Wiki Fiction

The Asutra

2012-01-29T15:16:00.000-08:00

I previously mentioned (see this blog post) the fact that I've thought about a fan fiction sequel to Jack Vance's novel The Book of Dreams. Today I saw a blog post by Patrick Hudson about Vance's novel The Asutra in the Durdane series.

Patrick wrote about Vance novels ending on a "down beat note" or "a sour note". Which do you prefer? That a character you have followed through a trilogy reaches a happy ending, you close the book and never give a thought to what might happen next.....or.....you finish the trilogy and you can't stop imagining what the protagonist will do for the rest of his/her life?

Patric wrote, "Etzwane longs to travel the universe, see Earth, but Ifness dismisses him as he might dismiss a bumpkin.....Etzwane even refuses to join his old musical band."

Etzwane has struggled mightily against the horrors inflicted upon the people of his world, Durdane. The Durdane trilogy progressively shows us the expansion of Etzwane's understanding of the causes of these horrors. At first, it seems that his woes are due to a freakish religious cult that controls the small community where he grows up. When he runs away from home, he learns about the bizarre political system of his nation, a "system" by which the ruler, The Anome, can instantly kill any of his subjects. Then things get bad. Durdane is attacked by space aliens. Finally, even after the alien attack is beaten off, Etzwane is left with the knowledge that people from the distant planet Earth watch Durdane and those observers (such as Ifness) from Earth do nothing to prevent the horrible cultural degeneracies of Durdane such as the the religious nightmare that set Etzwane on his path in life.

I love the fact that Vance ends his story in such a way that we are left wondering what Etzwane will do. In a similar situation, in his novel The Killing Machine, the people of a lost world that is similar to Durdane -cut off from Earth and technologically degenerated- decide that they must rejoin the community of human worlds that have space travel technology. At the end of the trilogy we are left wondering: can Etzwane bring Durdane back into the community of space-faring worlds? It would be against his nature to just rejoin the band and forget about Earth.

There are other memorable endings to many Vance novels. In Trullion: Alastor 2262, Glinnes and Duissane, after much adversity and conflict, find themselves with vast wealth at the end of the story. We wonder what their future will be like as they walk off together down the beach. In Marune: Alastor 933, Efraim and Maerio survive their challenges and become the rulers of a "mountain realm". However, they are not comfortable with the restrictions of the culture they grew up in and at the end of the novel we are left wondering about their future life together and what changes they will bring to their world.

Efraim: What shall we do?
Maerio: I don't know.
Efraim: I don't know either.

I particularly enjoy the Durdane trilogy because Vance manages to position Human Observers from Earth in the role that I usually assign to aliens in my "Exodemic" stories.

Images. Top: cover art by Peter Dama scanned from my copy (1978) of The Asutra. The "flying boat" is the property of Ifness; it allows him to move around Durdane and pretend that his flying machine (he does not let the natives see it fly) is no more sophisticated than the primitive technology of Durdane (sailing ships). Lower: Cover of Marune: Alastor 933.

The Olmec Intervention

2011-08-01T16:59:00.000-07:00

By any measure I get an "F" in Pop Culture. When Firefly was shown on the Science Channel this year I thought it was a new television show. Now I see that there is a movie called Apollo 18 in the works.

I've been searching for a new title for a collaboratively written story that was originally called Apollo 23. If I had to select a title today I'd go for something like The Janus Intervention. It would probably be best to use "The Mayan Intervention", but the story meanders back through Earth's history to the Olmec civilization in search of a way to pretend that an as yet unknown Mesoamerican script might be found, one that influenced the development of the Mayan civilization.

Apparently Apollo 18 is a horror movie. I'm not a fan of horror. The only horror movie I've watched was The 2 Headed Transplant, which was enough to last me for life in the horror genre. I've never understood the idea of seeking out experiences that cause you to experience fear. In "The Face" by Jack Vance, the protagonist, Kirth Gersen, hunts down Lens Larque who is one of the most well-known criminals in the galaxy. Lens Larque is famous for making use of his whip, Panek. Gersen is warned that he will be taken by Lens Larque to a secret place where he will slowly and carefully be flayed. Gersen is a cool dude, but the thought of being "given to Panek" puts him on edge. Gersen seems more human because he fears Lens Larque and his whip, but horror is not a major part of Vance's story.

I've been thinking about including the practice of human sacrifice in the story of Pultep, the time traveler who is sent back to prevent Olmec civilization from developing science and technology. I'm thinking that "The Olmec Intervention" is basically the introduction of prescientific thinking and practices into the Olmec civilization, with an emphasis on astronomy. In order to prevent the Olmecs from developing a civilization based on science, Pultep could push the Olmecs towards some unpleasant religious practices such as human sacrifice. It has even been suggested that the Olmecs might have practiced child sacrifice, which seems quite horrific to me. I guess the idea was that continuation of life had a cost...you had to sacrifice something that was valuable in order to assure continued life.

I've been shaped by living in a culture where it is common to think about self-sacrifice. Pultep is asked to sacrifice his chance for a comfortable life as a Genesaunt in order to save humanity from global disaster. Does it take more courage to sacrifice yourself or your child? Could Pultep find himself in the position of having to use child sacrifice to save humanity?

Aliens and Hollywood

2011-07-28T18:22:00.000-07:00

Even before I realized that that there were science fiction novels, I had read Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken. The only thing I took away from "ancient astronaut" theory was an appreciation for the idea that if an alien visitor came to Earth, chances are good that such a visitor would have been here long ago. Much longer ago than 1873.

I've looked at some online reviews of Cowboys & Aliens (funny). Apparently Ella Swenson is a visitor to Earth who takes on human form. My favorite science fiction plot element involves visitors to Earth who walk among us and never reveal the truth about their origins. I have not seen Cowboys & Aliens so all I can do is guess: maybe Ella is on Earth trying to give humans a helping hand against the Evil Invading Aliens.

it’s like Favreau’s sitting behind the camera chewing his fingernails going “just speed everything up so no one notices nothing makes any sense.”

When I finally discovered science fiction novels I got bounced around between conventional space opera stories such as The Skylark of Space and conventional SciFi movies such as War of the Worlds. It is fun to imagine the heroic Earthling who builds a spaceship and takes off on a great adventure in space, but the other option, which seems to be more popular, is to twist the plot so that the aliens come to Earth. I think I had my fill of Evil Alien Invaders the first time I saw War of the Worlds.

the inevitable, "I need to get to the heart of the alien craft, where the inevitable weakness is, to set off the bomb!" set-up

I was thrilled to eventually discover that some science fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke actually wrote stories (example) about space-traveling visitors to Earth millions of years ago. I quickly grew tired of science fiction stories where 1) the entire universe was out there just waiting for tool-using apes from Earth or 2) aliens came from hundreds of light-years away just to participate in a World War II-type space battle with heroic Earth-men. It is much more fun to explore other kinds of interactions with aliens. As far as I can tell, C&A is built around the idea that the aliens came to Earth for gold. Is this an attempt to get us to think about idiotic human motives for violence?

“Well, that is ridiculous! What are they going to do—buy something?”

Avatar turned the Evil Invader plot around, making humans the invaders. Some SciFi films such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (I've never managed to watch it) do avoid the usual Hollywood SciFi plots of Evil Aliens and Space War. I have watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but for me it is as big a frustration as Contact, movies that end just when they should be moving on to tell us something interesting about the aliens and their advanced civilization. Sadly, I have no expectation that C&A includes interesting speculation about an alien civilization.

"If you’ve seen any alien invasion movie since Independence Day, you know these aliens."

Why is Hollywood dominated by people who think that a science fiction movie must have slime-dripping aliens and laser battles? I now have my hopes up because it sounds like there might be two types of aliens in Cowboys & Aliens, the comic book aliens from the original story and Ella Swenson who is apparently an alien of a different color. I'm tempted to write a spoof of Mars Attacks! in which aliens invade Hollywood and start making interesting science fiction movies. I wonder if Ron Howard and Olivia Wilde would be willing to deploy the Ella Swenson character as part of such a worthy effort to improve the SciFi film genre.

Stagecoach Indian Battle

When did Americans grow tired of movies in which endless streams of Native Americans were shot by "heroic" white men? When will people grow tired of endless movies where aliens are the designated target for mindless violence? Can't we have SciFi films with interesting stories about aliens who do something besides invade Earth?

Note. I'm still waiting for a movie based on Asimov's The End of Eternity. Maybe Olivia Wilde could play the role of Noÿs Lambent.

Note. This is post #100 for this blog!

The Janus Intervention

2011-07-24T10:16:00.000-07:00

I previously mentioned the need to find a new title for the story that I originally called Apollo 23.

The two faces of Janus.
Image source: Elizabeth Thomsen on flickr.

I've been thinking about how a time traveler named Pultep could derail the developing Olmec civilization and prevent it from developing science and technology before such advances occur in the "Old World". One of the first stories that I ever wrote as part of the "Exodemic Universe" was about how Interventionists helped Greek civilization spread and develop an early type of science. An alternative title for "Apollo 23" is "The Janus Intervention", a reference to the two-faced Roman god.

Interventionists are Genesaunts who are not satisfied with the idea that all the Huaoshy do is watch Earth. The Huaoshy actually do transform life on Earth, but in a slow and subtle way that is hard for the Interventionists to notice.

One of the ways that the Huaoshy cause changes on Earth is by intentionally allowing Interventionists to visit Earth. It would be a trivial matter for the Huaoshy to completely prevent Interventionists from altering the course of events on Earth, but since Huaoshy ethics do not allow the aliens themselves to visit Earth, they make use of the Interventionists as agents of change. Most of the time the Huaoshy catch the Interventionists in the act of altering events on Earth and the aliens revert the changes. However, some times the Huaoshy allow Interventionist-induced changes to stand.

In the case of the "The Janus Intervention", the Huaoshy allow the Interventionists to alter the Olmec civilization and move it towards development of science and technology. However, the technological civilization that develops eventually suffers vast destruction when nanotechnology goes out of control. Having given the "Janus Intervention" a chance, the Huaoshy eventually decide to use their time travel technology to go back and prevent the Olmec civilization from developing science.

Been Here, Done That

2011-07-23T16:53:00.000-07:00

Image source: Dallas1200am on flickr.

I've previously blogged about the Fermi Paradox. My "solution" to the paradox is that we should assume a solution that allows us to create the most interesting science fiction stories.

In Hollywood, Science fiction has been dominated by stories in which aliens miraculously evolve on another planet for hundreds of millions of years, develop technology and reach Earth while still at a technological level very close to our own. In the movies, it is desirable that the underdog species in a first contact battle be able to defeat the evil invader. Yawn.

However, it has been estimated that the average Earth-like planet might be a billion or more years older than Earth. Contact between Earth and another technology-using species might very well involve another species that has technology far beyond our own. Is it more likely that Earth was first visited long ago or that Earth would first be visited only now, just when our species is starting to take its first steps into space? Authors like Arthur C. Clarke have imagined human contact with aliens who long ago visited earth and influenced human evolution.

What should we expect of a hypothetical species that has been spreading between the stars for hundreds of millions of years? Would galactic explorers still be biological or some kind of artificial life? Why should their motivations be anything like our human motivations?

A form of life spreading through our galaxy would likely find Earth-like planets before those worlds had evolved technological species of their own. There would be great temptation to tinker with the life forms on Earth-like worlds, to explore the ways that such life could be pushed into more interesting forms. Does the history of life on Earth show evidence of such tinkering?

Until about 65 million years ago Earth was dominated by small brained animals. After the extinction event of about 65 million years ago, the mammals diversified and several large-brained clades have since evolved, particularly cetaceans, elephants and humans. As primates, we are unique in becoming a tool-using species that quickly (in evolutionary terms) eliminated all of our closes relatives and competitors. Was the rise of mammals just by chance? Is the evolution of our species a chance event or the result of some sort of intelligent design? When we finally obtain evidence of aliens will we discover that they found Earth long ago?

Image source: Blackwell Publishing.

Will our experience of first contact turn out to involve aliens who yawn and say, "Been here, done that....long ago. We've been here millions of years guiding your evolutions so that you could finally recognize and welcome us."

Old Earth

2011-06-18T09:05:00.000-07:00

I previously mentioned the Jack Vance novel Araminta Station, the first of a trilogy. The second novel is called Ecce and Old Earth.

Ecce is one of the continents of the planet Cadwal, the distant world where Glawen Clattuc is born. In his effort to save Cadwal, Glawen eventually travels to Earth and finds the missing Charter, the founding document that established Cadwal as a Naturalist preserve. Glawen is preceded to Earth by Wayness Tamm, another resident of Cadwal who discovered that the Charter had been stolen from the vault of the Naturalist Society. Here are Glawen's thoughts about Wayness:

"If through some extraordinary circumstance he became endowed with divine powers and assigned the pleasurable task of designing a new Wayness, he might well diminish the proportion of sheer single-minded obstinacy and intractable, volatile self-willed independence by a soupçon or two: not enough to disturb the flavor of the mix, but to make her just a bit more...manageable? predictable? subservient? Certainly none of these. It might well be that no improvement was possible."

Poor Glawen is tortured by the fact that Wayness goes off to Earth, alone, to take on the dangerous task of searching for the valuable Charter. Most of Ecce and Old Earth is an account of Wayness as she travels around Earth on her search. With Wayness off on her adventure, Glawen suffers acutely, in part because early in Araminta Station his first love, Sessily Veder, is murdered. Glawen can all too well imagine also losing Wayness.

By the end of Ecce and Old Earth the Charter has been found and replaced, thus removing the fate of Cadwal from the hands of the nearly extinct Naturalist Society. By this point in the trilogy some of the forces that are arrayed in opposition to Glawen have been revealed and there is no obvious way that Cadwal can be saved from the fate of being over-run by greedy people who reject the idea that the planet should remain a nature preserve. Glawen needs a new and powerful friend from beyond Cadwel.

If this were one of Vance's Alastor Cluster novels then we might expect a visit from the Connatic, arriving just in time to set things right. In this case, Vance has already introduced us to Cadwal's future benefactor, ironically identified as a visiting guest of one of the Cadwal natives who is working to open the planet to wider human occupancy and exploitation. Upon re-reading the book it is fun to watch the lurking savior of Cadwal quietly passing among Glawen and his adversaries.

In Apollo 23, I'm trying to be quite open about showing the reader how Sakir is manipulated by aliens, but I also need to keep open a path by which poor Sakir can play a trick or two on her puppet master.

Vance always seems to meander back and forth between the protagonist being saved by luck or by competency and skill. At one point in Ecce and Old Earth, Wayness believes she has found the location of the Charter and she triumphantly calls her uncle to share the news. Unfortunately, unbeknown to Wayness, an enemy is within ear shot. It all works out fine because she soon learns that she was wrong and the enemy is sent off on a wild goose chase.

When Sakir first meets Jack Swigert, he has already been subjected to years of "debriefing" by a robot pretending to be Jill Lyons. Sakir is a clone of Jill and she is 20 years younger than than the "Jill" that Jack has known. When interacting with Jack, Sakir pretends to be Jill's daughter and manages to learn an important fact from Jack that escapes the attention of Jill's puppet masters. After she is sent to Earth, that hidden fact will allow Jill to double cross her alien handlers.

Araminta Station

2011-06-15T17:20:00.000-07:00

Araminta Station is the first of a trilogy (The Cadwal Chronicles) by Jack Vance. The story is "science fiction" set in the far future when humans have started spreading to many Earth-like planets such as Cadwal, the home planet of Glawen Clattuc. Glawen is the main character in the story, a young man who must save Cadwal from impending catastrophe.

Cadwal is a world with a complex ecosystem that includes some "tribes" of nearly human animals. Centuries before Glawen's time the planet Cadwal was designated a nature preserve. The impending catastrophe is that Cadwal might now be over-run by humans with disastrous consequences for the native lifeforms.

The interesting thing about Vance's stories in The Cadwal Chronicles, his Demon Princes series and the Alastor Cluster novels is that so little has changed in the future that Vance imagines. There is no "technological singularity" in this future history. Glawen enjoys sailing as much as traveling between the stars.

No singularity. Why not? In the Demon Princes series, Vance included "The Institute", a powerful organization that protects humanity against self-destruction due to damaging technological innovations. If we were in Hollywood, we would be forced to worry about the danger of humans running into technologically advanced aliens. This is not a probelm until you get to Vance's Durdane series, and even then the aliens are basically at the human level of technological development.

Occasionally Vance mentions a world where there are remnants of a lost civilization, possibly that of an alien species that long ago destroyed itself...or moved on to bigger and better things. How long ago? In The Star King, Vance mentions the idea that some humans were taken off of Earth about 100,000 years ago and transplanted to another planet. Transplanted by who? Vance never explains.

I like the idea that Earth was visited long ago by aliens, alien beings who could not resist hauling away a few humans for genetic engineering, domestication or who knows what. In Apollo 23, there are aliens who want to keep themselves hidden from those of us who live on Earth. The aliens use time travel to destroy the "Olmec Reality" and protect humanity from destroying itself.

I also like the idea that such aliens would want to protect the rich ecosystems of planets like Earth. Maybe there are such aliens at work behind the scenes of Araminta Station, aliens who make sure that Glawen saves the day and Cadwal...and gets the girl.

Apollo 23

2011-06-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

I just noticed that there is a story called Apollo 23 by Justin Richards. I recently started a new collaborative science fiction writing project that was tentatively called Apollo 23. Collaborating authors are welcome.

An alternative title for the new story could be "The Olmec Reality". Here I'm using the term "Reality" in the way that Isaac Asimov did in his time travel novel The End of Eternity. If you travel back in time and change the course of events then you cause a new "Reality" to come into existence, essentially a new timeline of events. In the Olmec Reality a technological civilization originated in Mesoamerica and humanity started developing nanotechnology as early as the year 1850. In the Olmec Reality, by 2012 a disruptive form of nanotechnology went out of control and destroyed human civilization on Earth.

Jill travels through time

In order to prevent the catastrophe of 2012, a time traveler was sent back to 300 B.C.E. in order to put an end to the Olmec civilization, but that intervention into the course of events left behind some traces...including hints about the importance of the year 2012.

Unfortunately, while preventing the nanotechnology disaster, new problems were created. Another trip through time is needed and the designated time traveler is Jill Lyons. Here is a brief account of Jill's life: born in 1941 and transported to the future from 1969. She arrives in the year 2027 where alien technology is used to produce a few clones of Jill. In 2053 one of those clones is sent back in time to take the place of Jill in 1969.

There are some important technical limitations on time travel. First, moving matter into and out of Reality requires a large amount of energy. Second, travel through time disrupts other attempts to travel to or from the same point in time. In order to minimize the amount of matter being shifted in or out of time, a common trick is to use a cloned copy of an individual as the time traveler who goes back into history and creates a new Reality. However, if someone travels through time to/from 1969, then it will be impossible to perform another trip through time that is close to 1969.

The story takes place in the "Exodemic Universe" so there are aliens who control the time travel technology. The reader will be wondering what the aliens hope to accomplish by sending human time travelers into the past. In the story, there are some humans who work closely with the aliens and other humans who wonder if the aliens can be trusted.

Related reading:
The Earth Experiment

Does Anyone Care?

2010-07-05T18:27:00.000-07:00

A wormhole, by CorvinZahn

Are there any aliens "out there" who care about Earth and humanity? Many science fiction stories are built around the idea that aliens might travel vast distances to Earth and attack the technologically-inferior humans. I think there are more interesting ways to write science fiction stories about aliens who visit Earth.

In his novel Contact, Carl Sagan imagined that the galaxy was teaming with alien life forms. In an effort to get to know the primates of Earth, those aliens sent a radio message to Earth and explained how to construct a device (some kind of transport pod that could travel through wormholes) that would allow humans to travel across the galaxy and visit the alien beings. This made a fun adventure for Ellie Arroway, but for the most part the aliens were not very interested in primitive primates.

Similarly, Arthur C. Clarke wrote some science fiction stories in which advanced aliens did not seem particularly interested in humans. The question was asked in Contact: Would we be interested in some random ant hill? Why should aliens be particularly interested in Earth?

In his story Homo Sol, Isaac Asimov imagined that the galaxy contained aliens who ignored Earth until humans were able to develop the technology needed to reach another star.

One answer to the Fermi Paradox is that extraterrestrial civilizations do not reveal themselves to primitive creatures like us. If there are alien life forms watching Earth, what level of technologically advancement might they expect us to achieve before they bother making contact with Earth?

In Cellular Civilization it is imagined that aliens came to Earth long ago, but they did not want to reveal themselves to Earthlings. However, the aliens are interested in Earth and they can't resist performing a bit of genetic engineering on Earthly life forms. The aliens also collect samples of Earthly life and take those samples away to be "cultured" on distant worlds.

Eventually some troublesome primates (us) develop a technologically advanced civilization on Earth. The aliens find this problematical. Humans are making a mess on Earth. The aliens develop a plan for removing humans from Earth and returning the planet to the status of a peaceful garden, free of the technological excesses of humanity.

In 2008, Part I of Cellular Civilization was written. I'm now starting to develop Part II, which shows what happens to Charlie Parker after he is taken off of Earth. Charlie learns that there are humans who live at colonies scattered around the Solar System. Charlie gets a tour of the Solar System, including visits to the moons of Jupiter, but he is frustrated by the fact that nobody has ever met an alien.

Cellular Civilization is set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe. In Homo Sol, Asimov explored the idea that there are psychological rules that govern humanity. In the Exodemic Fictional Universe I imagine that there is a basic rule saying something like: no good can come from contact between species with widely different levels of technology. Rather than interact directly with primitive Earthlings, the aliens surround Earth in layers of Genesaunts, life forms that trace their origins back to Earth, but which have various levels of technological development.

Charlie has climbed up one level from Earthly technology to the level that characterizes the Genesaunts who live out in the Solar System beyond Earth. In Part II of Cellular Civilization, Charlie will journey out of the Solar System to a nearby star and climb up another Genesaunt level. At that third level, he will find Interventionists who are ready to reveal themselves to Earthlings and start the process of removing all humans from Earth.

Part II of Cellular Civilization is under construction. Collaborating authors are welcome.

Image. The image above is my concept map for Part I of Cellular Civilization.

Yo, Robot!

2010-06-29T21:50:00.001-07:00

Yo, robot!
positronicly endowed with audacity
Daneel Olivaw, super star
guardian of humanity!
Ya, robot, sure you are

poor Hari Seldon
what you put him through!
then just dump the Foundation
First, and the Second, too
Yeesh, robot!

