Singularity Happens

L. E. Modesitt, Jr. wrote a long post on his blog on why he believes the singularity won't happen. [via SF Signal]

According to Modesitt, it won't happen because such visions are based on technology, not on humanity and they're based on a western European/North American cultural chauvinism.

He goes on to explain:

One of the simplest rules involved in implementing technology is that the speed and breadth of such implementation is inversely proportional to the cost and capital required to implement that technology. That's why we don't have personal helicopters, technically feasible as they are. It's also why, like it or not, there's no supersonic aircraft follow-on to the Concorde. It's also why iPods and cellphones are ubiquitous, as well as why there are many places in the third world where cellphones are usable, but where landlines are limited or non-existent.

All in all I think he makes a well-reasoned and cogent argument that completely misses the point. The point of the singularity is the premise, which I think is valid, that it is possible that a technology can arrive that completely overturns the basic assumptions we use to model the future. AI and nanotech are the oft-used sfnal examples, but history is already filled with basic advances that remapped the entire world to fit them: agriculture, sewage treatment, the printing press, anesthesia, automobiles, air-travel, television, the internet, cell phones.

But my main problem with Modesitt's argument is that it is primarily an economic one, based on the assumption that the basic economic rules are somehow set in stone and aren't manipulated by technological change. That's only true if you're very broad in defining your terms. A product's value is less and less defined by the cost of the materials and labor required to build it, more and more the impetus to distribute technology is to get the end user to buy into an associated service (psst, wanna free cellphone, how's about an inkjet printer, brand new DVR, just sign this contract) and as fabrication becomes more and more efficient, "things" become more like intellectual property where the cost has little to do with the physical object, counterfeits become ubiquitous, and theft starts meaning some basement entrepreneur is making something that looks too much like what you're selling. The labor theory of value breaks down in a replicator economy. Even his points about energy becoming more expensive is one good fusion reactor away from being moot.

Like I said, IMO his argument is basically why the Singularity won't happen. . . right now.

When book covers do it right

Working on Apotheosis (going well, thank you for asking) I've found myself digging in my old notes for Hostile Takeover. And I found a little sketch I made of the character Flower, when I was figuring out what the Volerans looked like.

Now I'm not a very good artist (I was a lot better before I decided to concentrate on writing some 20 years ago) but I thought it was a neat example of how sometimes a cover artist can actually tap into what the author was thinking. (Opposed to my prior post on book covers.)

Here's my little sketch:


And here's a detail of the cover of Profiteer, (one of my favorite book covers after the one for Dwarves) showing the same character:


The cool thing, Jim Burns never saw the sketch I made, he was going off of my description in the book. That was pretty cool.

I just wish he hadn't made Tetsami (a short Asian woman) look like a pissed of Sigourney Weaver.

Picture of the Alpha Dog

New Space Opera

There seems to be two main "movements" in science fiction (and I'm talking about science fiction, not the broader speculative fiction/fantasy etc.) at this point in time. Both were mentioned in the editorial in the October '07 issue of Asimov's. The first is the manifesto-wielding vanguard of Mundane SF that I've mentioned in an earlier post. The second movement has been called "New Space Opera," which has no manifesto I know of, or a website for that matter.

The name "New Space Opera" seems to have come into currency with a 2003 edition of Locus (a role that an upcoming issue of Interzone seems to be planning to play for Mundane SF) and has not had a terribly clear definition, but my favorite one is by Paul McAuley from that same Locus issue.

There are neither empires nor rigid technocracies dominated by a single Big Idea in the new space opera; like cyberpunk, it's eclectic and pluralistic, and infused with the very twenty-first century sensibility that the center cannot hold, that technology-driven change is continuous and advancing on a thousand fronts, that some kind of posthuman singularity is approaching fast or may already have happened. Most of all, its stories contain a vertiginous sense of deep time; in the new space opera, the Galaxy is not an empty stage on which humans freely strut their stuff, but is instead a kind of junk yard littered with the ruins and abandoned wonders of earlier, more powerful races.

The mention of the singularity is key IMO, as it seems one of the main differences in content between the "Old" and the "New" Space Opera is the whole concept of a "singularity." New Space Opera takes the singularity as a given and either goes with it, or establishes some explanation of why AI/Nanotech/Etc. isn't completely warping the setting beyond explanation.

I mention all this because the Apotheosis Trilogy I'm working on may, by the third volume, fit into this description-- closest I've ever been to being part of a literary movement.

I had to do it....

The End of Magazines. . .

Following upon my post about the oft-predicted demise of the printed book, and my opinion that it ain't going to happen any time soon, I come across a blog post by Warren Ellis (via SF Signal) about the tumbling circulation figures of the major print SF magazines, a term that seems to be becoming an oxymoron. The figures have inspired reactions from John Scalzi and Cory Doctrow, and has provoked some hand-wringing about how these magazines can save themselves.

