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.

I wrote a lot yesterday. I write a lot most days to be honest. Though I’m not often successful at this, my usual plan of attack is to spend a chunk of time in the morning writing on fiction projects, (after some sort of warm up like a blog post or a few email) before I graduate onto other projects. Often this doesn’t work: I have other commitments in the morning, I get sucked into emacs or website hacking, “the best laid plans of mice and men,” as it were.

Yesterday, something similar happened: I got up and had something to do that took up morning, and I tried to do a little bit of writing, but I fell into another project, where I wrote a lot of content, but none of it was fiction. And then, at about 8pm, I said “crap, I need to write fiction.”

So I did. And I yanked out about 500 words (which is about my current daily fiction writing goal,) and then I was done. And I felt good. One of the reasons I’m so intent upon writing fiction despite my utter lack of training, and dubious skill is that in aggregate writing fiction makes me very happy. This example demonstrates--as if we needed more examples--that while it’s important to get in the habit of writing, ritualizing the habit is probably counter productive.

When I finished doing school the last time, I thought, “yes! no more homework,” except that this writing experience (from a procedural point of view) was a lot like homework (“ugg time I should do this”). Surprisingly this isn’t such a bad thing: writing makes me happy, and truth be told I’m pretty good at doing homework.

Anyway. Enjoy your day, and write something if you’re inclined thusly.

I listened to the podcast of “After The Siege,” a novella by Cory Doctorow, the other week (I’ve been driving cross country and walking a lot, I’m going through a lot of audio.) It was really cool and I thought it would be good to post a few notes. (For those of you who want to skip right to the podcast, here’s the link, but I’d get the files straight from cory’s podcast).

The reading was done by Mary Robinette Kowal, and it was amazing. I very much enjoyed the story, but it was a bit rough for me, at least politically. The story science-fictionalizes stories from the author’s grandmother’s experiences during the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, to tell a story about contemporary American Imperialism. Politically, something about this comparison, seems a bit fraught; both in its scope, and in the way it understands American Imperialism.

I think it’s probably a sign that my politics come very close to intersecting with Cory’s that I get so riled up in response to some of his fiction. When there’s no chance that I’m going to agree with someone, the fact that I don’t agree doesn’t worry me. When I’m pretty close, it’s a more troubling concern. The story is, however, quite good, so go listen.

I posted a new story on Critical Futures today. It’s another one from the Knowing Mars novella that I wrote a year ago and that I had been posting previously. After a much too long break from posting fiction, I’ve decided that I have enough brain space to work through some projects there and bring it back to life. While I think my first six months was an unparalleled learning experience, I think a different strategy is in order.

My goal/intention is to slip into a Monday/Thursday schedule, of posting 400-600 words rather than the every work-day of 200-400 words. The word counts are mostly for my own thoughts and less of a hard guideline. It’s also helpful, because I think, that even if I run out of my backlog, which seems pretty likely to happen pretty soon. I feel like I could probably write the requisite 800-1200 words on Saturday/Sunday morning along with my non-fiction essays, no matter what my life is looking like. I’m not sure what the future will hold, or what exactly is going to happen with my fiction, but it’s going to be there.

One of my background projects, however (and I’ll write about the theory here in an essay,) is generate a few “curatorial” pages for critical futures (and I suppose for tychoish as well). Basically I want to give people an easier “in” to the stories that I post on the web. This includes more creative templates and some hand-compiled guide pages, and as websites become home to more and more information my thought is that curation is the only real solution to this, and that, in that, it’s really the next big thing for content. But that’s another thought for another time…

Check out the new Critical Futures story, “Knowing Mars, http://criticalfutures.com/2009/03/”

Thanks for reading, and do tell your friends/submit fiction if that’s your thing.

When I took a break from Critical Futures near the end of last year, I had intended to begin with the new year with renewed energy and vigor, but when the new year rolled around, I found myself somewhat lacking in vigor. So I’ve waited, and I kept waiting. And now, its the end of January, and I still haven’t restarted, and I think it’ll be good to talk for a moment about that.

A big part of this is the fact that holiday vacations (such as they are post school) are never quite as long as you ever expect them to be. So I didn’t get that massive fiction writing binge that I was expecting and hoping for. And I also didn’t get that website redesign binge that I was hoping for. Alas. So I’ve needed more time, if not to do things, then to let projects breath. So my one or two week vacation turned into a month or more.

Secondly, my “write more resolution” (such as it is) that I talked about in this post, is a practice that’s a little more than a week old at this point. that’s not a problem, but preparing content for posting when I’m not actively writing on a project very much feels draining. Also, I’m aware that my “supply” of fiction is going to run out, well. Sooner than I’ll be ready to resupply it, particularly since the novel I’m working on now, isn’t really a Critical Futures project. Well, it is, kind of.

So with that in mind, what lies in wait for Critical Futures?

Well…

Recently I’ve started working more on the ending to Station Keeping’s second “season” I’m not keeping a special eye on it, but I’m probably half way done with the second season (which is all new). That’s helped my morale a good deal. Also, I’m beginning to see some real progress on the new novel project (yay for being less stuck), which is a help. While it’s a long way off still, knowing that this is going to end up as a podcast (and that this podcast will be a part of Critical Futures) that’s been inspiring for my feelings of writerliness. Putting my “job” as a writer above my “job” as an editor/publisher was something that I really had to do in order to make it worthwhile.

So the plan? I’m going to post fiction less regularly. The pieces might be slightly longer (but probably not much). I’ll probably alternate Tuesday/Thursday weeks with Monday/Wednesday weeks. When the podcast starts, I’ll probably do a pod-cast episode and a piece of fiction a week. I’m not going to change the design of the site, much, but I think some tweaks are in order, and I need to add/update some of the static pages on the site.

If anyone has suggestions, quirky science fiction that they’d like to submit to Critical Futures, or wants to help out (with designs or the like), I’d love to hear from you.

Onward and Upward!