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James Keith
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Haynes Publishing's 'Dan Dare Pilot of the Future - Space Fleet Operations Manual' is an engrossing labour of love from a team clearly devoted to the legacy of a hero who inspired a generation – in the hope that he may do so anew. It includes work from some of the original artists, as well as updated cutaways of space-craft, kit and weaponry that remain true to the original spirit.
For a generation of post-war children - largely though not exclusively schoolboys - Dan Dare’s interplanetary adventures were a vibrant and exotic escape from the grey austerity and rationing that persisted long after global hostilities ended.
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The Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov wants us all to live forever, our minds inside avatars. And he is spending a bundle to try to make his colossal dream happen. GET right up close to Dmitry Itskov and sniff all you like — you will not pick up even the faintest hint of crazy. He is soft-spoken and a bit shy, but expansive once he gets talking, and endearingly mild-mannered. He never seems ruffled, no matter what question you ask. Even if you ask the obvious one, which he has encountered more than a few times since 2011, when he started “this project,” as he sometimes calls it. Namely: Are you insane? “I hear that often,” he said with a smile, over lunch one recent afternoon in Manhattan. “There are quotes from people like Arthur C. Clarke and Gandhi saying that when people come up with new ideas they’re called ‘nuts.’ Then everybody starts believing in the idea and nobody can remember a time when it seemed strange.” It is hard to imagine a day when the ideas championed by Mr. Itskov, 32, a Russian multimillionaire and former online media magnate, will not seem strange, or at least far-fetched and unfeasible. His project, called the 2045 Initiative, for the year he hopes it is completed, envisions the mass production of lifelike, low-cost avatars that can be uploaded with the contents of a human brain, complete with all the particulars of consciousness and personality. What Mr. Itskov is striving for makes wearable computers, like Google Glass, seem as about as futuristic as Lincoln Logs. This would be a digital copy of your mind in a nonbiological carrier, a version of a fully sentient person that could live for hundreds or thousands of years. Or longer. Mr. Itskov unabashedly drops the word “immortality” into conversation. Yes, we have seen this movie and, yes, it always leads to evil robots enslaving humanity, the Earth reduced to smoldering ruins. And it’s quite possible that Mr. Itskov’s plans, in the fullness of time, will prove to be nothing more than sci-fi bunk. But he has the attention, and in some cases the avid support, of august figures at Harvard, M.I.T. and Berkeley and leaders in fields like molecular genetics, neuroprosthetics and other realms that you’ve probably never heard of. Roughly 30 speakers from these and other disciplines will appear at the second annual 2045 Global Future Congress on June 15 and 16 at Alice Tully Hall, in Lincoln Center in Manhattan. Though billed as a congress, the event is more like a showcase and conference that is open to the public, with general admission tickets starting at $750. (About 400 tickets, roughly half the total available, have been sold so far.) Attendees will hear people like Sir Roger Penrose, an emeritus professor of mathematical physics at Oxford, who appears on the 2045.com Web site with a video teaser about “the quantum nature of consciousness,” and George M. Church, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, whose video on the site concerns “brain healthspan extension.” As these videos suggest, scientists are taking tiny, incremental steps toward melding humans and machine all the time. Ray Kurzweil, the futurist and now Google’s director of engineering, argued in “The Singularity Is Near,” a 2005 book, that technology is advancing exponentially and that “human life will be irreversibly transformed” to the point that there will be no difference between “human and machine or between physical and virtual reality.” Mr. Kurzweil was projecting based on the scientific and intellectual ferment of the time. And technological achievements have continued their march since he wrote the book — from creating computers that can that can outplay humans (like Watson, the “Jeopardy” winner from I.B.M.) to technology that tracks a game player’s heartbeat and perhaps his excitement (like the new Kinect) to digital tools for those with disabilities (like brain implants that can help quadriplegics move robotic arms). But most researchers do not aspire to upload our minds to cyborgs; even in this crowd, the concept is a little out there. Academics seem to regard Mr. Itskov as sincere and well-intentioned, and if he wants play global cheerleader for fields that generally toil in obscurity, fine. Ask participants in the 2045 conference if Mr. Itskov’s dreams could ultimately be realized and you’ll hear everything from lukewarm versions of “maybe” to flat-out enthusiasm. “I have a rule against saying something is impossible unless it violates laws of physics,” Professor Church says, adding about Mr. Itskov: “I just think that there’s a lot of dots that aren’t connected in his plans. It’s not a real road map.” Martine A. Rothblatt, another speaker at the coming conference and founder of United Therapeutics, a biotech company that makes cardiovascular products, sounds more optimistic. “This is no more wild than in the early ‘60s, when we saw the advent of liver and kidney transplants,” Ms. Rothblatt says. “People said at the time, ‘This is totally crazy.’ Now, about 400 people have organs transplanted every day.”
