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.

I’ve been reading--and by god I hope by the time I post this, I’m done reading--Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. I read (parts of) these once before, but I was busy adjusting to college at the moment and I didn’t retain a great deal from that experience. In any case, there’s a lot in these stories to pick apart and absorb.

And I enjoy that. I really like science fiction that both tells a good story and contributes to some sort of intellectual conversation that’s bigger than it. Surely all literature has some theoretical conception of itself, but work that unabashedly tussles with relevant knowledge is particularly powerful.

Hell, at one point, a character in Blue Mars meditates on Deleuzian philosophy. My heart goes pitter pattter at the sight of people who are willing to mediate on Deleuze and do a good job at it. (Ironically, or perhaps not, I think a lot of academics don’t quite know what to do with Deleuze.) Anyway…

One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed thinking about while reading Green and Blue Mars is that Robinson does a lot of economic theorizing and imagination. I find this an interesting playground as a lesson from fiction, and also as a productive consideration of the issues I began to talk about in my essay on co-ops, competition, and openness.

So read the book, particularly if you haven’t or if you’re interested in thinking about economic systems and potentials, but the current economy is… boggling.

Robinson posits (a martian) system where land is collectively owned, where projects (research, farming, construction) are undertaken by ~100-person co-ops that workers have to buy-into (with money earned during internships), with everything overseen by a Judaical system that makes judgments on mostly with regards to environmental impact.

My father, upon reading this, made the very apt judgment that, the key here is that--on Mars--there’s no countryside, and that farming (because it’s attached to cities because of the Atmosphere issue). While this is a vast oversimplification--of course--he’s right: new age hacker-type economic models need to consider “industries” like materials engineering and food production more than they currently do.

We have a lot of thinking to do.

In the last several days, I’ve spent a lot of time writing and working on this new novel that seems to be capturing too much of my attention. It’s a nifty story, definitely the best piece of fiction that I’ve written henceforth, despite all my worry, dread, and seemingly limitless self-doubt in relation to the project. Despite the gremlins on my shoulder saying “why aren’t you working on short fiction; why aren’t your characters having more sex; do you really think you can float such a disjointed/complex narrative; do you have a clue where this is going? …and so forth,” I’ve learned a few rather interesting things from this story this past week.

It’s a time travel story, stupid!

Yeah, I’m well into the 7th chapter (of about 12?) and I finally figured out that I was, at it’s core telling a time travel story. No, it’s not a case of getting several tens of thousands of words on paper and realizing that you’re writing the wrong story, but rather that I’ve always thought of it as a quirky space opera, and just this week I realized that what makes it quirky is that it’s fundamentally a time travel story.

Right.

My goal in this project was to write about history and how “history” emerges from “a collection of things that happen” to something more coherent and recognizable as such.

In a weird way, my fiction (since I started writing again in early 2007, at least) have always addressed the issues at the very kernel of my academic/scholarly interest. I’m interested in how communities form, and how people negotiate individual identities amongst groups of people. Open source software, cyberculture in general, and hackers are one way of looking at this that is very much the center of how I’m looking at these questions. Queerness is another. Same kernel.

In any case, history--however defined or used--is a key part of this community-identity-individual loop. Can you participate in the emacs/emacs-lisp community without knowing about the history of the XEmacs fork? Linux without knowing a little about the early days with Minix and UNIX? Git without knowing a little about CVS and the bitkeeper story? If you can, not for very long. There are other more mainstream culture examples as well, Americans and the great depression (particularly Roosevelt’s fireside chats, say?). Queers and stonewall? Etc.

This stuff is, to my mind, an incredibly important factor in “who we are” and how we all exist in our communities and the world at large. And because I’m who I am, I’m writing a story about this.

The science fictional effect, at play is relativity--lacking fantastic super-liminal (FTL; faster than light) space-drives--our characters must endure some pretty intense time dilation during transit: it takes them t weeks to get from planet A to planet B but meanwhile, it’s t years later on both of the planets who more or less share a common time line.

Now I don’t do the math right, for it to work out as being sub-light speeds (exigencies of plot; interstellar spaces are really big), but the time dilation is a huge feature of the story and of (many) main characters place in the world, particularly in contrast to each other.

