Mundane-SF

Mudanespotting Welcome to the Greenhouse

2011-03-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

This is my first ever mundanespotting of a freebie review copy--WELCOME TO THE GREENHOUSE, edited by Gordon Van Gelder. This is an original anthology of 16 stories about "climate change," featuring several Big Name SF Writers. What a welcome relief from all the wish-fulfillment and thumb-twiddling bullshit that regularly gets published as SF--never mind the straight fantasy that now dominates.

During the Golden Age of SF, there was a consensus that atomic power and rocketry were big things in our future. It was just a matter of how the science and society would play out. Well, that has all pretty much played out, and sorry, we do not have a libertarian space age with unlimited resources. Now, as then, we need to make do with scientific reality. That reality now includes "climate change." The stories in this anthology speculate about how things will play out with that.

1) "Benkoelen" by Brian W. Aldiss -- Does a rising global tide sink all boats, even the upper middle class ones? This story takes a look-see.

2) "Damned When You Do" by Jeff Carlson -- What if a fantastic savior is born to fix things? I would give this one satirical mundane credit if it wasn't so sketchy

3) "The Middle of Somewhere" by Judith Moffett -- How to cope with tornadoes in the very near future? Quite thin on sf content, but creepy to read after the recent tornadopacalypse so I'll let it through the mundane filter

4) "Not A Problem" by Matthew Hughes -- What an intriguing idea! maybe aliens with ftl can help?

5) "Eagle" by Gregory Benford -- Here's a small hint about what geoengineering will be like.

6) "Come Again Some Other Day" by Michael Alexander -- What to put between Benford and Sterling? Mercifully short time travel crap.

7) "The Master of the Aviary" by Bruce Sterling -- Here's a look at the future of The Philosopher after The Fall; amusing, with good insights, but a bit sketchy towards the end

8) "Turtle Love" by Joseph Green -- Here's one about how the bureaucracy might handle the rising tide

9) "The California Queen Comes A-Calling" by Pat MacEwen -- Rising tide again, this time things are pretty bleak, but the legal system survives, like the postman in The Postman

10) "That Creeping Sensation" by Alan Dean Foster -- a nice short speculation about how nature might respond to the Big Changes

11) "The Men of Summer" by David Prill -- fantasy romance irrelevantly set in the future of climate change; I might welcome this in F&SF or Interzone but the space is wasted here

12) "The Bridge" by George Guthridge -- a good look at things falling apart in Alaska

13) "FarmEarth" by Paul Di Filippo -- maybe there is a video game solution to the problem; I'm a sucker for coming of ages stories, so I liked this

14) "Sundown" by Chris Lawson -- the sun stops working so well, and then our current climate problems don't seem at all bad; escapism, but nonetheless interesting speculation

15) "Fish Cakes" by Ray Vukcevich -- a very virtual life amidst the big time warming is what somewhat happily awaits us here

16) "True North" by M. J. Locke -- longer survivalist story in a very warm and bleak future; does our hero win? you'll have to read to find out

So that's it. Four out of the sixteen did not even get the coveted mundane label. Nonetheless, there's some good speculation here, and a fair amount of variety. This is a good mundane value for a $17 list price. It's too bad there is wasted space because some of the stories needed more room to develop. None of the stories really excited me, but some of the Big Name ones are at least worth a second read. I'm glad this book is available, and now I can get back to my regular mundanespotting rituals.

Mundanespotting F&SF March/April 2011

2011-03-30T11:00:00.001-07:00

And here's the latest F&SF, crammed with 11 stories.

1) "Scatter My Ashes" by Albert E. Cowdrey -- fantasy

[that leaves 10 more]

Mundanespotting Asimov's April/May 2011

2011-03-30T10:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a double issue of Asimovs, featuring 11 stories.

1) "The Day the Wires Came Down" by Alexander Jablokov -- counterfactual boredom

[10 more to go]

Mundanespotting Analog May 2011

2011-03-09T11:42:00.000-08:00

The big three are back for another round. Analog is the thinnest so I will start with that. Blanket Spoiler warning: surprising alien twists!

1) "Tower of Worlds" by Rajnar Vajra -- humans and aliens are in some big tower doing stuff for many, many pages
2) "Boumee and the Apes" by Ian McHugh -- an elephant clan confronts the horror of a planet of apes! or something like that; not sure why this is in Analog; maybe this is our forgotten past or our elephant supremicist future, but I'm not going to read it to find out
3) "The Wolf and the Panther were Lovers" by Walter L. Kleine -- cowboy western in which, pinch me! the strange animals turn out to be aliens
4) "The Old Man's Best" by Bud Sparhawk -- jaded space workers out at Jupiter make homebrew to stick it to the Man
5) "Ellipses" by Ron Collins -- suburban neighbors turn out to be, what a shock! aliens
6) "Blind Spot" by Bond Elam -- fourth paragraph: "Effie is strictly software. She doesn't have a body of her own, so she's taken to commandeering the building's maintenance bot whenever she feels the need to assert herself physically."

So that one's a total bust.

Mundanespotting Analog April 2011

2011-02-17T10:40:00.001-08:00

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is the 958th issue of Astounding/Analog.

1) "Hiding Place" by Adam-Troy Castro -- cyber-brain-merging interstellar something or other with "entire alien civilizations" mentioned on page 25
2) "Ian's Ions and Eons" by Paul Levinson -- time travel
3) "The Flare Weed" by Larry Niven -- space opera
4) "Two Look at Two" by Paula S. Jordan -- aliens
5) "Blessed Are the Bleak" by Edward M. Lerner -- brain dumps
6) "Remembering Rachel" by Dave Creek -- fantastic homicide investigation on the moon
7) "Quack" by Jerry Oltion -- counterfactual medicine
8) "Balm of Hurt Minds" by Thomas R. Dulski -- aliens

And not a very satisfying mundane issue.

Mundanespotting Asimov's March 2011

2011-02-09T11:14:00.000-08:00

Here it is, the actual current issue of Asimov's.

1) "Clean" by John Kessel -- good geriatric mundane sf
2) "Where" by Neal Barrett, Jr. -- odd story lacking an infodump, but seems to be about child-like AI robots; maybe it's far future enough to be mundane if you're in the right mood
3) "'I Was Nearly Your Mother'" by Ian Creasey -- parallel universe crossover thumb-twiddling
4) "God in the Sky" by An Owomoyela -- totally big-ass supernatural thing in the sky in an otherwise mundane near future
5) "Movement" by Nancy Fulda -- temporal autism viewpoint chararacter; best story I have read so far this year
6) "The Most Important Thing in the World" by Steve Bein -- A cabdriver starts fooling around with a gadget left behind accidentally by a customer; and what a shocking turn of events, the gadget is a time machine!
7) "Lost in the Memory Palace, I Found You" by Nick Wolven -- this is cyberpunk without the punk or style, and sort of satirical without being clever; maybe it would make some mundane sense to you, but not to me
8) "Purple" by Robert Reed -- aliens

I definitely recommend the two highlighted mundane stories, and the rest is a typical mixed bag. And guess what? I'm up to date on the 2011 Asimov'ses. Stay tuned for the actual month of March to arrive.

Mundanespotting Analog March 2011

2011-02-03T14:29:00.001-08:00

Not quite the current issue, but not to be missed because it has humonoid aliens on the cover.

1) "Rule Book" by Paul Carlson -- trucking in the age of AI robots taking over the human jobs
2) "Falls the Firebrand" by Sarah Frost -- aliens
3) "Hiding From Nobel" by Brad Aiken -- memories of a supernatural childhood event turn out to have a silly fantastic explanation
4) "Julie is Three" by Craig DeLancey -- contempory medical story about abnormal psychology; not very convincing, but I'm pretty tolerant about giving this sort of thing the mundane label
5) "Astronomic Distance, Geologic Time" by Bud Sparhawk -- grand universe-spanning whatever
6) "Taboo" by Jerry Oltion -- the near future is bright because thanks to some offscreen technology people are pretty much immortal and enjoying their hopefully eternal middle classness, but there are twists nonetheless; I'll tolerate this one too as mundane
7) "Betty Know and Dictionary Jones in 'The Mystery of the Missing Teenage Anachronisms'" by John G. Hemry -- time travel

Another Analog down, and not a total loss thanks to my softness for bogus biomedicine. The overall quality of the writing seems better, even.

Mundanespotting Interzone #232 (Jan-Feb 2011)

2011-01-27T10:09:00.000-08:00

The new Interzone has reached the U.S.

1) "Noam Chomsky and the Time Box" by Douglas Lain -- time travel
2) "Intellectual Property" by Mark Pexton -- corporate espionage; interesting, but relies on memory plug-in jacks that are too fantastic for my tastes of the moment
3) "Plucking Her Petals" by Sarah L. Edwards -- fantasy
4) "Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise" by Sue Burke -- POV of an AI app that is apparently helping with some social difficulties
5) "Flock, Shoal, Herd" by James Bloomer -- people downloaded into animals

Oh well, maybe next time.

Mundanespotting Asimov's February 2011

2011-01-25T08:44:00.000-08:00

Although the March issue is already out, at least I am ahead of the calendar for the moment.

1) "Out of the Dream Closet" by David Ira Cleary -- technology looks like magic or psi or whatever in the apparently far future
2) "Waster Mercy" by Sara Grange -- post-apocalyptic sociology
3) "Planet of the Sealies" by Jeff Carlson -- clever story about future archaeology
4) "Shipbirth" by Aliette de Bodard -- alternate history
5) "Brother Sleep" by Tim McDaniel -- what if for those who can afford it, the disease of sleepiness has been cured? otherwise a story about Thai kids in college featuring excellent dialog
6) "Eve of Beyond" by Bill Pronzini & Barry N. Malzberg -- future corporate politics; not enough sf content to satisfy my mundanespotting sense of the moment
7) "The Choice" by Paul McAuley -- aliens

A nice harvest, and I'm even tempted to look for other works from these authors.

Mundanespotting F&SF January/February 2011

2011-01-24T09:33:00.000-08:00

Here is a big fat F&SF.

1) "Home Sweet Bi'Ome" by Pat MacEwen -- whimsical story about a house that is alive; mundane enough for my tastes
2) "The Bird Cage" by Kate Wilhelm -- cryogenics; mundane only if you can look past the fantastic psi powers
3) "Long Time" by Rick Norwood -- an old guy hangs out with Ishtar in Babylon or something
4) "Canterbury Hollow" by Chris Lawson -- love in the time of humans living on some far away planet
5) "Christmas at Hostage Station" by James Stoddard -- holiday fantasy
6) "The Whirlwind" by Jim Young -- downloaded and/or uploaded people
7) "The Bogle" by Albert E. Cowdrey -- ghost fantasy
8) "Paradise Last" by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg -- zombie fantasy
9) "12:02 P.M." by Richard A. Lupoff -- time travel
10) "Ghost Wind" by Alan Dean Foster -- character fantasy
11) "The Ghiling Blade" by Matthew Corradi -- heroic fantasy

After the slightly promising start, not too much to see here.

Mundanespotting Analog January/February 2011

2011-01-17T19:50:00.000-08:00

Here is a big fat Analog, bursting with aliens and a very thin stew of mundane content.

1) "At Cross Purposes" by Juliette Wade -- alien contact from multiple viewpoints
2) "The Unfinished Man" by Dave Creek -- finding oneself on an alien planet
3) "A Snitch in Time" by Donald Moffitt -- time travel crime fighters
4) "Some of Them Closer" by Marissa Lingen -- interstellar terraformer copes with the loneliness of relativity; if one believes that multiple interstellar travels without ftl by someone with a recognizable lifespan is a practical hope in the recognizable future, then this is mundane; on a very generous day, or for a very good story, I could go that far, but not today, for this one
5) "Enigma" by Sean McMullen -- genetically modified human/animal hybrids explore an alien planet
6) "The First Conquest of Earth" by David W. Goldman -- alien invasion
7) "Out There" by Norman Spinrad -- meta short-short about interstellar travel; blatantly and refreshingly mundane (believe it or not)
8) "Stay" by Stephen L. Burns -- aliens put dogs in charge of the U. S. of A.
9) "Non-Native Species" by Janet Freeman -- aliens in the Outback
10) "The Frog Prince" by Michael F. Flynn -- space opera
11) "The First Day of Eternity" by Domingo Santos (translated by Stanley Schmidt) -- multigeneration interstellar space colonization by orthodox Jews in a giant super spaceship run by AIs; more interesting than it sounds, though probably much is lost in translation

That's it for the "SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE!" Stay tuned for the March 2011 edition.

Gissa job

2011-01-14T16:02:00.000-08:00

A new person has joined the Linked-in community:

Hope his education field gets filled out more, as his bio at the CEI says:

A native of Baker County, Oregon, Mr. Ebell holds a B.A. from Colorado College and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. He also did graduate work at the University of California at San Diego and at Peterhouse, Cambridge University.

With one connection so far, he has a lot to catch up to Iain Murray's 368 connections. Iain is also interested in career opportunities, and he actually did get educated at an Oxbridge university before taking his talents in malicious political disinformation overseas to a country that is so uncivilized it is willing to reward people for this crap. Good riddance!

The only career move for any of these guys in the CEI to take is to follow in the steps of Wendell Potter and stand up for the truth about their history of lies.

Sadly there is no evidence that any of them has the slightest conscience. Even the ones with children.

Key House Committee Chairzzzzzz

2011-01-14T14:52:00.000-08:00

Possibly the dullest Myron Ebell posting ever this week:

Here is the lineup so far for House committees with jurisdiction over energy, energy-rationing, and global warming policy. Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) is the new Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), who was the Chairman in the 111th Congress, is now the Ranking Democrat. The Energy and Environment Subcommittee will be chaired by Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.). The Democrats have not yet picked their ranking member for the subcommittee.

To keep you amused, here is a video about banning harmful stupidity.

It's funny because it can't happen here. After all in this society we value some of the most petty freedoms above the long term survival of the species.

Mundanespotting Asimov's January 2011

2010-11-09T07:56:00.001-08:00

It's hard to complain about the state of mundane sf after the incredible breakout year of Paolo Bacigalupi. But I will try. I "discovered" Bacigalupi during his first big wave of stories that preceeded the various award nominations, and had the unprecidented pleasure of buying his first story collection knowing that I had read all the previously published content. I started blogging way back in 2004.

But Bacigalupi is about the only bright spot, and his reliance on the small press ghetto a massive indictment of sf publishing. In 2009 I made a heroic effort (meaning: with the help of interlibrary loan) to find and read all the nominated short fiction for the Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon awards. Not just mundanespotting, but full-on reading. I came up 3 novellas short (still might finish 'em), but read quite a lot of what was considered the best. There was not much mundane sf at all, and despite some good writing, there was some blatant crap, even among the winners.

Which brings me to today. I have made various attempts to revive the mundanespotting habit, but they all fell short of pressing the "Publish Post" button. This time it's for real. I'm going to attempt to mundanespot the nominal 2011 magazines, all in old school paper format, from front to back. In 2011, that's the big three, Asimov's, F&SF, Analog, plus Interzone, all still functioning.

My new trick is that I will not wait to finish a magazine (and risk losing all momentum) before posting. So here's starting with Asimov's January 2011 [since edited to completion].

1) "Two Thieves" by Chris Beckett -- warp gate
2) "Dolly" by Elizabeth Bear -- android homicide, ripped from headlines
3) "Visitors" by Steve Rasnic Tem -- the blurb says "collateral consequences of cryobiology," and I say mundane
4) "Interloper" by Ian McHugh -- seems to be about mind-controlling aliens in the Outback, though there wasn't much of an infodump
5) "Ashes on the Water" by Gwendolyn Clare -- mundane future India
6) "Killer Advice" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch -- ftl

Two out of six is not so bad for a start, and both of the mundane stories are worth a read.

The singulatarian spectrum

2008-06-22T01:49:00.000-07:00

Mundane SF, like atheism, is so completely mainstream in science and futurology that it's rare that anyone bothers to mention it. The IEEE Spectrum magazine has published a Special Issue on the Singularity aka Rapture of the nerds, pointing out often forgotten issues like:

IT'S A LITTLE EARLY TO TALK ABOUT SIMULATING CONSCIOUSNESS ON MACHINES WHEN WE BARELY KNOW ABOUT THE NEUROLOGY OF A SEA SLUG

but that doesn't ever seem to dampen speculation by those who would also be counting on a painless replacement for fossil fuels in the next ten years, or anti-gravity cars.

The editors gave a good interview in this week's Scientific American Podcast.

Take home message:

God doesn't exist

There's no evidence that our pitiful technology is going to somehow invent God in the next ten or a hundred years

You will die like all other humans before you.

In actuality in the future we'll be wondering whether our great technology is able to perform basic requirements, like feeding us. The best scientists in the world using the fastest and most high-tech computers have made the predictions to within a practical margin of error.

Now pay attention to it.

John Horgan pwnts the Singularitans

2008-06-07T11:54:00.000-07:00

Via Andrew Sullivan, a great quote:

"Let's face it. The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision. The science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod has dubbed it “the rapture for nerds,” an allusion to the end-time, when Jesus whisks the faithful to heaven and leaves us sinners behind.

Such yearning for transcendence, whether spiritual or technological, is all too understandable. Both as individuals and as a species, we face deadly serious problems, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, poverty, famine, environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and AIDS. Engineers and scientists should be helping us face the world's problems and find solutions to them, rather than indulging in escapist, pseudoscientific fantasies like the singularity."

Today.

2008-05-08T18:52:00.000-07:00

So after all the hype, the flames, the bitching and counter-bitching, Interzone 216 finally hits the stands today. The Fix (disclaimer: also owned by TTA Press) is the first out the gate with a run down.

In case you missed it, here's the cover again:

and the TOC...

Introduction by Geoff Ryman

How To Make Paper Airplanes by Lavie Tidhar
Endra — From Memory by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
The Hour Is Getting Late by Billie Aul
Remote Control by R.R. Angell
The Invisibles by Élisabeth Vonarburg
Into The Night by Anil Menon
Talk Is Cheap by Geoff Ryman

Features:

Greg Egan: Beyond The Veil Of Reality
interview by Jetse De Vries

Alastair Reynolds: House Of Suns
interview by David Mathew

Plenty of book reviews

Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe

Laser Fodder by Tony Lee

Ansible Link by David Langford

2007 Readers’ Poll: The Results

Geoff Ryman on the radio - now edited

2008-05-07T12:44:00.000-07:00

As we all know, editing is very important. Geoff's interview on the Radio 4 arts program mentioned in this post has been snipped out, converted into an mp3, and couldn't be uploaded onto blogger because it isn't a video! It's just sound.

So I've parked it in some random directory reserved for pdf documents in my work web page on a server I own, because the internet doesn't have enough leeched-in connections of this.

So here it is, Geoff's 5 minute interview about Mundane-SF on the radio. I hope that link still works in 2108.

5 days and counting...

2008-05-03T15:04:00.000-07:00

And the buzz is starting. Besides Geoff's radio interview (see below),
Damien G Walter over at the Guardian blog has a write-up:

OK, I admit it, sci-fi is boring. After endless Star Trek re-runs, innumerable badly scripted Hollywood movies and a thousand video games with pixel-deep narrative, the once wondrous ideas of sci-fi have become yawn-inducing. Fortunately for me, beyond the world of tedious mass media sci-fi, lies the exciting world of literary science fiction or "SF" constantly producing new ideas to satisfy my hunger for wonder. Now a radical sect of SF writers and critics claim that SF needs to abandon all those wondrous ideas, and concentrate instead on the everyday and the mundane. All hail the Mundane Revolution!

Make sure to check out the comments section too. Best line of the week:

You obviously didn't go to Science Fiction finishing school.

To the BBC

2008-05-03T10:38:00.001-07:00

On the BBC on Friday

The Mundane Movement in Science Fiction

Should sci-fi writers create plots which feature futuristic space ships flying faster than the speed of light, or should they focus instead on today’s real scientific discoveries and the changing nature of the planet we live on? That's the debate that been sparked off by a new manifesto for Mundane Sci-Fi. Geoff Ryman, one of the founders of the movement, explains his aims to Kirsty Lang.

The May edition of InterZone Magazine is dedicated to Mundane Sci-Fi. It is published on 8 May.

Click here to listen to it quick. You only have another 6 days until it goes off-air.

"Cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past..."

2008-04-15T19:47:00.000-07:00

Democracy Now:

"In Bangladesh at least 15,000 garment factory workers went on strike earlier today to call for higher wages to cover the soaring price of food. In South Africa, the country’s main union has kicked off a series of protests over increasing food prices. In recent weeks food riots have also erupted in Haiti, Niger, Senegal, Cameroon and Burkina Faso. Protests have flared in Morocco, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Mexico and Yemen....Here in the United States, food inflation has reached the highest level in seventeen years, and analysts expect it to get worse.

The Telegraph:

"A new Cold War is taking shape, around energy and food. The world intelligentsia has been asleep at the wheel. While we rage over global warming, global hunger has swept in under the radar screen.”

The Independent:

"The global food crisis became official yesterday."

Krugman:

"[I]t’s not clear how much can be done. Cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past."

[image courtesy of FT.com]

The Mundanista News Wrap-Up 03/21/08

2008-03-21T13:45:00.000-07:00

-Happy Iraq War Anniversary! To celebrate, Oil Change International has released a report on its 5 year climate and energy impact. Money quotes:

"Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends."

and

"If the war was ranked as a country in terms of emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do annually. Falling between New Zealand and Cuba, the war each year emits more than 60% of all countries."

-The Case for Cars! OMG you guys, Robert Zubrin has joined the ranks of DailyKos! *gasp* His mission? Destroy OPEC. (For great justice.) Because only by destroying OPEC and switching to methanol can we beat the arabs to Mars....er something. Best part: Methanol's only considered environmentally hazardous if you want to keep your optic nerves!

-Enough to make yourself sick. Almost ten percent of the U.S. population now suffer from an autoimmune disorder, with that number increasing each year. It now outnumbers both cancer and heart disease in causes of death nationwide.

-Water is for the weak! So because some crybaby hippies insist on bringing attention to the fact that people need water to live, and the fact that most people are in favor of people living, World Water Day is tomorrow. Enjoy it while it lasts. Oh, and by some strange coincidence, they're remaking Dune.

-25 reasons to read New Scientist. NS has a panel discussion of the 25 biggest future threats to biodiversity. Congratulations to the winners!

-My God, it's full of flaws! 2001: A Space Odyssey named one of the ten most historically inaccurate fims evar by Yahoo movies. (Clever, eh?)

Consensus Future

2008-03-18T13:06:00.000-07:00

Here's some great denial-breaking mundane sf thought from a Gary Westfahl essay just published on Locus Online:

It need not be said that science fiction today, more so than ever before, perceives itself to be in desperate straits; concerned reports of plummeting sales, shrinking income, and cancelled contracts are all too common. While many explanations can be advanced for these sad developments, I see the central problem as the genre's ongoing overreliance upon an exhausted, and clearly invalidated, "consensus future."

This consensus future was probably best articulated in Donald A. Wollheim's The Universe Makers: Science Fiction Today (1971), and has been most vigorously promoted by various incarnations of Star Trek — so much so that one might describe it today as the "Star Trek future." It's what I've been talking about all along — the idea that humanity will, in relatively little time and with relatively little effort, expand first throughout the solar system and then throughout the cosmos to inhabit thousands of worlds, bond with generally humanoid alien species, build a Galactic Empire or a Federation of Planets, and keep advancing toward an ultimate encounter with God Himself. Now, as I can confess from personal experience, it is very easy to grow tired of stories set within this overly familiar sort of future, and the events of the last fifty years, as I have discussed, certainly provide more than enough reasons for questioning its accuracy as a prediction of humanity's future.

