I have an admission to make.

My first novel opened with the scene of a sort of “perfect fall day” on Mars.

That’s right. I had oak tree’s and grass on Mars. It was that bad

The other night I had the idea of seeing if I could rescue that story in a like 2,000 word space opera with a sort of “the bad guys always get away, but at least we’ll always have each other,” kind of piece.

Only without the trees this time.

William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present -Boing Boing:

I love the idea of science fiction turning its lens on the present, of finding the same frisson of futuristic speculation in looking around at the contemporary world.

(from Boing Boing.)

Ok, so I haven’t read *Spook Country* yet, which is Gibson’s newest novel, though I probably will at some point. For those of you playing at home, it’s a science fiction novel set one year in the past.

My thought?

With due respects to William Gibson, wrong!

At least for me, the futuristic (or even alternate history) elements of the genre make it possible to write and think about the relationship of current issues to their historical moment.

So so lets imagine a story idea I’ve just summoned up, for the purpose of demonstration…

So imagine a world where people are horribly overcrowded, all over the world, the climate is changing and people don’t want to do the things that would be needed in order to save the planet (consume less, carpool, recycle, pay taxes etc.) even when people start dying because the overcrowding and poor environment has weakened immune systems and made it possible for a virus to spread like wildfire…

Clearly this is a story about consumption and modernity, and in some ways a criticisms of current environmental policy. I hope we can agree on this. So, then, we could set this story in one of several time periods:

1. We could set it in in late medieval europe, and use one of the last outbreaks of bubonic plague as a means to explore this issue. 2. Put the story in the middle of the industrial revolution in, say, london. 3. Set it in present day, and have it be about a treehugging blogger who’s an art teach at an elementary school where kids start dying of bird flu. 4. Set it 500 years in the future, were the overpopulation issue isn’t just an issue in big cities, but everywhere, and the people are basically suffocating.

Now I’ve handicaped this example, by making the present day option sound really lame, but they’re all pretty good, so lets imagine that they’re all equally entertaining.

If you write it in the present day, the ideas you’re writing about, which are in all cases actually about present day issues, become simply about present day issues, and are only thinkable in-terms of the present historical moment. And you have people reading your story say “gee if we only had better environmental laws and values, restricted access to hand-sanitizing gels, universal health care, and a non dick-wad president, we wouldn’t be so screwed when this happens.” Which is a potentially fine thing to think; however, the readers in this situation are not thinking about other things that are important and related to the point that you’re trying to make: that humans have always had an effect on the planet, and that you can’t go “against” technology on a society wide level, and so forth.

But if you take the story out of the present time you’re able to say, lets see how these ideas are related to our present historical context, and how they are always located in a historical moment but also never located in one historical moment. If you set it in the past, your reader can think, “well, we got over the plague, perhaps we’ll be able to get past bird flu,” or “well, we found fuel sources that are more effective than coal, maybe we’ll be able to move off of our reliance on gasoline.” If you put it in the future you can do more or less anything with history; you can turn present day subtleties into major issues, you can write about revolutionary ideologies that are virtually unknowable in the context of contemporary politics.

This ability to experiment and test ideas out, could at its heart be understood as the “science” referred to in the term “science fiction.” Yeah, everything science fiction writers write about is about the present, but then so is everything that “mainstream” fiction writers write about, science fictions brilliance is--among other things--in it’s ability to denaturalize this connection. So where does this leave Spook Country? Numinous, indeed but maybe not exactly a huge step forward for the genre that Gibson (and Cory Doctorow et al) seem to think it is.

After a backup scare a few months back, I’ve gotten much more vigilant about backing up files. Since I work in plain text files, using a version control program like what programers use seemed like a logical step.

Got my on disk subversion repository to work correctly. This isn’t a huge improvement, of course, because everything’s dependent on my disk, but it does mean that I have a version control system for my personal and important files, in a way that I’m happy with, and at least theoretically I should be able to move this set up to my webserver, when I get that underway. I would like to say that it’s exactly the way I want it, and there are only 10 revisions. Pretty nice. While a lot of subversion things clicked in the last few days, I am far from a subversion master. Things I have yet to master:

1. Rolling back to old versions
2. Taking the contents of one repository and putting it in another, for good backups and moving things about
3. Getting some sort of good way to interact with it outside of the command line.
4. Pass-wording and protecting a repository.

While I’m good and getting better with the command line stuff for my own uses, I have a project in the works that looks like it’s going to be built around collaborations to a subversion repository. I’m thinking of using Instiki, because I’ve seen a version of that that is built around subversion and markdown/maruku, which is what I’d be working in anyway. If that could work, I’d be happy. We’ll see.

