Grasping Reality with Both Hands

Steampunk!

Via Making Light: Sydney Padua: 2D Goggles » Lovelace: The Origin:

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace:

The Difference Engine:

Burning Chrome...

Greg Farrell:

Former Goldman employee accused of cyber-theft: Law enforcement officials in the US arrested a former Goldman Sachs employee over the July 4 holiday weekend, accusing him of stealing sensitive automated trading codes and uploading them to a server based in Germany. Sergey Aleynikov, a computer programmer who joined Goldman in May 2007 and resigned last month, was arrested late Friday as he disembarked from a flight at Newark International Airport and charged the next day with theft of trade secrets and transfer of stolen property.

According to an affidavit filed by a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in the matter, Mr Aleynikov – who held the title of vice-president at Goldman before leaving June 5 – was part of a team that developed and improved the software codes used in the firm’s computerised trading programs. Mr Aleynikov was bound by Goldman’s standard confidentiality agreements. The FBI affidavit alleges Mr Aleynikov, after accepting the offer from his new firm – which has yet to be identified – downloaded approximately 32 megabytes of proprietary trading platform data from his desktop computer at work as well as his laptop at home on four separate occasions between June 1 and June 5, his last day at Goldman.

Jo Walton on Spearpoints

From "The Dyer of Lorbannery":

papThe Dyer of Lorbannery: There comes a point in writing, and it's a spear-point, it's very small and sharp but because it's backed by the length and weight of a whole spear and a whole strong person pushing it, it's a point that goes in a long way. Spearpoints need all that behind them, or they don't pack their punch in the same way. Examples are difficult to give because spear-points by their nature require their context.... They tend to be moments of poignancy and realization. When Duncan picks the branches when passing through trees, he's just getting a disguise, but we the audience suddenly understand how Birnam Wood shall come to Dunsinane....

[T]he [spear] I used as a title for this -- in The Farthest Shore, a minor character shouts out her name for all to hear. For someone who read that page alone, this would be inexplicable and possibly silly. For someone who has come all the way through Earthsea as far as Lorbannery already, it's terrible and revelatory -- and when Ged does the same thing later, quoting his own name in what Orm Embar says to him, there's an even longer spear-point that goes back to Ged's naming at Ogion's hands near the beginning of A Wizard of Earthsea...

Paul Krugman Visits the Cantonese-Speaking Future of Sixty Years Ago, and Is Happy

Krugman:

The future is not what it used to be - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: TI’m in Hong Kong right now; as always, I’m just awed by the way the city looks. And this time I think I’ve figured out why it’s so appealing. Hong Kong, with its incredible cluster of tall buildings stacked up the slope of a mountain, is the way the future was supposed to look. The future — the way I learned it from science-fiction movies — was supposed to be Manhattan squared: vertical, modernistic, art decoish. What the future mainly ended up looking like instead was Atlanta — sprawl, sprawl, and even more sprawl, a landscape of boxy malls and McMansions. Bo-ring. So for a little while I get to visit the 1950s version of the 21st century. Yay!

But where are the flying cars?

Apropos of which, Jim Henly once confessed to similar disappointment:

Pulp Nonfiction § Unqualified Offerings: Hugo Chavez talks a big game, but persists in half measures. The promising headline, 'Venezuela launches Zeppelin to tackle rampant crime!', turns out to be about mere surveillance craft. As someone on the Fate RPG mailing list wrote,

Now they need to arm them, hang biplanes from them or pack them full of monkeys. Or pack them full of armed biplane-piloting monkeys.

So say we all...

Arachne Jericho: How Iain M. Banks Ruined Me for Science Fiction, Epic Fantasy, and Low Fantasy

Arachne Jericho says, I think, that she should not have read Iain M. Banks's book Matter:

Review: Iain M. Banks’ Matter: On the nesting Matryoshka dolls of space-faring civilizations, philosophy a la Nietzsche, and how Banks ruined SF and epic fantasy at the same time for me. Matter is one of Banks’ loosely set Culture novels. As a rule they’re Big Idea tales that ruthlessly use mechanisms unique to science fiction to explore said ideas.... His world-building is more glorious and mind-bending than before, his ideas more encompassing and disturbing....

I made the mistake of getting attached to the plot threads, even though I knew ahead of time that, given the nihilistic theme that became more and more apparent, the collision of the two plots just could not end well. I don’t mind characters dying... but Banks didn’t just destroy characters, but entire plots....

After Matter, I devoured more Culture novels.... His books are excellent, exquisite in their handling of story. He’s one of the best writers out there, in any genre or mainstream. But his books are, in sincerity, not for me.... Banks made me despair of ever liking SF again. Any other book or story I attempted to read felt lifeless. I folded myself into the Dresden Files for two weeks after I discovered that I couldn't even stomach epic low fantasy anymore.

Well played, Banks. Your story stayed with me.

Ah. Iain M. Banks...

Remember: a Banks novel will be set in a galaxy-spanning space-traveling future, inhabited by super-intelligent robots with jokey names, show bizarre technological and natural marvels of enormous scale, involve fearful fanatic antagonists who cannot be reasoned with, contain do-gooders who leave a cornucopiac utopia to try to help the less-fortunate using whatever means are necessary. At the end those among the protagonists whom a malign fate has put at the end of the spear that might thwart the evil purposes of the antagonists will screw their courage to the sticking place, remember that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, do what needs to be done, and die. Or maybe not, if Banks is feeling exceptionally generous. There is always hope--until the very last line. (And be sure to read beyond the Glossary...)

It is true that Banks should be read only be trained professionals. But if you are ready for a Banks novel, what a ride!

Will Wilkinson Comments on the Debate Over at the Economist

Over at http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/03/10/this-house-believes-we-are-all-keynesians-now/?disqus_reply=7087846#disqus-claim, Will Wilkinson writes:

Brad DeLong and Luigi Zingales debate it at Economist.com. DeLong’s opening statement too effectively arrays a huge amount of intellectual firepower against him. If he could persuasively cut this team of giants down to size, it would be a killer opening. But his response to the challenge he erects seems to amount to the contention that this squad of bona fide geniuses are really benighted halfwits guilty of an elementary error. That’s pretty hard to swallow...

Exactly so.

I have learned more about asset prices from John Cochrane than anybody else. And yet--I seem to have fallen into some bizarro alternate world in which they are making an elementary mistake that Charlie Kindleberger, Peter Temin, and Barry Eichengreen taught me back in 1980 had not been taken seriously in 50 years.

You know. It is, like, like that Star Trek episode? Where there is a transporter malfunction? And they beam back to the Enterprise but the Enterprise is, like, different because the Federation is, like, evil? And Spock has a beard?

It is like that. Exactly.

It is terrifying.

The Will of the Group of 17 Was the Will of Everyone...

via bighugelabs.com

---

Posted via web from http://braddelong.posterous.com/the-will-of-the-group-of-17-wa at Brad DeLong's Scrapbook

I Cannot Believe He Did Not Entitle This Post "The Giant Rat of Sumatra"

via crookedtimber.org

This may be the only opportunity ever to legitimately entitle a post "The Giant Rat of Sumatra." And now it is gone.

(What's going on? you ask. Belle Waring has bought her husband John Holbo a book by Lionel Fanthorpe.)

---

Posted via web from http://braddelong.posterous.com/i-cannot-believe-he-did-not-en at Brad DeLong's Scrapbook

Technological Synergies...

The interaction of the iPhone, Amazon Kindle for the iPhone, and dead time because I am early to a rendezvous with nothing in hand but my cell phone may prove expensive in the long run.

Just saying...

How come I have never before heard of the existence of Steven Brust, Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille?

And is this going to be a tragedy, a love story, a slacker-musician story, or an unlikely-troop-of-misfit-heroes-saves-the-galaxy story?

The Local Party Bosses and Their Thugs Are Here, and the Emperor Is Far Away

Henry Farrell writes:

Loyal to the Group of Seventeen: This Financial Times story on how petitioners to the Chinese government are treated is extraordinary...

How many of us are there who understand the title of Henry's post?

Amazon's Kindle and the Recovery of Readerly Naivete; or, Were-Bats--the Big Bug Scourge of the Skies!

Jane Austen:

Northanger Abbey: The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity...

In a normal book, an author cannot have the antagonist fall with an ensorcelled death-sword in its belly with one-third of the pages left to go and expect the reader to be surprised at what comes next. The thickness of the pages beneath one's right hand scream: "THAT'S NOT THE ANTAGONIST, SCHMUCK!!!"

Reading it on the Kindle--the sudden appearance of the were-bats has an extra punch that it cannot have in the hard copy...

Economic Magery

From Lois McMaster Bujold (2009), The Sharing Knife: Horizon: Three ranger-wizards talking:

“Look closely at this.” Arkady, mystified, accepted it. “If you found this somewhere, not knowing what it was, how would you judge the metalwork?”

“Well... the raised image of the crayfish is actually quite fine. And the lettering, of course, so tiny, but clear to read”—Arkady squinted—“Silver Shoals City Mint, One Cray. And making things perfectly round is harder than it looks, I suppose.”

