C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

I'm LMAO. You've got to read this parody article on Locus Online:
http://www.locusmag.com/2005/Features/0401_Stross.html
Charles Stross Attains Posthuman Status
"... Aussie critic and potential "Spiker" himself, Damien Broderick, comments, "I tried to visit [Greg] Egan years ago, and found myself stuck in a timelike infinity loop once I got too close to his nominal address. Only the concerted efforts of Stephen Baxter, Vernor Vinge and Greg Bear were able to free me."

From this link. Go read it! It's hilarious. I am reminded of cosette_valjean and I -- except, of course, that she and I get along well and take a sincere interest in each other's interests. This is the story of what might have happened had we met a decade earlier than we did.

Received from an English Professor:

This assignment was actually turned in by two of my English students:
Rebecca (last name deleted) and Gary (last name deleted)
English 44A, SMU, Creative Writing
Professor Miller

In-class assignment for Wednesday:

Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth. Remember to reread what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached.

Continue...

Marscon in Minneapolis, Minnesota was more of a media-oriented SF con than I'm used to, and also much more of a party con than we have here in Michigan. But I appreciated the space technology track. I envy the space science room, which was full of models and computers running simulations. The Dementia concerts were especially good, and I enjoyed hearing wormquartet, who was by far my favorite music artist among them.

One usually doesn't see many people dressed as Star Trek characters in Michigan, but there were a lot of Klingons at Marscon. I spent most of the evenings in the Klingon room, where they were showing Trekkies 1 & 2, which I must rent because I couldn't make out the words over the room's shouts of "tlhIngan maH!" The Klingons taught me how to play a Klingon version of chess, and I showed them the Shogi set I built and played it with some of them. It was quite popular with the Klingons, as I knew it would be since it expresses the martial spirit of bushido.

I sought out someone from the Klingon Language Institute because I wanted to talk about ways in which they might further their connection with Lojban. (Notice on KLI's website where it says, "This site hosted by The Logical Language Group, e'osai ko sarji la lojban. ji'a" That's us, giving them webspace.)

They only had one lady there who used to speak Klingon. She forgot most of it when she fell down a flight of stairs and got a concussion. That was also when she was contacted by space aliens from the Plieades constellation. "The Mayan calendar ends in 2012," she gravely informed me, and waited for my reaction to this fact. Since she had listened with such interest to my descriptions of the bits and pieces of Hopi Indian evidential tags, Russian event contours, Mandarin pronouns and computer language connectives incorporated into Lojban* I felt duty-bound to listen to her schpiel in return. Oh, who am I kidding; you know I can't resist. "We have all the knowledge in the universe in our genetic code," she continued, and described the books she had been reading about it. "To tap into that knowledge, we release our love to be a conduit between our DNA and the Plieades. If the whole species does this by 2012 it would usher in a thousand years of peace." She feels great joy and peace, and no fear. But she forgot 500 words of Klingon vocabulary, dammit!

Now then... I must try out a Star Trek costume. A Klingon will not do. It's just not me. So... where to obtain gold contact lenses and silver face paint...

*You've seen the T-shirt that reads, "English doesn't borrow from other languages, English follows other languages into dark alleys, knocks them down and goes through their pockets for loose grammar"? This has got nothing on Lojban.

0wnzored is from Cory Doctorow's collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More. I love it because it expresses the direct connection between the hacker culture and transhumanism. For that matter, depending how far you want to take the "root-level superuser of your own body" idea and extend it to the mind, it expresses the potential connection between those two and technopaganism.

Though the story is fiction, "Honorable Computing," described in 0wnz0red as "your basic Bond-villain world-domination horseshit," is real. The characters talk about "the Senator from Disney who wants to make computers illegal"-- this is Fritz Hollings, as the story says, but it could also be Orrin Hatch. Hatch believes in creating legislation allowing content providers to do malicious computer intrusion to spy on any computer that they think has copyrighted content. With no oversight, no due-process. Just the company deciding behind closed doors in a smoky room. Another idea Hatch supports is to allow corporations to decide (again with no oversight) to destroy the computers of people caught stealing music. World-Domination Bond Villian? Yes. In the vision of the entertainment industries and the legislators who they've bought and own, all computers would have to become like DVD players, where the industry has their proprietary code built in so that they are in total control over what you do with your property-- your computer becomes the entertainment industry's property. The industry is going into exactly the same conniptions that they did when VCRs came out and they nearly killed videotape then.

0wnz0red is published under the Creative Commons license, so the author and publisher want it to be copied far and wide. Please do so!

In my recent post about e-book copy protection, avt_tor asked me if I remembered how Karl Schroeder's Permanence ended. Since I couldn't remember, I tried looking up reviews of the book on Amazon.com. It was interesting that the reviewers criticized it mostly for the same reasons that I liked it: "too often resembles digressions that belong in an anthropology study, not a novel." "...the author packs in enough material for several volumes." I didn't care about his characters any more than they did, but I don't demand to; and I noticed that some of them were thrown in for little reason but I didn't care; I would have been just as happy had Schroeder never mentioned any individuals by name and simply invented a future history. I'm just wierd that way. It's an awesome book that kept me up at night thinking about Fermi's paradox, experimental techno-religion and intellectual property. SF literature seems to be dominated by the publishing world's literary values just as much as TV and movie SF is dominated by prosthetic makeup limitations, and gravity on the set, and the need to keep the same actors on every episode.

