework for the work being done with the above topics, but it actually has proven to be a surprisingly well-adapted metaphor for explaining the propagation of certain patterns in networks of information. For the theoretical background, I refer the reader to Wikipedia's article on Memetics and the Heath brother's Made to Stick. This second source serves as a "how-to" application of the theory set down in the Wiki article for business/viral marketing. In the brief (but incredibly fruitful) time I was able to e-collaborate with the Heath brothers during college, they assured me that their work rested upon the model of culture built by Hawkins, Dennet, Blackwell, and others. Hell, you can even read my own application to the study of literature if you like - it has a great bibliography on the topic at least, and is the method of analyzing literature you are most likely to see used by me later on here.

I'll wait here while you read up.

Now that you are familiar with the concept of Memetics, let's take a look at one biology-related meme as it propagates through the culture(s) of the internet. This video:

Chernobyl Fish

As you might surmise, this meme is counting on the sensational presupposition that it is the radioactive nature of the fishes' locale (which has enabled them to grow so unusually large) in order to replicate - an old SF plot device so common it has implanted itself into the collective unconscious of our culture as "true" even though evidence is scarce; these fish are well within the normally recorded ranges of length and weight, as it turns out (Well's Catfish).

Nonetheless, veracity is only one reproductive strategy in the ecology of ideas, and so we find this video making its rounds on the internet (even here!), evolving, and so on. A rather short video from the same bridge appears 10 months ago, then about 6-9 months later a flurry of new videos (1, 2, 3) from the same bridge but with better quality and longer times supercede it. The original idea was good, like exoskeletons, and it hit its own little cambrian explosion which both diversified and further propagated its ilk across the internet.

The interesting point for us as we witness how SF produces and is produced by the cultures it exists in is that the (in this case bad) fiction lent an air of believability to this urban legend.

Not only does SF use science to predict the present and the future, but we use SF to enhance our understanding of what is scientifically plausible. Knowing this, it would seem to place an onus upon SF artists to represent the facts as we know them accurately - or perhaps readers should be more skeptical?

Hey, now that I think of it, does SF with bad (false so far as we know) science behind it even qualify as SF, or is it a form of fantasy that takes itself seriously?

The silicon portal

2009-06-24T00:10:00.003-05:00

Escapism is very much part of my life with fictional works. There are several computer games that offer this to me, games that I play far more for the feeling of being there rather than any abstract challenge, because they offer more than the sum of their parts.

One in particular is, perhaps unsurprisingly. a game with a lot of text in it: Planescape Torment. Never--and I mean never--has an RPG managed to so completely enthrall me. The way the universe works is mind-boggling yet coherent, and the characters entirely believable within their realms. There's an element of black-and-gray morality that lurks here without ever entirely taking over, functioning along with the other aspects of the game that are just as well done, such as the music or the voice acting. This game made me fall in love with the Planescape universe to the extent of reading every single AD&D sourcebook and adventure module backwards and forwards. Sigil is not a happy place, but somehow it makes me want to go there.

Another game is Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, and this one is just...wow. The game is far less of a game than it is an interactive novel; there's not really a lot of freedom in it, and the 'action' sequences are pointless, often literally so, but the story, oh the story. It manages to be compelling and coherent without giving away much of anything, and there are aspects that are almost breathtakingly subtle. The characters are, once again, compelling and believeable, although in this case the main impetus lies in the main character. Zoey could have been a typical buxom action girl heroine, but instead she is a person, specifically a late-teens/early twenties girl who is thrown into a massive situation far beyond her, or anyone else's, comprehension. She solves some aspects but encounters others that seem massively incomprehensible except in the slightest of ways. Being the second game in a planned trilogy, it ends in a manner that is satisfying but piles on the mysteries to the point of making one doubt even the solved portions; I ended up with the feeling that there was something very, very large moving just beneath the surface of the plot, and that takes skill and effort to pull off.

I played the first game, The Longest Journey, after encountering this one, and the parallels between the two are satisfying and stunning in their complexity, a connection that makes both better than their parts. I should also add that both games have a sense of humor about them that is realistic and utterly endearing without going overboard.