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The pharmaceutical quest to give women a better sex life.
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CANNES, France – According to “Drive” director Nicolas Winding Refn (who’s also here this year with the ultra-violent “Only God Forgives”), the legendary unmade mid-‘70s film version of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” by Chilean-born mad genius Alejandro Jodorowsky actually exists – and he’s seen it. OK, even Refn hasn’t seen a version of it that can be projected on a screen or played on a high-def monitor, the version that was supposed to star David Carradine, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dalì. That doesn’t exist. But Refn says he spent a long evening in Jodorowsky’s Paris apartment while the latter went through the storyboards for “Dune” with him page by page, talking through every shot and every line of dialogue. “I am the only spectator who has ever seen this movie,” Refn concludes. “And I have to tell you: It was awesome.” I don’t hope to see a movie at this festival, or all year long, that’s as inspiring as Frank Pavich’s documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” the story of an enormously influential film that was never made. That may sound strange on a number of levels: How does one of the most famous collapsed productions in cinema history, a failure so dire that it derailed its director’s career for many years, become a source of inspiration? Especially when the resulting documentary largely consists of a man in his 80s sitting around and talking? Well, when the old guy talking is as brilliant, passionate, ferocious and hilarious as Jodorowsky, and when the stories he tells convince you that his quixotic dream of making an enormous science-fiction spectacle that combined star power, cutting-edge technology, philosophical depth and spiritual prophecy nearly came true, it’s as if you glimpse his vision of a transformed world where everything is possible. The rain-sodden crowd of movie buffs who packed into the Théâtre Croisette here on Saturday night for the premiere of “Jodorowsky’s Dune” (in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar competition) rode with the film for every second; there were several outbreaks of spontaneous applause and a standing ovation for director Pavich when it was over. I gather that aficionados of Jodorowsky and his “Dune” project have seen a good deal of the storyboard art before, along with Chris Foss’ color paintings of sets and design elements. But for the more casual sci-fi fan, this movie delivers a treasure trove of half-familiar images and ideas and opens a window onto an unexplored world that almost was, a world that – as critic Devin Faraci observes in the film – altered the course of pop-culture history without ever existing on its own terms. Now, it seems likely, in the cold light of hindsight, that Jodorowsky’s “Dune” would have collapsed for other reasons even if someone had funded it. (He and producer Michel Seydoux fell about $5 million short on a proposed $15 million budget, a vast sum for an art-house director in the 1970s.) Just because Dalì, Welles and Jagger had all said yes, albeit on ludicrous terms – Welles was promised a private chef; Dalì was to be paid $100,000 for every minute he appeared in the final film, and requested a “burning giraffe” – doesn’t mean they would actually have showed up. Furthermore, Jodorowsky’s films to that point, like the international cult hits “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain,” were surrealistic, visionary LSD-style freakouts that followed no discernible rules of narrative. Could he really have made a densely