And thus, in a manner of speaking, it’s a time travel story. Albeit where the time travel is one way (future bound,) linear, based on Einsteinian principals, and common place.

And it took me half the book or more to recognize the story as such, which will--if nothing else--allow me to explain the story a bit better.

In the future Project Xanadu Worked

I’ll probably touch on this later, but I realized (and this might not be particularly unique to my story) but that my characters were interacting with “the database” in the world. An internet-like system, only more structured, and more distributed, easier to search, easier to operate locally.

Which was basically Project Xanadu, on an interstellar scale. The features that my characters take advantage of:

• Distribution and federation of copies: I have ansible technology in the story, but even so, given the trajectories of data storage technology it makes more sense to store local copies of “the database” than it does, to route requests to the source of the data, or even your nearest peer for records. Assume massive storage capability, advanced rsync (a contemporary tool synching huge blobs of data across a network), and periods of, potentially, years when various ships, outposts, and systems would be out of contact with each-other. Nah, store stuff locally.
• Versioning Having a data store that stores data along a temporal axis (versions across time) is handy when you’re working on your computer and you accidentally delete something you didn’t mean to. It’s absolutely essential if you have lots of nodes that aren’t always in constant contact. It means you don’t loose data after merges, it solves some concurrency problems, interstellar data would require this.
• Structure: The contemporary world wide web (The Web) is able to function without any real structure, because we’ve imported data visualization from (more) analog formats (pamphlet layout/design; pages; index-like links, desktop metaphors), and we’ve developed some effective ad-hoc organizations (google, tags, microformats) which help ameliorate the disorganization, but the truth is that the web--as a data organization and storage tool--is a mess. My shtick about curation addresses this concern in one way. Creating a “new web” that had very strict page-structure requirements would be another. In the novel, their database grew out of the second option.

The future is here folks, but you knew that.

If you ask a science fiction writer about the future, about what they think is going to be the next big cultural or technological breakthrough they all say something like, “science fiction is about the present, dontchaknow the future just makes it easier to talk about the present without getting in trouble.”

While this is true, it always sounds (to me) like an attempt to force the “mainstream” to take science fiction more seriously. It’s harder to be dismissive of people who define their work in terms to which you’re sympathetic.

I’m of the opinion that when disciplines and genres get really defensive and insistent in making arguments for their own relevancy, it usually reflects some significant doubt.

Science fiction reflects the present, comments on the present, this is quite true (and key to the genre), but it’s also about the future. And that’s ok. Thinking about the future, about possibilities, more than the opportunity for critique is (part) of what makes this genre so powerful and culturally useful. To deny this, is to draw attention away from imaginations of the future sacrifice distracts what probably makes the genre so important.

I finished reading Jonathan Strahan’s The Starry Rift Anthology the other day. This was the first anthology that I read from cover to cover (I’m trying to get more into short stories). I’ve read other anthologies in bits and pieces, and the odd short here and there, but with this book, I thought, that I needed to add a bit of breadth, and I respect Strahan’s work a lot, so I gave it a go. And I quite enjoyed it.

I think that I’ll read more anthologies in this fashion in the future. The momentum and immersion of reading a novel is something that I enjoy a lot, and have had a hard time replicating when I’m reading short stories, but I figure this can be learned. I feel like I learned a bunch from the stories, both about the discourse and craft of short story writing.

I’ve also picked up Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. While I guess I read Red Mars years ago for school, I never really got into it. Or so I thought. As I’ve read these books again, I’m surprised and fascinated to learn how much they’ve influenced my writing and the way I think about science fiction world building and dealing with future possibilities.

And the books are really well done. In the last few days, I’ve read about a third of the last book (which is big in comparison to the other two,) and I’ll likely have read even more by the time I get around to posting this. After that, on to more Delany or another anthology.

My goal, I guess, insofar as I have one, is to get to a point where I can read a book a week, give or take. I’m not a particularly fast reader by default but I think as I read less than I’d like (perhaps) I’ve slowed down. Gotta change that.