The thing that ties both of these, and others, together is their quality of story, of course, but not just that; their problems, protagonists, villains and allies, solutions, and methods are entirely within their universes. Zoey, April Ryan, and The Nameless One face challenges that are complex because of interactions within their world are similarly complex. The Nameless One, for example, literally cannot die, and the player is never penalized beyond having to navigate a couple of screens for doing so--this is literally an integral part of the story, beyond its use as a mechanic. Were one to remove his immortality, the story would make no sense whatsoever. Zoey and April face problems that are on par with the real world's unfortunate tangle of issues; imagine, for example, of the complexities of the American reporters in North Korea and why they cannot, or perhaps just should not, simply be rescued by force of arms, and why Japan would be so worried about the whole issue, and why China is involved, or may be....and so it goes, history, politics, personalities, all tangled together. The universe of The Longest Journey is not reality, but it has that same feeling, and keeps its pace alongside narrative.

Whenever I play these games, I want to go there, wherever there is. They are not fantasy or science fiction, although they both have aspects of such...they are stories, and places, which is exactly what all tales should want to be.

Your blue may be my green

2009-06-23T23:25:00.003-05:00

I am not entirely sure that how I read is, well, normal. I read with great fervor and eagerness, but I also do not read like most people I know, with the possible exception of my brother.

It goes like this: when I read, I read in chunks, large segments, sometimes 3 or more lines at a time, sometimes paragraphs. I almost always ignore articles and other regular grammatical words, perhaps because the simple volume of what I have read before gives me a good sense of what to expect. When I run into understanding issues, I will backtrack, but by and large I can continue on in this manner indefinitely to the end of a book or article. My comprehension is high but not absolute; I would estimate that an initial reading tends to produce something like 80%, but that is for the larger aspects...I have considerable trouble with remembering small details, such as character descriptions, colors, general descriptions, and ultra-specific quotation.

To offset these disadvantages, I am a voracious re-reader. It is unimaginable for me to read a book just once, unless it fails to capture me, and even then, there is no absolute cutoff. My favorite books I have read almost uncounted times, and nearly every book that I own has been read more than once, front to back.

This all means a couple of things for how I approach books. For one, I end up filling in a lot of what I miss, particularly in the area of description and characters. There's books that have managed to force their visions on me, of course, and I do not tend to invent things wholesale, but commonly I end up with impressions that stick and are entirely specific to me. As a whole, then, I tend to comprehend books in a very cinematic manner, its focusing dependent on how the writer writes. Another, and more important, result is my tendency to quickly fall in love with a universe rather than a specific story. Sometimes when I read and re-read books, I end up 'getting' the mechanics of that universe, seeing the characters and locations and situations as parts of a greater whole. I read the book then not so much for the tale it tells but for the chance to return there.

A logical extension of these habits and tendencies is that I sometimes willfully ignore that which the author has put in front of me (in fiction!). The text is everything, indeed, but I feel that it is often the character of a work that is its strongest point rather than what is embodied in specific words. One cannot control the precise meanings of a word, and neither can one control the imagination of one's readers. I do read for enjoyment, after all.

There is no possible way that my modes of comprehension are unique to me, but I still end up feeling lost and alone sometimes because of it. No, I wasn't paying attention to the color of the suit that so-and-so was wearing; no, I don't care about that particular subplot; what do you mean you didn't get why he had to do that, and so on. It leaves me with a zero-man audience all too often, unless I am talking to my brother, who I also suspect reads in a manner very similar, although likely not identical.

A Question for (Any) Readers

2009-06-23T02:24:00.010-05:00

Think back to the days when video games and computer games (if

you care to make the distinction) were making their presence felt.

A new medium for storytelling, these games did not take their

stories seriously, nor would the literary establishment have taken

them seriously if they had tried. Many (including myself) would

argue that with video games this is still the case. No Harold

Bloom or Oprah's Book Club is going to treat S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear

Sky with anything close to the degree of critical respect The Road or even The Matrix got. It

was the same with film, and the same with novels before that. Each new medium must prove

itself capable of carrying the tripe before it is permitted to carry the jewels of culture. What

is interesting about this state of affairs from the point of view of an SF afficionado is that SF

(along with other non-mainstream genres such as Fantasy and Alternate History) seems to me to

be more prevalent among the early titles of these genres (with perhaps the exception of the

novel). Or maybe not. What do you think?

