Steps into Space

Lunopolis is a documentary style paranoia-toggling sf movie that relies on creative scripting, candid acting and gritty shooting to propel a heady, visceral path of discovery deep into the "truth" about our timeline and human cities on the moon. Highly recommended, watch with the lights off in a smoke-filled room, free on Netflix.

Also, in the spirit of Zero History (sci-fi conspiracy/the future is now) I came across this story of a paralyzed woman who was given a robotic arm that is controlled by her mind. Scientists mapped the neurons that fire when she thinks of moving her physical arm to the mechanism that controls the robotic arm.

The possibilities here are very exciting! If someone can control a device with her mind, where would the limitations end? One trick with this robotic arm is that imagining moving your arm fires the same centers in your brain as if you actually were moving your arm. (Interesting too when you think about doing something in a dream, is the sensation of the experience registered on our subconscious as truly as physically doing it?) Could we link ourselves to super-robots and interface with astonishingly powerful machines? Could we explore deep outer space in first-person? On a darker twist, could this the first step to a surrogates future? The singularity must be drooling. By the way, you've got to love that the main difference between Bruce Willis and his surrogate is hair.

Rapture Season

So.... we all take breaks from things, short vacations, sabbaticals are sometimes longer. Some of us go years without paying taxes. This post will be about time.

Where have I been? I've been on an apocalyptic bender. I almost wrote post-apocalyptic, but what I've really been into is right up before the crash. It has been rapture season, so I guess it all makes sense.
What kicked it off was a first edition copy of J.G. Ballard's early short story book The Four Dimensional Nightmare. It's basically a mix of stories about how the world is running out. I found it at a used book store for forty bucks. Well, I know who the number one audience is for that book and I wasn't willing to shell out forty bucks right away, so I made several trips to the store and read it over the course of several weeks. Actually, I didn't read all of it because someone bought it before I could knock out the back end. What kept happening was that I would read one of the stories and then get drawn into a barroom conversation with infinite glow EH who likes a drink and to talk some noise. (Anyways, turns out I had a copy of Voices of Time with dog bites in it that I got for three bucks, same stories mostly, and was able to finish the set.)

Ballard had the perspective that time was unwinding. The idea that entropy is eating us all in real time. I'd poked around a copy of Crystal World before, where crystalline structures slowly consume all life. On first touch, his writing felt like James Bond except mixed with pure doom: Foreign, elegant landscapes and tropical, slowly unfolding tableaus. Why would I read a march towards pure death?
Ursula Leguin wrote that science fiction is metaphor. I've heard this sentiment mirrored in other places, the idea that it's not predictive but rather that it's purely symbolic. This is something you don't normally trumpet as an SF writer because, well, a whole gang of readers say scientific innovation is the number one reason they read SF and writers don't want to shoot themselves in the foot.
Back to my question: why read Ballard's march towards pure death?
Well, yes his prose is beautiful: In the story Voices of Time where experimental animals exhibit special adaptations to prepare them to communicate with a greater source as time unravels, and human sleep patterns begin to change until people stop waking up, and alien races countdown the extinction of their stars ... I think it's gracious of Ballard not to toy with death but to reframe it, to make it the countdown in the song we're all singing, to present it in a story not as a fear motive to action, but the logical conclusion that will approach no matter how we look at it. Still, Voices seems to say, we choose how to look at it.
C.S. Lewis, you sonofabitch, I'm going to write about you, but I'll say this: Screwtape Letters rubbed me the wrong way. You are an excellent writer but an emotional man and your pen follows your heart.
This is an SF blog, not a philosophy blog, but I think here C.S. and J.G. share a similar line. The Abolition of Man argues that reducing meaning in action (via science/progress doctrine) to instinct, self-preservation, and reflex, denies man's deeper understanding of beauty.
For example, if society asks a man to die in war and gives the reason that it's for the preservation of the race. That's essentially saying, die to preserve me. (And the usual response to that is, "No, you go ahead, I'll hang out here.") The alternative C.S. gives is a father telling his son that it is noble to die in battle for a cause you believe in. Fighting in war is such an extreme example, but since this was written during WWII, you have a pretty specific crucible. Nonetheless, the idea is that meaning and beauty is something that must be taken as self-evident and should be passed down through generations. And, by the same token, meaning and beauty can excised from younger generations by older generations. There are beautiful and frightening directions to take this train of thought into, but I don't really want to do that here.

The reason I mention C.S., that sonofabitch, is I think it's beautiful that Ballard presents death as a logical build-up or exhaustion of resources. He doesn't allow fear of death to take meaning from life or from his stories. He doesn't extrapolate to an infinite future as many SF writers are wont to do. He presents the idea that man is limited and that we must value the time that we have and act with the meaning inherent in that belief.