In sum, as I mentioned in my essay on The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, this "consensus future" of science fiction is actually nothing more than a fantasy. And, if readers are going to be spending their time with fantasy, why shouldn't they go for the real thing, instead of ersatz fantasy masquerading as a prediction of humanity's future? Might this be the reason why fantasy is booming, and science fiction is floundering?

Nothing more than a fantasy.

It's the end of the world and he feels fine

2008-03-04T01:03:00.000-08:00

James Lovelock, popularizer of the Gaia Hypothesis, which has had several outings in Science Fiction, has given a recent interview:

In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful technological stuff". When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business," he said.

"And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's almost exactly what's happened."

On the subject of what the future holds now.

Most of the things we have been told to do [to prevent climate change] might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time... Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear... our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

...

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."

...

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

So, here's the question to all right-thinking SF fans out there.

Is it more enjoyable to write SF about space travel and aliens and how the act of shopping is going to drive the technological revolution, or do you want to write Mundane-SF that looks a bit funny now, but stands a chance of becoming increasingly relevant as time progresses?

Anyone can write a cyberpunk crime story today, but the people who look good are the ones who wrote it before the mainstreaming of the Internet. The technology was all there to see back in the 1980s; but precious few people recognized how important it was at the time.

IO9 asks what issues SF should take on

2008-01-24T19:45:00.000-08:00

Io9 continues to kick much ass. Charlie Anders posits the following:

Now that an Omega Man remake has made it big, the time is ripe for some 1970s-style "message" science fiction. We need more ripped-from-the-headlines science fictional stories that deal with the issues we're all freaking out about. But we need more than just parables about global warming and ebil corporations.

The choices are:

Peak oil. (which Mundanes have been writing about and talking about for some time now, and Paolo Bacigalupi has even been winning awards doing it for some time.)

Subprime foreclosures. (Hmm. Fair topic, but tough to do in an SF setting.)

Refugees from genocide. (Too bad 'Pol Pot's beautiful daughter' was fantasy.)

The global war on terror. (Actually, having even more heavy handed "message" stories about the Global War on Terror would be about as useful to me as having the ability to whistle out of my asshole. Lions for Lambs anyone?)

Super-epidemics of drug-resistant organisms.

I'm actually in the middle of writing a short on the last one. Right now refugees from genocide seems to be leading the pack with super-epidemics following close. But honestly, this really gets to the heart about what this movement is about. Everyone seems to be focused on the Mundane Manifesto's call for limitations, and not so much on its call for relevance. You remember relevance, don't you guys? It's that stuff people experimented with a few decades ago, along with other crazy shit like drugs, love-ins, and the idea of science fiction being written for an audience bigger than ever-shrinking incestuous niche.

Pick up a newspaper, and you'll find that most of the things happening on the world stage---A crumbling healthcare system, climate change, nuclear proliferation, rising fuel prices, soaring food prices, depleting metal deposits around the world, an increasing capacity for government surveillance and the curtailing of civil liberties, the weaponization of space as 'the fist of globalization' as Tom Friedman put it, a neuroscience revolution that has more potential for social and ethical upheaval than at any time since Darwin, the increasing inequality between the richest and the poorest, control over the production of human embryos and the possibility of creating artificial life----looking around it seems that most of the issues of the day are, either centrally or in part, issues of science. And all the areas of science that are actually intersecting with and impacting people's lives just happen to be the areas of science that science fiction chooses to ignoring the most these days.

So for those of you still perplexed at what this whole Mundane thing is all about, or why some of us sound so angry all the time, maybe that helps enlighten our point of view. Science fiction is determined to only write about science when it has absolutely nothing to do with what's going on all around us.

Does anyone else see anything wrong or just a little bit negligent about this?

Does anyone else think that maybe there's something that SF does better than any other literary genre, that maybe being the literature of ideas that it has tools no one else does to confront these changes that are remaking the world?

Does anyone else think that as a genre, we can be doing a hell of a lot better?

The Mundanista News Wrap-up

2008-01-24T10:57:00.000-08:00

- Early signs might be pointing to a new Eco-Patents Commons movement taking shape soon. Via eco-geek:

Inspired by open source movement behind Creative Commons and the Linux OS, the WBCSD and these companies believe that by sharing patents that reduce pollution and waste, they will provide a spawning ground for new collaborations in efficiency and sustainability.

And this is just the beginning of this kind of intellectual property sharing – other corporations with environmental technology are being actively recruited to join the Eco-Patent Commons.

- Kite powered ship to cross the Atlantic. I remember Paolo's 'Yellow Card Man' vaguely referencing the future return of clipper ships in the post-oil world. Oh, and speaking of Paolo, he’s going to be on Wired Science’s blog Science Fiction Friday tomorrow.

- A new documentary called "Flow" just premiered at Sundance, about water profiteering, one of the biggest growth industries in the world as access to drinking water becomes more scarce. They call for a UN resolution declaring access to clean drinking water a human right. At the same time, an exhibit at NYC Museum of Natural History showcases coming global water shortage.

- Hey guys, did you know that apparently the U.S. economy is in the shitter? Well now some crank at Intel (what would he know about economics?) claims that we need to invest in something called "science" to get out of it. Several critics tried crunching the numbers to see if he was right before they then remembered that we Americans can't do math anymore.

- A new study finds that rich nations have caused 1.8 trillion dollars in environmental damage to the third world. The third world didn't immediately return requests for comment on the story, since they're all fucking dead.

[Got news?]

Asimov's Guestbook

2008-01-23T11:42:00.000-08:00

James Patrick Kelly's column in the March 2008 issue of Asimov's is devoted to the Mundane SF Movement. If that's why you're here, the comments for this post are a convenient place to declare that Geoff Ryman is your Personal Saviour and to pledge your complete devotion to Mundanity, or to rant about how the Movement is threatening your Way of Life.

History Channel show asks what happens when WE'RE history....

2008-01-22T15:17:00.000-08:00

Kevin Kelly at i09 has a great review of the history channel special Life Without People. And no, it's not about agoraphobes. If you missed it, there will be an encore on Wednesday at 8/7 PM central. It kind of reminded me a little of The Future Is Wild, and it's kind of sad when some of the best science fiction is TV documentaries. Most refreshing was to see David Brin as a talking head on the show, rather than denouncing it as evil evil anti-progress, anti-enlightenment propaganda.

Mundanespotting December 2007

2008-01-06T22:54:00.000-08:00

Mundanespotting December 2007

I had a little time to try some new short sf recently. I won’t be able to keep up in the near future (maybe I’ll be back for the major award nominees), but here’s a look at a recent month to see what the market is like.

I am covering these nominal December 2007 ezines:

Analog
Asimov's
F&SF
Interzone (#213)
JBU

Interzone is finally available from fictionwise. Fictionwise also now directly supports the Sony ereader. Thus, I’m getting a pretty convenient reading environment for most of this (less so for JBU—I use their RTF release with the graphics removed).

— “Stray” by Benjamin Rosenbaum and David Ackert (F&SF): fantasy
— “Odin’s Spear” by Steve Bein (Interzone): mountain climbing on Callisto in a traditional sf future. I was unconvinced enough that I didn’t read very far, but there may not be anything hopelessly un-mundane if you like this kind of space adventure.
— “Kukulkan” by Sarah K. Castle (Analog): aliens
— “‘Domo Arigato,’ Says Mr. Roboto” by Robert R. Chase (Analog): race to grab an asteroid to build a space elevator to get to the “wealth” of the solar system, but a robot puts a fly in the ointments, as it were. Thoroughly traditional space story. The technology to exploit all that “wealth” (or even make a simple step in that direction) is always conveniently 20 years away. Keep dreaming, and read this story if you like that stuff.
— “The Lost Xuyan Bride” by Aliette De Bodard (Interzone): historical fantasy
— “The Bone Man” by Frederic S. Durbin (F&SF): fantasy
— “Double Secret Weapon” by Tony Frazier (JBU): fantasy
— “Who Brought Tulips to the Moon?” by S. L. Gilbow (F&SF): another interesting sociological story by the author of “Red Card” from February 2007. The minimally convincing moon setting is not really important to the story, which has the Outer Limits vibe.
— “Reunion” by David W. Goldman (Analog): aliens
— “Second Banana” by Way Jeng (JBU): space opera
— “Icarus Beach” by C. W. Johnson (Analog): space opera
— “do(this)” by Stephen Graham Jones (Asimov’s): a kid brings a computer to life
— “Laws of Survival” by Nancy Kress (JBU): aliens
— “The Rules” by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s): the Corporate Power Elite respond to ecological crises in the near future.
— “Misfits” by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (JBU): time travel
— “The Lonesome Planet Travelers’ Advisory” by Tim McDaniel (Asimov’s): aliens
— “Darwin's Suitcase” by Elizabeth Malartre (JBU): time travel
— “The Art of Memory” by Barry N. Malzberg and Jack Dann (JBU): fantasy
— “Osama Phone Home” by David Marusek (F&SF): the Corporate Power Elite respond to terrorism in the present. My favorite story from this rather weak batch of mundane sf.
— “Finisterra” by David Moles (F&SF): historical fantasy or space opera or something otherwise otherworldly
— “The Men in the Attic” by John Phillip Olsen (Interzone): political dissidents are hidden inside a guy’s head. This is well on the cyberfantasy side of my personal mundane sf line. I can imagine lots of neat cyber stuff but I need to see some reasonable level of extrapolation—not just magical brain dumps with no serious changes in society to go with it.
— “Salvation” by Jerry Oltion (Analog): time travel
— “Christmas Eve at Harvey Wallbanger’s” by Mike Resnick (JBU): fantasy
— “Don’t Ask” by M. Rickert (F&SF): fantasy
— “Metal Dragon Year” by Chris Roberson (Interzone): historical fantasy
— “Molly and the Red Hat” by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Interzone): fantasy
— “Fossilized Gods” by J. Simon (JBU): fantasy
— “Strangers on a Bus” by Jack Skillingstead (Asimov’s): fantasy
— “Anything Would Be Worth It” by Lesley L. Smith (Analog): time travel
— “The Best of Your Life” by Jason Stoddard (Interzone): Somewhat interesting (if not entirely convincing) social extrapolation that is mundane enough for me. There is some cyberfantasy in the background that I can overlook.
— “Queen's Mask” by Barbara Tarbox (JBU): fantasy
— “Inheritance” by David Wesley (JBU): weather satellite goes AI as asteroid approachs to destroy civilization, or something like that. Too cyberfantastic for me to bother but others might be more patient and find something to like.
— “All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis (Asimov’s): aliens

That’s only four stories I’m calling mundane. A pretty weak crop, but at least it was not hard to get through because of all the obvious time travel and alien crap. Stay tuned for more mundanespotting….

My Played-out SF Fads, Let Me Show You Them...

2007-12-31T14:13:00.000-08:00

Okay, this is going to sound like a broken record to long time readers of this blog. Obviously some of this is covered in Geoff's speech on the right, not to mention elsewhere.

But it's always zany to see other folks reaching similar conclusions themselves... (From A.R.Yngve's "Notes Toward Becoming A Better Writer")

All science-fiction fads, when you look back at them, seem naive. They are invariably rooted in the wishful thinking and cultural anxieties of their time and audience. But they were popular because they offered a phony wish-fulfillment "solution" to real problems, or articulated an irrational anxiety.

1.
Real problem: The reader, though intelligent and educated, is physically puny and gets sand kicked in his face by stronger, dumber guys.
SF "Solution": Psi powers ("I may look weak on the outside, but I have hidden mental powers!").

2.
Real anxiety: Where are the aliens?
SF "Solution": There is intelligent life on Mars (despite zero evidence to prove it).

3.
Real problem: Space is enormously huge. Traveling to other stars would take hundreds or thousands of years.
SF "Solution": Faster-Than-Light space travel (Ask Star Trek fans how the warp drive works. Yes, really. Ask them.).

4.
Real anxiety: People who don't understand computers are scared of them, and fear losing their jobs to automation.
SF articulation of anxiety: Evil intelligent computers take over the world (despite zero evidence of this actually happening).

5.
Real anxiety: You're going to die.
SF "Solution": When the Singularity comes, we'll all be uploaded into a giant computer network and live forever as digitized souls.

It's not that I dislike using one's imagination -- far from it. But when SF readers and writers confuse "If Only" with "For Sure," you get embarrassments like "psi powers" and "the Singularity Movement"... or the "Super Adventure Fun Club" (created by a science-fiction writer). People start mistaking obvious fictions for future reality. Intellectual speculation becomes Manifest Destiny.

Continue reading here.

(compliments of sf signal)

Weekly Mundanista News Wrap-up

2007-12-30T20:18:00.000-08:00

I'm trying out a new feature here, let me know what you guys think:

-What!?! You mean my 30 horsepower diesel powered leaf blower isn't actually environmentally friendly? New studies are showing that 'greenwashing' marketing may be the biggest openly deceptive marketing practice since 'more doctors smoke lucky strikes than any other brand'. According to numbers by the Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Trade Commission, of the 1,018 claims made, only one was found not to be complete stinking horseshit. And the FTC isn't too jazzed. They're now introducing new guidelines to reduce the levels of disinformation in ads from 'insulting' to merely 'brazen'. And since the guidelines are voluntary, we know they'll be followed.

-2007 declared the most insane year for weather ever. Hottest year on record in the northern hemisphere, in the US nearly 8,000 new highs were recorded in the month of August alone, record droughts in Australia coincided with record rainfall in China and England, all records for melting ice in the arctic were broken, ice sheets and Greenland and permafrost in Alaska melted to the lowest in recorded history. I think that's the most time I've ever said record in one sentence.

-Loss of deep sea biodiversity in the ocean predicted to cause global eco-collapse.

-It looks like climate change was in fact partly responsible for the natural disasters that plagued Latin America this year. This comes after a report from Oxfam earlier this year, tying global warming to the 4x increase in natural disasters that are hurting the developing world the hardest.

-The U.S. Military, long-haired tree-huggers that they are, are now determined to be on the front lines of alternative energy, with only completely benevolent purposes in mind of course. Two stories broke, one with the military looking into space based solar power, and the other with the Air Force intending to begin the switch to synthetic fuels.

Blame and Collapse

2007-12-26T19:49:00.000-08:00

Free will is a funny thing. It's the one thing, above all else, that people want to have both ways. We want it to justify our choices when we do something right, and then we want it to go away when we screw up and need to blame something else. Jared Diamond pisses off a lot of folks for seemingly doing the exact opposite of this, and puncturing both myths. First, in Guns Germs, and Steel he shows in detail why most of the progress and material gain of Western societies, at the expense of indigenous peoples, had very little to do with ingenuity and very much to do with environment and geography. It wasn't the superiority of its genes, its culture, or its institutions. Then in Collapse, he showed how societies can't simply shift the blame when they make key mistakes. If Guns, Germs and Steel was an "antidote to racism", then Collapse was an antidote to blind determinism. So it's no surprise to find Diamond a subject of controversy in tuesday's New York Times, in an article describing a conference just held by the Amerind Foundation, entitled "Choices and Fates of Human Societies".

The conference was apparently organized around the premise that Diamond "washed over the details that make cultures unique to assemble a grand unified theory of history." And that the message of Diamond's work is that "the haves prosper because of happenstance beyond their control, while the have-nots are responsible for their own demise."

Whuh? Considering the kind of flack Diamond has taken over the years, calling him a colonialism apologist is a little like calling Milton Friedman a communist. In fact, the entire impetus for Collapse seems to have been to show how people in the developed world (such as present day Montana) are right now 'responsible for their own demise', and may perhaps take most of the planet with them. The entire argument was that the modern day developed world is no different than any societies that have come and gone before. We're not special, we're not any more favored to survive despite doing everything that caused earlier civilizations to fail. (In fact, the "haves" of today have even less of an excuse since we have the entire tapestry of history as our guide.) While some societies might start off with more material wealth than others (whether it be because of the access to domesticatable crops and livestock or living in latitudes that are best for growing.), ultimately all are equally subject to the same laws of ecology, economics, and thermodynamics. There is no magic wand. If you make decisions that don't take these laws into account, you will probably not be around long to complain about it.

Talk at the conference was of "instead of seeking overarching laws" to "'contextualize,' 'complexify,' 'relativize,' 'particularize' and even 'problematize,' a word that in their dialect was given an oddly positive spin". (It's too bad the post-modern essay generator disappeared. You could have a lot of fun with that.) Overall it struck the reporter as "less like a scientific meeting than a session of the Modern Language Association."

So, pretty sad. I think there's something to be said for Feynman's adage that reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

KSR on climate change

2007-12-26T15:07:00.000-08:00

Thanks to anonymous comment in posting below. Here's his talk online. He's trying to tell google people what they could do to help with their resources.

See YouTube Kim Stanley Robinson On Google and Climate Change (embedding disabled).

Begins with statement by Republican Senator John Warner

What we will do in the next two or three years will define our future

There are plans. Can anyone help us imagine it? This is about the future, it's science fiction, it's Mundane-SF, and it's important. Does anyone think that their latest story about ET or space travel emerging from a world that looks as it does now will seem a little odd with this starts to really hit the fan?

Just as one credit bubble has burst.....

2007-12-22T19:24:00.000-08:00

One in five Americans expects to have to go into debt this winter just to stay warm.

"Heating bills are rising at a time when utility companies across the country are broadening electronic payment options for customers, including allowing credit card payments for utility bills. Personal finance experts say paying for basic living expenses with credit cards makes sense only if you pay off the entire balance each month. They also warn that carrying a revolving balance encourages people to live beyond their means while racking up interest charges that can plunge families deeper into debt."

If one looks at the numbers, a new credit bubble might be forming, as heating bills aren't the only thing that's going up. In the "UK, FOOD prices are likely to carry on rising after a year when floods, drought, biofuels and a growing appetite for milk in China have taken their toll on our weekly grocery bills." And in America, it's been the most expensive year in food prices in nearly two decades.

So it's increasingly looking like we are gliding into a future where those in the developed world will now be forced to reach for their charge cards for such extravagances as keeping warm, keeping food on the table, and (lest we forget the housing bubble) a roof over our heads...

The Two Stories

2007-12-21T20:16:00.000-08:00

"I really do believe that the increasingly intense disasters that we're facing: wars, terrorists, blowback, climate change...flow from this very dangerous story in which humanity is trapped. It's that same old story that tells us we can make a terrible mistake, and when we can no longer stand the sight of it, when we can no longer bear to live inside it, we can escape. We can escape to someone else's land, to a gated city in the sky, a "celestial green zone". This is the story we've been repeating now for thousands of years. It's why capitalism, imperialism, and the major religions have had such a fruitful partnership. Some are choosing to fight this with different narratives that essentially say the same thing. Stories that promise salvation and utopia, but only after much more death and destruction.

"It's in indigenous communities that we find narratives that flow from an entirely different premise: The earth is finite. Life is a cycle. There is no escape hatch. No boat is coming. We will not be elevated to the sky."

-Naomi Klein, wrapping up her 2007 Shock Doctrine tour in Chiapas.

BLDGBLOG interviews Kim Stanley Robinson

2007-12-20T03:05:00.000-08:00

Go read it!

Some highlights:

Robinson: It’s a failure of imagination to think that climate change is going to be an escape from jail – and it’s a failure in a couple of ways.

For one thing, modern civilization, with six billion people on the planet, lives on the tip of a gigantic complex of prosthetic devices – and all those devices have to work. The crash scenario that people think of, in this case, as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed... People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario... [P]eople kind of shrug and think: a) there’s nothing we can do about it, or b) maybe the next generation will be clever enough to figure it out. So on we go...

It’s almost as if a science fiction writer’s job is to represent the unborn humanity that will inherit this place – you’re speaking from the future and for the future. And you try to speak for them by envisioning scenarios that show them either doing things better or doing things worse – but you’re also alerting the generations alive right now that these people have a voice in history.

The future needs to be taken into account by the current system, which regularly steals from it in order to pad our ridiculous current lifestyle.

His comments lead strikingly on from this morning's rant over at the Myron Ebell Climate -- (chronicling his part in the suicide of the human species). Oh, and for a bonus he's seen through the nonsense of economic growth:

...the whole thing comes out of a kind of spiral: if only you could consume more, you’d be happier. But it isn’t true... [You] fall down a rabbit hole, pursuing a destructive and high carbon-burn activity, when [you] could just go out for a walk, or plant a garden, or sit down at a table with a friend and drink some coffee and talk for an hour. All of these unboosted, straight-forward primate activities are actually intensely satisfying to the totality of the mind-body that we are.

So pay attention all you Science Fiction writers of the future. This is the future, so put aside your time machines, talking robots, and so forth, and tell us what it's really going to be like. BLDGBLOG already has a warning for you not to be seduced by liberation hydrology, but I don't think we need that yet at the rate we're going, do we?

BLDGBLOG really has a lot to offer. What it needs, though, is a random article button to make it easier to dip into all that goodness.

100 year letter again

2007-12-10T11:00:00.000-08:00

As mentioned here last month, the hundred year letter project is on-going at DeSmogBlog and has collected one contribution from a professional fiction writer so far: Pete McCormack.

Although it's a challenge that ought to be squarely at the centre of the Science Fiction department, no SF fans or writers seem to have been drawn to it. Now I'm sure if pressed most mainstream SF people would give me perfectly reasonable sounding excuses about why they don't want to be involved, but the very fact that they want to make an excuses is something that is a recent phenomenon. Certainly, a similar hundred year letter project would have been welcomed by SF enthusiasts back in 1967, or 1977, or maybe even in 1997.

But here, in 2007, the Science Fiction community has abandoned the future; or the future has abandoned it and gone on its merry way, following the laws of physics and thermodynamics with absolutely no consideration for our fantastic dreams. What a shame.

It's Mundane but not SF we know it

2007-11-30T06:17:00.000-08:00

I read the news today, oh boy:

Sarah Hall has won the 2006/7 John Llewellyn Rhys prize, which celebrates the best fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama from the UK and the Commonwealth, with her third novel, The Carhullan Army, a tough portrait of life in a near-future Britain after the oil runs out.

The novel presents itself as the statement of a detained woman prisoner, and follows a narrator, known only as "Sister", as she escapes her regimented life of tinned food and rationed electricity to join a separatist female commune on the Cumbrian moors.

According to Hall, one of the inspirations for such a timely book was "the flooding in Carlisle, where I live". In January 2005, when many of Cumbria's biggest towns were devastated, "you didn't have to imagine [the breakdown of society] any more".

Hall, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2002 for her second novel, The Electric Michaelangelo, did not feel duty-bound to engage with the contemporary issues - climate change, fanaticism - that sit at the core of The Carhullan Army. Rather, she said, they were impossible to ignore. "You can't get away from all this stuff on the news. As a writer I feel like a tuning fork - you're picking up vibrations of things going on around you. You can't be impervious. But the duty of a writer is to write a good story, a f--ing good story"

The chair of the judges, Suzi Feay, hailed the strength of all the entries on the shortlist, calling them the books that "stuck out" amid the blur of the 120 books the judges considered. "We could remember even the weather in the shortlisted entries," she said. The shortlist revealed the strength of women's fiction - "for a while we thought we were judging the Orange prize".