I will publish the results of this poll as soon as I get a substantial (20? 100? I can dream!) number

of replies, so tell your friends and family to get over here and answer the question for me. The

potential "so what?" of this poll: if the perception exists that SF and other unconventional

(un-literary) genres lead the way in introducing a new genre, the following useful questions

appear:

1. Why does this phenomenon exist?

2. What effect does this phenomenon have on the cultural perception of the emerging

medium?

3. Does this phenomenon contribute to the continuing refusal of the literary canon to include

unconventional genre literature (or at least admit that it already contains unconventional

genre literature)?

And doubtless many others. If any occur to you, please list them in the comments below, along

with the usual.

On the Mohs scale of SF, Ben Bova eats diamond

2009-06-20T23:00:00.004-05:00

Something written by Ben Bova in his column (talked about it before here) has been bothering me:

I admit that if the only science fiction you’re aware of is what you see in movie theaters or on television, you have every right to be skeptical. That stuff isn’t based on scientific fact; it’s based on comic strips or the dreams of juveniles.

[...]

When I say “real science fiction,” I mean stories based solidly on known scientific facts. The writer is free to extrapolate from the known and project into the future, of course. The writer is free to invent anything he or she wants to — as long as nobody can prove that it’s wrong.

Man, this guy believes in the hardest of hard SF. I obviously disagree with what he is saying, but then, he's a well known author, while I post in some forsaken corner of the internet...but I'm a consumer of SF, too, which gives me some rights, yeah? I always value insight into others' mode of thought, besides.

But specifically--what's wrong with comic strips? The word used to compare them is 'juvenile,' wielded in a manner that drips condescension. I suspect that Mr. Bova thinks that all comics are basically The Family Circus, and therefore unworthy of his attention, which is an attitude that is very much prevalent in the American public. Some of the most interesting SF storytelling today is being told through an animated medium, and is often only tenuously related to scientific fact. I love it precisely because there is no pressure of reality upon it, either visually or thematically, and imagination is allowed to run free.

But enough about anime and comics for now. What about this requirement that science fiction be based upon something that cannot be 'proven false'? I find this silly for very similar reasons to the other assertion, but there's something more to this belief than simple condescencion. Ben Bova made his name in 'hard' SF and man, I can see why. That's a hard goal to live up to; virtually impossible, I would think, but it seems to work for him. I also think, though, that this is a remarkably narrow view, and more importantly potentially ignores the very function of writing, that of storytelling. Not saying that he has failed on this account, but there's a reason that I don't much enjoy the diamond end of hard SF and I suspect that this is it.

Ben Bova's viewpoint is that of a minority, however, and part of me is a little saddened by this. I see him and his ilk--Benford and...and...well, there's others that I can't think of right now--as being the ballast of the SF community, keeping it distinct and separate from other more fantastic genres by injecting a dose of (over)realism into the mix. I am a consumer, but I am not the consumer base...good thing, eh?

Ray Kurzweil, SF Author

2009-06-17T23:02:00.004-05:00

I do not believe in The Singularity.

Those of us who spend too much time on the internet, and the blogosphere in particular, cannot avoid excited talk of the upcoming Singularity, where man and machine merge into something more than just men and their peripherals. It is not really a moment, more a stretch of time when telling apart 'manmade' from 'computer made' will become less and less easy, where Turing Test-defeating machines are possible and easy to manufacture, if indeed they do not already manufacture themselves. The Singularity is simultaneously hoped for and worked towards.
If there is one thing that it lacks, it might be humanity, but really, it has humanity built in. Literally.

The problem is this: exponential progression is impossible when attempted by men. Predictions of the year 2000 had steam horses and rigid airships and other things similarly advanced, flying through the aether to Mars and beyond, perhaps to land on Jupiter. These are linear predictions, the kind that Kurzweil tells us is not only impractical, but worthless.

