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

A poster in Ops at U-Con advertised seeking geeks to be interviewed, for an honors thesis about geek culture. So I emailed Rachel Yung at and signed up. If you self-identify as a geek, Rachel wishes you to do likewise. Here is a transcript of the interview.
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There are two ways in which the high quality of writing has become a problem for readers.

The first way is that there are too many good books to read, and editors are telling us they don't want to filter any more narrowly than that. Let us be candid. Many of us do not care enough about books to read that many, so we ask magazine editors to narrow down the field for us to those that match our tastes. Instead, Mike Resnick tells us that as editor of Jim Baen's Universe he'll give us any fiction he thinks possesses generic goodness. In today's information overload, we wish for more specific literary filters in the torrent of work that has already passed through the "is it generically good?" filter.

This is far too broad a criteria given that different works of fiction provide different mental experiences for which we might have a hankering at various times. Examples include:

• Tear-jerking sentimentality.
• Romantic feelings.
• Intellectual stimulation about philosophy, business, politics, science, engineering, or other ideas.
• Laughter.
• Exciting action.
• Mythopoeia.
• Feelings of horror.
• A puzzle to be solved.

A murder and a detective are just a setting, but the puzzle is the reading experience you have in your head. Fantasy and science fiction are also just settings, and can provide any of those experiences, although there are good reasons that they tend to specialize. I think mental experiences make more useful categories than settings. When fans complain to Escape Pod that Mike Resnick's well-written tear-jerkers are "not Science Fiction", they are complaining wrong. They really were dissatisfied because they were expecting something else which is either on the above list, or belongs there and is missing due to my oversight. (Given that they named SF, good odds are that it's the intellectual one.) Hence Mr. Resnick hears them wrong and doesn't know what they want. People don't need one magazine full of detectives and murders, another full of outer space, and another full of swords and sorcery. Those are settings. Readers need a filter based on the mental experiences they find rewarding. How much does a work trigger fear, humor, tears, romance, intellectual stimulation, or let us work out whodunit? Those are happening in the reader's head independent of props like wands and rayguns.

The second way good writing can be a problem is when it gets out of its place and becomes an exclusionary idolatry. It's a little awkward and uncomfortable to say this, but some of us are unwashed ruffians who read prose fiction specifically to find out the fiddly details and explanations, rather than for the right reasons preached to us by Real Literature. We are the kind of readers who can be educated to appreciate the prose fiction writer's craftmanship, but who unapologetically continue to enjoy reading encyclopedic recountings in a GURPS Transhuman Space setting sourcebook.

It's understandable that many prose fiction authors become obsessed with wordcraft and dramacraft to the point that they can no longer see the rewards of a more polymath set of mental experiences. They wouldn't have gone into the job if they didn't love literature's particular subset of rewards. They're specialists, after all, and reading their livejournals about their writing process, I'm amazed at the depth of their insight into how it works. I just don't care as much as they do. Of course I don't... that's why they're writers and I'm not. Hey, somebody's got to read the stuff.

A polymath, such as a hard science fiction writer, is a jack of at least two trades. His or her work is divided in its loyalties, between the joy of narrative and the stimulation of ideas about our empirical world. Each enriches the other.

That's what fans of specifically science fiction like about it. Slavish totalistic loyalty to literary values like plot and characterization are an artificial limitation on written SF in a way comparable to film's prosthetic makeup limitations and gravity on the set. Carry it too far and pretty soon everybody's writing Dandelion Wine and Farewell Summer just because that sort of book is "well-written" by a supposed universal standard we are all supposed to appreciate.

When it reaches the point that good writing and good books have been set up in opposition to the polymath's enjoyment-- not only ignoring but denigrating-- good writing and good books lose that fight. Readers don't cease to exist when we put the book down. Some of us value other things in the life of the active mind in addition to wordcraft and dramacraft. Philosophy, politics, business, engineering, science. That's why when we go to the bookshelf with the limited time we have allotted for fiction, we specifically pull science fiction off the shelf.

A minority of authors love their skill set so much that it is difficult for them to fit this concept into their world. They find it necessary to narrowly denigrate enjoyment of cleverness more than emotional depth, or denigrate enjoyment of imaginative and fully-realized setting. Loyalty must be given over to literary values wholly. They can tell when an author, and by extension a reader, is serving two masters, enjoying a book for reasons not entirely related to books. For them the Good Book is a jealous god.

Insulting enjoyment is counterproductive. The reaction will not be to properly balance emotional depth. It will be to devalue prose fiction as not interested in giving them what they want, and simply read Popular Science, WIRED Magazine, or Ray Kurzweil instead. That is not necessary, as there can be rapprochement and coexistence on their bookshelves.

Go ahead, write a good book. But please, when you're done writing a book that's good by book standards, release a supplement for the dunces in which you tell-- not show-- the implications we didn't catch. Then we will ooh and aah along with the literary sophisticates.

Anders Sandberg created these hazard symbols. I want them on a t-shirt.