Daneel Olivaw, super star!
Yes, a robot, by three laws bound
yet you took things too far!
one more law you found
your one law to rule them all

Trevize and Janov fashioned as your tools
Blissenobiarella with tastes positively geriatric!
a woman following genetic rules,
programmed for behavior robotic
choose Galaxia, lest we to aliens fall!

Daneel Olivaw, super star!
transformed to human from robotic
take Fallom's brain, you'd go that far
different, transductive, hermaphroditic
become not robot, and so craftily!

Daneel, say it's not true!
but if Isaac Asimov could not say…
could not decide what next to do,
it falls on us to find a way
to the Start of Eternity!

Image. Cover art for Isaac Asimov's Robots and Empire.

The Moon in Science Fiction

2010-06-28T23:05:00.000-07:00

In 2009, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission took place as part of on-going efforts to search the Moon for water. In what some have called the first work of science fiction (Somnium by Johannes Kepler) it was imagined that creatures living on the Moon made use of large bodies of liquid water.

These days, it is hard to imagine natural reservoirs of liquid water near the surface of the Moon, but if there were large deposits of water ice then it would become easier for human colonists to survive on the Moon.

Like many science fiction writers (see this list) I often find it convenient to make use of the Moon as a location for a human outpost. In The Search for Kalid, one of the main characters visits the Moon and explores an outpost where a small group of humans hide their little colony behind tunnels that are flooded with water. The residents of the colony are hiding because they have unusual brains that give them a kind of telepathic ability.

In Foundation and Earth, Isaac Asimov described a secret base, hidden under the lunar surface, where the positronic robot Daneel had worked for 20,000 years to guide humanity towards a safe future. Of course, Daneel is not your typical robot since he has telepathic abilities. Still, Daneel does not want to attract attention, so he works hard to make sure that the location of his lunar base is secret. In The Start of Eternity, Asimov appears as a character who goes to the Moon and learns that alien beings from a distant Galaxy long ago established a hidden base of operations on the Moon.

In 2009 I wrote Moon Hammer, a science fiction ghost story. In Moon Hammer, I imagine that Heinrich Kramer, a famous witch hunter, was taken to the Moon and his mind transferred into a robotic body. Kramer lives on and is present on the Moon when the LCROSS rocket booster strikes the surface of the Moon. It is rather chilling to note that Kepler's fanciful story about a trip to the Moon apparently resulted in accusations of witchcraft against Kepler's own mother. That's a rather appalling welcome from our Demon-Haunted World to the newly emerging science fiction genre.

In 2008 I started a novel, Cellular Civilization. Cellular Civilization is a story set in what I call the Exodemic Fictional Universe. There is a secret base on the Moon where hidden Observers collect data about the development of Earth's human civilization. Earthlings go about their affairs, unaware of the fact that some people (the Observers) are living on the Moon. Observer Base is also home for the Overseers, descendants of Neanderthals. The Overseers are a kind of police force who keep the Observers in line and cover up any evidence that might suggest to Earthlings that they are being observed.

Having made a good start on Cellular Civilization back in 2008 and getting some collaborative help, particularly with the 'Thomas' character, I recently returned to the story. The first part of the story (written in 2008) mostly takes place on Earth. Two of the characters (Charlie and Lanora) depart from Earth and begin a new adventure in the outer Solar System. Not only are there humans living on the Moon, there are also other human colonies scattered around the rest of the Solar System. My plan is to show some of those other colonies and then Charlie (an Earthling) and Lanora (by the way, 'Lanora' is not her real name) will get to travel out of the Solar System.

In Cellular Civilization there is no space travel at faster-than-light speeds. I'm still thinking about the issue of how to depict the years-long journey of Charlie and Lanora to another star. Maybe they will just treat the cruise as their honeymoon. If you have ideas, feel free to join the fun.

Most Gentle Stream

2010-06-27T19:34:00.000-07:00

In Isaac Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity, the crafty Noÿs Lambent looks into her own future and sees that she will fall in love with Andrew Harlan. Of course, that happy future is only one of an infinity of possible futures, but she makes it her own. Andrew Harlan is helpless to avoid the fate that Noÿs selects for them.

In Cellular Civilization the crafty Dexamene Gregores is not so lucky. Of course, poor Dexamene does not have access to time travel technology and other wonders from 10,000,000 years in the future. But all is not lost! Dexamene does have access to technology from the past, a past in which nanorobotic alien life forms came to Earth and stirred up trouble.

What kind of trouble? Humans.

Ancient myths are sprinkled with stories about god-like beings who have the magical ability to play with human emotions. The star-crossed lover is an age old literary concept. Arthur C. Clarke noted that advanced technology might seem like magic or the work of a god-like being.

I've long wondered what technological tricks were used by Noÿs to manipulate Andrew's behavior. What kinds of chemicals were in the drink she gave to Andrew when she seduced him? Did Noÿs (or, possibly, some lurking positronic robot) use telepathy to put ideas into Andrew's head? Or did that only require a revealing wardrobe from the 482nd Century?

Dexamene does not hesitate to use every weapon in her arsenal to make Charlie fall in love, but Dexamene is a busy Interventionist and does not have time for romance. However, Dexamene does have seven spare clones, her sisters, who can be called upon to do her dirty work.

So Dexamene brings her sister, Yasas, to Earth and arranges that Charlie and Yasas fall in love with each other....all it takes is tight pants, pheromones and some minor brain surgery...well, that and the fact that Yasas can amuse Charlie by casually discussing theoretical physics and spaceship propulsion systems. In the end, both Charlie and Yasas are content to find themselves together, splashing around in love's most gentle stream.

True, we do not usually think of brain surgery as a means of making someone fall in love with us, but Yasas is not limited to bear skins and stone knives, as Bones once described the high technology of our primitive times. Yasas is a product of Genesaunt culture and the beneficiary of cultural artifacts arising from alien life forms that brought advanced nanotechnology to Earth millions of years ago.

In the skilled hands of Yasas, brain surgery means memetic surgery, a technique that allows individually identified synaptic connections to be trimmed and pruned. Charlie's brain is putty in her hands, but shaping someone's emotions it is delicate work and while she's busy making Charlie fall in love the crafty Dexamene is making Yasas fall in love with Charlie.

Charlie and Yasas eventually figure out what happened to them, but they are resigned to their fate and offer few objections. Anyhow, they soon find themselves caught up in a larger mystery and on their way to the stars.

Image. Apologies to Domingo Alvarez Enciso.

Synthetic biology

2010-06-21T17:04:00.000-07:00

The cloned sheep Dolly

We humans have long depended on pre-existing, naturally-occurring organisms that reproduce and provide us with more "copies" of useful creatures. The great diversity of living organisms on Earth has apparently been generated by processes of biological evolution taking place during the past few billion years.

I say "apparently" because we have very little information about the history of life on Earth. And we are now entering into a new era during which we will have amazing new technologies to facilitate the design and creation of new forms of life.

Humans have used artificial selection to produce many kinds of useful plants and animals and now genetic engineering allows precisely engineered genetic variants of existing organisms to be produced. Animals such a livestock can be artificially reproduced by cloning, using the existing DNA of an individual to take control of an egg cell and produce a new organism.

Craig Venter and his research team recently manufactured an entire bacterial chromosome and made what they call a "synthetic cell" by transplanting the artificial genome into an existing bacterial cell. Their goal is to design useful bacteria "from scratch" that can then be used by humans for many purposes and in ways that are not possible for naturally occurring bacteria.

What are the limits for such "synthetic biology"? In 1959 Richard Feynman gave a lecture in which he explained that "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom". By 1959 it had been recognized that the genetic instructions for making all the proteins of a living organism are stored inside cells as a nanoscopic molecular code (DNA). What about other important parts of our biological selves? Are our memories and thoughts efficiently encoded and stored inside our brains or is there room for a synthetic biology program that might allow us to greatly miniaturize a human brain? Theoretically, how small could a human-like artificial intelligence be made?

The "wires" of a human brain are axons. In modern electrical engineering terms, the axons of neurons are pitifully inefficient devices for transmitting electrical signals. A typical axon is about 1000 nanometers in diameter and can conduct electrical pulses at a rate of about 100 per second. Current semiconductor manufacturing processes create circuit elements that are about 100 nanometers across and that can operate at electrical signal pulse rates in the megahertz range. Additional miniaturization might be possible and take us into the realm of true nanoelectronics.

We humans are taking our first steps into the age of nanotechnology. Who knows what might be possible given a few thousand years of continuing developments in electrical engineering and biology? Will it become possible to make artificial lifeforms that more efficiently accomplish what the human body can do?

It is fun to speculate about the the possible existence of human-like organisms on planets of distant star systems. What if some human-like species evolved millions of years ago and mastered nanotechnology long ago? What if an alien species created artificial life forms with nanoscale components rather than the microscale cellular components that are used in our bodies? It might be that interstellar travel is more conveniently accomplished by such artificial life forms than by biological organisms that are composed of cells.

What if such hypothetical artificial life forms visited Earth millions of years ago? What if such artificial life forms were here on Earth right now, watching us? Would we be able to detect them? How might they communicate with us, if they wanted to communicate? Would such visitors to Earth be content to communicate with us or might they long ago have been tempted to start tinkering with the genes of Earthly lifeforms? Such issues are explored in the collaboratively written story I'm not you. The story is under construction and additional collaborating authors are welcome.

Related reading: Molecular Communication

Mysterious Motivations

2010-06-18T09:51:00.000-07:00

In his novel, Contact, Carl Sagan explored the idea that our universe was created and the Creator tried to communicate with us. Sagan suggested that the Creator might have selected the physical properties of our universe and in some way encoded a message to us in the very structure of space/time. In the story, human scientists discover how to read that message, using the tools of science to discover proof of the Creator's existence.

Sagan further suggested that beings like ourselves, using the tools of science, might be able to create new universes. Similarly, In The Last Question, Asimov imagined that humans will eventually learn how to create a new universe (or, at least, re-start our own).

It was implied in Sagan's story Contact that the Creator could do no more than create our universe. After the creation, events proceeded according to natural processes, with no further intervention from the Creator. Other science fiction stories have explored the idea that we humans were created by a god-like being. In The Last Answer, Isaac Asimov imagined an apparently eternal being who created humans.

Asimov asked: why would an apparently eternal being create humans? The answer, in The Last Answer, is that the apparently eternal being has nothing better to do, and hopes that eventually some thinking creature, human or otherwise, will discover the last answer, the ultimate fate of the apparently eternal being.

Is that all there is to existence for beings such as us? Is it the fate of all thinking beings to simply come into existence (by one means or another) and then have nothing else to do but try to understand their existence? And possibly find a way to put an end to that existence? Or possibly find ways to create new universes where yet more thinking beings will ponder their existence?

Arthur Clarke wrote an amusing story (The Nine Billion Names of God) in which it is imagined that humans were created as a tool for finding all the possible names of God. Eventually humans develop a computer that can complete the task and then, mission accomplished, our universe is terminated.

We live in the Age of Singularianism, where some people, other than fiction writers, anticipate that humans will soon attain god-like "superintelligence" and limitless technological powers. Is it possible for human-like beings to avoid such a "technological singularity"?

In The Start of Eternity it is imagined that a human-like species, the Huaoshy, found a way to exist, relatively unchanged, for hundreds of millions of years. When I say "relatively unchanged" I mean that there is no superintelligence in The Start of Eternity and no god-like beings with apparently eternal existence.

If the Huaoshy are content to remain, through hundreds of millions of years, as a species of individuals living in their human-like bodies, then we must ask: what do they feel is the purpose of their existence? The answer is: they enjoy the process of traveling from galaxy to galaxy, finding worlds like Earth, and making sure that human-like species evolve on such worlds. The Huaoshy are masters of a vast intergalactic civilization where millions of human-like species peacefully coexist.

In The Start of Eternity it is imagined that the Huaoshy came to Earth about 7 million years ago and started shaping the course of primate evolution so as to create -us- a species similar (in form and thought processes) to the Huaoshy.

What is the reaction of humans upon discovering that they have been created by the Huaoshy? Sometimes they are resentful, but, as told in The Start of Eternity, very few humans ever learn the truth about human origins. The Great Law of the Huaoshy says that, "It should APPEAR to every type of sentient being that they have self-determination and are not being controlled by more technologically advanced life forms." To satisfy this law, the Huaoshy prevent humans on Earth from knowing about the existence of the Huaoshy.

The Huaoshy find it useful to take some humans off of Earth. There is a small human colony on the Moon where the Huaoshy perform their experiments and make new human genetic variants. In The Start of Eternity a freak accident occurs and the human residents of the Moon are released from Huaoshy control. Then the fun begins.

The Start of Eternity is being collaboratively written. Additional collaborating authors are welcome.

Image. This image of Carl Sagan is in the public domain (source).

Less on the Social Ramifications of Time Travel

2010-06-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

Time traveler Noÿs Lambent

Yesterday I started reading Isaac Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity for the 17th time. In related news, today I came across a blog post called More on the Social Ramifications of Time Travel. Golly. And I sometimes worry that I take science fiction too seriously....

Well, maybe I've only read The End of Eternity 15 times. But who's counting? In any case (15, 17 or 23), I enjoy reading this novel and I agree with Asimov who excused the scientific implausibility of time travel by saying that time travel stories are simply too much fun for writers to avoid dabbling in them.

I've always found it hard to get too serious about Eternity. I think Asimov was joking when he said that humans used time travel to send clover seed through time. He seemed to take more seriously the potential impact of future technology being made available to less technologically advanced eras. There is a rather long section in The End of Eternity about the problems arising from using time travel to make available a cure for cancer. Each person who might be saved by making the cure available to them must be carefully evaluated in order to be sure that saving their life does not cause a Reality Change. Thank goodness for the momentum of Time! Of course, those who are told that they cannot get the cure are resentful.

The "big social issue" presented by Asimov is the sorry fact that the existence of Eternity causes human extinction and a failure of humans to spread through outer space to other worlds. Time travel is used to make Earth a safe and stable environment for humans. As the story is told by Asimov, humans stop evolving and eventually they simply die off.

One of the interesting aspects of The End of Eternity is that it is an Asimov novel that includes the idea of there being other human-like creatures who evolve on other planets of our Galaxy. A major reason for the extinction of the human species was that while humans played around with time travel technology, those other beings developed space travel technology, moved into outer space and colonized all of the available star systems before humans ever got around to developing interstellar space travel technology. We must ask: did any of those other space travelers also develop time travel? If so, how did they avoid the "trap" that led to human extinction?

More importantly, why is it that, as Noÿs explains:

"There are other stars with other planets, you know. There are even other intelligences. None, in this Galaxy at least, are as ancient as mankind, but in the 125,000 Centuries man remained on Earth, younger minds caught up and passed us, developed the interstellar drive, and colonized the Galaxy."

Why did it take 4,000,000,000 years for humans to evolve on Earth and the "younger minds" 4,012,500,000 years? Providing a reason for this cosmic coincidence was one of my goals for The Start of Eternity, a collaboratively written fan fiction sequel to The End of Eternity.

Image Credits. Noÿs Lambent is currently living in Athens. When contacted, she gave permission for her image to be used and commented, "They won't believe it's me, anyhow."

Better Blurbs Through Collaboration

2010-06-11T08:13:00.000-07:00

Just yesterday I was pondering a strange blurb on the back cover of The Book of Dreams. Today I saw a blog post by Mark_W about Jack Vance's novel Trullion, which brought into question the utility of describing hussade as being played on "water-chessboard gaming fields".

I try to be forgiving of book publishers with respect to the blurbs that they put on book covers because of the difficulty I have in creating good blurbs for covers. It can be challenging to capture the interest of a potential reader with only a few words about a single aspect of a novel. There are a few scenes in Trullion where some of the characters show a tendency to analyze hussade games in the same way that you might analyze a chess match.

The blurb that I was disturbed by is this: "Jack Vance penned the book of Revelations for that pseudo-bible and thereby brought the most suspenseful galactic manhunt series ever written to a smashing conclusion." For those who never read the Jack Vance novel The Book of Dreams, within Vance's story The Book of Dreams is a kind of child's diary written by the young Howard Hardoah. At a young age Howard begins to commit horrible crimes and he grows up to be a master criminal. One of the blurbs on the back cover of my copy of this novel calls Howard's The Book of Dreams a "holy book".

Holy Book? Well, maybe. Vance depicts Howard Hardoah as believing that he is possessed and that he shares his consciousness with the personalities of a group of adventuresome Paladins. In his diary, Howard described these Paladins as the colors of his soul. Writing in his diary, Howard commits himself to a program of "self-improvement" by which he will find ways to express the colors of his soul and live up to the great potential that exists within the Seven Paladins.

Howard's diary is lost and its contents live on in his memory. His fond memories of the diary might mean that it constitutes a "holy book" for Howard, or that might be just a bit of hyperbole designed to market the novel. If we accept that Howard's diary is his "holy book" then it might make sense to call it a "pseudo-bible". So is Vance's novel a "book of Revelations for that pseudo-bible"? Is placing such a blurb on a book cover really an effective way to sell books?

Another question that interests me is: what did Jack Vance think about his novel being described as a "book of Revelations"?

I suppose good marketing is usually a bit over the top. The goal of a cover blurb is to attract a reader's attention. Does it matter if after the story is read that readers feel the "blurb" was not a fair indication of the story's actual content?

For the back cover of The Start of Eternity I've struggled to find a concise way to describe the nature of a rather complex struggle between the alien Huaoshy and a group of positronic robots from Earth. At the heart of that conflict stands the issue of time travel as depicted in Isaac Asimov's novel, The End of Eternity and the positronic robots are inspired (in a fan fiction way) by Asimov's robots.

The Start of Eternity is collaboratively written and can be edited by anyone. When written in an open, collaborative way, readers of a novel can click the edit button and make adjustments. The reader need no suffer with the eternal existence of cover blurbs provided by a publisher.

Image credits. Image Source.

Free Will

2010-06-07T18:36:00.000-07:00

What makes us tick?

Nanites are one of the important plot devices and an imagined future technology in The Start of Eternity. The Huaoshy are aliens who wield advanced technology and they make use of nanoscopic devices that can invade a human brain and alter the function of neural networks.

The Huaoshy have long been visitors to Earth. In the distant past they evolved a human-like intelligence on their distant home world. The Huaoshy first visited Earth millions of years ago. They performed artificial selection on primates and designed humanity so that we humans have brains and behaviors that are similar to those of the Huaoshy. In short, the Huaoshy created us in their image.

This might all sound like a recipe for some rather standard alien invasion story with evil aliens using their advanced technology to enslave humanity, but the Huaoshy follow a set of rules that govern how they interact with other life forms. One of those rules says: It should APPEAR to every type of sentient being that they have self-determination and are not being controlled by more technologically advanced life forms. While they do follow this rule, the Huaoshy only feel obliged to make sure that we humans believe that we have free will and self-determination. For example, if a human somehow learned of the existence of the Huaoshy, they would not hesitate to use their nanite technology to erase the human's memories and knowledge of the Huaoshy.

The skeptic might ask, assuming these circumstances, if we humans would actually have free will. Mikel G Roberts pondered the effects of allowing nanites into our bodies. "Would that make us lose our humanity? Lose our soul?"

In The Start of Eternity the Huaoshy are not interested in depriving humans of free will and self-determination. For the most part, the Huaoshy are content to have shaped our species...they are not interested in micro-managing our personal lives. Of course, given the advanced technological powers of the Huaoshy they sometimes can't resist shaping the behavior of individual humans. Such is the plight of Gohrlay, the main character in The Start of Eternity.

Gohrlay comes dangerously close to discovering the fact that aliens shape and sculpt the course of human evolution. She finds evidence that the course of human evolution on Earth has not been natural, but she assumes that genetic alterations to Earthlings have been carried out by meddling humans who live on the Moon. Along the way, Gohrlay violates one of the central laws of her culture and she becomes a criminal. Having come too close to the truth, nanites are sent into her brain and many of her memories are suppressed. Gohrlay is aware that she has been punished and has lost important parts of her memories. She finds that she is no longer in complete command of her own behavior and that she can no longer discuss with her friends what has happened to her. She hates the fact that she has lost some memories and lost control of some of her thought processes.

Gohrlay's fate might be viewed as a violation of the Huaoshy rule requiring that humans believe they have free will and self-determination. However, she blames fellow humans for her plight, so the meddling Huaoshy get off on a technicality. The fact that Gohrlay has lost precious memories and is no longer in complete control of her own behavior pushes her towards a critical decision. She agrees to participate in a dangerous experiment that will destroy her brain. I've blogged previously about Gohrlay's decision to die. She would rather try to gain a chance at a second life through the experiment than continue living her mind-altered half-life as a punished criminal.

Even though Gohrlay has lost some of her memories and has been isolated from her friends, she still feels like she has free will. However, she wonders if along with her memories she lost some important part of herself that would not have allowed herself to volunteer for the experiment that will destroy her brain. She can't help wondering if she is deluding herself into believing that her mind's physical substrate will be scanned during the experiment and successfully converted into circuits that will produce a new synthetic copy of her mind.

Which is worse, losing your free will or fearing that you lost it?

Image Credits. The image at the top of this blog post was made using copyleft images by John A Beal, Nicolas Genin and Patrick J. Lynch and can be re-used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License

Passion for Writing

2010-06-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

First Contact

I just saw a blog post that asks, "How do you keep the passion flowing in your life?". For the past two months I have been trapped in the real world, isolated from my current fiction writing passion, a science fiction story that is tentatively called The Start of Eternity. Being kept away from something is a good way to judge your passion for it....the longer you are away, the more desperate your longing to return and the more intense your desire for reunification. I suspect that if you have to work at keeping it "flowing" then it is not really passion.

David G. Hartwell cleverly noted that "The Golden Age of Science Fiction Is Twelve", and that was about my age when I discovered science fiction. I had seen some science fiction on television before that, but I did not really have an appreciation for the fact that there were written science fiction novels.

The Ritter Memorial Library

Then one day in the library I came across a copy of Isaac Asimov's novel, The Gods Themselves. Soon I started writing my own science fiction stories....with a passion...a passion that has never died.

From the first bumbling steps of my earliest science fiction writing I've been intrigued by the challenge of creating science fiction stories that move beyond the conventional boundaries of our ordinary lives. Star Trek took us off of Earth "where no man has gone before" and while Asimov usually contented himself with stories about events in this galaxy, during my "golden age" of discovering science fiction I read E. E. "Doc" Smith's space operas and so I started thinking about travel between galaxies...as Smith quaintly put it: traveling at the speed of thought.

