Tag Archives: science fiction

Must We Remain A Nation of Small Ideas?

Posted on by
Reply

Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929-2018

Ursula Le Guin died on January 23, at the age of 88. I first encountered her writing in the seventies. After multiple readings of The Lord of the Rings, I was hungry for more heroic-quest fantasy novels. There were plenty of them, but the only one I remember is Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy (1968-1972).

At a time when science fiction and fantasy were viewed as escapist genres, decades before YA become a lucrative fad, and before we knew about Jedi, Ursula Le Guin gave us the coming of age tale of Ged, who becomes a powerful wizard only after learning that his most powerful enemy is himself.

Many of this week’s online tributes and memorials have included excerpts from her acceptance speech at the 2014 National Book Awards Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. It is worth emphasizing this passage from her six minute address:

URSULA LE GUIN: I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. …

Le Guin’s call for creative artists, and by extension, all of us, to imagine more life affirming ways to live on this planet underlines the poverty of our current public discourse, which confines our national imagination to ever more narrow ruts. We suffer not from fake news but from trivial news.

The last three administrations have spent $5.6 trillion on warfare since 9/11. We’ve killed more than 200,000 civilians (as of 2015) and lost more than 5,000 of our own troops (as of 2016), but none of us feel any safer. Where is our national debate on what we hope to accomplish and the nature of our exit strategy? It is non-existent. Instead, we argue on Twitter about whether football players taking a knee is disrespectful to troops…

The day Ursula Le Guin died, Amazon opened the prototype of an automated grocery store that doesn’t require cashiers. Two days later I saw the picture of Norway’s prototype, zero emissions, automated container ship, that will be entirely crewless by 2020. Panera and McDonalds are trying out order kiosks that could eliminate cashiers and – the list goes on and on. Where is the national debate on strategies for the near term, when automation eliminates millions of jobs before new technologies open up ways to replace them? That, conversation too, is non-existent. It’s more politically expedient to blame foreign nations and foreign nationals for “stealing” our jobs…

We can think of many more essential debates that are not taking place because of the cowardice of our leaders. Le Guin, of course, would shake her head at the notion that today’s politicians or CEO’s are remotely capable of being “the realists of a larger reality.”

Her legacy is a lifetime of visioning other worlds and other ways of living in this one. It’s up to people who care to move that vision forward. Sadly, it seems increasingly certain that the world we would wish to live in is one more thing that will not be “Made in America…”

Notes from 2017 – The Day of the Dove

Posted on by
5
The Day of the Dove, Star Trek, season 3, episode 7

The Day of the Dove, Star Trek, season 3, episode 7

A 1968 Star Trek episode, “The Day of the Dove,” is an apt metaphor for one of the perils confronting our nation 22 days into the new administration. The episode aired in November, 1968.

An alien entity traps Klingons and the Federation crew aboard the Enterprise, and incites them to anger and violence. It isolates individuals in different parts of the ship. It implants false memories of past harms to feed the anger. It materializes weapons as tempers build.

After recognizing the danger, Kirk and Spock convince the Klingon commander and their respective crews to lay down their weapons. They laugh, joke, and generally act like they’re having fun. The entity fades and disappears.

As David Brooks observed Friday night on The PBS Newshour, the new administration had ample opportunity to move toward “bringing the nation together,” the stated goal of every other victorious president I can remember. Instead they go out of their way to foment discord

Why? Continue reading →

The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson

Posted on by
7

Diamond Age cover

I have written on several occasions of Snow Crash, the visionary science fiction novel that Neal Stephenson published in 1992. The book envisioned a future where nation-states had diminished importance. Most people lived as citizens of corporate enclaves and spent their free time jacked into virtual worlds. Snow Crash was written a year before the release of Mosaic, the first popular internet browser, and eleven years before the inception of Second Life, the best known virtual world.

Stephenson’s next book, The Diamond Age (1995), gives us a world transformed by nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter at the molecular level. In Stephenson’s 21st century, the integration of molecular biology and semiconductor physics has transformed everything. In the first scene, we meet Bud, a would-be enforcer for the lucrative “alternate pharmaceutical” industry, who has bulked up his muscles with intelligent, micro-robotic implants and wears what we now know as Google glasses to precision aim his “skull gun,” an implant as nasty as it sounds. In passing, Stephenson shows Bud in a waiting room, where people read articles on smart paper, essentially tablet computers, that have replaced magazines. Remember: The Diamond Age was published 15 years before the iPad and 17 years before the first Google Glass prototype.