“Aye. Yet when we all visited the mint at Silver Shoals, back when we were coming downriver on the Fetch, we saw the machine that stamps these out a hundred at a time. One of these disks is a little work of art. Tens of thousands of ’em... become farmer magic.”

Arkady raised his brows; Dag plowed on. “They’re counters, memories of trade and labor that a man can put in his pocket and carry across a continent. They make things move. With my groundsense, I can summon my horse from a mile away. With enough of these, the folks at Silver Shoals can summon a forty-mule tea caravan from eight hundred miles away. And the ground density and complexity of a big river city like Silver Shoals is a making in its own right.”

“You see a farmer town as a making?” said Barr, his forehead wrinkling at this new thought. “I do.” “What about a Lakewalker camp, then?” “That, too, of course.” Arkady made to hand the coin back; Dag grinned and said, “Keep it. There’s plenty more where that came from”...

Charles Stross @ Crooked Timber

John Quiggin writes:

Charles Stross book event — Crooked Timber: A New Year, a new Crooked Timber book event. But instead of one book, we’re covering a dozen or so, all written by Charlie Stross, exploring different forms of the SF genre from postcyberpunk to alternate history and beyond.

Home Redecoration, Minas Morgul Style

From Kage Baker (2008), The House of the Stag (New York: Tor):

"Lady."

She looked up from her loom. The sergeant of the guard, the one with red eyes, bowed to her. "Sergeant?"

"Lady, we have the workmen for you. The Children of the Sun you wanted. With all their tools and gear. Himself says come and see."

"Thank you, Sergeant." She rose, smiling. "Where are they?"

"Got 'em in the lower courtyard."

He escorted her down through the corridors. Hideous monsters saluted shyly as she passed them. She stepped out into the courtyard and beheld red men, kneeling in a long row., They were blindfolded, their hands bound before them, and some wept and prayed to their gods. Piled in a heap to one side of them were chests and trays of tools. Gard stood to the other side of them, in his full black armor. When he spoke, it was not to her but to the prisoners, in a voice full of rolling thunder.

"Now, Children of the Sun, if you die tomorrow, you will still have seen the fairest sight of your lives, and you'd not see anything fairer if you lived on a thousand years. Free their eyes!"

His guards stepped forward and pulled off the blindfolds, one by one. One by one the red men blinked, stared around, then gasped as they saw the Saint. Some of them fell prostrate before her, bound hands outstretched. "Oh, Lady, save us!"

"Have mercy on us!"

"Don't let him kill us!"

She looked at them with horror and looked white rage at Gard. "What have you done?"

"Brought you workmen, as I promised," he said in that same theatrical tone, meeting her eyes without flinching. She saw amusement there, and covert purpose. "Why, madam, are you displeased? Shall I have them hanged?"

"No!" she cried. "You will have them released at once!" The red men crowded forward on their knees, weeping, thanking her, imploring her, praising her.

"Then I will spare your lives," said Gard to the Children of the Sun. "But you will slave for me nonetheless, to make fair the rooms in which my lady lives."

"They will not slave!" said the Saint. "If they choose to work, you will pay them in gold, and then you'll let them go!"

"Lady, is it fine work you want?" said one of the prisoners. "By all the gods, I swear you'll have rooms finer than a duchess's!"

"Wife, I will defer to your wishes," said Gard. "For I am your slave in all things. Should one of them displease you, however, his head shall look down sadly from a pike."

"May I speak to you alone a moment?" said the Saint to Gard.

He bowed her to the door, and she pulled him within the hall after her. "Now they will do anything you ask them," said Gard smugly.

"How dare you!" The Saint looked him full in the eyes with all the force of her anger, and he rocked back a little on his heels but did not look away.

"Wife, this is the way a Dark Lord accomplishes his affairs. And I had to bring them up here blindfolded, you know, that's elementary security. They haven't been hurt. They haven't been robbed. If they do a good job for you, by all means pay them what you will. They'll have to be taken down the mountain blindfolded too, but you have my word they'll be released alive and unharmed. That's fair, isn't it?"

"That isn't the point! Why couldn't you have asked them to come?"

"Because they wouldn't have. What with me being a Dark Lord and all, as they'd say. But look now: we'll get your rooms redecorated. They'll go back home and spread tales about the terrible Master of the Mountain and his beautiful and saintly Lady, who saved their lives. It'll do both our reputations a world of good."

"But this is all absurd!"

"Isn't it? I lie to survive, because people fear and respect a black mask more than an honest face. Life became much simpler once I understood that."

"We have not done with this conversation," she hissed...

Uh-Oh...

I have been In Teh Zone for the past three hours, furiously writing and finding connections falling into place with the effortless grace that comes about when one is In Teh Zone.

But at some point during the past three hours--I cannot remember doing it--I went to the refrigerator and grabbed the large iced coffee I was saving for breakfast tomorrow.

The glass is now empty beside my computer--I don't remember drinking any of it. The problem is:

• It was caffeinated.
• I have not had caffeinated coffee in three months.
• It's 11:30 PM.
• I am now bone-tired and exhausted from having gotten up at 5 AM.

I don't think I can sleep. And my brain is now too fried--I've come down from Teh Zone--to do anything serious.

I think that I have just flunked the Turing Test. This isn't the kind of thing that a sentient intelligence would do to itself, is it?

Maybe I'll go buy Steven Brust's Jhegaala on the kindle and read it until dawn...

Charlie Stross's Saturn's Children

Boingboing recommends Charlie Stross's highly excellent Saturn's Chidren:

Stross's new novel: Saturn's Children, a late Heinlein homage - Boing Boing: Charlie Stross's new novel, Saturn's Children, is out -- this is Charlie's Heinlein tribute, and unlike everyone else who does classic, adventure -story Heinlein tributes, Charlie's written a novel in the style of the late, indulgent, sex-saturated Heinlein, from the period before a cutting-edge surgery fixed a problem with the blood-supply to his brain (seriously). Orbit, the book's UK publisher, has also put an excerpt online.

Today is the two hundredth anniversary of the final extinction of my One True Love, as close as I can date it. I am drunk on battery acid and wearing my best party frock, sitting on a balcony beneath a pleasure palace afloat in the stratosphere of Venus. My feet dangle over a slippery-slick rain gutter as I peek over the edge: Thirty kilometers below my heels, the metal-snowed foothills of Maxwell Montes glow red-hot. I am thinking about jumping. At least I’ll make a pretty corpse, I tell myselves. Until I melt. And then –

I Can't Believe I Missed This! Monetary Economics in "The 47 Ronin"

I Can't Believe I Missed This! Teresa Nielsen Hayden:

Subterranean Special Science Fiction Cliche Issue: I always remember the moments when I’ve run into something I hadn’t realized was missing from other books.... That wonderful moment in Chushingura where the feudal retainers, meeting in their castle to decide whether they’re going to go to war with the central government, discuss how much of the paper currency they’ve issued is still floating around unredeemed. (They have to redeem it before rebelling, they decide; otherwise they’ll leave the peasants holding worthless paper.)

Ah. The footnotes tell me it's from the Kurosawa version, which I have not seen.

Hors d'oeuvres

I had never known before of anybody else who thought that "hors d'oeuvre" was "orderve."

Now I find that I have a fellow-sophont: John Scalzi, who actually uses "orderve" in a publication...

Let Us Welcome Our Web 2.0 Publisher Overlords

Charlie Stross on Tor Books's arrival on the internet at http://www.tor/com/:

Charlie's Diary: Dragged kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat: It's something of a truism that the larger a publisher gets, the more trouble they seem to have in understanding this interwebnet thingy. While smaller outfits like Baen Books and Subterranean Press seem to have more than half a clue, it's been almost embarrassing to watch the larger book publishers flailing around... so it's nice and refreshing to see one of them get their act together.

Case in point: Tor.com — Tor's revamped and relaunched web presence. It's very Web 2.0, with original fiction, blogs, and social networking bells and whistles; hopefully it'll be linked up to their long-awaited ebook store fairly soon so you can all buy my books. (Ahem ...)

Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden says:

Welcome to the Frontpage: The conversation: Effective blogging is a combination of good personal writing and smart party hosting. A good blog post can be a sentence long, or three pages long; what matters is that it encourages further conversation.

Back in the heyday of the Whole Earth Catalog, visionary Catalog editor Stewart Brand told would-be reviewers to (I quote from memory, and probably imperfectly) “write as if you are writing a letter to an engaged and interested friend who knows almost nothing about the subject.” That’s a good starting point for blogging. Tor.com is for fans of science fiction, fantasy, the universe, and the many “related subjects” that such persons are also liable to be interested in.... We’re not trying to convert everyone to our particular geeky obsession, but we do assume that our natural audience is composed of people who understand the pleasures of geeky obsession, and we hope to share the cool.

Much of what has driven Tor.com is our desire to more fully contribute to the great conversation that is the subculture of SF.... That conversation has done nothing but expand. It is a major tributary to the modern Internet. Tor.com aspires to be part of that conversation. We recognize it as something older and bigger than we are.

We’ve recruited a number of front-page bloggers based on their knowledge of certain specialized subjects and their demonstrated ability to blog interestingly....