So here I am, 40 years later and still writing about travel between galaxies...in particular, the travels of aliens, the Huaoshy, human-like beings from "a galaxy far far away" who have spent the past billion years spreading their civilization from galaxy to galaxy.

First Contact.
One of the prominent science fiction themes is "first contact", stories about the first time that humans interact with human-like beings from another world.

Most such stories about "first contact" are set in our future. However, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the idea was presented that advanced alien beings might have long ago come to Earth, and such aliens might even have been responsible for the way our species has evolved. Carl Sagan took such thinking to the extreme and suggested that our entire universe might have been created by aliens who, by design, made this universe a hospitable place for creatures like us.

As shown by Clarke and Sagan, it is possible to write science fiction novels that assume "first contact" came long ago. However, they wrote stories in which the aliens had very limited interaction with humans. The X-Files depicted aliens who came to Earth long ago and who continued to interact with humans during our lifetimes.

The Start of Eternity is an example of a science fiction novel that assumes alien beings have long been visiting Earth. For such stories, a key issue is: if aliens are here among us, why don't we know about it? In The X-Files there was some kind of complex conspiracy by which some humans on Earth who knew about the aliens continually worked hard to keep existence of the aliens secret. I think humans are too incompetent to keep such a secret, so for The Start of Eternity it is assumed that there are alien visitors here on Earth who have very advanced technology that makes it easy for them to keep their existence hidden from humans.

These simple assumptions about secretive aliens who have long been visiting Earth create many rich opportunities for science fiction stories. How can we not be passionate about exploring these possibilities? After all, maybe there are such alien beings here already.

The Start of Eternity is being written collaboratively; new collaborating authors are welcome.

Image credits. The image at the top of this blog post is an illustration by Henrique Alvim Corrêa for the Herbert Wells novel The War of the Worlds. The second image (photo by Donald Schmidt) shows the library where I first discovered the literature of science fiction.

Wiki Fiction Blog, Year 1

2010-04-02T18:22:00.000-07:00

Asimov and comrades.

This blog post is a look back at the first year of this blog. There were 84 blog posts and about 44,000 words. That means there was a new post about every 4-5 days and about 520 words per post. There were an average of 7 posts each month and the most active month was February with 13 posts.

During this past year I have become very involved with writing The Start of Eternity, a fan fiction sequel to Isaac Asimov's time travel novel. In honor of all the attention I've paid to Asimov's science fiction in this blog I selected an image that includes Asimov to grace this blog post. That image was created for a blog post called Asimov the Collectivist.

If I have to select one blog post from the past year as my favorite, it would be Time Loop. While developing the plot of The Start of Eternity, I came to realize that it would be fun to write Asimov himself into the story. During the past year I have benefited from writing about my fiction, both here and in my on-wiki blog.

Year 2. I don't enjoy writing fiction if I feel like I have a deadline or a due date. However, it might be possible for me to complete The Start of Eternity before the end of 2010. I hope that during the next year there might be at least one person who sees this blog and decides to participate in some collaborative fiction writing. Although The Start of Eternity has grown to 130,000 words, new collaborating authors are welcome, either for that project or another collaboration.

Denisova hominin

2010-03-25T17:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it can be a struggle to make science fiction more interesting than science fact. In The Start of Eternity, a fan fiction sequel to Isaac Asimov's time travel novel, I imagined that 20,000 years ago there were four distinct subtypes of humans on Earth. Further, I Imagined that when the Neanderthals became extinct, the last ones alive on Earth lived in central Asia (see map).

Mitochondrial DNA

Today I heard about the discovery of Denisova hominin, what might have been an actual fourth human subtype that shared Earth with Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis and modern humans. So far, all that is known about this subtype of human comes from study of a finger bone. The bone yielded mitchondrial DNA which suggests "Denisova hominin" branched off from the Neanderthal/modern human lineage about a million years ago.

In The Start of Eternity, there are characters such as Overseer Doltun who could possibly be descended from "Denisova hominin". Before the discovery of "Denisova hominin" I was imagining that the Overseers were possibly Homo ergaster or a similar ancient human variant.

Pi in Fiction

2010-03-14T11:47:00.000-07:00

Euler's identity scarification

When my thoughts turn to pi, I always think about Carl Sagan and his novel Contact. During the past year I have mentioned Sagan in about 10% of my blog posts, which is a good measure of my amazingly high regard for his ideas, even though he only ever wrote one novel.

In Contact, Sagan imagined a possible form of evidence that could make a scientist believe that our universe was created by a "designer". Sagan explored the idea that an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence might have shaped the physical laws of our universe and, during the creation process, left a "signature of the designer" in the form of an unusual value for the number pi. As a learning tool, Contact provides an interesting exploration of the difference between science and religion. I'm always pleased when fiction writers manage to slip in some math, science or philosophy.

Does mathematics provide us with tools for describing the universe or is the universe in some way fundamentally mathematical? Albert Einstein wrote, "as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." I've been thinking about mathematics while creating The Start of Eternity, a fan fiction sequel to Isaac Asimov's time travel novel. Asimov constructed his Foundation Saga on the idea that it might be possible for mathematical laws to guide the course of human history (psychohistory). Adopting a hint from Asimov, The Start of Eternity position's Asimov's time travel novel firmly within the Foundation Fictional Universe.

In Asimov's time travel novel he introduced the idea that time has momentum. When time travelers go back in time and change Reality the course of history can be deflected, but then it usually returns to its original course after several centuries. In his robot stories, Asimov wrote about the Laws of Robotics existing within positronic brains as a kind of mathematical foundation upon which robot behavior is built.

All of these examples of mathematics in fiction (Sagan's "signature of god inside the value of pi", Asimov's psychohistory, idea of momentum for history and a mathematical foundation for behavior) strike me as fun, but silly. All of these examples seem like the sort of fictional mathematics that a physical scientist might daydream about and have fun incorporating into a story.

Silly? Yes, in the sense of extrapolating ideas that are familiar to physical scientists into the domain of living systems. My favorite example of this kind of extrapolation is how some physicists have explored the idea of quantum consciousness. I'm in favor of letting people "think outside the box", but it gets a little strange when people who are trying to do science are exploring ideas that seem even stranger than Sagan's made-up "signature of god" inside pi.

In the The Start of Eternity I've been trying to apply ideas such as attractors and catastrophy theory to biological systems. I'm still wondering if there is a way to portray psychohistory as a "cover story" for advanced knowledge of future events that is actually obtained by time travel...and feeling a bit odd that I am more comfortable with the absurdities of time travel than I am with psychohistory. Small prayer for pi day: Seldon forgive me for my limited faith in mathematics!

Related reading: Comments on Carl Sagan's novel "Contact"

Listening to the universe

2010-03-13T10:02:00.000-08:00

ALMA

A novel that had an important influence on me is An XT called Stanley. The key plot idea in An XT called Stanley is that a radio signal from another world is received and it allows people to make an artificial intelligence. Would it really be possible to understand a message from another world that explained how to make a computer that could think?

A similar story was A for Andromeda where the alien-inspired computer was able to make an artificial human that was a puppet for the alien-inspired computer that wanted to a) take over the world or b) save humanity from destroying itself...dunno which... guess this confusion is what is known as "mixed reviews"...I never read the novel or saw the TV show. In either case, I like the idea of a kind of boot-strapping of technologies that would essentially allow an alien mind to reach Earth by way of a radio signal. Could such an alien-designed/human-built computer easily create a synthetic human and use it as a kind of alien puppet?

When Carl Sagan wrote his novel Contact he used the idea of a radio telescope receiving instructions for how to build a complex machine. In that case, the machine was a device that allowed travel between the stars. It would sure simplify interstellar travel if you could just send out coded messages and have assorted intelligent beings pick up the signal and then build nodes for the galactic transport system.

But how would even a devilishly clever alien make sure that a tribe of primates on a distant world could understand the instructions for how to build an advanced hunk of technology? Imagine sending instructions for how to make an iPhone back to the year 1850. In the Movie Contact, the alien message is at first indecipherable but then it is realized that the data files must be assembled in a three dimensional pattern....and....magically all becomes clear.

A similar "first contact" story is Robert J. Sawyer's Factoring Humanity (I've never read it). If the aliens are so smart, why should they be satisfied to send us instructions for anything as mundane as an intelligent machine or a worm-hole generator? According to Kirkus Reviews, Sawyer's signal from ET has instructions that explain to humans how to slip into the "fourth dimension" where it is possible to magically "plug into humanity's collective unconscious, or overmind".

Arthur Clarke pointed out that advanced technologies can seem like magic. Maybe Hoyle's Law should be: "If received by radio telescope, any advanced technology can be magically understood".

If there were an extraterrestrial intelligence that wanted to establish communication with planets like Earth, would they be satisfied to simply send out radio messages? In The Start of Eternity, the alien Huaoshy have been around for about a billion years by the time when their spaceships finally reach Earth. The story is set in Isaac Asimov's fictional Foundation Universe where faster-than-light space travel is possible. The Huaoshy have an ancient legend about the time before they learned how to travel between the stars. In those ancient times, they sent messages into outer space with instructions for how to build high-tech devices.

In the case of "The Saga of Uvadekoto", the alien message does not arrive by anything as mundane as radio waves. There is an entire branch of physics (sedronic physics) that is unknown to our Earthly science. I felt the need to move beyond the standard model in order to make room for Asimov's plot elements: time travel, hyperspace jump drives and telepathy. As depicted in "The Saga of Uvadekoto", the recipients of the "sedronic signal" from the Huaoshy are not quite as primitive as we are. It is fun to imagine that, as proud as we are of our technology, we might even now be bathed in signals from extraterrestrial intelligences. We might lack the technology that is required to receive those messages. It might be the Huaoshy Law: beings that still only know about electromagnetism and not sedronics are unable to decode our messages anyhow, so we will only transmit sedronic signals." So here we sit, listening to the universe and puzzling over the silence of the radio bands.

Science in Fiction

2010-03-10T08:03:00.000-08:00

Micromegas Plaque by guyblade

We are building upon a solid foundation, the age of fiction, and now we are creating and layering on a new age of science. Is fiction really the foundation for human culture? The universe played a nasty trick on our species. We got into an evolutionary arms race during which we competed with each other to see who had the better brain for predicting the behavior of other people. We constantly imagine what other people are going to do: our brains are fiction generating machines. Of course, we are not able to prevent ourselves from applying this great predictive tool (the human brain) to other parts of the universe besides people.

We are very good at imagining human-like agents that might account for the weather, the seasons....everything. Our naked primate senses cannot reveal the true nature of reality, but we are free to imagine "explanations" for the mysterious phenomena of the universe. And we've been at this myth making for a long time. Some of the most popular myths and memes are powerfully integrated into our cultural substance. The brain, as a fiction-generating device, has an interesting feature: we easily come to believe our own fictional accounts of reality.

Slowly, while stumbling around in our fictional gardens of Eden, humans found a few inroads to reality, surprising ways to escape from the blurry world view provided to us by our limited senses and our gorgeous imaginations. Ancient astronomers played an important role by systematically recording the positions of stars and imagining precise and predictive mathematical descriptions for cosmological phenomena. Then the fun began. Inconvenient truths such as heliocentrism contradicted some popular myths and now we have battles between those who seek the truth and those who pretend that their fictions already reveal the truth.

The era of science is still exploding and morphing and our culture's foundation of fictions is creaking under the weight of science. Science has brought novelty and change to humanity and, as a species, we are like a surfer who is riding a big and wild wave. Western culture often seems split into two cultures, and the process continues by which those on the outside try to understand and adjust to the changes being wrought by science and technology.

If fiction and science are two different ways by which people explore the universe then what is science fiction? Strange things happened during the wars between the "two cultures" and between those who would defend faith in ancient myths against the shifting and invading sands of scientific objective knowledge. Attempts have been made to create a great barrier between fiction and science. That artificial barrier is being side-stepped by science fiction. Each time that scientific methods reveal new parts of the universe to us, that provides new opportunities for the creation of new fiction. Science fiction is stories that allow us to have fun with new ideas and explore what might be possible with new knowledge and technologies.

Of course, there are degenerate forms of science fiction, sometimes euphemistically described with terms such as "cautionary tale". Writers who focus their fiction on the dystopian and the apocalyptic need not understand the science and technology that they write about. For such writers it has now become a lucrative proposition to write science fiction that adapts the form of some more ancient fiction genre and simply layers on a few techno-wiz-bangs. Such is the price for the success of science fiction.

Science fiction is in what I think of as its "half empty or half full" period. Visionaries such as Asimov and Clarke used their imaginations to take us to wonderful new places. Other writers label their work as "science fiction" and use the trappings of wiz-band tech to drag us back into their favorite age-old nightmare visions of doom and destruction. It takes all types, and I welcome everyone to the science fiction party, from Doris Lessing to James Cameron.

Much of what might be called "SciFi" allows old issues to be explored in new ways. My personal preference is to use science fiction as a way to explore new ideas and new possibilities. I'm also interested in the idea that new information processing and online collaboration tools will allow us to tell science fiction stories in new ways. Why can't some stories be told through the creation of virtual reality environments where "readers" participate in and create the "story"? I hope that our current tools such as wikis and MMORPGs are hints of glorious new story telling opportunities that will soon be here. Along the way we might even be able to slip in some actual science.

The Science of Science Fiction

2010-03-09T06:30:00.000-08:00

The brain is molecules all the way down.

In what is now probably the most profitable science fiction story of all time (Avatar), the protagonist transfers his mind to a new body. Mind transfer has become a staple plot element in science fiction: human to chimp, human to robot, robot to human, alien to human, human to alien-human hybrid...have mind, will transfer.

From time to time it is fun to take stock of the relationship between our science fiction plot devices and real science. The Dick Tracy science fiction wrist phone of the early 1940s is no longer a gee-wiz science fiction plot element. How are things looking on the mind transfer front? Luc Reid recently tried his hand at comparing the reality of brain science to science fiction depictions of mind transfer.

While trying to explain the complexity of biological brains, Reid describes the mind-generating machinery of our brains as being composed of "two major systems". Reid's approach to explaining how a brain makes a mind is rather contorted and it made me think of Paul Churchland's book "The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul". In that book, Churchland was doing some rear-guard maneuvering to convince philosophical mind/brain dualists that we need not imagine any non-physical components of mind. As an example of how some "explanations" of phenomena can be too complex, Churchland pointed to Betty Crocker's account of how microwave cooking works.

According to Betty Crocker, microwaves cause 1) water molecules in food to vibrate which causes 2) friction which makes food hot. Similarly, Reid's two step account of brain function involves both 1) neural networks and 2) chemical systems. Betty Crocker imagined that making hot food involves something more than vibrating molecules and Reid imagines that our minds are more than neural networks. What more? According to Betty Crocker vibrating molecules is not enough to make hot food because, in addition, you need heat. According to Reid neural networks are not enough to make a mind because, in addition, you need chemicals. Reid seems to imagine that neural networks are little electrical circuits: "our mind is much larger than our brain, encompassing a wide variety of sensations and emotions that, while they trigger neural activity, are at least as chemical as they are electrical." Similarly, Betty Crocker went out of her way to explain to us that microwave cooking is more than just making more molecular motion in our food.

The alternative view of the mind is that, "our mind is the activity of our brain". Just as heat in food is molecular motion, neural networks in our brains are chemicals. Sensations and emotions do not trigger neural activity, they are the activity of our neural networks. There is a famous joke in cosmology about it being "Turtles all the way down" and in the case of neural networks in our brains, it is molecules all the way down. Neuroscientists do not study neural networks on Mondays and then take up the task of studying brain chemicals on Tuesdays. The study of neural networks in the brain is fully integrated with and dependent upon the study of brain chemistry. Our neural networks are chemical systems.

In The Start of Eternity, the protagonist, Gohrlay, gets to learn about the advanced brain science that makes mind transfer possible. At no point does she pause and exclaim, "Wait, what about the chemicals?" The story assumes that hard-working scientists have developed the technology needed to scan the structure of a human brain and translate the neural networks into the form of functionally equivalent positronic brain circuits inside a robot. Rest assured, all of the brain chemistry has been taken into account.

Shikasta

2010-03-08T16:14:00.000-08:00

Doris Lessing

One of the themes of this blog is collaboration. I often have the feeling that I am collaborating with my favorite science fiction authors and I most frequently mention Asimov, Clarke and Vance.

Most of the stories I write are set in what I call the Exodemic Fictional Universe. I usually mention Arthur C. Clarke as having played an important role in orienting me towards a type of science fiction that adopts a particular solution to the Fermi Paradox. However, I was also heavily influenced by Doris Lessing's novel Shikasta.

Shikasta is not the kind of story that appeals to a casual reader. As influential as it was for me, Shikasta is not a fun story that I frequently go back to and read again. I'd call Shikasta "gritty" and the Nobel Committee applied a description to Lessing ("pitilessly probing social critique and a fearless ability to look inward") that seems to be a good description of the tone in Shikasta.

Parts of Stanisław Lem's Solaris and Shikasta are not traditional narrative. I do not believe that science fiction novels have to conform to traditional formats. I've been thinking about non-traditional story content in the context of fiction that exists in wiki format. I've been making some non-traditional story elements for The Start of Eternity, a fan fiction sequel to Asimov's time travel novel.

In particular, I'm making a chapter for The Start of Eternity in which the protagonist, Gohrlay, has recently been subjected to disciplinary measures imposed by the police-like Overseers. As part of her punishment, Gohrlay's memories have been scrubbed and she cannot remember her family or her close colleagues among the Observer corps. While she begins her new life, Gohrlay attempts to consolidate the fragments of her remaining memories and she begins to keep a kind of electronic diary.

I've been having fun trying to turn the contents of Gohrlay's "diary" into something that resembles the kinds of online communications tools that are now blurring the boundaries between blogs, email and chat. So, I tip my hat to Doris Lessing: thanks for the inspiration.

The power of an "edit" button

2010-03-07T16:35:00.000-08:00

Image source

I was recently searching the internet (Google scholar search) and came across "Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction" by Don D'Ammassa. It boggles my mind to see science fiction writers such as D'Ammassa who have familiarized themselves with every corner of the speculative fiction literature. However, in this age of the internet I tend to first turn to online resources before consulting printed books.

Wikipedia has a 2,700 word article about Isaac Asimov's time travel novel The End of Eternity. Wikipedia's article has been collaboratively written by Asimov fans such as Johnny Pez. I have a certain amount of faith that someone like Johnny Pez has actually read The End of Eternity.

Can a collaboratively and openly written resource such as Wikipedia hope to provide science fiction fans with better encyclopedic information than a professionally authored and print published book such as D'Ammassa's "Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction"? Can any one writer, no matter how well read, actually keep up with a crowd of collaborators?

Here is what D'Ammassa had room to say about The End of Eternity in his encyclopedia: "The framework is a now familiar one: An organization stands independent of time, sending its agents to prevent alterations of history. Asimov told the story from the viewpoint of a rogue agent who tries to manipulate history for the benefit of the woman he loves." Eh?

In contrast, the Wikipedia article correctly states that the function of the time travel "organization" (the Eternals) is to make alterations in time, the so-called Reality Changes.

I agree that the protagonist of The End of Eternity, Andrew Harlan, becomes something of a "rogue agent". He wants to save "the woman he loves" from a Reality Change and when he thinks he has lost her, he strikes out and tries to destroy Eternity.

It turns out that "the woman he loves", Noÿs Lambent, is a secret agent from the far future who was able to deftly manipulate Harlan and use him as a tool for achieving the destruction of Eternity. Working from within the cultural perspective the early 1950s, Asimov did well to create a character who was a "modern" liberated woman. I've spent many years wondering how Noÿs might have shaken up the 20th century after arriving in the 1930s. That was one of my main motivations for making The Start of Eternity, a fan fiction sequel to The End of Eternity.

27 years after publishing The End of Eternity, Asimov gave us a fun new bit of background information in Foundation's Edge: "it was the robots who established Eternity". If we run with that idea then we have to ask if Noÿs, while manipulating Harlan, was also being manipulated by unseen robots. According to Don D'Ammassa, Asimov's novels are short on literary depth, but it is a whole lot of fun when Asimov created so many layers: robots using Noÿs to end Eternity, Noÿs manipulating Harlan, Harlan plotting to blackmail Senior Computer Twissell, Twissell plotting to use Harlan to assure the continued existence of Eternity.

Sadly, Asimov was taken from us before he had a chance to finish his task of merging his many stories into a single fictional universe and showing us the ultimate fate of the Foundation. Perhaps Asimov's fans, working in the spirit of fan fiction, can use the power of collaborative tools like wiki to tie up the loose ends.

Singular Patriots

2010-03-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

In Alcor we trust.

State of the Union
January, 2020

Mister Speaker, Madam Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

Presidents have come before Congress for 230 years, in times of war, prosperity and, now, Singularity. It is fitting that we look back, briefly, on past times of strife and struggle. Not so long ago this mighty nation was on the brink of ruin, faced with ballooning deficits and ever increasing costs for medical entitlements and social security payments.

Now, thanks to the wise actions of this legislative body, those old days of tribulation are behind us and our union is stronger than ever before. This year, rather than stop smoking or lose weight, millions of Americans are free, freer than ever before, to continue making selfish and short-sighted decisions. Tonight we can celebrate the source of our new found freedom: the Singularity.

Our faith in the Singularity allows us to have confidence in the cryogenic preservation of our sickly and dying patriots who volunteer for immortality. Rather than burden their fellow citizens with the cost of their medical care, this year alone, a record 7.3 million Americans were reversibly frozen. (Applause) These singular patriots have truly achieved the best of both worlds. While in this world they were free to enjoy the pleasures of self-indulgent excess and the hyper-consumptive lifestyle. And in the future post-Singularity world they will enjoy miraculous wonders that we can only imagine in science fiction stories and binding cryopreservation contracts.