plotted space opera with many interlocking sets of characters, especially combined with special effects that were barely possible at the time and deep-focus Wellesian cinematography? It seems impossible. But what you come away from “Jodorowsky’s Dune” thinking is: Hell, just maybe. Jodorowsky had been trained in Europe and South America as a theater artist and circus performer and knew almost nothing about the film industry. But the team he gathered – largely through his own personal charisma and by instinct – was truly extraordinary. He walked out on a meeting with “Star Wars” design guru Doug Trumbull, who was then the highest-paid special-effects whiz in the business, and instead hired the little-known Dan O’Bannon after seeing his work in John Carpenter’s “Dark Star.” French comic-book artist Moebius (aka Jean Giraud) drew the storyboards and character-costume sketches, while Foss, a British artist well known for his science-fiction book covers, supplied color paintings of spaceships and sets. To design the nightmarish sets and costumes for the sinister House of Harkonnen, Jodorowsky found a Swiss surrealist painter named H.R. Giger. Is all of that starting to sound oddly familiar? Fans of Ridley Scott’s 1979 “Alien,” a movie that did get made and blew the minds of sci-fi devotees around the globe, don’t need me to tell them that O’Bannon co-wrote its screenplay after the collapse of “Dune” left him broke and homeless. Moebius and Foss both worked on the film as well, and of course Giger designed the scariest extraterrestrial monster anyone had ever seen. Remember that Jodorowsky’s “Dune” would presumably have come out before “Star Wars”; when we look at the designs for this unproduced film, we see the birth of a design aesthetic that has shaped both pop culture and the physical world for the last four decades. Oh, and if you’re wondering about David Lynch’s 1984 film of “Dune,” yes, Jodorowsky went to see it, with great trepidation. He was delighted it was awful; not the most noble reaction, he admits, but human.
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Our visions of the future tend to be forged in the pages of science fiction. But for the past half-century, a number of prominent thinkers, activists, and scientists have made significant contributions to our understanding of what the future could look like. Here are 10 recent futurists you absolutely need to know about. 1. Robert Ettinger
Man Who Vowed to Live Forever Robert C.W. Ettinger, who famously said that death was for the unprepared and the unimaginative, He’s known as the intellectual father of the cryonics movement. Physicist Robert Ettinger, who only died recently and is currently in cryonic stasis, was an early advocate of immortalism, or what we would today call radical life extension. In his 1964 book, The Prospect of Immortality, Ettinger argued that whole body or head-only freezing should be used to place the recently deceased into a state of suspended animation for later revival. To that end, he made the case that governments should immediately start a mass-freezing program. He also believed that the onset of immortality would endow humanity with a higher, nobler nature. "Someday there will be some sort of psychological trigger that will move all these people to take the practical steps they have not yet taken,” he wrote, “When people realize that their children and grandchildren will enjoy indefinite life, that they may well be the last generation to die." Today, organizations like Alcor and the Cryonics Institute (which he founded) have put his ideas into action. Ettinger is also considered a pioneer in the transhumanist movement by virtue of his 1972 book,Man Into Superman.