She praised the courage and importance of the winning novel. "Sarah Hall's fierce, uncomfortable story of a radical dissident group holed up in the far north after the total breakdown of society seemed to all the judges to be the book that tackled the most urgent and alarming questions of today," she said. "The quality of The Carhullan Army was simply unignorable. We need writers with Hall's humanity and insight."

This is exactly what I've warning you about, boys and girls. Mainstream literature is doing an end-run around the outside of SF to connect with the real future of life as we will come to know it. Clearly the world is ready for this kind of thing, even if most SF writers are incapable of such imagination. What it is going to do is leave SF behind playing with its 1950's dated tropes of space ships and little green men like plastic children's toys stuck in a time-loop, never able to move forward beyond worn-out dreams we once had.

Without a tactical embracing of Mundane-SF, the genre will be dead within 30 years, cut-off like many other forms of literature, because it remained entrapped within its short-list of false tropes that permanently blinded it from the real story.

So it goes.

Everyone loves Amory

2007-11-28T04:49:00.000-08:00

It's an old joke. (I'm a mathematician, by the way.)

An engineer, a physicist, a mathematician, and an economist are spending the night in a motel. After they have all gone to sleep, a fire starts out in the engineer's wastepaper basket. He wakes up, fills a bucket with water, and douses the fire. He creates a big mess on the carpet, but at least solves the problem.

Not too long afterwards, the physicist's wastepaper basket catches fire. He wakes up, whips out his calculator, and determines the precise amount of water needed to extinguish the blaze. He fills the water glass with that exact amount; as the last drop lands, the fire is extinguished.

A bit later, a fire breaks out in the mathematician's wastepaper basket. He wakes up, sees both a bucket and sink, and then goes back to sleep content that the solution is trivial.

When the economist is woken by the smell of burning, he kicks over the wastepaper basket because he is assured that if no one is prepared to make any money out of saving the motel from the flames, then it is better for everyone to see it destroyed.

Recently one of our Mundane-SF contributors justified the unchallenging optimism presented in his story in the following way:

The mode of travel did bug me while writing the story; given a choice between assuming some new magic to keep planes flying in the sky and assuming we retreat to slower/older modes of travel, I decided to go with the first, rather than the second option. The basic rationale (ignoring the usual one of wishful thinking) was this: [1] supply always meets demand, and [2] the demand seems to be for faster and faster modes of travel. With the recent steady drumbeat of good news on energy-efficient transport, perhaps the first option is not too unrealistic.

Extra points for mentioning it; normally something so consistent with prevailing wisdom is not even held up for question.

I, personally, question it. I question it profoundly on the basis that this type of rationale is just an observation which too often masquerades as a natural law immunized from criticism.

In my experience, there are numerous things which are demanded, but which the market won't supply. It's pointless to go into details because the rationale that "supply always meets demand" is the front-line of an interlocking set of fall-back positions. Were I to exhibit a case where supply did not always meet demand -- and thus falsified the claim -- the response would be a combination of the following excuses:

Well, what you're demanding is not realistic.

What you're demanding is a niche product; nobody else wants it, and the market quite rightly services the majority.

You're being impatient. It'll happen in the future once the investment cycle is complete, and it'll phase in just in time.

If you think you've got a very good case, why don't you set up your own company and make lots of money manufacturing and selling your idea.

Theoretically, these claims are very difficult to overturn with any evidence, therefore they're weak rather than strong. Newton's law of gravity is strong because it would be falsified as soon as you showed two masses which did not attract one another according to his equation. The final position above, which forms half the definition of the word free in the phrase "Free Market" is unfalsifiable because it boils down to the tautology:

If someone else doesn't do it for you, then you have to do it yourself.

I mean, really, we have to work on a level above these petty moral truisms that bog down any progress.

What's this got to do with Amory Lovins?

Lovins is a dude who set up his own institute, consults for American auto makers, and writes books, such as Winning the Oil Endgame.

Most people oppose my position that we are heading over a cheap energy cliff where life will get a whole lot more interesting, with the world expanding to its proper size, the exurbs being evacuated, and politicians no longer able to solve problems by starting wars. It's a matter of faith that life will continue as-is with ever-longer daily commutes to jobs that are by and large pointless, that traffic jams will get worse, and that Black Friday will remain the cultural highlight of the year.

Such people who do like the world as it is, and disagree with my countervailing choice of predictions (predictions are so all over the place you can take your pick), don't usually have the information to argue, and just say it's wrong, because it is. Look, they say, throughout all of our history each generation has managed to overcome the challenges presented to it. Your father was ugly too, and yet he managed to find a woman to get married. His father the same. And so on and so forth. In fact if you look down any timeline of life, there's always an appearance of triumph over adversity, because those that have failed and died out are not properly represented. Our history necessarily presents a false case for optimism. More representative cases emerge from archeology. You might not like the evidence that there have been die-offs of civilizations from the pinnacle of their achievement, but you have to know about them before you can claim it's not relevant.

I often wind up doing the research for lazy people who know they're right, but don't know why. If you don't want to download and read the book (fully peer reviewed with accurate numbers about how the free market is going wean the United States down to zero oil use by 2050 in the absence of government intervention), you can watch or listen to his lectures which tell you all the information.

Quick summary: It's all done using safe and ultra-light carbon-fibre car bodies which save energy six-fold and ratchet up efficiency because lighter cars mean lighter engines, which means even lighter cars to carry them.

Anyways, those who doubt me can go on and watch these streams and doubt me even more. I don't need to state the case. Save to point out that I scratch a living in the CAM toolmaker industry writing software for cutting molds, and have attended Euromold for about a decade (I'll be there again this week), and it's all news to me. Simple things such as carbon-fibre kayak paddles still cost an absolute fortune. I'll believe in this material once I start seeing it in my everyday life.

Unlike most technologists, Amory Lovins makes actual predictions based on rigorously applying orthodox market economics. This is good. It means his claims are falsifiable, and so they embody information. If the evidence in the next 5 years goes against it, we can legitimately demand a more sophisticated account for the applicability of market economics than that it always supplies.

GW and Neal Asher's Grapes of Wrath

2007-11-25T19:39:00.000-08:00

So, Oxfam has a new study showing that, as a direct result of greenhouse gas emissions, natural disasters have increased four-fold in the last two decades:

The world suffered about 120 natural disasters per year in the early 1980s, which compared with the current figure of about 500 per year, according to the report.

And worse...

...the number of people affected by extreme natural disasters, meanwhile, has surged by almost 70 percent, from 174 million a year between 1985 to 1994, to 254 million people a year between 1995 to 2004, Oxfam said.

Floods and wind-storms have increased from 60 events in 1980 to 240 last year, with flooding itself up six-fold.

But the number of geothermal events, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, has barely changed.

And still worse, the hardest hit are going to be the poorest nations.

So okay, that sounds bad. But, as I discovered just today, Neal Asher has already pointed out the good news. As he posted back in September:

Global warming, we are told, is a bad thing, yet I cannot help but notice, that with the return of a few warm years, like we had in the 40s, in the medieval warm period, in Roman times, during the Holocene Maximum, certain things that are now occurring: farmers being able to keep their livestock grazing throughout the winter, massive plankton blooms off Cornwall being fed upon by a record number of basking sharks, it maybe becoming possible for us to grow decent wine grapes in Britain, like the Romans did, you know, when it was warmer than it is now.

So, the good news is that we in the developed world might be too drunk on all that awesome new wine that we can now grow to notice that the third world will probably be, you know, genuinely fucked. Nice work, Neal. Not everyone can have their very own 'series of tubes' moment.

The 100 Year Letter Project

2007-11-19T17:40:00.000-08:00

From DeSmogBlog, comes the 100 Year Letter Project:

We asked friends of DeSmogBlog to write a letter to their great, great grandchildren about their vision and hopes for their world in 100 years, in the context of global warming. Will we all be underwater? In outer space? Over time, we'll be adding more letters to this list.

Clearly these are all going to be works of Science Fiction in their own right. When more of them have been published I will analyse the results to see how many of them are characterized as Mundane-SF. This will be a test of how popular this sub-genre is outside of our little ghetto.

The Whale Tale

2007-11-18T04:41:00.000-08:00

Meanwhile, in an ocean far far away, the most magnificent animals on the planet are preparing to die. Greenpeace has attached satellite tracking devices so we can watch it as it happens.

We also need tracking devices on the Japanese whaling ships as well. Oddly, by international law designed to automatically avoid collisions, there is a system.

To prove there is no shame, the hunt is classified as scientific, which means it gets subsidized by the Government. The "science" is equivalent to logging the Amazon rain forest and hiring a couple of kids to count some of the tree-rings to determine the average age of the trees. In other words, it's self-invalidating.

After that, it's time to kill all the sharks.

Science Fiction, UN feature

2007-11-18T03:57:00.000-08:00

I divide my time between a number of thankless tasks -- for which I have by definition not been thanked -- such as a Web 2.0 webpage for the United Nations.

Consequently, I know where to look when I hear odd things on the news; stuff which for most people washes straight down the memory hole into a pit known as "gut feeling" where it is largely responsible for the fact that elections seem to consistently deliver the worst of all worlds. We are not abstract perfect intelligences. We are thinking animals that, like the Microsoft Operating System, are riddled with weaknesses which can be systematically exploited by evil virus writers.

Anyways, that's a different matter. On 17 November 2007 - The Secretary-General said:

I come to you humbled after seeing some of the most precious treasures of our planet -- treasures that are being threatened by humanity's own hand... In Antarctica, the message was chillingly simple: the continent's glaciers are melting... I was told that if large quantities of Antarctica's ice were to melt, sea levels could rise catastrophically... If the IPCC's most severe projection comes true, much of the Amazon rainforest will transform into savannah. In Punta Arenas, Chile, near the centre of the famous ozone hole in the earth's atmosphere, children wore protective clothing against ultraviolet radiation. There are days when parents don't let them play outside, or even go to school.

These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie. But they are even more terrifying, because they are real.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Slowing -- and reversing -- these threats are the defining challenge of our age. The world looks to our climate brain trust to educate, inform and guide us.

He actually means a Mundane-SF movie, because in a Sci-Fi movie none of this would be frightening at all because space tourism would have funded our emigration to Mars, and thence the stars, and aliens would have given us nanotechnology to rebuild the glaciers crystal by crystal.

This isn't the first time science fiction has been referred to in vain by a Secretary-General. At the previous annual Climate Change conference on 15 November 2006, Kofi Annan said:

All of us in this hall are devoted to the betterment of the human condition... That vision, which has always faced long odds, is now being placed in deeper jeopardy by climate change... Climate change is not just an environmental issue, as too many people still believe. It is an all-encompassing threat...

This is not science fiction. These are plausible scenarios, based on clear and rigorous scientific modelling. A few diehard sceptics continue to deny global warming is taking place and trying to sow doubt. They should be seen for what they are: out of step, out of arguments and out of time. In fact, the scientific consensus is becoming not only more complete, but also more alarming. Many scientists long known for their caution are now saying that global warming trends are perilously close to a point of no return.

It's not only Climate Change scenarios which are perceived to be emerging from Science Fiction into reality (quite unfairly, since such realistic stories don't get written and don't get published), there are other topics.

Secretary-General, 10 March 2005:

Nuclear terrorism is still often treated as science fiction. I wish it were. But unfortunately we live in a world of excess hazardous materials and abundant technological know-how, in which some terrorists clearly state their intention to inflict catastrophic casualties.

The UN senior Influenza Coordinator, 10 July 2006:

Bird flu is "not science fiction, but a very real and dangerous threat that was not restricted to H5N1 as there are a variety of pathogens stemming from the animal kingdom that can threaten human security."

Joy Kennedy of the Ecumenical Team, 19 March 2002

[The idea] that a free market system would effectively address society's woes was pure science fiction.

Press Release, 1 March 2002

Despite the enormous attention the subject had received, the ethical issues remained obscure and misunderstood due, in large part, to the fact that human cloning occupied a pre-eminent place in the annals of science fiction and the popular media.

Fighting terrorism through disarmament:

The current anthrax attacks in the United States have made the world aware that biological weapons are horribly real, not just science fiction. Yet these attacks are just the "tip of the iceberg" in terms of the potential deadly power of bio-terror.

Post 9/11 Missile threats and responses, 3 October 2002:

At the moment, there is a tendency for governments to rely on military force for defence and if that fails to keep piling on the force and pouring in more money and technology to try to plug the vulnerabilities. By contrast, some governments apply completely different standards for political defence and security measures such as multilateral treaties and the building of cooperative security regimes. In the latter, any weakness in compliance or verification is treated as proof of vulnerability and justification for bailing out, rather than reason for improving the implementation.

Such approaches are short-sighted, for a perfect force field that can repel all attacks exists nowhere but in science fiction, and the quest for perfect security based on military and technological dominance will merely give rise to new kinds of threats.

Millenium Report of the Secretary-General:

Indeed, when the United Nations was founded... [t]he planet hosted a total population of fewer than 2.5 billion, compared to 6 billion today. Trade barriers were high, trade flows minuscule and capital controls firmly in place. Most big companies operated within a single country and produced for their home market. The cost of transoceanic telephone calls was prohibitive for the average person and limited even business use to exceptional circumstances. The annual output of steel was a prized symbol of national economic prowess. The world’s first computer had just been constructed; it filled a large room, bristled with 18,000 electron tubes and half a million solder joints, and had to be physically rewired for each new task. Ecology was a subject confined to the study of biology, and references to cyberspace would not have been found even in science fiction.

2 February 2004:

A senior Serbian government official had described the Chief Prosecutor’s aspersions that Karadzic was in Belgrade as "science fiction"

Judge Yankov of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, 9 December 2002:

I am pleased to have this opportunity also, in submitting this statement, to say on a personal note, that this commemorative meeting is to me an important point in my professional career. I am among these young veterans that the President of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Seas referred to, who started in 1967 in this place with the initial discussions in the First Committee of the General Assembly on a very long-worded agenda item entitled "The exploration and exploitation of the seabed and the ocean floor and the subsoil thereof beyond the limits of national jurisdiction for peaceful purposes". That was the title of the statement made by the late Ambassador Arvid Pardo. As far as I know, his statement set a precedent in the practice of the General Assembly, because it covered the entire day and appeared in the verbatim records of both the morning and afternoon meetings. Most of the representatives were taken by surprise and considered the topic to be in the realm of science fiction. It evolved from there and went to an ad hoc committee to study this problem with the very long title. I had the opportunity, and perhaps a real chance in my career, to be Vice-Chairman of the Legal Subcommittee of the Committee on the Seabed. From 1968 until the very last day of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea in Montego Bay, I served as Chairman of the Third Committee, whose mandate was the protection and preservation of the marine environment, the regime of marine scientific research and the development and transfer of marine technology. There may be an emotional or nostalgic touch to what I have said but this was the most important, and perhaps the greatest, period of my professional activities.

And I'm told this UN stuff is boring-- especially for the majority of people who can't be bothered to look around for more than two minutes and prefer to read spy thrillers where the main character succeeds in cracking the case by being capable of looking for secrets in important documents for more than two minutes. You'd like to think that people who seek to write such fiction would be similarly disposed, but apparently not. Did you know that next year will be the International Year of Sanitation?

Didn't think so.

Don't waste your time on this blog

2007-11-15T08:29:00.000-08:00

Every so often someone points me to something they think I'll like. Today it was this blog post about Liberation Hydrology.

[T]he main problem I have with using maps... [to show Climate Change is that they] are actually so evocative, and so imaginatively stimulating, that it's hard not to get at least a tiny thrill at the idea that you might get to see these things happen.

Nothing against Miami, but all of south Florida under several meters of water? With Cape Canaveral lost under a subtropical lagoon and St. Petersburg an archipelago?

The problem, it seems, is that climate change scientists, in describing these unearthly terrestrial reorganizations, are science fictionalizing, so to speak, our everyday existence. The implicit, if inadvertant, message here seems to be: hey, south Floridians, and all you who are bored of the world today, sick of all the parking lots and the 7-11s, tired of watching Cops, tired of applying to colleges you don't really want to go to, tired of credit card debt and bad marriages, don't worry.

This will all be underwater soon.

It could be called liberation hydrology.

Climate change becomes an adventure – the becoming-science-fiction of everyday life.

Then comes the down-side...

Instead, it would seem, you have to point out quality of life issues: you might starve to death, for instance, as organized agriculture and food distribution chains are interrupted. Malnourished, your teeth will fall out and your hair will grow thin. You may be living in a refugee camp, with neither privacy nor close friends nor personal safety. The governments of the world may have collapsed, overwhelmed by the logistical burden of displaced populations and by the loss of the world's economic centers, like NY, London, and Shanghai; there will thus be no police; you might be physically assaulted on a regular basis. There will be rats, roaches, and rivers of human sewage – followed closely by disease, infection, infant mortality, and premature death. And you won't just be able to drive away, leaving the catastrophe behind – because the roads will be potholed, without a government to fix them, and your car will probably have been stolen, anyway. Clean water will be a luxury; you'll be drinking radiator water out of abandoned pick-up trucks, rusting on the sides of highways outside St. Louis.

Aside from being much better written, BLDG|BLOG is full of gorgeous images every month.

I want it in the blogroll along with the Futurismic blog so people can click through to the good stuff. But someone won't let me have the password.

Oh these are the dogs my friends

2007-11-15T03:10:00.000-08:00

Surfing around Category:Military robots came up with the above object. At first you are impressed, until it starts to look like two back ends of a pantomime horse dancing around like a blind thing to the sound of a whining tiny chainsaw. The comments on the video seem to bear me out.

Let's face it, it's a bit crap.

Often that's the reason for keeping military technology top secret these days-- so that we believe it's good.

The majority of the Military robots are flying drones. Obviously staying up in the air is much less of a challenge than interacting with something solid. However, all they can do is look around, find targets, and bomb them. Then the news gets bombed with lies about how legitimate targets were present, and how only legitimate targets were killed. Job's a good 'un.

I wish reporters would keep track of official sources properly, because if you pay close attention to the flow of information you realize that the definition of an indiscriminate attack is that the video-game teenagers on the warships don't have any idea many people they have killed-- until someone pokes through the rubble and counts the bodies. Once the number is known, they can all be declared guilty. Then, before anyone gets too interested, they move on to another remote control strike somewhere else in the world aimed at the ghost.

It's just not good enough. I am tired of this disconnect between the fantasy of what the engineers and war-makers convince the press they can achieve, and what's actually going on. The developments are heading in a different direction from the way people are used to making it up.

It's worth paying close attention and having a non-credulous discussion about what's good and what's not, because once robots begin to work and get out into the environment, they will change the world completely. The only question that matters is what type of robot is going to go mainstream first. Will it be a small device that can assassinate, or a slow vehicle driver? Will it be something that can do all the housework including cleaning the ceiling, or will it be street litter-picker, sorter and recycler? Will it be the size of a donkey, a car, or a honey bee?

This change to the age of the robots -- if it happens -- will be bigger than the internet, and must happen before anything close to AI gets invented. Science Fiction missed out on the internet, and it's missing out on stories about the age of robots for the same reason. The reason being that story-tellers consistently leap straight onto the trope of thinking computers (AI), because it gives them an extra character for free. Fiction is supposed to be about Characters, you see. That's how we are taught to write. The urge to anthropomorphise is totally irresistable.

Unfortunately, always, necessarily, this causes the SF author to gloss over the all intermediate technologies, such as effective (but dumb) robots that will undeniably change the world completely. AI is like a mile-deep bear-pit which SF writers routinely fall into, followed by an enjoyable experience of the wind swishing past the ears till the end of the story. On the other side of this hole lies an entire continent of unexplored territory that SF writers have rarely been into.

We will not have the world as it is now, but with AI. This fully played-out and false scenario is specifically excluded from Mundane-SF for this reason.

Meanwhile, here is a message of hope:

I can report that I had the honour of meeting Reverend Billy while he was on tour in England four years ago. I took part in a very modest retail intervention. The experience blew my mind. I recommend that everybody participates in one.

The Panasonic Professor

2007-11-12T13:51:00.000-08:00

Rodney Brooks, Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT, called his talk at the Singularity Summit:

The Singularity: A Period Not An Event

He began:

I haven't been involved in the Singularity Institute before, so I thought I'd check and see exactly what is meant by "The Singularity". The "Singularity" as defined by the Singularity Institute is:

The technological creation of a smarter than human intelligence.

and the questions are whether this will lead to opportunities and risks.

Now predicting the future is sometimes hard.

He then made some points about what the age of flight might have looked like to the Parisians in 1783 on seeing the first hot air balloon drift over their city.

He continued:

As I was looking through quotes about the future, I realized we didn't know how good we had it when Dan Quail was Vice President.

The future's here, maybe, just not everyone's got it. And every research lab in the world now uses this slogan: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." -- and we're the ones who are going to invent it.

I think Arthur C. Clarke had it right when he said, "When it comes to technology, most people over-estimate it in the short term, but under-estimate it in the long-term."

The way we think about the future is often through Hollywood. But Hollywood has a very specific way of talking about the future... [which is to] take the world exactly as it is, and then we add one thing...

My point is that when an Artificial General Intelligence appears, the world is going to be a very different place than it is today. So it's not today's world and add in this really super-intelligent being; it's the world that's going to change over time. And I think, by the way, we will be long gone, but in a positive way.

So the world is going different before we have these General Intelligences. Notice I said "when", not "if".

The rest of the talk got into the history and development of robotics over the past 25 years at the MIT labs. Happily for me he covered the spectacular failure anyone has made towards cracking the obvious problem of human vision.

Towards the end of the talk he ran through a series of scenarios about how artificial intelligences could emerge from things like home robots looking after us, or brain implants developed onwards from cochlea implants which already exist.

In these proposed scenes he makes the point that we will be different from the way we are now by the time the Singularity happens. It might be that there is no us and them at the precise turning point, so we might not notice.

In the context of the historical observation (not necessarily proven) that war-making is what really drives technology along, I picked up on the final question at the end of the speech. After talking about the company he founded called I Robot which has supplied products to all sectors of society including the military, there was the following exchange:

Professor Panasonic: There were reports that the PackBots been equiped with machine guns. That's not true. None of the PackBots have had machine guns. The Talon from Foster-Miller has had a weapon on it, all with safety circuit and a human in the loop. I think it's an interesting question. When we want to allow robots to have independent targeting authority, I think now is the time to act. There is a bunch of ethics conferences coming up in the next year. I think it's time to put this into the Geneva Conventions -- some governments do go along with the Geneva Conventions -- and I think it's time to think about that.

Question: You said, "Some governments" follow the Geneva Conventions, but apparently not the one you've done some work for. Is it a good idea to be developing AI in robots for the US Government? In my mind that could lead to some of the worst nightmare scenarios.

Professor Panasonic: That's in a sense nothing to do with AI. That's a question which has faced scientists since the time of Da Vinci, who was completely funded by doing military work for his patrons. So that's an issue which scientists have had to deal with for hundreds of years independent of the AI question. And I think it's the responsibility of scientists to worry about controls and how things are used, and I think that the Geneva Conventions have been a good way of doing it. We've seen very little biological weaponry appear because it was banned by the Geneva Conventions. I think it has been successful. There are perturbations. Governments do change. Governments can change. People can change the Governments. And I think it's going to be an ongoing question for a long time. But I don't think it's AI specific. I think I'm finished, sorry.

Well... What a sterling demonstration of back-peddling, as well as the principle that it's impossible to get someone to understand something when their income depends on their not understanding it.