Skyline

Science fiction's explosive rise was sparked by fears of nuclear war. The threat of not just nuclear proliforation, but nuclear devastation was (and is by the way) real to the American Public and suddenly the power and alienation of modern science was an emotional reality that needed to be discussed and understood in a way that only fiction can access.
Well, Skyline manages to completely skirt that, along with any other semblance of human emotion, which, at the end of the day, really spells make or break for even the most special of special effects blockbuster.
I've felt more excitement when turning the screw on the two quarter prize machine. Go ahead, kill off these meaningless characters who are all holding desperately on to their completely dysfunctional relationships as well as to the hate that manages to alienate them from each other. Is this a reflection of modern American life? No. In no way. Sorry. Maybe I'm an optimist (or just not an aggressive enough pessimist) but I just don't see it.
This movie looks like a band of trustafarians pissing through their greatgrandchildren's trust funds. These beautiful special effects were wasted. Broadcasting H.G. Wells had a powerful effect because of the delivery and composition of the material, dare I say the art. In Skyline, these elements were an afterthought to a movie which spent most of its time trying to figure out how to out-cool itself, which is probably why it's nineties arm tatoos, 1988 graffitti artist drawings, and Biggie hot tub party had no resonance at all. Yeah, Independence Day was a pretty cool movie at the time, and good for Will Smith's career. And, hey, remember the nineties... But remember also, that was in a slew of end-of-the-earth movies, along with death by meteorite, death by volcano, death by tornado, and death by global warming to name a few.
In Skyline, spoiler alert but don't let it stop you, the characters are much more fantastic than the idea of machines descending on earth cities to harvest human brains to run their machines.
Science fiction, if it is indeed suffering any decline in readership, is not suffering because the issues of science affecting the emotional reality of modern life are changing. Rather, SF, and reading in general, is suffering from a lack of faith in the resilience and strength of the human identity, of human adaptability, of human knowledge, and yes, remember the Beatles, of love.
This was a sad, boring movie. A sad, expensive to make, wasteful, boring movie. This will reflect poorly on SF as a genre though it illustrates almost nothing of what makes SF great.

The Sounds of Science

What is it about classic rock that pairs so well with astronomy, planetary sciences, and all that heady racket? What Friday night laser show doesn't feature a little Pink Floyd, maybe some Zeppelin, and then fading into the master strains of Alice Cooper's "School's Out"?
People have always speculated about the future, cut open chickens, read tea leaves, shaken magic 8 balls, but it was always from the language of what we knew, be it guitars, tea, poultry. Somehow, as SF developed as a language for scrying, it grew increasingly interior.
In E.E. "Doc" Smith's Triplanetary, the future technology is envisioned as rays and dirigibles and yet undiscovered wavelengths displayed in a war field of unencumbered logic. Conway Costigan, our space hero, steps onto the page amid an orchestra gala, the full musical experience of the 40's.
Later, Rogery Zelazny, who imagines the controlled fantasies of a psychiatric machine that joins the consciousness of doctor and patient in the outstanding short story "He Who Shapes," is asked to write a story for Heavy Metal. (Check out his collection The Last Defender of Camelot which contains both stories.)
William Gibson imagines cyberspace, a fantastical world generated in the brains of computers. He's credited with leading the cyberpunk movement, which has a genre of music all its own.
Think of the Blade Runner soundtrack which marries a cyberpunk world, to a mystical, technical, electronic music.
Classic, heavy, space rock gives a naturalistic feeling of vastness with its huge reverb and delay; it gives the sense of raw electric power, not digital processing but electric force, at least the early tube stuff did with it's crackling transistors and amps pushed to the max. The old VOX amps didn't have distortion, you just turned them up until the sound wobbled then snapped like the back of a jet engine cracked wide open.
And electronica, especially world electronica and punk electrics of the 80's, was highly connected to the equipment, rather than a Macbook with an output, so that every artist had an organically unique electric sound. These sounds were large but the space was interior, generated not simply by the reverb splash of a crackly spring, but by the complexity of tone and the layering of waves.
So, what is the sound of our paradigm now? Is it the steady chug of indie rock that speaks to our visions and fantasies? Maybe its the disarming vulnerable volatility of the rising tides of folk, it's apparent lack of technology a rebellion in itself... or perhaps modern folk is even a more organic technology altogether of sensitive mics that underline and amplify even the tiniest flourish...
Perhaps it is the subtle attenuation that is the language of our time. Perhaps our visions of the future are not so vast right now, in this era of the grooming of the ego on Facebook, of media marketing, and personal presentation and branding. Why this focus on this interior? Perhaps the technological, cyber world has led us to introspection. Phillip Dick, author of the book that inspired Blade Runner, was always an introspective author, well ahead of the cyberpunk movement, so for his work to ascend to greater heights of popularity in the 80's fits in quite smoothly. Still, where does this cyber world focus our vision?
In the internet generation, there's that sense that the future is already here, hidden somewhere in a nook in a blog on the internet, something new, THE NEW, is out there waiting for you to type in the http. Maybe that's not so, maybe we've lost track of the vision of the future, not just to re-imagine what is already here but to speculate wildly that maybe it's far far beyond anything we've ever seen or heard before. Maybe the future is not, dare I say it, a coming singularity. Perhaps the future is not Chthulu slumbering in the depths of the internet waiting to be discovered, perhaps it is a black monolith floating in space, making it's silent way towards us, completely unannounced.