I would suggest that men working towards a future of the Singularity are laboring under the same misbeliefs. I think that Kurzweil moves his predictions closer, unbeliveably close, in hopes of circumventing this lack of imagination, but in the end his predictions are still functionally worthless. Take his prediction of a Turing Test capable machine: we know what that means, from a technological standpoint, but remember that years ago it was discovered that the simplest of looped response scripts can be incredibly convincing...this does not show limitation in the techology, but it does demonstrate the critical failure point of any predictions, namely that while we understand the technology, the mechanics of humanity continue to elude us.

This is where I think that Kurzweil's predictions suffer. He predicts artificial blood that increases oxygen carrying capacity by thousands of percent or more, while I suggest that what REALLY may happen is something completely different, unpredictably different. Artificial blood is the hyper-advanced airship, and whatever happens for real is the Concorde, because not only might new uses come up but other challenges may evolve that were literally unthinkable ten years before. Remember the idea of videophones? Who even thinks about those any more? We have devices that carry video, often shockingly high-def video, and phones that can transmit that in realtime--but we don't have videophones because we don't want them! Who wants an unavoidable video connection; voice is one thing but getting a midnight call on a videophone is quite another.

Basically, I think that Kurzweil is thinking like an SF author, a possibly misguided, probably genius, and certainly prolific SF author. He is taking what he knows, and adjusting it to what he predicts. While others publish novels, however, he publishes the predictions in non-fiction form. Same thing, different presentation--and who gets taken seriously? All negativity about his ideas aside, I think that he is on to something, and something big, but it's not something that is unique to him.

SF Apocalypses

2009-06-17T00:23:00.016-05:00

If there were one thing the apostle John would appreciate about Science Fiction, it would probably be the genre's propensity for apocalyptic prophecy. From H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds to Dynamix's Earthsiege Universe, the genre has compiled an impressive number of attempts at the ultimate prognostication - the end of the world as we know it. The artists of the last ten years are certainly no exception - here's a (surely incomplete) list of Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic SF published in the last decade:

1. Terminator: Salvation & Terminator: Rise of the Machines

2. The Day the Earth Stood Still

3. Half-Life 2

4. Fallout 3

5. The Happening

6. The Road

7. Children of Men

8. 28 Days Later & 28 Weeks Later

9. Titan A.E.

10. Knowing

11. WALL-E

12. Homeworld 2

13. Sunshine
14. Core
15. The Day After Tomorrow
16. I Am Legend
17. Doomsday
18. The Matrix: Revolutions & The Matrix: Reloaded

19. One Second After

20. War of the Worlds

Take a look at this list for more (not genre-specific or within the last 10 years): http://www.quietearth.us/postapoc.htm

And this is leaving out all those great pre-millenials like Armageddon, Deep Impact, The Andromeda Strain, The Omega Man, etc., so forth, ad nauseam.

Science Fiction has been a primary vehicle for the darkest fears of our imaginations. When was the last time you saw a movie, read a book, or played a game that posited the destruction of this universe because of magic or mysticism? Take a look at ExitMundi, an amusing collection of eschatology. The category of apocalypses with the most entries is Science. The next highest is Space, and the third Earth. Note that most of the apocalypses in these categories would remain completely hidden from us without the aid of scientific inquiry. Certainly nearly every culture in the world circulates some form of the end times or another, vastly outnumbering the presently conceived scientific armageddons. That is not my point. The point is that we, as a western culture, are more and more concerned with the potential for annihilation revealed and/or created by the reaches of science.

Why the shift in interests? Is it because we have begun finding plausible threats? Hardly: civilization has known of the perfectly scientific apocalypses of disease, natural disaster, and Malthusian overpopulation for centuries. Is it novelty? Surely scholarly research into the eschatologies of obscure world cultures has kept apace. What about a growing sense of our own hubris, a sort of premonition before the fall? Perhaps, although civilization seems to be steaming along at a fairly unstoppable pace at this point.