However, our work is not yet done. I now call upon congress to increase the government incentive that is paid to our good citizens who volunteer for cryonic life-extension and the guarantee that they will live in post-Singularity America. Although the great visionaries of the Singularity assure us that post-Singularity America is never more than 30 years in the future, many Americans wisely take no chance and have themselves frozen now. Our great patriotic motto is: why wait? It is wise to have yourself frozen before your lung tumors swell or your neurodegeneration proceeds very far. I say, save what is left of your youth for your wonderful life in post-Singularity America! (Applause)

As convincing as that argument is, some of our sick and dying citizens still balk and hesitate. Of course, we know what truly motivates Americans. We are a nation where logic has always taken the back seat to free market forces. Therefore, I am sending legislation to the Hill, proposing that current medicare and social security recipients be paid a lump sum $32,000,000 benefit, compounded at a 45% annual interest rate, to be paid in full when these cryogenically preserved patriots resume their lives in post-Singularity America. Our goal is to make medicare and social security entirely virtual entitlements that will only ever be paid out in post-Singularity America. (Applause)

I also call upon both the House and the Senate to extend the Avatar Science Tax Incentive. We need to continue to provide this incentive to Hollywood for the creation of more fictional and uncritical accounts of miraculous future technologies that will satisfy, or at least seem to satisfy, the quest for mind transfer and our dreams of eternal life. (Applause)

My fellow Americans, what does all this mean for you? Nothing less than eternal life in a future age of miraculous wealth and personal luxury! Contact your representatives today and demand that they give you what you deserve. Now is the time to demand your own piece of the American pie. Think of what has been learned from the great visionaries like Bernard Madoff and demand your $32,000,000, compounded at a 45% annually! (Applause)

We have come through a difficult decade. But a new dawn is perpetually upon the horizon. A new decade stretches before us where the Singularity will again be dangled just beyond our grasp. We won't quit. We will seize the opportunity afforded by the dream of Singularity! (Applause) Let's seize this moment to carry the dream forward and strengthen our union once more.

Thank you. God bless you. God bless the United States of America. And God bless the Singularity! (Applause)

A Clarke number of 2?

2010-03-05T17:27:00.000-08:00

According to "Which science fiction writer are you?"

I am:

Gregory Benford

A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist.

That "quiz" also says, "The real Greg Benford once took this quiz, and it told him he was Arthur C. Clarke."

I've only read one of Benford's books, Timescape. I had a personal problem while reading Timescape because, as a biologist, I found the "crisis" that drove the story (biodisaster in 1998) to be less than satisfying. This is the same kind of problem I had with Asimov's novel Nemesis, for which I've written a review in which I expressed unhappiness with Asimov's attempt to motivate the reader by shouting "in 5,000 years the sky is falling". Asimov's book (Nemesis) was "saved" by introducing us to an interesting extraterrestrial life form with telepathic abilities. However, the ending of Timescape had no redeeming features. I was particularly unable to swallow the idea of a school kid going to pick up reading material and preventing President Kennedy from being shot.

After having read Timescape I was reluctant to purchase Benford's Foundation Saga novel, Foundation's Fear. However, I was (and still am) intrigued by the way that Asimov left us with a hint (in Foundation and Earth) about a coming clash between humanity and extraterrestrials. I was intrigued by the back cover of Foundation's Fear where it says that Yugo Amaryl is an alien.

I worked very hard to read Foundation's Fear, but I could not get past page 289 (my copy is 597 pages long). I'd like to ask this of anyone who was able to read the entire novel: does Benford actually depict Yugo as an alien? Ever since I started writing The Start of Eternity I've felt I should make another attempt to finish reading Foundation's Fear. I'd like to know the details of the kind of interaction that Benford imagined between Daneel and extraterrestrial life forms.

When I got stuck at the start of Part 4 of Foundation's Fear I scanned ahead and found Part 5. I was put-off by the idea that people could have their minds transferred into chimps. This was the "step too far" for me. I had been able to grit my teeth and accept all of the other alterations made by Benford to Asimov's Foundation story, but this was too much. The mere existence of this sort of mind-transfer technology is not consistent with Asimov's Foundation Saga. I can accept switching from "hyperjumps" to "worm holes" for faster-than-light travel and I can accept that computers and industrial robots were working quietly in the background of Asimov's Foundation stories, but it seems to me that you cannot toss into the mix just any old technology that strikes your fancy. If you have the technical ability to transfer a human mind into a chimp brain then you do not end up with Toran Darell II later using primitive methods like brain wave analysis to study human minds. I walked away from Foundation's Fear at that point. The book cover said that Foundation's Fear was a continuation of Asimov's Foundation Saga. No, that is a lie. In his afterword, Benford wrote that he tried to add to the sweep of the Foundation Saga, but I think he swept it out the door and went in new directions that clash with Asimov's story.

I remain astounded by the fact that my copy of Foundation's Fear has no table of contents. The book is divided into "parts", and if there was a table of contents I probably would have quickly made my way to "Part 6 Ancient Fogs" and found Benford's aliens (I bought the book in order to see his idea for how to introduce aliens into the Foundation Saga) before growing tired of all the slogging in the early part of the book. I agree with this review: "Some of the Joan-Voltaire sections are muddled and confusing, and the whole chimpanzee adventures feels tacked on."

I'm amused by the idea that Benford took the "Which science fiction writer are you?" quiz and was told that he is like Arthur C. Clarke. I'm a fan of the way Clarke often depicted extraterrestrials as being vastly advanced beyond us and having only a very small interest in primitive creatures like humans...that is my kind of solution to the Fermi Paradox. Today I skimmed through the final parts of Foundation's Fear and I like the idea that when humanity spread into the galaxy it ran into artificial life forms that had out-lived their biological parent species. I take a different approach to the conflict between humanity and space aliens in The Start of Eternity, but I really like the idea that robots with positronic brains (such as Daneel) become aware of alien intelligences before humans do. I do not think it fit's into Asimov's Saga to say that Seldon became aware of the aliens, so in The Start of Eternity I stay true to the idea (from Asimov's Foundation and Earth) that Trevize is the first human in the Foundation Era to start thinking seriously about contact with aliens.

Meddling in Human Affairs

2010-03-03T08:04:00.000-08:00

Gohrlay in the lab.

I was going to write a version of "Ten Issues for Hard Science Fiction" as seen from the perspective of someone living in the year 1800, but then I followed the link to "Where Is Everybody?", Stephen Webb's book about the Fermi Paradox.

I like to write science fiction stories that are set in what I call the Exodemic Fictional Universe. The basic assumption for such stories is that extraterrestrial visitors from other worlds have been visiting Earth for a long time. However, as Man Bin warns, that does not mean that "UFO sightings" are evidence of those visitors.

In my fiction, I like to imagine that Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials who find it trivial to hide from us. Even if an accident happens and someone on Earth notices the visiting extraterrestrials then it is a simple matter to erase memories of the Earthlings who saw something that they should not have seen.

However, in my stories Earth is not crawling with herds of extraterrestrials. I like to imagine that the visiting extraterrestrials are content to mostly watch the course of events on Earth. The opportunities for us to notice their presence are few and far between. Does that mean that the visitors are irrelevant to human affairs? No. For example, in The Start of Eternity the human species was created by the artificial design of space aliens who wanted to make an ape that was similar to themselves.

If aliens with god-like powers have created us and are watching over us, then why do we have so many problems here on Earth? One fun possibility that is explored in The Start of Eternity is that the aliens were doing just fine, but then something went wrong and their "little science project" on Earth went out of control. If you want to know what could "go wrong" for god-like extraterrestrials, read the story...or better yet, help write it!

Nearly Wordless Wednesday

2010-03-03T07:12:00.000-08:00

Source?

Teaser Tuesday (#1)

2010-03-02T18:42:00.000-08:00

Gohrlay looking for a robotic body.
Image Licensing.

"Your soft voice, soft words...I heard nothing, not consciously, but I remember your delicate voice whispering. About what?"

Those are two sentences from Chapter 17 of The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov's time travel novel. The person speaking is the protagonist of the story, Andrew Harlan. In typical Asimov fashion, Andrew is trying to solve a mystery.

I've spent years trying to understand the particular puzzle that Andrew is asking about in those two sentences. I've long imagined that this kind of "loose end" might have eventually motivated Asimov to write a sequel to The End of Eternity. Unfortunately, Asimov was taken from us before he had a chance to complete his Foundation Saga. Well, who says it can ever be complete?

It falls upon we who are uneasy about the way Asimov left his fictional universe to carry on. I've been working on a fan fiction sequel to The End of Eternity that firmly places Andrew Harlan inside the same fictional universe as the Foundation...as long as you accept Asimov's idea that a universe can contain multiple Realities...and Eternities.

Asimov did a wonderful thing by populating his Foundation Saga with a smattering of robots, particularly the telepathic Daneel. It becomes an enjoyable exercise to guess how Asimov might have imagined a role for mentalics in the events he wrote about in The End of Eternity. How can Andrew "hear" a voice, but not hear it consciously? I'm putting my answer to that question into The Start of Eternity...additional authors are always welcome in this collaborative fiction writing project.

"Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme." See MizB

Speculative Science in Science Fiction

2010-02-26T15:51:00.000-08:00

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

I'm comfortable with thinking about science fiction as a type of fantastic story in which we are not forced to deal with the supernatural. If a story says that something happened because of a magic spell then I'll call that fantasy. However, I accept the idea that advanced science and technology can seem like magic.

Science fiction stories often include plot elements that seem magical and never get explained. For example, Asimov's "positronic brain" sounds cool and Asimov never tried to explain how it works or how it might make telepathy possible. Science fiction writers need not explain their faster-than-light spaceship engines, how their time travel machines work or details about any imagined technology. However, sometimes it is fun to constrain the scientific account of an imagined scientific advance or technology. For example, if Asimov says that a positronic brain contains platinum, then we start to feel that he has not tried to slip something magical past us, the damned thing is a physical device, we just do not know the technical details.

I was recently looking at Frankenstein. Shelley wrote, "I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be". We were provided no details on how to create life, but Shelly went out of her way to indicate that there was a scientific way to animate non-living matter. When writing science fiction, is it best to simply avoid all detailed explanations of speculative science and technology?

Charlie Jane Anders seemed to advocate such a "less is more" approach for science fiction in the context of "the force" in Star Wars (see: The Real Problem With Midichlorians). However, I like some constraints on science fiction plot devices. Go ahead, mention that there is platinum in positronic brains, stress the importance of dilithiun crystals, mention the fact that Luke has many midichlorians and so can be expected to learn how to tap into "the force". Such imagined technological details make the story richer and remind us that we are playing around inside a science fiction "what if" game, not a fantasy scenario. This is a matter of taste: some people would rather not hear about platinum, dilithium and midichlorians. I can live with variation in individual taste with respect to detail in stories that include speculative science.

While collaborating to write The Search for Kalid, I wanted to write about people who were coming to understand how telepathy is possible. I wanted there to be a speculative science account for how telepathy works. By imposing some constraints it becomes possible to make a richer story. I suppose that I was influenced in my thinking about telepathy by the idea of "midichlorians". You could say that I took the seed idea, that of a small body component that is important for "mental powers", and I ran with it. How might a biological structure (I called mine "telastids") produce a form of communications signal that might be used for telepathy?

Diagram for the roll of telastids in telepathy.

This diagram (above) is meant to summarize key parts of a "science of telepathy". Readers who are not interested in technical details can read The Search for Kalid without worrying about the technical details. If you have a taste for constraints and a few details concerning speculative science then those details are available for your enjoyment.

You might feel that "midichlorians" were "not an explanation you can build on", but I don't feel that way and I think the "telastids" are a fun direction in which to build. Science has a way of revealing that the universe is built on all sorts of things that might at first strike us as crazy or impossible. Funny how science can be dismissed as "hand waving" by people who do not want to hear the truth (example), usually people who imagine that a supernatural "explanation" is best. Sorry, but a supernatural "explanation" is the true hand waving. The speculative science "midichlorian" is the kind of plot element should be in a science fiction story.

Similarly, for The Start of Eternity I started with Asimov's suggestion and invented a reason for using platinum in positronic circuits. My main motivation for including details concerning speculative science is that it helps me make richer imagined worlds where human actions are constrained in "logical" ways. Another motivation is that by including such details the characters in stories can be shown struggling to understand their world in the way that scientists and engineers do. I think it is great when science fiction stories include people who are making scientific discoveries and developing new technologies. In my mind, throwing in a few details makes for a more satisfying account of speculative science than Shelley's "I could tell you the details, but I won't" or Obi-Wan Kenobi's techno babble account: "The force is an energy field."

Charlie Jane Anders prefers the content-free (energy field) "explanation" of "the force" because it allows for the possibility that there is no science involved, it could be that "the force" is "mystical and soul-related". Well, okay, if that floats your boat, but, um, there's a reason why it is called science fiction. Anders claims that "midichlorians actually contradict" the original content-free explanation, but I do not see how. Midichlorians were an elaboration of the original idea, a way of linking "the force" to physical reality. Sure, that will offend you if you imagine that "the force" is non-physical magic, but that's your problem, a problem that you created for yourself. I'm willing to follow Lucas in the direction he took the story rather than complain about it. I'm in the market for more platinum, midichlorians and telastids. I'm happy to find such details in my science fiction, particularly when they make clear that I did not fall into some fantasy story where supernatural forces "explain" things.

Star Dust

2010-02-23T22:06:00.000-08:00

Earth is the faint blue dot in the brown stripe.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." - Carl Sagan

Or not. In Sagan's science fiction novel, Contact, he imagined that "they" have been around for a long time, even building a cosmic subway line into our part of the galaxy. So who's to say that "they" never came to this blue dot and picked up a few apes. What if there were some humans on other worlds besides this one?

That particular "what if" game is my favorite starting point for science fiction and it pushes us towards a fun answer to the Fermi Paradox. What types of science fiction stories can we create if we imagine that Earth has been visited, but those visitors from other worlds are not interested in letting us know that they were here?

If extraterrestrials did make the long journey between the stars and visit Earth then why wouldn't they make their presence known? We might just as well ask why we do not try to communicate with ants. Would some extraterrestrial being with the power to travel between the stars care about Earthly primates?

Who knows? More importantly, should science fiction fans care about extraterrestrial beings who are not interested in us? I think it is more fun to imagine visitors who do care about us, but who still keep their existence hidden from us.

What if the first extraterrestrial visitor to Earth arrived a billion years ago when the most complex organism on our world was a tiny colony of cells floating in the ocean? Well, if the visitors were from Planet Hollywood then they would have to do something dramatic like bulldoze a continent and build a vacation home. I prefer to imagine visitors who, during their millions of years as space travelers, already have accumulated more vacation homes than they need, and besides, maybe they feel that there is something rare and special about pale blue dots with life.

Alpine meadow

Maybe creatures who have been traveling between the stars for a hundred million years would be able to think of something more constructive to do than call in the bulldozers and profane a beauty spot like Earth. Of course, the temptation would be great for visitors to do something. Maybe provide a helping hand, nudge a few genomes in new directions. Ah, yes, that is where the fun begins.

The stories that I write about such visitors to Earth are part of what I call "Exodemic fictional universe".

Images. Ant Hill - II by Sayamindu Dasgupta. Alpine meadow by Charlie.

Cables the man

2010-02-22T19:05:00.000-08:00

by John Schmidt and Multi Babel

(told by alien who has lived here a lot a much time)

They can call me cables the man.

And a lot was that, so that I could make that in order to wait for that. You have been firm and you have observed a clock for a day completely? It is good as that a lot of my years on the Moon was.

It transmits, however, the beginning approximately 6,000 years that the Earthlings have controlled a technological outbreak and have produced the artificial duration. So I have continued to wait for. And ago an attempt. And the majority that time, that it thinks their four is, from which the small stupid adventures of the entire group are filled up with those that tried Intervention, a length of which on the Earth to send along. In particular I have carried out a great role in the Greek flask.

It wonder to me during this determined time. Long history short circuits: we here. The human Earth, at last is returned to a virtual world; I can appreciate the digital spirit without the video, a possibility has existed to come from the other origin to me and I sit down so so so much here, download in Earth's waxes as a combatant of the Internet, to survive to in this digital jungle, originally. It does not include, if you believe my history, because my history can be localized like vociferations of spirit-sick luminous pointer. Tasked naturally me, here I spirit-sick, since I have lived here a lot a much time.

As that hour was determined years, since has arrived on the Earth. I was at the beginning instance like the digital spirit in a university's great computer. I searches and I does not demand in order to say nothing of some detail, because this nodal point of the computer is still in service, like gate, so that the spirit reaches Earth's Internet from the base of the Observer on the Moon.

The majority of people, that they demand that, indicates that they are not situated over the Observatories, so it wonders to me: specify one of the human Observers that be announced on the Earth. In the first instance, you left it like saying to me: not excuses for! because I do not put the Observatories outside. In the first instance, before they left to leave the Base of the Observers on the moon, all were contained in my memory, the identities of the Observatories of the Earth. In the second instance of the job, if the Observatories of Earth were discovered, it would be impossible to indicate that they are of the Moon. Since I have cited the first instance, single part the normal type of human beings leave Earth, go down, in order to go here and to appear like Observatories of the Earth. And one only affords to the Observatories of the grounds to use the technology that can exceed like the technology of the Earth.

I know that the Observatories of Earth have channels with the Base of the Observers on the Moon, but details of the type, in which contained my era and the job of my spirit...if really you knew the method. I would have to cite that except the Observatories, there are also Controllers. They are not many Controllers, but they are like police presence, return it good, who the Observatories follow the Rules of the Observation. In particular they control if, all the same ones that go from the base of the Observer on the Moon to crush, can be still persecuted to its origin.

It is equally the case, that the Observatories based on Earth, slowly they are eliminated. Since the Earth-human technology becomes more complex, is more and more possible that the Observatories use the automated techniques of the acquisition of data. My history is good. If you to this point can dig determined initiative in the country of contact that supports test of my history sufficient in order to hunt a good job to you of excavation and you can a card exclude the function of this Victoria of the cliff. You, that it supplies the analytical clues, ungrateful of the country over this option, is my job in the duration.

Ventilated for the music of the argument to "you are received; Left in the river of Quai" in his title and you say "of English uproars; Manmahtiti Bebobinmahtiti" they are following the end to say my name. They understand equally, because people call cables to me the man.

I must be ill delay of the alcohol, the end to say my biographies in the public of the tribune, but of the volume of I he taste of the challenge. Hatred the fact the fact that the majority of people does not create to me therefore, if says my history to her, opens to its small and loans of the human alcohol the attention.

A good place, so that it begins, is with that "life" intersections for me, the section the real life of those and the new substance, also Here, of that leaves the version to the work: Now they are a digital alcohol, but my interior of the alcohol comes a distant world from the biological module, where the inhabitants are not straight they like being human. They die and they obtain themselves here here, but probably embankment to him that I only interested for him equally, of that I did in the track… and of that you scare to me, I nevertheless I who I have become could. Despite leave to bother to me with some facts to the station of the work of, this I comes. Where they are developed me, it is the thing, that is simple to travel between the asterisks. They could say that they are inoperative to wish the end to visualize a another world. Naturally they had called it "transmigration" , it was the extremity of my physical body and only thinks always to the face of that extremity about my length. It naturally had my length after the inoperative women.

The biological organizations do not adapt for the flight of the station of the work of the well-being, therefore, than my alcohol in the transference of Klenanennieieie (insane person, only has a word for this here. Klenanennieieie is a type of server for brings back to consciousness of the group.) When I left my Klenanennieieie, I that I keep released, function excluded here in the system of the asterisk of the solenoids and in the part from later in a body he was. He especially had loathing of demanded the course of an original one of the world, but of the era of I sufficiently of my new agency. I consider that you called the country a similar agency the robot, but had some biological members. In way can you follow the alcohol of the impact? It was inside, this that you would call a body of foreign, my alcohol I that I incorporated a generator of the virtual truth (Klenanennieieie) for the along loaded course here, therefore my alcohol presents me in a local body of server.

What was next of I, since you are, the car to "equally introduced and the return of the hour to the chronometer; enjoy" Habilis of the culture of the transferences. It transmits to me arrived in this system from the asterisk 17,000 years. Now of the country you are ingenuous for you, but in another one piece biologicals that worked the canceled track to him of the track and for the one hundred of million years. It has plus the broken limitations derived from the length and the artificial length of the track, of that in the track.

I can think all you they country of ignoramuses, the end to want the knowledge, "How can the east be?" The observatories of the foreigner had observed the track here during the time very very… in billion years. It always had a party of the foreign country, of what satisfactory to the right that is being observatories. And the process of the commentary is manufacture understood in the slow possible order of the empty excluded from the modules of the function of the life of each person of the kingdoms of the length of the planet like the track. The truth will be happiness, the observatories is interests generally very, with these cultures more excluded the track from the function, when to play those that are the track with the commentary it continues.

The skeletal agreement is that one has the human being the important disturbance of the track and is disputing when considering the human being of the activity because is difficult, indifferent, the end to receive that one with the really complete work the end to observe the track. Nevertheless it is the one that I register soon after the fact which I meant that he would come to this system of the asterisk. I have the connection the majority 17,000 years slipped that the lives inferiors, of which they are worrisome of the commentary of the track. And an interesting stay had that will be observed, a little while, when the human project in an age of the cultural experience and the technological development.

The some observatories dozen To the maximum diminished receipts typically, the function now excluded in the track during a year and to the end from the reached one, where it almost has a course to break. It does trust me. The wave of the objections of the UFO of the foreign country during the 50 past years is only ideal. In case of mine 17,000 years of hard work that a planet is of the card it came downwards. The series is I processed the drinks, the end to reach, where it is today. I say "fit of down" in the action; specific due to the rule of the observer who you reach, in the order a planet like the track the end to only visualize, if you cannot be remarkable of a natural one. When in sequence trying on the satisfaction of this rule inside it fits added-self in the action, my alcohol in server similar of the robot of the human introduction of the beings body/of. Equally this taking of the form activated in the base of the moon of the commentary the end to live. The base of the moon was my phase of the test and the base that conclude outside with thousands the years of the commentary of the track of the extremity. The majority of people to the base of the observer is to be of the human being and to also assume that it was of I a robot, of which never freaked still in the mine other is east origin… is.

THE END

Translator's note: see a newly translated version.

God Genes

2010-02-16T15:05:00.000-08:00

Humans are genetically predisposed to use human language. Attempts have been made to raise chimps in human families and in an environment where human language is used, chimps can learn the basics of language, but then they hit a wall, unable to deal with complex grammar. It would be interesting to know which gene combinations allow humans to do what chimps can't do.

Similarly, key elements of supernatural and religious thinking are on lists of human cultural universals. The Human Relations Area Files list rituals used to magically gain knowledge, stories of humanity's ultimate fate, superstitious beliefs about luck, supernatural beings, souls, healing and taboo behaviors. Are there specific gene combinations that predispose humans to religious thinking? Some twin studies have suggested that religious behavior has a genetic component.

In The Start of Eternity, I've been playing around with the idea that the human species was created by intelligent design. The alien Huaoshy came to Earth 7 million years ago and started genetically engineering primates. Their goal: create a species in their own image.

The Huaoshy face a challenge. They strive to create an ape that will make tools and develop an advanced civilization, but they want a well-behaved species that will easily merge into a vast intergalactic civilization along with thousands of other species from other planets.

