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Why Do We Fear Aliens? Part 2

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast, science journalist

Athena’s note: Larry’s article is particularly timely, given the recent buzz about the Earth-type planet Gliese 581g.

Part 1

Part 2

For those who may still wonder and question just how much weight the words of the famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking hold for the concept of alien intelligences and their potential reactions to encountering humanity, consider this:  A new science fiction film coming out this November titled Skyline recently released its theatrical trailers.

One of the older Skyline trailers begins with the line:  “On August 28th, 2009, NASA sent a message into space farther than we ever thought possible… in an effort to reach extraterrestrial life.”

Now it is true that on that date a transmission was broadcast into deep space by a NASA-owned radio telescope located in Australia.  This collection of messages from people all over the world (sent as part of the Hello from Earth campaign) was aimed at a planet in the red dwarf star system of Gliese 581, which is only 20.3 light years, or 194 trillion kilometers from us.  That may seem like a long way to Earth-bound humanity, but on a celestial scale the Gliese 581 system is a near neighbor.  As of this writing, the transmission has traveled just over one light year.  That isn’t even far enough to reach our closest stellar neighbors, the Alpha Centauri system 4.3 light years away, let alone merit the title of the farthest-flung human message ever.

As a final point, we simply don’t know if life of any kind exists on or near the target of Hello from Earth, the fourth world circling the star Gliese 581.  However, astronomers now think at least one and possibly three planets in that system have the potential to possess liquid water, a major ingredient for the formation of at least terrestrial types of life.  Of course the transmission is not going to stop once it reaches that alien planet.  The messages will spread outward and onward into the galaxy at light speed, which will give them an increased chance of being detected some day by an ETI, assuming any exist in the signal path.

After this inauspicious beginning to the trailer, the viewer is treated to some apparently real news broadcasts about Hawking’s alien warnings interspersed with images of strange bluish-white meteor-like lights dropping down upon Los Angeles.  In the news segments, former CBS Television news anchor Dan Rather intones that “if extraterrestrials visit us, the outcome might be similar to when Columbus landed in America.  In other words, it didn’t turn out too well for Native Americans.”  The trailer caps off this dire warning with the text “Maybe we should have listened.”  And done what, I have to ask?  Cover Earth in black tarp with some stars painted on the outside and hope nobody notices us?

Too late.  The menacing spaceships of the alien Columbuses, looking like gothic metal sculptures, are bearing down on the places where the lights landed.  The name of the film flashes on the screen, then comes a close-up of one of the alien vessels hovering over LA.  Its underside open wide like the jaws of some immense beast, it’s pulling thousands of tiny screaming, tumbling humans up through the air and into itself for reasons yet unknown, but ones the audience has little trouble imagining may not be for the benefit of humanity.

A final text warning commands us “Don’t look up!”  The injunction is directly counter to everything our society has been taught in terms of social progress and evolutionary development – to say nothing of what the recently deceased astronomy popularizer Jack Horkheimer said at the end of every episode of his PBS program, Star Gazer, which was to “Keep Looking Up!”

More Than One Side to the Alien Encounter Debate

Aside from the near-certainty that Skyline will be little different or better than the majority of alien invasion stories of the last one hundred years, using the real words of a real scientist (and a cosmologist at that) to give a sense of weight and urgency to just one side of the concept of alien interaction with our species ultimately blurs and overshadows the wider range of possible outcomes for what may one day define the ultimate course of humanity among the stars.

While it is true that the primary overall purpose of Skyline is a material one – to line the pockets of its makers with money by appealing to the basic instincts of those who will provide said profits – the film (and Hawking) are nevertheless contributing to the debate on how we should deal with other intelligences in the Cosmos.  This is the case whether the filmmakers had any deep intentions of doing so or whether the idea is plausible.

Too many science fiction stories about aliens tend to focus on the negative aspects of encounters between different sentient species, thus biasing (and reflecting) public thought on this topic.  So it is both fitting and important to take a look at just how plausible dire predictions like Hawking’s truly are.  Of course, there are certain limits as to how much one can reasonably determine what an ETI may do in regards to humanity in its present state: not yet knowing for certain if there is any life beyond Earth tops the list here.  However, we do possess enough scientific and technological knowledge to make some plausible determinations on just how likely our greatest fears about our galactic neighbors might be.

Just as SETI requires its hypothetical subjects to share some common elements with humanity in order to work, any beings who wish to harm us must also think and behave somewhat like us.  So when examining types of invading aliens, I am excluding the ones with abilities we would consider to be godlike: able to appear at will anywhere or anytime and commanding so much knowledge and power as to make the act of rendering us extinct a quick and easy exercise.  I presume that if such superbeings wanted us gone, it would have happened by now.

The fact that this has not happened could mean a number of things: they are much too smart and nice to harm others; they don’t care about us one way or the other; or they will destroy us but just haven’t gotten around to it yet.  So I will not speculate further on superETI, except to warn that beings able to do just about anything blur the line between science and fantasy.  In addition, I make no pretense that my lists of alien motives and weaponry are in any way complete, so further ideas are welcome.

The Why of Alien Invaders

Since invading another world across interstellar distances requires serious time and resources, our hypothetical alien marauders will not attempt to take down humanity and its home planet on a whim or to follow some cliché of galactic hegemony.  Like the future humans in the 2009 film Avatar who travelled 42 trillion kilometers to reach the Alpha Centauri system moon Pandora for its mineral wealth to aid their ailing civilization, our invaders will have to come up with a compelling reason to travel all that way if they ever literally want to leave the ground.

Of all the “whys” for an alien assault on Earth, taking our planet as a new place to live and utilize because their homeworld is dying or destroyed for one reason or another, is at least as old as H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

Well’s 1898 novel was a reflection on how European colonizers of the era were treating the people and places they were colonizing and an extrapolation of the idea of advanced beings responding to the slow but inevitable demise of the habitability of their home planet, in this case Mars.  The numerous astronomical reports of seemingly straight lines on the Red Planet since 1877 had led to speculation that they were artificial.

The wealthy American astronomer Percival Lowell championed the idea that the lines were actually immense canals built by the Martians to bring water from the icy white polar caps to quench their drying, dying cities.  While Lowell seems to have assumed the superior Martians would eventually accept the end of their species and become extinct with dignity, Wells imagined these same creatures not wanting to go down with their planetary ship, thus their invasion of Earth.

Of course, one advantage Wells’ Martians had over just about any other species in the Milky Way galaxy was living so relatively near to our world.  A conventional rocket can propel a spacecraft to Mars in a matter of months, as they have in reality since the early 1960s.  However, it is an entirely different matter to send a ship between even the nearest stars.  Unlike the vessels of science fiction which are equipped with fanciful warp and hyper drives or have a convenient cosmic wormhole nearby, our current knowledge of what it would take to get from one star system to another is fraught with technological and celestial hurdles that make even a slow multigenerational ship a daunting task.

So even if an alien planet was going down the drain ecologically, geologically or cosmically, would it be wise (to say nothing of practical) to send a fleet across interstellar space to take over another star system?  Unless their sun was turning into a red giant or going supernova, it would be far easier to utilize the worlds in their own solar system for resources and settling.  For example, if an alien society was in desperate need of water like Lowell’s and Wells’ Martians, it would be much cheaper to mine the many, many comets that we know circle other stars, just as they do at the fringes of our Sol system.  And while we have yet to detect any exomoons, we do know that most of the moons circling the four Jovian planets are covered in water ice and some, like Jupiter’s Europa, probably have deep global water oceans.

The same goes for mineral resources.  The Milky Way galaxy alone is estimated to contain many billions of solar systems.  Presumably they have lots of planetoids and comets in addition to their major worlds, just like our celestial neighborhood.  It is also probable that many of those worlds are uninhabited but rich in elements that a technological civilization would find useful.  So even if our marauding aliens do want to journey all the way across the galaxy for gold or oil or whatever, why focus on Earth and its environs when the pickings are so easy and plentiful elsewhere?   Hauling all those rocks home would be expensive as all get out.  So trying to colonize a solar system that already has one intelligent species, even if that species is just starting to explore and utilize space, might be more trouble than it is worth.

Now let’s look at another classic reason for an ETI to want to come to Earth:  Dinner.  It has become practically an old joke that some aliens would see all the teeming life forms covering our planet and consider us an open buffet.  Not only do we once again invoke the question of whether it would be worth going to all that time and expense for a meal when there are probably much closer snacks at home; it is also virtually certain that our biochemistries would be so different that Earth organisms would be poison or cardboard to an alien creature (and vice versa).  The vastly different genetics would also prevent interspecies breeding, especially since it is unlikely that we and they will look anything alike.  As for needing a race of slaves, robots would be much less expensive and far more efficient.  Mission Serving Man sounds like some very old and very low-grade science fiction.

If it is just too much to fly all the way here for rocks or a meal, are there any other reasons why an ETI might still want to exterminate us?  We may not be a threat *now*, but perhaps there might be others who could see us as future cosmic competitors for available places and resources.  If the galaxy has beings who think in very long terms, certainly much longer than most present humans do, they may not want to wait until our descendants are arriving at their doorsteps and may want to take us out now instead.

I for one would like to think and hope that a stellar island of 400 billion suns over 100,000 light years across with perhaps 100 billion galaxies beyond our Milky Way in a Universe 13.7 billion light years wide would be plenty for everyone.  However, perhaps some cosmic real estate is more choice than others and its finite nature makes it a valuable target worth fighting for.  One estimate I saw in a Scientific American article from 2000 said the galaxy could be conceivably colonized in just 3 million years – a very short time compared to the 10 billion year age of the Milky Way.  The fact that our planet appears to be free of any alien conquerors/settlers may say something about that idea, or perhaps conquest and colonization is not as popular as we might imagine (and often do).

Even if we and others decide to be planetary homebodies for many generations, there will come a day when a home system’s main source of light and heat, their sun, will begin to die out.  Our yellow sun is no exception:  Sol is expected to start making things pretty unbearable on Earth in just a few billion years as it begins to expand into a red giant.  Even if Earth is spared being swallowed up by this bloated monstrosity of hot gasses, our planet will be charred into molten slag, killing anything living that remains.  Earth will later turn into a frozen iceball as Sol shrinks into a white dwarf and eventually a dead, dark cinder.  Even if our planet survives all this in at least its physical presence, when Sol goes completely so will Earth, its icy battered carcass floating off into the depths of the Milky Way as a rogue world.