In the diamond age, so named because synthetic diamond is cheaper than glass, objects made by hand are expensive and revered, since everything else is produced by matter compilers (a generation beyond 3d printers)? Just as in Snow Crash, nation states are obsolete. The upper classes live as members of cultural enclaves known as phyles or tribes, whose settlements are often above ground level, while the lower class “thetes” or people without a tribe, live below.

John Perceval Hackworth is a nano tech engineer for the Neo-Victorian, “New Atlantis” tribe. New Atlantis sits on an artificial mountain a mile above the polluted streets of Shanghai.  The clave is ruled as a corporate oligarchy by “Equity Lords” who style their culture after 19th century English royalty.

Hackworth is commissioned by Lord Finkle-McGraw to program an artificially intelligent book, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, a subversive text, which will help his daughter Elizabeth lead a life beyond the boundaries of the status quo. Hackworth makes an illegal copy for his own daughter, Fiona, but this is stolen when Hackworth is mugged. It falls into the hands of Nell, Bud’s daughter, a thete who lives in a ground level slum. Hackworth, Fiona, Nell,her brother Harv, an actress named Miranda, and a Chinese black market engineer named Dr. X are all involved with the Primer for reasons of their own; at its deepest level, the Primer holds the key to decoding and reprogramming humankind’s future.

The Diamond Age, which won Hugo and Locus awards in 1996, is classified by genre wonks as “post-cyberpunk,” whatever that means. As he was in technology and socio-economics, so was Stephenson decades ahead of his time in speculative fiction. We call this kind of book “dystopian” now.  I can think of at least two recent movies that play upon themes explicit in The Diamond Age. I won’t name them because I have no evidence that their creators read the book. Still, it is hard to imagine any serious writer of dystopian fiction who hasn’t marveled at Neal Stephenson’s vision.

Robots ‘R Us, installment 2

Posted on by
2
The Steam Man of the Prairies, 1868. Public Domain.

The Steam Man of the Prairies, 1868. Public Domain.

An obscure author, Edward S. Ellis, who published a dime novel called The Steam Man of the Prairies 145 years ago, may prove to have been a visionary according to two recent news articles.

The first, in the New York Times, reports that Google quietly acquired seven robotics companies over the last six months (Google Puts Money on Robots).  The scale of the investment is huge and appears to be aimed at automating manufacturing processes.  “The opportunity is massive,” chirped Andrew McAfee, an M.I.T. research scientist.  “There are still people who walk around in factories and pick things up in distribution centers and work in the back rooms of grocery stores.”

The second article I noticed bears an uncanny relation to the cover of  The Steam Man.  The California DMV has set rules for companies aiming to test automated cars (Driverless Cars Could be Cruising California Roads by Spring).  To put it in the terms of the M.I.T scientist, we may soon be able to robotize trucks and remove even more inefficient humans from the workforce.

The problem with this manufacturer’s wet dream should be obvious.  Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton puts it simply: “the economy remains lousy for most people. It will likely remain that way: As technology and globalization take over the economy, the U.S. has no national strategy for creating more good jobs in America.” (The True Price of Great Holiday Deals).

Economic discussion, with few exceptions, focuses on how to get back to the good old days of (relatively) full employment and opportunity for those who work hard.  Politicians bicker over which levers to pull, but no one dares to ask the fundamental question: has the structure of the world economy changed too much to recapture that particular sort of past “good times?”

A few years ago, news got out of worker mistreatment at Foxconn, the huge Chinese assembly plant where much of our high-tech gear is assembled.  Foxconn agreed to reforms, and the CEO announced plans to deploy a million robots.  By December 2011, robotic arms had reduced the number of workers on certain assembly lines from “20 or 30 down to 5.”  As we argue over fair wages for fast food workers, it’s a good bet their employers are working on ways to automate the task of making a burger, which can’t be harder than plugging components into a motherboard.

The problem, of course, is that downsized workers will not be buying either Happy Meals or iPhones.

Last March, in a post called Robots ‘R Us (?), a first look at such issues, I quoted a blogger named Orkinpod who was already considering them in depth.  On Feb. 27 he said:  “When the future arrives (and I believe that it is very, very close), and machines can supply all the things that humans could possibly ever want, what is everybody going to do?”

One thing many may wind up doing is working on food production.  Last summer I wrote of a compelling PBS NewsHour series, “Food for 9 Billion” (1).  That’s the total number of hungry humans who will occupy the planet in 2050 as the amount of arable land continues to shrink.  One of several examples given of coming change was Singapore, where five million people live on an island with only 240 acres of undeveloped land.  A 50 year old Singapore engineer developed a revolutionary type of vertical greenhouse that prompted the Directer of the National Institute of Education to say, “I think, eventually, urban factories for vegetable production will take the place of electronic factories in Singapore.”