2. Shulamith Firestone Back in 1970, at the tender age of 25, Shulamith Firestone kickstarted the cyberfeminist movement by virtue of her book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. To come up with her unique feminist philosophy, Firestone took 19th and 20th century socialist thinking and fused it with Freudian psychoanalysis and the existentialist perspectives of Simone de Beauvoir. Firestone argued that gender inequality was the result of a patriarchal social structure that had been imposed upon women on account of their necessary role as incubators. She felt that pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing imposed physical, social, and psychological disadvantages upon women — and that the only way for women to free themselves from these biological impositions would be to seize control of reproduction. She advocated for the development of cybernetic and assistive reproductive technologies, including artificial wombs, gender selection, and in vitro fertilization. In addition, she advocated for the dissemination of contraception, abortion, and state support for child-rearing. She would prove to be a major influence on later thinkers like Joanna Russ (author of "The Female Man"), sci-fi author Joan Slonczweski, and Donna Haraway (who we’ll get to in just a bit). 3. I. J. Good British mathematician I. J. Good was one of the first thinkers — if not the first — toproperly articulate the problem that is the pending Technological Singularity. Predating Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, and Vernor Vinge by several decades, Good penned an article in 1965 warning about the dramatic potential for recursively improving artificial intelligence. He wrote: Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. The phrase intelligence explosion has since been adopted by futurists critical of “soft” Singularity scenarios, like a slow takeoff event, or Kurzweilian notions of the steady, accelerating growth of all technologies (including intelligence). His work has influenced AI theorists like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Ben Goertzel, and of course, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence). Interestingly, Good served as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing during World War II. He also worked as a consultant on supercomputers for Stanley Kubrick for the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. 4. K. Eric Drexler Back in 1959, the renowned physicist Richard Feynman delivered an extraordinary lecture titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” in which he talked about the “experimental physics” of “manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.” This idea largely languished, probably because it was ahead of its time. It wouldn’t be until 1986 and the publication of K. Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology that the idea of molecular engineering would finally take root and take its modern form. Drexler, by virtue of this book and his subsequent lectures and writings, was the first futurist to give coherency to the prospect of molecular nanotechnology. Given the potential for working at such a small scale, Drexler foresaw the rise of universal assemblers (also called molecular assemblers, or simply “fabs”) — machines that can build objects atom by atom (basically Star Trek replicators). He predicted that we’ll eventually use nanotech to clear the environment of toxins, grow rockets from a single seed, and create biocompatible robots that will be injected into our bodies. But unlike Robert Ettinger, Drexler actually came up with a viable technique for reanimating individuals in cryonic suspension; he envisioned fleets of molecular robots guided by sophisticated AI that would reconstruct a person thawed from liquid nitrogen. But he also foresaw the negative consequences, such as weaponized nanotechnology and the potential for grey goo — an out-of-control scourge of self-replicating micro-machines. As an aside, Drexler also predicted hypertext. 5. Timothy Leary Timothy Leary is typically associated with drug culture and the phrase, "tune in, turn on, and drop out," but his contributions to futurism are just as significant — and surprisingly related. He developed his own futurist philosophy called S.M.I2.L.E, which stands for Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, and Life Extension. These ideas developed out of Leary’s life-long interest in seeing humanity evolve beyond its outdated morality, which would prove to be highly influential within certain segments of the transhumanist community. As a futurist, Leary is also important in that he was an early advocate for cognitive liberty and potential for neurodiversity. Through his own brand of psychedelic futurism, he argued that we have the right to modify our minds and create our own psychological experiences. He believed that each psychological modality — no matter how bizarre or unconventional — could still be ascribed a certain value. What's more, given the extreme nature of certain psychedelic experiences, he also demonstrated the potential for human consciousness to function beyond what’s considered normal.More. 6. Donna Haraway Donna Haraway made a name for herself after the publication of her 1984 essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” At the time, it was seen as a reaction to the rise of anti-technological ecofeminism, but it has since been interpreted and reinterpreted by everyone from postmodernist lefties through to transhumanist postgenderists. Referring to Haraway as a Cyborgian Socialist-Feminist, the futurist and sociologist James Hughes describes her legacy this way: Haraway argued that it was precisely in the eroding boundary between human beings and machines, and between women and machines in particular, that we can find liberation from the old patriarchal dualisms. Haraway says she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess, and proposes that the cyborg could be the liberatory