The real question is what's the difference between robots wandering around with weapons, and a minefield? Since the problem with dumb minefields is that they are a gift that keeps on killing, maybe it's the high-tech nature of robots that makes them better. We know how good software is, don't we, boys and girls, especially when it gets contracted out to the private sector. You don't think our lives count more than our votes, do you? The guys who gave us the Enforcement Droid Series 209 in that movie in 1987 probably didn't go far enough, with what may be coming down the pipeline.

I expect my SF writers to go to places where Professors of Robotics fear to tread. The people at those ethics conferences he speaks of are going to be writing Mundane-SF. Probably without sufficient readability or characterization. But it's all there for the picking if anyone bothers to find it on the internet for free.

Anyways, that's just a little side issue of mine. It's always good to have a bit of passion about something, such as a healthy hatred for things likely to kill you and your fellow human beings.

What was really important was the Professor's statement that when (his "when", my "if") the Singularity happens, it will already be quite a different world to the way it is now. My observation of attempts to write about the Singularity is it's a speculation too far. It leaps over so much that you tend to see stories about a world that's exactly the same as it is today, but with this one thing different.

If Mundane-SF is about anything, it's about filling in the gigantic gaps relating to the interesting, likely, and possible scenarios in future history as it may occur. Conventional SF has shown itself wholly unwilling to go there. At its core, Mundane-SF is about originality. The truth is stranger than fiction, so why not make a little bit of room for the truth to come in and visit. Show it around. Get used to it. Don't scare it away with all your bright lights and noisy trope-ic nonsense.

Stories which feature thinking computers are almost always unoriginal and generally unenlightened by the scads of changes that have got to happen to us before the Singularity. Whether it exists or not is debatable, but many more ought to be able to see that it's not producing satisfying SF. It's like going straight for the candy instead of saving your appetite for a proper meal.

This trope has got to go.

P.S. Picture at top is of three Goliath tracked mines, manufactured in 1942 to carry up to 100kg of high explosives each. Imagine how much more advanced we can make these things 65 years later.

Astonished at the workload

2007-11-08T01:59:00.000-08:00

You may came to this blog because of the link in the Mundane-SF Interzone issue rejection notice. We're reaching that stage now. Here are some notes.

First, a note about karma. I am a writer too. By the end of this episode I calculate that I will have sent out about the same number of rejection notices as I have received for my efforts over the years. This means I will have achieved a balance. Geoff, who has read more than his fair share of submissions, will also be sending rejections. Since he has been selling fiction for years, one can only guess how bad his karma is becoming.

For some stories I've had time to leave comments in the rejection notice. Please don't take them seriously. If they help, use them; if they don't, ignore them. I have no idea who each of you are or what you respond to. Email is a very problematic medium, and the reactions are often unpredictable and sometimes undesired.

I should make clear that the slush pile for this Mundane-SF issue has never been seen by the Interzone. If you think your story is good and we've missed it, didn't like or get the point, or you've substantially reworked it having found my comments useful (God forbid), you might like to know that their Interzone.November2007 e-submission system is currently open.

I don't know how pleased this makes the reader Jetse de Vries for my bringing this to everyone's attention, but he doesn't know where I live. My admiration for what he's doing is immense -- even though he's rejected four stories of mine over the past couple of years. Now I can't send any more to Interzone because of conflicts of interest from working on this guest issue. Not that it'll make a blind bit of difference.

(If you're interested in a story I actually have sold (after it got recalled by the editor who had rejected it), look here. I am an Ideas person, rather than a Very Good At Writing person. This was one of those stunning ideas you get only once a decade which, in the hands of a real SF writer, would have got a Hugo and blah blah blah. It's not Mundane-SF because it revolves around some fictional science. It is licensed under the real creative commons license (derivative works and for profit allowed), unlike the work of certain internet inactivists I could mention.)

Anyways, moving swiftly on from that little not-necessarily-welcome editorial interlude, it's worth noting that there's another outlet for Mundane-SF (ie scientifically consistent and therefore more relevent to Life, the Universe, and Everything fiction than not) called Futurismic. They also run a far better blog than this one. Go support them.

It goes without saying that you can get more details from Ralan.com to build up your story rejection karma, and you can simulate the fun of being submissions editor by scoring by aiming for the Most Productive Critter award every week for six months.

Finally, here's an example of all the work I'm not doing. I'm self-employed so I can freely spend days and days and days at this game and still not keep up.

Ah, but think about the lessons learned. There's always, always going to be that, if it doesn't kill you.

mundane.py now closed for business

2007-10-31T16:43:00.000-07:00

Friends, it is with great relief that the www.freesteel.co.uk/cgi-bin/mundane.py webservice is now closed. Over the past few months it has swept up hundreds of submissions with very little problems (other than a few #'s in the text now and then when people used funny characters). I have now typed the following three lines in the requisite place:


  print "Status: 301 Moved Permanently"
  print "Location: http://mundane-sf.blogspot.com"
  sys.exit()

For anyone who's late, I recommend a quick trip over to ralan.com to find another place to drop off your work. It's finally time to put a lid on this collection point.

If you need to make a comment, the best place to do it is through this blog because it's public enough that I can be shamed into monitoring it. The email mundanesf@gmail.com is still there (and is the reply-to for all rejection notices), but it doesn't get checked as frequently as it should be.

So, that's it, aside from the backlog and my slower than expected reading speed. The writing so far seems pretty literate, which means I must read to the end of most of them. The most common niggle is that stories are not ambitious enough. It seems harder than expected for people to break away from every-day concerns and current affairs into the open territory I am looking for.

Rejections ought to start finding their way through the system during next week as we whittle it down. Thank you for your patience. Hopefully I'll have something to say on many of them. I am a writer too and I have always been deeply infuriated by empty form rejection letters over the years. Now that I have experienced the other side of the equation, I see why it happens, even with the best of intentions.

I've got two reasons for it so far. The first is the means of selection. If you scan through the submissions looking for the two or three winners you can use in the next issue, that doesn't mean you necessarily have anything to say for the ones which have fallen out. Even if you did have a comment, you've probably forgotten it by the time things get sent.

The second reason is that good writing takes a lot of time. Editors know that inevitably their rejection letters are going to be badly written; they don't have time to draft and redraft it; these artistic judgment thoughts can be pretty hard to put into words. This is unfortunate when writers (like myself) are going to hang on every word. Don't do that. Join critters.org for genuine feedback.

Hmm... I wonder if I should put a standard disclaimer at the bottom of each email, like you get from people in corporations telling you that you will be sued if you use any of the information against their boss's financial interests.

Last day now

2007-10-30T17:12:00.000-07:00

It's October 31 in Liverpool where I live. I have foolishly promised to read everything submitted in this final week in time to go to Novacon. Geoff has been doing a sterling job keeping on top of it until now. I am concerned I have let myself in for a mad rush at the end as all the writers polish their work until the last minute before sending it in.

I am not very fast reading, but try to read to the end of most of stories, so it's taking a lot of time. Every story is a different world, and sometimes it's difficult to forget the world of one when I move on to the next. If I lose my focus I have to start again from the top when I realize that in this world the theme is over-population, because in the previous world everyone had been wiped out by a virus.

We're not sending out rejections till next week when we've had a chance to review each other's opinions. I haven't got a way of automating it. I have included some notes to send back to the authors in the comments. Maybe they'll make sense, maybe they won't when I paste them into the emails. Who knows? It's my first time.

The site will be going down sometime during tomorrow night. There might be a delay as I work out how to do the http# redirect codes, but hopefully nothing gets lost.

11 days left

2007-10-20T12:41:00.000-07:00

Mundane-SF submission (Interzone issue) webpage closes on midnight 31 October. If you miss that, you have to submit to Interzone where your story will be considered for ALL the other issues except this one.

Familiar malaise at Skepticality

2007-10-20T11:46:00.000-07:00

Listen to this or read this. Op-ed and interview with Daniel Loxton. It all sounds so familiar:

In the summer of 2006, Martin Rundkvist (one of the editors of the Swedish skeptics magazine Folkvett) tackled this question in his blog. The entry’s title, "Stuffy Inquirer," captured his thesis: the Skeptical Inquirer "appears to be written by old men for old men." According to Rundkvist, "there’s something lacking" in both the
tone and the content. (Personally, I disagree — I love the Skeptical Inquirer.) He wrote, "A lot of the articles in S.I. seem to be about hoaxes and 'mysteries' current when I was a kid. Uri Geller is still very much an ongoing concern in S.I. And in the current issue they discuss Central American crystal skulls again!"

...

All this raises the question: what is the skeptical movement for? What are we trying to accomplish, exactly?

...

Regarding science literacy, we all know the stakes — yet, can we remind ourselves too often? In Sagan's (still spine-tingling) articulation,

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements ... profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.

That really says it all. The kids in schools today (and the adults reading magazines) are called upon to navigate unimaginably vast challenges, in which millions (even billions) of lives hang in the balance. Climate change, peak oil production, dwindling water supplies, the human population peak, unprecedented demographic trends, soaring antibiotic resistance in disease organisms, the AIDS-driven crippling of entire nations — my children will see all of it, and they’ll have tough choices to make. Those problems are all science problems, and every citizen desperately needs the factual background and cognitive tools required to help solve them.

Many skeptics, like Sagan, are explicit that this is the real point of what we do. CSICOP Fellow Bill Nye recently suggested that science advocacy "wouldn’t matter if we didn’t have global heating, if the world weren’t going to end for many, many humans unless we take a scientifically literate view, and take scientifically informed steps to save the planet for our own species."

It’s hard to argue with that. The stakes really are that high; science literacy and critical thinking, of the types promoted by skeptics, are that important.

Framing skeptical activism in terms of global challenges and vast human consequences certainly helps communicate the importance of our project. As I’ve often said myself, to family, to friends, or to the press, "If you can save a grieving widow from being taken advantage of by a callous con-man, that’s a good in itself. But really, the stakes are bigger than that. Really, it’s about the global science and technology issues facing our culture..."

Right. So, can anyone out there explain what genre of fiction is going to serve the need for preparing us for the actual future? Or is the only criterion that ever matters is that the book just makes you feel good and doesn't challenge you in any way about the inevitable changes in your life that is going to happen?

Why do Science Fiction writers make stuff up

2007-10-12T04:55:00.000-07:00

when they can just look at the Science?

Last February there was a TV program called Five Ways To Save The World, which was profoundly depressing.

There's probably a feedback loop here because if you don't take the information from scientists, you won't believe that the world needs saving, and so their speculatory plans with all their boring numbers and calculations on what would actually need to be done to make a difference -- rather than to establish a plot point -- seem ridiculous.

If I see another carbon sequestration plan in any SF story that is not on the scale one of these proposals, I shall scream. Again. Science Fiction stories should not pale into insignificance in comparison to an equivalent Science story. They should stand up for themselves.

I leave you with part of the transcript. The BBC site has lots of pictures which are worth surfing.

Ian Curtis: November 2006, NASA are playing host to the world’s top scientists. They’re meeting in California to put forward radical solutions to the greatest threat humanity has ever faced – global warming. All believe we may not reduce carbon emissions by enough in time to stop the devastating effects of climate change.

Prof John Latham: We’re approaching a situation that could be absolutely catastrophic...

Stephen Salter: And we need an emergency panic button to stop the damage that it is doing.

Ian: So dramatic plans are now under serious discussion to engineer the world before it’s too late, and many of those whose livelihoods are at risk say it is time to listen.

...

Paul Crutzen: We cannot wait another generation doing what we are doing now, it will really get out of hand.

Ian: The first of five ways to save the world is the most expensive and ambitious. It’s aim? To cut the amount of sunshine which hits the earth.

For as long as the sun has been shining, man has been sheltering from it using sunshades of one sort or another to protect himself. Imagine if you could do this for the whole world. One man thinks he can do just that, by putting a giant sunshade consisting of 16 trillion glass disks a million miles from the earth, diverting the sun’s rays. British born astronomer, Roger Angel, has turned his attentions from looking out at space to looking back at the crisis here on planet earth.

Roger Angel: The issue of our own planet has become so acute, when I’m feeling depressed, I tell my astronomer friends that they’re like the band playing on the Titanic, like this is... you know, so I’m worried about the ship going down [laughs] now. The last thing we want to do is wait until we know that we’re in deep trouble.

Ian: Roger Angel is one of the world’s foremost minds on glass optics. He’s responsible for designing the mirrors on telescopes, like the large binocular telescope here in Arizona USA, the world’s most powerful. He believes glass could be the answer to solving global warming...

Roger Angel: The same laws of optics and mechanics that hold for these enormous mirrors of 20 tonnes, hold for the one gram optics that will make each piece of the sunshade.

Ian: Roger Angel has calculated that he would need to divert only 2% of the sun’s rays to reduce global warming. But even that would require a sunshade an incredible 100,000 kilometres wide. It would be positioned a million miles from the earth, and orbit the sun at what is known as the L1 point, the point of zero gravity between the sun and the earth.

Roger: The reason I went to very small pieces is that I can do all the building of these one gram little spacecraft on the earth, launch them to this L1 point where they’ll orbit in front of the sun, and then don’t have to build anything there.

...

Ian: Roger Angel is convinced the sunshade will work in principle, but he estimates it will cost $4 trillion and take 30 years to complete. He hopes, however, mankind will be wise enough to deal with the now widely accepted causes of global warming and cut carbon dioxide emissions, so his sunshade will remain just a dream.

Roger: We are not happy campers, right? We are not saying: Wow! This is a great idea! Let’s go do it right, that’s the... the feeling is.. you know, this may be a way that we hope will never be wanted, but which we have to think about in case the dire situation comes out.

Emphasis added.

50 years at Windscale

2007-10-10T03:21:00.000-07:00

In 1969 Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his book Slaughterhouse Five:

"I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

"I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that."

Fifty years ago today people were playing with a huge nuclear reactor on the west coast of England attempting to manufacture atomic bombs. Records show that it had more to do with their desire to be just as good as the Americans than anything related to national defence.

If fiction has a point, it is to teach us about the morality of our tiny insignificant struggles for life within the greater context of the world. Unfortunately, Science Fiction usually white-washes the things that Government scientists and engineers generally get up to. They always seem to be investigating strange phenomena for the benefit of mankind, rarely demonstrating their amazing ability to transfer their consciences wholesale to organizations with a record for mass murderer.

The worst example for this is Gernot Zippe who -- after working as an engineer for the Nazis, spending 10 years building Uranium centrifuges for Stalin in Russia, and then recreating his work for the United States military, before finally returning home repeat his technological feats for the powers in Europe from where it proliferated throughout the rest of the world through the Pakistani government -- excused himself thus:

"With a kitchen knife you can peel a potato or kill your neighbour, it's up to governments to use the centrifuge for the benefit of mankind."

Everyone should have fallen over laughing. A more truthful summary of his life's work might have been:

"A cannister of VX gas can be used to exterminate a room full of human beings, or as an object to prop open a door. Take your pick which you think is going to happen."

The disaster that occurred fifty years ago today on the west coast of England has been described thus:

Because they were built hastily and during a time when little was known about reactor design, the reactors had a number of serious design flaws that contributed to the disaster. Graphite is flammable in air and air was being fed into the reactors constantly for cooling, so there was a constant fire hazard. During the accident the graphite in the reactor did not actually catch fire. However, the reactor's fuel, metallic uranium, burns if it becomes too hot, unlike the uranium dioxide used in modern reactors.

Early in the morning on October 10, it was suspected that something unusual was going on... One thermocouple indicated that core temperature was rising. In an effort to help cool the pile, more air was pumped through the core. This lifted radioactive materials up the chimney and into the filter galleries where the monitoring devices were housed. The radiation monitoring devices at the top of the discharge stack read full scale, then showed a gradual decrease in radiation. The full-scale reading caused the shift foreman to declare a site emergency... There was no doubt that the reactor was now on fire...

Operators were unsure what to do about the fire. First, they tried to blow the flames out by putting the blowers onto full power and increasing the cooling, but predictably this simply fanned the flames. The engineers had already ejected some undamaged fuel cartridges from around the blaze and suggested trying to eject some from the heart of the fire, by bludgeoning them through the reactor and into the cooling pond behind it with scaffolding poles. This proved impossible and the fuel rods refused to budge, no matter how much force was applied. The poles were withdrawn with their ends red hot and dripping with molten metal. The engineer knew this had to be molten irradiated uranium.

Next, the operators tried to extinguish the fire using carbon dioxide. The new gas-cooled reactors next door had just received a delivery of 25 tonnes of liquid carbon dioxide and this was rigged up to the charge face of Windscale Pile 1, but the heat generated by the fire was so extreme that the oxygen was stripped from the carbon atoms and added to the blaze.

On the morning of Friday October 11 and at its peak, 11 tonnes of uranium were ablaze. Faced with this crisis, the operators decided to use water. This was incredibly risky: molten metal oxidises in contact with water, stripping oxygen from the water molecules and leaving free hydrogen, which could mix with incoming air and explode, tearing open the weakened containment. But there was no other choice. About a dozen hoses were hauled to the charge face of the reactor; their nozzles were cut off and the lines themselves connected to scaffolding poles and fed into fuel channels about a meter above the heart of the fire.

All cooling and ventilating air entering the reactor was shut off before the water was turned on. The engineer hauled himself atop the reactor shielding and reported watching the flames leaping from the discharge face slowly dying away. During one of the inspections, he found that the inspection plates were stuck fast. This was the fire trying to suck air in from wherever it could. Water was kept flowing through the pile for a further 24 hours until it was completely cold.

No air-cooled reactors have been built since. The final removal of fuel from the damaged reactor is scheduled to begin in 2008 and continue for a further four years.

The BBC produced an excellent documentary of this accident, the political inevitability behind it, and the reason why the engineers who bravely risked their lives to put the fire out rather than run away screaming took the blame.

Britain continued to pursue and test Hydrogen bombs. Now fifty years later the Government retains a policy of deployment -- nearly twenty years after the official excuse evaporated. New generations of scientists and engineers are being recruited.

What is motivating them? Nuclear weapons are no longer cool. Their geo-political malignancy is well-understood.

Are they doing it just for the money?

It is possible to pay someone to stand on top of 11 tonnes of burning Uranium, but only if they don't know what they are doing. Under those circumstances it's more likely to end in tears.

Before anyone accuses me of having an ideological hatred of private capital, I do in fact know about The Nuclear Threat Initiative which helped move 48kgs of highly enriched Uranium from Serbia where it had been abandoned by all the Governments of the world, to a place where it could be safely dealt with. They paid $5million dollars to get it done. The US presidential candidates will spend that in a week running TV ads about how they're going to fight nuclear terrorism. Looks obvious, doesn't it? Maybe they lack an imagination.

Sputnik is 50

2007-10-05T15:11:00.000-07:00

The fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1 passed me by yesterday, October 4. Those backward Commie rats with their totalitarian Soviet state and lack of free enterprise had beaten the United States into space. Being impossible to reconcile the proof that the phenomenon of twentieth century technology was independent of the American economic system, it's been quietly ignored. This important anniversary was only brought to my attention by Democracy Now in the following interview:

AMY GOODMAN: Fifty years ago tomorrow, Sputnik -- what does that have to do with today?

NORMAN SOLOMON: Well, the official storyline is that the US went from humiliation, with the Soviet launch of Sputnik fifty years ago, to triumph, man on the moon in '69, technological superlatives ever since.

But there's a shadowy side, a terribly damaging and destructive shadowy side, which many people in the United States and around the world have been subjected to, and that is the hijacking and the channeling of technological expertise and scientific research in billions of dollars for purposes of what Dwight Eisenhower called in '61 the "military-industrial complex" and, in a less well-known phrase in his farewell address in '61, a "scientific technological elite." That elite is sending 2,000-pound bombs into urban areas of Iraq. It is not only paying off outfits like Blackwater to, out of sight and often out of mind, slaughter Iraqi people in our names and with our tax dollars, but also pursuing missions that are very far from the official storyline.

And so, you could say, just as Sputnik was said to have launched a trajectory of US technological expertise, Silicon Valley and all the rest of it, we have the underside of what we could call a political culture of hoax that has counter-pointed all of the rhetoric about democracy and scientific progress with what Martin Luther King called in 1967 a dynamic of "guided missiles and misguided men," of using our talents of our country, our resources, our scientific brilliance, for purposes of enriching a few and building a warfare state, which is part of us every moment.

Is Science Fiction, as it has been practiced throughout this period, part of it? Maybe it's not harmless. Perhaps if it wasn't developed as it was, our highly expert engineers couldn't have devoted their entire lives spending Six Trillion Dollars just on atomic mechanisms to destroy cities on the other side of the globe? Just think if it had occurred to them that there were better things to do.

There seems to be a cultural expression going on today with posters all over London advertising a computer game Halo 3 If you went around the streets with your eyes open and you didn't know what was going on you'd be completely freaked out by these images. Maybe there is a small part of our mind that doesn't fully make the distinction between the all pervasive narrative of Science Fiction, and real life, and Believes. What would be the result?

Maybe it's time we insisted on reality getting back into Science Fiction before this story kills us.

I look forward to all the 50th anniversaries of American space technological triumphs being noted in the media soon. It should be interesting.

The Decay of Science into Fiction

2007-09-24T10:50:00.000-07:00

Skepticality Podcast (minute 28) interviews a contributor to the astronomy cast:

This is a change in direction that NASA is taking. There has been a mandate put out that we're going to the moon, and we're going to Mars, and to fullfill that Presidential mandate that doesn't come from the scientific community we have to reshape what NASA is doing. We have to start building extremely heavy-lift vehicles. We have to basically take our old idea of how the Saturn rockets work and amp them up so that we can start getting big things to the Moon and start building construction platforms so it's not a big deal to build something in space that can take humans on interplanetary missions...

For a while we were looking to the decadal studies: the long term well-thought-out-by-the-entire-scientific-community studies that stated, "Here are the questions that we want to answer. Here are the needs in order to do it. This is what has to be accomplished to answer these questions."... That way to define programs has been set aside.

In other words, the guys setting the policy are following Science Fiction rather than Science, or even recognizable Mundane-SF. It breaks my heart to see Science Fiction being used as a tool to suppress science.

Happily I've just discovered the Space Cynic blog:

"We are NOT anti-space. We are anti-Koolaid."

If they come good on their promise to say all the right things about the Google Lunar Prize, it'll save me a lot of time.

I got onto this today because Colin Pilinger, our modern day Heath Robinson, is getting the go-ahead to do a Lunar lander. This man is the world expert at doing ambitious space projects at bargain prices. The point is it's got absolutely zero to do with the ideological source of funding, and everything to do with whether the people advocating it are just BS-ing and proven that don't care about the known technicalities.

Astropreneurs are kidding no one

2007-09-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

Now they've got dear old Arthur C. Clarke to record a video promoting the Google Lunar X-Prize. Yes, even he couldn't keep a straight face when he read out the sentence: "Now the Google Lunar X-Prize will inspire a new fleet of private space craft to take humanity back to the moon."

Just so you get the message properly, the speakers at the launch party said:

Today we're challenging private teams around the world to design and build robot explorers and race them to the surface of the Moon. The Google Lunar X-prize is a competition that will once again demonstrate that small dedicated teams of individuals can do what was once thought only possible by governments.

Science has a serious marketing problem. This is the best antidote I've seen for that... We believe that setting an ambitious goal like going to the Moon is a really good way to improve the state of Humanity and the World, and that's why we care about this.