As this site’s editorial straw-boss, I guess what I’d say to everyone playing here, front-page bloggers and commenters alike, is: Converse. Be yourself; be a person, not a megaphone--a personal point of view, not an encyclopedia or an “objective journalistic voice.” Even the original fiction is part of the conversation; the authors writing for us are aware that there'll be a public comment thread following every story, just as if it were a blog post. Talk to the rest of us like we’re human beings at an interesting social event. If you feel like you’re up at a lectern on a big stage, reconsider. Tor.com aspires to be a room party, not Carnegie Hall. Circulate and talk.

Wimpy Ross Douthat Resorts to Half Measures Only!

One of the big problems of the world is these wishy-washy centrists who offer us milk tea and weak toast. Here Matthew Yglesias identifies a problem:

Ross Douthat: I was watching Star Wars IV: A New Hope last night on television, and somehow it occurred to me for the first time that a new generation who watches... starting with The Phantom Menace is going to wind up with a very different perception of the story... that whole thing about Darth Vader being Luke's father... also in terms of some broader atmospheric points. The beginning [of] A New Hope is cloaked in a sense of mystery. For all we know old Ben Kenobi really is just a crazy old man and Han Solo's skepticism about "hokey religions" is justified. The audience rides along with Luke throughout the film, learning to trust in the power of the Force. New audiences won't have that experience, they'll already know much much more than Luke does about the Jedi, the Empire, the Skywalker clan, etc...

But Ross Douthat's proposed solution will do only half of what needs to be done:

Ross Douthat: I can promise you this much: In the Douthat household, the prequels don't exist - not now, and certainly not in a future where I'm charged with introducing a new generation to the Skywalker universe. Indeed, I intend to carefully vet all of my children's friends to ensure that there's absolutely no risk of a playdate or sleepover bringing them in contact, even fleetingly, with Jar Jar Binks, Count Dooku, the midichlorians and Padme Amidala, Queen of frickin' Naboo...

If he were a proper man he would go farther, and not pretend that half-measures will salvage the situation. There is a remaining problem bigger than all the rest: Ewoks. Enough said.

The only proper way to watch Star Wars is this: "A New Hope" followed by "The Empire Strikes Back" and the first third of "Return of the Jedi." The saga properly ends with the death of Boba Fett and Jabba the Hut, and oru last image of our heroes should be them looking forward into their unknown future struggle with the empire.

Walter Jon Williams: Implied Spaces

Walter Jon Williams's sword-and-singularity novel ("which sense of singularity?" you ask; that would be telling) Implied Spaces is highly recommended.

<minor spoilers>

It starts as what can only be called an hommage to the indescribable "Eye of Argon", and expands from there all the way up to the scale of Revelation 12:7...

I must say that I never expected the hero to be rescued from the villain's lair by a trained seal--albeit a highly-trained talking seal with 1337 hacker skillz...

And why does Aristide call his sword "Tecmessa" when it is clearly Morgaine kri Chya's sword Changeling? I never figured that out.

</minor spoilers>

Unexpected Benefits of Manhattan...

Unexpectedly early to a lunch in Greenwich Village:

View Larger Map

I halt the cab at the Flatiron Building

to see if can possibly finally meet a Nielsen Hayden or two in the flesh. And whom do I also find there sitting in a semi-lotus position but New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing on tour for his brand-new (and excellent) book Little Brother, who proceeds to:

• give me his five-minute lecture on why he finds David Brin's The Transparent Society too optimistic,

• and then hands me a pre-sale copy of Jo Walton's Half a Crown for me to read on the plane back to San Francisco.

(I had expected to meet Doctorow at CFP on Thursday, but he was then in San Francisco signing books).

Now off to lunch with Nouriel Roubini at the Mercer Kitchen...

Theodicy and the Rapture for Nerds

Charlie Stross provides us with a short course in modern theology:

Charlie's Diary: The Fermi Paradox revisited; random despatches from the front line: The Fermi Paradox.... We exist, therefore intelligent life in this universe is possible. The universe is big.... So where is everybody? Why can't we hear their radio transmissions or see gross physical evidence of all the galactic empires out there?... [I]t's a fascinating philosophical conundrum — and an important one: because it raises questions such as "how common are technological civilizations" and "how long do they survive", and that latter one strikes too close to home for comfort.... Anyway, here are a couple of interesting papers... the 21st century rationalist version of those old-time mediaeval arguments about angels, pin-heads, and the fire limit for the dance hall built thereon:

First off the block is Nick Bostrom.... "The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful--which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable--that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods." The nature of the Great Filter is somewhat important. If it exists at all, there are two possibilities; it could lie in our past, or in our future. If it's in our past, if it's something like (for example) the evolution of multicellular life — that is, if unicellular organisms are ubiquitous but the leap to multicellularity is vanishingly rare — then we're past it.... But if the Great Filter lies between the development of language and tool using creatures and the development of interstellar communication technology, then... we're going to run into it, and then ... we won't be around to worry any more.

But the Great Filter argument isn't the only answer.... Milan M. Ćirković... criticizes the empire-state model of posthuman civilization that is implicit in many Fermi Paradox treatments... for a civilization to be visible at interstellar distances it needs to be expanding and utilizing resources in certain ways.... Ćirković explores... non-empire advanced civilizations... such localized civilizations would actually be very difficult to detect....

Finally... here's John Smart pinning a singularitarian twist on the donkey's tail... our posthuman descendants bootstrapping themselves all the way into "'intelligent' cosmological developmental singularities, highly compressed structures, censored from universal observation, which are very likely distantly related to the quasars and black holes."... [I]t's down the rabbit hole that we're heading, which fits neatly with the city-state model that Ćirković explores....

Finally... John Baez on the end of the universe... Boltzmann brains...

The Bush Administration: Worse than You Can Imagine Even Though You Know It Is Worse than You Can Imagine

Via Sadly, No! Stew Magnuson reports on psychopaths who "have the ear" of Undersecretary Jay Cohen:

Security Beat: Now a fixture at Department of Homeland Security science and technology conferences, SIGMA is a loosely affiliated group of science fiction writers who are offering pro bono advice to anyone in government who want their thoughts on how to protect the nation. The group has the ear of Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Jay Cohen, head of the science and technology directorate, who has said he likes their unconventional thinking.... Among the group’s approximately 24 members is Larry Niven, the bestselling and award-winning author of such books as “Ringworld” and “Lucifer’s Hammer.”...

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

“The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.

“Do you know how politically incorrect you are?” Pournelle asked.

“I know it may not be possible to use this solution, but it does work,” Niven replied.

“I cannot guarantee I’m going to be a great help to Homeland Security,” Niven said earlier....

The 45-minute panel discussion quickly deteriorated as federal, local and state homeland security officials, and at least one congressional aid, attempted to ask questions, which were largely ignored...

The Bush administration: worse than you can imagine even though you know it is worse than you can imagine.

Jo Walton on Linguistic Subcreation

Patrick Nielsen Hayden sends us to Jo Walton. She writes:

papersky: Fast and Dirty Fantasy Names: You don't have to make up languages the way Tolkien did, you have to make up words and names and the illusion of languages. But those names and words have to be right, because names are threads in the tapestry, names need to work with the picture, or at least be neutral....

There is a simple way of getting round this... the random fantasy name generating program.... First vowels -- eliminate one, and decide which of the others is the favourite. Then consonants -- decide between: B-V V-W W-R M-N B-M C-K C-G C-S S-Sh Ch-Sh TT-Th. When you've decided, write down the alphabet without the ones you don't want, with the favourite vowel twice and with "Ch" or "Sh" or "Th" if you want them.... Then randomly (roll dice?) select consonants (no more than two together) and vowels, stopping when you have stuff that feels nice....

[I]f you want to have two fantasy countries that are different from each other, make all the different choices for the other language... their names and words sound different from each other, even if the reader can't tell exactly how.... The Gonovians and the Camavese really will seem like different people....

carandol and I once made an alien language.... The aliens were called Xanfd, and they rocked.... But I defined so many of their words that eventually when I ran the [word-generating] program it was as if I was getting messages from them, full of words I knew, or half-knew, and other words I didn't. The screen would fill up with things like "Human attack /something/ spaceship /something-plural/ size-comparative something-highstatus FTL communications /something/ broken /something/ /something/ light something something-plural survivors".

I could therefore use this for plot generation.

I do not actually recommend this, as my memory of sitting in a darkening room reading yellow text on a blue screen that told me of battles far away and alien secrets is a little too realistic for comfort.

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Paul Krugman Is "Startled at My Ignorance"

Paul writes:

Economic science fiction: I’m startled at Brad DeLong’s ignorance: he thinks there’s something new about science fiction novels where the science in question is economics.

This theme actually goes back a long way. I once stumbled across Robert Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, a very early novel that’s actually inspired by the then-popular doctrine of secular stagnation, which argued that rising savings and declining investment opportunities would lead to persistent problems in getting people to spend enough.

Oh, by the way — it’s a terrible novel, though not as bad a novel as The Internecine Project is a movie. Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes novels, on the other hand, are economic science fiction worth reading.