So while we do have several billion years to prepare for this event, eventually nature will force our hand and make us choose either flight or extinction.  Even staying in distant parts of our system will become impossible once Sol starts collapsing upon itself.  And this is the fate of every star some day, even the very long lived red dwarfs, though some suns will also turn supernova or collapse into neutron stars or black holes.  I know things will be very different in those distant epochs, but anything beyond briefly visiting Earth or anyplace else nearby in those eras seems infeasible at best and deadly at worst.

Have other species around other suns realized this about their celestial hearths as well?  Will they decide to stay at home and wait for the end, or will they pack up and look for worlds where their suns won’t be going out quite so soon?  Will the fact that we have at least a few billion more years of relative safety be appealing to such refugees?  What happens when it is our species’ turn?  Perhaps there are many vague and hidden factors that will render all this speculation and prediction moot, but at least this idea has the merit of being a plausible reason why one might take up interstellar voyaging.

Another reason ETI might want to come to Earth is religion.  Perhaps like certain segments of humanity there are alien beings who strongly believe it is their sacred duty to share the Good News with everyone else, whether they want it or not.  Will alien missionaries ply the stars seeking to convert other species to what they perceive as The Truth, perhaps affecting “heathens” in the same way that missionaries affected other cultures in their zeal to save souls – settling in some very nice real estate in the process.  What will happen when a human group and an alien collective of very intense and very certain religious missionaries encounter each other?  Or is religion a primarily human concept?  Well, so far we have not been forced to worship any strange alien deities by clergy from the stars, unless some of our current religions were the direct result of an ancient missionary visit.

Images: 1st, the obligatory destruction of the White House by aliens, here in Independence Day; 2nd, alien appetites shown on Mars Attacks trading cards (Gelman, Brown and Saunders); 3rd, a bored godlike alien as embodied by Star Trek’s Q (John de Lancie); 4th, squabbles over choice real estate in Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds; 5th, A Case of Conscience by James Blish, an early SFnal example of planetary missionary fervor.

Part 3

Slowly Ripening Apples

Saturday, September 25th, 2010

As the days grow golden and the nights deepen, many things are quietly fermenting in the back of my mind. I’m thinking of autumnal cultures, such as Vulcans and Elves; I’m thinking of language as a uniter and a divider; I’m thinking of the travails of stem cell research.

The most urgently bubbling vat is a long-suspended story close to my heart. Those who watched me create the Embers/Spider Silk universe have seen an early draft of its beginning. For those who read Planetfall, its hero — and I use the male form on purpose — is the nameless first-person narrator in Night Whispers, the last section of that story.

When I write about that world I live in it: it fills my head, it haunts my dreams. So all else will have to wait, in the cricket-filled hush of early fall, until The Wind Harp sings.

Image: Rest at Journey’s End by Heather D. Oliver, depicting the end of Night Whispers.

Why Do We Fear Aliens? Part 1

Monday, August 30th, 2010

by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast, science journalist

Athena’s note: Many readers assumed that I wrote this article, especially those who are familiar with my views on ETI.  I wish I had, but please note the byline.  Though this is superfluous, I should add that I completely agree with Larry.

Part 1

Several months ago, the famous British physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking shared his views on extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI) with the intelligent beings of the planet Earth. This was done in no small part as a way to gain publicity for his new television science series, Stephen Hawking’s Universe, video clips of which may be seen here.

Hawking thinks that if biological life evolved elsewhere in the Cosmos as it has here on Earth, then there is a good chance it will have a territorial and predatory nature similar to most creatures on this planet. These behaviors would persist even in species that achieve sentience and technologies that exceed ours.

Sounding very much like the alien invaders from the 1996 science fiction film Independence Day, Hawking’s advanced ETI would roam the galaxy in massive starships that serve as both transportation and home. Having used up the resources of their home world (and presumably the rest of their solar system), Hawking’s ETI would search for suitable worlds to “conquer and colonize,” using them up as well (subduing and/or removing any living native competition in the process) and then moving on to the next set of viable targets.

There are numerous issues with Hawking’s scenario, which even a modest student of science fiction knows goes back over a century, with the invading Martians of H. G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds being the most notable of the premise that alien intelligences might treat us the way most human cultures have treated others on Earth for millennia, right up to the present day. The numbers of novels, books, films, television series, and articles that have been made about this subject since Wells’ day would fill a decent size library. So why are Stephen Hawking’s views on this matter receiving so much attention from the media and public?

The most obvious reason is that Hawking is a famous and brilliant scientist, one of the few whom the general populace recognizes with ease, like Albert Einstein, even if they don’t always know or understand his work and ideas. These factors combine to make the public and media think that professionals like Hawking are therefore experts on virtually every subject in existence, including the nature and behavior of hypothetical ETI.

While few would dispute the high intelligence and knowledge of Hawking when it comes to his chosen career fields, the truth is that on the matter of extraterrestrial life he has no deeper insights than any other human on Earth, past or present. Hawking is still subject to his culture, era, and species when it comes to ETI. Even Einstein, to whom Hawking has often been compared, followed the trends of his place and time when it came to aliens. Einstein assumed there were intelligent beings living on Mars and even wrote about an optical method of communicating with the imagined Martians in 1937. Einstein did this despite the fact that by that time most professional astronomers seriously doubted that the Red Planet either had or could support complex, intelligent life forms.

This is not intended to be a putdown of these great thinkers. Instead, it shows that when it comes to predicting the forms and motivations of ETI, after two millennia of contemplation on the subject and just a few decades of actually searching for them, all we really have to go on for solid evidence are the inhabitants of a single planet called Earth and the tantalizing clues slowly popping up across the rest of the Universe.

So why do Hawking and so many others assume a Universe full of predatory life forms, be they amoebae or beings of superior intelligence and technology? Going along the theme that even great scientists are subject to the knowledge limits of their time, culture, and profession, life on this planet has long been viewed and portrayed as one which is in a constant struggle for survival against both the environment and other creatures, including and especially one’s own species. There is of course a great deal of truth to this, as virtually every terrestrial organism spends much of its life fighting for food, living areas, and mates, through either physical force or more stealthy manipulations.

However, in recent decades, it has been recognized that life forms across the board, especially those that exist in societies, are far more altruistic and cooperative than it may seem on the surface. Even humanity, despite its abilities to make war on a globally destructive scale and despoil entire ecosystems, is much more cooperative and conscientious of ourselves and our surroundings than we tend to give ourselves credit for. We have finally begun to recognize and act upon the fact that Earth is not some limitless playground that will tolerate our ancient instinctual needs and behaviors indefinitely. This has brought about our efforts to preserve and protect the remaining resources and biota of Earth – imperfectly, of course, but at least a global response is underway – and we have so far succeeded in avoiding a nuclear war or other similar form of drastic artificial catastrophe, something our military and political leaders considered both survivable and winnable not so very long ago.

With this being the case, would future humanity extend its current instinctual drives in an uncontrolled manner into the rest of the galaxy once we begin expanding our species beyond the boundaries of its home world? Would our children become what Hawking fears about ETI?

While no one can guarantee absolute certainties in either direction with our limited knowledge and experiences in these areas, I will say that I think living in space and on the other worlds of our Sol system, none of which are presently survivable upon without either dwelling inside protective enclosures or being heavily modified (which could take centuries if not millennia to work for the latter case), will force our space-residing descendants to work together for their mutual existence and evolution. The very harsh nature of reality beyond Earth will not tolerate the excesses and foolishness our species has been largely able to get away with for most of its existence.

Of course it is possible that future science could create a form of humanity genetically tailored to occupy just about any corner of the Sol system, on-worlds and off, or they could abandon biology altogether and place the human mind in a mechanical form and/or create a new kind of mind-being called an Artilect.

Granted, these scenarios are not something that will happen next week to be sure, plus they have numerous hurdles to overcome even if they are possible. However, they do illuminate the point that the best kinds of beings to survive and thrive on a cosmic scale are not necessarily the type of humanity that exists on Earth now, or any other form of life suited for one world only. Add to this fact that a spacefaring society would find vast amounts of resources among the planetoids and comet which we know exist throughout the stars and perhaps a species that spends its time marauding inhabited planets makes a bit less sense, if not as enthralling for the entertainment of our species.

Perhaps what Hawking and others fail to completely grasp is that any alien intelligences which do emerge in our galaxy will come from a world that is not a carbon copy of Earth and may in many cases evolve on a Jovian type moon, or a Jovian type world itself, or perhaps in some other kind of environment that current science would not consider to be a place for any kind of life. There is no certainty that even the behaviors or organisms everywhere are literally universal, including the kind that devour their home worlds and then have the ability and will to pack up and do the same thing again and again across the heavens. To be even more specific, the kind of actions and goals that may work for a creature confined to its home world may not be feasible beyond their domain of origin.

The fact that even someone as educated and intelligent as Stephen Hawking should view other societies in the Milky Way galaxy with fear under the presumption that all intelligences evolved in similar ways and will continue to behave in an instinctive manner even if they achieve interstellar travel shows how much of humanity still thinks and lives as if the whole of existence revolves and focuses around our one planet.

Accepting the fact that the vast majority of us have remained Earthbound and will continue to do so for at least a few more generations, our species nevertheless has been intellectually aware for centuries now that we dwell on a rocky planet circling one of hundreds of billions of suns in a vast celestial island. Just as the elements which make up this world are also found throughout the Universe, it is equally possible that biological organisms do universally behave just as Hawking predicts. The question remains, however: do they evolve into beings of higher intelligence who still retain certain instincts or do they eventually move away from them? Or does something completely different happen and is it unique for every species? That will be the focus in Part 2, along with a look at how events might go and why if an ETI ever did attack us and our world.

Images: Top, two archetypal hostile aliens — the xenomorph of the Alien tetralogy and the hunter of the Predator series; middle, the truly terrifying Kang and Kodos of Rigel VII and The Simpsons; bottom, the alien fleet approaches Earth’s moon in the V remake.

Part 2

Part 3

Only Kowtowers Need Apply

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

About twenty years ago, I was going through the gauntlet of becoming a US citizen. The immigration interviewer put her hand on top of the thick stack that contained copies of the Harvard B.A., the MIT Ph.D., the assistant professor appointment from Harvard Medical, the research papers, the Harvard Review articles and asked: “Have you ever been a whore? Are you one now?”

None of my credentials mattered. And given the specifics of the situation, she could humiliate and mistreat me with impunity. People who want to cut others down to their own size consistently employ this technique.