How many of you [young people] would like to go to the Moon? Raise your hands. Yeah. That's why we're here. We're capable of doing that. Maybe not all of you, but at least some of you will be able to go.

And there's also an official cheezy short movie dramatizing what the winning the prize will be like. An excerpt:

Until recently, space was off-limits to the public, but in 2004 the winners of the Axsari X-prize proved that private enterprise could travel to space in a reliable reusable spacecraft less expensively than any government programme.

The competition ignited a revolution that will launch thousands of civilian passengers into space. Today, the Google Lunar X-Prize is challenging free enterprise to reach much further, to the Moon to pave the way to harnessing its wealth of resources. Only days away its earth partner in a unique two world system.

...

Earth's off-shore island, the Moon can become our greatest asset. It could help provide our world with abundant resources and clean affordable limitless energy.

Much of the lunar soil is Silicon, a key ingredient of solar cells. In the future the silicon could be mined and used to build huge solar powered satellites. These satellites could be deployed to capture clean solar energy for the Earth, each one capable of powering a large city.

I am going to scream! Guess what most of the dirt on the Earth is made of? Silicon! You don't need to go to the Moon for that. Why isn't it being used on the ground already then? Solar powered satellites are one of those very bad old ideas that have been looked into at length over the years, admittedly by Government scientists who must by definition be stupid. (After all, they only invented the internet.) The fact that you mention it as an idea, and the only idea proposed in the movie, proves you still haven't thought of anything better!

Look, kids. None of you are going to the Moon. There are certain more pressing matters which will present issues of human survival in your own lifetime that you'll know about if you've been paying attention to the scientists.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think if any science fiction reader from the past saw this prize going down as the one great hope for Humanity, he would die of shame that the whole endeavour has withered down to this. Sure, there may be a few die-hards with nowhere else to go who will claim that the Surge is working. But this was not how it was supposed to be.

Perhaps we ought to put this whole space-ship fantasy on hold for a couple of generations and pay some attention to the question of its own long-term survival on the home planet, eh? I don't think even the most optimistic man is of the belief that we're going to get these life-rafts off into space before the ice-sheets collapse.

Even if they're only supposed to rescue the billionaires.

"Take the Third Star on the Left and on til Morning!" by Geoff Ryman

2007-09-16T16:34:00.000-07:00

Geoff Ryman gave this Guest of Honor speech at BORÉAL 2007 SF convention in Montreal on 2007-04-29.

First off many thanks for the opportunity to give this talk. I think probably many people in this room have no idea who I am. Sometimes I wonder who I am as well. I only have one novelette translated into French, from 20 years ago, which saddens me.

I also founded a small group of SF writers called the Mundanes. Being a Mundane boils down to avoiding old tropes and sticking more closely to what science calls facts. We believe that for most of us, the future is here on Earth.

I understand that this translates into French as ‘Profanes’. I think this sounds a lot more exciting, as a movement.

As I’m sure you have all heard, the European Space Agency announced this week the discovery of an Earth-type planet outside the solar system. Other planets that we know of outside the solar system have all been like Jupiter or Neptune. It orbits the red dwarf star Gliese 581 about 20.5 light years from here. At temperatures from 0 to 40 degrees, it could have water, but we don’t know that. It’s gravitational pull would be twice that of Earth’s. Being 14 times closer to its dwarf star than the Earth is to the sun, it is probably also a radioactive environment.

This is life-changing news. Especially for me, because at 20.5 light years distance, it happens to be within my own personal limit for how far I think we can get into interstellar space.

I don’t believe in starships. At least not the starships that turn up so regularly in Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, etc. The speed of the universe is c. Go faster than ‘c’ and something catastrophic happens: mass becomes infinite. We have no idea what that means. It’s a mathematician’s way of saying something can’t happen.

Yet mass-market SF still dreams of faster-than-light travel, through such tropes as warp drives. The Physics of Star Trek by Laurence M Krauss calculates that warp drives would consume energy equivalent to whole galaxies. This is his way of saying something can’t happen without alienating the Star Trek fans who bought the book.

If there are wormholes or portals I see no way that something can travel through them without being converted into energy or crushed by gravitational forces. This is Geoff’s way of saying the starship gets wrecked.

Stephen Hawking says anti-matter engines are possible, and could accelerate to a reasonable percentage of the speed of light. They could get us to Alpha Centauri in 6 years. I accept that on his authority, but for me, that’s a best possibility, an upper limit.

Very fast sub-light speed would still impose a horizon on how far we get. I don’t have the tools to figure out that limit. If someone does please come and talk to me afterwards.

But if Hawking’s ship can go 4 light years in 6 years, then I my rough reckoning done before Gliese 581 is about a 20-25 light-year radius from Earth. It depends how long you think a starship can keep going without risking major malfunction and how fast an anti-matter driven starship could be. I reckon 30 years in its own time-frame, you may think more.

We won’t know til 2020 if Gliese has water or an atmosphere. I don’t think we’ve found a beautiful new Earth to inhabit. The cost of transporting terra-forming equipment and material 20 light years is likely to be prohibitive. Terraforming Mars may be a better bet than travelling those vast distances to terraform a rocky, radioactive wilderness. Both efforts would take tens of thousand years. What human endeavour has lasted tens of thousands of years?

Well, agriculture has lasted that long; and the rearing of children along with language itself. Staying home on the farm and raising kids seems to be just the activities most SF dreams of escaping.

Since the same physical restrictions will apply to aliens, at least aliens made of matter, I don’t believe we are likely to meet aliens. We might be able to exchange some kind of messages with them at the speed of light. If we are picturing our future, it’s a safer bet to imagine one without Mr Spock or even versions of cuttlefish who communicate with shifting skin patterns.

For most of us whose descendants will not be among those specially selected interstellar crews, for our children, for humankind as whole, the future is here on Earth.

I realized that I didn’t believe in time travel either. We are part of the universe, embedded in it. If we travel in time, we have to take the universe with us. I don’t think that’s at all feasible number one, affordable number two and number three: if everything around us is going backwards or forwards in time with us, would we even notice? How could we tell? Oh yes, we go through one of those wormhole loops. That’s of real mathematical interest. You know my views on wormholes.

So a few kindred spirits drew up a list of things we didn’t believe in like telepathy. Have you ever experienced it?

Immortality? Suns die, galaxies die, the universe dies. Nothing is immortal outside of God’s heaven. We will all die one day. Leaving Earth won’t stop it.

Brain downloads: transferring something that has four switches (up and down in both directions) to a system works through binaries?

Partly Mundanity was also the result of asking: what’s worked best in the past? My favourite SF authors such as Philip K Dick, J G Ballard, Samuel Delaney or Walter Miller tended to avoid those particular tropes. For a while naming writers who could be considered Mundane was quite a hobby.

We felt as if SF had accumulated so many improbable ideas and relied on them so regularly, that it had disconnected from reality. The futures it was portraying were so unlikely as to be irrelevant, if not actually harmful.

Julian Todd, a British SF writer, pointed out the moral problems as well. If we keep telling ourselves that faster-than-light travel will whisk us to scores of new Earths, then we’d feel better about burning through this one.

In really bad SF, like the movie LOST IN SPACE, environmental catastrophe is almost wished upon us, to justify the cost of interstellar voyages. Why, why the continual desire to escape our beautiful planet?

My particular bugaboo was the cheat of having faster-than-light travel without any relativity effects from different time frames. Mass market SF, the SF that most ordinary people think of when you use the phrase, commercial and media SF want to pick and choose from science, using only those things that will grant us our wishes and dreams.

We want FTL interstellar travel with no more inconvenience than a tour of duty on an aircraft carrier. Mom can ring us up from 30,000 light years away to have a real-time conversation about why we haven’t married yet. She’s still alive when we get back home. Everything is recognizable, comfortable. In Star Trek, we get to the stars without having to change.

Mass market SF doesn’t imagine how different interstellar flight will make us. And I don’t mean the usual posthuman stuff. I mean different culturally. I mean getting back home to find 200 years have passed and that everything we loved and believed in is gone. Yes, some SF has done just that, notably The Forever War. So why isn’t the space pilot coming back from the distant past an SF stereotype? Answer: because that’s not what the SF wants.

Big SF, the stuff that sells hugely or is found in movies, is not really about the future; we know that. It’s also not about the present, though that’s our excuse when people point out that SF couldn’t predict its way of a public restroom. SF, especially mainstream commercial SF, copies the past onto the future, to make it comfortably entertaining. The future will be just like the more exciting parts of the past only with better toys. Perhaps that’s because so many people now fear the future, rather than welcome it as a wonderland of possibility.

So I wrote a jokey Mundane Manifesto. It said let’s play this serious game. Let’s agree: no FTL, no FTL communications, no time travel, no aliens in the flesh, no immortality, no telepathy, no parallel universe, no magic wands. Let’s see if something new comes out of it.

In a reference to The Bonfire of the Vanities, I called this the Bonfire of the Stupidities. That was what we call a joke, but jokes can be serious. I also said that we should burn the Manifesto when it got boring.

Some of the blog commentary went a bit angry. I have a better understanding of what I thought of as an invitation to play a game was so widely misunderstood. Essentially it suggested that we left the old tropes to one side, and focussed on more likely futures.

This January I read the introduction to The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt. Written at the moment of Sputnik, Arendt was struck that mainstream newspapers said what science fiction had been saying: mankind was now free from Earth.

Science fiction is worth regarding she says, because it is a vehicle for mass dreams and desires. In essence it is a dream of escaping being human. We want to leave Earth, a free gift that gives us life, and substitute artificial environments that we have made. We wish to escape old means of reproduction. We wish to escape death. We want to become post-human.

"This future man... seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence
as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he
wishes to exchange for something he has made himself."

Fifty years after she wrote that, these themes are still with us. Indeed they have been with us from the beginning, and the beginning is Frankenstein in 1818. Science Fiction predates Darwin, has survived Marx and Freud and outlasted modernism and post-modernism. That mass dream it fulfils is no temporary fancy. That dream runs deep.

The dream only cares about seeing its wishes fulfilled. That explains why old, tired, improbabilities survive as SF regulars, while the storytelling innovations of The Forever War have not become genre stand-bys. Only those slim possibilities that help fulfil the dream survive to be re-used: wormholes, warp drives. Because the aim is NOT to write about a real future.

Arendt hints at some of the sources of the dream. For me personally, there is something in the nexus of Mother Earth, femininity, domesticity, women’s power over reproduction of that clump together in a kind of misapplied need to leave home. A real future will have an everyday life and a home just as domestic as the one the dream needs to leave. So it does not dream of a real future.

I think the sources of the SF dream are not culturally specific. I think they are psychological, perhaps even ultimately biological. That explains the incredible endurance of SF for rising 200 years. I suspect that the dream has something to do with how we as an animal are cared for, the length of time we are dependent, the length of time our parents must love us and have power over us. In other species, parents initiate the process of separation, pushing the fledglings out. In human beings, that process is initiated by the cubs. In order to leave adolescents become angry and resentful, and initiate the separation themselves.

The SF dream recapitulates this. I believe it’s a kind of extension of somewhat undifferentiated drive to leave home, and escape into adventure. The dream therefore belongs essentially to childhood and to early adolescence.

The drive to write and read big-market SF is not much different from the drive to write and read Peter Pan. You never grow up. You fly by magic away from home to Never-neverland. (Take the third star on the left.) It’s full of mermaids, pirates and native peoples, just like Star Trek. Something really weird is going on around the whole idea of mother and Wendy.

I like Peter Pan. I like watching mass market SF. It’s a holiday from being an adult. The fantasies that fulfil the dream may show us wonders, but they are very repetitive, stereotyped wonders. Less to do with real innovation and more to do with a sense of comfort.

To sum up, what I realised reading Arendt was this: I am a Mundane because I don’t share the dream. Not because I have such a peculiarly scientific imagination, and yearn to get out my calculator when I write. I am the last person who should be a Mundane, as I most of my work has some kind of magic in it.

What, I want to ask, is so un-wonderful about Earth? What is so unexciting about our future here? Disaster, innovation, climate change and virtual reality, understanding of our DNA, biocomputers that evolve.

Will cramped, smelly spaceships full of people who have been trapped with each other for twenty years, with terrible food, no light, drugs and entertainment only so long the computers hold out, is that really the most exciting thing we can imagine?

There is a case for saying that our distraction with outer space meant SF missed the information revolution until it was past tense. It had already happened and was on the street when we started to write about it. What are missing now?

What is so useful about dreaming things that are unlikely to happen? Have you not noticed that we are NOT going into outer space? In the Star Trek universe, the Federation has already been founded for nine years.

People who love space blame NASA, and say boldly let the private sector in there. Do they really think if there were fortunes to be made in space you could keep the private sector OUT? There are no silks, sandalwood, or myrrh to be brought back from space, no light, small, valuable things that will pay for the costs of the trip. You can’t trade with balls of frozen methane. There will not be a business case for space.

So, interstellar travel will be a prestige project using vast resources that really are needed elsewhere. I don’t think it will be democracies that get us into space, with their short-term priorities and their reliance on markets. I think it will be a command society that gets us halfway to the stars. It was the Communists and not the Capitalists who got us into space the last time.

I dream of a future here on Earth, a future that I hope continues to get better in some ways. We so face many unpleasant and pressing issues for which there will be no cheap, quick easy fixes. I enjoy reading books like Forty Days of Rain that look at these near future challenges. I’m not sure that democracies are equipped to survive this future either.

Mundanity is not just about a near future, but also a far future, one in which there are new wonders to take the place of the old ones. I dream of a future in which things really change. Post-human, possibly, if we do succeed in controlling our own evolution. These new humans won’t be us, and not because they have extra limbs or can photosynthesize. They will not be us because they value different things, speak differently, think differently, and respond differently in emergencies. They will be the end of everything we love and believe in. And the change will keep on going.

I dream of a science fiction that is literature, right up there with Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, and Jane Austen. There is no reason for it not to be. Forty years ago that was the project, and it seemed like we were going to do it. That was the age of New Worlds, Dangerous Visions, of Ballard, Delaney, LeGuinn, and Tiptree.

Now, I’m not even sure what I meant by literature then, or what I mean by it now.

But here’s a Sartrian stab at it. Literature destroys innocence. It deprives people of childhood. It shows them the world as the writer honestly sees it. If it does show the reader something new, they have lost their innocence about it, and are now responsible for it.

In making them more responsible, literature makes them more powerful. It can’t be literature if recruits or propagandizes. It can’t be literature if it dupes people or panders to them. And it can’t be literature if it is fundamentally dishonest, if it says its doing one thing, when actually doing another. It can’t call itself science fiction and have nothing to do with science.

Entertainment leaves innocence intact. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it won’t make you more powerful or help you to grow up.

Nothing in our human culture is more adult than science. It doubts and tests our lies, half truths, fond hopes, and unsorted dreams by testing its hypotheses. Science could be working hand in hand with fiction to deliver the greatest possible literature.

The Institute of Ideas is staging the Douglas Adams Debate on May 3rd this year in London. The topic is From Star Wars to the Battle of Ideas: Is science fiction good for public debate? On the distinguished panel are two astronomers, a curator for the Science Museum of the exhibition ‘The Science of Aliens’, a consultant in reproductive medicine who worked on the film Children of Men, a physics teacher, but not one science fiction writer.

Here is a quote from the description:

"Writers and film makers often take their inspiration from science and ask ‘what
if’ but when it comes down to it, they have few qualms about ditching scientific
accuracy in favour of gripping narrative. Does it matter how much actual science
gets into sci-fi, as long as it gets people talking? Do writers and director
have a responsibility to make their science accurate, or even
educational?

"Should ‘proper’ sci-fi deal with hard science rather
than ‘issues’? Or should we just enjoy it?"

Hard science rather than issues. That strikes me as a very weird opposition. Personally, I can’t think of a better way to get some measure of any issue than to find out what the science says about it. I find the equation of ‘issues’ with entertainment not what I would expect either. All I can say for certain is that whoever wrote the blurb is thinking in entirely different terms from mine.

Plainly, by science fiction they don’t mean books that we as SF fans and writers value most. Film, directors... they are thinking of Science Fiction as what is called in French une marque du grand surface, the big movies and TV shows.

They mean the stuff that most people think of when you say sci-fi. We have to accept that that is how we are seen. The question for me then is partly, what if anything do I do about that? How do we change people’s views about what it is?

And of course, why no SF writers on the panel? In a debate named after one? I’m trying to avoid putting this down to snobbery. That’s what SF folk usually say when we are excluded. Who’s to say we were excluded? Maybe they tried to get an SF writer and couldn’t.

But let’s also consider the possibility that the scientists wanted to have a debate amongst themselves without us there. Most commercial SF is scientifically out to lunch. Would it be all that surprising if scientists were concerned with that? It is the centre of their lives. What, the debate may be asking, can we do about the lies science fiction tells?

And should there be an element of contempt in this for some kinds of SF; are we sure that it’s entirely unjustified?

If there is an estrangement between science and science fiction, then it should be possible to do something about it. It can only be fruitful.

A small press in Britain has asked me to edit an anthology of stories that are based on research that SF has largely ignored or wildly mis-represented. The aim is to commission these stories and then join up the SF writer with a scientist in that field to advise or co-author the piece.

If anybody here has a suggestion for a field of research that could form the basis of one of these tales, or would be interested in taking part either as a scientist or a writer, please email me.

I’m also guest-editing a Mundane issue of Interzone. If you are interested again please contact me. We have a website up to accept electronic submissions and give some guidance. Please visit http://www.freesteel.co.uk/cgi-bin/mundane.py

And for more information about mundanity, visit http://mundane-sf.blogspot.com/

I’ve spoken a bit about the dream that underlies SF as being essentially adolescent. But there is one aspect of the dream I’ve left out. Surely the urge to leave home and escape everyday life finally ends with the child making a home of its own and becoming adult. There is room in the SF dream for growing up, accepting the mundane. That’s the part of the dream my fiction will try to fulfil.

It’s never too late to grow up.

Can to ten backwards in Japanese?

2007-09-14T05:10:00.000-07:00

What the heck is going on here?:

It has been many decades since we explored the Moon from the lunar surface, and it could be another 6 - 8 years before any government returns. Even then, it will be at a large expense, and probably with little public involvement.

...

To win the Google Lunar X PRIZE ($30 million) a team must successfully land a privately funded craft on the lunar surface and survive long enough to complete the mission goals of roaming about the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending a defined data package, called a "Mooncast", back to Earth.

That was published yesterday. Just in case you haven't read the news today:

Japan launches lunar probe

Could these businessmen really be so up their backsides? The Chinese send up one of their own next month. You'll find that their public is actually involved, by agreeing to have their taxes spent on it, and celebrating it as a source of great national pride.

Trust our business elite to formulate an economic theory that implies without any evidence that a particular means of funding is a source of virtue.

In translation, the words "privately funded" can only mean "billionaire joyrider". The Ansari X Prize paid out $10 million dollars for a space-ship that was built at the cost of $20 million dollars by the co-founder of Microsoft -- and it probably cost less than his taxcut.

After all, what else are they going to do with that money? Go for joy-rides into space on former Communist rockets sold off cheap like the rest of the Russian economy? You can read it everywhere:

Google's billionaire founders are also paying $1.3m for a space connection of a different kind.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page have struck a deal to park their personal "party plane" on a restricted Nasa airfield near the internet company's headquarters in California. In return, they will allow the US space agency to put scientific instruments and researchers aboard their Boeing 767 and two other Google aircraft.

Back in the old days we just lifted the $1.3m from their bank accounts using the tax system and only allowed scientists and engineers who moved the project forwards onto the site. In this new era we'll have to waste time putting wrapping plastic over the experiments to prevent Martinis being splashed over them.

Anyways, what kind of scientific instruments can you put in the back of a party plane, exactly? A thermometer? I think we should be told. This is soon going to get out of hand, and we'll have embarrassing incidents like when "14 high-rolling CEOs" took the controls of a nuclear powered submarine in 2001 and sank a Japanese ship with school children.

When you are super-rich, the whole world becomes your play-ground, and everything which the scientists, engineers and mechanics have built up over the decades are just as toys to be used and broken.

By adding a small bit of show-biz glitz, combined with years of mass mis-education, the Western public can be sold the lie that this could possibly lead anywhere, and that the space-tourism movement isn't one vast self-indulgent, counter-productive drag on any human progress no matter how you define it, when we should all be pissed about it, not applauding it.

Our expectations have become this low and this stupified.

The State of the Future

2007-09-13T14:27:00.000-07:00

What a treat this is. Just look at these covers of a series of gigantic books from the United Nations. You have got to love it. Check out the table of contents from the 2007 edition:

1. Global Challenges (1,100 pages)

2.1 Global State of Future Index (286 pages)
2.2 National State of Future Indexes (89 pages)
2.3 Global Challenges Assessment (94 pages)

3.1 Normative Scenario to the Year 2050 (21 pages)
3.2 Exploratory Scenarios (41 pages)
3.3 Very Long-Range Scenarios-1,000 years (23 pages)
3.4 Counterterrorism-Scenarios, Actions, and Policies (40 pages)
3.5 Science and Technology 2025 Global Scenarios (21 pages)
3.6 Global Energy Scenarios 2020 (103 pages)
3.7 Middle East Peace Scenarios (91 pages)

4.1 Future Science and Technology Management and Policy Issues (400 pages)
4.2 Nanotechnology: Future Military Environmental Health Considerations (21 pages)

5. Education and Learning 2030 (59 pages)

6. Future Ethical Issues (69 pages)

7. Global Goals for the Year 2050 (24 pages)

I mean, why isn't everyone getting it? Well, it's not available for download, and no one has summarized it in the wikipedia article, though that place does lead you to entities like the futures wheel and the World Transhumanist Association...

Anyways, enough surfing. Back to the executive summary, which contains a lot of bunk about "genetically increased intelligence", "chemical brain enhancement", "artificial microbes enhancing intelligence", and "Web 17.0".

Okay, okay, we get the point. You have something about making humans more intelligent. I feel there is quite enough intelligence already in this world, it just doesn't get to be The President.

Paleontologists have observed that intelligence is a just another of those evolutionary experiments in the life history of this planet, like fish growing legs and coming onto the land, or lizards growing to gigantic proportions. Time may yet prove that it was a tragic mistake.

Maybe if it came onto us as a species gradually over a period of ten million years, rather than what appears to be a sudden big bang a hundred thousand years ago, one could have more confidence that it wasn't going to end in tears.

I can't tell from the summary whether any apocalyptic scenarios made it into the report, or if these were ruled out as being not interesting. The last two paragraphs could be included in a mundane manifesto, however.

There are many answers to many problems, but there is so much extraneous information that it is difficult to identify and concentrate on what is truly relevant. Since healthy democracies need relevant information, and since democracy is becoming more global, the public will need globally relevant information to sustain this trend. We hope the annual State of the Future reports can help... decision-makers and educators who fight against hopeless despair, blind confidence, and ignorant indifference -- attitudes that too often have blocked efforts to improve the prospects for humanity.

Heretical Science Fiction

2007-09-05T05:44:00.000-07:00

I've recently been pestered with copies of the article Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society by "Hard" Science Fiction's favourite physicist Freeman Dyson. He writes:

As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions... When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. The predictions of science-fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate.