It’s a grand irony to reflect that industrialism, which began by channeling people out of agriculture, may have succeeded too well; its end game my involve shifting some of them back into food production again.  But what about everyone else?  What happens as robotics and marvels like 3D printers leave ever more people idle?  Insiders aren’t even asking the question, though science fiction writers have since the mid 20th century.

robot3

Unfortunately, in stories where humans go up against robots, the outcomes are usually not the ones we would like to see.

Neil Gaiman on libraries, reading, and daydreaming

Posted on by
19
Neil Gaiman, 2007, CC-BY-SA 2.0

Neil Gaiman, 2007, CC-BY-SA 2.0

Neil Gaiman visited China in 2007 for the first ever, party-approved, Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention.  He asked a top official what had changed; in the past, these genres had been disparaged.  The official said his government had realized they were good at making other people’s inventions, but they didn’t invent or imagine new things themselves.

“So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google,” Gaiman explained, “and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.”

Gaiman told this story while giving the 2013 Reading Agency annual lecture on the future of reading and libraries.  The Reading Agency is a British charity that supports libraries and literacy programs, with the mission of giving everyone “an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers.”  Another story Gaiman told underscores the importance of the Agency’s efforts.  In New York, he once attended a talk on private prisons – one of America’s growth industries.  In trying to predict the need for future facilities, prison industry officials have developed a simple algorithm based on one key factor – the percentage of 10 and 11 year olds who can’t read.

Gaiman spoke at length of fostering not just the ability to read, but the love of reading.  There are no bad authors or bad books for children, he said.  Adults can destroy a child’s love for reading by giving them “worthy-but-dull books…the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.”  Everyone is different and will find their way to the stories they like and need.

Because written fiction, as opposed to television or movies, requires our imagination to turn the authors words into a vivid world, we return to our own world as a slightly different person, with an awareness of other points of view.  Reading fosters empathy, Gaiman said, and:

“Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals…You’re also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this: the world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.”

In his inspiring lecture, Gaiman talked at length of his love for libraries and how critical it was for his own development to have supportive librarians at the small library near his home while growing up – librarians who simply wanted books to be read and showed him how to use inter-library loan when he finished all the local books on vampires, ghosts, and witches.  When government officials close libraries as cost saving measures, “they are stealing from the future to pay for today.”

Gaiman expressed what he believes to be our responsibilities to children and to our future.  Reminding the audience that everything made by humans begins with imagination, we have a responsibility to use and foster our imagination of a better world than the one we found.

Gaiman ended with a quote from Albert Einstein.  When asked how to foster intelligence in children, the great scientist said, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

It’s mostly insubstantial

Posted on by
7

This morning, on friend and author Amy Rogers’ website, Sciencethrillers.com, I found the link to a great article by New York Times bestselling author James Rollins.  Rollins writes science thrillers, and the article, Turning Science Into Fiction, details a tour he took of Fermilab, near Chicago, the conversations he had with physicists there, and how he turns such information into riveting stories like his most recent novel, The Eye of God.

The Eye of God

The article holds points of interest for writers of all sorts.  When Rollins sat down with a group of Fermilab physicists, his question was, “Tell me what scares you about your research, what keeps you up at night?”  Not only did the answers become central to The Eye of God, but they hold great interest to me as a student of Eastern thought.

All religions hold that the world we perceive with our senses hides much of what is really real, but according to Rollins, his conversation with these scientists centered on “the insubstantiality of the physical world.”  He gives this quote he discovered after his visit:

“If you remove all the space within the atoms making up the human body, every person that’s ever lived would fit inside a baseball.” – Brian Greene, physicist

Beyond such ultimate pondering, Rollins’ article is full of details on his research which should be of interest to any novelist who wonders how much one needs to learn of an esoteric topic to be able to tell a convincing story.

I highly recommend this article, and for more of the same, Sciencethrillers.com, which you will find in the link above and on my blogroll.

Super 8: a movie review

Posted on by
3

Super 8 poster

Even if you didn’t know that Steven Spielberg was involved in the production of Super 8, 2011, you would think of him and the parallels to ET, 1982.  Both movies appeal to all ages, but center on the courage, creativity, and compassion of young people.  Best case, the adults need to be reminded of what really matters; worst case, these are the things they oppose.  Spielberg sat on the storytelling committee with director, J.J. Abams, and helped produce Super 8.  The film won numerous awards and nominations, for its special effects and the two young stars, Joel Courtney and Elle Fanning.