Brave New Readers

On my constant vigilant hunt for those precious copies of classic sci-fi books slathered with hand painted starscapes and eight legged Saturn Dragons, I am always bemused to find certain SF books filed in with the lit fiction. Notably, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. Hmmm. Isn’t Brave New World set in London in 2540 AD? Doesn’t it deal with the social implications of eugenics technology? And, hey, what about, Fahrenheit 451, described by Bradbury as “a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.”
I’m sure by now there’s a chorus of dissenting comments, echoed remarks out there on the other side of the wire. I conducted a casual survey among friends and other SF heads to sound off on these books. And when asked, “Are they sci-fi?” The answer was a resounding, “Sort of.”
Now before I start making a pedestal case for why we, readers, must sneakily and rebelliously re-shelve these books, I think it would be better to gaze more closely into this rift. Is it because these books are old? Is it because teachers want to assign them to their high school students without fear of threats that they’re turning the minds of their students to mush with their pleasure reading drivel? Are general/lit fiction readers trying to reclaim what they believe is rightfully theirs? Perhaps these are the tokens of a war that is raging. There is that delicious tension in the frictional rifts between genre and “literary” fiction that stirs up in academic circles.
From my investigative survey, I found that many readers said, “Well, Brave New World veers towards general lit because it deals more with social issues than technology, and the same goes for that other one.” That seems like kind of a cheat. After all, what about Asimov’s Foundation series which contains some pretty incredible examples of human political power relationships, or Ender’s Game, which turns up on Air Force reading lists for its interpersonal tactical strategy.

Sure, hard sci-fi, along the lines of Arthur C. Clarke's, 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Forever War, written as Joe Haldemans thesis for the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, is going to give more explicit descriptions of technology, but what about near future SF, like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash which is set in a future where the U.S. Federal government had been privatized (e.g. General Bob’s Army), and there’s Phillip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, which describes the near future if the Axis had won WWII.
Science fiction may have science in it, but ultimately it is fiction and its function leans on the successful development of plot and character. Is it so bold to say that SF readers are looking for great character and plot above scientific explication (or at the very least on par with it)? But maybe that’s the trick, a little closer to home. Genre is more defined by its readership, or its assumed readership. Is it considered more aristocratic to read, say, Lydia Davis than Issac Asimov? Yes. Maybe. Hmmm. That might be another article. Either way, a book isn’t fired out into the void to be discovered like a lucky penny. Readers are a specific set of people, and within that general set are many more specific groups, similar to music audiences. (Does that make J.K. Rowling the Beatles of published fiction??? Perhaps Hemmingway is a little more Indie, say Jack White or The Strokes.) Only a percentage of the population reads, statistically the number of Americans who buy ten or more books in a year is around forty six percent. When you take out cook books, how to’s, and The Secret, the number of fiction readers within that set begins to dwindle. Of this population of readers, the number who consistently purchase books (some might say compulsively, I’m not admitting anything here) is even less still.
There’s a reason most book stores give you thin, clear plastic bags. You’re showing off, you’re part of an elite subset of people who are, at least theoretically, bettering their minds and their vocabularies. Think about that at your next trip to Grissell and Junior’s Market when they wrap your tequila in a black plastic bag.
Here, I’m including the Wikpedia definition of genre fiction because I think it’s more telling than the definition of SF:

Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is a term for fictional works (novels, short stories) written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre.

