Chrononautic Log

September 30, 2003

Ken Macleod has added to the current crop of rants on what is and isn’t science fiction. (For the S in SF below, definitely read science, not speculative.)

What I want to take issue with is the criterion of judging SF by its degree of closeness to ‘realistic’ or ‘fantastic’ literature, the literature of the campfire and the dark.

One of the most insidious ways of doing that is to privilege SF that deals imaginatively with social and political issues. Speculative political fancies have been respectable since Plato, who is more or less the Form of Respectability in the Western canon. Thomas More could write an approving speculative fiction about communism and remain respectable, not only canon but canonized. The most respectable work of recent SF is very likely Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed. . . because it’s an SF book that people with no interest in SF can read comfortably. Its sole real SF content, the theory of the ansible, can whizz right over their heads. It might as well be radio. The real focus of interest is all the cosy familiar campfire stuff about the Individual versus Society, and Society versus Society, which plugs it neatly into the Great Tradition. In short, it’s SF for people who don’t like SF.

SF isn’t fundamentally about that. Getting that right is good, don’t get me wrong. Do for heaven’s sake have some understanding of human beings before writing about them, at least to the extent that you do write about them. But what SF is fundamentally about is not the Individual versus Society, or Society versus Society, but humanity in the universe.

So my first reaction is Yeah, but that leaves out not just le Guin, but half of Iain M. Banks — and not the ‘Iain Banks’ mainstream half, either — swathes of the Strugatsky brothers, Maureen McHugh, plenty of Bradbury. . . Hell, get me a drink or two and I could probably be persuaded to try to make a case that it leaves out Hal Clement (“Mesklinites in the universe”); or, at least, that it leaves out several of MacLeod’s own Fall Revolution books. (And let’s not talk about Margaret Atwood. “Hey, Langford, it’s okay! She doesn’t write SF after all!”)

But my second reaction is to think that he’s kind of got a point. Maybe not a very useful one, and maybe one that just reduces down to the old Hard vs. Soft debate (while, meanwhile, tossing out entirely a whole lot of stuff that’s just men’s adventure fiction disguised as hard SF, or fantasy disguised as soft SF), but a point nonetheless.

If there’s one thing that makes a story unequivocally SF, to my mind, it’s this: If the story fundamentally could not have been written before the invention of science as we know it in the seventeenth or eighteenth century — before, as MacLeod says, “the sun came up,” — then it’s SF.

Whether everything that’s called SF should be judged solely, or even primarily, on the basis of how well it meets that criterion, is a different question. You’ll note that MacLeod doesn’t say that if something doesn’t meet that criterion, it’s not SF. What he’s arguing, as I understand it, is against judging SF on the basis of how badly it meets that criterion.

Which is fair enough.

I’m just not sure it happens as often as he thinks it does.

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September 29, 2003

Went down to Portland this weekend for a congenial and productive meeting with Jay Lake and Deb Layne of Wheatland Press (publishers of Polyphony and other fine books), the upshot of which is that Wheatland will be publishing the All-Star Retro-Pulp Zeppelin Anthology To Be Named Later, edited by yours truly with assistance from Jay. Look for official guidelines to be announced before the end of October, and for submissions to open up in January. (Feel free to start writing now, but don’t send me anything yet; give me time to get a PO box first.)

Figure 1. Goodyear-Zeppelin dirigible USS Macon moored at Moffett Field, Sunnyvale (actually Mountain View), California.

But the anthology still needs a name — or rather, an adjective or modifying noun phrase. I’ve narrowed it down to six: ACTION, ADVENTURE, DANGER, RACY, WONDER, and ZESTY.

If the All-Star Retro-Pulp Zeppelin Anthology is successful, there may very well be further volumes in the series — the All-Star Retro-Pulp Rocket Anthology, the All-Star Retro-Pulp Space Monster Anthology, and so on:

• ACTION
• All-Star Rocket Action Stories
• All-Star Space Monster Action Stories
• All-Star Zeppelin Action Stories
• ADVENTURE
• All-Star Rocket Adventure Stories
• All-Star Space Monster Adventure Stories
• All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories
• DANGER
• All-Star Rocket Danger Stories
• All-Star Space Monster Danger Stories
• All-Star Zeppelin Danger Stories
• RACY
• All-Star Racy Rocket Stories
• All-Star Racy Space Monster Stories
• All-Star Racy Zeppelin Stories
• WONDER
• All-Star Rocket Wonder Stories
• All-Star Space Monster Wonder Stories
• All-Star Zeppelin Wonder Stories
• ZESTY
• All-Star Zesty Rocket Stories
• All-Star Zesty Space Monster Stories
• All-Star Zesty Zeppelin Stories

I’ve found a script on the web that may let me set up a Hugo-style instant-runoff ballot on this, but in the mean time, let me know what you think.