Here's a photo taken at yesterday's Kerrytown Book Fair in Ann Arbor by SF/Fantasy author Tobias Buckell:

The only thing I knew about the event in advance was that John Scalzi, Sarah Zettel, Anne Harris and Tobias Buckell were giving a panel on science fiction. Since their business is not bookbinding, I expected the Book Fair to have more to do with "book" meaning "text content" than "book" meaning "sandwich made of paper and flavored with ink". I was surprised to learn this was not so. There was precious little original content being promoted, and woe betide the person who talks about e-books.

Speaking of sandwiches made of paper and flavored with ink, BoingBoing reports the latest in geek cuisine. You've got to check it out.

Reason #217 to read Eliezer Yudkowski's website.

"I am Eliezer of Borg. You have the option of being assimilated."

Q. Is resistance futile?
A. We are happy to help you with all forms of futile resistance. We regret that, to ensure the safety of others, non-futile resistance is not possible at this time.

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Every time I go to a convention, there is usually an anime room. Sitting in there watching the otaku enjoy subtitled animation from Japan, I am impressed by how powerfully this medium spreads a foreign language through other cultures. I think back to the anime conventions I've visited and consider the classes on Japanese that they teach there! An entire subculture exists online, called "fansubbing", for amateur hobbyists to translate Japanese culture into English and other languages before it is officially released.

For another example, audiences hear Klingon spoken with subtitles in Star Trek, or Quenya spoken with subtitles in The Lord of the Rings, and are captivated by the setting that language creates. Not only could Lojban gain the speakers that it needs by using this effect, we'll have fun creating a film!

Animation once required prohibitive amounts of time and money. But with the advent of machinima, that's no longer true, if you're willing to settle for relatively crude computer animation.( Read more... )Much of the work could be distributed among multiple people who become excited about this project. It would require:

1: finding or writing a story.

2: converting it into a screenplay format with dialog and voiceovers.

3: drawing storyboards.

4: translating the script into Lojban.

5: modeling the characters, props and sets in 3D.

6: if we decide to use Second Life, probably purchasing land and paying to put the models in it.

7: puppeteering and recording the models in machinima software such as Second Life.

8: recording our voices acting the Lojban script.

9: editing it all together with music and English subtitles.

10: posting it to Youtube and Google Video.

11: submitting the link to my friend Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.net who will probably blog the $#14 out of it.

12: welcoming the influx of newbies.

I'm still breathing, so it can't be that bad, he tells himself hopefully. Remember, if you break your neck during a botched parachute landing and then a mad conspiracy-theorist injects black market nanomachines into you, it's highly unlikely that anything worse can happen before sundown, he tells himself in a spirit of misplaced optimism.

Appeals Court by Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross is the sequel to another of their collaborations, Jury Service. Their powers combined, these two stories form a novella titled "The Rapture of the Nerds," now available free online in its entirety.

Remember how hilariously surreal Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was? I used to think science fiction humor had to be absurdist comedy like that. But hilariously surreal is the phrase I use to describe this team. Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow constantly throw dizzying and head-swimming curveballs, while setting the wierdness in the hard science fiction near term, ripped from the headlines of genetic, nano and A.I. research with their own political twist. Frankly, some of you might not be ready to directly inject the neuropetrol of Stross & Doctorow. I dare you to read it! But read them in order. Start off with Jury Service first.

Several months ago I signed up to receive Google Alerts of any new mentions on the web of Greg Egan, who as you know is my favorite author of all time. Unfortunately, there are at least two other Greg Egans who get more press than the Australian science fiction master, so I've had to modify the parameters of the persistent search to exclude the words "hockey" and "wrestler".

Also, it kind of upsets me that www.gregegan.com leads to a placeholder page for a defunct website that has nothing to do with him, while Mr. Egan himself uses gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au. If I wrote to Mr. Egan and offered to buy that domain for him and pay for it to be maintained, I wonder if the reclusive and invisible author would even respond?

While on a panel at ConFusion 2004, Karl Schroeder once said that Greg Egan doesn't go to conventions, hardly anybody even knows what he looks like, and it is humorously rumored that he may actually be an artificial intelligence. Later, this hypothesis was repeated near the end of a hilarious article by Paul di Filippo in Locus Online.

Well you know what? The way my luck has been going lately I bet he would respond to me! I'll try it!

I'm almost done reading Calculating God by Robert Sawyer, a novel about alien races who believe in Intelligent Design. It's a frustrating experience, full of vicarious embarassment.( Read more... )There is a reason that when I want science fiction, I don't go into a Christian bookstore, home of sloppy research, thought-killing sentiments, and a needless, too-easily surrendered despair about ever reconciling morality with reason. Reading Calculating God is like going back there.

I know that a character or civilization depicted in a book does not necessarily represent the viewpoint of the author. I want very badly to believe that's the case right now. ( Read more... )
I am accustomed to disagreeing with conclusions reached by science fiction authors in their novels. ( Read more... )
Here's a timely Doonesbury comic strip that treebones sent me just now.

In the fifth installment of his serialized novel "Themepunks" Cory Doctorow uses an idea which occurred to me independently long ago: multiple small dishwashers for bachelor roommate pads. Don't use cupboards, just leave the cleaned dishes in the dishwasher and transfer them to the other dishwasher when they're dirty. It's really just an idea whose time has come.