I had reason to recall this incident yesterday. A friend sent me a link to a magazine soliciting literary criticism and non-fiction of interest to the SF/F community. I e-mailed them asking if they would consider reprints. When told that they wouldn’t do reprints, I gave a link to an published example to showcase my work and proposed a brand-new unpublished review.

The editor — who prides herself in her progressiveness — didn’t deign to read through my message. Instead, she accused me of trying to “sell” used goods (for the astronomical amount of $100, one third of my hourly consulting fee). The last sentence of her e-mail, which is representative of her overall tone, reads: “I appreciate your chutzpah but you are wasting my time”.

The exchange was so fast that she clearly didn’t bother to even Google me. Maybe the non-Anglosaxon name was sufficient to disqualify me from consideration as either a writer or a human of sufficiently high caste. And obviously I did not register as someone who could affect her wallet or reputation – if I had, the refusal would at least have been polite.

As with the immigration officer, it made no difference that I’ve written a popular stealth science book, that some of my essays won awards, that I must turn down requests for reviews and articles for lack of time, that several SF authors consult me and send me their novel drafts for critique, that I’m one of the few people in the domain who is also a working scientist. The crucial point was to establish superiority by acting as if I were a sleazy impostor attempting to weasel my way into her gated community.

My words won’t change anything, because this person is deemed to be one of the industry Names who Must be Appeased (if only because “editors talk to each other”). And I’m sure I will hear the argument that her brilliance as a critic and editor excuses her behavior. The reality is that she represents the increasing mistreatment of writers by self-appointed gatekeepers who fancy themselves feudal lords and the rest serfs because it’s a buyer’s market.

This kind of behavior does nothing to enrich the stock of contributors or the quality of the contributions. When the overriding factor is massaging a primadonna’s ego, craft and imagination become distant second requirements. It does encourage other things, however: bootlicking and similar ghetto habits. And it may explain why speculative fiction increasingly cannot have nice things.

Image: Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), the epitome of rudeness to “inferiors” and obsequiousness to “superiors”.

What I Did During My Summer Non-Vacation

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

(best read to Oysterband’s Dancing as Fast as I Can)

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes,
and oh, my friends —
It gives a lovely light!

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

To anyone wondering about the unusually long silence on the blog — I’ve been working solo in the lab and closing out my two small grants. I’ve gone once again to half salary, to nurse my tiny seed corn until the fate of my pending grant gets decided.

On other fronts, I’ve managed to keep my hanging gardens going despite the weather. Last weekend we went on an art walk in that lovely corner of New England tucked between Newport and South Dartmouth, which is Cape Cod minus tchotchkes and tourists. I’m wrestling with several invited stories, articles and reviews — though I need to impose some discipline, because they keep jostling each other for attention in my head.

I was one of the judges in the short story contest of Science in My Fiction. The ten finalists were excellent and hard to rank. They also had several commonalities. All but one and a half were resolutely earth-bound; all but two unfolded in the US or a vague post-apocalyptic landscape; all took their kernels from biology and focused on the brain/mind; and they contained zero romance. In short, cyberpunk… but they engaged well with the scientific concepts that fueled them.

I also gave a solo talk and participated in two panels at Readercon. In my talk, Citizens of the Universe, Citizens of the World, I discussed the importance of wide horizons to writing speculative fiction with authenticity and legitimacy. The panels were Avatar and the Future of Planetary Romance and The Body and Physicality in Speculative Fiction. Both were thought-provoking and lively – and if you guessed that I had much to say and did so, you’d be right. The second panel could easily have lasted three hours. We were just getting warmed up when we had to roll our tents.

On the Saturday of Readercon Joan Slonczewski, Jack McDevitt and Sue Lange came to dinner. Given the topics we covered, I should have registered this as a panel!

And I still take the occasional moment to shake my head over such things as the seriously flawed longevity gene study (another spectacular case of hype over rigor, especially for a journal like Science) and the witchhunts by those whose appetite for destruction has overwhelmed their reasoning capacity. The Democratic leadership should grow a spine and re-read the tale of the scorpion and the frog.

Images: top, Loie Fuller, Serpentine Dance (1896); bottom, the hanging gardens of North Cambridge.

Escaping Self-Imposed Monochromatic Cages

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010

A few years ago, I shared parts of my SF saga (glimpsed in Planetfall) with several dozen readers in a closed list. Their first view of the Koredháni, the major culture in the story, was the formidable Meráni Yehán:

My consort’s people are lean, sharp-featured, great-eyed. Intricate jewelry circles their arms, adorns their long manes. A spiral-shaped brand glimmers on the breastbone of one of the adult men. Two are striplings, a girl whose breasts have just budded and a boy with the roundness of childhood still on his limbs. They range loosely behind an erect, dark woman with white hair still glinting with copper threads and eyes the color of stormy seas.

Stopping two paces in front of me, she smiles calmly and briefly inclines her head. “Ánassa Tásri-e Sóran-Kerís… Meráni kóren, tanegír adhríti Yehán.”* The night-hued voice, the voice that sailed into my mind like a sleek canoe to help me reel him back from the starry void.

*”Long Shadow Tásri-e Sóran-Kerís… I am Meráni, leader of hearth Yehán.”

Right away, one reader asked: “How do you ‘see’ Meráni and her husbands?” (Yes, women lead all the households, many are polyandrous, and the co-husbands consider themselves brothers; they also have nanobiotech, star drives and both gene and planetary engineering – and have used their technology to leave practically no footprint on their adopted planet).

I replied, “Except for the seafoam eyes, she looks like Entity (Tina Turner) in Beyond Thunderdome. Her four husbands look like a Celt, a Native American, an Arab and an African. And Ánassa looks like Lao Ma (Jacqueline Kim) in The Debt.” This was so with no deliberation on my part. That’s how they looked to me from the moment I conceived them.

There was dead silence on the list for a day or so. Then I got an avalanche of private e-mails, with photos attached. Without exception, the e-mails told how they felt that the story had become truly theirs. Unbeknownst to me, and not easily discernible from the names, half my readers were non-white.

This led to another outcome: everyone stopped assuming that the characters in my story were white (in fact, none were, given the Koredháni reproductive constraints). In a tiny way, I had jogged everyone’s mindset away from instinctively following a convention. This led to an unexpected gift that has never ceased to amaze and delight me. After the photos, I also got a flood of illustrations to my saga from two readers who are artists. Their depictions were so true to my characters that I can no longer see them in any other way – and if the saga ever sees the light of day, I will try to include them in the manuscript.

I was born and raised in a country that was racially and culturally homogeneous, but had always been a migratory passage as well as the nexus of two multicultural empires – Alexandrian and Byzantine. My history courses were peopled by Persians, Egyptians, Nubians, Gauls, Huns. When I came to the US at 18, I marveled at the human colors, shapes and accents, and the individual and collective backstories that came with them. And when I started writing fiction, my characters came in all hues without any conscious effort on my part. How could it be otherwise, with the swirling kaleidoscope inside and around me?

Yet even today, the default assumption of SF/F denizens continues to be that everyone is bleach-white unless explicitly specified otherwise. This is not confined to Anglosaxon cubicleers who write faux-Victorian steampunk. The Japanese give saucer-round eyes to most of their manga characters (these, along with the breathless falsetto voices, are very disquieting on female characters with exaggerated secondary gender attributes). Manoj Nelliyattu (aka Night) Shyamalan, a Tamil who must have more than a drop of Dravidian in him, cast bleached actors in all the main roles for his disastrous Last Airbender.

I still remember starting a story by Arthur C. Clarke that postulated a long-generation starship in which the social structure was identical to fifties middle-class suburbia. Having read his “bouncing breasts of female astronauts distract men in zero-G” screed I already thought him blinkered, but this clinched it. I put the story down unfinished and never read anything by him again. How is it possible for self-defined visionaries to continue showing societies inhabited by people of a single hue in nuclear patriarchal families? Only if you build a mind cage and put yourself willingly in it can you continue extrapolating in this impoverished, impoverishing mode.

Readers want to find themselves in stories. They want protagonists who look like them, who carry at least a bit of their particular culture and history. And when enough unbleached people appear in a genre, they stop being sidekicks or tokens and become the unique, memorable persons they have the capacity to be: Ursula Le Guin’s copper-skinned, hawk-featured Ged and her Inuit-like Gethenian hero/ine Therem Harth rem ir Estraven; Poul Anderson’s half-Dutch, half-Javanese Nicholas van Rijn; Alma Alexander’s sworn women friends in alternative China; Aliette de Bodard’s Aztec priest Acatl; Xena’s rainbow of lovers; the Scorpion King and his almond-eyed sorceress partner (which put Dwayne Johnson on the snacho list).

There’s an object lesson in my experience with my readers. We don’t have to accept every culture and cultural custom as equally valid for ourselves individually. Personally, I would not be happy in any fundamentalist and/or coercive world and would be unlikely to read with pleasure a story that depicted such a culture positively (cautionary tales are a different category). But we cannot become citizens of the universe if we do not first become citizens of the world: if we do not allow ourselves to register the dizzying richness and variety that surrounds us – and use this knowledge, carefully but fearlessly, to create genuinely new worlds worthy of remembrance.

Images: Tina Turner as Entity in Beyond Thunderdome;
Ged, Wizard of Earthsea by Laurie Prindle;
Meráni, tanegír Yehán, by Heather D. Oliver.

The Future’s so Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades!

Monday, April 26th, 2010

As of last Friday, I’m an affiliate member of SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.  I want to thank Mary Robinette Kowal for her lightspeed approval of my application and her warm welcome; and the three friends who supported my application: Jack McDevitt, Laura Mixon and Gerry Nordley.

To further brighten this happy occasion, SF Signal is hosting my review of Shine, an anthology of optimistic near-future SF edited by author/editor Jetse de Vries.  Readers of this blog have heard me complain about the inclination of contemporary SF to whiny broodinessShine is an antidote to that: a worthwhile experiment that deserves to have readers and successors.

And… io9 approached the Science in My Fiction blog founders, asking if they can reprint posts of potential interest to their readers.  For their first “reprint”, they chose You Only Find What You’re Looking For.  Today io9, tomorrow the galaxy!

My Cup Runneth Slightly Over

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Lest anyone is worried that I’m slacking off, the reason for the (comparative) silence is that I’ve been toiling on three almost simultaneous articles.