Admittedly my memory of Beyond This Horizon is hazy. But I recall it as being much more about scientific research into life after death, ennui, dueling customs, eugenics--I don't recall secular stagnation and the consequent danger that too much savings would produce chronic high unemployment as playing much of a role, although I do recall a powerful government able and eager to finance all kinds of expensive blue-sky research. I also recall a "social credit" government that finances itself and pays citizens a basic income, all out of seigniorage...

I agree that Charles Stross's Miriam Beckstein "Merchant Princes" novels are much better than Beyond This Horizon.

And I still maintain that Daniel Abraham's "Lord Iron and the Cambist" is worth a Hugo...

A New Kind of Science Fiction...

John Scalzi sends us to a new kind of science fiction--for this time the science is economics:

Daniel Abraham, "The Cambist and Lord Iron".

Nominated for the Hugo award. Vote early and often. Shows a deep understanding of the concept of opportunity cost.

Now I Have an Irresistible Desire to Go Read "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"...

Gary Farber sends us to Samuel Delany, who reads:

Samuel R. Delany: About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words: Now let's atomize the correction process itself. A story begins:

The

What is the image thrown on your mind? Whatever it is, it is going to be changed many, many times before the tale is over. My own, unmodified, rather whimsical The is a grey­ish ellipsoid about four feet high that balances on the floor perhaps a yard away. Yours is no doubt different. But it is there, has a specific size, shape, color, and bears a particular relation to you. My a for example, differs from my the in that it is about the same shape and color—a bit paler, per­haps — but it is either much farther away, or much smaller and nearer. In either case, I am going to be either much less, or much more, interested in it than I am in The. Now we come to the second word in the story and the first correction:

The red

My four-foot ellipsoid just changed color. It is still about the same distance away. It has become more interest­ing. In fact, even at this point I feel vaguely that the in­creased interest may be outside the leeway I allowed for The. I feel a strain here that would be absent if the first two words had been A red … My eye goes on to the third word while my mind prepares for the second correction:

The red sun

My original The has now been replaced by a luminous disk. The color has lightened considerably. The disk is above me. An indistinct landscape has formed about me. And I am even more aware, now that the object has been placed at such a distance, of the tension between my own interest level in red sun and the ordinary attention I accord a the: for the in­tensity of interest is all that is left with me of the original image.

Less clearly, in terms of future corrections, is a feeling that in this landscape it is either dawn, sunset, or, if it is another time, smog of some sort must be hazing the air (… red sun …); but I hold all for the next correction:

The red sun is

A sudden sense of intimacy. I am being asked to pay even greater attention, in a way that was would not demand, as was in the form of the traditional historical narrative. but is…? There is a speaker here! That focus in attention I felt between the first two words is not my attention, but the at­tention of the speaker. It resolves into a tone of voice: “The red sun is …” And I listen to this voice, in the midst of this still vague landscape, registering its concerns for the red sun. Between the and red information was generated that between sun and is resolved into a meaningful correction in my vision.

This is my first aesthetic pleasure from the tale—a small one, as we have only progressed four words into the story. Never­theless, it becomes one drop in the total enjoyment to come from the telling. Watching and listening to my speaker, I proceed to the next corrections:

The red sun is high,

Noon and slightly overcast; this is merely a confirma­tion of something previously suspected, nowhere near as major a correction as the one before. It allows a slight sense of warmth into the landscape, and the light has been fixed at a specific point. I attempt to visualize that landscape more clearly, but no object, including the speaker, has been cleared enough to resolve. The comma tells me that a thought group is complete. In the pause it occurs to me that the redness of the sun may not be a clue to smog at all, but merely the speaker falling into literary-ism; for at best, the redness is a projection of his consciousness, which as yet I don't under­stand. And for a moment I notice that from where I'm stand­ing the sun indeed appears its customary, blind-white gold. Next correction

The red sun is high, the

In this strange landscape (lit by its somewhat untrust­worthily described sun) the speaker has turned his attention to another grey, four-foot ellipsoid, equidistant from himself and me. Again, it is too indistinct to take highlighting. But there have been two corrections with not much tension, and the reality of the speaker himself is beginning to slip. What will this become?

The red sun is high, the blue

The ellipsoid has changed hue. But the repetition in the syntatic arrangement of the description momentarily threatens to dissolve all reality, landscape, speaker, and sun, into a mannered listing of bucolica. The whole scene dims. And the final correction?

The red sun is high, the blue low.

Look! We are world and worlds away. The first sun is huge; and how accurate the description of its color turns out to have been. The repetition that predicted mannerism how fixes both big and little sun to the sky. The landscape crawls with long red shadows and stubby blue ones, joined by pur­ple triangles. Look at the speaker himself. Can you see him? You have seen his doubled shadow …

Though it ordinarily takes only a quarter of a second and is largely unconscious, this is the process.

When the corrections as we move from word to word produce a muddy picture, when unclear bits of information do not resolve to even greater clarity as we progress, we call the writer a poor stylist. As the story goes on, and the pic­tures become more complicated as they develop through time, if even greater anomalies appear as we continue correcting, we say he can't plot. But it is the same quality error com­mitted on a grosser level, even though a reader must be a third on three-quarters of the way through the book to spot one, while the first may glare out from the opening sentence.

In any commercial field of writing, like s-f, the argument of writers and editors who feel content can be opposed to style runs, at its most articular:

“Basically we are writing adventure fiction. We are writ­ing it very fast. We do not have time to be concerned about any but the grosser errors. More importantly, you are talking about subtleties too refined for the vast majority of our readers who are basically neither literary nor sophisticated.”

The internal contradictions here could make a book. Let me outline two.

The basis of any adventure novel, s-f or otherwise, what gives it its entertainment value—escape value if you will—what sets it apart from the psychological novel, what names it an adventure, is the intensity with which the real actions of the story impinge on the protagonist's conscious­ness. The simplest way to generate that sense of adventure is to increase the intensity with which the real actions im­pinge on the reader's. And fictional intensity is almost en­tirely the province of those refinements of which I have been speaking.

The story of an infant's first toddle across the kitchen floor will be an adventure if the writer can generate the infantile wonder at new muscles, new efforts, obstacles, and detours. I would like to read such a story.

We have all read, many too many times, the heroic attempts of John Smith to save the lives of seven orphans in the face of fire, flood, and avalanche.

I am sure it was an adventure of Smith.

For the reader it was dull as dull could be.

"The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" by Roger Zelazny has been described as “…all speed and adventure…” by Theodore Sturgeon, and indeed it is one of the most exciting adventure tales s-f has produced. Let me change one word in every grammatical unit of every sentence, replacing it with a word that “…means more or less the same thing …” and i can diminish the excite­ment by half and expunge every trace of wit. Let me change one word and add one word, and I can make it so dull as to be practically unreadable. Yet a paragraph by paragraph synopsis of the “content” will be the same.

An experience I find painful (though it happens with increasing frequency) occurs when I must listen to a literate person who has just become enchanted by some hacked-out space-boiler begin to rhapsodise about the way the blunt, imprecise, leaden language reflects the hairy-chested hero's alienation from reality. He usually goes on to explain how th “…s-f content…” itself reflects our whole society's divorce from the real. The experience is painful because he is right as far as he goes. Badly-written adventure fic­tion is our true anti-literature. Its protagonists are our real anti-heroes. They move through un-real worlds amidst all sorts of noise and manage to preceive nothing meaningful or meaningfully.

Author's intention or no, that is what badly written s-f is about. But anyone who reads or writes s-f seriously knows that its particular excellence is in another area altogether: in all the brouhaha clinging about these unreal worlds, chords are sounded in total sympathy with the real.

“ … You are talking about subtleties too refined for the vast majority of our readers who are basically neither literary nor sophisticated.”

This part of the argument always throws me back to an incident from the summer I taught a remedial English class at my Neighborhood Community Center. The voluntary nature of the class automatically restricted enrollment to people who wanted to learn; still, I had sixteen and seventeen-year-olds who had never had any formal education in either Span­ish or English continually joining my lessons. Regardless, after a student had been in the class six months, I would throw him a full five hundred and fifty page novel to read: Dmitri Merezhkovsky's The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci. The book is full of Renaissance history, as well as sword play, magic, and dissertation on art and science. It is an ex­tremely literary novel with several levels of interpretation. It was a favorite of Sigmund Freud (Rilke, in a letter, found it loathesome) and inspired him to write his own Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality. My students loved it, and with it, lost a good deal of their fear of Literature and Long Books.

Shortly before I had to leave the class, Leonardo ap­peared in paperback, translated by Hubert Trench. Till then it had only been available in a Modern Library edition translated by Bernard Gilbert Gurney. To save my last two students a trip to the Barnes and Nobel basement, as well as a dollar fifty, I suggested they buy the paperback. Two days later one had struggled through forty pages and the other had given up after ten. Both through the book dull, had no idea what it was about, and begged me for something shorter and more exciting.

Bewildered, I bought a copy of the Trench translation myself that afternoon. I do not have either book at hand as I write, so I'm sure a comparison with the actual texts will prove me an exaggerator. But I recall one description of a little house in Florence:

Gurney: “Grey smoke rose and curled from the slate chimney.”