I think this nails it. Whether a deliberate choice or an unconscious disposition, every author writes for an audience, be it themselves or the entire breadth of Stephen King’s readership. And, ultimately, authors who professionally publish must write for an audience of at least one reader, usually many, at the publishing house who separate the wheat from the chaff, and sometimes vice-versa.
The stages of publishing a book, including building up a catalog of published works and developing a relationship with editors and wider readership, largely defines a book’s genre. Or, more simply, a book’s genre is defined by where it’s shelved when it’s released, and if that shelving changes, along with the audience, then the book subserviently follows, because part of what makes the power of a written work is its reader.
BNW (1931) and Fahrenheit 451 (1951) are not so old that they precede audiences who sought out science and adventure stories. Amazing Stories, the Sci-Fi magazine, launched in 1926 and quickly saw a circulation of 100,000 readers. In fact, Fahrenheit 451 was first published in a shorter form as "The Fireman" in a SF magazine (Galaxy Science Fiction, Vol. 1 No. 5, February 1951). But times have changed, and with them, so has the reading of BNW and 451. One of the things that’s so exciting and frightening about classic SF is that now, many years since the original texts were composed, some of it’s machination have come to life (check out my first post for a nice taste). The harrowing threat of Eugenics supported by the Nazi party became more real and thus the impact of BNW became more powerful after it was published, not to mention its implications about mass production. And what about Fahrenheit 451, whose ominous warning toll still strikes a chord. (Remember when 1984 was automatically recalled from Kindles?)
The text remains the same, but the audiences have changed for these books. The meaning and flavor of these stories has transformed and deepened, daresay like a fine red wine. While Sci-fi is written, marketed, and published to reach an established audience (as all new professional writing must) of dedicated readers, BNW and 451 have a much further reach, appearing in high school reading lists and library recommendation lists. High school reading lists and other introductions to fiction are not replete with Sci-Fi because, let’s admit it, be it for time or interest or what have you, not all readers venture deep into the rich veins of published work. Lucky for them, and for us, SF fans, there is something to draw them there. BNW and 451 wait in the general/lit fiction section, bated hooks bobbing in the water, something to spin new minds and turn them on to the power and insight of great fiction, great Science Fiction.

Photos of Saturn

Thought I'd share this actual photograph of Saturn back-lit by the sun. It was taken by the NASA satellite Cassini.

Here's a link to the Cassini image database and a great NYtimes article.

My favorite cut from the Times article is where they describe guiding the satellite using gravity assistance from the planet:

"A better analogy, he said, is two ice skaters in a hockey rink: a little girl and her father. The little girl is Cassini, small and fast; Dad is slow but strong. When the little girl reaches Dad at the red line, they clasp hands and Dad rotates. He can fling his daughter farther down the ice toward the far goal, toss her at right angles into the boards, send her back where she came from or let her go off at an angle."

A Little Perspective on the Matter - Long Time in SF

“Time draws the shapes of stories… a story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate. Where the teller begins and ends his tale decides what its point is, how it gathers meaning.”
Joan Silber, The Art of Time in Fiction, pp 3-4

Friends, today’s entry began as an exploration into the idea of long time in science fiction novels. This is the idea of telling stories where the plot is revealed over the course of many years possibly many hundreds of years or even millennium. Two classic SF examples of this are Ray Bradbury’s haunting The Martian Chronicles and Isaac Asimov’s crucial Foundation.
The Martian Chronicles, which begin in January 1999 and ends October 2026, can be viewed as a series of short stories joined by a common theme of the intersection of Martian and human civilization or, much more interestingly, I think, it can be read as the story of the human race's existence on Mars.
Foundation takes the course over hundreds of years. It is more likely to be read as the story of the evolving, ever changing Foundation society as they navigate their course through the demise of the intergalactic empire. But it can also be read as a collection of short stories as each chapter introduces a new set of characters and a new plot arc.
In these books, we see the power of the vignette, the idea that time does not always need to be explicitly described and linked in a contiguous line through back story. The leaps between chapters takes us on lily pads across a greater plot arc and leaves gaps that the imagination fills all on its own.

How do we tell stories of ideas that are more complex than the events of one person’s life? How to we show the fallout of the scientific discoveries and political intrigue that shape the “foundation” of our lives? I don’t holster an automated rifle every morning before I go to work. I don’t live in a mud hut hidden away in the mountains to prevent discovery. The main thing large corporate entities want from me is my purchasing power, rather than my physical strength, my talents, or any wisdom that I might contain. We live in a social, political, and technological world, with each of these structures opening and closing a myriad of doors for opportunities and paths on the way our lives might be lived. Our hopes and dreams are intrinsically tied into the world that we live in.