— An expanded version of You Only Find What You’re Looking For appeared in Science in My Fiction. Opening paragraph:

“Extraterrestrial life is a staple of SF and the focus of astrobiology and SETI. Yet whereas SF has populated countless worlds with varying success, from Tiptree’s haunting Flenni (Your Haploid Heart) to Lucas’ annoying Ewoks, real ETs remain stubbornly elusive: nobody has received a transmission demanding more Chuck Berry, and the planetary probe data are maddeningly inconclusive. Equally controversial are the shadowy forms on Martian asteroid ALH84001, though the pendulum has swung toward wary favoring of the biological possibility after scientists discovered nanobacteria on earth and water on Mars.”

— I was invited to be part of a Mind Meld at SF Signal. The question was “What are some of the coolest robots in science fiction? Why?” I won’t put excerpts of this here, to avoid spoilers! Here’s a hint, though: my answer partly aligns with what I said in The Souls in Our Machines.

— My article Miranda Wrongs: Reading too Much into the Genome, which discusses naive views of genetic engineering, appeared on H+ Magazine. Opening paragraph:

“When the sequence of the human genome was declared essentially complete in 2003, all biologists (except perhaps Craig Venter) heaved a sigh of gladness that the data were all on one website, publicly available, well-annotated and carefully cross-linked. Some may have hoisted a glass of champagne. Then they went back to their benches. They knew, if nobody else did, that the work was just beginning. Having the sequence was the equivalent of sounding out the text of an alphabet whose meaning was still undeciphered. For the linguistically inclined, think of Etruscan.”

Revel in the bounty while it lasts! May will be grant-writing time again.  After that, I’ll concentrate on fewer, larger writing chunks.  In particular, my stories are banging urgently within my head.

Images:  top, T’uupieh of Titan, assassin, singer (Joan Vinge, Eyes of Amber); bottom, cartoon by Polyp.

Jade Masks, Lead Balloons and Tin Ears

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

“Ich bin ein Berliner,” John F. Kennedy announced to West Berlin in 1963. No doubt, Kennedy’s handlers, hearing the roars from the assembled throng, thought the young president had charmed the Germans. Had they listened closely, they might have heard guffaws escaping the crowd. After all, they had just heard the leader of the Free World proclaim that he was a jelly donut.

Fast forward to 2010. An up-and-coming fantasy author has written the customary trilogy and his world-building has been hailed as “meticulous, yet fresh”. A caste in his books names its male members after precious stones. One of the two main heroes is called Nephron.

Nephron means Kidney.

I gamely pointed this out in an online magazine that featured a worshipful review of the trilogy. In response, the author descended upon the forum and spake thus:

1. He was perfectly aware that nephron means kidney but those who possess deep learning and intellectual subtlety would be aware that nephrite is the Greek name for jade.
2. Despite point 1, surely he cannot be expected to consider every possible silly nuance. After all – and here I quote him verbatim – Lord of Wind might be construed to refer to farts.
3. And despite point 2, he researched everything in his trilogy within an inch of its life and he doth challenge me to prove otherwise. I’m surprised he didn’t say he would grade me.

The fact that I’m a native Hellenic speaker does not automatically make me an authority on etymology or connotations. However, I went to one of those bloody elite schools where they forced us to learn all the flavors of our language, from Homeric to demotic. I also became fluent or competent in a few more languages through the years and I love exploring patterns, links and shifts. So I know that in most Indo-European tongues the word for jade means “kidney(-like) or flank stone” because it was thought to help kidney colic: nephritis lithos (Hellenic), lapis nephriticus (Latin), Beilstein (German), piedra de ijada (Spanish). Nephrite is one of the two distinct silicates bundled into the term jade, nephritis is medicalese for kidney inflammation, nephritic means of the kidney.

Bottom line: Nephron, unmodified and standalone, still means Kidney and no amount of sophistry or posturing can change that.

To give you a parallel example from the same work, the other main hero is called Carnelian – derived from the Latin carnis, flesh or meat, because of that gemstone’s most common color. Nevertheless, the author did not name him Carne. The sensibility of the author’s own Romance natal language led him to avoid such a lethal blow to his work’s intended Wagnerian gravitas.

While the author was holding forth, I headed over to his site and read his synopses of the first two volumes of the trilogy. His naming system is a mishmash: for example, name endings aren’t linguistically congruent even within each stratum of each culture. So I suspect that his vaunted research into the suitability of Nephron probably went like this:

Author to the corner Greek or Cypriot grocer: Hey Spiro, does Nephron sound heroic to you?

Grocer (snickering discreetly, like the Berlin residents at Kennedy):
Sounds fantabulous, mate!

Author (putting check mark next to the name): One more item deeply researched.

Tin ears and leaden tongues are not exclusive to Anglophone SF/F authors or directors with Hindenburg-sized egos. Most Japanese manga and animé blithely serve Name Mangle Royale. This actually goes down very well in satire, parody or light-hearted pastiches (think Xena or Samurai Champloo). However, it’s as enticing as thrice-thawed carne in wannabe epics that take themselves deadly seriously (Star Wars, Bleach, the Tolkien clones). In a secondary universe, character names invariably peg the creator’s ability to bring that world into life and make readers yearn to inhabit it.

Invented names and terms need to reflect the fictional culture they represent at several levels, because they serve as extra conduits into the created universe. This means they must have a fundamental integrity, and be more than half-digested scraps from shallow meta-sources. Their inventors have to be aware of the languages they base them on – their structure, rhythm, tonality, inflections. Being multilingual helps and so does research, but a good ear is even more crucial. Too little foundation, and you have cardboard; too little integration, and you have soupy cement. Poul Anderson knew this. So did Tolkien, though he got slightly carried away. So do Ursula Le Guin and Jacqueline Carey, adept at creating layered secondary worlds with names/terms that make you sigh happily and say “that’s it exactly – I couldn’t imagine this being called anything else.”

Which brings us back to Kidney and his world. As its names go, so does the rest of it. I was sorely tempted to take up the author’s challenge and write a detailed review of his doorstops. I read as much of the three novels as I could find on the Internet and found the excerpts predictable and pedestrian (and no, I don’t need to read the entire Twilight series to form an opinion of it). Besides its toe-fracturing heft, the trilogy also sounds like a fantasy version of the TV series 24: even its devotees mention that torture is graphic and constant, the action unfolds …in …real …time and the author is so enamored of world-building that the edifice creaks like Hollywood plywood town fronts. In other words, this is Robert Jordan or Storm Constantine for the kidneyed… er, jaded.

Even if I had the time and stamina to slog through such an opus, I cannot read violence porn for jollies or to prove my edgy sophistication. Torture shadowed my people till the mid-seventies and was used on my immediate family. It’s also worth reflecting that an equivalent amount of sex in the book (even the vanilla kind, let alone BDSM) would have consigned it to a very different category and we would not be having this sardonyx… excuse me, sardonic conversation.

Images: Kuzco in his llama incarnation, from The Emperor’s New Groove; cartoon, Baloocartoonblog, 2009; Ekaterina Shemyak, Therem ir Stokven – a beautifully named character in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness whose equally haunting tale can be read here.

Related posts:

On Being Bitten to Death by Ducks
Storytelling, Empathy and the Whiny Solipsist’s Disingenuous Angst
Being Part of Everyone’s Furniture; Or: Appropriate Away!

Being Part of Everyone’s Furniture; Or: Appropriate Away!

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

For I come from an ardent race that has subsisted on defiance and visions.

Two weeks ago, I was too tired to undertake the one-hour drive home after staying late in the lab.  I took refuge in a hotel with the proverbial 57 channels.  And so it came to pass that I finally saw 300, purporting to depict the life of Leonidhas and the Spartans’ stand at Thermopylae.  Except that the Spartans wore black naugahyde diapers, Xerxes was a slim version of Divine, his Immortals looked like orcs and Leonídhas showed his bravery by shoving an unarmed herald down a pit the size of an asteroid crater (in Sparta’s central square yet – bad for tots, to say nothing of fast traffic).

As I watched this dumb dull mess, it came home to me that my culture is deemed common property and used accordingly.  Yet few people really know anything about it beyond the cartoon version that passes for world history in most US schools.

As my readers know, I was born and raised in Hellás (as Hellenes, aka Greeks, call their country) and came to the US at 18.  Since my transplantation, I haven’t seen a single Anglosaxon film or TV show depicting Hellenic history or myth that was not cringe-worthy.  They’ve been so uniformly dismal that the cheerful hodgepodge of Xena was at the top of the pile (no exaggeration).  In 2005, literally everyone I spoke with asked variants of “Are all ‘you people’ like those in My Big Fat Greek Wedding?” and I had to restrain myself from wielding a baseball bat – or a spear.  There are three Hellene directors of international standing who explore the culture’s myth/history (Michális Kakoyánnis, Theódhoros Angelópoulos, Pantelís Voúlgharis) but their work appears only in art film archives.

I have also read vast numbers of historical and alternate history novels by Anglosaxon authors that take place in Hellas  – to name just a few, Mary Renault, Steven Pressfield, Barry Unsworth, Ellen Frye from the literary side; from SF/fantasy, Jacqueline Carey, Guy Gavriel Kay, Greg Benford, Jenny Blackford.  Many of these books are fine if judged solely on their literary merits, some are best passed over in silence. In most of them, the stray Hellenic phrases (even when uttered by natives) are at the level of tourist pidgin and the Hellene characters are Gunga Din sidekicks.  A few of the stories ring “real” enough that I can lower my shield and relax into them: Jim Brown’s Blood Dance, Roderick Beaton’s Ariathne’s Children, Paul Preuss’ Secret Passages.

In stark contrast, Hellenes have no literary voice in the west.  Although ancient Hellenic literature used to be the province of any well-educated Western European man, the same cannot be said of contemporary Hellenic letters.  If asked to name recent Hellene writers, people may manage to dredge up Nikos Kazantzákis, and him only because of the popularity of the movie version of Zorba the Greek.  If they are intellectuals, they might be able to name the four world-famous poets: Kostantínos Kaváfis, Odysséus Elytis, Ghiórghos Seféris, Yiánnis Rítsos.  English-speaking readers can browse through translations of just about any national literature you can name. Yet translations of contemporary Hellenic prose are still non-existent.  Nobody knows that Hellas boasts perhaps the best magic realist in the world, Evghenía Fakínou; at least three living poets of giant stature: Victoría Theodhórou, Jénny Mastoráki, Kikí Dhimoulá; and a veritable galaxy of stellar novelists.