Trench: “Billows of smoke, grey and gloomy, ele­vated and contorted up from the slates of the chimney.”

By the same process that differentiated the four ex­amples of putting books on a desk, these two sentences do not refer to the same smoke, chimney, house, time of day; nor do any of the other houses within sight remain the same; nor do any possible inhabitants. One sentence has nine words, the other fifteen. But atomize both as a series of corrected images and you will find the mental energy expended on the latter is greater by a factor of six or seven! And over seven­eights of it leaves that uncomfortable feeling of loose-end­edness, unutilized and unresolved. Sadly, it is the less skilled, less sophisticated reader who is most injured by bad writing. Bad prose requires more of your mental energy to correct your image word to word, and the corrections them­selves are less rewarding. That is what makes it bad. The sophisticated, literary reader may give the words the benefit of the doubt and question whether a seeming clumsiness is more fruitfully interpreted as an intentional ambiguity...

Walter Jon Williams's Implied Spaces

S.M. Stirling tells me that I must buy this book:

Night Shade Books: Williams, Walter Jon - Implied Spaces: Implied Spaces pioneers a new genre of SF--the 'Sword & Singularity' novel. Williams combines fantasy tropes believably with nanotech, bleeding-edge infotech speculation, classic smashing-planets space opera and intriguingly human, or possibly post-human characters along with a fast-moving plot and a quirky sense of humor in a melange that's cosmological, theological, ontological, comic, and thoroughly entertaining.

John Scalzi Is too Good a Book Salesman

He must be stopped. Or I will be brokie:

The "I'm Writing This to Totally Make You Jealous" Post: In which I tell you about some of the ARCs I’ve received recently that mean I get to read all the books you want to read before you do. Bwa ha ha ha hah ha! Hi, I’m evil. Let’s see what we got:

• Saturn’s Children, by Charlie Stross — It’s Stross does late-period Heinlein! Now there’s an image that will haunt your sleep for decades. Charlie actually gave me a peak at this a while ago, and I immensely enjoyed what I read, but then a computer implosion basically took that file away from me. Yes, we pause to shed a tear here. But now I have it! In ARC form! And lo, there was much happiness. It comes out in July, friends. Suffer until then.

• Ink and Steel, by Elizabeth Bear – “Queen Elizabeth rules by wit and by will, but magic keeps her on the throne...” reads the cutline. Well, yeah. I thought everyone knew that. Bear’s output makes me feel like a slacker, and there aren’t that many writers who can make me feel like that. The next time I see Bear, I’ll have to tell her that: “You make me feel like no other writer!” And then, the tasering will commence, I suppose. This also hits in July.

• The Edge of Reason, by Melissa Snodgrass — Patrick Nielsen Hayden described to me thusly: “a contemporary metaphysical thriller about the secret battle between the forces of rationality and the Old Ones From Beyond Time, the latter of whom are using superstition and religion as the means by which to knock over the barriers that prevent them from breaking through and eating our brains.” Really, he and Snodgrass had me at the brain-eating. I’m very excited about this one, and for the rest of you, you have until May to put your brains under lock and key.

• The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds – This book was already nominated for the BSFA Best Novel award this year, so you could say it comes with a recommendation to you from all of British fandom. Which, you know. Is nice. And it’s set in Reynold’s Revelation Space universe, so fans of that have something to look forward to. In June. Which is when you’ll read it. After me. Ha!

• Lonely Werewolf Girl, by Martin Millar – As Publishers Weekly blithely summarizes: “Young werewolf skulks around London and struggles with anxiety and eating disorders while scores of subplots merrily explode around her.” Well, and isn’t that always the way, when you’re a young werewolf? That’s the way it was for me. Hmmm. I suspect I may have said too much right there. The publication date here is April 20, but Amazon says it has it in stock. So I can’t hold my ability to read it before you over you this time. Curse you, Amazon, for denying my cheap and tawdy attempts at literary superiority! We hates Amazonzes, Precious! We hates them forever!

Go on, admit you’re jealous. I’ll still respect you. Really.

Tor Books Enters the 21st Century: Step I

This threatens to be, in the words of Jo "Authoress of the Damnedest Versions of Both the Tale of Sir Lancelot and Jane Austen (Actually Anthony Trollope) I Have Ever Read" Walton:

more fun than a barrel of Arcturan spider-puppies!

From Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

Making Light: Phase one: collect underpants: Yes, we're building a new web site, separate from our perfectly good corporate site.... [A]s I told at least one web reporter, if we knew exactly how it's going to work, we'd be done. We don't, entirely, so we're not, entirely.

But we know several things. We know that the site will use a blog-like architecture to present an ongoing stream of news, opinion, and observation from various Tor people, myself included, about the SF and fantasy events of the day--and about perhaps less-current things that are nonetheless of interest to SF and fantasy readers, such as medieval siege engines, the Van Allen Belt, hoisin sauce, XKCD, and the novels of Georgette Heyer. We know that there will be non-Tor bloggers.... We know that the site will also feature new original fiction... free of DRM... lightweight "social networking."... Most of all, we know that the real point of the exercise isn't to create yet another blog, but rather, a place and a context for the lively, ongoing, wide-ranging, and profoundly self-organizing discussions that have characterized the science fiction subculture since its earliest days. In other words, it'll be a lot like Making Light, except with original fiction and art, more front-page bloggers, a more direct connection to SF and fantasy, and run out of the middle of Tor Books.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: So this is, like, a big Tor promotional exercise, right?

PNH: Only in the sense that Tor is a pretty good brand to put on something associated with science fiction....

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: So what about the free e-books?

PNH: I'm glad I made you up so that you could ask that question! As you know, Bob... we are, For A Limited Time, sending... links through which they can download free, un-DRMed digital editions of various recent Tor books in a variety of formats.... However, the munificence of this offer (Slashdotted twice on its first weekend), combined with our vagueness in describing the actual site for which the offer is merely a build-up, has caused a lot of people to jump to the conclusion that the new site will be all about selling and/or giving away digital books. This isn't the case....

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: Is to be a Focal Point Fanzine, meyer.

PNH: So very busted.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: We thought so. We recognized the signs. The sensitive fannish faces. The faint but unmistakable aroma of mimeo ink. Exactly whose idea was this?

PNH: Well, er, Fritz Foy, former Holtzbrinck CTO and incorrigible ubergeek... and the aforementioned Irene Gallo...and, er, well yes, both Nielsen Haydens. Not long after the project's initial phase, Teresa was promoted to the Vingean Beyond, from whence she sends occasional messages of encouragement to those of us back in the Slow Zone where FTL and true AI are impossible.... And of course we'd be nowhere without the energy, enthusiasm, focus, and endless Outlook-calendar meeting notices of professional Web producer Larry Hewitt, hired by our corporate management to turn our gauzy ideas into a properly flowcharted plan. (Look! He has a plan! We must eat his brain!) We cope.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: So when do you launch? Do you have a beta phase? Are you looking for early volunteers?

PNH: Again you anticipate me with the slan-like acuteness of your fine minds!... Act now! Act without thinking! WORK LIKE YOU WERE LIVING IN THE EARLY DAYS OF A BETTER NATION. Anyway, that's our plan.

Bad Blurbs for Good Books

A parlor game: write the worst blurb you can imagine for the best book you can think of. For example:

Making Light: This can't be good for one's soul: Plucky heroes travel across a fantasy world, encountering strange creatures and languages (invented by the author!) to destroy a magic artifact, while being pursued by Minions of the Dark Lord. They are aided by a King in Exile, an elven archer, and a wizard with a long beard. People sing at them a lot, occasionally in fake languages (invented by the author!). Did we mention the author made up some languages for the book?

Ha'Penny

Cory Doctorow reviews Jo Walton's Ha'Penny_:

Ha'penny, haunting thriller about an alternate British Reich: Ha'penny is the sequel to Jo Walton's chilling, heartbreaking novel Farthing, an alternate history about a quisling Britain that makes peace with Hitler and helps create a stable, thousand-year Reich on the Continent....

Ha'penny is a thriller, not a murder-mystery, but it is otherwise the twin of Farthing. It continues the story of New Scotland Yard Inspector Carmichael, a compromised, closeted homosexual who is the pained lackey of the fascist plan to sell Britain out to the Reich. In Ha'penny, Carmichael is called on to investigate a plot to assassinate Hitler and the Prime Minister, a plot that's mixed up with the IRA, radical Lords, and a family of divided aristocratic girls... a Britain that is credibly and horribly transformed, a Britain where fear of terrorists has driven sensible people to believe evil things, such as the need for the ubiquitous identity cards that play a key role in the oppression that is at the heart of this book.

Walton is doing amazing work here, writing a kind of latter-day 1984, a savage blast against the authoritarian opportunists who have cynically manipulated terrorist tragedies to suppress political speech and whip up fear to a high froth of CCTVs and identity papers.... Ha'penny is a literary Guernica.... It doesn't hurt that this is a top-notch thriller.... I hear there's a third in the series, and I can only pray that it brings some hope to Walton's Quisling Britain, some chance of redemption for the all-too-plausible authoritarian alternate history that is such a sharp mirror of our sad present world.

Ha'Penny is highly recommended.