mythos for women. This essay, and Haraway’s subsequent writings, have inspired a new cultural studies sub-discipline of “cyborgology,” made up of feminist culture and science fiction critics, exploring cyborgs and the woman-machine interface in various permutations. And as Wired’s Hari Kunzru noted, “Sociologists and academics from around the world have taken her lead and come to the same conclusion about themselves. In terms of the general shift from thinking of individuals as isolated from the "world" to thinking of them as nodes on networks, the 1990s may well be remembered as the beginning of the cyborg era.” 7. Peter Singer He’s primarily regarded as a philosopher, ethicist, and animal rights advocate, but Princeton’s Peter Singer has also made a significant impact to futurist discourse — albeit it through rather unconventional channels. Singer, as a utilitarian, social progressive, and personhood-centered ethicist, has argued that the suffering of animals, especially apes and large mammals, should be put on par with the suffering of children and developmentally disabled adults. To that end, he founded the Great Ape Project, an initiative that seeks to confer basic legal rights to non-human great apes, namely chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. It’s a precursor to my own Rights of Non-Human Persons Program, which also includes dolphins, whales, elephants — and makes provisions for artificial intelligence. Singer has also suggested that chickens be genetically engineered so that they experience less suffering. And in 2001, Singer’s A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation argued that there is a biological basis for human selfishness and hierarchy — one that has thwarted our attempts at egalitarian reform. What’s needed, says Singer, is the application of new genetic and neurological sciences to identify and modify the aspects of human nature that cause conflict and competition — what today would be regarded as moral enhancement. He supports voluntary genetic improvement, but rejects coercive eugenic pseudo-science. 8. Freeman Dyson Theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson is one of the first thinkers to consider the potential for megascale engineering projects. His 1959 paper, "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation," outlined a way for an advanced civilization to utilize all of the energy radiated by their sun — an idea that has since inspired other technologists to speculate about similar projects, like Matrioshka and J-Brains. 9. Nick Bostrom Swedish philosopher and neuroscientist Nick Bostrom is one of the finest futurists in the business, who is renowned for taking heady concepts to the next level. He has suggested, for example, that we may be living in a simulation, and that an artificial superintelligence may eventually take over the world — if not destroy us all together. And indeed, one of his primary concerns is in assessing the potential for existential risks. An advocate of transhumanism and human enhancement, he co-founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998 (now Humanity+), and currently runs the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. 10. Aubrey de Grey Love him or hate him, gerontologist Aubrey de Grey has revolutionized the way we look at human aging. He’s an advocate of radical life extension who believes that the application of advanced rejuvenation techniques may help many humans alive today live exceptionally long lives. What makes de Grey particularly unique is that he’s the first gerontologist to put together an actual action plan for combating aging; he’s one of the first thinkers to conceptualize aging as a disease unto itself. Rather than looking at the aging process as something that’s inexorable or overly complicated, his macro-approach (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) consists of a collection of proposed techniques that would work to not just rejuvenate the human body, but to stop aging altogether. Back in 2006, MIT’s Technology Review offered $20,000 to any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that de Grey’s SENS is “so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate.” No one was able to claim the prize. But a 2005 EMBO report concluded that none of his therapies "has ever been shown to extend the lifespan of any organism, let alone humans." Regardless of the efficacy of de Grey’s approach, he represents the first generation of gerontologists to dedicate their work to the problem that is human aging. Moreover, he’s given voice to the burgeoning radical life extension movement.
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Science fiction is notoriously difficult to define, but Fredrick Pohl’s definition is one of the lovelier ones. “Does the story tell me something worth knowing, that I had not known before, about the relationship between man and technology? Does it enlighten me on some area of science where I had been in the dark? Does it open a new horizon for my thinking? Does it lead me to think new kinds of thoughts, that I would not otherwise perhaps have thought at all? Does it suggest possibilities about the alternative possible future courses my world can take? Does it illuminate events and trends of today, by showing me where they may lead tomorrow? Does it give me a fresh and objective point of view on my own world and culture, perhaps by letting me see it through the eyes of a different kind of creature entirely, from a planet light-years away? — These qualities are not only among those which make science fiction good, they are what make it unique. Be it never so beautifully written, a story is not a good science fiction story unless it rates high in at least some of these aspects. The content of the story is as valid a criterion as the style.”
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The premiere of Daniel Johnston's brand new video for 'Space Ducks', the lead single from the soundtrack album of the same name.
