Via FutureWire comes material that may provide relief for those concerned that the strictures of the Mundane SF submission requirements leave them too little room for maneuver …

IBM has published a report called “The Next Five in Five”, which is a cheerily optimistic bit of futurist thinking that lays out the five major technological innovations that the Big Blue crew believe will occur within the next five years. You’ll need to click through for details, but here are the all-important bullet points:

1. We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world
2. Real-time speech translation-once a vision only in science fiction-will become the norm
3. There will be a 3-D Internet
4. Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance
5. Our mobile phones will come close to reading our minds

What I find interesting about this report is how plausible it is. It may be that IBM deliberately kept it that way, but even so it contrasts astonishingly to the Tomorrow’s World type of boosterism that I remember from my childhood. I’d watch those programs and think “wow, just imagine that!” I read that list, and I shrug and think “yep, seems likely.”

I have some sympathy with the Mundane manifesto*, and this report shows why – there’s acres of scope for speculative fiction based purely on plausible real-world developments. Though of course you’ll need to get published quickly before reality trumps your fictional masterpiece!

That said, I think there’s still a place for the wide-screen new space opera, which fulfils a different urge. You can write fiction featuring scientifically implausible tropes and still make it deeply relevant to the human condition – as the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks demonstrate most admirably, IMHO.

[* Said Manifesto has vanished into the places where unrenewed domain names are eternally blessed, at least as far as I can tell from a perfunctory Googling, but Abigail Nussbaum's report on it will tell you most of what you need to know.]

Remember me linking to Jamais Cascio’s post about worldbuilding a little while ago, where he said that what he does (foresight consultancy, or what used to be referred to as ‘futurism’) is a remarkably similar skill to science fiction writing in some respects?

Well, here’s Jamais on the Worldchanging blog, pitching four brief potential future scenarios set three decades from now, showing the potential results of different reactions to the climate change issue. I’ll quote one as an example:

“02037: I stumbled across a memory archive from twenty years ago, before the emergence of the Chorus, and was shocked to see the Earth as it was. Oceans near death, climate system lurching towards collapse, overall energy flux just horribly out-of-balance. I can’t believe the Earth actually survived that. I had assumed that the Chorus was responsible for repairing the planet, but no — We told me that, even by 02017, the Earth’s human populace was making the kind of substantive changes to how it lived necessary to avoid real disaster, and that 02017 was actually one of the first years of improvement! What the Chorus made possible was the planetary repair, although We says that this project still has many years left, in part because We had to fix some of We’s own mistakes from the first few repair attempts. The Chorus actually seemed embarrassed when We told me that!“

OK, so it doesn’t have the snap and crackle of the prose of a practiced novelist, but that’s a slice of science fiction right there. I know for a fact that Karl Schroeder does this sort of work for a living, too; maybe foresight consultancy will be an industry where sf writers can use their skills to earn a good living in times to come?

Go and read the whole post, by the way. The scenarios are hauntingly familiar to any sf reader, and there’s some serious food for thought there.

The M. John Harrison worldbuilding post has bit the mainstream internet over the last few days (us sf obsessives are so far ahead, it’s just sick) – amazing what a Warren Ellis link can do for a post.

But here’s a polite refutation from futurist / foresight consultant Jamias Cascio, who points out that his line of “non-narrative fiction” is exactly what Harrison is complaining about.

Now, that’s an apples and oranges comparison, and I’m not trying to claim otherwise. But what interests me is that in the last part of his post, Cascio nails the exact point that it seemed to me that Harrison was trying to make, and that so many people misunderstood:

“The art of Worldbuilding comes from knowing what to omit, from knowing what needs to be surveyed and what can be tacked up as a Potemkin Future. It becomes an intensely detailed game, figuring out what the readers want to know, covering what they need to know, teasing them with the implications of a fuller vision, and creating an effective illusion of paradigmatic completeness.

Harrison has it wrong: it’s not the biggest library ever built, it’s a painting of a library that seems to go on and on, with some prop books on a table in the foreground. Make sure those prop books are interesting enough, and the reader will never try to explore the rest of the library.”

When I read Harrison’s post, I thought that was exactly what he was trying to say, and that he was rejecting the overintricate unnecessary filigree that some writers produce. Then again, I’m quite possibly superimposing my own perceptions on both posts, so maybe I’m wrong on both counts.

One thing that I’m pretty certain of, however, is that this debate will run for some time to come. Another is that Jamais Cascio is well worth reading for anyone who likes science fiction literature. He’s coming at the same point from a different angle – great food for thought, and frequently sobering.

A few things that seemed interconnected in the daily feeds today. Firstly, a letter written sixty years ago by an angry young copywriter named Bill Bernbach, complaining to his bosses that his industry was in danger of stagnating:

“The danger lies in the temptation to buy routinized men who have a formula for advertising. The danger lies in the natural tendency to go after tried-and-true talent that will not make us stand out in competition but rather make us look like all the others.”

