I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Martians, on my Kindle the other day (the short review: It was great, I don’t know how I felt about the poetry at the end, but I liked the collection.) and promptly began reading this month’s Asimov’s. The first story is an alternate history/fantastic history/I-think-there’s-science-fiction-coming-but-it’s-not-here-yet, piece and I can’t bring myself to really read get into it. It’s well written, and I even find myself delighting at the text (in a technical sense.) I think the issue that I’m running into is that I don’t really get the alternate history thing.

Which is, you know, weird. I should break out and say that my fiction tends to be very historically concerned. I’m fascinated by history and there are a lot of historiographical themes and ideas in the stories I write. But they’re all set in the future, and try as I might, I don’t really have much interest in writing stories set in the past of our world. Alternate or otherwise.

Maybe it has something to do with my view of history. I tend to take a big picture approach to history and I tend to think that single events and single individuals rarely really affect history. If you called me a determinist I’d probably gnash my teeth for a few moments and then agree. Which makes constructing alternate histories sort of difficult. Add to that the fact that quasi-deterministic big pictures, though probably accurate and helpful, don’t lend themselves to good stories. When you don’t feel like your characters--any of them--have agency, it doesn’t make for terribly interesting story telling.

At least for me. I think other people can pull it off.

This whole “I want my science fiction to be set in the future,” thing isn’t something I can rationalize or support very well. Clearly I don’t find the past to be a very good “escape.” The future is fun, vast, and full of possibilities and enables the sorts of things that I enjoy most in science fiction: the ability to engage in a critique of the present, high energy stories with adventure, and for lack of a better term, stories that impart a “sense of wonder.” There’s more out there, I just can’t seem to muster the interest.

This isn’t to say that I don’t sometimes find myself enchanted by non-futuristic stories, it’s just not a terribly frequent or predictable sort of experience. I should also be clear, I’m not of the opinion that when science fiction stories talk about the future and are set in a future, that they are about anything except the present at all.

And I’m not terribly proud of this. I suppose we all have our things.

I worry that my tastes aren’t sophisticated enough, that I enjoy stories for the wrong reasons, or that I get too caught up in the scenery and forget to pay attention to what really matters. Despite this whole “writer thing,” that I have going on these days I don’t have very much formal training in literature. It’s sort of awkward to say “I feel like I’m not a very good reader,” that’s definitely something that I battle with.

For those of you who are part of the larger community of science fiction/fantasy/genre fiction readers (which I think necessarily includes writers,) I’d be very interested to learn your thoughts on this subject: how do you relate to the future in the stories that you write and read? The past? Alternate histories? Is there some connection that I’ve mostly failed to see? Am I not alone in this?

Thank you (preemptively) for your feedback.

I’ve been, perhaps without good reason, trying to establish a tie between the (for lack of a better term) critical writings I’ve been doing here, and the kinds of things I try to accomplish in my creative work. I think my contact with and involvement in the Outer Alliance is probably responsible for this bit of introspection, but blame isn’t really required.

I’m a very political kinda of guy, right? I mean, I think about things very politically, I think there’s a lot of worth in thinking about how class, economics, and power dynamics (probably in that orders of priority.) I think that talking to people about political ideas, about how to change the world, and share these ideas with people is really a rather huge core of what I’m doing with this blog, and related projects.

When talking with OA people, I’ve realized how, at least superficially, my writing isn’t terribly political. I think I’m bold about addressing some of the intellectual ideas that I think are important, and there are ways in which the stories I tell are political on some level, but for the most part, I think

This gets me into all sorts of “art is apolitical” and “art transcends politics,” trouble, and I don’t think that’s exactly what I mean. Of course art is political, even my stories--which can’t omit to having overly complex political thoughts during the writing of the texts--are quite political. But I think the politics is the kind of thing that happens to a story when people read it, not during the moment of writing. When I’m writing, my experience is usually much more along the lines of “how do I get this character out of, or through, this scene,” and not how do I resolve this political crisis. As it were.

I think a few OA folks probably read this from time to time, and I’d be interested in hearing what they think about the juncture of “politics” and “writing fiction.” Thoughts?

Onwards, and Upward!

My first year seminar in college was all about Colonizing Mars, and it was built around the Mars Trilogy (which I’ve been writing about rather a lot these past few weeks, but I must admit that my first encounter here was not as fruitful.) Even though I spent most (all?) of my college years away from the science fiction world (long story, sorry BSFFA), the whole idea of space travel and colonization has been a fascinating problem.

And not just the recent hubbub about one way journeys to Mars, which I think Karl Schroeder does I fine job of dispelling, though I think there’s a much more thorny problem around population pressures and the cost of emigration that deserves some attention than the common discussion about space settlement has really been able to spawn so far.