Okay, so predictions are always unreliable. This is not to say that some predictions are less reliable than others. For example, he continues:

To understand the movement of carbon through the atmosphere and biosphere, we need to measure a lot of numbers. I do not want to confuse you with a lot of numbers, so I will ask you to remember just one number. The number that I ask you to remember is one hundredth of an inch per year... We don’t know how big a fraction of our emissions is absorbed by the land, since we have not measured the increase or decrease of the biomass. The number that I ask you to remember is the increase in thickness, averaged over one half of the land area of the planet, of the biomass that would result if all the carbon that we are emitting by burning fossil fuels were absorbed. The average increase in thickness is one hundredth of an inch per year... To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil...

I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology. No computer model of atmosphere and ocean can hope to predict the way we shall manage our land.

Must be suffering from amnesia here. The entirety of the Kyto Protocol (signed ten years ago when all this science was well established, but before Exxon and co set to work on our weak and feeble minds) was based on Carbon offsetting and carbon sinks, and was the subject of an entire volume of the 2001 IPCC report compiled by hundreds of scientists. For those of you who can handle more than one number, further figures can be found here. It is important to remember that CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere has been climbing like a voracious weed over the last hundred years, suggesting that it might pose more of a problem than can be dealt with my merely mowing the lawn more frequently.

In fact, Dyson well knows about all this because he started the idea way back in 1976, as reported in this Cornerhouse briefing which reports:

Several decades ago, the British physicist Freeman Dyson, pondering the coming age of interplanetary travel, had a stupendous idea for propelling large payloads through space. Why not set off nuclear explosions underneath space probes and just blast them around the solar system?

Not many people found Dyson's brainwave attractive. But you can't keep a well-intentioned visionary down for long. In 1976, Dyson reemerged with another brilliant scheme: to soak up the excess carbon dioxide which the burning of fossil fuels was putting in the atmosphere by planting gigantic areas of trees.

Clearly, if he had anything important to add in the last 30 years he would taken it to one of the Working Group III meetings and had it looked into by the men with the facts, rather than merely announcing his heresies to the innumerate public. It's like a court of law. If you know the man on trial is innocent, you are suppose to avail yourself as witness, or have a very good excuse for not doing so.

No one has asked him for his excuse. However there's an interesting interview with him from earlier this year where he says:

"My view of the prevalence of doom-and-gloom in Cambridge is that it is a result of the English class system. In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since."

So, apparently, this whole climate change doom thing and threats to life as we know it is just wealth envy. The Brits and the rest of the world are simply not as optimistic as those rich Americans over there, who by the power of their beliefs can ignore reality. It's always been thus, he says:

"I do not agree that there has been a recent shift from progressive ideas to dystopian anxieties. The best writers have always been dystopian. In the 1890s we had Wells's Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau. In the 1930s Huxley's Brave New World. These were the classics that I grew up with seventy years ago. Nothing that has been written recently is gloomier than Wells and Huxley. And in spite of that, there have always been optimists like me and Amory Lovins. I recommend Amory Lovins as an antidote to gloom and doom."

Friends, let me introduce Micawber Principle, by Charles Dickens:

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Now the question I would like to pose is: Is this an optimistic or a pessimistic person making this statement?

Or is it someone explaining to you in simple terms what you need to do in order to avoid misery?

I would like to think that that's what scientists are doing. And if we make up stuff in order to ignore it, then we might find that their predictions are not quite as unreliable as science fiction writers are.

Meanwhile, while you were sleeping, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado last night have been stunned by the collapse of the Arctic ice sheet. They weren't expecting it. Turns out the climate models are indeed quite inaccurate. The situation is far worse than expected.

UPDATE: Trent, put a link to Edge Foundation, Inc on the right hand side panel, in which Dyson's article was published. It's got exactly the sort of thing SF writers ought to read if there's a chance they'll make stories that are better than real science.

You go to the future with the science you have

2007-08-29T05:32:00.000-07:00

...not the science you'd rather not know.

The Lagrangian point is a popular place for Science Fiction yarns to pass through. For ten years there's been a plan to park a satellite called the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCVR) at that place in space to do things like observe the Earth from a distance, measure the activity of the sun from outside the magnetosphere, and other such things.

According to some news reports, after 90% of the costs of building this satellite has been spent, NASA has decided to cancel it. There is said to be a whiff of politics going on, and it has to do with the global warming denial industry.

One of the many bogus accounts of global warming explains that the ice is melting on Mars, just as it is on Earth, and there must be a common cause. Since there is no industrial release of CO2 on Mars, the CO2 released on Earth has nothing to do with it, so it's probably due to changes in the Solar radiation.

A detailed (sober) account of the climate studies on Mars is here, and a summary of what we know about recent changes in solar output is here (it hasn't changed since 1950).

Clearly, having a satellite out there designed to look at all these results would be a good thing, unless you already know the answer and aren't going to like it. The desmog article concludes:

Interestingly, a common complaint of climate change deniers has been that the satellite data used to develop climate models is unreliable. DSCOVR would go a long way to settling whatever honest debate remained about the reliability of those models.

Considering that these climate models are now driving enormous public policy decisions, one would think that DSCOVR would be a top priority. It certainly has been a priority of other governments. The French were so alarmed by the foot dragging by NASA they offered to send DSCOVR into space themselves at a greatly reduced cost. The Ukranian government even offered to launch DSCOVR for free aboard a Tsyklon IV rocket – the most reliable launch vehicle in the world.

Can anyone corroborate this story?

You know, from a pure narrative point of view, seen as a piece of science fiction, this story doesn't wash. A believable plot would require the President and higher officials to be part of on an alien conspiracy. After their mission of subverting and blocking all action in the proper direction of survival, the space-ship from Alpha Centauri lands and takes them away and repopulates the globe with green lizards.

It is unconscionable that such policies could be pursued by human beings destined to remain on the planet they are playing fast and loose with.

Brain downloads and death

2007-08-20T23:25:00.000-07:00

Another good source of podcasts to get you through those sleepless nights and long train journeys in case aviation gets abolished (subtitle: "We are armed... only with peer-reviewed science") before our planetary life-support system collapses is IT Conversations.

From the 2007-08-16 podcast:

"This is Doug Kay from GigaVox Media, and today I am excited to bring you another edition of Tech Nation with Dr Moira Gunn... And here's your host, Dr Moira Gunn... From San Francisco, I'm Moira Gunn. And this is Tech Nation. Today we'll look at life will be like after a hundred years of biotech."

Actually the program is about nothing of the sort. It's just an interview with science fiction writer Richard Morgan and his new book called "Black Man" or "Thirteen", depending on where you are.

It's a book set about a hundred years in the future. If anyone has time to read it, please send a review. The interview points squarely in the direction of Mundane-SF, although he doesn't know it. I've transcribed it extensively because it pretty much says it all in relation to this particular banned trope.

Here is Morgan placing this novel in relation to his earlier books about a character called Kovacs:

Morgan: The Kovacs books dealt with a universe in which you could swap your body, or you could be dumped onto a mainframe and be run as a simulation. And so Kovacs doesn't really have any ties to a particular body. In a sense, that's one of the things that's scary about him. He is almost like a demonic presence. He just pops up and creates mayhem.

The point about this book, Thirteen or Black Man as it's called in the UK, is that you're tied to your skin. You are the person you are born as. The physicality that you've got is the physicality that's going to stay with you. And mortality is unavoidable.

These are things I couldn't really deal with in the Kovacs universe, because for Kovacs and for people like him mortality is avoidable: you just skip into a new body. Issues of race, gender, the kind of physicality that you exist in are also not really issues for Kovacs because he can pop out of a body and into another one at any time. Clearly a society where that's possible is pretty soon going to shed any concern about physicality because you don't know who you're talking to...

So I couldn't explore what I wanted to explore in the Kovacs universe. This is one of the reasons I ducked out and produced a stand-alone [novel]. This book is about physicality and the constraints of physicality and the fact that you are locked into who you are and there's not a whole lot you can do about that. Not only at the level of what colour your skin is or whether you're a man or a woman, but also in the sense of what kind of personality you are.

Then from the end of the interview after being side-tracked into why the book has two different titles:

Gunn: We started on this when we were comparing this character to characters in your earlier novels and that the consideration of what death means is really important. A lot of people think that with bio-tech you're living another ten, twenty or thirty years, but what it really means when you start to live that long is that while you may see your great-great-grandchildren, you will witness a lot more death through your family line...

[In the past before medical science] many children never made it out of childhood, mothers died in childbirth, people were dying for all kinds of reasons, and death was much closer to humanity. And it will become more close in the century we're going into, even though we're depicting it as life extension. You really gripped that idea of death and what that means.

Morgan: I think that mortality is an important thing to deal with. I lost my mother last year to a stroke. And that's really the first time I've had death affect me closely... It does make you think. And, yeah, I'm not getting any younger either... At some point I'm going to lose my father as well, and then it will be me... As you get older this does concentrate the mind...

In a way the Kovacs books are quite young. They do sidestep that whole issue. They're quite unpleasant because of the way they do it is pretty traumatic, but fundamentally there is the sense that dying is no big deal. And so I wanted a book where dying is a pretty big deal, because that's your lot.

Cyber-present

2007-08-12T07:49:00.000-07:00

Today's english newspaper has an interview with William Gibson, who has just written a new book.

There are some good quotes, which can be read with a Mundane-SF interpretation -- that the SF genre is being left behind by events and circumstances of the present day.

That's the diagnosis. The treatment is to either abandon the genre somewhat and simply report things as they are happening, because they are so ridiculous you cannot make them up. Or you can hypothesize that the problem is due to the pernicious weeds that have grown up within the genre, such as faster than light travel, aliens, brain downloads, etc. which strangle all other development. Gibson, below, mentions that he dropped the space travel and aliens in order to make his seminal book, Neuromancer. Mundane-SF suggests getting rid of the rest of the non-existent clutter and seeing how that works.

There is no one right answer. All approaches to the problem should be tried out. Mundane-SF is only one of them.

The interview. Boldface added:

[Gibson's] latest novel, Spook Country, is a dystopian thriller set in presentday New York, LA and London. I ask him first why he has stopped prophesying and started simply observing.

"It's been a gradual thing for me... I don't think it was deliberate. For Neuromancer, I think it is virtually impossible to date the action of the text, though I assumed it was about 2030 when I was writing it. I did that for a simple reason: though I never imagined anyone would be reading it after a year, I wanted to give it its longest possible shelf life.

"When I wrote my fourth novel, Virtual Light, I set it in a very near future - probably about now - to punk things up a bit, not honour the sci-fi rules and write a book that would date terribly. But for my last two books, I have become convinced that it is silly to try to imagine futures these days."

...

Things, technologies, now happen too fast and in unpredictable locations. "What I grew up with as science fiction is now a historical category. Previous practitioners, HP Lovecraft, say, or HG Wells, had these huge, leisurely 'here and nows' from which to contemplate what might happen. Wells knew exactly where he was and knew he was at the centre of things."

...

These days, 'now' is wherever the new new thing is taking shape, and 'here' is where you are logged on. What he has learnt is that the tools of the science fiction writer are perfectly applicable to describing the jump-cut present. He does exactly this with characteristic black comedy and inventive edge in Spook Country, which involves trademark riffs on such diverse subjects as the ethics of viral marketing, the whereabouts of the billions of dollars of banknotes sent by the Bush administration to Iraq, the elegant scam of boutique hotels, and the potential for the use of satellite global positioning in art (to recreate, in this case, virtual celebrity deaths - River Phoenix, John Lennon - on the exact spot they took place).

"I'm really conscious, when I'm writing now, how Google-able the world is. You can no longer make up what some street in Moscow looks like because all your readers can have a look at it if they want to. That is an odd feeling. It is a genuine way that cyberspace is, to use a word from Spook Country, everting the world. It is turning itself - and us - inside out. It's where we transact so much of who we are these days."

...

Gibson started writing when he married and had his first child in his late twenties. He had stopped reading science fiction, but went back to it to discover it had ceased to be 'cool'. It was still all about space travel and little green men. "I remember thinking: what can I do that is alien without aliens? That is where Neuromancer came from."

Was he a prophet? "Not a very good one: there are no cellphones in Neuromancer. A 12-year-old would spot that straight away. There's no email either, no websites, no internet really. But there is a lot of heightened language about the possibility of computers to transport us out of ourselves."

What have we come to when one of the leading SF writers of our generation says: "it's silly to try to imagine the future" ? It's completely outrageous. If our leading scientists are expected to do their job of imagining the future (though many people don't like results, and so tell us that the future will be exactly like the present), it is a derogation of duty if the Science Fiction writers abandon them at this time.

It's grim up North

2007-08-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine is off to do his PhD in Spitsbergen, some town in the north of Norway, he said. I said I'd like to come and visit.

Now that I've seen just how far north it is (roughly level with the north coast of Greenland), I don't know if it's possible. There is no cheap way there. Further web-surfing corroborated the fact that there is a university at the place. The current news for the UNIS mentions a lot of research to do with ice, wind, and weather, not surprisingly. My friend is a physicist who's going to do something with the Aurora Borealis. We might hear from him on-line quite a bit during the eternal night from October to February.

In the life getting ahead of Science Fiction department, they've started building the Svalbard Global Seed Vault there:

The proposed seedbank will be built by hollowing out a cave in a sandstone mountain. The bank will have dual blast-proof doors with motion sensors, two airlocks, and walls of steel-reinforced concrete one metre thick. Seeds will be wrapped in aluminium foil to keep out moisture. There will be no full-time staff, but the vault's relative inaccessibility will make it easy to track human activity.

Spitsbergen was considered an ideal location due to its lack of tectonic activity and its longtime permafrost, which will help to preserve seeds. Coal from a local mine will also be used to power refrigeration units which will further cool the seeds to the internationally-recommended standard −20 to −30 C. Prior to construction, a feasibility study determined that the vault could preserve seeds from most of the major food crops for hundreds of years. Other seeds, including those of important grains, could survive far longer, possibly for thousands of years.

The goal is to prevent important agricultural and wild plants from becoming rare or extinct in the event of a global disaster such as global warming, a meteorite strike, nuclear or biological warfare, or gene pollution from transgenic plants. There are already over 1400 local seedbanks around the world, but many are in politically unstable or environmentally threatened nations. When this seedbank is built, the vault will be secure and isolated from much of the world's population.

Well, it's a relief to see some people are thinking ahead here, and not relying on any Fi-Sci (Fictional Science) developments to preserve the basic technology our species depends on to thrive.

I wonder if there's a story here of an expedition to the north to rescue these seeds after a disaster. Maybe there are a series of "Indiana Jones"-like traps so as to only let in people who are going to understand how to cultivate the seeds, and not just any old numb-skull who doesn't know to plant things properly in whose hands they would be completely wasted.

What devices would let a Nikolai Vavilov through, and stop me, whilst persuading me to go fetch him?

Man plus tech equals what?

2007-08-03T02:26:00.000-07:00

Frederick Pohl's Man Plus introduced us to the squishy geekment of computer-enhanced human sensory abilities and bionic prosthetics - but that, of course, was the future, back in 1976. If you really need to tool-up, cyborgically-speaking, with today's technology, how might you go about it? Over at Free Geekery, there's a guide for enthusiasts that includes implanting RFID chips in your hand (give your house a wave and it will open up), wearing contact lenses to improve the acuity of your vision beyond 20/20, and connecting a computer to your actual brains.

All of this is technically mundane, and if you're up for submitting a story to Interzone's Mundane issue, maybe something in that post will provide inspiration. From the article:

If you continue to carry out your transformation research with earnest, you eventually will encounter Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading and the first human cyborg. Warwick carried out a series of experiments that involved the neuro-surgical implantation of a device into the median nerves of his left arm. This device linked his nervous system directly to a computer so that he could assess the latest technology for use with the disabled. He also has been successful with the first extra-sensory (ultrasonic) input for a human and with the first purely electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans — actually, between Warwick and his wife, Irene.

Mundanespotting February 2007

2007-07-29T16:41:00.001-07:00

I read most of these and then had some distractions before I wrote this up, so some of these thoughts are a bit stale. This is my first sustained reading of Jim Baen’s Universe (JBU), which is an electronic periodical using the subscription model. With the “big three” in perpetual circulation decline, and the “corporate patron model” of SciFiction shriveling up and dying, maybe this is the future for short “speculative” fiction. I found JBU to be an interesting alternative to the mostly stale form that is Analog (which had a double issue for January-February, covered last time). Interzone is at the other end of spectrum—a full-blown colorful magazine. The mundane-ness of this particular Interzone didn’t excite me, but overall the magazine is great to have (though quite expensive to import) as a counterpoint to the U.S.-centric sources.

Short fiction contents from:
Interzone 208 (February 2007)
F&SF February 2007
Asimov's February 2007
JBU Volume 1 Number 5 (February 2007), excluding “classic” stories

— “War Stories” by Elizabeth Bear (JBU short): soldiers in a mundane future; not very interesting to me
— “I Could’ve Done Better” by Gregory Benford and David Brin (JBU short): historical fantasy with time travel, apparently; that is, crap
— “Demonstration Day” by Ian Creasey (JBU short): unserious and not mundane
— “Storm Warning” by Robert Cruze (JBU medium): ridiculous solar system space story, thankfully with ftl communications so I could stop reading at that point
— “The Star Necromancers” Alexander Marsh Freed (Interzone medium): “We await the necromancers in the palace of the Gloriarch, whispering to one another as jealous eyes watch from dataspace an mnemetic pollens cloud the air.” Yawn. Space opera or far future science-is-magic or both, or otherwise un-mundane.
— “Red Card” by S. L. Gilbow (F&SF short story): interesting sociological story in the 1950s “Galaxy” mode; an odd future that may not be very convincing to many, but is quite mundane
— “Pawn’s Gambit” by Carol Hightshoe (JBU short): fantasy
— “Brain Raid” by Alexander Jablokov (F&SF novelet): an AI story that could go either way for me as mundane because it’s an interesting take on the sociology of this particular (otherwise) mundane future; I’m calling this story “not mundane” based on personal whim about AI; I think real AI could eventually come, but it is not at all on the near future horizon; the “bigger computers are smarter computers” argument failed long ago in real life, but lives on through too much crappy sf; if you think otherwise then this story is worth a mundane read
— “Old Folks’ Home” by John Kratman (JBU short): traditional adventure story about a retirement home in orbit; silly, but I’ll let it pass for mundane
— “Where the Water Meets the Sky” by Jay Lake (Interzone short): mundane ecological future in the U.S.; story didn’t leave much of an impression
— “Cold Fire” by Tanith Lee (Asimov’s short story): some sort of pirate fantasy or alternative history
— “Empty Clouds” by G.D. Leeming (Interzone short): mundane ecological future in China; story didn’t leave much of an impression
— “A Stranger in Paradise” by Edward M. Lerner (JBU longish): ftl space opera far future crap
— “The Spiral Road” by Louise Marley (JBU longish): fantasy
— “Marklord Pete” by Wil McCarthy (JBU longish): fun speculation about law and intellectual property; would likely be quite tiresome if bloated to novel length; in this form, my favorite story from this batch
— “Islington Crocodiles” by Paul Meloy (Interzone long): funky urban story; I read one chapter and would have kept going if this had any real hope of not being a fantasy
— “A Portrait of the Artist” by Charles Midwinter (Asimov’s short story): not very convincing story about an artist in some sort of biotech future, but otherwise I’ll say it’s mundane enough
— “Fool” by John Morressy (F&SF novelet): fantasy
— “Close” by William Preston (Asimov’s short story): psychological story with an un-mundane ending
— “Recovering Apollo 8” by Kristine Kathyrn Rusch (Asimov’s novella): alternate history
— “The Chimera Transit” by Jack Skillingstead (Asimov’s short story): escaping Earth with ftl
— “Stone and the Librarian” by William Browning Spencer (F&SF short story): nice tribute to Robert E. Howard, but too much of a stretch to be anything but a fantasy
— “The Goblin Hunter” by Jeff Stehman (JBU short): fantasy
— “Softly Shining in the Forbidden Dark” by Jason Stoddard (Interzone long): characters seem to be “jacking in” to some sort of “group mind” on trips to Alpha Centauri; might be mundane in some far out wacky sense, but I didn’t give it much of a chance
— “Rebel the First” by Edd Vick (JBU short): fantasy
— “Outgoing” by Alex Wilson (Asimov’s novelette): space story that might be mundane if it wasn’t utterly ridiculous; I am embarrassed that something like this was published in a magazine with Isaac Asimov’s name on it

Again, 7 stories that made the cut, but I’m less excited about this batch than the January ones. Asimov’s was especially disappointing this time. This issue of JBU has Mike Resnick as editor, apparently for the first time, so it’s too early to tell what direction he is taking it. Being able to publish a pile of stories without worrying about fitting them into an artifact of a specific size must be nice for the editor. Stay tuned.

Soap bubble heads

2007-07-26T04:32:00.000-07:00

I got given a copy of Michio Kaku's 2005 Parallel Worlds book yesterday as it seems to be the source of a lot of SF speculation about Time, Space, and Multiverse travel which supposedly makes all of Mundane SF irrelevant. I'm reached page 97, and it's so far a rehash of the usual Einstein history of physics. Flicking forward, I can tell I'm not going to like this M-space stuff. It reminds me of that cosmological speculation you hear when people have smoked enough dope.

Like, Man, you know each of those atoms in your fingernail could be like a tiny solar system with a whole other earth and people living on it.

The BBC appears to have had a lot of time for him. And there's this nifty FAQ which is good for a laugh.

Better still, there's a 23 minute interview with him on an in-depth news program in April 2005.

This interview literally took my breath away, so I've transcribed it extensively.

Kaku: Even 150 years ago thinkers like Charles Darwin or Bertrand Russell wrote about the fact that Physics does seem to say that the Universe will eventually run down, it rusts, we have what is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, chaos takes over, stars blink out, stars get cold, the oceans will freeze over, and we'll all die in a big freeze. And Charles Darwin wrote in his autobiography, "What an unpleasant thought that we struggled to get out of the swamp, that every letter we struggled with is all for naught." Why bother to wake up tomorrow morning? Why go to work, knowing that we're all going to freeze to death billion of years from now?

Well, now we have an exit strategy. Ah, you mentioned George Bush. He has to ponder when is the situation cool enough in Iraq to exit troops.

Well, we Physicists believe that our universe is cooling down too rapidly. That it is out of control. That we are in an accelerating run-away universe.

...In some sense there seems to be a death warrant for our universe. Again, it'll be billions of years from now. But what a thought, knowing that all the achievements of humanity will eventually crumble, when the universe itself begin to crumble.

Now we Physicists just give talks. We get very embarrassing questions like, "Professor, what happened before the Big Bang?" Well the answer to that is: The Multiverse.

The other embarrassing question we get is, "This is all very depressing, hearing that the stars will blink out, the universe will consist of black holes, the oceans will freeze, the night sky will be dark, there will be no stars to guide us at night. What a horrible thought."

And my attitude is that the laws of Physics do have an escape clause. An escape clause by which we may have to go through this umbilical chord to perhaps journey to another universe.

(I stare at the screen with shocked and terrified expression like John Stewart after he's played an appalling clip of Bush.)

According to wikipedia, there's an interview with Kaku in the February 2007 Jordanian magazine "Business Today" in which he says that he considers terrorism as one of the main threats in man's evolution from a Type 0 civilization to Type 1 on the Kardashev scale, that's a civilization that is able to harness all of the power available from a single star.

Well, the link is broken; it's only wikipedia. Can't possibly be true.

The BBC interview continues.