Many people dream of escape to a new land. It’s the classic American dream, the spigot to the west, furthered even in a get away to Mars , a fresh start on a home planet, a zero percent interest loan for a big mansion in the suburbs. This is, perhaps, a response to feeling constricted in a world delineated by invisible rules. SF allows us to play with those rules to understand on a personal level what the effects are on our day to day lives. Some SF books that have offered us a bare glimpse into the power of these rules are Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Looking Backward, and We. These books are not technical manuals outlining science, psychology, and politics, they’re fiction, telling the story of people experiencing these worlds from the inside, which makes them all the more powerful.

Here’s a great quote from David Mamet describing theater, but I think it resonates with what really works in great fiction.

“It is not the theme of the plays to which we respond, but the action—the through action of the protagonist, and the attendant support of the secondary characters, this support lent through their congruent actions.” (Writing in Restaurants, Mamet, pp 8)

Good SF is not about science, per se, rather about the effect of the world on people, and great science fiction is perhaps about the effect of people’s choices and creations on the world. In Chronicles, when Bradbury describes the African American group getting on the spaceship to take them away from the oppressive racist society, he’s not describing the space ship, he’s talking about the power of escape, the freedom that was once offered by the discovery of new land, the American West, and now, what? Where can we move to get away, start fresh, free of the shackles of corrupt governments and social pressures?
When Foundation follows the story of people influenced by Hari Seldon the psychohistorian who used math and psychology to prophesize the future, Asimov doesn’t spend the bulk of the book describing Seldon’s methods. He describes the choices individual people make when they are forced to grapple with foreknowledge of the future.
A counter argument to this idea that Sci-fi is the story of people, rather than an explication of machines, might be the August 2026 entry in The Martian Chronicles, which simply tells the story of an automated house that has long outlived its occupants. Even this story of the functioning of technology, comes across more as a haunting story of the family and civilization that spawned this technology. It’s like the dry description of a car wreck where the violence has been removed but becomes only more powerful by the subtexts that appear from repeated banal description.
Stephen L. Gillett in his book World-Building: A Writer’s Guide to Constructing Star Systems and Life-Supporting Planets asks, “Why ‘World-Build’?” His answer? “A sense of wonder. How many times have we heard that advanced as the reason for science fiction? For most SF readers, that’s what drew them to the genre in the first place. And yet how many stories of books wring out that ‘gosh, wow’ reaction? One reason, no doubt, is the lack of a sense of immersion in the story. If the story doesn’t take itself seriously, why should the reader?” He adds, “If the effort is there, it lends a coherence and substance to a story that can never hurt. Although it can’t make a bad story good, it can make good stories out of fair ones, and even great stories out of good ones.” (Gillett, 1-2)
So, while good, hard science description may add to the sense of wonder a reader feels and create the space for the mind to wander, it’s truly the characters, their actions and feelings that drive the reader.

Long time in SF creates a sense of wonderment. We feel the characters are adrift in a sea of time. Their specific, unique actions and identities and decisions are part of a greater context, not that they are simply gears in a machine, and this is the beauty of Foundation, but that by understanding the machine, they can break through the societal constructs that have held them from their freedom.

Isaac Asimov, in his 1991 science book, Guide to Earth and Space, writes, “Thinking always leads to more thinking and there is no end to it. To people who enjoy thinking, that is the glory of science. People who don’t enjoy thinking about things that don’t concern them immediately, find the necessity of continuing to do so indefinitely frightening, and they turn away from science. I hope you re in the first group.”

Fiction is an exploration of problems that cannot be solved logically. Again, this quote is for plays, but I think the idea holds true:

“The play is a quest for a solution. As in dreams, the law of psychic economy operates. In dreams we do not seek answers which our conscious (rational) mind is capable of supplying, we seek answers to those questions which the conscious mind is incompetent to deal with. So with the drama, if the question posed is one which can be answered rationally, e.g.: how does one fix a car, should white people be nice to black people, are the physically handicapped entitled to our respect, our enjoyment of the drama is incomplete – we feel diverted but not fulfilled. Only if the question posed is one whose complexity and depth renders it unsusceptible to rational examination does the dramatic treatment seem to us appropriate, and the dramatic solution become enlightening.” (Writing in Restaurants, Mamet, 8-9)


Science is an open exploration of the physical world. It is a practiced curiosity just like fiction. In long time SF stories, we see the elements of fiction pushed to the edge and we are given the chance to ask questions not just about characters and how they act with each other, but also how they act in the context of the life-paths provided by the day-to-day social, political, and technological boundaries set by civilization. Long time SF provides us a perspective to step outside the social, political, and technological structures that surround us, and look in, and say, “What if?”


Further food for thought about the way technology and politics shape people, and the way that people shape them: check out the short story Committee of the Whole in Frank Herbert’s collection The Worlds of Frank Herbert.