At the same time, Westerners are convinced that they “know” my tradition by hazy general familiarity, as I had the dubious privilege to discover.  Everyone mispronounces my name even after repeated corrections.  In my chosen research domain of alternative splicing, the established terminology of exons and introns betrays the namer’s ignorance of Hellenic: exons stay in, introns are spliced out to form the final RNA.  And in a concrete example from another realm, my submission to the Viable Paradise SF workshop contained scenes of contemporary young Hellene men teasing each other.  The participants who critiqued the work were American or Canadian; none had ever been to Hellás.  Yet they insisted that “only gay people talk like this.”  They took it for granted that they knew better than a native how Cretans behave and that their stereotyped assumptions trumped my first hand experience (so much for diversity and cosmopolitanism in SF).

There have been impassioned discussions in the speculative fiction community about whether authors can write with authenticity and moral authority about cultures that aren’t their own – travelogues aside, which invariably say more about the author than the place they are visiting, P. J. O’Rourke being a poster case.  This discussion cannot help but be complex because it’s overlaid with issues of race and colonization.  Taken to its extreme logical conclusion, the injunction of “Write (only) what you know” would put a fatal crimp on fiction.  On the other hand, the sudden emergence of Victorian Orientalism in steampunk is a serious added annoyance in an already self-consciously regressive subgenre.

Hellenes spent four hundred years under Ottoman occupation as second class citizens, subject to whim death and mob violence (flaying and impalement were among the common punishments), forbidden to learn to read and write their language, forced to supply their overlords with children who were turned into janissaries or odalisques.  The Hellenes – small from malnutrition and mostly olive-skinned and black-haired – were called “dirty darkies” when they first arrived in Western Europe and the US after the bruising civil war.  They were not people of color, but they weren’t considered Aryans either, as the Nazis decided during their occupation of Hellas: each German killed by the resistance merited the execution of at least ten Hellenes, or the slaughtering and razing of the entire nearest village.  The Hellas of today is a poor EU cousin currently undergoing a major economic crisis. Unlike AIG or Bank of America, it’s not “too big to fail” even though its debt ratios are similar to those of the US.

Yet the culture had enough élan and vigor to flower four times – Mycenaean, Classical, Alexandrian, Byzantine; the latter, totally ignored even in the anemic world history books, lasted a millennium and acted as a bridge and a buffer between East and West, between the Romans and the Renaissance.  Hellas gave the world much of its science, art, politics, philosophy (and before anyone starts emoting, I’m keenly aware of the equally decisive contributions of other cultures).  Its people kept their language, identity and spirit intact through all the violations and depradations.  Hellenes ace the verbal SAT with little effort, since everything in English longer than two syllables is mostly derived from our language.

So when all is taken into account, I think we are strong enough to survive even the crude cartoonish renditions of Hellas and Hellenes in the media.  I’m not sure if we’ll weather the imminent release of The Clash of the Titans remake, however.  Judging by its trailers, it will be yet another total chariot wreck.  And to Sam Worthington, a word of advice: that buzz cut reduces your hero status to zero. Hellenic heroes had long hair, from Ahilléas to Leonídhas to the untamed outlaws who wrested the country’s independence from the Turks. A shaved head was a sign of slavery. Long hair was a signal of freedom.

Images: The Angel with the Machine Gun, Tássos, woodcut (the figure is dressed like an andártis, a resistance fighter during WWII); Iríni Pappá (Klytemnístra) and Tatiána Papamóschou (Ifighéneia) in Kakoyánnis’ film version of Eurypídhes’ Ifighéneia; Astradhení (Star Binder), Evghenía Fakínou’s first novel; Thémis Bazáka (Eléni) in  Pantelís Voúlgharis’ Ta Pétrina Hrónia (The Stone Years); Athanássios Dhiákos, a freedom fighter captured and impaled by the Turks in 1821, age 33.

Note: Now also posted on HuffPo.

Related posts:
Iskander, Khan Tengri
The Hyacinth among the Roses: The Minoan Civilization
Jade Masks, Lead Balloons and Tin Ears
A (Mail)coat of Many Colors: The Songs of the Byzantine Border Guards
Evgenía Fakínou: The Unknown Archmage of Magic Realism
Herald, Poet, Auteur: Theódhoros Angelópoulos (1935-2012)

“I Like a Little Science in My Fiction”

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Some people walk on water //
Some just keep falling down.

— from Ramon, by Laurie Anderson

Whenever the imminent death of SF from lack of scientific knowledge and/or mindset comes up, some people wring hands and point fingers at YA fantasy or the “feminization” of the domain, some spring to action:  Kay Holt and Bart Leib, the founders/editors of Crossed Genres, just launched a blog titled Science in My Fiction.  As Kay says, both in words and in the playful image she created to celebrate the launch (right):

“The purpose of the Science in My Fiction blog is to get science fiction and fantasy writers and fans thinking ahead of science again. Playful bloggers will take a look at recent scientific developments and extrapolate potential futures from them. // This is a fight for survival of the fiction. It’s time to seize culture and do science to it!”

Visitors to Astrogator’s Logs will recognize some SiMF contributors: Peggy Kolm, Calvin Johnson, and yours truly.  The first post is Extrapolative Fiction for Sapient Earthlings by Kay Holt.  Posts will initially appear twice weekly and may increase to thrice weekly once the contributors find their rhythm.

Go take a look!

Storytelling, Empathy and the Whiny Solipsist’s Disingenuous Angst

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

In the last few weeks, I’ve been reading stories nominated for the Hugo awards. One of them, the first choice of an SF/F author whose judgment I trust, gave me pause. The concepts were interesting, although the story was a variation on Total Recall. But the characters tasted like cheap cardboard and the style was equally flat. This led me to ponder yet again the much-discussed decline of SF. And from there, with the help of yet another Dr. B. (not the Dr. B. I discussed in Camels, Gnats and Shallow Graves, though they’d fall into a bromance at first sight), my thoughts segued to empathy.

Empathy, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, neatly falls into the “feminine” virtues. Certainly, it is a requirement for successfully rearing children. It is also is a survival tactic for the powerless. So it’s not surprising that it’s a cultivated and praised attribute in women and slaves.

Three kinds of adult humans lack or have difficulty with empathy. The first group cannot help it: they are the people with autism spectrum disorders who often find it hard to understand or interpret the emotions and motivations of others. The second group consists of fundamentalists of all stripes who are convinced they verily possess the stone tablets of Truth and are ready to smash dissenters’ heads with them. [ETA: the second group includes narcissistic socio/psychopaths, who invariably regard themselves as messiahs].

Finally, we have the obnoxiously smug. Invariably these are comfortably off white men who feel free to smirk and sneer about Other’s issues, but when called on it insist that they are misunderstood free spirits persecuted by the humorless PC police. Which brings us to Dr. B.

A few months ago, a pingback showed that someone had referred to my essay The Double Helix: Why Science Needs Science Fiction. Being a curious cat, I followed the link. It led to the blog of Dr. B., an academic astronomer who also writes hard SF. He advocates science literacy, calls himself progressive… so, ever hopeful, I started visiting, happily prepared to join the conversation.

Yet almost immediately, I couldn’t help but notice that several of Dr. B.’s stances “ain’t evolved” (to paraphrase Clarence Thomas). Among them was gratuitous, strident misogyny skulking under the “fairness” veneer. The trend culminated in a recent post in which Dr. B. commented approvingly on an anonymous screed from the National Post, the Canadian equivalent of Fox News:

Women’s Studies programs removed from Canadian universities: “These courses has done untold damage to families, our court systems, labour laws, constitutional freedoms and even the ordinary relations between men and women.” I guess I don’t shed a tear if these are gone. Where are the Men’s Studies? I guess some would say every other course and department out there, but that’s not exactly fair. // Well, that should be provocative enough for some comments.

The Post article itself is the usual venomous tripe about the horrific harm feminism hath wrought, though it missed one obvious talking point – that them dastardly feminazis caused 9/11. It’s the sort of thing Marc Lépine might have written before he murdered fourteen women students of engineering in the Montréal École Polytechnique.

Being a believer in giving people a long rope, I went through four rounds of exchanges with Dr. B. In his responses, he covered every single square of the misogynist bingo board, from the demand to “educate him” to the opinion that women bring down standards in the hard sciences, to whining about the humorlessness of feminists. The gist of his replies was: Enough about women and their imaginary problems. What about oppressed tenured white male ME???

People of this ilk infest self-labeled “progressive” groups – SF authors, transhumanists, “futurists”. Their mindsets are so similar that I wonder if pod-style human cloning isn’t already with us. Their sense of entitlement is as vast as that of any three-year old. They sulk and throw furniture when they’re thwarted in any way, consider their monoculture experience to be universal truth, and believe that their muddled self-serving ideas should be accepted without question because… well, because they are “liberal, leaning libertarian” (translation: it’s fine to bully Others, as long as it’s not state-imposed).

At this point, my readers will justifiably say: “Yet one more obscure navel-watcher is dragging his knuckles on the Internet. Maybe he had a messy divorce, maybe the Diversity Office in his campus took a corner office he was eyeing. Why are you wasting your time and ours on him?”

The answer is, because this man has assumed the role of thought leader and storyteller. A person with a mindset like his is highly unlikely to write absorbing fiction or convincing characters. The empathy that would make the works anything beyond a mirror of the author’s blinkered self-involvement is absent. I found one of Dr. B.’s novels on the Internet. I gave up after slogging through sixty painful pages. Bear in mind that I like hard SF, from Egan to Mixon, and I’ll endure infodumps, shallow characters and tin-ear dialogue if a story’s elements captivate me.

To write well (let alone live well), people need to have open, informed minds. What constitutes such a worldview goes beyond just imaginative extrapolations of concepts and objects. Curiosity and empathy toward others are equally crucial components. If an author can’t (won’t) do that, s/he won’t be able to create credible elves or andromedans either. By encouraging and rewarding lopsided parochialism, SF/F contributes to its own ghettoization and puts a stamp of approval on being junk-food escapism by/for the emotionally stunted.

When people in relatively privileged circumstances live as Others even briefly (John Howard Griffin comes to mind), their outlook changes radically. If I ever became Supreme Dictator, one of my edicts would be that everyone spend at least one year in another culture during their adolescence. Even a brief stay in a different environment peels away the complacency that arises from being embedded in a single context. The double vision that results from such exposure forever alters people’s perceptions. Layered, nuanced storytelling, free of navel-watching and whiny angst, can arise from these jolts.

Most fiction works are slated for oblivion. “Cool” concepts date fast, genre fashions even faster. But storytellers who see into others’ minds create characters that haunt and compel us, whose actions and fates matter to us. Through them, they burst past genre confines to make great literature that is long remembered, retold and sung.