Space is really big. Right? Like huge. The colonization of space if it is to be successful--in its own right, building settlements takes the efforts of a lot of people--is really about moving millions upon millions of people to Mars or the Moon not to mention other possibilities like constructed outposts and longer range colony ships. And that’s an incredibly huge proposition. Of course, the there would be some sort of pioneering group, but you’d need to be able to commit to being able to send a great deal of people out there in pretty short order. Think a million people a year for ten or twenty years? That’s 2,700 people a day and some change. If you wanted to ship a billion people off world over ten years, you’d need to lift almost 274,000 people a day.

Which isn’t anywhere near feasible, with transportation costs, equipment costs, let alone the logistics costs of getting a quarter of a million people to do anything in a concerted fashion every day for ten years. But the truth is to make a settlement viable out there you need a lot of people, perhaps I think more than can be easily transported from Earth.

Space is huge, though. Even our little corner of space is huge. Mars, because it doesn’t have oceans, has as much landmass as Earth. That’s a lot of room, and while I’m certainly not saying “we have to work to fill up the rest of the solar system as fast as possible,” I think there are likely critical mass and critical densities of people that would be required to make the settlement of space viable.

On top of Schroeder’s simple point about the role of launch costs (using current/Apollo-era technology), there is a whole other issue of “what to do when we get there,” (and how we’re going to sport that, whatever it is) are equally important considerations.

I guess my point, insofar as I have one, is that while we might start to feel a bit crowded on earth in the next hundred years--which may or may not be real--using off planet settlements as a “population shunt” is difficult. (Anyone else have a good way to get 20k people a day off world. Or more? Way more?) It would be hard to move people off world fast enough to make a dent in the population here, and also hard to move people off world fast enough and in great enough quantities to sufficiently populate those settlements.

One of the things I adore about Samuel Delany’s Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand is the huge scope of the universe, and that it’s huge not just in the traditional conception of “space is big,” where we put a lot of thought into “Stars are really far apart,” but also in the “Planets hold a lot of people.” There’s a segment, which is otherwise not particularly notable, where the narrator talks about the population of the settled universe, and he is--to our eyes--incredibly out of touch with the actual number of people in his “world” (universe,) and I think the figure the narrator gives is unspecific to the tens of billions of people. Which is sort of boggling.

And I think I’ll leave you on that note. Food for thought! Cheers!

From the file of “things I would like to be writing if I had more time.” Please, if you’re inclined or would like to use one of these ideas for the basis of a story, please feel free to.

1. A distributed space opera

I’ve been telling very tight space opera stories for a while now. Stories set within the next 1000 or so years that revolve around our sun, where the civilization shares much of our cultural background. Stories set in the future chronicles of “Western Civilization” as it were. I’d like to get away from that and tell stories that are bigger than that, stories with less ubiquitous communication between worlds.

2. An Alien Story

As a kid who grew up with ubiquitous bipedal aliens in Star Trek, I’ve been wary of alien stories, as I worry that the aliens will be too campy or too human like. Or I’ll fall into the exoticisism trap and have my aliens be too wondrous, and that’s not good either. Despite this avoidance, I love alien stories, and I love stories that can take advantage of this additional spectrum of difference and diversity, to mention nothing of the potential communication issues.

3. A Planet-bound Space Opera

Back to space opera. If this is my thing then, I’m happy for it. One of the things that I like about the forum are the ways in which it forces us to expand the limits of possibility and difference, it makes us thing big. The distributed idea above makes the world huge and vast by disconnecting the story-world from ours. I think setting a story on a planet or outpost, in a world where there’s a interstellar economy/culture, I think it would be interesting to explore the vastness and world view from the perspective of people who don’t actually travel between the stars very much.

4. Cyberpunk and Internet Networking

I’d like to write some sort of story that addresses some of the problems with managing “big data.” Which is to say, we’re collecting so much data right now and there’s so much raw information that it’s difficult to keep track and store it reasonably, much less find a way to make use of it. I think this is a hugely interesting problem, but I think as we begin to expand a little bit the there’s going to be technological limitations to the accessibility of data in some locales based on distance and local capacity. Exploring how this plays out practically in cyberspace is I think important. There will clearly be massive shared data collections, and computers will be networked, but will there be one data network in the way that there is now, or will there be many data networks? And where are the breakpoints socially?

5. A Story about Death and Closure

In my psychology major days I was very interested in development processes and moments around death and dying. Maybe I read too much Irvin Yalom, but I think a science fiction story--perhaps a sort of claustrophobic inmate story about the death of a civilization/society/planet (i.e. a “Cultural Fugue” to borrow an idea from Delany) handled in an optimistic sort of way, but not terribly sentimentally, to be fair. Because I like that kind of thing.