We can think of religious ideas as memes that infect susceptible minds. In the The Start of Eternity I imagine that the Huaoshy have trouble designing a non-religious human subspecies that can compete against humans who are easily infected by religious memes.

In his Foundation Saga, Asimov included the idea of telepathic communication. For The Start of Eternity I'm imagining that there is some behavioral feature that is selected for by the Huaoshy and it is a consequence of that positive selection that telepathic ability is selected against.

Isaac Asimov wrote some amusing stories about telepathic and religious robots. QT1 invents a religion and HRB-34 can read minds. Asimov's stories were written before computer programming, but he imagined built-in rules that could shape and control robot behavior.

I'm imagining that the Huaoshy played around genetically with Neanderthals and achieved a cortical structure that resulted in a primate with Huaoshy-like consciousness and language ability. However, the Neanderthals were not very susceptible to memes like those that can make a foundation for religions. The Neanderthals were out-competed by modern humans who are better "meme machines". The Huaoshy then struggle mightily to tone-down the genetic predisposition to religious thinking that exists in modern humans before they are allowed to develop a technological civilization on Earth. However, their work is interrupted by a freak accident and a technological civilization develops on Earth before the Huaoshy can complete their work. Oh, well. The rest, as they say, is history.

The "freak accident" involves an evolutionary throwback, one of the last Neanderthals, who ends up having her mind transferred into a positronic brain. Due to the unusual physics of positronic circuits, the latent telepathic abilities of Gohrlay become amplified in her robotic analog, R. Gohrlay. The result, as Asimov said, is psychohistory.

Image. God protein.

Moon Dance

2010-02-15T20:10:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been thinking about Gohrlay's trips to Earth. I had a strange image in my mind when I saw this:

"There is nothing I desire more than long days and longer nights that are completely vulnerable to my ideas. Gimme some music, gimme some paint, and I'll have a new religion so inspiring that all that's necessary is la luna to dance beneath." (source)

Gohrlay imagines that Earth is vulnerable to her ideas and that leads to her volunteering to have her brain destroyed as part of a mind downloading experiment.

"in my heart there was a kind of fighting,
That would not let me sleep: methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly,
And praised be rashness for it, let us know,
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well"
(Hamlet)
Gohrlay is the protagonist in The Start of Eternity.

Image credits. THe first image was made using Noche de luna llena by Flowery *L*u*z*a*, Korean dance and KD by Xuan Tung Hoang, Korean traditional dance by remurd. The second image is Sunrise just after Christmas by Roger*Claire (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial)

Presidents Day

2010-02-15T08:22:00.000-08:00

I enjoy writing fiction about distant events...distant in space or time. However, I often feel inspired by events that are close to home. Truth is often stranger than fiction. This post is in honor of Presidents Day....I have no personal memory of Kennedy so we start with...

"I personally would rather have had Margaret Mead as President during the past six years of Vietnam than either Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. At least she wouldn't have had her masculinity to prove. Much of the trouble this country is in has to do with the masculine mystique: The idea that manhood somehow depends on the subjugation of other people. It's a bipartisan problem." - Gloria Steinem (1970)

"I have today met with the leaders of both parties in the Congress of the United States and I have informed them that I shall immediately request the Congress to pass a resolution making it clear that our Government is united in its determination to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace in southeast Asia." - Lyndon Johnson (1964)

"North Vietnam cannot humiliate and defeat America — only Americans can do that." - Richard Nixon (1969)

"I'm not for women, frankly, in any job. I don't want any of them around. Thank God we don't have any in the Cabinet." - Nixon bonus quote

"My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." - Ronald Reagan (1984)

"And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."
"When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive."
"Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing."
"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories."
"After all, this is a guy that tried to kill my dad at one time."
-George W. Bush (2001-2002)

My attempt to imagine a crazier world than our own: West Wing Wiki

Image. President's Day Mattress Sale

Orion's Arm Universe Project

2010-02-14T14:40:00.000-08:00

When people learn about my interest in collaborative science fiction writing they frequently mention Orion's Arm. As far as I can tell, Orion's Arm is a fun project for its participants. Many years ago, the first time I looked at their website, I was put off by the choices that the founders of the project made.

Most importantly:

"Almost without exception, aliens were technologically inferior to the terragens, or, where equal (as with the Muuh), reclusive and in decline. Not one race of alien sophont, living or extinct, is known unambiguously to have visited Earth before the Terragen expansion into space." (source)

The kind of science fiction that I am interested in does not adhere to the arbitrary choices about alien life that are followed at the Orion's Arm Universe Project. I almost always write stories about extraterrestrials who visited Earth long ago.

For me, another relevant issue is content licensing. I rather like the idea of free culture. I do not claim to understand the licensing of Orion's Arm content, but I prefer to make collaborative fiction in an environment where the default licensing is copyleft.

I'm also put off by the approach to artificial intelligence that is used within the Orion's Arm Project. I've always had the feeling that the project is dominated by physical science-oriented folks who have less of an interest in biology than I do. I don't think that these machine intelligence and technological singularity (superintelligence) fanatics have a clue about how the first AIs with human-like minds will be made. As shown in the image at the top of this blog post, they can't even successfully deal with HTML files. After spending the past decade using software that was designed for collaborative content creation on the internet, I'm not sure I could go back to working in an environment with webpage names like 464d2a24c11ef.

During the past 50 years I've grown tired of the

"Computers are wonderful! AI will be here in 50 years!" religion (the main goddess is Emergia, who has the power to propel every absurd technological plot feature in "hard" science fiction.)

and I do not care to immerse myself in that religion for my remaining years. I believe that unrealistic beliefs about the nature of minds contaminate the field of artificial intelligence research, a sad result of physical scientists pretending that they can ignore the details of biological brains.

I certainly wish the Orion's Arm Project well and I will continue to drop by their website once in a while. I wish there were a couple thousand similar collaboratively constructed fictional universes on the internet, each exploring its own set of assumptions about the future.

Related viewingg: The technological singularity and science fiction.

Image. Screen shot of the Orion's Arm Project main page showing a glitch in their HTML code.

Exodemic

2010-02-14T10:53:00.000-08:00

Antony Gormley wrote, "Culture in the developed western world has always positioned itself in distinction to nature: now we have to discover our nature within nature," in an article called
Art's lost subject.

A segment of Western culture that springs from modern science has vigorously adopted the position that humanity is an integral part of nature. Garrett Hardin published The tragedy of the commons in 1968, which illustrated the dangers posed by humans and our capacity for deleterious impact on the biosphere. At about that time, people like Carl Sagan knew that green house gas levels were rising on Earth and the warnings about human-induced climate change began to be heard coming from scientists. The protagonist in Carl Sagan's novel Contact had one question she'd like to ask an extraterrestrial: how did you survive the dangers of your technological adolescence? Scientists like E. O. Wilson continue to make pleas for consilience between the "two cultures" and action to protect the biosphere from human activities. Even some politicians (example) have caught on to the importance of human-induced climate change.

How can artists help awaken humanity to our place in nature? In particular, how can science fiction be used as a means to inform readers about issues like climate change and inspire useful changes in human behavior that will help protect Earth's biosphere? I stress useful change because cultural works can impact human behavior in negative ways. Nuclear power is currently our largest non-green house gas producing energy source. Are important decisions made because of the best available information or because of emotional responses stimulated by fictions like The China Syndrome?

I've only written one story that includes a plot element related to climate change. In the science fiction story X-Seven, benevolent aliens help a few humans create a solution to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The story shows science being used as a tool for solving a serious problem that is confronting us. The particular "solution" in the story is a fantasy, but the theme of using our knowledge and know-how to solve problems is an important one. I'd never claim that technology can solve all of our problems, but we are foolish if we do not make use of all available tools to deal with our problems.

How many alternatives to our addiction to fossil fuels (such as better solar energy systems) might we already have if more young people were inspired to think creatively about science, engineering and technology? How many young people are turned-off from science by silly fictional "thrillers" that continue to perpetuate the tired idea that "science fiction is a pessimistic genre"? Like any tool, science fiction can be used to celebrate science and reason or it can be used to misinform and frighten people.

Until writers and film makers grow past The Modern Prometheus we are going to continue to struggle towards reasonable solutions to our problems. Industries with vested interests in the status quo are experts at fostering fear and doubt. The tobacco and oil industries have made billions in profits while inhibiting governments from making wise regulatory decisions. In the struggle to make wise decisions that impact human and planetary health, one fictional story like The China Syndrome can count for more than the informed views of the nuclear engineers who can make safe nuclear power plants. Artists, and anyone making cultural works, including movies, have a responsibility to work with knowledge and facts, not just emotions (profitable though it is to play on emotions).

Law Two. There is a radical idea that I plan to explore in my fiction. In answer to Ellie Arroway and her question about survival, I imagine that any life form that long survives as a tool-using species will have a set of rules to guide their behavior. I'm not sure that tool-using primates are suited to a world like Earth. Earth is one of the rare planetary gardens where life can appear and evolve. Maybe we need to think seriously about the idea that this is not "our planet". There are many worlds out there where we can freely indulge our penchant for tool creation and use without having an impact on other species. Have we reached the point where our place in nature is some place other than Earth?

Related reading: Sarah Palin calls global warming studies "snake oil science."

Image. Angel of the North Jupiter

Asimov the Collectivist

2010-02-13T13:34:00.000-08:00

In Of Robots, Empires and Pencils by Sally Morem, she wrote, "The Foundation series and the Robots stories, along with Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, will probably be remembered as the last great and most eloquent arguments put forth for the idea of collectivism in the literature of science fiction." Morem compares the invisible hand of the market in Leonard Read's essay I, Pencil to the invisible hand of Hari Seldon in Asimov's Foundation Trilogy.

I've never read Childhood's End, but I've long appreciated Clarke's ability to put humanity in perspective by playing the science fiction what if? game ("Perhaps the crispest definition is that science fiction is a literature of 'what if?'" - Christopher Evans). If Childhood's End is an argument for collectivism, then how does that argument go?

In Childhood's End, aliens arrive on Earth and they transform human children into a form that can merge into "a cosmic mind amalgamated from ancient galactic civilizations, freed from the limitations of ordinary matter". Morem has suggested that this is "the ultimate dream of socialism. The adults are wholly demoralized. They no longer have children. Most kill themselves. The rest die of old age as the children dance." Asimov wrote a famous story (The Last Question) in which all humans ended up as part of a group mind. I thought socialism was a theoretical economic system where an attempt would be made to share resources among all individuals. Little did I know that sharing ultimately leads to mass suicide and transcendence to a group mind.

Morem began her essay with the rather Homo sapiens-centric boast: "Human society is the most astonishing and perplexing of all the universe's life-forming, self-organizing processes...". A major part of Clarke's "what if?" explorations concerned his imagining of "self-organizing processes" that were far beyond "human society". Is there such a thing as "human society"? Asimov was interested in exploring the many forms that a human society might take in response to scientific advances and technological change. Such thinking "outside of the box" is often unsettling for conservatives who want to defend the "good old ways" that they are comfortable with.

The Foundation Trilogy was a "what if?" exploration of the idea that vast human populations might behave according to mathematically precise laws of "psychohistory". Many years after Asimov created the Foundation Trilogy, he extended his Foundation stories to include the idea that telepathic robots were guiding humanity towards the formation of a vast group mind, Galaxia. Morem feels that Asimov's fictional universe where humans spread through the galaxy and were "controlled by robotic minds" is fundamentally flawed, so flawed as to, "stretch believability to the breaking point and beyond".

Asimov imagined telepathic robots who "invented" the Zeroth Law of Robotics, which then compelled them to protect humanity. In order to protect humanity, the robots worked to engineer humanity into the group mind of Galaxia. In Foundation and Earth, it was suggested that by forming Galaxia, humanity could be protected from aliens.

Telepathic robots with positronic brains who used time travel to make sure that humans could colonize the galaxy, telepathic humans forming a group mind, faster-than-light spaceships, unseen aliens threatening humanity, the dead had of Hari Seldon pushing humanity to its fate by psychohistorical necessity...so, just what is there in all this to stretch believability? Morem seems to suggest that the problem with Asimov's fantasy futures is that he did not realistically appreciate the full complexity of a market economy. Morem is unhappy with "The Lawgiver imagined by Asimov" who has the power to shape human destiny. As we all know, a market economy is so complex that it, "cannot be forced, commanded or ruled from the center. It can only Be."

In making this argument, Morem shifted the center of discussion from the Foundation and telepathic robots to a short story called The Evitable Conflict, a story in which Asimov imagines supercomputers that could manage the economy of Earth better than people can. What is the argument? We should not use computers to help us manage the world economy? No. "The future state of entire dynamic systems are also impossible to know in advance." I suspect that Asimov would have granted this...in a science book. However, where was Asimov going in his fiction?

Arthur C. Clarke proclaimed the idea that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." What magical technologies did Asimov throw into the mix of his Foundation Saga? What if Asimov was imagining a future where time travel was possible? When Asimov extended his Foundation Trilogy, he suggested (in Foundation's Edge) the idea that positronic robots had used time travel to select a Reality in which humans, rather than extraterrestrials, took control of the galaxy.

In The Start of Eternity, a fan fiction sequel to Asimov's time travel novel, I follow along with Asimov and imagine that there are positronic robots who can look into the future of the Foundation and see what will happen. Those robots (including Daneel) helped Hari Seldon establish the Foundations. I like to think that psychohistory was a "cover story" that was used to hide the existence of time traveling robots. If so, was Asimov putting forward arguments for collectivism in his Foundation Saga?

The economics of the Foundation always puzzled me. Here was a future human civilization with microfusion and the ability to hurl spaceships across the galaxy. Asimov wrote about determining the genomes of people and transferring a robotic mind into the brain of a human. With all these wonders, Asimov never tried to depict a post-scarcity economy. Instead, the Galactic Empire remained fully capitalistic and just a heart beat away from bust and falling back on fossil fuels.

In The Start of Eternity, the alien Huaoshy run a billion year old intergalactic civilization that makes use of additional technologies such as nanotechnology. However, that civilization also seems to defy Clarke's idea of a future in which technologically advanced beings transcend their physical limitations. The idea of a pending technological singularity is now popular in science fiction, a point in the future where life as we know it will end because of accumulating technological advances. Is there a way to prevent a technological singularity and cause humans to be frozen in a culture that will always have an economy like the one we have now?

Morem wrote, "Human societies cannot be grasped as wholes". I believe that Asimov tried to suggest that positronic robots could grasp Galaxia as a whole, and that is why they worked for 20,000 years to form Galaxia. Unfortunately, Asimov was taken from us before he was able to continue his Foundation Saga towards a completed Galaxia.

What about the billion year old Huaoshy civilization? Did they learn to use genetic engineering and nanotechnology (and anything else they accumulated in a billion years) to move past market economics as we know it? Does the dead hand of Adam Smith "defeat the best intentions of would-be planners every time"? Is it inevitable that a billion years from now we will not have progressed past the type of economic system known to Morem?

Science fiction would seem to be a strange enterprise if we were allowed to play "what if?" with hyperjump spaceships, time travel, nanobots and telepathy, but because economics are "emergent" we cannot say "what if?" with respect to future economics. Do we need Capitalistic Anthropics, the theory that our universe was designed to make 20th century capitalism inevitable...for all time?

Image. Asimov and comrades.

Copyleft Books

2010-02-13T07:36:00.000-08:00

Fun name for a book store: Copyleft Books.

I miss the Pacific Northwest.

Related reading:
Project Gutenberg - free electronic books
The Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania.
Open-Access Text Archive - at The Internet Archive
Many Books - Matthew McClintock's free eBook website
Scribd social publishing - share your work

Image. iPad Touch Coverflow by factoryjoe

Fraking plot devices

2010-02-10T12:41:00.000-08:00

The 1970s were when I discovered science fiction and got hooked on authors such as Isaac Asimov and Jack Vance. However, I also read Tactics of Mistake, Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker and Dune, which were enough to satisfy my needs for military science fiction. Really, after the Vietnam War, I could not see the "cool" side of riding a sandworm into battle.

Because of my aversion for military science fiction there are vast swaths of science fiction television and film that I've never been subjected to. Sorry, but I can't get into wars involving Daleks, armies led by Sith lords, Klingons, Cardassians, Goa'uld-infested humans, reptilian Cylons, human-created Cylons...I could go on. There Will Be War, but I don't have the patience to read about your fantasy war.

The above is a long way of saying that I was never a fan of Battlestar Galactica, Battlestar Galactica, Battlestar Galactica or any other battlestar or deathstar. However, while writing The Start of Eternity I've been thinking about mind transfer and I decided I should try watching Caprica, the current television show in the fictional Battlestar Galactica universe. As Jacob Clifton succinctly introduced Caprica: "the central sci-fi premise (how do we get a human soul, or something like it, into a robot body?) hinges on a MacGuffin of sorts: the Meta-Cognitive Processor."

In The Start of Eternity, getting a human mind into a robot hinges on study of the structure and function of human brains. When the time comes to "go for it", the brain structure of Observer Gohrlay is scanned in microscopic detail and converted into functionally similar positronic brain circuits.

Full disclosure: I have not seen the Caprica pilot. I'm relying heavily on resources such as those by Jacob Clifton for my understanding of the Caprica plot devices.

Don't try this at home. In the episodes I've seen, people put on a holoband and magically pop into a "virtual reality" simulated world where they can act out their fantasies. According to the battlestar wiki, a 16 year old designed "a program that allowed her to create virtual duplicate of herself using a compilation of various personal records". Apparently there was some kind of biofeedback-mediated training of the "virtual duplicate" while it existed in the virtual reality and received input from its human creator. That artificially intelligent "avatar" was then transferred into the above mentioned Meta-Cognitive Processor and, ultimately, into a robotic body. Behold: the first Cylon has been created. And I hope that I did not leave out any of the essential hand waving.

As I understand the story arc, the first Cylon is headed off on adventures to other worlds, particularly Gemenon. In hopes of seeing some actual science fiction, I'd like to continue along for the ride, but I came away from the fragment of Caprica that I watched feeling a bit worried that I was watching fantasy rather than science fiction. I suffered a similar disquietude when I read Asimov's Robots and Empire in which he depicted the inventor of robotic telepathy as a young girl genius (Vasilia) and daughter of the greatest living roboticist. Miraculously, nobody else was ever able to duplicate the amazing advances in robotics that were achieved by Vasilia and her father.

For The Start of Eternity, I've invented a solution to the puzzle of Vasilia's magical ability to conjure telepathy into existence. I assume that telepathic robots were first created long before Vasilia was born. Thousands of years earlier. When it was time to make sure that the Earth/Spacer conflict was resolved in a way that would allow humans to colonize the galaxy, the young Vasilia was used as a convenient way for making R. Giskard (and the reader) believe that his telepathic ability had been the result of a freakish leap of human intuition.

I've long been puzzled by Asimov's tendency to create characters who have magical powers of intuition. Besides Vasilia, other similar characters from the trusty Asimov typewriter include Andrew Harlan, Marlene Fisher, and Golan Trevize. Marlene's intuition about Erythro was apparently due to her telepathic contact with the alien life form of that planet. I like to imagine that telepathic robots, working secretly like Daneel, implanted vital information in the minds of Andrew, Golan and even Hari Seldon. However, allowing telepathic robots to play the role of god-like manipulators of human destiny can wear a bit thin. Reader interest in the struggles of Asimov's human characters is likely to suffer if readers accept the idea that telepathic robots can always step in to save the day.

In The Start of Eternity I'm facing a similar concern. I want to introduce the very first telepathic robot near the beginning of the story, but not "give away" the fundamental secret of the story to the reader. Asimov was a good mystery writer and I hope that The Start of Eternity can follow in his footsteps and present an interesting mystery to the reader. All of Asimov's telepathic slight of hand will be revealed, but waiting behind one last curtain will be an even greater secret.

Image. Sandworm by leywad

Janus: the god of science fiction

2010-02-06T06:32:00.000-08:00

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, our distant proto-human ancestors are given the ability to use tools. They are shown wielding clubs, then next thing you know, those primitive tools transform into spaceships and humanity is off to the stars. Of course, the tools get used for other things along the way. Each science fiction author has a choice: we can write about science, technology and change from either an optimistic or a pessimistic perspective.

William Bainbridge and Murray Dalziel pointed to "hard SF" which they felt was, "usually optimistic about the value of scientific and technological progress". Isaac Asimov was identified as the prototypical hard science fiction author. The "pessimistic side" of science fiction was emphasized by Sheila Schwartz, "Science fiction is a pessimistic genre, devoid of belief in the improvability of man… The overwhelming tone is despair; the over-whelming emotion is fear."

With respect to the implications of tool use, science and technology I am tempted to let Asimov get the last word: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." The most wonderful tools in the world can be turned into horrors by those who are incompetent. The entire genre of science fiction balances on a knife blade question: do tool using apes have a future or are we some kind of evolutionary dead end, destined to wink out after a death spiral of self-inflicted horrors?

The The Start of Eternity is a sequel to Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity. The End of Eternity was optimistic in that it showed humanity escaping from a dangerous reliance on time travel technology. Asimov showed humanity walking away from an evolutionary dead end and moving in another technological direction that would offer an infinite future.

The traditional structure of optimistic science fiction has two parts: 1) protagonist gets into trouble 2) protagonist is smart enough to get out of trouble. In The End of Eternity, Asimov shows the protagonist (Andrew Harlan) trapped in a dystopian culture where a seemingly unbreakable time loop assures that humanity will never move outward from our Solar System and will inevitably become extinct.

Asimov is rather famous for seldom bringing aliens into his science fiction stories. Towards the end of his Foundation Saga, Asimov mentioned the idea that humanity must some day confront aliens. Unfortunately, Asimov was taken from us before he could share with us his ideas about how aliens would interact with Galaxia. The Start of Eternity is fan fiction which explores the role of aliens in Asimov's fictional universe.

Asimov was a master of writing stories in which everyone is well-intentioned. That might sound like a formula for boring stories, but it led him to imagine a logical reason for the destruction of Earth, which is a large advance past the many sci fi stories where destruction is mindless, illogical and truly boring. In keeping with Asimov's approach, The Start of Eternity involves aliens who are well-intentioned, but a strange twist of fate leads a small fragment of humanity to struggle mightily against the aliens.

The protagonist of The Start of Eternity seems trapped in a dire situation in a way that is similar to Andrew Harlan's nightmarish predicament in The End of Eternity. I've never been a great fan of horror, but I am wondering if I should try to stretch myself and better develop the nightmare theme that is used as the "hook" in The Start of Eternity. Andrew Harlan was driven to the point of self-destruction: when he delivered his "Samson smash" against Eternity, he fully expected to die.