The answer may be that we are more interested in exploring the options we have the capacity to resist or avoid. Take a look at the list above: it runs the gamut from malevolent god-like AI, nuclear holocaust, disease, global warming, gray goo, various natural disasters in space and on earth, malevolent aliens, portals into other less amenable dimensions, and pollution. The link between all of these calamities is that the stories that tell us about them argue that there is something we can do to rectify, avert, or minimize their negative impact on the chances of survival for our species (often by using more science!).

Where they get their science wrong, we laugh, deride, and forget them. But when these stories have frightened, inspired, and most of all - convinced us, we began to pay attention.

In the past decade, for example, we have successfully identified the trajectories of roughly 85% of large Near Earth Orbit (NEO) objects in our solar system. That feat, considering that the attempt began in 1998 with almost nothing, is remarkable.

What is more remarkable, perhaps, is that Deep Impact and Armageddon were both released in 1998.

"Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries."

- Christopher Morley

Do not read this. It makes no sense!

2009-06-16T21:40:00.006-05:00

A previous post spawned an interesting point:

[...] Then, since storytelling is a form of communication and the intent of all communication is to share information, the most useful interpretation is the one with the best information that the most people can understand.

I'll leave you to determine what makes some info better than other info, but at least by looking at it from this standpoint we can say that yes, all interpretations are valid but not all are equally useful.

In other words, why talk about what Janet thinks of Alice in Wonderland if what Janet thinks has little utility to us?

Ideas necessarily exist independent of utility, and as such, can only 'gain' it through application. Application in this case, as near as I can see, is use of the interpretation of others as a medium for understanding of larger things, and as such, validity (utility) is indeed not infinite but is instead limited to a generalized palette. Thus, if Janet is a paranoid schizophrenic who interprets the rabbit hole as a metaphor for her personal hell of persecution by rabbits and clocks, her interpretation is fantastically useless in analyzing the text. Valid, but useless, as stated in the comment above.

However, how might one determine that her interpretation is, in fact, useless, if not exactly invalid? We have no a priori knowledge of this interpretation.

Basically, this is the process of deciding an interpretation. See the image to the left: moving from 1 to 3 results in something that is easy to understand, a 'natural' progression that is anything but natural, but has the advantage of avoiding an overcomplicated explanation of every other possible 'end' result. I believe that we do this every time we interpret something, and therefore end up presenting 3 as a completed interpretation, having pared a massive tree down to something more manageable. (image modified from this)

B could be any one of the end points and 3 would always end up looking the same; that is, all are valid, because the process of creating an interpretation is identical in all cases. But is it useful? We cannot tell until we see where A and B were, originally. Without a priori knowledge of the interpretation, we only have 3 to go by.

My god, the point, finally: if interpretations are presented to the world as #3, knowledge of other interpretations can help shape a more complete knowledge of #1. As long as Janet arrives at B from A along a path that can be abstracted to #3, the interpretation is both useful AND valid. In fact, assuming adherence to the text and analyzation of the whole, all possible interpretations are both! Ultimately I would suggest that the definition of usefulness that is brought up in the comment is usefulness applied to some midpoint, one of the boxes that are unlabled. Certainly, progressing along one of the initial two division trees when the point or the idea that one is interested in is on the other is a path to confusion and uselessness. Thus only some would be useful, but still valid.

Relation of this to anything: non-zero but closer to 0, but these are the things that keep me up at night.

2009-06-15T18:06:00.003-05:00

According to Ben Bova, reading more Science Fiction could have saved a lot of grief over the years. To wit:

If our political leaders had been reading science fiction, we might have been spared the Cold War, the energy crises, the failures of public education and many of the other problems that now seem intractable because we were not prepared to deal with them when they arose.

We could be living in a world that is powered by solar and nuclear energy, drawing our raw materials from the moon and asteroids, moving much of our industrial base into orbit and allowing our home world to become a clean, green residential area.

Yes, and get me those flying cars while you are at it. He's on to something here, of course, but I think that he doesn't quite extend the article to the conclusion that I take from it all: no one reading SF is a symptom, not a cause.