Kaku: We're Type 0. We get our energy from dead plants. But every time I read the newspaper I read the birth-pangs of Type 1.

What is the internet? The internet is the beginning of a planetary telephone system. I see it right before my eyes a type 1 communication system opening up. The language of Type 1 will be English. It is already the universal language of elites. It will be the language of Type 1.

And, look at the economies. NAFTA, European Union, Trading blocks, the birth of a new economy is taking place.

Now there are people who don't like this transition, who feel in their gut feel more comfortable being in a Type minus 1. They're the terrorists. They in their gut realize that a Type 1 civilization has flowing ideas, challenging orthodoxies, new bigger, wondrous ideas popping forth. That's Type 1.

The interviewer asked whether mankind is going to destroy the world in our own way with global warming or war before we have anything like these problems.

Kaku: When I look in outer space and we look for signals for alien life, we see nothing. It's quiet out there. But the laws of physics tell us it should be teeming with intelligent lifeforms.

One theory is that there were many Type zeros out there. But the savagery of their rise from the swamp kept with them all the sectarian, fundamentalist, racial nonsense of the forest. And that's why they self-destructed before they attained high-form status. So the birth of Type 1 we think is going to be quite convulsive. It'll take place in the next hundred years. The next hundred years are the most important hundred years in all of human history, because it'll determine whether or not we make that transition to Type 1 civilization, a planetary civilization.

...We'll go out into outer space and see different star systems. Perhaps we will see planets whose atmospheres are too hot, they did have a greenhouse effect, or their atmospheres are radio-active, they did have a nuclear war. And perhaps that's why we don't see them with our telescopes.

(I lean over and weep into my hands.)

I pretty much agree with the particle physicist Martinus Veltman that astrophysicists are full of crap, which he explained in a lecture I blogged about in February.

These are dangerous ideas. Of the kind that believing you can fly off a cliff with a pair of cardboard wings is a dangerous idea.

Correction: Replacing erroneous "Yaku" with "Kaku".

What's a Benderite?

2007-07-13T03:28:00.000-07:00

I've no idea what a "Benderite" is. But it shows up in one of the interesting derivated discussions of this blog. Person had inspected my Myron Ebell Climate production, which is a proxy blog for the most evil person in the world, a major promulgator of life-threatening lies to the people of this planet. More people should join this undertaking. I have a whole list of such people.

My understanding is that human beings are born with an over-powering instinct to make ourselves consistent with the belief systems suggested to us by those in authority -- for very good reasons of self-preservation. You don't get far by disagreeing with your Chief. One of the unfortunate emergent properties of this instinct is that, on large scales, entire empires of human beings can go systematically insane. There is no doctor in the asylum to stop us from walking through the oven door.

Planet Earth is fine. In 500 million years there will be just as many oil deposits and beautiful living species as there were before humans discovered fire. We, however, are very likely to be one sorry grease spot, a thin 50,000 year layer in the rock strata, encapsulating all those childish dreams that we were somehow going to get off this planet, go forth and conquer the stars. This, after the scientists have applied their enormous energy and intellect to discover the laws of physics, ecology, and psychology, and we, the Science Fiction writers, have decided to disregard the entire lot for no reason other than habit and tradition.
MundaneSF backlog -- I've cleared it till 1 June. Having gotten many rejections of my own which are unhelpful, I try to write something down. I now understand why editors don't do this -- it can only cause trouble.

One unusual aspect of my rejections is I often include a link to a newspaper report or wikipedia article covering the same theme as the piece that was sent in. This is my none-too-subtle hint that reality has already beaten it, and it won't do. For me, the idea comes first. Without some form of thought-provoking vision about something real, no amount of good characterization and compelling writing can redeem it for me.

Here is a medley of sentences from notes I have sent out about stories recently. Submissions close October 31. Get your story in earlier and this gives you time to fail and try again.

Story appears to be from the PoV of aliens taking over the earth. Bacteria tend to be more specific in their activity. This is primarily a world-building sketch rather than a fully developed plot. For the purpose of your story you're assuming technology we don't have (cars that don't require a road network), and ignoring technology we do have (transponders). The SF element is not apparent. I'm looking for stories with larger scale conflicts than this. This story shoe-horns its premise into the standard "mad scientist invention escapes lab and destroys the world" plot. I don't believe space debris has the characteristics of velocity and density you require for your story. This appears to be about an application of a new law of physics. I believe there are already a good number of rules of war, with interesting and meaningful consequences based on historical cases, without needing to invent new ones to fit with a story. I am minded of the fact that with a shortage of gasoline people will not be abandoned, as they will be required for manual labour, as they were in the past. Although this story contains an illustration of some of the consequences of climate change, it also refers to brain downloads and a space elevator.

A world without Science Fiction

2007-07-07T03:49:00.000-07:00

Having no time to read anything apart from submissions to the MundaneSF Interzone webpage, I listen to podcasts. Last week there was this broadcast from Scientific American magazine on 27 June 2007 of an interview with the author of A World Without Us.

The hypothesis of this Science Fact book was: Assume all human beings vanished off this planet in an instant, for whatever reason, what would be the changes that would be seen on the ground in the coming days, years, and decades?

The reason why this premise is scientifically relevant is that it provides a base-line control situation to compare against what we are doing. Ideally we should have a second planet orbiting the sun on the opposite side which is untouched by humans to use as a controlled experiment. This would put paid to arguments by certain fishermen I have met at a small harbour in Scotland recently who blamed the lack of fish in the North Sea on those pesky seals who steal 20 pounds of their fish a day! On alternate earth there would be a thousand times more seals, and even more fish. The discrepancy could be explained in terms of industrial fishing methods; a seal kills exactly 20 pounds of fish to fill its stomach, whereas the damage caused by bottom trawling is the equivalent of slash-and-burning of a rain forest.

Helpfully, Sci Am also has it's article on-line for this piece, and includes a rather cheezy animation of the bit about the decay of Manhattan. It's a shame not to watch it after they have gone to the expense.

There's no point in me recounting all the details here, which you can read there, or listen in the podcast. Save to say that yet again SF is falling perilously behind the Scientific writing in this day and age. If you're going to have a story that features an abandoned large city, you don't need to make it up from scratch. It's there, and it's far beyond most of the visions of such in SF which I have seen so far. Get with it already.

Greg Bear on TV

2007-07-04T03:46:00.000-07:00

Greg Bear was interviewed on the esteemed Daily Show on 21 June 2007 as "one of several science fiction writers who gets called upon by the United States government to help combat terrorism".

It is my claim that the US government is one of the greatest consumers of bad MundaneSF in the world. Whilst the SETI@home project showed that there is a big market out there for searches for Little Green Men, that's not where the money is. The money is in fabricating excuses for a hundred billion dollar space weapons system against a closed society that is teetering into its second famine in ten years and over-selling terrorist plots by uneducated and incompetent bozos who don't know what an explosion is. But then, neither do the journalists.

Famines. Now that's a major human event that doesn't feature in SF very often. Does not compute with our current culture. As always, what you get to read in fiction is determined by what's popular with the editors. In scientific writing the literature is determined by what's important, whether or not it's liked.

Stewart: ...So you can't just in the middle of your story go, 'And there's a gate, and you step through it. You're on another planet!

Bear: I've done that! That's fun.

He was showing off his book Quantico which is a "technothriller" based on what he learnt during a conference in 2000 on Future Crime.

He points out that the bullet we don't hear is the one that gets you. "We are concentrating on all these foreign terrorists, and we've forgotten about domestic terrorists."

They're starting to talk about dual-use technologies in biological laboratories.

Bear: The point is we need to put these capabilities into high schools and universities and so on so that our kids can be raised for the bio-tech world we are entering into.

By dual-use, it's medicine and research into pathogens which you necessarily learn how to culture and grow them.

Stewart: For you the ultimate scenario of terrorism is not a bunch of guys on planes doing those sorts of things, it's eleventh grade chemistry students figuring out how to grow viruses and then figuring out how to switch this little protein here we can make it have teeth.

Bear: That's it. Very concise. In five to ten years college students will have the equipment to assembly viruses from scratch.

Stewart: Not computer viruses. You're talking about living viruses.

Then it degenerates into something silly about putting pathogen sensors and radiation detectors into everybody's cell-phones so it can phone in the alert.

Maybe they'll only use it to detect kids smoking pot.

It does seem believable that millions of high school kids are likely to contain more stupidity and greater capability to get up to some serious mischief than any band of terrorists. It's like Vonnegut's Ice-9 in Cat's Cradle. Someone young without any sense of mortality will make something awful. And the reason they had the capability was that we were trying to educate them.

This is likely to come out of one of the rich upper class private schools where they have excellent facilities. Maybe they'll drive across the railway tracks and try out their concoctions on people in the poor part of town and inject Plutonium into their bloodstream.

Oh, the CIA has done that already.

Unfortunately, this is one of those crazy things that happen which goes beyond anything that features in polite SF writing these days.

Mundanespotting January 2007

2007-06-20T22:42:00.000-07:00

A few years back when I learned about this Movement I was attracted to the idea. But I thought, surely there is a reasonable amount of mundane sf being published in short form. It can’t all be time travel crap. I decided to try reading some of the magazines to look for such stories. In the past I was generally discouraged by the quality of magazine stories, and relied on the Best Of editors to filter the field for my occasional fix. But now I had a Mission, to see if there was really mundane sf out there like I thought. In the process, I actively bypassed the obvious fantasy or fantastic (my favored word for non-mundane sf) stories. Some of them might still be great stories but I wasn’t willing to spend the time finding out. Mundane sf was what I wanted to experience. I might just be another jaded fan without it.

So now, after a long break because I have had little time for fiction, I am at it again. I try to be pretty tolerant of different approaches to mundane sf. If it’s about something reasonably human on something that seems reasonably like Earth in the future, I’ll give it a chance. I have some biases, but for the most part I am looking for any kind of meaningful speculative experience. There’s plenty of high quality escapist fiction in my collection, so I feel no need to dig through the current sf magazines to look for more.

Finally, I have the excitement of the Sony PRS-500, the e-reader with the funky “ink” technology that you can read about elsewhere (readability and low power drain are the big hooks). It is my first e-reader and it has surprised me by being substantially better than expected (after I got over the initial quirks). I am using the “large print PDF” format from fictionwise (which itself is a quirky source, but generally an excellent way to go), in landscape orientation (half page at a time) at the highest available magnification (medium). Now if I read from a digest magazine it seems like such a dirty experience. Skipping over the non-mundane stuff is also relatively easy. This overall scheme isn’t particularly cheap, but the experience of having my own growing library in the palm of my hand is a new one that I am liking. Maybe in the next generation of hardware it will be possible to read a full-blown facsimile of a digest magazine page on one of these things.

For this first new round of mundanespotting I have read or skimmed through the nominal January 2007 magazines in e-form. I report below on the short fiction, sorted alphabetically by author. Although Analog is a double issue, a lot of its pages were devoted to articles and a serial. I was pleasantly surprised for the first time by the experience of reading it. I will see if I sour on it in the future.

Contents from:
F&SF January 2007
Asimov's January 2007
Analog January-February 2007
[na = novella, nv = novelette, otherwise short story]

— “The Face of Hate” by Stephen L. Burns (Analog): aliens
— “Gunfight at the Sugarloaf Pet Food & Taxidermy” by Jeff Carlson (Asimov's): sort of a whimsical chase story; very little speculation and thus perhaps a bit too safely mundane
— “Café Culture” by Jack Dann (Asimov's): a decently edgy psychology-of-terrorism story complete with an Asimov’s brand disclaimer
— “Double Helix, Downward Gyre” by Carl Frederick (nv Analog): a somewhat preachy chase story that is nonetheless mundane enough for me and a nice story to see in Analog
— “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” by Neil Gaiman (F&SF): an otherwise mundane story with fantasy or fantastic elements; I stopped halfway through, though the story probably had more going for it than the Gerrold…
— “The Strange Disappearance of David Gerrold” by David Gerrold (F&SF): a Being David Gerrold Story with fantastic or fantasy elements; I gave up halfway through
— “Radical Acceptance” by David W. Goldman (Analog): some sort of fannish non-mundane story, I guess
— “Exposure Therapy” by R. Emrys Gordon (Analog): interstellar travel or aliens or whatnot
— “Safeguard” by Nancy Kress (nv Asimov's): bio-political intrigue; not all that convincing but still a nice story
— “The Unrung Bells of the Marie Celeste” by Richard A. Lovett (Analog): FTL
— “Poison” by Bruce McAllister (Asimov's): overt fantasy
— “The Darkness Between” by Jeremy Minton (nv F&SF): generally traditional sf story about science and superstition in a fantastic future
— “Numerous Citations” by E. Mark Mitchell (na Analog): a somewhat mundane story with a bit too much unconvincing AI to make the cut; I would probably give this a mundane rating if the storytelling did not break down badly towards the end
— “The Hikikomori's Cartoon Kimono” by A.R. Morlan (nv Asimov's): a really funky story about art and culture in an otherwise straightforward mundane setting; my favorite story of this bunch—worthy for any “Best of” collection—Recommended
— “Battlefield Games” by Games R. Neube (Asimov's): non-mundane military sf
— “If Only We Knew” by Jerry Oltion (Analog): generally mundane story with hint of fantastic or fantasy elements I was unwilling to forgive
— “The Dark Boy” by Marta Randall (F&SF): mundane non-sf with a thin veneer of fantasy
— “X-Country” by Robert Reed (F&SF): I’ll call this a contemporary fantasy; interesting, but not credibly mundane
— “Super Gyro” by Grey Rollins (nv Analog): mundane sf power fantasy
— “The Taste of Miracles” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Analog): near Earth space story in a blatantly traditional non-mundane future
— “Kiosk” by Bruce Sterling (na F&SF): distinctive Sterling story about Eastern Europe and consumerism and technology and stuff like that; could easily be bloated into a novel that would bore me; works well enough in this form and is mundane enough for my tastes
— “Trunk and Disorderly” by Charles Stross (nv Asimov's): I think this was supposed to be about a future sport in a non-mundane future; I didn’t try reading very far into it
— “Emerald River, Pearl Sky” by Rajnar Vajra (na Analog): blurbed and skimmed as some sort of far future non-mundane science-is-like-magic story

OK, so that’s 7 stories that made the cut, including a fair number of long and memorable ones. That would make a good-sized mundane sf magazine for January if there was room in the field for a periodical with editorial tastes other than “eclectic,” “fantasy” or “Analog.” I will optimistically move on to February, thinking that the field for mundane sf may be improving. The next batch won’t include Analog because of the double issue this time, but I will be reporting on Interzone (in actual paper form!) and Jim Baen’s Universe (JBU) for the first time. Stay tuned.

Long Bets

2007-06-19T03:32:00.000-07:00

Trent, put www.longbets.org up on the right hand panel of important links, please.

This is so directly down our line that even Bet Number 1 about the Turing Test is consistent with MundaneSF. There is an interestingly phrased counterposition to this view. (My personal view is that the Turing Test is an utterly flawed exercise based on the fallacy of Behaviorism, but we'll let that slide.)

As if to prove the disconnect between the current state of conventional SF and this stuff, very few of the usual tropes appear in any form in that list. It would be really great if MundaneSF stories had to be associated to a long bet. If you aren't creative enough to invent one and submit it, just pick one and place some money on the other side.

In fact, that would be the way to get an exemption for using technology and laws of science that do not exist today -- you can only use them if you have placed a bet that it is so. For many people, having to put a token bit of money down behind their claim gets their attention and makes them think straight. So, you can have aliens beaming from outer space, only if you accept this bet. The discussion for that bet is also worth knowing.

There is a void in literature where no one is writing science fiction based on the laws of science, because it's too scary and difficult. Either an off-shoot of SF is going to colonize it, or someone else will, and we will be ghettoized permanently.

Make me want to read your story

2007-06-16T10:24:00.000-07:00

Whenever I enter a story, I am looking for a reason to read it. Usually, a story question--simple or profound--can do the trick. Sometimes, beautiful language works, but not the easy, knee-jerk pretty language that's trying to sentimentally tug your emotional strings by repeating gold, golden, gilded, silver, and such. Originality is the key.

Examples:

"I've done a terrible thing." -- Robert J. Sawyer's Humans

This forces the reader to ask: "What terrible thing?"

"He found the flying mountain by its shadow." -- Gregory Benford's In the Ocean of Night

This is an SF sentence. The reader wants to know by what means the mountain flies--among hundreds of other questions opened up by such a simple question.

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel
"'It's not like I'm using,' Case heard someone say." -- Neuromancer by William Gibson

Interesting, vivid imagery and language. Plus it evokes that old-time SF awe--an entire sky like TV. Mood-wise, there's something vaguely ominous about "dead" and even watching a sky that looks like a dead channel. He could have said that the channel was off the air.

Also, we wonder what drug the overheard character might be using. It turns out, though, that this drug usage is a joke in the Sprawl, which raises questions about the society that Case lives in ("What's a Sprawl?" a reader might also ask.)

Here is another example evoking that old-time SF awe:

"It was the most majestic series of structures David Collingdale had ever seen. Steeples and dome and polygons rose out of the ice and snow. Walkways soared among the towers, or their remnants. Many had collapsed." -- Omega by Jack McDevitt

Note that this also asks the question of why the structures collapsed.

In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space, he pops an SF sentence and follows it up with a question that is important to the protagonist:

There was razorstorm coming in.

Sylveste stood on the edge of the excavation and wondered if any of his labors would survive the night.

Now some speculative writers want to begin more in a literary mode. We still ask questions, but they should be driven to find out more about the characters:

"They sat stiffly on his antique Eames chairs, two people who didn't want ot be here, or one person who didn't want to and one who resented the other's reluctance."--Nancy Kress' Beggars in Spain

"To get through the afternoons that wound into early evenings, driving a school bus along long country roads and driveways, Hud kept slightly drunk." --The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God by Timothy Schaffert

"Each of us has a private Austen."--Karen Joy Fowler's Jane Austen Book Club

Why are Kress' characters tense?

In Schaffert's, different readers might ask different questions: "How can such a horrible man be in charge of children's lives?" "What drove him to drink and risk other people's children?" "What will this quirky character get up to next?"

Karen Joy Fowler's is also more complex than it appears. It's a simple yet original philosophical statement that gets us to ask, how so? But there's also a narrator who is commenting on other characters, so that we end up (if we've read Austen) asking which books and what kinds of characters would define their lives by these books--apparently finding them worth living by.

In fact, the beginning of fiction is only just the beginning of getting the reader to ask questions. If you tell the reader that today is an ordinary day, that the character lives in an ordinary apartment, that the character is just like everyone else you ignore on the street, the reader will wonder why he's being asked to read this.

Keep this in mind when submitting your stories. Why are you telling this story? What's interesting about starting in this place? If you don't have something worth saying at the beginning, you can't expect the readers to want to read further.

More oily editorial updates

2007-06-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

For those who want a video to watch, here is Robert Newman's A history of oil. For a conflicting story of oil there's this article from Armed Madhouse -- a very fine book which I am now reading. It's full of all kinds of short stories and vignettes on every page. It matters naught whether they are true; the stories are believable... it you are able to swallow the idea that our rulers now are no better than many of the rulers we know from ancient history.

Among the story submissions for the MundaneSF issue of Interzone are some rather apocalyptic visions about the end of oil in which all of society collapses and there's no longer anything to buy at the malls and people are reduced to living off weeds in between bouts of starting at their dead TV screens.

Ridiculous!

Think about it.

Humans were operating great European empires in the 1700s entirely without gasoline, satellite navigation or access to modern materials (plastics). You can be sure that when the gas runs low, every man and boy will be rounded up and put to work, doing the labour that used to be done by powered machines. We, our muscles, like horses, will once again be needed. It is very likely that society would become more integrated and interdependent than it has ever been before. Only with cheap oil do we have the luxury of going it alone and living our own isolated worlds, which is much more inefficient way of life.

In the future we might start living our entire lives near our parents, as humans always used to do till we got into the habit of splitting to the far corners of the globe. For many a modern person these days, this might seem unbearable. But maybe if we lived with our parents it would stop them becoming so eccentric; the world would be a better place if the older generation were prevented from becoming insane.

The quality of writing in the submissions is very high, which makes thinning them down jolly difficult for a novice editor like me. Unfortunately, no one is giving me any big ideas.

In 50 years time the world is going to be utterly unrecognizable to what it is today, and it won't be due to brain downloads or time travel.

If you can sum up your story in one sentence at the beginning, do so, and then get on with telling me about the big world beyond.

The key to the future is in the past. The old ways of doing things will come back, except it'll be different. It'll be like going back to grade school when you are grown up and 40 years old. Could you do it, go through the motions? Would it be very easy?

In some parts of the world the past is coming back. Here is a Carnegie Council podcast about North Korea. One of the worst famines of the twentieth century happened there in the mid-1990s and nobody noticed. This in a small country totally isolated from the world and apparently able to manufacture nuclear reactors and missiles. This ought to be impossible.

Old Science Made New

2007-06-08T11:02:00.000-07:00

Wireless Energy! (Scientific American)

Mundanespotting 2007

2007-06-04T21:38:00.001-07:00

After a long absence, I am going to try to do some reading and blogging again. I have some time, finally, to work with, and have stockpiled lots of fiction. To start off, I will be looking for (my idea of) mundane sf in the major periodicals with a nominal 2007 publication date. I've got Analog, Asimov's, and F&SF from fictionwise on my Sony ereader, and most exciting of all for this side of the Atlantic, I have an active Interzone subscription plus a giant pile of back issues (darn if I can't find 196 or 200, though). Also, I've got the first year of the Baen ezine and I might give that a look and maybe resubscribe. Stay tuned.

Spacetravel and nanobots

2007-06-01T02:47:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows my other blog will be familiar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute which is -- very worryingly -- taken seriously by many U.S. policy-makers. The problem, as I.F.Stone famously put in words, is that:

All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.

But this is not the blog for political ranting. I'm here to show you the following relevant excerpt from the CEI after-dinner speech where Fred the Director speaks from a space-ship in the year 2107 having gained immortality after his body was retooled by nanobots.

He's gives his usual spiel, that I won't pass comment on, that this glorious future somewhere away from planet Earth was finally made possible by the abolition of government regulation -- as if laws of physics and ecology were imposed by the government.

The point I'm trying to make is that this art-form -- the broadcast from the bright and better future -- used to be common currency. Now it's very rare and looks horribly dated. I think there is an important anthropological message here.

Or maybe I've got my observations wrong, and there is a whole slew of such videos on YouTube I am not aware of. If anyone locates any, I'll post them up. All contemporary views of the future are important to this project.

Often such stories are politically motivated. The defining characteristic is that it's a story about what will happen if we follow the policies that they are advocating, as opposed to a horror story of what will happen if we do not implement the policies. Do people propose positive arguments anymore?

Encyclopedia of Life

2007-05-24T02:33:00.000-07:00

Recently I got an iPod which now allows me to listen to all kinds of interesting broadcasts from around the world that were previously unaccessed. The aggregator software, the citizen journalism, the interviews with scientists who speak about what they believe in without the need to be filtered through the boring style required of scientific papers -- all of this has appeared in the last couple of years as yet another phenomenon never mentioned in an SF story before it happened. Like most aspects of the internet.

Writers have been too busy about telling us about holographic telephones to dream up the real stuff that matters.