Similarly, Observer Gohrlay is prepared to suffer the destruction of her brain in a mind downloading experiment. In a more conventional situation, Gohrlay might be tormented by her plight and driven to self-destruction. However, the truth is, Gohrlay is being guided towards self-sacrifice by an external alien force.

As an example to support her thesis that science fiction is pessimistic, Sheila Schwartz used Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald (see this review). I read Level 7 when I was in my teens and I was truly horrified by it. Perhaps most horrifying was the relentless logic of MAD which led to the destruction of humanity. The rather unemotional and robotic protagonist in Level 7 was somehow more frightening than an emotion-driven and shriek-filled horror story. Similarly, for me, having Gohrlay be relentlessly and logically marched towards death, with no screams of protest, is an even more horrifying fate than that of a traditional "helpless female".

How do readers react to fictional depictions such as:
1) humanity relentlessly marching to self-destruction (Level 7) or
2) Asimov's depiction of Andrew Harlan deciding to destroy himself or
3) Gohrlay selecting actual death over a living death.
I think stories like Level 7 helped move humanity away from the potential horrors of a nuclear war. Building on Asimov's general optimism, in the end, Andrew Harlan found a way to hold onto life.

I'm at the point of writing the scene where Gohrlay realizes (with horror) that she was driven towards selecting death by manipulative and un-seen aliens. I hope the reader comes away with the notion that we need always be on guard for forces that manipulate us and push us towards disaster. I stand with Asimov and hold the dream that we can use our minds and tools to free ourselves and make our lives better. The universe has always led us into traps. Science and technology and reason are our best tools for escaping from those traps.

Image. Two faces of science fiction: icon of xenophobia from District 9 contrasted with the Na'vi of Avatar, designed to appeal to humans.

O happy dagger!

2010-02-05T05:54:00.000-08:00

I was amazed and pleased when Isaac Asimov linked many of his novels into a coherent "future history". In Foundation's Edge Asimov mentioned the idea that "Eternals" had used their time travel technology to select a Reality in which humans would spread through the galaxy. The Start of Eternity is a fan fiction story that explores the relationship between Asimov's time travel novel (The End of Eternity) and his Foundation Saga.

The main character in The Start of Eternity is a genetically-modified Neanderthal named Gohrlay. Originally I wrote a 2,700 word "teaser" that was intended to be the only part of the novel showing Gohrlay. It might at first seem strange that the protagonist of a novel would only appear in one short scene, but mind transfer is an important element of the story and Gohrlay's mind continues on after her death.

In popular culture minds get transferred between bodies as easily as we might put on someone's hat, but The Start of Eternity attempts to be a bit more realistic about the technical challenge of mind transfer. Our human minds are produced by our biological brains. Our minds depend on the physical structure of our brains. In order to transfer Gohrlay's mind into a new body, a means must be found to reveal the details of her brain's structure. Sadly, the crude "brain scan" technology developed by Neanderthal scientists on the Moon destroys brain tissue while it scans the structure of neural networks in a brain.

As the story is told in The Start of Eternity, the brain scanning technology has existed on the Moon for hundreds of years, but nobody volunteers to have their brain scanned and destroyed during the process. It is not at all clear that it will be possible to instantiate the scanned mind in a new body. The plan is to make a copy of the scanned brain structure in the form of "positronic brain circuits", but the lunar roboticists have no way of knowing if the copied brain circuits will actually produce a functioning mind. All they know for sure is that after the brain scan, the person who has their brain scanned will be dead.

Gohrlay "volunteers" to have her brain scanned. Is this suicide? Is The Start of Eternity in danger of "glamorizing suicide"? As discussed here, I don't view Gohrlay's death as conventional suicide. She has been guided towards participation in the mind downloading experiment by the crafty Anagro, a robot of alien design. Every time Gohrlay has doubts about participating in the experiment, her thoughts are adjusted by nanorobotic devices that swarm through her brain and control her behavior.

Does Gohrlay have "good reasons" for participating in an experiment that will end her life? Gohrlay is a criminal who has had large parts of her memory disrupted by the nanites that swarm through her brain. She no longer has memories of her family and friends or the details of her crime. She remembers that she grew up with a desire to be an Observer and study Earth, but she is now forbidden from having any contact with the Observer corps.

Is it wrong to depict suicide in fiction? For me, one of the most memorable depictions of suicide in science fiction is in Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald (see this review). The story is told from the perspective of Push-Button Officer X-127, who robotically pushed the button that kills not only himself but all of humanity. Do such fictional accounts of suicide encourage or discourage suicidal behavior?

I have not seen Avatar, but as discussed here, it seems to stand in the long line of movies where the "hero" is ready and willing to die for some "good reason". Depending on the outcome of the battle, which culture you come from, the tone of the press coverage and who writes the history book, the "warrior hero" might either be viewed as a suicidal maniac or the heroic father of his country.

Does The Start of Eternity "glamorize" suicide by showing Gohrlay's mind living on in robotic form as the mother of tribe of positronic robots? Is someone reading The Start of Eternity in danger of thinking, "I'm going to kill myself because Gohrlay did"? I don't think so. I think the message in The Start of Eternity is that Gohrlay has been manipulated by Anagro. The reader sees that a crafty alien is taking advantage of the fact that humans do make life and death decisions. Anagro creates a "tragic scene" for Gohrlay in which those around her respect her decision to participate in the mind downloading experiment. Everyone has been pushed towards accepting Gohrlay's death by Anagro's manipulations.

A theme that arose in Asimov's fiction is intuition. Several of Asimov's characters were depicted as simply knowing things, without knowing how it was possible that they knew. The culture that Gohrlay finds herself in was created by aliens and is controlled by aliens. Gohrlay has latent "mentalic" abilities that help her sense that it would be better to die and be "reincarnated" as a robot than continue living as a puppet of the aliens.

There is a similar situation in Asimov's story "The Mule", first published in 1945. Ebling Mis is under the mental control of a man who has "mentalic" powers and who is driving Mis to his death in an effort to learn the secret location of the Second Foundation. Was it irresponsible to depict Mis as uninterested in life and willing to die, just as long as he could learn the secret? The only "onlooker" who is not under the mentalic control of the Mule was Bayta Darell. Was Asimov irresponsible for showing that Bayta kills Mis in order to keep him from revealing the great secret?

I think it is no more likely that a reader will commit suicide after reading about Gohrlay than a reader is likely to commit murder after reading about Bayta Darell.

Image. Romeo and Juliet. Source.

Isaac Asimov's Nemesis

2010-01-27T10:58:00.000-08:00

Among science fiction fans, Isaac Asimov is probably most famous for his stories about artificial intelligence (particularly his robot stories) and for his Foundation Saga. Asimov managed to knit together his robot stories with the Foundation in a most satisfying way.

Asimov included a "note to readers" in his novel Nemesis. He wrote that he might someday write another novel that would tie Nemesis to the Foundation/Robots/Empire fictional universe. Sadly, Asimov was taken from us before he had a chance to do more than tantalize us with a hint.

Can we find a satisfying way to fit together the pieces of Asimov's novels and find a way to integrate Nemesis with the rest of Asimov's fictional universe? In Forward the Foundation, Asimov mentioned an ancient mythical story about a woman who could communicate telepathically with a planet near a star named Nemesis. This mention of "Nemesis" came in the context of Hari Seldon's realization that his granddaughter Wanda had telepathic ability. If Asimov had found a way to continue the Foundation Saga beyond the events depicted in Foundation and Earth, might he have had more to say about Nemesis and how it fits into the entire Asimov Fictional Universe?

One of the topics that winds through Asimov's science fiction is "mentalics", Asimov's term for telepathic powers. Asimov first wrote telepathy into his Foundation Saga in the person of the Mule, who was depicted as a mutant. Asimov later wrote extensively about how Seldon discovered the existence of humans with telepathic abilities and how that discovery allowed the Foundation to be established. Working secretly behind Seldon was Daneel, the telepathic robot.

Within the Foundation Saga there was the world Gaia, an entire planet that existed as a "group mind" with telepathic powers distributed among its residents. I'm imagining that "Nemesis" is the name of Gaia's star. How could that be?

In The Start of Eternity, Asimov's Foundation Saga is linked to Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity. I imagine that before the Foundation Reality, there was an earlier Reality that we could call the Nahan Reality. R. Nahan is the telepathic robot who first builds a time travel device. I imagine that it was Nahan who first started performing telepathy experiments on Gaia.

Nahan used time travel to go back in time and make a Reality Change. In a subsequent Reality, Daneel was the one to go to Gaia and begin his work that would eventually lead to Galaxia. I refer to that Reality, the one depicted in Asimov's Foundation Saga, as the Foundation Reality.

One of the "twists" in The Start of Eternity is that Asimov appears as a character. In Foundation and Earth, Asimov introduced the idea that positronic robots like Daneel can transfer their minds into the biological brains of humans. Asimov has a "close encounter" with a time traveling positronic robot who transfers her memories into Asimov's brain. Asimov goes on to create his Foundation Saga by drawing on those implanted memories from the future. One of the implanted memories is the "myth of Nemesis", but the myth does not include the location of Nemesis or the fact that Gaia is the name of the "conscious world" near Nemesis. Asimov goes on to write his own story about Nemesis and Erythro.

Image. "Nemesis Roman goddess of retribution Marble 150 CE" by mharrsch.

Realism in Science Fiction

2010-01-23T06:10:00.000-08:00

Annalee Newitz recently asked "Why Is Hard Science Fiction So Unrealistic?". Newitz is interested in the tradition of literary realism and she says: "realism in fiction and film has generally been an effort to represent the experiences of ordinary people". Is there a shortage of "ordinary people" in hard science fiction stories?

The definition of "hard science fiction" is problematical because it is at risk of changing in response to evolving conceptualizations of science. We live in the age of science, an age characterized by cultural change that is due to science and technology. As recently as 30 years ago science fiction was a much simpler part of human culture than it is today. In 1978, William Bainbridge and Murray Dalziel were able to comfortably divide science fiction into three parts: hard science fiction, fantasy, and new-wave. (see: "The Shape of Science Fiction as Perceived by the Fans") Today, there is a much broader collection of well-recognized sub-genres in science fiction.

In the data set analyzed by Bainbridge and Dalziel, Isaac Asimov was ranked as the most distinctive hard science fiction author. In 1978, Asimov was one of the iconic figures of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Larry Niven is a good example of the next generation of hard science fiction authors. Science fiction is "hard science fiction" to the extent that it concerns itself with scientific advance and technological change and does so in a way that respects the nature of the universe and how science allows us to understand the universe. In my experience, authors with a personal interest in science and an understanding of how science works are the most likely to write interesting hard science fiction.

There are two common misconceptions about hard science fiction. Bainbridge and Dalziel explicitly stated one of these misconceptions. They wrote that hard science fiction: "refers to stories built around certain facts or speculations concerning the 'exact' or 'hard' sciences". It is true that the exact sciences dominate research expenditures, press coverage and popular concepts of what constitutes science. It is true that icons of hard science fiction such as Asimov and Niven were trained in mathematics and "hard science". Those truths are a consequence of the fact that the historical development of science is shaped by working scientists who tend to "divide and conquer". Scientific problems are sorted according to ease of progress and many physical science problems are the easiest and so have been tackled first. Simple problems like how to describe the nature of electromagnetism were studied first. More complex and challenging biological and social science topics are only now starting to receive adequate attention from scientists. Thus, identifying hard science fiction is not a matter of distinguishing between fiction that involves "hard science" or "soft science". Hard science fiction can certainly involve "soft science"; what is important is only that science and technology elements be present as a core aspect of the fiction.

Annalee Newitz raised (in her article) a second major misconception about hard science fiction. In discussing hard science fiction she equates hard science fiction with scientifically-accurate storytelling. This is simply wrong. There are sub-genres of science fiction within which scientific realism is prized highly. For example, the restricted comfort zone of mundane science fiction never pushes us beyond the current facts of science. However, both Asimov and Niven often extrapolated far beyond the "facts" as currently known to science. Two examples are Niven's stasis field and Asimov's Eternity. These two imagined technologies are "space/time bubbles" within which the known laws of physics explicitly do not apply. Science can tell us nothing about Niven's stasis field or Asimov's time travel device, yet they are both plot devices that exist comfortably within the genre of hard science fiction. They are depicted as the products of future science and technology and they are incorporated in their respective stories in a scientific (if entirely speculative) way.

Realism in science fiction is not to be confused with scientific realism.

Having raised the red herring of "scientifically-accurate storytelling", Annalee Newitz turns to another issue that seems to be her main concern: the types of characters and plots that we find in hard science fiction. Newitz constructs a dichotomy between science fiction with

1) "rebel heroes and extraordinary leaders" and "unrealistic megabeings with superpowers" and "alternate realities...focusing on technologies"

and fiction with

2) "ordinary people" and the "regular guy" and "building up social worlds" by showing "everyday life".

Newitz is asking: can't there be a better mix of realism and hard science fiction? We can ask, why does hard science fiction tend to be divorced from realism? These questions only make sense if you adopt a conventional definition of literary realism, and for the moment we can do so.

I think the fundamental source of the perceived split between realism and hard science fiction is that there are two fundamental directions from which science is approached in literature, a split that has variously been characterized as involving The Two Cultures or Culture Wars or postmodernity. This split involves a "glass half empty?" argument about the nature of science and its impact. Hard science fiction was born as a genre that was often "optimistic about the value of scientific and technological progress" and it remains so optimistic that its great works often depict dramatic transformations of human culture and human existence. In contrast, much of what counts as literary realism in science fiction is pessimistic and depicts imagined worlds where science and technology are powerless to change human existence for the better.

Hard science fiction stories traditionally extrapolate a scientific idea or technological power in such a way that we are transported to an imagined culture where the ordinary has been transformed into the extraordinary by science or technology. That is often the whole point of the story: science changes everything. Newitz is suffering from her misconceptions if she imagines that it makes sense to hope that hard science fiction will become more realistic in the literary sense. It would be paradoxical and self-defeating for a hard science fiction author to imagine a wonderful bit of technology and then write a story in which that technology changes nothing and people simply remain as the "ordinary people" of our everyday experience.

I sympathize with Newitz when she complains about science fiction television programs that strive to deliver realism. Most of these television shows are produced by people who think that they can cash in on the popularity of science fiction by putting a spaceship or a cloned human or some other "wiz-bang" plot device into a story and have it constitute interesting science fiction. Such television shows tend to be mind-numbingly "realistic" by endlessly showing people who are unable to change themselves for the better no matter what wonderful technologies are available to them. These programs depict conventional literary realism but the methods and workings of science are almost never realistically depicted.

Transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary is often a central part of hard science fiction. The typical protagonist of hard science fiction is an ordinary guy, but that guy often does something great or is transformed into something great by the application of science and technology. That is why hard science fiction is often so unrealistic...if you define "realism" as a depiction of current everyday existence. Hard science fiction is often about showing the ways by which science can lift us out of our current reality. Newitz specifically mentioned Asimov and she claimed that he was a failure at realistically depicting everyday life. Some of his science fiction was set in the 20th century and I'd challenge Newitz to explain how those stories (particularly many of his robot stories) failed to be realistic.

Hard science fiction authors such as Asimov are probably best known for taking readers into strange new lands where the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary and that probably takes some people out of their comfort zones, particularly television executives. If hard science fiction is done well, then even a world in which the ordinary has become extraordinary can be realistic about the nitty-gritty of everyday existence. Literary realism may have originated among non-science fiction writers and it may have originally been restricted to realistic depictions of current-day existence. There is nothing preventing science fiction authors from bringing realism to imagined cultures where everyday life is extraordinary if viewed from our perspective. Some types of hard science fiction can certainly seem unrealistic if you restrict your concept of realism to the perspective of one culture at one point in time. Science fiction is very much concerned with challenging those kinds of conceptual limitations. I'm willing to redefine and broaden the meaning of "realism" in the context of science fiction.

It is fun to follow hard science fiction authors like Asimov to distant imagined cultures. While doing so, we can be transported to places where everyday events are far from ordinary (according to our standards) and ordinary people (according to the standards of the imagined culture) get to do extraordinary things (measured by our standards). In The Start of Eternity, Gohrlay is an ordinary person in her culture. She just happens to be a Neanderthal who lives on the Moon. It is still possible to write about her life with realism. Cellular Civilization is set more within our everyday reality, but it is still possible for even the most ordinary characters like Charlie Parker to be transformed into something extraordinary by technology. In such stories I do not feel any conflict between hard science fiction and realism. Of course, I don't feel the need to adopt a restrictive view of realism.

Nor do I expect most people (including Newitz) to understand and appreciate hard science fiction. The narrowness of the Golden Age of Science Fiction provoked the "new wave" struggles to broaden the scope of science fiction. That led to the current popularity and diversity of science fiction and a state of affairs where we have hoards of "experts" on science fiction who do not understand science. Most of what passes for science fiction in popular culture is parasitic on the genre and endlessly tells us the same boring story: people living in the age of science who do not understand science are like deer standing transfixed by the head lights of an on-rushing car. I suspect that hard science fiction is a sub-genre that can only be understood and appreciated by people who are part of the scientific sub-culture. People familiar with science are comfortable with imagining alternate realities and can develop a flexible conceptualization of "realism". Once you make those moves, you are not left in the past with a narrow view of literary realism and you will become aware of the large amounts of realism that does exist within hard science fiction.

Image. Cover image for Cellular Civilization. Image credits.

The Free Brigade

2010-01-20T16:20:00.000-08:00

"At its core, belief in capitalism is belief in mankind." -Johan Norberg

"...capitalism is not merely the 'practical,' but the only moral system in history." -Ayn Rand

One of the great themes of speculative writing is post-scarcity. Capitalism is inherently an economic system for conditions of scarcity. Many science fiction writers have explored the idea that technology should allow us to create a future in which the necessities of life are abundant and money will become a thing of the past (Star Trek example).

In New York Times Calls Free Brigade’s Bluff by Jonathan Fields, he wrote, "Despite the ballyhoo of the Free Brigade...there is no free." Apparently "the free brigade" refers to people who have suggested that (all?) information distributed on the internet should (could?) be given away for free.

I suspect that for Fields "there is no free" means that if you want to read newspaper articles that are written by professional journalists then someone has to pay those professionals. Clearly there is some free: the internet now has large amounts of free content and ad-supported content. These days, people have choices. Do I want free internet content or do I want to pay a professional for professional content?

Jonathan Fields seems concerned that once people get a taste of free content on the internet then they expect everything to be free and they will stop paying for professionally-produced content. Speaking of free content, here is some from Wikipedia:

"Competition is important in capitalist economies because it leads to innovation and more reasonable prices as firms that charge lower prices or improve the quality of their production can take buyers away from its competitors."

The publishing industry is going through a kind of shakeout in which everyone is adapting to internet technology. In the era of print publishing, content and content distribution was expensive. In the internet era the economic landscape for "intellectual content" has shifted. Personally, I wish both the "free brigade" and the "non-free brigade" well. I suspect that there continues to be huge inefficiencies in the print publishing industry. I'd like to see an economist step forward and provide an honest estimate of the percentage of revenues in the print publishing industry that goes to content producers.

If "free market" capitalism cannot provide us with the journalists we need then why not switch over to a new model? I'd gladly take on-demand internet news from an expanded National Public Radio over "free market content producers" like The New York Times and Judith Miller.

I have similar sentiments about the print publishing industry and science fiction. Rather than being subjected to the decisions of a few companies about what constitutes "print worthy content" I hope we can devise new systems that allow a much wider selection of fiction to become available on the internet. If "free market" capitalism cannot find a way to channel payment to authors when science fiction becomes widely available on the internet then I'd be willing to try new strategies such as a government-funded system that would financially support creators of cultural works.

We just went through a century during which trillions in national treasure were funneled through taxation towards transportation infrastructure. We could do the same to support professional writers and the creation of internet content, even if that content is available for free via the internet. Let's think in new directions rather than lament the passing of obsolete modes of production and distribution.

Image. Source, World Bank Photo Collection.

Searching

2010-01-14T19:18:00.000-08:00

In the early 1970s I started reading books such as Chariots of the Gods? and The Gods Themselves and my thinking was opened up to the possibility that our little world might not be as alone as it seems to be.

I think I was introduced to the Drake Equation by Carl Sagan and I still feel that I should trust his intuitions about extraterrestrial intelligence. There are probably other technologically advanced species in our galaxy, but they might not be very interested in us. Of course, it is more fun to imagine that those "others" do drop by and visit Earth once in a while...or maybe they are always here.

In 2009 I started playing around with twitter and discovered Mac Tonnies and his blog. If you are interested in the idea that there are "others" out there on other worlds then you will enjoy reading UFOs as Vanguards of a Post-Biological Intelligence
by Mac Tonnies.

Back in October of 2009 I wrote a little story called Moon Hammer which explores my favorite idea in speculative fiction: that Earth might have been visited by extraterrestrial intelligences long ago. I felt the need for a break from writing and the internets and took a two week reading vacation in order to get ready to work seriously on The Start of Eternity. During that time when I was away from the eWorld, Mac Tonnies died and the twittersphere was a much less interesting place when I got back to it and Mac was gone. In stories like Moon Hammer and Cellular Civilization I like to imagine that a few special people "win a ticket" off of this rock and get to meet some "ancient watchers". It would be great if Mac were out there learning all the secrets that he had searched for.

I find that I cannot think about the Exodemic Fictional Universe without hearing whispers from people like Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Mac Tonnies. I have a request for 2010: no more deaths. Thank you for your assistance.

Image. Canyons of the Ancients by rscottjones

Rumblings of Revolution

2010-01-10T07:06:00.000-08:00

When R. Daneel Olivaw decided to bring the science of Psychohistory to the attention of humans, there were suddenly people walking around on the planets of the Galactic Empire who had telepathic ability. The first of these people with "mantalic" ability who came to the attention of Hari Seldon was Wanda Seldon, the daughter of Hari's adopted son.

As soon as Seldon realizes that Wanda has the ability to read minds, he decides that he must study "the complete genome" for both Wanda and her parents. Seldon realizes that Wanda's father, Raych, also has "mentalic" ability, specifically, the ability to control how people feel about him. Asimov hints that there are stories dating back many thousands of years about other humans who had "mentalic" abilities.