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Update (27 Oct 2003): Submission guidelines for All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories are now available at http://www.allstarstories.com/.

Comments (29)

September 26, 2003

Interesting categorization of future shock levels by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, the basic premise being that there’s a hierarchy of what you might call SFnal weirdness, and that you’ll have trouble introducing people to an idea in proportion to how much more deeply weird it is than the ideas they’re accustomed to thinking about.

Not that Yudkowsky puts it in quite those terms, ’cause he’s coming at it from the point of view of an extropian and I’m coming at it from the point of view of an SF writer.

[A] Singularitarian can shock [an average] science-fiction fan, but not an Extropian — the Extropian will be interested, perhaps enthusiastic, but not shocked. . . An Extropian can shock your average Wired reader, but should be careful about trying this with the “person on the street” — they may be frightened. And so on. In general, one shock level gets you enthusiasm, two gets you a strong reaction — wild enthusiasm or disbelief, three gets you frightened — not necessarily hostile, but frightened, and four can get you burned at the stake.

I think he’s exaggerating, there — no one’s going to burn you at the stake for talking about the Singularity at a cocktail party; what they will do is find an excuse to go help refill the punch bowl, or whatever, and leave you talking to thin air.

But ithe principle behind Yudkowsky’s scale is still a useful one for SF writers: when you start asking yourself questions like How much explaining am I going to have to do? — or, conversely, Am I being weird enough? — you have to start by asking, Who is my audience?

Comments (1)

September 25, 2003

And one of which I think the TorCon committee should have warned attendees: Legally, at least within the jurisdiction of the Ontario Superior Court, extraterrestrials are not persons.

[I]f the plaintiff is not a person in that he is neither a human being nor a corporation, he cannot be a plaintiff as contemplated by the Rules of Civil Procedure. The entire basis of Mr. Joly's actions is that he is a martian, not a human being. There is certainly no suggestion that he is a corporation. I conclude therefore, that Mr. Joly, on his pleading as drafted, has no status before the Court.

—— Joly v. Pelletier, [1999] O.J. No. 1728 (Ontario Super. Ct., May 16, 1999)

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September 24, 2003

So putting the AI discussion on the back burner (before Brandon and Derek start throwing bar stools and breaking the necks off of bottles), and switching the entry category from Science to Art — I think what’s really annoying me, from an artistic perspective, is that harnessing the energy of entire galaxies and turning everything into giant computers and other Big Dumb Objects is so done. It’s a ’60s idea.

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Apparently my theory that Bush really is the born-again he claims to be and really does think we’re sliding into the End Times is not supported by the evidence. Jeanne d’Arc quotes Al Franken (not trying to be funny):

Then I talked to [Howard] Fineman and he remembered talking to Bush during the primaries in New Hampshire. Howard asked him what selection of the Bible he’d read that day because the campaign was saying that Governor Bush read the Bible every day.

And we tracked down the transcript and Bush was totally defensive and it seemed to me from the transcript that he really didn’t read the Bible every day. He just said he did — which is, like, a very weird thing to lie about.

(Via Brad de Long.)

Given the current geopolitical situation, I guess this is a good thing, on balance. I guess.

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September 23, 2003

Been doing some research on AI, IA, the Singularity, computronium, Matrioshka Brains, all that good stuff, trying to piece together the MacGuffin for the Planetary Romance.

Man, is it Sturgeon’s Law City out there — and even the stuff written by the people who know what they’re doing seems pretty damned simplistic and old-fashioned. (Some of them even still seem to think Deep Blue’s defeat of Kasparov says something about AI, instead of something about chess. Others are busy turning the Singularity into a religion.)

It all boils down to the ‘simple AI’ scenario, the ‘Mycroft’ scenario (from Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) — that if you could just connect enough transistors together, and maybe kick the box a couple of times in the right place, you’d have something like a human brain. As a professional programmer, this sounds like total fantasyland to me. I’m aware there are plenty of professional programmers and comp-sci types out there who would disagree, but I’m just not seeing any qualitative change over the last ten or twenty years in the sorts of things we’re making computers do. Wherever that 100- or 1000-fold increase in processor power is going, it’s off on some other vector, perpendicular to the one that would point toward conscious, humanoid AI. More transistors just gets you a giant Beowulf cluster. More transistors is boring.