Unlike printed books, it seems to me that printed magazines are being displaced by their electronic counterparts in a way that seems unlikely to happen to the book-length form. Why? Several reasons I think. First, unlike e-books, e-mags just require a web browser. No dedicated hardware or software. Second, it is easy to mirror the established economics of print mags (subscriptions and advertisements paying for content) on-line. Third, magazines are, like web-pages, blogs, forums &c., ephemera comprised of relatively small nuggets of information generally between one and ten thousand words. Lastly, on-line mags offer advantages over and above traditional print subscriptions, the major one being that if you subscribe to an on-line mag you get instant access to everything that magazine has ever printed-- not just 12 issues.

My solution to the plight of F&SF, Analog and Asimov's would be simply to adopt an on-line subscription model in parallel with the print one.

Ok, I Think Everyone Needs to Get a Grip

What the hell is going on here? J. K. Rowling makes an aside about the backstory of one of her characters-- something that's not mentioned, or even evident in the text of the book-- and people start freaking out.

Right now there are like 40+ comments on two separate posts on Whatever. There's nearly 150 comments on a post @ Making Light. It's making news at E!, Fox, Newsweek and the Washington Post.

What really annoys me is this quote from the AP story with the equally annoying headline "Dumbledore’s outing gives text new meaning"

“Jo Rowling calling any Harry Potter character gay would make wonderful strides in tolerance toward homosexuality,” Melissa Anelli, webmaster of the fan site The Leaky Cauldron, told The Associated Press. “By dubbing someone so respected, so talented and so kind, as someone who just happens to be also homosexual, she’s reinforcing the idea that a person’s gayness is not something of which they should be ashamed.”

Yeah, I would buy that-- if it was part of the effing books! It wasn't. Dumbledore's sexual orientation is so peripheral to his character that it didn't merit a mention. That means that every single person who reads these books from now until the end of literacy as we know it is only ever going to read the character as gay if they've heard about Rowling's aside. Most of the people who have read the books, I daresay most who will ever read the books, aren't going to read about someone "so respected, so talented and so kind, who just happens to be also homosexual." They're going to read about somone "so respected, so talented and so kind, who's sexual orientation is beside the point."

What's more annoying is that if Rowling intended to make some sort of positive message out of Dumbledore's sexual orientation, rather than having it as a background character trait, I don't doubt she would have explicitly spelled it out in the books.

This hubub is saying a lot more about the folks hububing than it is about Rowling, Potter or Dumbledore.

J. K. Rowling Throws the Slashfic Writers a Bone

Well J. K. Rowling has confirmed that Dumbledore was gay, and you know something is very strange when the sexual preference of a fictional character is a major story on CNN. I'm just saying. . .

I just hope things go well for the headmaster of Hogwarts. After all, we all know how badly things went for Tinky Winky when he was outed. I can only hope that we have grown a little more tolerant as a culture since then.

The Great Internet Echo Chamber

Well, predictably, there's a thread on Whateveresque (not to be confused with Whatever) that delves into the Doctrow/Le Guin mess in all its retarded glory, and does so in flametastic eloquence I couldn't even begin to match. . .

Disney Explains Fair Use & Copyright

Haven't posted a clip here in a while. Here's one I found via the SFWA blog. (Irony again.) Here we have Walt Disney characters explaining the concept of fair use and copyright. Made by professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University. For added fun, count up how many of the characters are based on prior work.

If it ain't broke, fix it anyway. . .

Just a note that the blog will be undergoing sporadic, unannounced, and random formating changes as I play around with the layout.

Well, this is ironic. . .

Sometimes you come across news that so twisted in recursive levels of self-parody that you cannot even express an opinion on it, you just have to sit back and say, "gee that's f__ked up."

Case in point, this series of events, the latest of which I found thanks to a post on the SF Site blog:

The SFWA e-piracy committee overreaches in demanding a laundry-list of items taken off a website because of copyright violations. Some items turn out to be perfectly legit, including some work by Cory Doctrow released under a Creative Commons license. Can you say oops?

Doctrow gets predictably medieval on SFWA's ass in an internet dust-up that essentially ends with SFWA throwing the current incarnation of the e-piracy committee under the bus.

Then we find out that Doctrow reprints an essay by Ursula K Le Guin under the Creative Commons license. Problem? The essay wasn't printed under any such license, which means Doctrow was guilty of exactly the reverse of the mistake that SFWA had made.

What this all means to me?

A) IP law is broken. (But we knew that.)
B) Everyone is capable of being stupid, and the current IP law facilitates such stupidity.