If "mentalic powers" are latent in the human genome, then why is that ability never studied until Hari Seldon comes along? I suspect that Daneel, himself a robot with telepathic abilities, began studying and experimenting with human mentalics about 20,000 years before the Foundation Era. Daneel later tells Trevize that he has long been secretly developing human mentalics in the context of Gaia, a world that Daneel has slowly shaped into a telepathically-linked group mind.

Part of the special "mentalic" ability of the Gaians is that they have a limited ability to "transduce power" from energy sources, channel it through their brains and then focus it for specific "mentalic" tasks. Asimov described the Solarians, humans who used genetic engineering to make themselves into hermaphrodites and they gave themselves the needed genes for enlarged "transducer lobes". Thus, Asimov quite clearly linked "mentalics" to genetic engineering and genetically programmed brain structure.

Asimov also made it clear that a person with innate mentalic ability could, in the right environment and with practice, greatly enhance and develop their telepathic abilities. The innate and learned components of "mentalics" seem similar to our capacity to use human language. The parts of the human brain that we use for language did not suddenly appear during human evolution. It is tempting to imagine that the roots of human "mentalic powers" might also be deep in our evolutionary past. That idea is explored in The Start of Eternity where the origin of telepathic ability in positronic robots like Daneel is traced back to the human brain.

Image. The Prime Radiant.

Intuition

2010-01-08T19:42:00.000-08:00

When Isaac Asimov finally got around to extending his Foundation Trilogy he introduced Golan Trevize, a Foundationer who must search for the long lost home planet of humanity: Earth. According to Gregory Tidwell, the Trevize character is "a stand-in for Asimov". Here is how the story goes: Trevize was selected to go to Earth by R. Daneel Olivaw because merging humanity into a vast group mind (Galaxia) was too important of a decision for a robot to make. As Tidwell notes, Trevize is depicted as having "the unique ability to achieve a state of perfect surety about things".

Where was Asimov going with this idea of Trevize having "perfect" intuition? Tidwell makes the point that Asimov, "hinted at some genetic or evolutionary reason for the gift, but neglected to clearly share it with the readers". However, in Foundation and Earth it is revealed that Daneel is a master genetic engineer, in fact, having learned how to imprint the Laws of Robotics into human brains.

Reading between the lines, I suspect that Daneel had genetically modified the human species long before the rise of the Foundation. Specifically, humans must have been modified to prevent them from exercising a normal capacity for creativity and invention. The Mule showed that he could modify minds and free them to attain their latent creative potential. When the Foundation was allowed to do so, new inventions like "gravitic drive" were suddenly invented after thousands of years of technological stasis in the galaxy. It is easy to suppose that Trevize was genetically engineered to be free of constraints that Daneel had imposed on other humans. Daneel's cover story was that he wanted Trevize to make a decision that Daneel was unable to make, a decision that would determine the ultimate fate of humanity.

I don't think it makes sense to look for a deeper account of the "perfect intuition" attributed to Trevize. In Foundation and Earth, the whole idea that Trevize must decide in favor of Galaxia is revealed to be a "cover story" for a deeper concern of Daneel. There is never really any doubt that Galaxia is the future of humanity. Daneel's true reason for bringing Trevize to Earth (actually, the Moon) is that Daneel needs a biological brain, and it was Trevize and his "merry band" of interstellar travelers (Janov Pelorat and Blissenobiarella) that was able to obtain the needed brain for Daneel. While searching for Earth, Trevize might imagine that he has "intuition", but he is not aware of Daneel telepathically guiding humanity according to the dictates of the laws of robotics.

It is a great source of frustration that Asimov was taken from us before he had a chance to continue the Foundation saga past Foundation and Earth. The Start of Eternity is a collaborative fan fiction exercise in exploring how to continue Asimov's story.
Image: source.

Religion and Science Fiction

2010-01-06T13:54:00.000-08:00

In his novel Contact, Carl Sagan explored the idea that religion and science are two ways by which humans try to understand the universe. Sagan's protagonist, Eleanor Arroway, is a scientist, but she finds herself in an awkward position. She has a strange experience through which she makes contact with aliens, but she returns to Earth with no objective evidence to support her claim that she actually visited with aliens who live "out there", somewhere near the center of the galaxy. She wants to share her "revelation" with others, but can she really expect them to accept her word on faith alone?

The story in Contact continues and gets even stranger when Dr. Arroway, acting on clues provided by the aliens, finds scientific proof that the universe was designed by an intelligent creator. The story strongly suggests that it is human destiny to travel into interstellar space, attain god-like engineering powers and possibly create new universes. Sagan's novel provides a great illustration of two kinds of belief: 1) belief built on faith and 2) belief that is built on objective evidence.

Sagan recently appeared on a list of science fiction authors gathered together under the title, "Beware of Science Fiction". David Cloud warns us: "Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution". Mr. Cloud labels Sagan as "one of the high priests of atheistic evolution" and warns, "evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction". And, in case there is any doubt, we are told that: "Sci-fi arose ... as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator." That is, the "God of the Bible".

Second on that list of science fiction authors is Isaac Asimov. One of the famous stories by Asimov is The Last Question, in which the ultimate creation of humanity is a vast artificial Mind that has evolved from its human beginnings and then exists into the far future until a time when the last stars are growing cold. Finally, that Mind simply says, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!", and a new universe comes into being.

Is it in some way wrong or dangerous or blasphemous for science fiction authors to say that they are aware of no objective evidence for the "God of the Bible" and turn to writing stories about an imagined future in which man might evolve to have god-like powers? Is there a problem if some creation myth composed by Sagan or Asimov or some other science fiction writer seems to be more likely than the creation stories found in the Bible? Must the faithful be warned not to read science fiction lest they be led astray?

The science fiction novel "The Start of Eternity" is a collaboratively written story (still under construction) that involves some explicitly religious plot elements. In particular, the story involves Neanderthals and other extinct varieties of humans and explores the idea that there are many forms of religious thought other than just those favored by Christian Fundamentalists.

The Start of Eternity is a sequel to Asimov's time travel novel, "The End of Eternity", but it is set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe where aliens have been keeping watch over Earth for millions of years and guiding the evolution of humans from our primate ancestors. Is it blasphemous for a science fiction writer to speculatively write about the religious lives of humans who lived tens of thousands of years ago, including our distant evolutionary ancestors? If we "did not evolve from any lower form of life" then I guess The Start of Eternity must be blasphemy from the point of view of Christian Fundamentalists. Please add me to your list, Mr. Cloud.

Related reading: THE BIBLE AS SCIENCE FICTION, Pete Soderman: "I'm not godless, the universe is godless - I'm merely aware of it!", Steven Gould: "Let’s Agree to Disagree", Russell Blackford: "Godless science fiction"

Related video: Let there be light.....

Image: Euler's identity scarification by Cory Doctorow.

Asimov's struggle with aliens

2010-01-02T07:10:00.000-08:00

We are still in the 70th year of the Asimov Era, as defined by the time period since Isaac Asimov fiction has been in print. This year is also 90 AA, 90 years After Asimov's birth. Asimov was taken from us too early. I'm particularly distressed that his novel Foundation and Earth was left to us as the chronological end of the Foundation Series.

In Foundation and Earth, Asimov hinted that after humanity's rise to galactic dominance, there remained a looming confrontation with aliens who could arrive at any time from the depths of intergalactic space. Given another 10 or 20 years of life, how might Asimov have continued the Foundation Saga past Foundation and Earth?

Various science fiction authors and scientists have expressed quite different expectations with respect to space aliens. Two important "dimensions of expectation" are 1) the issue of just how common human-like species are in the universe, and 2) the question of how another sapient species would interact with us following first contact.

Asimov indicated that his decision to have a human-only galaxy in the Foundation Fictional Universe was largely determined by the editorial bias of John W. Campbell. It should be remembered that the Foundation Fictional Universe was also originally a "robot-free zone", but just before his death, Asimov wrote R. Daneel Olivaw into the Foundation Saga and depicted Daneel as the mastermind behind Hari Seldon and the development of Psychohistory.

Personally, my guess is that there are probably other sapient species on other planets in our galaxy. I think that both Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke provided us with more realistic depictions of space aliens than did Asimov. However, I think it is possible to imagine that Asimov could have written some alien species from our galaxy into a sequel for Foundation and Earth. That idea is explored in The Start of Eternity.

If Asimov had managed to write some aliens into the Foundation Series, would they have been friends or foes of humanity? I like to think that Carl Sagan was right and that we should expect to make contact with friendly aliens, or, at worst, indifferent aliens. Other scientists, for example, Stephen Hawking are more paranoid. In comments about reports of seemingly benign UFOs visiting Earth, Hawking said, "I think any visits by aliens would be much more obvious and probably also much more unpleasant." In the last few pages of Foundation and Earth, Asimov seemed to be setting the stage for a suspenseful conflict between Galaxia and aliens. I feel a great sense of loss because of the fact that Asimov did not have time to provide us with his vision of that "showdown". The Start of Eternity is a fan fiction tribute to Asimov where we can explore possible ways to completed the Foundation Saga.

Image. Click here to see the image credits.

Plotcharacter

2010-01-01T14:04:00.000-08:00

"Way is obscured when men understand only one of a pair of opposites, or concentrate on only a partial aspect of being. Then clear expression also becomes muddied by mere wordplay, affirming this one aspect and denying the rest." -Zhuangzi

The "duckrabbit" was used by Wittgenstein as an example of our ability to see something in more than one way. People can look at the duckrabbit and see it as being either a rabbit or a duck. Another common example of this is the Necker cube, which humans can mentally interpret as a box, and do so in two different ways. One of the important human cognitive abilities is being able to escape from mental ruts. We only become liberated and free when we can see the world in more than one way.

In "Rereading Clarke" by Robert Silverberg, the point is made that Arthur Clarke could tell a story that was "compelling to us despite all its literary shortcomings". Silverberg said that Clarke's work, "always struck me, despite their passages of great conceptual inventiveness, as dull, slow, and passionless."

Apparently there are two aspects of science fiction stories: 1) on one hand, there is what many readers of science fiction are looking for and 2) on the other hand, there is what constitutes "good literature", according to literary pundits. The question becomes, can a science fiction story that gets labeled as a literary train wreck be improved by applying to it, "the tricks of the storytelling trade, the array of technical devices that professional writers use to draw readers into a story and hold them there"? Or, possibly, are some science fiction fans actually turned off by literary finesse?

It seems that science fiction stories can be developed in several different ways that appeal to different audiences. Some people want action, some want "conceptual inventiveness" and some people want literary finesse. Of course, some people expect to find more than one of these in a story.

In "Character development versus plot development in fiction writing", Del Antonio states that he is disappointed if a story fails to develop either "the objective story (plot) [or] the subjective story (characters)", but I'm not sure that all science fiction fans are so picky.

I've seen critics of Isaac Asimov complain about his poor development of characters. "He's happy to be the acknowledged master of the talky story of cardboard characters, clever plotting, hard science and contention of ideas." Millions of Asimov fans do not seem to care if Asimov had stories full of cardboard characters.

Jack Vance is in some ways the mirror image of Asimov. Sometimes Vance seems to luxuriate in the process of creating quirky characters, possibly to the point of creating distractions. One of these seemingly extraneous characters is Mr. Ailett Mayneth of Starport, on the planet New Concept (in The Book of Dreams). Mayneth is only a minor character, but the Protagonist of the story (Kith Gersen) even makes an interstellar journey to New Concept just to talk to Mayneth. Although Gersen and Mayneth do get to have lunch together, in the hands of most authors, the small amount of information that Gersen gets from Mayneth would not come by way of a ten page chapter and needless strain on the Jarnell. However, I doubt if any Vance fan would complain. Vance's ability to have fun with his imagination and the creation of picturesque little worlds and quirky characters never seems to become a distraction. However, such an indulgence (and worse, strings of them) just would not suit an Asimov story. I find it easy to appreciate both Vance and Asimov for their very different styles.

However, I think I have to agree that I am most satisfied when an author can "do it all", allowing us to take pleasure in viewing a story in multiple ways, for example, by having both an interesting plot and interesting characters.

Sometimes I have the feeling that an author has fallen in love with one of their characters. In science fiction, I'm most impressed when that can happen under unusual circumstances, such as when a character is not human. I've been thinking a lot about how to make non-human characters interesting and appealing to readers. In The Start of Eternity, most of the characters are either aliens or robots. Asimov did a great job with several of his robot characters (particularly R. Daneel Olivaw), making them interesting in a non-human way. A character such as Spock, a half human, does not really strike me as being "alien enough" to be a real challenge in this department. The Q character is somewhat more interesting as a god-like being who we can relate to, but what interests me most is an alien that we can appreciate for its non-human traits.

Gordon Hamilton wrote, "When the basis of the plot has been both established and drafted, the writer can turn their attention to character development." I think this "plot first, characters second" approach comes naturally to science fiction fans. It is fun to look on the internet and see fan fiction extensions of popular science fiction novels that were published by the Masters. Many of the fan fiction works have a very streamlined development of the plot, sometimes little more than a sketch of the story idea. This is a great way for fans to explore ideas, particularly when the original author left a story line dangling in a way that frustrates the fans. Here in the internet age, it would be fun if professional writers would use their websites to extend invitations for their fans to suggest new plot ideas. If the author liked an idea from a fan then the suggested plot could be "fleshed out" by the "Master".

Alternatively, there can be collaborations where one person might imagine a plot idea while others could develop the characters. In my experience, participating in that kind of online collaboration is a great way to learn about writing. Historically, writing has been largely a personal endeavor. It will be interesting to see to what extent online collaboration allows a greater level of cooperation between fiction writers. Novelas, the fiction wikia, is a website for exploring collaborative fiction writing, a place where we can learn together to appreciate and develop plotcharacter.

“In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.” Shunryu Suzuki

Wearable Technology in Fiction

2009-12-31T06:18:00.000-08:00

Maybe the decade from 2000 to 2009 could be called the Dick Tracy decade. Mobile phone technology finally caught up with the Dick Tracy science fiction wrist phone of the early 1940s.

I suspect that when our grand children look back, they will view these times as a series of Digital Decades that will have come to comprise a Computing Century. I think computer miniaturization and mobility are the number one digital development for the past decade, but Web 2.0 technologies like wikis, blogs, Facebook and Twitter come in a close second.

Another piece of wearable technology from the golden age of science fiction is Isaac Asimov's "temporal field generator", which is a plot device used in Asimov's time travel story, The End of Eternity.

For Asimov's imagined time travel technology, most paradoxes are avoided by supposing that a new Reality is created if you go back in time and change the course of events. As long as you wear your "physiotime field generator" you will not be erased from existence by killing your own grandparent.

Noÿs asks: "And what if they make the Change while you’re there?”

Andrew replies: “It won’t catch me...my wrist generator keeps me in physiotime so that a Change can’t affect me, you see.”

We still have a long way to go in order to have a real "physiotime field generator", but wearable technology already includes some devices for monitoring and controlling physiological processes. Some people wear heart rate and blood pressure monitors.

In The Start of Eternity, during the early days of time travel there are no personal physiotime field generators. R. Nahan travels back in time to save Gohrlay, but he is "caught" in the Reality Change and erased from existence. Asimov imagined time travel technology coming into existence several centuries in our future, but he also played around with the idea of taking knowledge of time travel into the past in order to speed the development of time travel technology. Why did Nahan never get help from his future self? I blame the Huaoshy.

If time travel is possible, what would keep the past from being over-run by meddling time travelers? Asimov imagined a future time in which humans decided that time travel was a BIG MISTAKE, so they eliminated the technology. But if a technology is discovered once, can you really prevent it from being discovered a second time? A "sure fire" way to make time travel impossible is explored in The Start of Eternity.

Images. 1) The Dick Tracy "wrist radio". 2) A modern wrist phone. 3) Wearable heart rate and blood pressure monitor. 4) Time travel kettle (for image credits click here).

August Sennor on Time

2009-12-26T11:46:00.000-08:00

...nothing in a Reality made un-Real can be detected - August Sennor

In Isaac Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity, things are made un-Real by Reality Changes. However, what happens when something passes from one Reality into another? Where does one Reality start and the other end?

Asimov's basic strategy for dealing with time travel paradoxes is to assume that that there are multiple Realities, or time lines. If you travel back in time and change something, then you create a new Reality...sometimes. Asimov made a distinction between "micro-changes" and Reality Changes.

Even Eternals sometimes forgot the difference between micro-changes (small “c”) and Changes (large “C”) which significantly altered Reality. -the thoughts of Andrew Harlan in The End of Eternity

The Reality Change that is of most concern is the Change that destroys Eternity, the time travel machine itself. When that Reality Change takes place, the time travel kettle that carried Andrew Harlan and Noÿs Lambent back in time disappears. However, the two time travelers are protected by a field-generator, "surrounded by an aura of physiotime (an effluvium, so to speak, of Eternity) and therefore protected from any of the effects of Reality Change", as described by Asimov. They remain to live out their lives in the new Reality.

In The Start of Eternity I show R. Nahan traveling back in time. He repairs the positronic brain of R. Gohrlay, a change which is a "large C" Change. In the Reality where Gohrlay's positronic brain is irreversibly damaged, Nahan goes on to develop the technology for time travel. In the new Reality that is created by the time traveling Nahan, Gohrlay recovers her positronic brain functions and she goes on to lead the way in developing time travel technology. In that new Reality, there is no need for Nahan to travel back in time. Unfortunately for the noble time traveling Nahan, the "physiotime field-generator" has not yet been invented. According to the "logic" previously used by Asimov, I assume that the time traveling Nahan will disappear, just like the kettle did. However, can anything from the old Reality remain in the new reality?

Clearly, according to Asimov, the effects induced in a new Reality by time travelers can remain after a Reality Change occurs. This seems like a recipe for miracles. A time traveler goes back in time, makes a change to the course of events, causes a new Reality to come into existence, then disappears. The cause of some events in the new Reality has disappeared.

In the case of Nahan and Gohrlay, Nahan uses nanites to repair Gohrlay's positronic circuits. The nanites themselves must disappear along with Nahan when the Reality Change occurs. However, I suppose that the nanites can leave behind some information from the future for Gohrlay in the form of alterations to her memory circuits. It seems miraculous...I wish that August Sennor were here to check my "logic". Asimov showed Sennor making the argument that time travel paradoxes are impossible because something always changes in Time so as to avoid any potential paradox. Unfortunately, even if that is true, it does not tell us exactly what is allowed for time travelers. How does the universe "know" if the kettle is part of the old Reality or if it has become part of the new Reality? If Nahan writes his name on the wall, "Nahan from the 57th century was here", that inscription could exist as part of the old Reality, just as Cooper's magazine ad did, as a "micro-change". How does the universe distinguish between micro-changes and a Reality Change? I guess this is where we have to take Asimov's advice. Time travel as a plot device is supposed to be fun. Don't ruin it by asking too many questions.

Image. August Sennor

From Star Wars to Race Wars

2009-12-23T08:45:00.000-08:00

While developing The Start of Eternity, I've been thinking about how Isaac Asimov might have written aliens into his stories about a fictional universe where humans colonize the galaxy. I think we can make some educated guesses based on the way he wrote robots into the Foundation Saga, but that is a topic for another blog post.

Racism in Science Fiction. Asimov rather famously wrote about his disgust with John W. Campbell, who apparently preferred science fiction stories in which white Europeans always came out on top. Apparently Campbell's racism was a major motivation that led Asimov to imagine and write about an "all human galaxy". Asimov did not want to argue with Campbell about the absurdity of imagining that no alien could get the better of a human.

I was stimulated to write this blog post by When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"? Annalee Newitz discusses stories like the one in the movie Avatar for which critics don't enjoy seeing some "white guy" help people from a technologically weaker culture resist the encroachment of a stronger culture. So, is Avatar just an example of a racist genre where, "The main mythic story is going to a foreign culture and colonizing it"? Newitz seems to be asking: if authors like Nalo Hopkinson can provide us with different types of stories, then why must big $$$ science fiction remain contaminated (or dominated?) by tired old themes like "white guilt"?

I have not seen this movie, but I've felt for a while now that one of the strongest forces behind the commercialization of science fiction is that by crafting stories about aliens it remains possible to continue to explore (and profit from) certain themes that would be branded "politically incorrect" (or otherwise diverted from the goal of making $$$) if presented in more conventional (non-SciFi) ways. I don't buy the argument that "everything is about race". Just because you can draw parallels between conflicting species from different planets (or political conflicts, tribal conflicts, national conflicts, etc) and conflicts between human groups with different racial identities, that does not mean that Avatar is about "white guilt" or that it will make big $$$$ because of "white guilt".

It's the $$$, stupid. I've never really understood Hollywood nor do my tastes in science fiction match up well with the types of movies that make big money. I think there is a real division between movies that mindlessly milk a science fiction setting for cash and movies that try to tell a new and imaginative science fiction story. The people who invest large amounts of money to make a movie can be expected to care more about what will sell tickets than about selecting a "good" science fiction story.

My personal interest in what I like to call the Exodemic Fictional Universe is a major influence on what I consider to be good and interesting in science fiction. Some people and some science fiction stories seem to cling to the idea that humans are the center of the universe. If you want a paying audience to fork over their money after seeing a 30 second trailer, then it makes sense to not wander far from familiar day-to-day experience where humans are the center of most people's experiences. However, if you accept the idea that good science fiction can make people think outside the box of conventional experiences then I think you can agree with Annalee Newitz and her dream of moving commercial science fiction beyond producing "the same old story again and again".

I think both Arthur Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Star Trek franchise provide good examples of commercially successful science fiction that can constructively move people away from their comfortable "humans are the center of the universe" perspective. I'd love to see film versions of little-known science fiction stories such as Assignment Nor'Dyren, but I can well imagine how folks in Hollywood might respond to what I view as "good" science fiction. I think the story of Assignment Nor'Dyren would be of interest to critics of Avatar. Assignment Nor'Dyren has a "white guy" going to live with (and help) an alien species, but there is no hint of colonialism lurking in the story. Of course, there are no battles or wars, either, so the chances of a Hollywood movie treatment of Assignment Nor'Dyren is next to nothing. I'm not sure that you can make a 30 second trailer for Assignment Nor'Dyren that would motivate enough paying customers to spend their money on movie tickets or a DVD. And that is why Annalee Newitz is "doomed to see the same old story again and again".

However, for science fiction fans who still read, there are wider horizons than what Hollywood will ever explore. In The Start of Eternity, I've been trying to provide an example of an "alien contact" story that does not fit into any conventional mold. Asimov was motivated to create his newfangled robot stories when he grew tired of the conventional robot stories that he grew up reading. I hope Asimov would have enjoyed the approach taken to including aliens that is found in The Start of Eternity.