Passed-out-cold bookworm: Gutenberg Project.
“Tantrum” bronze sculpture: Gustav Vigeland, Oslo.
Tales from Earthsea cover: David Wyatt

Readercon 2010

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Yours truly got invited to participate in Readercon 2010.  It’s happening July 8-11 in Burlington (Massachusetts, not Vermont).

Nalo Hopkinson and Charles Stross are this year’s guests of honor. Two friends will also be there, Jack McDevitt (definitely) and Joan Slonczewski (likely).

I may give a talk, be in a panel or both. If you’re thinking of attending, this may help you decide — one way or the other! If you’re there, come say hello (I include a recent photo for identification purposes).

I’ll send a reminder when the event draws near. By then, I will know what I’ll be doing and when.

Contra Mundum

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Crossed Genres is running a ‘donate for Haiti’ campaign by having SF/F authors link free stories to their site.  Contra Mundum originally appeared in After Hours 18, p. 30; Spring 1993 (all my stories published there can be found in The Realms of Fire). The talented Joanna Barnum graciously gave me permission to use one of her lovely watercolors to enrich the story.  If you like the works, please consider making a donation to one of the charities listed at Crossed Genres.

The Tiger’s Bride © Joanna Barnum

Contra Mundum

by Athena Andreadis

Note: Ariáthne, the maiden aspect of the Minoan Great Goddess, was the Mistress of Animals. Her chariot, like that of her Semitic counterpart, Ishtar, was pulled by lions. There are persistent rumors of mountain lion sightings in the Massachusetts Quabbin Reservoir. No one has proved or disproved their existence.

——-

After an interminable interval of slate-gray skies came one day as clear and hard as a diamond. Ariáthne decided to postpone her — so far fruitless — job search and get out of the city. On the way north, she stopped at the Stoneham zoo. She had never been there before.

Her heart swelled with anger and pity. The animals were crowded, emaciated, sickly. She had left the big cats for last. Many visitors were gawking intently into the tiger pit. It was feeding time; the older, much larger male stood over the beef haunch. He periodically interrupted his eating to slap, with increasing ferocity, the young female that kept stealing up to the food, undaunted by the blows that left bloody furrows in her fur.

Ariáthne walked up to a uniformed keeper. In a voice raspy with checked wrath, she asked:

“If they don’t get along, why do you put them together?”

“We don’t have any more space,” he said helplessly. “It takes ages to have a proposal approved by the committee. We had hoped that they would tolerate each other, but the only way this could happen now is if she were to go in heat. But her weight has dropped so much, that has also become impossible. She’ll die of anemia or concussion. Or they’ll come to their senses and have her put to sleep.”

Ariáthne left, hardly knowing where she was going. She drove to Plum Island, but the beautiful place had suddenly become invisible. Burned onto her retina remained the image of the thin, multiply scarred flank of the tigress. She returned home, sat unmoving till it grew dark. Then she rummaged through her tool chest, selected a crowbar and a large file and left.

——-

She had no difficulty scaling the walls. With such lax security, she was surprised the animals hadn’t been hurt. She timed the comings and goings of the single guard, then set to work. Despite the premature arthritis which was already crippling her fingers, the years of laboratory research had given her discipline and skill. She worked so quietly that the animals were not disturbed — except for the tigress, who had come up to the bars and was watching silently, intently.

Ariáthne finally released the lock and sprinted for the wall. She tumbled into the car, then turned to look. Outlined against the stars, the zoo fence suddenly sprouted a cat-shaped bulge. Without any hesitation, the tigress approached the car in a stately trot.

She is hungry, thought Ariáthne, and fear brushed her mind. The tigress put her face and front paws against the passenger window, transfixing the woman with the lamps of her eyes. Without pausing to think, Ariáthne opened the right door and flipped the seat forward. Soundlessly, the tigress jumped in the back and Ariáthne drove away as fast as the dilapidated engine would bear.

I must be finally going crazy, she moaned to herself. If I don’t get eaten, how am I to explain this to the authorities? The neighbors? My landlord? What will I do, hide her in the bathtub and feed her cockroaches?

The big cat’s musky smell flooded the car. Soon a rumble covered the noise of the engine and Ariáthne knew that her passenger would be civil to the chauffeur.

——-

When they reached her apartment house, she considered carrying the tigress upstairs wrapped in the dusty quilt kept in the car, but she was too tired and her package too heavy. So she opted for the matter-of-fact approach and simply used the stairs, since everyone else seemed to only employ the elevators. The tigress didn’t need much coaxing. Once in the tiny apartment, she investigated it minutely. The two resident cats initially reacted with agitation; however, they eventually decided that she smelled like their long-lost mother. Shortly thereafter, all three formed a tight, snoring coil on the bed. Exhausted, and aware that her blankets were being subjected to major shedding, Ariáthne grumpily rearranged the inert mass enough to carve out a small niche for herself. Lulled by the purring and warmth, she instantly sailed into slumber.

She awoke to snuffling and discovered that she was being examined as thoroughly as her apartment had previously been. The alarm clock showed late afternoon; the light through the window was already amber. Realizing that no one had been fed for the last twelve hours, she ran out, praying that in her absence the intra-feline truce might still prevail.

As she entered the elevator, staggering under the weight of six pounds of hamburger, she saw a note on the elevator wall: “Fumigation tomorrow, 9 am to 2 pm. Please remove all pets from your apartment.” Well, she would have to put the cats on the fire ladder as usual. What a nuisance — as if it had ever made a dent into the cockroach hordes. And then she remembered.

She went in, fed everybody. Then, to clear her mind, and recalling that big cats needed exercise, she snuck into the back alley with her unlikely companion, as soon as the darkness was complete.

——-

She had never liked the place. Dark, dotted with garbage dumps, broken bottles and struggling sumac trees, it mirrored and amplified the alienation around it. She waited uneasily for the tigress to finish, her back against a pillar that once had held an electric lamp. And then, the nape of her neck bristled and her bloodbeat faltered.

“Hey, baby.” He wasn’t loud; didn’t need to be. The alley was a dead end and very dark.

“Show us the good stuff.”

They herded her towards the trash cans against the back of the alley. One carried a knife, the other a short metal pipe. It would do. Tomorrow she would be collected with the rest of the garbage. To her, the weapons were in sharp focus; the rest of them remained a blur.

From the mouth of the alley came a low cough. The taller one clicked his tongue in annoyance.

“Check it out,” he rapped. “Damn old winos. I’ll handle this — you take your turn later.”

The other grumbled under his nose, then loped towards the source of the noise. The one left jabbed her lightly in the midriff with his knife.

“Make it real easy, honey. Maybe we won’t have to mark this pretty face.”

A short scream arose, then was bitten off. The man smirked.

“Sounds like the busybody met my friend. Hey, buddy,” he half-shouted, “come share the goods.”

A quiet pad, pad, pad was approaching. Two phosphorescent orbs appeared, stopped, started slithering towards him. He looked at her, fingered his knife, uncertain.

“This some kind of trick?” he started. “Don’t try to pull…” and then the tigress came into full view, and his voice died.

His knife clattered on the ground; a dark stain started spreading in the front of his trousers. The tigress, disgusted with the lack of spirit in her quarry, half-heartedly closed her jaws over his calf. He collapsed to the ground. She released him, batted him around a few times, gave the equivalent of a shrug and came up to Ariáthne.

Ariáthne looked him over; he was alive, more in shock than hurt. Then she headed out of the alley. There lay the other one, untouched, his eyes frozen open, dead of heart failure.

She went to her car, opened the door, flipped the seat forward. Without demur, the tigress leapt in. Pulling on her gloves, as it was getting bitterly cold, Ariáthne headed westward. She entered the turnpike. At some point, the tigress decided she preferred the front seat, much to Ariáthne’s discomfort. Nevertheless, she felt grateful to have warm fur nestling next to her.

On and on she went, under the brilliance of the Hunters, Procyon, Sirius and Orion. The highway was deserted. She started humming a Springsteen tune, the usual intoxication whenever she was at the wheel stealing upon her. She turned off at the Quabbin Reservoir exit, went all the way to the entrance of the park, climbed over the fence. The tigress followed. Then she let the tigress lead, since she had better night eyes.

When they were well into the foliage, she motioned the tigress forward. Reluctantly, the tigress moved into the bushes, then came back. Ariáthne shooed her on again. This was repeated a few more times. Finally, the tigress came over, rubbed her whole length against Ariáthne and melted away silently into the dark background.

Ariáthne walked slowly back to the car, happiness rippling inside her like waves upon the shore. There had been sightings of mountain lions in the Quabbin. Somehow, they had made their way eastward across the urban sprawls. The tigress would find her own kind. In a few years there would be striped cubs frisking in a hollow — and, with some genetic luck, perhaps the beginning of a new species… Felis Ariathnénsis.

She reached her car, looked back. The sounds and movements of approaching day were starting. In her line of sight, an eagle rose, started riding the thermals upward. A good omen. She smiled; a few hours ago, she thought she would never live to see this sunrise. Now she must go back to attend to her life. It was a good thing the exterminators were coming today — she strongly suspected the tigress had harbored fleas. She headed back east, into the gates of dawn.

Cameron’s Avatar: Jar Jar Binks Meets Pocahontas

Monday, December 21st, 2009

“…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

– Shakespeare, MacBeth, Act V, Scene V

Sarah ConnorJames Cameron made two films that are high on my list of favorites: Terminator 2 and Aliens – not least because powerful women are central to the stories (even though he gave them the most conservative and clichéd motivation for heroism: maternal protectiveness).  He was a taut, visually inventive storyteller once.  But all his films after The Abyss increasingly resemble the Hindenburg: bloated, self-indulgent, lacking originality and subtlety in all but F/X.

The latest iteration, Avatar, is the culmination of these traits and a poster boy of the industry’s tendency to let CGI spectacle be the sole concern.  A quarter of a billion dollars went into the film, the GNP of a small country, yet they couldn’t pay a decent SF writer a paltry sum to give even a whiff of freshness to the story. The characters are stale broad stereotypes, the plot reheated canned slurry, the dialogue rusty nails scratching a cement slab. The borrowings are endless, starting with the ersatz Campbellian mythology that failed so abysmally to add resonance to Star Wars.  But the definitive stamp of hackery is that many elements are frank rip-offs of older Cameron creations.  The vaunted 3-D effects are devoid of unique payoff and the Pandoran life forms look like shiny hood ornaments.