Can’t help but feel that the industry must have stopped listening, and the recent rise of the web and viral marketing has caught them on the hop. New models, new challenges.

But never fear, there’s always a way to cheat: look at this piece about using fMRI brain scans to determine recognition patterns in the brains of people being shown different models of cars:

“When Daimler Chrysler recently showed pictures of their cars while measuring brainwave activity with an fMRI scanner, they found that sports cars stimulated the reward centre of the brain, which is also the area stirred by drugs, alcohol and sex. The front view of the cars, with distinctive facade and headlight “eyes”, subjects showed brain activity in the facial recognition centre of the brain.”

Now I’m a big fan of science, but the thought of it becoming the inescapable tool of marketeers is a far from pleasant one. I suppose it’s too much to hope for that companies might just focus on making brilliant, necessary products – instead of pissing away millions on brainwashing us into buying crap we don’t need. Meh.

Regular readers will be aware that I venerate Captain* Bruce Sterling as not only a damn fine author but also one of the greatest minds on the face of the planet. OK, so he’s never invented a new type of engine, or solved Fermat’s last theorem or anything like that, but he’s a synthesist; he can pull together all the disparate threads of the world and weave you a big scary rug from them – a rug with a pattern that makes sense.

If you want the proof, go and listen to a recording of Sterling speaking at the SXSW Interactive festival earlier this week. He talks about blogs, crowdsourcing, computers as unreliable platforms, climate change, terrorism and a whole raft of other stuff, and it’s all part of one continuous flowing thing. He’s a big-picture guy, and pretty damn funny at times to. Give up an hour, sit down and listen. I challenge you to not be challenged by the things he says.

[*As far as I know, the only person in the world who refers to Bruce Sterling as 'Captain' is me. I expect if I met him, and called him 'Captain', he'd have some very short sharp words to say. I wouldn't care. I am not old enough to be completely beyond certain forms of hero-worship and placing-upon-pedestals.]

The world imitates science fiction once again, as South Korea announces a project to draw up a code of ethics “to stop humans misusing robots – or vice versa.”

“Hye-Young adds that the government’s guidelines will reflect the “Three Laws of Robotics” put forward by science fiction author Isaac Asimov.”

Good old Isaac – his mark on history is assured, the media can’t write a robot article without giving him a plug…

This headline rang Pavlovian bells for me, and I realised that was because I blogged about a very similar announcement from the European Robotics Research Network back in June 2006, in a post called ‘Legislating against robot rape‘ (which naturally mentions Asimov’s Laws, because I wasn’t so worried about cliche back then, cough cough):

“You can’t rape an autonomous vacuum cleaner (although you could conceivably have sex with it, and knowing humans, people probably already have – the tales of people with vacuum related injuries turning up in casualty departments are too common to be completely unfounded). But something with a mind of its own, however limited? That’s another question entirely.”

Despite its potential import, it’s a hard subject to treat seriously in journalistic mode – but it seems to fare far better in fiction. Curious.

You can’t turn your head or click a link these days without bumping into someone proclaiming the death (or terminal illness) of print media. Science fiction is not immune to this state of affairs, either – and I’ll readily confess to being one of those who say that print is in trouble, if not actively dying at the current moment. Continue reading “Science fiction magazines don’t have to die”

Science fiction blogosphere habitues have probably already my SF Site interview with Ken MacLeod regarding his forthcoming novel The Execution Channel. I am pleased to tell you that there was lots of peripheral material left over, and that I have just published that material here on VCTB.

Ken’s a fascinating interviewee with lots of interests, and we covered a lot of ground. He discusses his friendship with fellow Scots science fiction legend, Iain M. Banks; their differing routes to publication; his reading and writing habits; transhumanism; the singularity; the future of publishing … and, of course, a little bit of politics! Here’s a little teaser for you, but as it’s stored on a static page, you’ll need to click through on the excerpt to read the whole thing:

***

You’ve mentioned before that you think life extension is a realistic possibility within the next handful of decades; how far would you go to extend your own life-span? And how much sympathy do you have with the transhumanist movement?

“So far, the only proven life-span extension method is calorie restriction, which I understand works in rats, and I haven’t gone for that. In matters of speculative medicine I have no intention of being an early adopter. It’s like the old joke: how many extropians does it take to change a light-bulb? None, they sit in the dark and wait for the technology to improve.”

Enjoy!

Tags, tags, tags. They’re everywhere, from big name news sites to tin-pot backwaters like this one. But are they any real use to the average internet denizen, and more specifically to science fiction heads?

Continue reading “Tagging for today and tomorrow”

Here’s another first at VCTB – the first time I’ve bothered reposting something I saw on YouTube.

Being an incorrigible science fiction reader, and leaning toward the harder end of the spectrum, I’ve heard plenty about nanofactories (or ‘replicators’, or ‘fabbers’ as they are sometimes called). But to actually see a visualisation of how one would work was pretty inspirational. Continue reading “A tour of a nanofactory”