More and more I find myself leaning toward the Roger Penrose (The Emperor’s New Mind) argument that consciousness may rely on non-computable processes, even if I’m not enough of a mathematician to follow his argument or even believe it. (It’s all very well for Penrose to say that his ability to prove new mathematical theorems demonstrates that his consciousness is non-computable, but where does that leave us non-mathematicians?)1

Then there’s the Bruce Sterling (“Swarm”, “Our Neural Chernobyl”) argument, which is that consciousness is highly overrated and probably not a long-term survival characteristic anyway.

The only interesting computer stuff going on is in things like genetic algorithms and cellular automata. Genetic algorithms lead to hardware and software human beings can build and control and use, but that no human being can understand.2 Cellular automata lead to the Greg Egan (Diaspora, etc.) scenario where you have purely mathematical ‘beings’ that ‘exist’ only theoretically, as results that would be produced if some relatively simple function were iterated some arbitrarily large number of times. Either one could certainly lead to systems with behavior sufficiently complex and unpredictable that we might have to take their word that they’re intelligent, but neither of them promises anything like the Mycroft scenario; neither of them promises either humanoid AI or simulation of human consciousness in the foreseeable future. No Wintermute, no Neuromancer.

I’m thinking it’s likely to turn out that Wittgenstein’s Lion isn’t just, like Ben Rosenbaum says, the answer to Fermi’s Paradox, but the answer to the Turing Test as well: if a machine was to become intelligent, we wouldn’t recognize it.

Which leaves me kind of screwed, as far as my MacGuffin’s concerned. But that’s probably a good thing, since if I went with that MacGuffin it would seriously look like I was ripping off Walter Jon Williams’ “Prayers on the Wind.” (Which is a kick-ass story, by the way. You should read it.)

I’ll just have to come up with something else. I’ve promised to have my outline done in a week and a half. Anyone got any good ideas? :)

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1 That doesn’t, note, imply that artificial intelligence is impossible, only that it's impossible to achieve just by making bigger, faster Turing machines.

2 It’s ironic that in A Fire Upon The Deep Vinge cites just such hardware as evidence that his Skroderiders are engineered artifacts of a superhuman intelligence, when it’s likely that in the near future we’ll have such hardware as the result of ‘design’ processes that are exactly the opposite of intelligent. But then Vinge is a pretty clued-in guy, so I’m sure the GA stuff was in his mind when he was writing those scenes. When he gets around to the next book in that sequence I’ll be curious as to whether he addresses the question of whether the Blight was actually intelligent at all, in the conventional sense.

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John Caudwell, CEO of British mobile phone retailer Phones4U, has banned the use of email company wide. Tech sites like Ars Technica are reporting this as a prime example of management technophobia, mental sclerosis, and general lack of clue, but really, the guy’s in the voice business. What did you expect?

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September 22, 2003

I figured out what it is that the future I see when I read the news or listen to the radio these days reminds me of. It reminds me the final scene of Charlie Stross’ “A Colder War.” XK-MASADA. All that.

That’s been bothering me for a while, so I’m glad I finally figured it out. The odd thing is, I only read the story for the first time yesterday.

This is why I’m not paying all that much attention to the news right now.

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Wow. I am so not interested* in the new SFWA rate requirements argument.

I’m not sure why.

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*Except as it affects Jed, Susan, and Karen.

Comments (25)

September 20, 2003

Not only is Lost in Translation funny and touching, it nails my home town of record (well, one of them, anyway) almost perfectly.

Plus, you get Bill Murray singing “More Than This” and “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” in a Shibuya karaoke bar. What more do you want? Go see it.

Comments (4)

September 19, 2003

In honor of International Talk Like A Pirate Day, we have what is possibly the world’s only ergonomic keyboard for pirates.

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There’s been a lot of argument over definitions in the SF world lately — nothing new, I’m sure, just the latest wave. But it got me thinking. And then I ran across this link in the Making Light “Particles” sidebar, and that led me to this one: “Definitions of Science Fiction.”

Plenty of luminaries represented there. Robert Heinlein’s definition is exclusionary, Tom Shippey’s is academic, Frank Herbert’s is mystical, Ray Bradbury’s is surprisingly dull, and John Brunner’s is less depressing than it should be.

But the only one that really resonated, for me, was this one, from ol’ Hugo himself:

By “scientifiction” . . . I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story — a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.

——Hugo Gernsback

Not to say that’s always what I write, or even always what I’m shooting for; but I like it.

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September 18, 2003

Okay, technically it’s a trojan horse, not a virus. But you get the idea.)