The worldbuilding is equally shoddy.  As I said in SF Goes McDonald’s, scientific accuracy is not crucial in SF.  However, consistency and informed imagination are.  A moon as close to a gas giant as Pandora is would be awash in radiation and wracked by earthquakes and volcanoes like Jupiter’s Io.  Also, its independent biogenesis would give rise to life forms that would not remotely resemble us.  But let’s concede that point for the sake of audience identification.  Since all Pandoran animals are six-limbed and four-eyed, the Na’vi would share these evolutionary attributes.  This would actually make them far more interesting.

oceancoverThe clunky clichés and logic gaps of Avatar are wince-inducing even if you accept the film’s premises.  Here’s a species that’s essentially the “neocortex” of a sentient planet – yet they have… nuclear families and hereditary chiefs.  The conceptualizations of the avatars and of the Na’vi neural links to the Pandoran flora and fauna are too silly to dissect.  If the link worked as advertised, they wouldn’t need to hunt (or, conversely, killing an animal would have concrete physiological repercussions).  I discussed mind uploading in Ghost in the Shell. If you want to see a linked, communing ecosphere done right, read Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean or follow Odo’s individuation struggles in Deep Space 9. And if you want action with stunning animation, elegiac depth and heartbreaking stakes, watch Hayao Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime.

The Na’vi are sexed-up Ewoks and Pandora is a prelapsarian Eden where they can live dilemma-free with Stone Age technology.  Yet like all Others, they’re helpless until a White Alpha Male steps down literally from on high to rally them to battle, while in turn they enable him to reconnect with his inner Mother Earth anima.  Soft-focus imperialism and New Age fuzziness mix queasily with post-genocidal sentimentality about Noble Savages — a pernicious mindset that I described in And Ain’t I a Human?

It’s bad enough that films since the maturation of F/X have been aimed at 15-year-old boys.  Far worse is the fact that the most lavish Hollywood films have been made by their directors’ 15-year-old inner boys – tightly conjoined with plans for lunch boxes and video games whose complexity far exceeds that of the films.  Welcome to Infantileland, where crudity, banality and sloppiness rule, where clouds of sycophants allow directors to call themselves Emperor of the Universe or Master Jedi without a trace of irony.  In one of my visions of hell, I’m forced to endlessly watch Lucas’ Star Wars (except, perhaps, episode V), Jackson’s King Kong, all of Spielberg’s SF/F and Cameron’s Avatar.

Q'Orianka KilcherThere’s nothing wrong with adults enjoying Disney-level spectacle, as long as they don’t make it their moral, intellectual or esthetic measuring stick.  An artist with Cameron’s credibility and clout should undertake real challenges that inspire our innate desire to explore instead of recycling militaristic violence porn and preachy feel-good platitudes.  He did it incredibly well before, he can do it again.  And some childish dreams should remain dreams.  They work far better as beckoning beacons.

Images: top, Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in James Cameron’s Terminator 2; middle, David Switzer’s cover for Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean; bottom, Q’Orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas in Terence Malick’s New World.

Update: The Huffington Post just re-printed this article. I’m donning my asbestos space suit!

Related articles:
Lab Rat Cinema: Monetizing the Rat Brain
The Andreadis Unibrow Theory of Art

SF Goes MacDonald’s: Less Taste, More Gristle

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Eleven years ago, Harvard Alumni Magazine asked me why I wrote The Biology of Star Trek despite my lack of tenure.  My answer was The Double Helix: Why Science Needs Science Fiction.  In it, I described how science fiction can make science attractive and accessible, how it can fire up the dreams of the young and lead them to become scientists or, at least, explorers who aren’t content with canned answers.

syfyThe world has changed since then, the US more than most.  American culture has always proclaimed its distrust of authority.  However, the nation’s radical shift to the right also brought on disdain for all expertise – science in particular, as can be seen by the obstruction of research in stem cells and climate change and of teaching evolution in schools (to say nothing of scientist portrayals in the media, exemplified by Gaius Baltar in the aggressively regressive Battlestar Galactica reboot).

This trend culminated in the choice of first a president and then a vice-presidential candidate who flaunted their ignorance and deemed their faux-folksy personae sufficient qualifications to lead the most powerful nation on the planet.  Even as the fallout from these decisions deranges their culture, Americans cling to their iPods, SUVs and Xboxes and still expect instant cures for everything, from acne to old age, seeing scientists as the Morlocks that must cater to their Eloi.

Science fiction is really a mirror and weathervane of its era.  So it comes as no surprise that the dominant tropes of contemporary speculative fiction reflect the malaise and distrust of science that has infected the Anglosaxon First World: cyberpunk and urban fantasy have their feet (and eyes) firmly on the ground.  Space exploration is passé, and such luminaries as Charlie Stross delight in repeatedly “proving” that the only (straw)people to still contemplate crewed space travel are deluded naifs who can’t/won’t parse scientific facts or face unpalatable limitations.

Jack of ShadowsI’ve been reading SF since the early seventies, ever since my English became sturdy enough to support the habit.  In both reading and writing, I favor layered works that cross genre boundaries.  This may explain why I have a hard time getting either inspired or published in today’s climate, in which publishers and readers alike demand “freshness” as long as it’s more of the same.  Yet old fogey that I’m becoming, I do believe that people who write SF should have a nodding acquaintance with science principles and the scientific mindset.

So imagine my surprise when the following comment met with universal approval on a well-known SF blog: “There seems to be a common feeling with people coming into SF that you need to know real science to write good SF. Which is of course rubbish.”

Let me rewrite that statement for another genre: “There seems to be a common feeling with people coming into historical fiction that you need to know real history – or at least the history of the era you plan to portray – to write good historical fiction or alternative history.  Which is of course rubbish.”

Cell phones in a Renaissance novel?  Tudor court ladies on mopeds?  Why should anyone notice or care?  Likewise, “cracks” in the event horizon of a black hole?  Instant effortless shapeshifting?  Only an elitist jerk would object, spoiling the fun and causing unnecessary angst to the author!  Never mind that such sloppiness jolts the reader out of the suspension of disbelief necessary for reading the story – and is particularly unpardonable because a passable veneer of knowledge can be readily acquired by surfing the Internet.

Many of today’s SF writers and readers don’t just proudly proclaim that they don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout no science; they also read only within ever-narrowing subgenres – and only contemporaries.  When I attended an SF workshop supposedly second only to Clarion, a fellow participant castigated me for positing the “completely absurd” ability to record sounds off the grooves of a ceramic surface.  Of course, this is essentially a variation of sound reproduction in phonographic records.  No wonder that much of contemporary speculative fiction tastes like recycled watery gruel or reheated corn syrup.

Downbelow StationPlease understand, I don’t miss the turgid exposition, cardboard-thin characters and blatant sexism, parochialism and triumphalism of the Leaden… er, Golden Era of SF (though the same types of attributes and attitudes have resurfaced wholesale in cyberpunk).  My lodestars are Le Guin, Tiptree, Anderson, Zelazny, Butler, Cherryh, Scott – and Atwood, despite her protestations that she does not, repeat not, write science fiction.  They all prove that top-notch SF can incorporate gendanken experiments that contravene physical laws: FTL travel, stable wormholes, mind uploading, a multiplicity of genders and earth-like planets, anthropomorphic aliens, to name only a few.

Fiction must be the dominant partner in all literary efforts.  Imaginative storytelling trumps strict scientific accuracy. Nevertheless, SF requires convincing, consistent worldbuilding.  This in turn demands that the author stick to the rules s/he has made and that the premises adhere to known laws once the speculative exceptions have been accommodated: if a planet is within a red dwarf sun’s habitable zone, its orbit has to be tidally locked barring incredibly advanced technology.  If a story contravenes or doesn’t depend on science, real or speculative, it’s not SF.  It’s magic realism or fantasy.  Not that it matters, as long as the plot and characters are compelling.

Avast, Impure Cooties!

Avast, Impudent Cooties!

There have been recent lamentations within the tribe about SF losing ground to fantasy, horror and other “lesser” cousins.  Like all niche genres, speculative fiction further marginalizes itself by creating arbitrary hierarchies that purport to reflect intrinsic worth but in fact enshrine unexamined cultural values: hardcover self-labeled hard SF preens at the top, written mostly by boys for boys; print-on-demand SF romance skulks at the bottom, written almost exclusively by girls for girls (though the increasing proportion of female readership is exerting significant pressure on the pink ghetto walls).

The real problem is not that science is hard to portray well in SF.  The problem is impoverished imagination, willful ignorance and endless repetition of recipes.  In short: failure of nerve.  Great SF stories are inseparable from the science in them.  A safe, non-demanding story is unlikely to linger in the readers’ memory or elicit changes in their thinking.

If science disappears altogether from SF or survives only as the gimmick that allows “magic” plot outcomes, SF will lose its greatest and unique asset: acting as midwife and mentor to future scientists.  This is no mere intellectual exercise for geeks.  To give one example, mental and physical work on the arcships so denigrated by Stross et al. would also help us devise solutions to the inexorable looming specter of finite terrestrial resources.

Rick Sternbach: Solar Sail

Rick Sternbach: Solar Sail

The political and social pseudo-pieties of the US cost it several generations of scientists, some in their prime.  The full repercussions won’t appear immediately, but already the US is no longer the uncontested forerunner in science and technology and its standard of living is dropping accordingly.  Breakthroughs in physics and biology are happening elsewhere.  Of course, all empires have a finite lifespan.  Perhaps the time has come for the Chinese or the Indians to lead.  But no matter who is the first among equals in the times to come, I stand by the last sentence in my Double Helix essay: “Though science will build the starships, science fiction will make us want to board them.”

Update 1: Huffington Post just re-posted this article (without the accompanying images, though, which add texture to the story).

Update 2: The article is now also on the new blog I Like a Little Science in My Fiction.

Planetfall

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Traveler from afar who sailed to our shores –
ask the Sea Rose for a gift…

Flight

Most of my friends know that I write fiction.  Publication started fifteen years ago, when five of my stories (collected in the file In the Realms of Fire) appeared in After Hours, a venue pointed out by my friend and fellow writer Calvin Johnson.

Since then, in addition to writing The Biology of Star Trek and the essays here and elsewhere, I spun six novels in an alternative universe where the Minoans survive the explosion of the Thera volcano.  The saga starts in the Bronze Age and extends into the far future.  A small press is interested in the first novel in the series, Shard Songs, which gives me strong motivation to finish it.  The trouble is that the entire opus needs global editing – a full-time job that requires focus and calmness of mind.