The internet is moving into a different age. The dot-com boom was all about trying to make money out of this new technology. The logic of a business plan happens to give the most extremely blinkered view imaginable. Almost all the ideas were about how to make people shop more. Luckily, after all those millions of dollars were wasted on not writing any useful software (where the heck did it go?), no lasting damage was done. I say luckily, because all of the software patents that those companies took out -- claiming ownership of ideas -- could have been worth more than the paper they were written on, which would means they would have been extracting an idea tax from everything that followed.

In the May 16, 2007 edition of the Scientific American podcast is a segment entitled: "The Encyclopedia of Life; and the End of John Horgan's Pessimism" where there is an interview with the biologist E. O. Wilson who has a lot of very interesting theories.

In this interview he says he feels that for the first time in his life he is making history, because he was present at the launch of the Encyclopedia of Life.

The web-page doesn't have much to show for itself to be honest, so stick to the podcast. The idea is to gather together, organize, and provide totally free access to everything that is known to science about every living species on the planet.

Given that it is believed that the Earth is presently undergoing one of the greatest mass extinctions in its entire history, they're going to have to hurry up.

What could emerge from this encyclopedia is evidence of large scale patterns that no one has yet imagined, or particular species in the entire spectrum that happen to be the pathogen or the cure of vital importance. Maybe the identification of a particular roundworm in the wrong place is the vital clue in a detective story.

Here's a different miserable web-page that might just save your life: Famine foods.

At last

2007-05-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

It's still early days. We've dealt with about 15 stories through the web-page so far, so at least my design of the code is up to scratch. Each editor has their own password, and we can look at the table of stories awaiting attention simultaneously whilst coordinating through a Skype channel.

If anyone out there wants a copy of the program that runs the webpage, drop me a message. I wrote it a year ago, and since then it's been used to manage the submission of abstracts for the Experimental Psychology Society. I'll probably put a copy up somewhere which can be downloaded for free.

In the meantime, we don't expect the floodgates to open until later in the summer when folks have finally begun finishing off their mundaneSF short stories. What we're getting now is obviously not inspired by the guidelines, but was written beforehand and just happened to fit.

Stories so far are better written than I had expected, but they seem to be lacking in ambition in my opinion. Real life gets the better of it. And it shouldn't. If you read through the wikipedia article on Hurricane Katrina you'd see about 20 different stories that chart the event through the eyes of vastly different characters. There were people were on the rooftops, and others who drove down from the North with supplies because they were appalled by the government failure. There were even some men who got lost in the prison system for over a year because they had been picked up for an unpaid fine and then all the police records were destroyed by the floods so no one could tell the murderers apart from the people who hadn't handed back their library books in time. There's so much there.

Now, just to be clear, I do not want to see any stories about Hurricane Katrina. That's something that has now happened, and we can read the real life stories that are every bit as compelling as the best fiction anyone could ever write. What I am trying to get across is the fact that there are these spectacular events which are happening now and will happen in the future. It's got to be Science Fiction. The flooding and chaos of New Orleans was Science Fiction back in 2004. Now it's too late because it's reality. Had we published a story of someone living through those extraordinary events back then, it would have made the news. But we didn't. And we must do better in future.

The Mundane Interzone Issue

2007-05-05T18:54:00.000-07:00

It's time to revive this blog from the doldrums. A plan has suddenly been set in motion.

Originally we were going to sponsor a MundaneSF anthology. Then I thought of an "easier" option: Why not ask to be a guest editor for one issue of an SF magazine? We appear to have talked Interzone into it.

As you can see, the call for submissions is already up on their page. I had written this story submission webpage system a year ago, which still seemed to be working. While attempting to bring it up to date I was horrified to find that that there were already six(!) stories posted on it in the past week.

Well, at least it means the interface works. Unfortunately, the first story I picked out didn't look much like Science Fiction to me. Hoo Boy.

The closing date is 31st October 2007. The contact email is: mundanesf@gmail.com Further details to follow.

Science News

2007-02-22T16:57:00.000-08:00

Mag-lev system may assist in lowering costs for future space expeditions:

"The main cost-saving areas would come from reduced fuel consumption and
the reduced mass of the spaceship. "

Weather in Greenland affects the rest of the world:

“If things are happening near Greenland today, probably two days from now that
[air mass] will move down over Europe.... Two or three days after
it’s affected Europe, it affects Asia and then ultimately comes around and
affects North America. So Greenland ultimately affects the whole Northern
Hemisphere … our knowledge will potentially help improve forecasts.”

New understanding of subglacial lakes in the Antarctic (presumably have they not always existed and interfered?):

sudden pulses of fresh water could potentially interfere with nearby ocean
currents that redistribute heat and carbon dioxide around the globe, disrupting
the Earth's finely tuned climate system. "It's almost as if the lakes are
capturing the geothermal energy from the entire basin and releasing it to the
ice stream."

Yet another model proposing the origin of cancer:

[otherwise] harmless.... viruses... fuse cells.... abruptly unit[ing] two or
three cells under the same membrane, a change that triggers massive [chromosomal instability (CIN) and cancer].

Hold on to your lie-detecting hat, bub.

The Atlantic-to-Pacific exchange of water vapor:

might be an important feedback mechanism for abrupt climatic changes.
Researchers say the global ocean circulation during the past 90,000 years has
varied between warm and cold periods, some lasting thousands of years....
during warmer phases, moisture export from the Atlantic increased, which
reinforced the salt buildup in North Atlantic surface waters. The reverse
situation occurred during cooler periods, with decreased fresh water flux across
Panama.

Genetic hearing loss? Connexin26 may help! Troublesome old gene-therapy may not be needed.

Superbot can reconfigure himself for different terrains.

Elizabeth Bear's "War Stories"

2007-02-21T23:25:00.000-08:00

Baen's Universe isn't the most easily accessible electronic magazine. After a number of failed attempts and numerous contacts with the zine, I finally got in. I have to thank Bear for helping me connect initially with someone who could help. It may just be an isolated incident--although they do time you out after an hour or two.

The upside is that they provide quite a bit of content. The latest issue has five SF stories, three fantasy, three stories by new writers, serials, a classic, and a few other odd bits.

Elizabeth Bear's "War Stories" is reminiscent of Lois McMaster Bujold but told through a war-jaded protagonist hopped up on cyberpunk. The story has two threads--one where Jenny Casey as a member of the Canadian troops has moved into Hartford, Connecticut, the other where she helps care for the dying wife of a friend. In the Hartford thread, she runs across an orphan shot non-lethally in the head. She briefly takes him under her wing as he heals--he reminds her of herself at that age, coarse--but she eventually abandons him to his fate. When they reunite a decade or so later, it's as drinking buddies. It's more a personal story than SF, but that's pretty standard for much of Bujold's work--military life played out on the future stage. A solid work.

Peter Friend's "Minature" in Feb 2007, IGMS

2007-02-21T22:32:00.000-08:00

IGMS is a nifty little ezine. Cheap, too: $2.50/issue.

In "Miniature," Peter Friend takes on the alien-knocking-on-your-door trope (which as we all know is anathema to Mundane SF, so it is evil. Okay, now that that's dispensed with, on to the review).

Here the door knocked on is that of a crochety gentleman who--unlike most elderly folk--wants no visitors. The alien's attempt to get inside the door gives the story its best line:

"We may talk please, random human," it said, each word in a different voice.

When the alien flips him a C-note, the old man finally relents. From here, however, the story gets sentimental as the old man describes his meeting his wife and regretting her passing. It isn't necessarily sentimental in a bad way, but it might have explored the old man's personality more--or something. Still, the story has lots of heart.

Diana Rowland's story in Writers of the Future, volume XXII

2007-02-21T20:23:00.000-08:00

In "Schroedinger's Hummingbird," Diana Rowland has written a sort of tragic-domestic/magical realist/interstitial/SF story. A woman has lost her child due to an accident of either her or her husband's leaving the child-gate unlatched. In her grief, she revisits the past, but each time she goes back it changes. She tries to reset the past to where it was so that she can change it back to what it should have been without the mistake, but she keeps failing.

At times, this piece is genuinely moving. But the impact it has often gets diluted with wordiness:

at the bright red plastic feeder she'd put out the day before. That long-ago day before. She barely remembered that yesterday anymore, it had been so long since she'd lived it.

This says the same thing about four different ways when one or two would have worked (after all, the structure of the story and the story itself goes into this in some detail). This is not to say that repetition is always ineffective--Joyce Carol Oates has demonstrated otherwise throughout her career, but if you look closely, each of her repetitions is slightly different, shading a bit differently.

Also, while "telling" or explaining one's emotional state to one's self in the interior of a third-person limited POV is necessary, it sometimes goes on a bit long or isn't as sharp as it might be:

she sipped her tea and pondered the bright futures stretching before her and her wonderful family.

Nonetheless, Rowland makes the story worth reading by capturing some of the spirit of churning over the same old events with the frustration that such behavior entails:

She lost six months of her life that way--six months that had never happened except in her memory.

Text of Greg Bear's "Blood Music" now online at Tor

2007-02-21T19:59:00.000-08:00

The original story, "Blood Music," that precursor to what some think of as nanotech and what some once thought belonged to cyberpunk (although the humanists laid claim to it as well), is available at the Tor website. It's meant to entice you to buy Bear's entire collection. It should do the trick.

(I have a minor quibble with the reading format. You may want to reformat it yourself in your word processor if you have difficulties.)

People Peer in at Mundane SF

2007-01-30T23:26:00.000-08:00

Someone in Azerbaijan found us by searching for "barons as a fuel in future" and found this. (Someone in Beijing also translated us.)

Alasdair Stuart has written a very reasonable article for Coyote Wild. Unfortunately, most of my replies have been scattered or lost on defunct websites, so Alasdair may have missed my response to the unexpectedness of future science. Of course, science will change in the future. And so will MSF. MSF may be the most challenging form of genre fiction because it asks "Is this probable?" The writer cannot rely on any eye-candy because it looks cool. Every reflexive trope has to be re-evaluated. Of course, as hard SF writers know, this is nigh impossible. So be it. If nothing else, MSF should make it writers think about each gimmick before tossing it into the fictional stew.

Of course, we appreciate Alasdair Stuart's taking such a considerate approach, weighing each argument carefully.

2007-01-30T19:02:00.000-08:00

Scientific American has a blog. (Livejournal feed)

PBS on the 22nd Century.

Some worry about the lack of public awareness concerning nanotechnology (discussions of the safety problems). I discovered the lack of awareness when I had non-SF readers read a story about nano-tech. The average bloke simply hasn't even heard of its existence. Perhaps the future isn't on our minds.

2007-01-29T20:43:00.000-08:00

The garage will park your car for you (packing nearly three times the number of cars under your apartment).

One key to resolving Greenhouse may lie within Siberian peet moor:

With this new method the researcher could also clearly show that non-drained peatlands will eventually be extremely important net storage areas for greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, even in the case of global warming.

If global warming and the northward shift of bioclimate zones continue, however, then the peat moorlands will enhance the greenhouse effect says Borren.

When we age, we get silent (undetected) strokes, leading to memory loss.

Some excitement over Titan's methane lakes: It has a cycle like earth's rain.

Death DNA so that scientists might one day construct "a 'suicide gene' to code for deadly amino acid primes. It could be attached to genetically modified organisms and activated to destroy them at a later date if they turned out to be dangerous, Hampikian suggests."

Jonathan Lethem is giving his stories away to filmakers for a dollar.

Japanese Frill Shark Seen

2007-01-24T18:01:00.000-08:00

Normally living a half mile under water, this rare shark sickened and swam to the surface. Some cool pictures.

China building a sun?

2007-01-15T17:46:00.000-08:00

Physorg reports that China's fusion tests are reliable. I hadn't heard fusion had come so far. This news site reports that it is reactor that is reliable. They're hoping to maintain their artificial sun for 1000 seconds.

Mundane SF Enters the Genre's Lexicon

2007-01-11T07:29:00.000-08:00

Due to the recent appearance of two zines soliciting Mundane SF, I performed my first google for "mundane SF" in awhile--to see how it is faring in the lexicon. Despite the initial misunderstanding of the manifesto's tone--I was surprised to learn--that idea is percolating quite well.

The biggest news is that two novelists, with novels coming out this year, have avowed their work is Mundane. Charles Stross told Scifi that he'd written a Mundane SF novel. It turns out he had already told this to HardSF.net in an interview. Anil Menon also has a Mundane SF novel coming out--his debut novel, in fact. In his journal, he compares MSF to "the Kashmiri pundit Kshemendra describ[ing] a poet's education in the Kavikanthabharana." Author Paul Cornell called David Louis Edelman's Infoquake MSF (which the publisher, PYR, proudly linked to)--as if that were a good thing. Edelman, in fact, does link to the group. (Earlier Stross had mentioned that he considered Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End to be MSF, but I have no link for that.) (Side note on authors, #1: Ian Hocking has podcast his entire novel, Deja Vu. I can't recall if he said if it were MSF. Side note #2: A number of as yet unpublished novelists are also claiming their work as Mundane, such as David Mace, an aspiring author in the UK who is working on a Masters in linguistics.)

Tim Pratt told SFRevu that MSF had potential for exciting stuff. Patrick Samphire discusses MSF off-hand as a means of distinguishing rational SF from irrational. Hobby Space shares the MSF vision of a developed solar system but nothing else (which is not to exclude MSFers who believe only in a developed Earth). Playing with the alternate definitions of "mundane," he calls this idea "anything but mundane."

I loved this: Anna Feruglio Dal Dan translated into Italian the ideas behind Mundane SF and Infernokrusher. MSF stirred vigorous debate while infernokrusher bored them. Abigail Nussbaum described/debated MSF for SF readers in Israel (she gets hung up on the tone, but that's old news; the manifesto had always mocked itself for being a manifesto, which was supposed to be part of the fun; funny, how some people pick up on that immediately while others never do: Paperback Writer, for one, enjoys the antagonism: without evidence she attributed a Dark Cabal to MSF and a commenter of hers described his and her work as writing that doesn't "give a hang about the science." I do honestly wish Viehl the best with her writing).

In the comments, Niall Harrison compares/contrasts MSF to Spinrad. Ben Burgis described "V for Vendetta" as MSF as though that were a good quality. Someone in the commentary at Washington Monthly recommended the blog.

I finally found a description of the live debate between Ian McDonald and Geoff Ryman, written up by Andrew Ducker:

"I made it to the start of the programming in time to see Ian McDonald and Geoff Ryman argue about Mundane SF. Or rather, since Geoff turned up 20 minutes late, to see Ian McDonald defend Mundane SF by proxy until it could be defended in person. Various people seemed baffled by the idea that SF with certain limits might be considered particularly interesting, and Geoff was very careful to describe the whole thing as "rules for a particular game that I'd like to see played" as opposed to "How SF should be written".. Some members of the panel seemed slightly confused that FTL might not fit into hard SF, or that just because the story was obviously fiction didn't mean it was ok for absolutely anything to happen. Anyway, it was all fascinating, and hearing Geoff talk about the fact that Cyberpunk was effectively SF written after the fact, because people were so busy looking 3000 years into the future they weren't looking 30, made for a good discussion."

Six months ago, in Part 2 of a four part interview, Carolyn Hill for the Chronicles Network asked Geoff Ryman about MSF and how it was misunderstood. Actually, the whole interview is worth reading. Hill did a good job.

Two markets are actively soliciting for Mundane SF stories

2007-01-10T16:35:00.000-08:00

Future Fire lists Mundane SF as something it is seeking (submission guidelines).

The Angler, for its next issue, says, "What I'm looking for are submissions that at least give a passing nod to Mundane SF." Here's his podcast on Mundane SF.

podcasting

2007-01-10T08:30:00.000-08:00

Scientific American has a podcast.

Finally, Environmental Good News

2007-01-10T00:00:00.000-08:00

Scientific American: "seasonal plants can adapt quickly--even genetically--to changing climate conditions.... however,... longer-lived plants have a tougher time going with the flow."

New Scientist: "amphibians have a remarkable capacity to bounce back from environmental changes" however "Roelants warns that an ability to bounce back in the past does not necessarily mean amphibians will show the same resilience in the future."

Montserrat explodes and may explode again. Why is that good news? Locally, it's a major concern and a hardship, but according to Jared Diamond, it can be a source of new soil--even for areas distant to the explosion (strange how there can be good is some catastrophe). I also recall reading (although not where) that volcanic dust in the atmosphere may help slow the effects of global warming.

"The volcano's latest burst of activity began on Dec. 24. Glowing streaks of red from the pyroclastic flows have created nighttime spectacles visible across much of the island. The volcano's rising dome remained in place after Monday's explosion, raising fears of a bigger event soon."

***

In other science new: black diamonds originate in space, and the highly educated lose vocabulary faster than the less educated (so even if you pile higher and deeper, you don't get to keep that pile).

News

2006-12-22T14:53:00.000-08:00

Microbiology becomes Nanobiology: A researcher uses shotgun sequencing to discover smallest "microbes," which may or may not be cultured on its own.

Grannies will be gaming to keep their brains nimble. Get her an Xbox for Christmas and you won't see her again until New Year's.

Build a faster computer. Slow down light.

Planting trees is good, right? But where?

2006-12-13T15:55:00.000-08:00

Found this at PhysOrg:

"[N]ew forests in mid- to high-latitude locations could actually create a net warming. It also confirms the notion that planting more trees in tropical rainforests could help slow global warming worldwide....

"Forests affect climate in three different ways: they absorb the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and help to keep the planet cool; they evaporate water to the atmosphere and increase cloudiness, which also helps keep the planet cool; and they are dark and absorb a lot of sunlight, warming the Earth....

"[T]ropical forests are very beneficial to the climate because they take up carbon and increase cloudiness, which in turn helps cool the planet....

"[B]y the year 2100, forests in mid- and high-latitudes will make some places up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than would have occurred if the forests did not exist. "

Well, crud.

News

2006-11-14T01:31:00.000-08:00

What's going on in Australia:

They're playing air guitar that plays real music.

They're searching for ways to use less water in the showers (combining water with air) and on their gardens (turns out people use about 4x more than they need):

Gene therapy is not dead, apparently: It is being used for memory & now has a delivery vehicle.

What your granny ate may affect the activity of your genes.

Lying may affect true memories.

China projected to pass US in emissions earlier than expected.

Finally, body morphology may affect the brain. It may be that this places further limits on intelligent life elsewhere. (although their thoughts are aimed at AI):

"well-coordinated and learned actions of the robots created additional structure in their own sensory inputs. This additional structure may be used by the brain to more efficiently process information."

(Which may be another way for those dastardly neat-freaks to believe they control the world.)

News via Phys Org, Scientific American

2006-10-18T14:33:00.000-07:00

Strawberries may improve memory (especially if you're a rat or a mouse):

"Fisetin, a naturally occurring flavonoid commonly found in strawberries and other fruits and vegetables, stimulates signaling pathways that enhance long-term memory."

Ant memory tricks (which may have future implications for robots)

How do human brains solve problems?

"[W]e respond to increasing cognitive challenges not on a continuum, but in leaps as different areas of the prefrontal cortex activate."

Nervous system development

Cell traffic control

Possibly, the coolest news: Using UV lasers to cross-entangle two pairs may get around the problem of measuring one, an act that alters its state.

From the Novel to Collaborations

2006-07-31T18:44:00.000-07:00

This continues the conversation from the writing of "Calorie Man" and novels), which began with the original post about the general mechanics of everyday writing. The subject matters range wildly; hence, the short posts.

Lou Anders
Paolo Bacigalupi
James Gunn
Pamela Sargent
George Zebrowski

JG: What novels interest you? What criteria do you use or just instinct?

LA: Mostly instinct. 3000 words does not demonstrate writing a novel. Enough twists and characters that it makes me interested. He thinks PB should write a novella first.

GZ: I’ll buy it sight unseen.

PB: Great. I’ll hand it to you, and you can close your eyes.[laughter]

JG: You can always plot or develop characters. Creating world important. Best short stories in which novel is implicit, with tendrils branching out.

PB: Thought about that. Hints of greater world. Liked that about other stories. Bigger world hinted. Create lots of indicators without having to nail down all the mystery they indicate.

PS: Star Trek books you have background world and characters (although we invented characters). Don’t collaborate much. Dangerous to explore hints of real life creeping in. [GZ and PS] had bodies of work behind them first [before they collaborated]. We did it because we liked the show. Not the same emotional investment. GZ good at first draft. PS controlled final draft and characters. At each stage the other person did not interfere. Would not argue against collaborator. Only do collaborations after you’ve developed own voice. If done too soon, you don’t learn to develop defects.

GZ: I worry about collaborations. Nobody will think that’s your major work.

JG: No problems with Jack [Williamson in ], who didn’t care what JG did. Not profitable or useful enterprise. Pohl/Kornbluth. Kuttner/Moore. They talked it over first, wrote until tired, back and forth. One would say, “Okay, I’m done. You’re on.” The one who felt strongest about [story elements over which they argued], won the arguments. They forgot who wrote what. Moore estimated how much of who wrote what.

GZ: I balk at stories with 3 people writing one story.

JG: That’s the [usual] pattern of screen plays. [directs to LA]

LA: We wrote weak spots so that they can focus and then talk person into your own solution. [laughter] I hated revision. He [his writing partner] wrote/edited after I was done.

GZ: Work only cares if it hangs together.

LA: I’ve trained myself to collab, stop at 80% done.

Terry: How do you do science research?

Calories and the Novel

2006-07-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

When we last abandoned our panel heroes, George Zebrowski had asked Paolo Bacigalupi how “The Calorie Man” had come about, from creation to finish.

PB: It began in Bangkok with a fat white man who had just walked out of a girlie bar. (was “The Wind-Up Girl”). But kept getting energy-based thoughts--peak oil. I’m not sure I believe we have enough oil and coal for future. Read Hubbard’s peak. What if we didn’t have any? An economy not based on fossil fuels at all. What kind of economy would that be? Building big energy companies based on grain (calories). You can store energy in springs, to create portable energy. Introduced 15 characters. Had 3 plots going. New technologies kept coming up. Gets bigger and bigger. So kept paring as building. My son was born. Kept packing. Couldn’t see that multiple plot lines couldn’t be in 11,000 words. So most interesting thing was calories, the GM crops (control, intellectual property (from Mundane list), Indians flipped out [over something] and dragged that in as well. Peak oil, GM -- from that he created character who could carry out idea. Character integrated into world of points trying to make. Calorie smuggler to find gene-ripper who may have solution to problem. Muddy process of finding what was interesting about story. Once shifted focus, it didn’t make sense to set in SE Asia. It’s a grain story so it has to be set in deep farming regions, with Mississippi as road transport. Very little at beginning became story.

GZ: Sprague de Camp also had a “calorie” story. All that happens was two sleds chase each other over ice. Running and running, until one stops. Slide rule, calculates the number of calories they’d expended and finds that the others could not have survived. Hero turns back.

LA: Don’t do a calorie anthology.

PB: Still kicking around doing this as a novel. Back story is coming out in Asimov’s. Spin-out ideas still pretty neat. Yanked out early story character. Asimov’s story a bit more of an entertainment, but not as important. Working with central mass again. How might pull apart. Cultural appropriation: Process of girding self for writing story that he has no business writing about is daunting.

LA: It does sound like a novel I’d be interested in.

JG [to LA]: What novels interest you? What criteria do you use or just instinct?

How will Lou Anders respond? Does he expect novels to be accompanied by Alexander Hamiltons? or by dancing girls? What is the secret of selling a novel to Pyr? Stay tuned!