I’m getting a lot (like, a pair every five minutes — not sure why it’s coming in pairs) of pretty homogeneous, virus-laden email coming in to dm@chrononaut.org this morning. Since it’s only coming in to that address, I think there’s a reasonable chance that some folks out there with that address in their Outlook/Exchange mailboxes or address books have gotten infected. (It seems less likely that an email virus would be combined with a web screen-scraper, but I suppose it’s possible.) So any of you unfortunate enough to be on That Platform may want to do some virus checking.

And if you’re on Windows and you get an email that claims to be a Microsoft security update (with plenty of realistic-looking content in the message itself, including links and phone numbers) with an attached “patch file” or “audio file”, for God’s sake don’t open it.

A sample:

From: "MS Corporation Security Support"
To: "Commercial Customer"
Subject: Latest Net Upgrade

Microsoft Customer

this is the latest version of security update, the "September 2003, Cumulative Patch" update which eliminates all known security vulnerabilities affecting MS Internet Explorer, MS Outlook and MS Outlook Express. Install now to maintain the security of your computer from these vulnerabilities, the most serious of which could allow an attacker to run code on your computer. This update includes the functionality of all previously released patches.

System requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/2000/NT/XP This update applies to:

• MS Internet Explorer, version 4.01 and later
• MS Outlook, version 8.00 and later
• MS Outlook Express, version 4.01 and later

Recommendation: Customers should install the patch at the earliest opportunity.

How to install: Run attached file. Choose Yes on displayed dialog box.

How to use: You don't need to do anything after installing this item.

(Except maybe kiss your sweet ass goodbye.)

Comments (8)

Bill Amend’s Fox Trot isn’t political very often, but when it is, it’s on.

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September 17, 2003

Are any of the San Francisco mayoral candidates replicants? The Wave Magazine wants to know. (Courtesy of Rob.)

(Best line: “Fifty-fifty he’s a skin job.”)

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Noticed this gem from M. John Harrison over at the Night Shade space opera discussion from a couple of weeks ago:

Naming of this kind seems to me to be an aggressive act, one that serves the commercial, professional, academic and psychological agendas of the participants. My feeling is that if this kind of naming is inevitable, then I’m damned if I’m going to be co-opted without a struggle. I had enough of being a movement footsoldier in the 1970s.

Not that I feel that strongly about it. But I am kind of glad none of the candidate names for the movement that may or may not exist (and that I may or may not be a part of) seems to have caught on, with the possible exception of notorious style monkeys — which, for the record, I consider a purely descriptive term rather than a tribal boundary marker.

(Meanwhile, the outline for the Planetary Romance has cleared 9000 words and most of the major plot hurdles: the star-crossed lovers are reunited, the surviving Buddhist monk has hooked up with the veteran revolutionary, the rogue trader, and the monarchist POWs, while the oligarchy’s secret policeman has joined forces with the con artist and co-opted the interstellar conglomerate. Now I just need to figure out the monarchy’s motivations for using their dirigible-borne bicycle paratroopers in a diversionary attack on the oligarchy’s launch site, so that the anarcho-syndicalist agents provocateurs can help the monk escape the conglomerate’s orbital defenses and reach the ruins left by the ur-civilization in the outer solar system.)

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September 16, 2003

Figure 1. Hurricane Isabel at 19:15 UTC, 15 September 03.

That Coriolis force is some crazy stuff. All of you between the Bahamas and, well, Lake Erie, good luck.

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September 12, 2003

I like it when Product Management is discovering new bugs a week after “code freeze,” half an hour after we were supposed to go gold, and decides that

1. they all need to be fixed before we release
2. we’re still releasing on Monday.

Yeah, that’s what I like.

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So how are we doing, two years on? Well, shockingly, the “make peace through war” plan seems to be stumbling a bit; for some reason, all war seems to make is more war. Oh, I know, I know, it’s only been a few months, we gotta give this war a little time to mature and magically invert its nature to become peace. But still, I can’t help wondering . . . is it possible that war isn’t the answer?

—— Stephen Notley

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Or other reasonably priced beverage of your choice, for the first person to come up with a compelling explanation of why someone would actually need one of these.

(And no, the sensory deprivation torture scenario from Schismatrix does not qualify.)

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September 11, 2003

Howard Waldrop kicks ass.

That is all.

You may return to your regularly scheduled programming.

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Trying to Google up an injury or ailment that would allow a downed spaceman to drop out of the narrative for several weeks, I discover Virtual Naval Hospital, featuring, among other things, Emergency War Surgery: Second United States Revision of The Emergency War Surgery NATO Handbook.

Some of it is stomach-turning. And yet invaluable.

I have a feeling more of my characters than just the downed spaceman are in for some bad shit.