I think Jo Walton has set herself a very, very difficult task here with the third book. A trilogy is too much for dystopia: it is all very well to have a boot stamping on a human face, forever, in theory. But in practice three boots is too much.

On the other hand, to have a happy ending to the trilogy is likely to destroy the artistic, moral, and message integrity of the series. The only out I can see is for Carmichael to die heroically at the end of the third book, and so cause the United States to enter the war...

---

UPDATE: Oh dear. I appear to have eroded the morale of Jo Walton, which was not my intention. I have enormous confidence in her ability to write her way out of the corner she is in:

papersky: Why one shouldn't pay attention to reviews: I was looking for Ha'Penny reviews (it's been out nearly a week now, surely some more people should have read it, and what about Kirkus?) and I found Brad Delong quoting Cory and saying he doesn't think I can pull off a happy ending at the end of the series -- well, I think it nearly works and I'm fixing it, but what do I know. Hoom, hom. Next year.

I also found Pamela's Eric loving Farthing with spoilers and a stranger in Bristol loving Farthing without spoilers and an Amazon review saying it's worthless and that they stopped reading in the first ten pages because the dialogue sucked.

The dialogue? I thought dialogue was one of those things I could sort of do, not brilliantly but kind of OK and invisibly? Nobody has ever complained about my dialogue since I figured out, rather late but before being published, how to format it properly. I turn frantically to the first ten pages of Farthing, which reassured me that in fact I can do dialogue OK, and also cheered me up somewhat -- and I figured out what the reviewer actually didn't like. He didn't like Lucy's voice. Now I can see that. You either like it or you don't, and if you don't it's going to grate like nails on a blackboard, because it runs on like that for the whole book, with her "Henry the Eighth, or King James, or whoever it was" and all of that. It isn't dialogue in the conventional sense that was worrying me, but it is her voice, and he called it dialogue because what does he know?

Having resolved that to my satisfaction, I have achieved precisely nothing but wasting time. I spent two minutes each being gratified at the good reviews and ten minutes panicking at the one liner put down -- and honestly Charlie, this is me not paying attention to them.

But it's hard not to look at them, because writing is such a solitary thing, and reviews and reactions are one of the things that are reassuring to my sense of it not being quite real. This isn't imposter syndrome exactly, it's more the floating-in-black-space hoping for echoes thing.

The Gazette, our local English-language paper, has a listing inj their Saturday Books section for my "launch" of Ha'Penny on Wednesday at 19h00 in Paragraphe on McGill. (I hope to see some of you...) Seeing it in print on paper in the paper I read anyway was odd. It made it seem no more real, but somehow much more grown up.

Post-Lecture iPhone Blogging

Is something horribly wrong? Or is something wonderfully right?

Here I am, picking up after lecture. I am packing away:

• the iPod in my left shirt pocket that was recording the audio from the lecture
• the iPhone in front of me that has my lecture notes on it (and that I am blogging from)
• the laptop to my left which was controlling the screen
• the laptop to my right which I had connected via wireless and was checking quotes from Lincoln during the lecture

I am reminded of a wonderfully cheesy line from Isaac Asimov's wonderfully cheesy Second Foundation:

There you would have been invulnerable, in the midst of your minions and machines, and with your mental power...

I have no minions. But the machines and mental power I have.

Unusual AP English Summer Reading List

The Seventeen-Year-Old is doing his summer reading for AP English: Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

The Sparrow is the most horrifying thing I have Ras in years: an extraordinarily brutal and powerful novel about alien contact gone wrong. And the Fountainhead is not, whatever the young Nora Ephron may have thought, a big book about an architect.

I wonder what the students will make of them...

Andrew Sullivan Is Trying to Give Me Nightmares...

Andrew Sullivan is posting YouTube clips from "Aliens":

I prefer the kinder, gentler Sigourney Weaver of "Galaxy Quest":

Walter Jon Williams Is a Truly Excellent Writer, but...

I think Walter Jon Williams is a truly excellent writer. But I'm not famous enough to do him any good.

Here he is, blogging from the High Desert of New Mexico, surrounded by his men, his machines, and his mental power...

Angel Station: Dude. Where's My Tail?: Writers of mid-list fiction--which is pretty much everything but the best-sellers--are more or less obliged in these sub-lunary times to shoulder the burdens of publicity and promotion ourselves. We are expected to have web pages, we are expected to have blogs. It's not that I don't enjoy communicating with my readers, or that I don't have fun... but I have to wonder how much profit actually accrues from this use of my time.

Full-time advertising professionals assure us that an advertising campaign along the lines of, "This is a new Walter Jon Williams work, wholly original and unlike any previous Walter Jon Williams work" is doomed to failure. According to these highly-qualified professionals, people only respond to things that look like other things that they already like. That's why, whenever I write a book like Days of Atonement, which was the world's first (and, so far as I know, only) Gothic Western science fiction police procedural, a book which I fondly assumed might appeal to readers outside the normal SF audience, the publisher made sure to put Death Rays on the cover, to assure genre readers that this was a thing that looked like other things that they already liked, and to make sure that all potential new readers were discouraged from so much as glancing at the book.

It is a truism of advertising that you keep the consumers you've got--even if they're getting older and reading less and, you know, dying--rather than take the risk of alienating them in pursuit of new consumers. So the rule would seem to be: whatever's actually in there, it's gotta look like the other stuff. But I don't get to pick cover art and design anyway--at best I get to veto it when I don't like it--so any further thoughts in that direction are fruitless.

Nevertheless the next book, Implied Spaces, is appearing from Night Shade, which is a small(ish) if very successful press, and which despite its success presumably can't afford to spend five or ten times the advance to make a brilliant success in the market. Which means we've got to sneak the success and glory in on a low budget.

And it has to be something I can do from New Mexico, which is the most isolated place in the U.S.

I have observed with interest the development of Long Tail theory, in which it is demonstrates that the development of electronic distribution networks can theoretically provide very large audience for hitherto obscure books. I'm not sure that this would work for me: I suspect that my books already sell more copies than just about all of those Long Tail books.

Still, growing a Long Tail certainly wouldn't hurt sales. But how is that to be done? What I clearly need is a huge online audience, like those of Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow. The problem is that Neil was beloved by a vast audience well before he ever had a blog, and Cory had a huge online audience before he ever wrote an SF novel. So it seems to me that I've got to get famous first.

What has to happen, it seems to me, is that I need a certifiably famous person to say that I should be more famous and popular than I am. Elmore Leonard was a fairly obscure writer until George Will wrote an entire column about how good Elmore Leonard was. Then Leonard became famous, and book and movie deals descended like unto manna from heaven. And to mix fairy tales if not metaphors, Oprah regularly turns ugly ducklings into gold-laying geese. Does anyone have her phone number?

Does anybody out there know a truly famous person who could be persuaded to tell everyone that I should be famous, too? And if not, does anyone have any useful ideas?

Possibilities for Really Cheap Entertainment

From "As You Know, Bob":

As You Know, Bob: "Ahhh! My hand!": Earlier today (well, last evening, now), the eldest kid and I made a nerd road trip up to the new digital-tv transmitter shack up in the hills. All afternoon, I had been brooding about standing at the foot of the broadcast tower while it was radiating a few megawatts of radio energy into space. So, come sunset, I went down to the basement and dug out a couple of 48" fluorescent bulbs, and threw them and the family into the car. We drove over to the nearest high-voltage power line, and we watched the fireflies while we waited for full dark, and then we played light sabers in the gloaming...

Procrastination City!

Very little work is going to get done tomorrow:

Ken Macleod (2007), The Execution Channel (New York: Tor Books: 0765313324).

Memo to Self: New Stationery

I have new stationery.

Charlie Stross: Tomorrow's Future Today!

A science fiction writer as technological forecaster. I think his clients got much more than their money's worth. Whether they know what to do with it is another matter:

Charlie's Diary: Shaping the future: Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me here today. I understand that you're expecting a talk about where the next 20 years are taking us, how far technology will go, how people will use the net, and whether big shoulder pads and food pills will be fashionable. Personally, I'm still waiting for my personal jet car — I've been waiting about fifty years now — and I mention this as a note of caution: while personal jet cars aren't obviously impossible, their non-appearance should give us some insights into how attempts to predict the future go wrong.

I'm a science fiction writer by trade, and people often think that means I spend a lot of time trying to predict possible futures. Actually, that's not the job of the SF writer at all — we're not professional futurologists, and we probably get things wrong as often as anybody else. But because we're not tied to a specific technical field we are at least supposed to keep our eyes open for surprises....

The big surprise in the 20th century — remember that personal jet car? — was the redefinition of progress that took place some time between 1950 and 1970. Before 1800, human beings didn't travel faster than a horse could gallop. The experience of travel was that it was unpleasant, slow, and usually involved a lot of exercise.... Then something odd happened; a constant that had held for all of human history — the upper limit on travel speed — turned into a variable. By 1980, the upper limit on travel speed had risen (for some lucky people on some routes) to just over Mach Two, and to just under Mach One on many other shorter routes. But from 1970 onwards, the change in the rate at which human beings travel ceased — to all intents and purposes, we aren't any faster today than we were when the Comet and Boeing 707 airliners first flew. We can plot this increase in travel speed on a graph — better still, plot the increase in maximum possible speed — and it looks quite pretty; it's a classic sigmoid curve, initially rising slowly, then with the rate of change peaking between 1920 and 1950, before tapering off again after 1970....