Insert the obvious pun here

And now presenting cats, and a bag.
Please make up your own joke.

The End of Books?

According to The Guardian, ye olde brick-and-mortar bookstore is not long for this world. According to a survey at the Frankfurt Book fair [from SF Signal]:

Almost a quarter of the 1,324 industry professionals who took part in the survey predicted that the high street bookseller would no longer exist in 2057 while only 11% thought that the printed book would be obsolete.

Just a cursory reading of that stat sort of invalidates the scare headline "Short shelflife for booksellers, industry figures claim" , i.e. something less than 25% of industry figures claim. And that 11%? Yep, that's overwhelming. . .

I have a problem with printed book obsolescence. Information delivery technologies are only made obsolete by technologies that do exactly the same thing. Illuminated hand-written manuscripts were made obsolete by the printing press, but hand-drawn illustration was not made obsolete by photography. Not the same thing. CDs made LPs obsolete, but didn't kill cassette tapes. It took CDRs and MP3s to do that.

eBooks will not kill printing because

1. books are cheap
2. books do not require software maintenance
3. books are permanent and stable storage devices that will be readable indefinitely
4. books have no power requirements
5. books can be transferred without concerns for hardware platforms or DRMS
6. books are simple and straightforward to use without any training beyond basic literacy
7. books do not require another, more expensive, device to read them
   

An eBook technology would have to overcome all these advantages of the printed book in order to make the printed book obsolete. IMO, some of these may never be overcome by the current model of eBooks, i.e. a device that plays something from storage media. That model works for music and movies, because that's the model that existed before. (i.e. I have some film, or a recording, and I stick it in some sort of player.) But books were never like that, they've always been a unitary device, self-playing. Adding a machine to "read" a book for you imposes a level of complexity that is not worth the trouble either economically or practically.

In order for eBooks to make the printed book obsolete, they would have to be comparably priced, self-reading (i.e. you purchase one object, you have the book) and free of most of the issues of obsolescence and power requirements of "traditional" eBooks.

Frankly, that might have to wait until after the singularity. . .

Zoë

Yes, our cute little kitten has a name now, Zoë. Here are two obligatory kitten pictures.

But, then, how can you go around freaking the Mundanes?

There is a movement afoot, complete with manifesto, called Mundane SF. You may or may not have heard of it, but it does seem to be gaining a little traction to the point that Interzone is doing a Mundane SF issue. If you're unfamiliar with the movement, there's a post on the Mundane SF blog that encapsulates Geoff Ryman's idea pretty well. In a nutshell, to quote from Mr. Ryan's post:

Being a Mundane boils down to avoiding old tropes and sticking more closely to what science calls facts. We believe that for most of us, the future is here on Earth.

Or, from the Interzone Mundane Guidelines:

Today there is no --

• Faster than light travel
• Psi power
• Nanobot technology
• Extraterrestrial life
• Computer consciousness
• Materially profitable space travel
• Human immortality
• Brain downloading
• Teleportation
• Time travel

-- And maybe there never will be!

In a nutshell, it is Dogme 95 for speculative fiction. It also seems to be doing a good job of what manifestos like this should do, which is to provoke reaction. So what's my take?

(Note: this is a reaction to Mundane SF as a literary movement described by Geoff Ryman. I am explicitly not commenting on any of Geoff Ryman's fiction, which I have not read.)

First, I'll say, it can be a worthwhile artistic exercise to place limits on yourself. Especially if said limits keep you from using a device or techniques that you're comfortable with or prone to overusing. In that respect, I think a lot of SF writers might benefit from producing a Mundane SF story or two, myself included. (Though my attempt might not sync with Mr. Ryan's goal, as I'd try to do a complete gonzo post-singularity story in his Mundane sandbox. It'd be a challenge.)

However, I think the purpose behind the Manifesto, as described by Mr. Ryan, is not an artistic one. It seems to me that the "Mundanes" are of the opinion that SF-- at least SF of literary merit-- should serve a particularly narrow purpose, the illumination of possible, or even more restrictively, probable futures. In this view, entertainment is not something to aspire to, and escape is a childish impulse. To this view "good fiction," like medicine, needs to be "good for you."

I hate that shit!

It is a self-serving philosophy that allows wannabe literati to pat themselves on the back and say they're doing something worthwhile even if they write something no one wants to read. They can say that it is "literature" and the public just doesn't "get" it.

Bullshit!

Shakespeare, Dickens, Chaucer, Hemingway, they were all populists. Any writer who looks down on entertaining their audience, who places some higher purpose above telling a good story, is doomed. IMO, if someone practices Mundane SF for any other reason than the thought that doing so, playing with these rules, will produce a better told tale will, instead, produce turgid, boring crap.