The real problem is a lack of imagination, a lack of insight on the part of humanity and the United States in particular, or perhaps more an overabundance of the here-and-now. The worst insult that can be thrown at a visionary--or best, depending on one's view--is to call them 'impractical.' Impracticality is certainly something to look out for, but these generalized tossers of insults, the majority of Americans, I think, do not mean 'impractical over the long term.' No, they mean 'impractical NOW.' This attitude, coming from people who use computers and drive cars with GPS units in them and watch HD television, is silly and pointless, as virtually nothing that they use was very practical in the past, sometimes in the very near past, even. What is useful now is not necessarily worth beans in the future, and vice-versa.

With this holding us back, we are limited to the (comparatively) slow, steady pace of normal technological progress, a recombinatory process which extends from the present to the near future. Science fiction bypasses all of this, ignoring the slow process to look to at an end product of sorts. Sure, everything past the nearest future is often wildly impractical from a modern perspective, but, first of all, where's the fun in that, and why not try to take the path and see what else comes along? The end product is, after all, NOT an end product, but instead a transitory stage, an accumulation of other pathways that are all independently variable.

[...] The writer is free to extrapolate from the known and project into the future, of course. The writer is free to invent anything he or she wants to — as long as nobody can prove that it’s wrong.

Thus science-fiction stories can deal with flights to the stars, or human immortality, a world government, settlements on other worlds. All of these things are possibilities of the future.

Science Fiction is not an instruction manual; it's only a guidebook. Impractical, even--but knowing what might be at the end should excite anyone, and if it doesn't, well, then SF writers just need to write a little better.

Society and SF, or, why, in the future, we will all have a society of our own

2009-06-12T13:40:00.004-05:00

It strikes me that if there's one thing that SF does relatively poorly, it is in creating believable societies. I don't mean societies that are believable in the scope of the tale; I mean societies that can really stand up to more than a couple minutes' examination and avoid the tendency towards fridge logic that can take up residence in fictional stories at the drop of a hat. Star Trek is very much the poster child for this, as it is basically a universe built around a single ship and filled in on an ad-hoc basis. The Federation doesn't seem to really work so much as simply exist, which is forgiveable within the tale but falls apart if one spends any time pondering it on the way to the kitchen.

The classic SF authors avoided this through a simple expedient of writing their own society into the future. This isn't a cop-out, not in the slightest, because they knew at the very least that something had to change to maintain a modicum of suspension of disbelief while keeping familiar environs. I would call Asimov's Foundation series a prime example, from a 21st century perspective, because, once one strips away all the spacecraft and interstellar-ness, the dialogue and setting is a little archaic to modern sensibilities. Heinlein did this often, particularly with his Future History tales, but he also adopted another conceit: an ideologically triumphant society.

What I mean by an "ideologically triumphant society" is a society that is less an attempt towards belivability and more an attempt to transform one's personal belief system into a viable and transcendent system. In Heinlein's case, Starship Troopers is the exemplar (I seem to recall Stranger in a Strange Land as being one, too, but it's been a long while, and I didn't much like that book in any case). The society of Starship Troopers is, well, one of soft facism, what one today might call Libertarian Paternalism. The chaos of the past has been banished by application of Heinlein's belief in individualistic responsibilities, so much so that they look upon 'past' systems with a mix of fear and pity. A lecture by a professor in the book is actually a lecture by Heinlein himself about the failings of the juvenile justice system; it's all in the past, in this book, and this quietly confident society sails on through rough waters of warfare and tragedy to a calmer sea of peace.

This kind of society is generally easy to read if the rest of the story is up to the task. Starship Troopers is very much a product of genius and is undeniably a science fiction war novel before anything else, and as such succeeds. However, I see this as being only one side of the coin. Heinlein used it positively, to portray what he believed should be, but it can be used negatively, as well, in dystopian fiction. This is the most common method today, I think, and it is hard not to see why: drama feeds off of disaster. Things going wrong is ever a catalyst for heroism.

Movies have very much adopted this perspective, mostly because it allows for explosions. In V for Vendetta, a militant fascist society, Norsefire, controls all of England, and has carried out various iniquities upon its people until brought down by the machinations of V. Alan Moore, the writer of the graphic novel, is very much a dyed-in-the-wool anarchist, and it shows (The graphic novel is far more careful and interesting, by the way, but condensation is necessary for a movie. Remember what I said about reducing interpretations?).