One side-effect of faster travel was that people traveled more. A brief google told me that in 1900, the average American traveled 210 miles per year by steam-traction railroad, and 130 miles by electric railways. Today, comparable travel figures are 16,000 miles by road and air — a fifty-fold increase in distance traveled.... We probably don't spend significantly more hours per year aboard aircraft that our 1900-period ancestors spent aboard steam trains, but at twenty times the velocity — or more — we travel much further and consume energy faster while we're doing so.

Around 1950, everyone tended to look at what the future held in terms of improvements in transportation speed. But as we know now, that wasn't where the big improvements were going to come from. The automation of information systems just weren't on the map, other than in the crudest sense — punched card sorting and collating machines and desktop calculators.

We can plot a graph of computing power against time that, prior to 1900, looks remarkably similar to the graph of maximum speed against time. Basically it's a flat line from prehistory up to the invention, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, of the first mechanical calculating machines. It gradually rises as mechanical calculators become more sophisticated, then in the late 1930s and 1940s it starts to rise steeply. From 1960 onwards, with the transition to solid state digital electronics, it's been necessary to switch to a logarithmic scale to even keep sight of this graph. It's worth noting that the complexity of the problems we can solve with computers has not risen as rapidly as their performance would suggest to a naive bystander. This is largely because interesting problems tend to be complex, and computational complexity rarely scales linearly with the number of inputs; we haven't seen the same breakthroughs in the theory of algorithmics that we've seen in the engineering practicalities of building incrementally faster machines....

We know that Moore's Law has some way to run.... However, it looks unlikely that we'll ever be able to build circuits where the component count exceeds the number of component atoms, so I'm going to draw a line in the sand and suggest that this exponential increase in component count isn't going to go on forever.... The cultural picture in computing today therefore looks much as it did in transportation technology in the 1930s — everything tomorrow is going to be wildly faster than it is today, let alone yesterday. And this progress has been running for long enough that it's seeped into the public consciousness.... All of this is irrelevant. Because computers and microprocessors aren't the future. They're yesterday's future, and tomorrow will be about something else.

I don't expect I need to lecture you about bandwidth.... Improvements in bandwidth are something we get from improvements in travel speed or information processing; you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a pickup truck full of magnetic tapes.... Now, with little or no bandwidth, when it was expensive and scarce and modems were boxes the size of filing cabinets that could pump out a few hundred bits per second, computers weren't that interesting; they tended to be big, centralized sorting machines.... With lots of bandwidth, the picture is very different... a world where there are nearly as many mobile phones in the EU as there are people, where each mobile phone is a small computer, and where the fast 3G, UMTS phones are moving up to a megabit or so of data per second over the air — and the next-generation 4G standards are looking to move 100 mbps of data. So that's where we are now. And this picture differs from the past in a very interesting way: because lots of people are interacting with them.... It's like the difference between having an experimental test plane that can fly at 1000 km/h, and having thousands of Boeings and Airbuses that can fly at 1000 km/h and are used by millions of people every month. There will be social consequences, and you can't easily predict the consequences of the mass uptake of a technology by observing the leading-edge consequences when it first arrives.

It typically takes at least a generation before the social impact of a ubiquitous new technology becomes obvious. We are currently aware of the consequences of the switch to personal high-speed transportation — the car — and road freight distribution. It shapes our cities and towns, dictates where we live and work, and turns out to have disadvantages our ancestors were not aware of, from particulate air pollution to suburban sprawl and the decay of city centers in some countries. We tend to be less aware of the social consequences.... It is no longer rare to live a long way from relatives, workplaces, and educational institutions. Countries look much more homogeneous... because community has become delocalized from geography.... This is the effect of cheap, convenient high speed transport.

Now, we're still in the early stages of the uptake of mobile telephony, but some lessons are already becoming clear.... Mobile phones in contrast connect people, not places.... This has interesting social effects. Sometimes it's benign; you never have to wonder if someone you're meeting is lost or unable to find the venue, you never lose track of people. On the other hand, it has bad effects... bullying via mobile phone is rife in British schools.... It's even harder to predict the second-order consequences of new technologies when they start merging at the edges, and hybridizing. A modern cellphone is nothing like a late-1980s cellphone....

Putting it all together: Let's look at our notional end-point where the bandwidth and information processing revolutions are taking us — as far ahead as we can see... about 25-50 years away. Firstly, storage. I like to look at the trailing edge; how much non-volatile solid-state storage can you buy for, say, ten euros?... Today, I can pick up about 1Gb of FLASH memory in a postage stamp sized card for that much money. fast-forward a decade and that'll be 100Gb. Two decades and we'll be up to 10Tb.

10Tb is an interesting number. That's a megabit for every second in a year... enough to store a live DivX video stream... of everything I look at for a year.... It's a life log; replay it and you've got a journal file for my life.... Why would anyone want to do this?... Initially, it'll be edge cases. Police officers on duty: it'd be great to record everything they see, as evidence. Folks with early stage neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimers: with voice tagging and some sophisticated searching, it's a memory prosthesis. Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it's all indexed and searchable. "What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?" Think of it as google for real life.

We may even end up being required to do this, by our employers or insurers.... (There are also a whole bunch of very nasty drawbacks to this technology — I'll talk about some of them later, but right now I'd just like to note that it would fundamentally change our understanding of privacy, redefine the boundary between memory and public record, and be subject to new and excitingly unpleasant forms of abuse....)

Now, this might seem as if it's generating mountains of data — but really, it isn't. There are roughly 80 million people in Germany. Let's assume they all have lifelogs. They're generating something like 10Tb of data each, 10^13 bits, per year, or 10^21 bits for the entire nation every year. 10^23 bits per century.... My model of a long term high volume data storage medium is a synthetic diamond. Carbon occurs in a variety of isotopes, and the commonest stable ones are carbon-12 and carbon-13, occurring in roughly equal abundance... a device that will create a diamond, one layer at a time, atom by atom, by stacking individual atoms — and with enough discrimination to stack carbon-12 and carbon-13, we've got a tool for writing memory diamond. Memory diamond is quite simple: at any given position in the rigid carbon lattice, a carbon-12 followed by a carbon-13 means zero, and a carbon-13 followed by a carbon-12 means one.... Sixty kilograms can store a lifelog for the entire human species for a century.... The Google cluster, as of mid-2006, was estimated to have 4 petabytes of RAM. In memory diamond, you'd need a microscope to see it. So, it's reasonable to conclude that we're not going to run out of storage any time soon.

Now, capturing the data, indexing and searching the storage, and identifying relevance — that's another matter entirely, and it's going to be one that imprint the shape of our current century on those ahead, much as the great 19th century infrastructure projects (that gave our cities paved roads and sewers and railways) define that era for us. I'd like to suggest that really fine-grained distributed processing is going to help; small processors embedded with every few hundred terabytes of storage. You want to know something, you broadcast a query: the local processors handle the problem of searching their respective chunks of the 128-bit address space, and when one of them finds something, it reports back. But this is actually boring. It's an implementation detail. What I'd like to look at is the effect this sort of project is going to have on human civilization....

[W]e're going to end up with — at the least — lifelogs, ubiquitous positioning and communication services, a civilization where every artifact more complicated than a spoon is on the internet and attentive to our moods and desires, cars that drive themselves, and a whole lot of other mind-bending consequences. All within the next two or three decades. So what can we expect of this collision between transportation, information processing, and bandwidth?

We're already living in a future nobody anticipated. We don't have personal jet cars, but we have ridiculously cheap intercontinental airline travel.... [W]e do, in fact, require more than four computers for the entire planet.... An increasing number of people don't have telephone lines any more — they rely on a radio network instead.... Hands up, anyone in the audience, who owns a slide rule? Or a set of trigonometric tables? Who's actually used them, for work, in the past year? Or decade?... [T]he pocket calculator and the computer algebra program have effectively driven those tools into obsolescence. This happened some time between the early 1970s and the late 1980s. Now we're about to see a whole bunch of similar and much weirder types of obsolescence....

[W]e'll be raising a generation of kids who don't know what it is to be lost, to not know where you are and how to get to some desired destination from wherever that is. Think about that. "Being lost" has been part of the human experience ever since our hominid ancestors were knuckle-walking around the plains of Africa. And we're going to lose it — at least, we're going to make it as unusual an experience as finding yourself out in public without your underpants. We're also in some danger of losing the concept of privacy.... [W]e're already seeing some interesting tendencies in the area of attitudes to privacy on the internet among young people, under about 25; if they've grown up with the internet they have no expectation of being able to conceal information about themselves. They seem to work on the assumption that anything that is known about them will turn up on the net sooner or later, at which point it is trivially searchable....