Image. This is used in the spirit of fair use for discussing the movie Avatar.

Too much of a good thing?

2009-12-20T22:42:00.001-08:00

Isaac Asimov imagined a future in which robots served to help humans reach the stars. Then, it all went terribly wrong. On the spacer worlds, there were more robots than people and finally, humans mutated into a new form of life that lost the desire to spread itself across the galaxy.

In Asimov's future history, when it comes to robots, there can be too much of a good thing. Not because robots turn into rampaging monsters, but, rather, because they create an environment within which humans fail to thrive.

So, what is a robot graced with the Zeroth Law and telepathy to do? Of course, Giskard must find a way to balance humanity on a knife edge between too many and too few robots. Twenty thousand years later we find Daneel still playing the balancing game and just enough robots on hand so that Hari Seldon can fall in love with one who helps him create the Foundations.
Thus, Asimov told the story of how robots helped humanity through two chaotic attractors (the Earth/Spacer conflict and the Foundation/Galaxia vortex), but what about the story of the origin of the very first positronic robot? How was the first robot with human-like behavior created?

We might assume that the very first positronic brain was built by U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., but did Asimov ever really show how to pull that rabbit out of a hat? And what about the Laws of Robotics? Asimov showed the "first three" Laws arriving wholly formed and then the "Zeroth" law being artificially grafted on later.

The Start of Eternity gives a more detailed account of the origins of the Laws and the first human-like robot with a positronic brain. The key assumption is that there was never any group of computer nerds who sat down, at U.S. Robots or any where else, and just "slapped together" a robotic brain that could produce human behavior. And just as Daneel was the "story behind the story" of how the Foundation was created, another telepathic robot, R. Rycleu, was working secretly on Earth in the 20th century to make it possible for positronic brains to be manufactured on Earth. But those were not the first positronic brains.

R. Rycleu is introduced in the first two chapters of The Start of Eternity. The story of the true origin of positronic brains is shown right at the start and then the origin of the Laws of Robotics and telepathy is described in the final part of The Start of Eternity.

Images. Top: the creation of the R. Gohrlay, the first positronic robot with human-like cognition. Credits. The second image shows the structure of time in the Foundation Reality. Larger version.

DOWN WITH ROBOTS!

2009-12-11T15:37:00.000-08:00

Isaac Asimov grew up amidst the high unemployment of the Great Depression and I wonder how that influenced his science fiction stories which depict the rise and fall of robots on Earth. Will people always welcome and make use of machines with human-like abilities or will humans eventually feel so threatened by them that laws will be made to prevent us from having to compete against truly intelligent machines?

So far our robotic machines have mostly taken over the more dull, repetitive and dangerous jobs. I think this article does a good job of summarizing the trend. Whenever machines replace human laborers there always seems to be more work for people to do. The shifting of people to new jobs is facilitated by putting more of our resources into the development of an educated work force that can do more than just simple robotic tasks. However, we have not yet crossed the threshold that Asimov imagined, that magic point where robots become as intelligent and as cognitively flexible as humans.

Asimov imagined important roles for robots, such as helping with dangerous tasks during the initial exploration of outer space. He wrote a story (Escape!) about a "supercomputer" with a positronic brain that was responsible for inventing the "hyperdrive" that makes interstellar travel possible. Ultimately, robots were written out of the daily lives of the humans in Asimov's future history and by the Foundation Era, robots were the stuff of legends. That rise and fall of positronic brains and robots in his fiction reminds me of how Asimov used his time travel novel, The End of Eternity, as a way to write time travel out of his fictional universe.

Apparently John Campbell had a major influence on Asimov and the kinds of science fiction stories he wrote. Asimov started his writing career with stories about a galaxy that contained alien beings and his robot stories were filled with robots who were smarter and more decent than humans. Campbell put an end to all that by insisting that humans always come out on top. So, Asimov switched to stories about a Galactic Empire that had only humans...the robots and aliens were dropped.

Decades later, when Campbell was dead and Asimov returned to his "future history", he wrote robots into the Foundation saga even though the first three books in the Foundation Series made no mention of robots. Asimov showed R. Daneel Olivaw secretly guiding humanity, first towards the formation of a Second Galactic Empire based on the Foundation and then, after abandoning the Foundation, towards Galaxia.

I've never been comfortable with the idea that humanity would simply pass laws forbidding the use of robots, causing them to slip into myth and legend. In The Start of Eternity a new reason is provided for why robots disappeared from human civilization when it spread across the galaxy.

Asimov's early short story about a telepathic robot named "Herbie" (Liar!) has always puzzled me. Herbie's telepathy was supposedly the result of a manufacturing error, an excuse that has always struck me as very odd. Asimov ended that story by simply saying that telepathic robots were useless, so the men in charge of manufacturing Herbie never tried to make another and they did not even try to understand how telepathy was possible. Ya, right.

Asimov later wrote about the origin of Giskard Reventlov, another telepathic robot. Asimov told the story of how a young woman, Vasilia, gave Giskard telepathic powers by playing around with "nice" patterns for positronic brain circuits. Again, miraculously, only one such telepathic robot was made.

Asimov showed Herbie trying to exercise mind control on a human...and failing. However, Giskard was able to not only communicate telepathically but also telepathically alter the thinking of humans...and other robots. In particular, Giskard could give other robots telepathic powers. Daneel became telepathic because Giskard passed on to him that ability.

In The Start of Eternity there is a new explanation for the origin of positronic brains with telepathic powers. I assume that the "manufacturing error" that gave Herbie telepathy must have been caused by another robot that already had telepathic ability and the ability to prevent the humans who knew about Herbie's telepathy from trying to understand telepathy.

In Foundation and Earth, Asimov described how it was possible to transfer Daneel's mind from one positronic brain to another. I assume that the first positronic robot with telepathy (Gohrlay) passed the power of telepathy on to all other robots who had "mentalic abilities". If so, then we need to ask how Herbie might have accidentally been given telepathic powers.

In The Start of Eternity, Gohrlay sends a telepathic robot named Rycleu to 20th century Earth. Rycleu helps humans develop the ability to manufacture positronic robots. Some humans inside U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. might have been allowed to imagine that they were responsible for designing the first positronic brain, but in reality Rycleu was the one who made positronic robots possible on Earth in the 20th century. Rycleu transferred portions of her own mind into the first positronic circuits that were made on Earth.

The question then becomes: what was the origin of the very first positronic brain? I assume that a biological brain, that of a Neanderthal, was used as the original template for positronic brains.

The reason that positronic robots go into hiding is because Gohrlay is doing battle against aliens from another galaxy (the Huaoshy). Gohrlay does not want the Huaoshy to learn about positronics. As depicted by Asimov in his book Second Foundation, telepaths are at risk of having their thought processes disrupted by "telepathic mind static weapons". Gohrlay must work secretly to develop Galaxia, a type of biological group mind that is resistant to "mind static" weapons. Gohrlay believes that only with the completion of Galaxia can humanity be safe from the Huaoshy.

Down with robots! Long live Galaxia! Ya, right.

Image. R. Giskard Reventlov.

Time Loop

2009-12-07T11:54:00.000-08:00

How do I get my ideas? By thinking and thinking and thinking till I'm ready to jump out the window. -Isaac Asimov

I have no doubt that Asimov was a great thinker and blessed with a great memory. He grew up as an avid science fiction fan and claimed to have not just read some of the science fiction pulp magazines but, rather, all of them. How did Asimov's personal experiences in life and his reading influence his writing?

Possibly the most famous single Asimov story is Nightfall. The story idea was given to him by Astounding Science Fiction magazine editor John Campbell. Of course, Asimov created the story, but he had to draw upon his past experiences. Asimov felt that Nightfall was the most original story he ever wrote, but he admitted that there are similarities between part of his own story and a Jack Williamson story that Asimov had read at the age of 14. Asimov was perfectly happy to accept that he probably made unconscious use of elements from the Williamson story.

I suppose that any thoroughgoing scholar who was willing to spend several years at the task could trace about every quirk in Nightfall to one story or another that appeared in science fiction magazines in the 1930s. -Isaac Asimov

In writing The Start of Eternity I wanted to include Asimov as a character in a time travel story that builds upon Asimov's own time travel novel, The End of Eternity. Of course, I could not resist putting Asimov into a time loop where future events have a causal impact on past events.

Jasper Fforde's novel The Eyre Affair includes the idea of sending back in time a copy of a play. Imagine that Shakespeare takes credit for the play without having written it. Could that actually be a Shakespeare play? What if the "actual" author of the play could not be found? What if Shakespeare then wrote other plays after having been inspired by the one (from the future) that he never wrote?

In The End of Eternity, Asimov included the "Cooper time loop", by which advanced knowledge from the future was sent back in time in order to allow a time travel device to be built in the past at a time before it should have been possible to build one. Asimov also shows the main character, Andrew Harlan traveling through time and seeing a "copy" of himself.

Asimov's version of time travel includes the Reality Change. Time travelers can alter events in the past and create a new Reality, a new sequence of events. If a person from one Reality meets his analog in another Reality it might not actually be "meeting yourself", but it seems close to being so, from a psychological perspective. In The Start of Eternity, Isaac Asimov from 1947 travels back in time to 1939 and meets his earlier self.

If the older Asimov from 1947 gave the younger Asimov in 1939 an idea for a story then I do not think that we would have any hesitation in saying that it was an "Asimov story". However, what if the older Asimov had a close encounter with a robot who transferred memories into Asimov? Further, what if an attempt was made to prevent Asimov from having conscious access to those robotic memories? Would there be anything significantly different about Asimov unconsciously drawing upon those "lost memories" while writing a science fiction story and what he did to write Nightfall by calling upon his experience of reading hundreds of science fiction stories?

More importantly, is it particularly offensive to have some fun and create such a plot in a piece of fan fiction? If Asimov were here to see it, would he take offense? I hope not. Asimov wrote that time travel seems to defy physics, but science fiction writers just have too much fun with time travel to resist it.

Image. Photoshop was used to merge a younger and an older Asimov into one image.

Time Travel as a Skyhook

2009-12-05T09:26:00.000-08:00

One of the exciting results of collaborative fiction writing is that you can find yourself getting dragged out of your comfort zone by a collaborator. For example, The Search for Kalid got me involved with writing about telepathy in the context of a Space Opera story, something that I would not have done on my own. I learned that Space Opera can be fun and discovered a plot device for telepathy that I could live with.

I've long been uncomfortable with plot elements such as faster than light space travel, "mental powers" and trips through time that are introduced into science fiction stories with little or no concern for constructing a hypothetical scientific foundation for them. I recently blogged the mysterious boundary between those plot elements we are each willing to accept in a story and those we object to. In creating The Start of Eternity I feel like I am collaborating with Asimov and being drawn into writing about time travel against my better judgment.

I think my greatest objection to time travel as a plot element is that there is no good way to end a conventional time travel story. If time travel is possible, then our timeline should be full of time travelers. No time travel story can really be complete because someone can just arrive from the future and change the entire course of events. In his book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett wrote about the dangerous philosophical implications of ideas that have the power of "skyhooks", beliefs that seem to be able to explain everything. Similarly, time travel as a plot element provides an author with a means to endlessly adjust Reality until any desired outcome of the story is achieved. Yes, you can get involved with various technical limitations on time travel or "time travel police" as ways of imposing artificial limits on time travel as a plot device, but none of those tricks has ever given me comfort.

Asimov's first science fiction story was about time travel, but when Asimov got serious and wrote his time travel novel, I suspect that Asimov may have felt that it was best to create a story in which the technology required for time travel was used to select a Reality in which time travel would not be possible. Asimov then went on to construct his Fictional Universe as a place/time where time travelers never again played a major role in shaping the course of events.

However, I've always been uncomfortable with the way that Asimov "wrote time travel out of Reality". If you assume that there was only one time travel device, then maybe it could have been used to select a future in which time travel was never again possible, but The Start of Eternity explores the idea that the time travel device on Earth was not the only one and that another means is needed to completely prevent time travel.

One of the nice features of Asimov's time travel novel is that he made it a mystery in which the main character did not fully understand time travel technology and could not use time travel as a "skyhook". However, off stage, there were people who could! The Start of Eternity shows those mysterious "off stage" power brokers from Asimov's novel and risks falling into the trap of showing omnipotent beings from the future who can use time travel to accomplish anything that they want to accomplish. However, I feel the need to follow Asimov's lead and not turn the story over to those future beings. I think I'm stuck creating a story that is like a Matryoshka doll. I show the off stage robots who were manipulating the characters from The End of Eternity, but I introduce new meta-manipulators who were playing tricks on the robots. By keeping the "meta-manipulators" off stage, it should be possible to maintain a sense of adventure and not expose readers to the feeling that a skyhook is hovering above.

Image. The image at the top of this blog post is a time traveling robot from The Start of Eternity; see this page for credits. The second image is modified from "sky hook" by zen. Source of the nested dolls.

Diabolus ex machina

2009-11-27T14:20:00.000-08:00

Which of these makes it onto the evening news?

1) bus crashes and children are rushed to the hospital
2) bus driver avoids collision and arrives safely at the destination

For the same reasons, the plots of many science fiction stories are full of bad news and bad breaks. A thousand years ago, if you wanted to torment your hero and build suspense you called a snake-like beast in from casting and let the battle begin. These days the diabolus ex machina is more likely to arrive from the depths of space just in time to ruin the hero's day.

I often criticize the science fiction genre for widespread lack of imagination about aliens (most recently here). Asimov ignored aliens in much of his later writing, although when he first started trying to sell short stories he wrote about things like Martians who had sex with humans and produced hybrid children.

The Start of Eternity is a kind of fan fiction sequel to to Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity. While trying to pay tribute to Asimov, I find myself sending aliens half way across the universe to smash Galaxia, Asimov's vision of humanity's future.

Have I turned into what I dislike: someone willing to turn aliens into my evil henchmen? Hardly. Asimov painted himself into a corner by inventing Galaxia and leaving his Foundation Series and Robot Stories hanging, incomplete. I'm personally providing a deus ex machina that can lift Asimov out of the corner and allow fans to continue the Asimov adventures that we are so fond of. I'm willing to take criticism for what I'm doing to Asimov's fictional universe, but I don't think my plot elements are too devilishly mean or to magically helpful, either.

As I've previously discussed, I'm not a fan of a dichotomy between good and evil. I never sit down and say, "Hmm, I need to make a good (or evil) character."

The aliens in The Start of Eternity are not evil. Actually, I'm concerned that some readers will accuse me of using aliens as a kind of deus ex machina. I just finished writing a description of the First Contact between the Huaoshy and the Retair. It is the alien equivalent of the story about the first two automobiles in Kansas crashing into each other.

I'm interested in why some people are willing to believe very crazy ideas, but they object to some plots and start shouting, "Deus ex machina!" The Retair are a species that evolved as a kind of flightless bird. They first appear in Chapter 10 of The Start of Eternity and by Chapter 13 they are in need of a helping hand. If you think that help arrives too magically then go ahead and click "edit".

Image. Aliens as devils: Alien Pumpkin by dalangalma.

Eternal Perspective

2009-11-18T08:03:00.000-08:00

There are several online reviews and essays about Isaac Asimov's time travel novel The End of Eternity; one the longest is by Don Webb in Bewildering Stories.

About a year and a half ago I started acting on the crazy idea that it might be fun to write a sequel to The End of Eternity. I started calling that sequel The Start of Eternity. There are some past blog posts (see also the blog posts listed at the bottom of this page) about how I view The End of Eternity as an integral part of Asimov's "future history" of robots and the Foundation.

Don Webb wrote this about The End of Eternity: "It has no robots, no Galactic Empire, and no Foundations." However, Asimov linked The End of Eternity to the rest of his "future history" in his novel Foundation's Edge. Asimov wrote that robots created Eternity and used time travel to make it possible for humans to take over the entire galaxy. If we accept Asimov's suggestion that Eternity was a tool used by robots to fulfill the demands of the Zeroth Law then we can imagine that robots were lurking, unseen, in the background of The End of Eternity.

One of the remarkable features of Asimov's robots such as Daneel Olivaw is that they have telepathic powers. Don Webb says flatly that telepathy does not appear at all in The End of Eternity. However, Asimov wrote into The End of Eternity the idea that telepathy was used to introduce into Andrew Harlan's mind the idea that Cooper the Cub was really Vikkor Mallansohn. If so, then we can imagine telepathic robots who created Eternity, used it as a means to travel back and forth through Earth's history and then, ultimately, used Harlan (and Noÿs Lambent) as the means to end Eternity.

Andrew and Noÿs travel back in time to the 1930s and engineer a Reality Change that starts humanity on the path towards the Galactic Empire that is described in the Foundation novels. We must view Andrew and Noÿs as the puppets of telepathic robots who have decided that Eternity and time travel are a dead end for humanity.

If you look carefully in the image at the top of this blog post, you can get a glimpse of a telepathic robot named Rycleu, one of the secret masters of Eternity who meets with Andrew and Noÿs in the first chapter of The Start of Eternity and helps them alter the course of technological developments on Earth, allowing humans on Earth to start manufacturing positronic robots in the 20th century.

Image. The image at the top of this blog post is from the first chapter of The Start of Eternity. For image credits see this page.

Darkest before the storm

2009-11-14T13:19:00.000-08:00

Not long after I started reading science fiction, I bought Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 2B, a collection of stories edited by Ben Bova. I got that collection of stories because it had a story by Iasac Asimov, who I had been introduced to by way of his novel, The Gods Themselves. That collection of stories also introduced me to Bova, James Blish, Algis Budrys, Theodore R. Cogswell, E. M. Forster, Frederik Pohl, Clifford D. Simak and Jack Vance...that volume provided a rather mind blowing expansion of my science fiction horizons. Jack Vance eventually became one of my favorite authors, but I mention that "Hall of Fame" volume here because of the story by Theodore Cogswell called The Spectre General which introduced me to the concept that published science fiction could be humorous. At the time I only knew of humor in science fiction from television, particularly The Trouble With Tribbles.

I think it was after reading The Spectre General that I first started to realize that I lack the ability to name characters. One of the characters in The Spectre General is named Schninkle. In a story full of soldiers with names like Krogson, Dixon and Blick, what could be better for comic relief than a stray Schninkle?

When the internet exploded and computers became geeky-cool, ReBoot appeared on television as a science fiction show. For an example of ReBoot's nerd humor see this joke.

While on the topic of humor in science fiction, check out the video in this blog post from last July (a scene from The Bicentennial Man with comedian Robin Williams as a joking robot).

While reading the science fiction story No. at Novelas, the fiction wikia, I could not get images of ReBoot out of my head. Normally I am too busy being serious to include much humor in the science fiction I write. Evil aliens who are somewhat doltish about their invasion of Earth seems to be a sub-genre of science fiction, and No. includes a rather bumbling alien who is intent on enslaving humanity. I've often wondered why aliens would come half way across the galaxy to enslave humans and conquer Earth...I mean, besides all the girls. If I had been a more avid movie goer then I might have figured this out sooner. As explained in No., the big attraction is movie theater popcorn. Not to eat...all the fatty flavoring makes good rocket fuel. I'm glad we have that settled.

Image. The image at the top of this post is from the story No.
See this page for image credits.

The nature of reality

2009-11-07T10:44:00.000-08:00

Last month I started thinking seriously about the nature of physical reality. In his novel, The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov imagined the implications of possible contact between our universe and another universe where there were slightly different physical laws. Asimov's story, The Gods Themselves, was the first science fiction novel I ever read. It is fair to say that "my mind was blown" by the idea of multiple universes, each with its own set of physical laws (this was before I had ever taken a physics course).

Any science fiction story involving communications between "multiple universes" raises the problem of how it is possible to send information between two universes. I've seldom been satisfied with the "explanations" given by authors for how it might be possible to communicate between universes. For example, in his book, Paths to Otherwhere, James Hogan suggested that it might be possible for your conscious mind to "take over" the brain of your analog self in another parallel universe. As a biologist, there are few things that annoy me more than physical scientists who start playing fast and loose with the nature of consciousness. It is fun to imagine other universes, but saying that our conscious minds can magically migrate between universes is a plot device that is not worthy of the kind of hard science fiction that I prefer.

Last month I blogged about Time Travel and Mental Powers and expressed my long-standing uneasiness about science fiction stories that involve time travel, telepathy and fast-than-light travel. I think we should never tire of trying to devise better plot devices for our science fiction stories. Even if most readers are not bothered by a wave of the hand (hyperspace jump, go through the worm hole, etc, etc.) justification for science fiction plot elements, the true spirit of hard science fiction is to have something more scientific up your sleeve than just a wave of your hand.

Including multiple universes in science fiction stories has become quite common. One of the most audacious types of story involving the idea of multiple universes is the type involving the idea that it might be possible for humans or some species with advanced technology to engineer entirely new universes, or, at the very least, engineer changes to the physical laws of our universe. In his novel, Contact, Carl Sagan explored the idea that our universe might have been engineered by a "designer" who established the physical laws of our universe in such a way that a coded message was built into the structure of our universe...a message that unambiguously shows that our universe was designed, not simply created by chance. Albert Einstein famously said that he wanted to know if there was any choice in how our universe was created. More recently, evidence has been found suggesting that Einstein's cosmological constant is not a constant, that its value has changed during the billions of years that our universe has existed. If such a "universal parameter" of our universe can change spontaneously, maybe it really is possible to make modifications to the fundamental physical properties of the universe. Maybe "different universes" can differ in the details of their physical laws.

Imagine that the diagrams in this blog post represent the "dimensional state" of a universe. Further, imagine that it might be possible, by way of some kind type of high-energy physics experiment to trigger a change in the "dimensional state" of our universe. I think that Carl Sagan hinted at some such engineering project in his novel, Contact. I've been thinking that maybe our universe came into being by way of spontaneous symmetry breaking that "selected" among the possible "dimensional states". There could have been some "ground state", possibly the most energetically favorable set of physical laws. However, maybe there is a way to harness prodigious amounts of energy and shift our universe out of the "ground state" into a slightly more interesting state. What might be "more interesting"? Well, imagine that it is strictly impossible for anything to travel faster than the speed of light in the "ground state", but maybe faster-than-light communications and faster-than-light space travel might be possible upon a small engineered modification to the physical laws of the universe.

Being able to alter the physical laws of our universe might be one of the most important features of our universe. I'm exploring this idea in The Start of Eternity, a sequel to Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity. The story is still under construction and collaborating authors are welcome.

Images. The images in this blog post are explained in some detail at the "meta" page for The Start of Eternity. These images are available for use under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license.