At ConFusion this year there was a panel on "Is the demand for scientific accuracy killing the creativity in SF?" with Robert Sawyer and Anne Harris. Ms. Harris gave many cogent arguments for why her invention of fake science is good and valid writing. Each argument was from a literary, not intellectual, standpoint and was therefore, although perfectly sound, more or less irrelevant to me. Soft SF and hard SF have no need to appeal to each other's audiences for validation. There is no doubt in my mind that she must be an author of surpassing characterization and plot, but I dislike the fact that it's automatically assumed that is my first priority. When I go to a bookstore's SF & F section and witness the monolithic steamrolling hegemony of shelf upon shelf of film and TV franchise novels, and the clerk says "Egan who?" I am in no fear that soft SF is in danger of not having an audience. Quite the opposite. I fear that the literature of ideas is the one at risk. At cons I usually hear the assumption "everyone wants what we want" not from futurists, but from the publishing world for whom narrative story is the priority.

Even the defender of hard SF on the panel, Robert Sawyer, didn't seem to think SF had anything to do with the future. He merely said that science fiction has to have real science for the same reason mystery has to have a crime to be solved. This is an excellent comment but to stop there would be argument from definition; there remains the question of why these genres contain these things. What motivates someone to choose hard SF, or soft SF, or to even go to the bookshelf at all instead of TV? To any authors reading-- if you think about motivation, there's no sense trying to poach readers away from hard SF. Some people go to the bookshelf because they are thinking "I have a hankering for a good book." This may be impossible for an author to comprehend, but I have never had that feeling. I have never aspired to be an author, either (we do exist, even in fandom!). Some of us only read narrative stories because we want an illustration of what it might be like to live in the kind of future we see in the non-fiction works of Eric Drexler or Marvin Minsky or Ray Kurzweil. Books worth reading are a dime a dozen, but my reading time is a carefully-guarded commodity and I just have to choose what's most important to my personal obsessions. Greg Egan, as it has been said, tends to write chapters on physics that resemble the passages about the biology of sperm whales in Moby Dick, and he has deep-seated double-ply issues, but they're my issues. I choose reading material that provides a real-life kind of intellectual stimulation, and a real-life kind of scary, and a real-life kind of hope, which is why I rarely make time to read fantasy. Why should I care deeply about the implications of a technology on my life and on the real world, unless I believe it just might possibly exist?

At Cafe Penguicon on Friday night of ConFusion, I playtested Planet Catan. This is my variant of Settlers of Catan played on a Hoberman sphere. The player must balance the strategies of mega-engineering the planet Catan to fit the colonists, or bio-engineering the colonists to fit the planet Catan. Through the game the colonies diverge into human subspecies until the planet is irreversibly transformed to be habitable by the winning global techno-ecology. This is a photo of me with one of the playtesters (whose name I failed to get, which is a bad habit of mine) and another photo of ESR on the left and ded_guy on the right, pointing. (Correction. It is not him after all.) They were both playtesters; the bald guy in the center is a bystander. Congrats to ESR for winning, and thanks very much to the playtesters for awesome improvements to the game. I must buy a used Hoberman sphere now so I can play it at Star*Con and Penguicon. Here are the rules:( Read more... )

This week I downloaded and read The Religion War, a science fiction novella and the sequel to God's Debris, by Scott Adams, better known for creating the comic strip Dilbert. I enjoyed it. Be prepared that it's not a comedy, although it does bring up questions similar to those raised by another famous humorist with the last name of Adams who employed science fiction for the same end in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Religion War is about the Avatar, a Sherlock Holmes figure who is a hypnotist and thinks he is immune to delusion, trying to stop a global war between the Christianized western nations and the Islamic Caliphate. The promotional copy says this book will "spark many late night conversations with friends." What I want to know is whether they can remain friends after such conversations. It's remarkable to me however, that no less a cultural influencer than the author of Dilbert recognizes that a deist, an atheist, an agnostic and a pantheist possess nothing important to argue about, whereas people of unquestioned faith have the same essential problem no matter what that faith happens to be.

I recently started watching Babylon 5 for the first time, since my housemate has it on DVD. I appreciated how the producers occasionally made a few concessions to the scientific realities of zero-gravity vacuum, when they felt it didn't detract too much from the corny space-opera melodrama they were aiming for. How nice of them.

The fact that they considered their relatively lax standard to be so rigorous, reminded me how much I loved the PC computer game Independence War, a capital ship combat simulator. It depicted the most plausible combat spacecraft I've ever seen. (One of these days I intend to scratchbuild a model Dreadnaught class corvette.) The sequel, Edge of Chaos, was not quite as good in that regard. What I loved about this game's setting was the incredible level of painstaking justifications for the social/historical/technological detail. As a result it's the only space combat game that doesn't play as if you're riding an underwater torpedo. The depth of combat strategy was sublime. ( Read more... )

Cory Doctorow has replied to my e-mail inviting him to Penguicon 3.0. Not only is he willing to be our honored guest, he's so enthusiastic he's already suggested a half-dozen schedule events! I can't describe how geeked I am about this without lapsing into Lojban. ( Read more... )