Anyway, this is cool software, and I’m quite pleased with it.

Cheers, tycho

I was thinking about Olin College for some reason, which launched me into something of a rathole about tenure and academia.

I have a buddy at Olin College, and I’ve heard some people rave about how awesome and hard-core revolutionary the program is. And I think it’s pretty nifty that in the late 20th and early 21st century, new institutions of higher learning can start and (hopefully) succeed. Having said that, as I am wont, I was curious about how tenure was dealt with.

Olin College is distinctive in several ways. First, it does not intend to establish traditional academic departments. Instead, the internal academic structure will involve several multidisciplinary clusters of faculty whose primary bond is the successful development of a cohort of engineering students. In addition, faculty employment relations will be based on renewable contracts rather than a traditional tenure system.

Now we’re talking about a faculty that I suspect (this is a guess) is maybe 40 people, and maybe growing a little. Also tangentially, “academic departments” are almost always about institutional administration. Now in a small setting you don’t could probably cut out that mid-level administrator, and just have the dean and a couple of people in that office take care of those kinds of things, but I’m not sure that really cuts much out, but whatever.

I have to say that I’ve had better experiences at institution where tenure is stronger, and the cries of, “but it isn’t economically viable!” is distracting, and I have yet to be convinced. I’m also convinced that when faculty are more fulfilled and supported, students learn more (and better). Part of keeping faculty supported is tenure, not to mention, living wages and health insurance. But there’s a difference between adjuncts that teach 5 intro-level classes a term and tenure/tenure-track professors that teach about three classes a term (or less), and have the opportunity to do research, and be active professionally.

I remain convinced that Tenure remains useful, even in the contemporary world. I can think of no other renewable contract-faculty type system that might successfully encourage research. You can’t have meaningful research/publication systems without it. Tenure allows for the ebb and flow that’s typical of the general career, it grants freedom, and sets expectations that research be incorporated into faculty life. Renewable contract systems focus on teaching, because that’s easy to talk and think about.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, as long as tenure continues to exist, those jobs will be preferable to non-tenure jobs to many people, and thus continue to attract better faculty. At the very least, I think tenured faculties will be more acceptable. To make an analogy, new science fiction magazines that pay writers, “pro rates,” tend to sell better, than ones that pay less than the 3 cents per word mark, because readers know that they’re able to buy better stories from authors, and are able to perceive that difference.

The idealistic (and flagrantly incorrect) free-market argument should suggest that non-tenured full time jobs should pay more than tenured jobs (trading the security of tenure, for an increase in salary) and frankly if that were the case, it might not seem like quite as bad of a deal, but not only do non-tenure jobs, tragically misunderstand the role and purpose of faculty, but they put faculty in a pretty precarious situation, it seems to me, and that’s not good.

Do any of you know how hard it is to write about the interactions of bodies, like physical contact, and expressions when you can’t say “so and so raised < pronoun > hand”

Well it’s hard. And I fear it’s making my characters seem even more chaste.

Just saying.

Do any of you, wise readers, have a good program that will take a bunch of messages in a mail.app mailbox and export them to a plain text file. I want to be able to take a lot of the messages that I don’t use most of the time, and be able to back them up, and also grep through them, without having them clog up my mail program.

I want something that will export headers and everything, and that will make one long text file rather than 10,000 separate files.

I have spent a little bit of time today, deleting messages that I don’t want to archive and getting my mail program organized in a more coherent way. I’m down from about 25 mailboxes and 20 rules, to about 13 rules and 15 mail boxes. This is an improvement. I also only have four emails in my inbox, which is also an improvment from my usual number around 20.

But I should be doing other things.

Also, somehow, I have a working onsite subversion repository. How’d that happen?

I’ve been thinking/talking here recently about the connections between open source (free; as in speech) development and knitting. I’ve also said that this, at least in my mind is related to the ideas I was considering in terms of how writers and creative types make money in the digital age, and while in my first foray I touched upon a debate over the commercial use differences between a creative commons license¹ and the GPL/GFDL, I think that post dealt with too many issues, and I think that the issue of commercializing content/product that is also free (again speech, not beer) is one that needs ongoing attention. Without further ado…

I should preface this with “but I’m not a lawyer,” to be fair. This thankfully has never stopped interested folk from honest commentary. My main point earlier was non-commercial clauses in that in situations where authorship is community mean that there is no “copyright holder” present to override that clause of the license. While I license TealArt to you all for non-commercial use, I can use my content commercially should I choose to. If TealArt were a wiki; however, and every entry was the product of a collaboration of many (more) people who, at least theoretically, liscenced their work to TA under “by-Nc-Sa” terms, if the rules where adhered to, no one would ever be able to use TA content commercially, not even me or any of the other originating contributors. In this way, for group projects, in an odd way, the GPL/GFDL approach lets the originators (and other people as well) use the content commercial.