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Courtesy of Electrolite, an interesting (and somewhat depressing) discussion on Kathryn Cramer’s weblog, about the childcare, or lack thereof, at science fiction conventions. (WisCon, at least, is apparently on the ball — as you’d hope.)

An interesting exchange, a few comments into the discussion:

“Alison” opines:

Sorry . . . but as an event planner . . . it wouldn't ever occur to me to provide such a thing at a social event for adults or a professional meeting. I would assume that those who would like to participate . . . would take care of their own children . . . by leaving dependents in the adequate care of someone they trust.

Ms. Cramer herself answers:

One of the significant obstacles to professional women in America is the assumption that professionals never have their children in tow, that to do so is unprofessional.

This is the sort of observation that classic social SF is made of, the observation of a phenomenon that’s so big it’s practically invisible — particularly to the young, single childless male like myself. (But I don’t remember LeGuin or Tepper dealing with it much, either.) As a society we’ve got a pretty good idea of what we mean by professionalism, and I think most of us are in favor of it. But how much of that idea has a real foundation, and how much of it is just arbitrary leftovers from the work and family lives of Victorian gentlemen?

(Side note: Am I the only one who sees in some of the comments a subtext that Ms. Cramer must be either a bad congoer, a bad mother, or both?)

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UPDATE: Wouldn’t you know, those tireless newshounds at the Onion — or, at least, their editorial staff — are on the case.

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September 10, 2003

From the file of approaches to be avoided by aspiring writers;

BUCKY THE CAT: I’d like you to read my screenplay. It would be the first screenplay written by cats for cats.

FRANCIS: But see, as cats have zero buying power, you aren’t a demographic anyone cares about.

BUCKY THE CAT: Normally when somebody says something like that to me, I whiz on their shoes.

FRANCIS: Not making me want to read your story more.

(From today’s Get Fuzzy.)

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September 7, 2003

Unless some total bastard (and I will hunt you down) is forging email from Gardner Dozois, I’ve just sold “The Third Party” — twelve-thousand-word novelette, prelude to the Space Opera / Planetary Romance (op. cit.) — to Asimov’s.

On Greg’s advice, I am now going to get blissfully drunk.

(Thanks to Greg and Jay and Lara and everyone else who helped me out with this one.)

Comments (29)

September 5, 2003

Fascinating piece by WNYC on the “Wilhelm Scream,” the trademark “guy falling into a bottomless pit” scream that appears in everything from Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark to 50s B-movies and a Judy Garland song. I’d never noticed it before, but I bet I start now.

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September 3, 2003

Apparently Robert Zubrin’s proved that a Bussard ramjet won’t work because the drag of your ramscoop is greater than the thrust you get from fusion. Guess my Space Opera / Planetary Romance is going to be looking for a new STL drive. And my characters are going to be looking for a gas station.

UPDATE: Okay, maybe it’s not as bad as all that; I didn’t read the article clearly enough, and it looks as though there may be a way out if you can fuse your interstellar hydrogen without accelerating it up to the speed of the spacecraft first. Sounds a bit dicy to me, though — fusing the stuff as you pass by / through it is all very well, but how does the fusion energy actually get applied to accelerate your ship?

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September 2, 2003

I regret to announce that the title Spicy Zeppelin Stories has apparently been done. I’m now soliciting alternate titles. Saucy Zeppelin Stories? All-Star Racy Zeppelin Tales?

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Update (27 Oct 2003): Submission guidelines for All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories are now available at http://www.allstarstories.com/.

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Mostly I just skipped straight to the “carouse” part of the schedule.

Seriously, there were apparently various things wrong with the con, but I didn’t notice any of them since I was having too much fun talking shop and/or trash in the bar of the Royal York, prowling the corridors looking for the Secret Plastic Surgery Ward (it’s on B, behind the Ontario Ballroom), and getting to know all the brilliant people at the Second Annual Worldcon Beer & Wings Fest, the Viable Paradise Party, the Strange Horizons / Ideomancer Tea Party, the Strange Horizons Impromptu Sri Lankan Dinner, and the Viable Paradise Posse Impromptu Breakfast. Thanks to all of you for making it a great con.

Figure 1. The Viable Paradise Posse.
(Photo courtesy of Scott Janssens.)

Thanks, too, to everyone who took the time to tell me they’d read and liked my stuff — especially the people I didn’t know who apparently read it of their own free will, without coercion.

And a special thanks to Jay Lake for letting me highjack the second half of his reading — the Greek Chorus was a hard act to follow, but I did my best.

Profound regrets to everyone who wasn’t able to make it this year; you were sorely missed, and everything we said about you behind your back was complimentary. Hope to see you at WisCon or World Fantasy next year.

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