Onward, and of course, Upward!

Here’s another one for the “economics” collection of posts that I’ve been working on for a while. Way back when, I started this series by thinking about Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and by the model of economic development presented in the final two books. In short economic activity is organized around ~150 person co-operatives that people “buy into,” and then work for as long as the co-op exists or until they sell their spot so that they can work on a different project/co-op.

In the series, these co-operatives arose as part of a response to the multi/trans/meta-national corporations which were the books antagonists. Corporations which had grown so big, that they resembled nations as much as they did companies in the contemporary perspective. The co-ops came around in part as a response to the metanat’s, but then the corporations themselves restructured in response to an ecological/sociological catastrophe, so that they eventually started to look more like the cooperatives. The “progressive,” meta-national corporation was called “Praxis,” in the stories and Praxis was the organization that lead the transformation from metanational capitalism to, what followed. As part of this series, I’d very much like to think about Praxis and what kinds of lessons we can bring back from this thought, beyond the simplistic “cooperatives good, corporations bad,” notion that I’ve been toting for months. Thus,

• The corruption and disconnect from authentic economic exchange in that the metanats display in the Mars Books, far outclasses anything that’s happening today. On the one hand, given the nature of Science Fictional criticism, this isn’t such a great barrier to importing ides from the books; on the other, we must also imagine that Praxis is able to “out compete” traditional meta-nationals because of the scale of the issue. That is, the Praxis critique and solution may be valid today, but things may have to get much worse before a Praxis-like solution becomes economically viable.

• Praxis succeeds in the story, not because it can out compete the meta-nationals at their own game, not because it’s “right.” I appreciate fiction (and reality,) where the winning economic solution wins on economic rather than moral terms. While I’m hardly a Market proponent, it’s hard to divorce economics from exchanges, and I think the following logic fails to convince me: “we change current cultural practice to do something less efficient that may create less value, because it complies better with some specific and culturally constrained ethic.”

  One part of my own thinking on this issue has revolved around looking for mechanisms that produce change and I think Praxis is particularly interesting from a mechanistic perspective.

• Praxis presents a case of a revolutionary-scale change, with evolutionary mechanisms, which is something that I think is hard to argue for, or encourage as the change itself is really a result of everything else that’s going on in the historical moment. Nevertheless, everyone in the story world is very clear that Praxis-post transformation is fundamentally not the same kind of organization that it was before. In a lot of ways it becomes its own “corporate successor state,” and I think that leaves us with a pretty interesting question to close with…

How do we setup and/or encourage successor institutions to the flawed economic organizations/coroprations we have today without recapitulating their flaws?

Two things on the agenda. First, the third “season” of the BBC science fiction show Torchwood, which I have recently completed. Second, Samuel R. Delany’s novel “Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand,” which I am two-thirds of the way through.

Act One: Torchwood

I’m a huge fan of torchwood. It’s quirky, it’s fun, its easy to connect with the characters, and then there’s the Ianto/Jack relationship, which is handled amazingly throughout the entire story. The show isn’t without its flaws, of course, but it works really well.

So about this third season. It was good. While the fan in me says “I want more stories, and episodes” and “I want more characters to survive,” and “I want to see more of characters that I didn’t get to see very much of,” and “why do they leave so many fucking threads untied,” on the whole, I thought it was very well executed.

I think the mini-series--as this was, undeniably--is likely the future of television. The story telling potential is great, there are marketing reasons why it has merit, and I think from the perspective of the scripted television world, I think there’s a lot of potential for this sort of approach to television.

As for my quibbles with the story itself, I will attempt to not spoil anything, but I will say, that while the sentimentalist in me would have liked to see something different: it worked. Furthermore, I’d almost be tempted to say that “more torchwood” wouldn’t really work, and I don’t know that there’s anyway to write a season four that would capture “what I liked” about torchwood. It isn’t a pretty as the Battlestar Galatica ending this spring, but there’s almost a similar finality. Discuss?

If you’ve not watched torchwood, it is, I think, a worthwhile expenditure of time.

Act Two: Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand

This is an amazing book. The prose is stunning, the world that Delany created is incredibly fascinating, and the story pulls it all together. Amazing. Simply Amazing.

I know what happens (or doesn’t happen) in the end, which but so much of this book revolves around absorbing the ecstatic experience of the characters, that it doesn’t really seem to matter. There’s also, a second book that remains unfinished (though a portion was published in the 90s,) and I don’t expect that to be finished, pretty much ever, though I could be surprised.