Now the share-alike and the self-propagating property of the GPL/GFDL are probably equivalent from the perspective of an open knitting project. This quality means that while the content of such projects are open to be copied and used by anyone, any derivatives that are distributed must be liscenced under the same license as the original. The end result of this is that these licenses provide a good “countermeasure” to commercialization, and in an odd way, a powerful motivation for progress.

I think it would be helpful at this point to explore how commercial use and “open sourcing” could work together in a knitting situation.

Say there was a repository of knitting designs which contained notes on process, notes on intention, and even a pattern, and there was a project in this repository that I thought would be great for a class I was going to be teaching, I might decide to take the hat pattern and reproduce it for the class. Reading the notes and other materials, I was able to create an edited pattern that I could use in my class, which I “sold” to my students. Under GPL/GFDL-style terms, I would be obligated to share my modifications (and notes) with the OSK repository and my students.

It’s important to recognize that what’s being sold here, is not the pattern so much as a class, a service around the pattern, which is exactly how companies like Novell and RedHat make their money, and stay afloat. Linux, despite being free (as in beer, as well as speech) is, or can be, a viable business. To return to the hat class, we can assume that while I could have come up with my own hat pattern, the class is probably better for my using of the open hat pattern, because it’s been vetted my loads of other knitters, and hopefully my contributions to the project was useful; but if I’m going to be successful using Open Knit content, my teaching/etc. has to be more helpful than simply editing and providing a pattern, because access to the theoretical Open Knit content is, well, open to everyone: and free (beer/speech), of course.

With luck this openness helps keep the products that people sell of the highest quality, and if a GPL/GFDL/Share-Alike license is used advancements that commercial uses produce become part of the larger body of free/open work, and everyone benefits. It means that people hoping to make money from knitting and knitting design have to find other ways to participate in this process other than selling “intellectual property,” tied to services (teaching, editorial work for publishers, yarn design/sales, day jobs, subscription programs/clubs), but when you think about it, that’s how most people in the knitting business operate already, they’re just going it alone, rather than in a community. Which brings us to a great topic for next time: how the community/social aspect of open/free development projects (software and knitting) are organized on a more granular level, in terms of who’s doing the organization and the work.

But until then, I remain, tycho

Having basically converted from writing almost exclusively in Word, the last time I wrote fiction, I’m now enjoying writing in Markdown using plain text and TextMate. Here’s why:

So I’ve been writing today, and I think, despite a slight false start, I’m really liking how my writing turned out today. Unlike a lot of other pursuits (homework, dancing, sometimes knitting) that are really fun when I’m doing them but draining after the fact, getting writing done--particularly fiction writing--almost always leaves me feeling invigorated and fresh. I feel like I can do more when I’m done writing than I can when I’m done with other things.

What I love about fiction writing in Markdown:

1. It’s a subset of HTML, which means that HTML elements work in markdown. This is cool because as I’m writing I can use HTML comment tags, <!-- like this -->, to make notes to myself. For instance, today, I something changed with how I was writing a character today, so I left a little note to myself marking the occasion, which will persist with this document, and will be nice to keep with the documents. Also I’ll write up outlines and keep them in comment tags so that nothing sneaks through. Also TextMate highlights these tags, so that they look different from the text while you’re writing.

2. If you’re not writing linearly, or think that you need to go back and edit a paragraph later, but don’t want to break your forward flow with an edit, you can throw a hash or two or three (#) before the line and TextMate will mark the entire line in a special color so that you can pick it out quickly, or jump to it with the quick reference. If you forget about it, then when you run markdown or maruku, you’ll know very quickly that you have to change something.

3. Mark down makes pushing things out to the web, and a well formated paper/pdf document equally easy (particularly with Maruku), and I find tweaking a LaTeX document in TextMate (and even running LaTeX) to be way better than running it from the command line.

4. The Markdown subversion support is really great, and it’s nice to know that your stuff is all backed up and versioned properly.

5. Between MegaZoom (a SIMBL pluggin) and good text zooming support, a good--full screen--distraction free writing environment is easy to obtain, and a pleasure to write in.

6. Slim and Stable. This is a TextMate issue, of course, but, I really love not having to run Microsoft products.

That’s it. Good Wholesome fun.