It is 1979 as the film opens.  Fourteen year old Joe Lamb (Courtney) mourns the death of his mother in a factory accident.  His father, Deputy Jack Lamb, blames the father of his son’s friend, Alice Dainard (Fanning), since his wife was working the shift of the elder Dainard, out with a hangover, when she died.

Meanwhile, Joe’s friend, Charles, is making a super 8 zombie movie for an international competition.  He enlists Alice as the love interest in the film, and she and Joe are soon smitten with each other.  One night they sneak out to film a scene at the station against the backdrop of a passing train.  As the camera rolls, a pickup drives onto the track and causes a major derailment.  The pickup’s driver, Dr. Woodward, their biology teacher, is badly injured, but pulls a gun and warns them to forget all they’ve seen or their parents will be killed.  As the kids drive away, an Air Force convoy arrives to secure the scene.  The convoy leader, Colonel Nelec, discovers a super 8 film cassette and sets out to find whoever made it.

Things in town start to get weird.  All the dogs run away to the next county.  Electronic devices begin to disappear.  All the engines in all the cars at a local dealership are stolen overnight.  Nelec’s forces surround the town and begin knocking at doors.  Joe and Charles sneak into Dr. Woodward’s house and discover why he was trying to derail the train.

There are plenty of nail-biting moments, and when things come out right in the end (you never really doubt it in this kind of movie), we get to see Charles’ zombie production, which is a charming ode to amateur movie making and the creativity of young people

Super 8 is well worth a viewing.

Robots ‘R Us (?)

Posted on by
4

forbiddenplanet

In the field of robotics, as in so many other areas of life, science fiction writers saw the future decades before the rest of us; they warned that androids were coming and the relationship would not always be easy.

Recently, I’ve seen adds on the cable channels by legal firms inviting the “thousands of victims” of botched robot surgery to join class actions suits (go to badrobotsurgery.com).  Ironically, the same Google search that brought up the lawsuit page also showed adds for robotic prostate surgery, which is not the time you want your robots going rogue!

Practicing medicine without proper training isn’t all the dastardly droids have been up to.  In an article called, When the future comes, what are we going to do with it?, blogger Orkinpod looks at how robots eliminate manufacturing jobs.

As an Apple geek, I was dismayed last year to hear stories of mistreated workers at Foxconn, the mammoth Taiwanese contractor that assembles iPads and iPhones.  Apple hired independent auditors to investigate, and Foxconn agreed to clean up its act, but that was not their only decision.  According to links in Orkinpod’s post, Foxconn is stepping up plans, announced in 2011, to deploy a million robots across their assembly lines.  They are much less inconvenient than humans.

If the sheer size of this transition is hard to grasp, the trend itself isn’t news.  Industry experts have already warned us not to get too excited about Apple’s move to bring mac production back to the states.  The process is now so automated that the number of new jobs will be far less than hoped for.

All this prompts Orkinpod to pose a question I haven’t heard anyone ask before:  “When the future arrives (and I believe that it is very, very close), and machines can supply all the things that humans could possibly ever want, what is everybody going to do?”  

That’s a question I’ve been thinking about since I read his post, and it generates many other questions centering on the value of work.  Even excluding the jobs that are dangerous or abusive, no work situation is perfect.  Everyone wants more respect or money or benefits than they currently get, but if we’ve learned anything over the last few years, it’s that being out of work is usually worse than being badly employed or under employed.  Aside from the money, work lies close to the core of self-esteem and meaning in our lives.  Even if we are working on the great American novel at night, as an artist I admire once said, “You’ve got to do something during the day.”

Even where there are safety nets, ever larger numbers of people displaced by technology is an issue I don’t think any nation has started to address.  In December, I discussed a report by the National Intelligence Council called Global Trends 2030:  Alternative Worlds. The report’s most definite conclusion was that the next 18 years will usher in more rapid change than anyone living has ever seen.  Summing up the findings, NIC Chairman, Christopher Kojm said:

“We are at a critical juncture in human history, which could lead to widely contrasting futures. It is our contention that the future is not set in stone, but is malleable, the result of an interplay among megatrends, game-changers and, above all, human agency. Our effort is to encourage decision makers—whether in government or outside—to think and plan for the long term so that negative futures do not occur and positive ones have a better chance of unfolding.”

I recommend Orkinpod’s post, which asks important questions “for the long term, so that negative futures do not occur and positive ones have a better chance of unfolding.”