There’s so much to say about the book, even with 150 pages left to go, that saying anything seems incomplete. Despite the fact that the main character is human, the world, and “his” world, is so totally alien. There’s this new gendered-pronoun system that the main character (and narrator) uses, where everyone regardless of gender is “she,” unless the speaker is attracted to the referant, at which point they’re “he,” and typically people refer to themselves as “women.” It makes it hard to track things, but it really works.

The other cool thing, is that there are these two ideologies that are battling each other for domination. The conservative one, called “The Family,” take a very structuralist approach to social organization. In today’s world we might call them “conservative,” but I think that misses the point; in contrast there’s the “Sygn” who take a very radical/post-structuralist approach to social organization, which is useful both as an example, and as it provides a very non-Utopian idea of freedom.

This is amazing stuff, and in a totally different way, it’s a very worthwhile book and experience. Give it a shot if you’re looking for something good.

About a week ago, by your reading, I finished writing a short story. The fact that I was writing a short story when I should have been working on the novel is perhaps a bit distressing, but I’ve taken the opinion that any work on short fiction--particularly short fiction where I’m excited about the project and reasonably happy with the results--is worth what ever attention and love I can spare for it.

So I took a break from my novel to write a short story. Most of my attempts at short fiction are so abortive that I was hesitant to even talk about it on the blog lest I jinx myself in some way.

But nevertheless, I got to a first draft. A first draft, that has an ending which doesn’t suck. This is a major accomplishment.

I’m not going to talk too much about it now, as it still has to pass muster with my reviewers and get edited into something a bit less rambling, but for right now I’ve chosen to take pleasure in the acomplishment.

I will, however, say that the story is basically a compression of a lot of the ideas in the novel I’m writing. The short story is set about 10-15 years before the story, but it has many of the same core characters, and--I guess--reformulates the core issues in the novel’s story in a different context.

Oh, and it’s a pretty cool space-adventure at the same time.

Because that’s how I swing.

I read a pretty cool interview with Vernor Vinge, in H+ magazine, where he talked about the coming technological singularity, which I thought was really productive. I’ve read and participated in a lot criticism of “Singularity Theory,” where people make the argument that the singularity is just a mystification on the process of normal technological development, and that all this attention to the technology distracts from “real” issues, and/or that singularity is too abstract, too distant, and will only be recognizable in retrospect.

From reading Vinge’s comments, I’ve come to several realizations:

• Vinge’s concept of the singularity is pretty narrow, and relates to effect of creating human-grade information technology. Right now, there are a lot of things that humans can do that machines can’t, The singularity then, is the point where that changes.
• I liked how--and I find this to be the case with most “science theory,” but the scientists often have very narrow theories and the popular press often forces a much more broad interpretation. I think we get too caught up with thinking about the singularity as this cool amazing thing that is the nerd version of “the second coming,” and forget that the singularity would really mark the end of society and culture as we know it now. That it’s a rather frightening proposition.
• Vinge’s comparison of the singularity to the development of the printing press is productive. He argues that the printing press was conceivable before Gutenberg (they had books, the effects, however were unimaginable, admittedly), in a way that the singularity isn’t conceivable to us given the current state of our lives and technology. In a lot of ways, the technological developments required in the Singularity, without attending to the social and cultural facts. The singularity is really about the outsourcing of cognition (writing, computers, etc.) rather than cramming more computing power onto our microchips.

As i begin to understand this a bit better--as it’s pretty difficult to grok--I’ve begun to think about the singularity and post-singular experience as being a much more dark possibility than had heretofore. There are a lot of problems with “the human era,” and I think technology, particularly as humans interact with technology (eg. cyborg) is pretty amazing. So why wouldn’t the singularity be made of awesome?

Because it wouldn’t be--to borrow an idea from William Gibson--evenly distributed. The post-human era might begin with the advent of singularity-grade intelligences, but there will be a lot of humans left hanging around in the post-human age. Talk about class politics!

Secondly, the singularity represents the end of our society in a very real sort of sense. Maybe literature, art, journalism, manufacturing, farming, computer terminals and their operating systems (lending a whole new meaning to the idea of a “dumb terminal”), and the Internet will continue to be relevant in a post-human age. But probably not exactly. While the means by which these activities and cultural pursuits might be obsoleted (tweaking metabolisms, organic memory transfer, inboard computer interfaces) are interesting, the death of culture is often a difficult and trying process, particularly for the people (like academics, educators, writers, artists, etc.) “Unintelligible” is sort of hard to grasp.

And I think frightening as a result. Perhaps that’s the largest lesson that I got from Vinge’s responses: the singularity is on many levels something to be feared: that when you think about the singularity the response should be on some visceral level “I’d really like to avoid that,” rather than, “Wouldn’t it be cool if this happened.”

And somehow that’s pretty refreshing. At least for me.