It'd be nice to tie your lifelog into your blog and the rest of your net presence, for your personal convenience. And at first, it'll just be the kids who do this.... Well, it'll be the kids and the folks on the Sex Offenders Register who're forced to lifelog as part of their probation terms.... Okay, it'll also be people in businesses with directors who want to exercise total control over what their employees are doing, but they don't have to work there ... yet.... The political hazards of lifelogging are, or should be, semi-obvious.... If you dig hard enough, everyone is a criminal....

And then there's history.... Barring a catastrophic universal collapse of human civilization — which I should note was widely predicted from August 1945 onward, and hasn't happened yet — we're going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages. Sixty kilograms will handily sum up the total history of the human species, up to the year 2000. From then on... we still don't need much storage, in bulk or mass terms. There's no reason not to massively replicate it and ensure that it survives into the deep future.... [W]e're going to give future historians a chance to build an annotated, comprehensive history of the entire human race. Charting the relationships and interactions between everyone who's ever lived since the dawn of history — or at least, the dawn of the new kind of history that is about to be born this century.... I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first forty or fifty years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants' relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before.

Meet your descendants. They don't know what it's like to be involuntarily lost, don't understand what we mean by the word "privacy", and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever. They are incredibly alien to us. And, yet, these trends are emergent from the current direction of the telecommunications industry, and are likely to become visible as major cultural changes within the next ten to thirty years.

None of them require anything but a linear progression from where we are now, in a direction we're already going in. None of them take into account external technological synergies, stuff that's not obviously predictable like brain/computer interfaces, artificial intelligences, or magic wands. I've purposefully ignored discussion of nanotechnology, tissue engineering, stem cells, genomics, proteomics, the future of nuclear power, the future of environmentalism and religion, demographics, our environment, peak oil and our future energy economy, space exploration, and a host of other topics.

As projections of a near future go, the one I've presented in this talk is pretty poor. In my defense, I'd like to say that the only thing I can be sure of is that I'm probably wrong, or at least missing something as big as the internet, or antibiotics.

(I know: driverless cars. They're going to redefine our whole concept of personal autonomy. Once autonomous vehicle technology becomes sufficiently reliable, it's fairly likely that human drivers will be forbidden, except under very limited conditions. After all, human drivers are the cause of about 90% of traffic accidents: recent research shows that in about 80% of vehicle collisions the driver was distracted in the 3 seconds leading up to the incident. There's an inescapable logic to taking the most common point of failure out of the control loop — my freedom to drive should not come at the risk of life and limb to other road users, after all. But because cars have until now been marketed to us by appealing to our personal autonomy, there are going to be big social changes when we switch over to driverless vehicles.

(Once all on-road cars are driverless, the current restrictions on driving age and status of intoxication will cease to make sense. Why require a human driver to take an eight year old to school, when the eight year old can travel by themselves? Why not let drunks go home, if they're not controlling the vehicle? So the rules over who can direct a car will change. And shortly thereafter, the whole point of owning your own car — that you can drive it yourself, wherever you want — is going to be subtly undermined by the redefinition of car from an expression of independence to a glorified taxi. If I was malicious, I'd suggest that the move to autonomous vehicles will kill the personal automobile market; but instead I'll assume that people will still want to own their own four-wheeled living room, even though their relationship with it will change fundamentally. But I digress ...)

Anyway, this is the future that some of you are building. It's not the future you thought you were building, any more than the rocket designers of the 1940s would have recognized a future in which GPS-equipped hobbyists go geocaching at weekends. But it's a future that's taking shape right now, and I'd like to urge you to think hard about what kind of future you'd like your descendants — or yourselves — to live in. Engineers and programmers are the often-anonymous architects of society, and what you do now could make a huge difference to the lives of millions, even billions, of people in decades to come...

Dunedain Enterprises, LLC

Steve Stirling is having too much fun with his new novel:

smstirling.com: "Will you take a check...?" "By all means," Astrid said, all graciousness again. "Make it payable to Gwaith-i-Dúnedain, Herth."

Tralfamadorians and the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

Over at Gordon's Notes, we read:

Gordon's Notes: The Tralfamadorians and the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics: I tried, and I wasn't able to find a genuine Google hit on the search Tralfamadorians quantum mechanics transactional interpretation...

We can fix this! We just have!

Of course, Gordon's Notes had fixed it before us.

Answers to Never Asked Questions

(1) Yes, it is possible to watch old "Star Trek" episodes on the video iPod while waiting for the BART, and enjoy them (as much as one can enjoy Star Trek TOS episodes, that is: YMMV).

(2) Yes, Mark Lenard is a remarkably good actor to be able to do the things he does with the incredibly cheesy role of the Romulan Starship Commander in "Balance of Terror."

(3) Yes, if I had seen "The Enemy Below" before seeing "Balance of Terror," I would have found "Balance of Terror" to be an awkward and pathetic cheesy knockoff of a pretty good WWII submarine movie.

(4) Yes, because I saw "Balance of Terror" first, I still enjoy it: my brain paths are too-deeply engraved.

(5) Yes, I do want my HUDs from A Deepness in the Sky, as soon as possible please.

Steve Stirling Is Having too Much Fun

Steve Stirling is having much too much fun writing his alternate-history book about the Cold War in the late twentieth century--and its spillover to an inhabited Mars:

smstirling.com : "I am glad that Your Supremacy is pleased with our fraternal aid," Lin Yu-Pei said, rather obviously translating too-literally from his native speech.

The courtiers tensed very slightly, adopting postures of disassociation, implying that they were not present. The guards reacted in a more unambiguous fashion, touching weapons.

"That is not the most appropriate of phrasing," Sajir said gently.

"Your Supremacy?"

Sajir sa-Tomond fell into the Terran language called Russian; they had a ridiculous number of them, and used them all simultaneously, but it was an ability he had thought it sufficiently useful to cultivate. Communication beyond the basics required more than translation of words; modes of thought and perception embodied in the underlying syntax must be understood.

"You implied a genetic relationship with myself, the Tollamune," he explained gently. "This is a serious breach of protocol and may not be done even as a matter of metaphor."

"My apologies, your Supremacy,"

"While not forgotten, the offense is allowed to pass without repercussion due to your ignorance of the Real World's usages," Sajir said formally.

Unnoticed by the Terran, the Expediter of Painful Transitions lowered the grub-implanter.

Forthcoming from Tor.

Your One-Stop Source for Star-Trek-Canon Blogging

Dymaxion World enters the Star Trek canon discussion:

Dymaxion World: Nerd moment: For my money, Star Trek VI is by far the best movie the series has produced, ever. Aside from being by far the superior script and directing of all the movies, I'm not sure how you can possibly top the multi-layered Cold War references. Most especially Christopher Plummer as a Klingon channeling Adlai Stevenson yelling to Kirk, "Don't wait for the translation, answer me now!"You could put that movie on every Sunday on Space, and I'd watch it every Sunday.

Honorable mention: Chekov in Star Trek IV, asking in faux-Russian accent "where are the nuclear wessels" to passersby in Reagan-drenched America. Yes...

I prefer this exchange from Star Trek VI: "We believe in alienable human rights!" "Inalienable.* I wish you could hear yourselves. Human rights. The Federation is a homo sapiens only club..."

I must disagree, however, with his claim that Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is the best. There are two better Star Trek movies:

• Forbidden Planet

• Galaxy Quest

He Is Not of the Body!

A correspondent points me to Jonah Goldberg's unsuccessful and pathetic attempt to pass himself off as a Star Trek geek:

Jonah Goldberg on National Review Online: I referred to the Gamesters of Triskellion, a famous episode where a bunch of day-glow super-brains-under-glass capture aliens from across the galaxy (the sector, really) and pit them against one another in gladiatorial bouts (I thought it'd be cool if presidential candidates did the same thing). The brains (send more brains...), or rather the "Gamesters," bet vast sums on who will win and how, etc. But for the life of me, I couldn't remember what the name of their currency was. I could remember what it sounded like, but I couldn't be sure. So, I wrote "I wager ten thousand credits that..."

Literally, within five minutes of posting the column, five people e-mailed me saying, "It's not credits, you bonehead! It's "quatlooms"! So, I made my Webmaster put down his copy of Juggs and change it to "quatlooms." At this time I would like to point out that many of these readers -- of whom I am quite proud -- could probably use a tan. Anyway, we changed it, and over the course of the next twenty four hours I got probably two dozen e-mails from people saying, "No, no, no! It's kwatloos." Or, "Good lord, man, don't you know anything? It's Quatloos." You see the subtle distinctions?

He is not of the body! Somebody call Landru!

John Scalzi's Online Poll

pollView.jsp:

Uh, so, how are you?

• Well, you know. Fine.
• As happy as one can be without medication!
• As happy as one can be with medication! Whoo-hoo!
• Filled with nameless dread, which I shall name "Todd." Wait, now it has a name. Oh, God.
• I'm great with honey butter!
• I refuse to answer on the grounds that I doubt your interest is sincere. You goddamn fake.
• I'm CAFFINATED!!! w00t!!!111!!1one1!
• I'm gleeful as I plot your downfall, that's how I'm doing. And soon you will have blundered into my trap. Yes, yes.
• I am because one night my mom and dad got busy. Isn't that how you are, too?
• Hallucinating again. Now get your tongue out of my spicules, Admiral.