All of this does not mean that there is not hope for belivable societies in SF. Neal Stephenson's latest book, Anathem, avoids most of this ideology. The reversed perspective of what are basically technologically philosophical monks thrives within its limits, never quite allowing the reader to see past the prejudices of the protagonists while still allowing details of realism seep through. Arbe is obviously--and literally--a literary stand-in for Earth, to the point of almost innumerable parallels, which allows Stephenson the luxury of combining the simple fuctionality of writing modern society with the more-or-less neutral ideological views of his protagonists.

Despite what I said before, I see that Science Fiction does actually do fine with society, but only to a point, the point to where it serves the story, and not the other way around. Neal Stephenson wanted to write about philosophy; Asimov wrote about people and technology; Heinlein wrote about the effects of lifestyle and war. Different skills and talents produce different results, leaving the SF field scattered with methods that are varyingly believable and may or may not be worth embracing. Learning from a fictional tale is possible, but adopting it wholesale is impractical...because there IS nothing else other than the story. More on that later!

Science Fiction as Thought

2009-06-11T16:50:00.008-05:00

Science Fiction is robots, spacecraft, aliens, and Science! all wrapped into a package of epic storylines and a generous helping of buxom ladies, often in various states of undress. Science Fiction is Asimov and Clarke, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Star Wars. Science Fiction is brightly colored and shows the future. It is HG Wells and Independence Day.

Watch this and reconsider the above. No spacecraft. No robots. Nothing that men of the 40s and 50s SF explosion would recognize as being their chosen theme. Certainly no epic storylines, even given that the music is Led Zeppelin.

In order, I was reminded of: plants, ice caverns, glaciers, fountains, the moon, Halley's Comet, the great pyramid at Giza, European cathedrals, a mandala, bells, a suspension bridge, stairs, and endless plain, bronze in a furnace, lake of fire, the sun, an Incan calendar, The War of the Worlds, a single-celled organism, a dreamcatcher, dragon's teeth, the fall of night, Tron, monoliths, drill bits....

My list has a definite hint or two of Science Fiction, what with the moon, strange landscapes, and Tron all wrapped up together; there's some Fantasy in there, too, and some history, with some science thrown in for good measure, and an extraneous hardware reference. I saw a lot in there. I'm sure of two things: first, that people watching this for the first time will likely as not be reminded of things completely different, and second, that, if exposed initially to my list of perceptions, that they will suddenly be able to see the same things I saw, and perhaps even be unable to see others.

Any human being whose eyes work more or less properly and whose mind is more or less on spec cannot help but see something at work in those colors and shapes; it's not colors moving on a two-dimensional plane, but instead is a collection of objects moving through a three-dimensional space, alternately simulating motion of the observer and motion in the observed.

If I manage to influence people into seeing those things, does that make it Science Fiction? Assuming that someone else produces a list that is vastly different, does that make my list invalid? Would their perception of whatever they saw make it that? Certainly not! I could only succeed in convincing others of its science-fictional nature by forcibly eliminating a myriad of ideas, all equally valid. Ideas are all that matter, and, in the absence of a chosen, specific narration, there are virtually endless ideas in every piece of media.

This is why artists have a chosen medium--to alternatively limit or expand potential interpretations. Modern art often errs on the side of ambiguity, while classical art is (more) narrowly focused on a real thing, or place, or kind of person. Movies are the most constrained, showing and telling in a very directive manner, and writing falls somewhere in between.

Science Fiction, however, as a concept, straddles all of these, from the video I linked here to a carefully crafted movie narrative. I validly interpreted the video through the screen of my experience, which is very much suffused with classic and modern SF, just as I can watch a movie such as, oh, The Running Man, which has Science Fiction aspects but is mostly a rail-bound by-the-numbers Arnold Schwarzenegger movie and has a very small number of valid interpretations.

What is Science Fiction, then, if not robots and spacecraft? I said all of that so I could say this: SF is nothing more or less than a mode of interpretation, and while it often includes the aforementioned robots, it can just as often include almost everything else.