Several friends saw parts of the saga as it unfolded.  It inspired two of them (Heather D. Oliver and Kathryn Bragg-Stella) to create the beautiful artworks that grace the site’s cover, blog logo and gallery.  However, none of it had officially seen the light of day till this August and I had serious doubts about its publication potential.  This was in part because it doesn’t fit into any category and ignores several recipes… er, rules.

In it, legends, songs, vision quests and geasa intertwine with genetic engineering, wormhole travel, planetary settlement and sapient aliens.  Some portions have multiple narrators, the cultures are not Anglosaxon and an invented language whispers through it: my version of the lost Minoan tongue.  Worse yet, in an era where dismemberments earn a work a PG rating, kudos and awards whereas glimpses of a nipple earn it an NC-17 rating and snide sniggers, my saga contains as much sex as it does war – and though it’s not romance, love is a powerful engine in it.

Then, in August, Crossed Genres accepted Dry Rivers, a brief story from the  saga that takes place in Minoan Crete.  The just-released issue 13 of Crossed Genres contains Planetfall, a much longer braid from the saga’s tapestry.  Planetfall consists of five linked stories whose human protagonists are descendants of the characters in Dry Rivers and Shard Songs.

BasinI don’t know if any of these novels will ever get published.  But these two green shoots have given me great joy and hope.  It was my tremendous luck to have devoted friends who urged me to keep writing the saga; to meet Kay Holt and Bart Leib whose vision of Crossed Genres focused exactly on hard-to-categorize works like mine; and to enjoy the unwavering certainty of Peter Cassidy, who’s convinced that one day the entire saga will emerge from its cocoon and unfurl its wings.  Dhi kéri ten sóran, iré ketháni.

Web Flatunauts and Electronic Tribbles

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Calm FL crop

Quiet has been reigning in my head lately. I can concentrate on my tasks, my mood is the best since I recovered from my operation (as long as I ignore the fibromyalgia that resulted from the shock to my system) and I even have occasional chunks of time for original writing.

This is the result of neither Modafinil nor meditation but of something much simpler: I walked away from electronic forums. Facebook’s gone, Yahoo and Google discussion groups are gone except one, RSS feeds are gone. I’m tracking two blogs that interest me and an artist friend’s works through Livejournal. But I’ve essentially left the Second Life building.

noiseWhen I belonged to several forums, my head resembled a gull rookery, awash with noise, random peckings and guano. Facebook was by far the worst offender, even after I ruthlessly pruned my friends list to a quarter of its size. And trying to reason with loud ill-informed semi-illiterates on scientific or political threads got tedious, sort of like having to handle teenagers who seriously think they’re the first and only ones to discover — nay, invent — sex.

Don’t misunderstand me, the Internet is a great resource for quick (though often unreliable) references and images. It’s also a decent medium for keeping in touch with distant friends. But its forums, unless they exercise draconian moderation, encourage problematic aspects of human nature and culture: evanescent trivia; hysterical narcissism and mob swarming; regurgitation of undigested skimmings. Lacking the nuances of body language and required to be soundbite-long, most Internet exchanges rank low as meaningful communication, to say nothing of depth or wit.

By disconnecting, I pulled free from the constant white noise that turns into a black hole of distraction. Of course, I annulled some of the beneficent effects of Internet quiet by writing a series of articles for a high-visibility venue — especially the most recent one, which dealt with the impossibility of immortality, uploading in particular. The article got slashdotted and was also highlighted in one of the blogs I still track, with the predictable outcome: it attractedTantrum many thoughtful, thought-provoking comments;  it also attracted commenters who objected strenuously to the article without having read it. Some brandished Star Trek, The Matrix and Kurzweil’s Singularity at me as science textbooks (or gospels, take your pick).

I’m tempted to collect the latter (with meta-comments added) in an anthology titled Uppity Biologist Deflates Nerds’ Wet Dreams with Wetware. Alas, ars longa, vita brevis. I’ll have to delegate this to my uploaded mindclone,  while I continue to struggle with the very real problem of dementia in the lab.  But, most importantly, quiet still reigns in in my head.

Another Double Hit!

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

CylonAs a companion piece to Calvin’s excellent Caprica review, my article about mind uploading (and other proposed methods of individual immortality, feasible and otherwise) just appeared in H+ Magazine: Ghost in the Shell: Why Our Brains Will Never Live in the Matrix

There will be a third article, then we’ll see if they’re game for more!  My thanks to the wonderful editor-in-chief of H+ Magazine, R.U. Sirius of Mondo 2000 fame.

Time TravelersUpdate 1: They say good things come in threes.  When I got home tonight, I found a surprise package: Jack McDevitt’s just-released novel, Time Travelers Never Die.  It contains a dedication, an acknowledgment “for acting as a guide and translator at Alexandria” and there is an Andreadis fellowship in that universe — for linguists, I think.  Thanks to Jack for inviting me to share his exciting journey.  I’m eager to read the book… and wonder: what will the third good thing be?

Update 2: The H+ article was slashdotted.  The funniest comment there was “Shhh.  Nobody tell Kurzweil!”  And the Andreadis fellowship in Time Travelers is for classical studies.  Very fittingly, its first recipient is named Aspasia Kephalas.  The former name is a nod to the Miletian courtesan partner of Pericles, famed for her intelligence and learning; the latter is street-Greek for “Brainiac”.

Sins of the Children: Caprica

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

by Calvin W. Johnson

Today I have the pleasure of hosting my friend Calvin W. Johnson, who will give us his thoughts on Battlestar Galactica and Caprica.  Dr. Johnson is Professor of Physics in San Diego State University where he does research in computational quantum mechanics.  He’s also an author with poems and SF stories in many venues, including Analog and Asimov’s.

Galactica Fleet 2One of the earliest and most lasting narrative models in science fiction is Frankenstein.  The recent SciFi channel reboot of Battlestar Galactica owes itself as much to Mary Shelley as to the original 1978 television series. In the original, the robotic Cylons are creations and inheritors of a now-extinct reptilian race; in the 2003 reboot, the Cylons are our own creation. Like Frankenstein’s creature (in the novel), the reimagined Cylons are as capable of tormented philosophical reasoning as they are of homicidal rage.

It is the Cylons’ self-doubt that saves the human race from extinction, which is lucky considering the forty thousand surviving humans are so flawed and back-biting that a brace of ambitious bonobos armed with a bottle of window cleaner and some lead-tainted Mexican candy could have wiped them out. In current parlance Battlestar Galactica was “dark,” a quality currently all the rage  (see also: Christopher Nolan’s two Batman movies).  The first two seasons frequently had brilliakara starbuck thrace1nt writing and acting, but by the final season Battlestar Galactica (or BSG to its friends) deteriorated into a self-parodying soap opera. We were told at the beginning of episodes that the Cylons “have a plan,” but it became increasingly clear that creator Ron Moore was making it up as he went along; by the series finale he had written the reboot’s most compelling creation, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, into such a corner that he could only end her story by having her melt into the wind like an bad odor.

But Battlestar Galactica was the best thing going on the SciFi channel. Ominously, and not in a good way, the Powers That Be agreed to a prequel, Caprica, set 58 years “before the fall.” Caprica details the story of how the Cylons were created and how humanity sowed the seeds of its own destruction. (Warning: mild spoilers ahead).

Caprica takes us back to a shinier, happier time to meet Zoe Greystone, the 16-year-old scion of a cybernetics corporation. Part genius, part whiny goth girl, part secret religious fanatic (a monotheist in a world of polytheists), she is killed off in the first few minutes. Eventually, she is resurrected cybernetically, much to the regret of everyone, herself included.

If this sounds familiar, why yes it is, even more so than Frankenstein. When one thinks of a prequel written in response to a successful, gritty science fiction phenomenon, one can only invoke…

Star Wars.

The parallels are uncanny.

Recall: in the Star Wars prequels, Lucas takes us back to a shinier, happier time, to meet Anakin Skywalker, a technologically brilliant yet whiny child who secretly falls in with the sinister cult of the Sith, is nearly killed, then resurrected in a cyborg body to terrorize the galaxy.

Wow. I get goosebumps just thinking about the parallels, and not in a good way.

Zoe capricaCaprica is far better than The Phantom Menace, but that is a low bar, and neither is Caprica as compelling as the opening Battlestar Galactica miniseries. We are supposed to sympathize with Zoe’s grieving father, a Bill Gates-like character, but his distance from wife and work also distances him from the audience. Much more intriguing is Joseph Adams, a well-dressed lawyer who lost his wife and daughter in the same bombing that killed Zoe, and who is attempting to reconnect with his young son William, all the while in a dangerous dance with a Mafia-like gang from his Tauron homeworld. Young William, of course, grows up to be Bill Adama, who helps to save the human race 58 years later as captain of the Galactica. The Adama drama is much more compelling than the dull Frankenstein, I mean Greystone, family but is curiously underplayed here despite a few dramatic scenes.

The technology of Caprica is not only flashier but also significantly more advanced than in Battlestar Galactica; I suppose the First Cylon War seriously knocked civilization back on its heels. Among the advance is a kind of virtual reality; I tend to despise virtual reality stories on principle, although here the stupid factor is significantly less than Star Trek holodecks or The Matrix, again low bars (I realize such a statement is hate-mail bait).  Oddly enough, the tech I liked the best was a kind of smart paper; less dramatic but much more realistic.

BSG, as does all science fiction, provided a platform to play out current anxieties: terrorism, genocide, abortion, religion. It’s clear that Caprica will touch upon at least two major themes: the tension between heritage and assimilation among immigrants facing bigotry, and religion. Most discussions about religion in science fiction are ill-informed and inane, and have none of the critical depth or insight found in, say, Life of Brian or South Park. In both BSG and Caprica, however, the religion proxy discussion is more intriguing, mostly because the writers allow the characters the sincerity of their beliefs or, better yet, realize the insincerity of all our beliefs and non-beliefs.

06-Caprica-City

Watching Caprica I was struck when one character, questioning the monotheism of another, asks: do you really want to believe in a universe run by a single God who gets to decide what is right and what is wrong, with no recourse, no appeal? In other words: polytheism as the ultimate checks-and-balances for governing the universe. For science fiction, this counts as a deep insight.

The pilot for Caprica was released as a DVD and download in April; it is set to premiere as a series in early 2010. It’s unlikely to be as awful as spinoffs often are — for example, I couldn’t even bear to try the Stargate: Atlantis spinoff from SG-1 — but I am not holding my breath. In fact, I’ll probably wait for the DVD.