Why Science Fiction is the Most Relevant Genre of Story-Telling Today

2009-06-07T01:39:00.006-05:00

"The future is already here, it's just not widely distributed yet."

A quote from William Gibson, famous science-fiction author and futurist. Gibson started out in the '80s creating the cyberpunk sub-genre of SF - arguably the first wave of recognition in the SF community for the computer's revolutionary effect. Cyberpunk is often irreverent and byzantine, seldom distant, and nearly always noir. These characteristics do a pretty good job of defining the future this genre foresaw: complex, similar and chronologically near to our own time yet changed in many ways, and dark.

Why didn't Gibson and others, such as Stephenson and Jeter, extend their cyberpunk narratives further in time? After all, Science Fiction has traditionally been about detailing scientifically plausible futures for various purposes like social commentary, gedankenexperiment, or simply prognostication. Restricting your work to the near future as opposed to the billions of years which lie ahead in the existence of the universe seems to unnecessarily minimize the palette. The question only becomes more urgent when you consider that Gibson has more or less gradually worked closer and closer to the present with his works. Actually, some of his most recent work is actually set in the present, possibly even the near past, ala Pattern Recognition and Spook Country.

The truth is that what would seem to be a gradual collapse of one of the genre's defining traditions is instead an increasing acknowledgement of singularity. The closer we come to the "event horizon," the more the rate of change makes reliable, usefully-detailed prediction impossible. Few authors of the 1950's would have pretended to be able to reliably extrapolate the technologies and societies of a thousand years from now because, as in chess, it becomes difficult to see a certain number of moves ahead, no matter how deterministic the system happens to be. When the rate of change increases to include the same number of "moves" in a tenth of the time-frame, you must adjust accordingly.

(Let me qualify the assertion about SF authors and predictions. Yes, there are quite a few stories out there that find it no great problem to attempt a prophecy thousands, even millions, of years out. These stories generally fall into a few categories:

1. Those stories which use the distance in time to purposefully separate their narratives from that of the present so that little adherence to the legacy of present circumstances need be heeded.

2. Those stories that invoke special circumstances to indicate a massive slowing in the rate of change, such as stasis fields, civilization reboots [you can argue about the implications of this one], civilization stagnations, or even alien enslavement.

3. Those stories which are dishonest or misjudge the predictability of the future. Barring the science of Hari Seldon, there are limits to what we can know about the world of tomorrow.

4. Those stories with no treatment of the history constructed by human civilization on Earth [ala Star Wars].

Remove these special cases, and you should find the pool well-thinned and more amenable to the earlier assertion.)

Science Fiction, therefore, is more than ever the genre which predicts not what the distant future will be like, but is instead increasingly concerned with tomorrow and later today. Gibson's quote sums it up - the rate of change has gotten to the point where science, technology, and society advance so fast that most of us are left behind in some facet or another. Moderns such as ourselves are left in the curious position of attempting to predict what our present day is like.

The sentiment is insidious and shared. In the July 2009 issue of "Asimov's Science Fiction," we find Robert Silverberg (in an otherwise worryingly narcissistic article) writing that "we all live in the far future, these days." Certainly Ray Kurzweil would agree, with qualifications. He has focused his mind on getting the next twenty to fifty years right in terms of scientific and technological advances in several specific fields, but has had little to say about everything else. As with the rest of us, he lives in a present he only partially apprehends.

Science Fiction is the genre that deals with our visions of tomorrow, which have now become the visions of today. If we want to understand our present circumstances, it is fast becoming imperative to look to the one genre which is seriously concerned with interpreting that predicament - Science Fiction.

An aside: I hear voices in my own head suggesting that non-fiction, too, can answer this question for us. Without getting overly poetic or philosophical, only a short retort is possible: fiction can honestly provide a hypothetical special-case scenario with depth and detail, while non-fiction must abandon itself to do the same. Of course it is important to understand the broader hypotheticals as well, but as our lives seem very special-case to us, fiction is often the more accesible avenue to grokking.

Startup

2007-04-26T13:38:00.000-05:00

Perhaps I'll use this in the future as a place to put up my fictional work and my philosophical rantings. Something. Just creating a presence within the "blogosphere," should that ever become desirable.