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Last week Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, where I serve as director, officially launched the Hieroglyph Project, an effort to get science fiction writers talking with scientists and engineers about the future. (Disclosure: Future Tense is a partnership of ASU,Slate, and the New America Foundation). The goal is to break out of our dystopian rut and get some ambitious new ideas on the table, and we need your help to do it. Sci-fi great Neal Stephenson founded Hieroglyph with the idea that we need more optimistic visions of the future—visions that are still grounded in real science and technology. As Stephenson haspointed out, a good science fiction story can save us from hundreds of hours of meetings and PowerPoint presentations by immediately getting everyone on the same page about a potential breakthrough. This sounds great in theory, but the entertainment landscape is crowded with evidence of what can go wrong when you try to substitute idealism for good storytelling. On the one hand, it would be a terrible mistake to try and impose optimism on every idea. That way lies the Kitchen of the Future, Brook Farm, and some of the creepier episodes of the Twilight Zone. At best, true utopias make for boring and implausible stories. On the other undulating, Cthulhu-esque appendage, your standard-issue dystopia isn’t going to help much either. Survival narratives in the post-apocalyptic ashes like The Road generally reinforce the notion that the details of scientific progress are unimportant since the endgame is inevitable and wretched. The more nuanced genre of Orwellian nightmare scenarios (Children of Men, for example) is a little better, since it reminds us of everything we have to lose, but the moral of these stories usually suggests that no uplifting technology can match the destructive power of human folly. How can we use Hieroglyph to create convincing stories about a better future, tales with conflict and resolution, with believable characters, with a compelling mixture of hope and irony? Well, while we have set of guidelines for our collaborators, there’s no expectation that every story will have a happy ending. A story where people make mistakes and things don’t work out exactly as planned—that’s pretty much every human story worth hearing. Some of the optimism in Hieroglyph might rely on the simple claim that we can build a better world if we set our minds to it, even if our hero dies or the mistakes along the way are painful ones. Second, we aim to draw a few lessons from the golden age of science fiction without succumbing entirely to that worldview, which at its worst imagines every future problem can be solved by chisel-jawed white guys with engineering degrees wielding the weapons of Science. At their best, stories like “Requiem” by Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov’s “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” were technologically optimistic without sacrificing a credible sense of humanity. The spirit of adventure, of boundless promise, was tempered with human conflicts that illustrated the importance of understanding our tools both technically and culturally. A big part of what gives these stories their frisson, the fresh chill of a new future, is the gap between our world and the fictional universe in question. There’s a kind of intellectual vertigo at play: The author has made some kind of grand imaginative leap and asks us to follow along. What distinguishes Hieroglyph is that we seek to radically extend our idea of what is possible in the present, not a distant future, by drawing on real, cutting-edge research. And we’re doing it online. Of course we’d really like to invite every writer and researcher involved to spend a few weeks at some serene resort with a well-stocked bar, but then we wouldn’t be able to invite the whole world to participate in these conversations. So instead we built hieroglyph.asu.edu, a site for social collaboration based on WordPress and Commons in a Box, a suite of tools designed for just this kind of work. Hieroglyph is an experiment in mapping out the current field of human potential—stuff we could do if we just set our minds to it, but that is so alien to conventional wisdom that it creates that familiar science fiction vertigo. Through the interactions these incredible thinkers will have on the Hieroglyph site, I hope we will also put a much larger group of people in conversation with different ideas about the future. And that’s where you come in: this experiment is only going to work if we use these ideas to start a bigger conversation. Come on over and help us build this thing.
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Must Watch: Dawkins, Nye, Tyson, and Stephenson Discuss Science and Storytelling "Without hyperbole, it is true that i don't think there has ever been on one stage an assembly of science storytellers and communicators like this," said theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of the panelists assembled for the debate featured here. We're inclined to agree with him. After all, it's not every day you get astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, theoretical physicists Brian Greene, executive director of the World Science Festival Tracy Day, Science Friday's Ira Flatow, acclaimed science fiction author Neal Stephenson, and Bill "The Bowtie" Nye under one roof chinwagging about "the science of storytelling and the storytelling of science" – but when you do, you do it in a massive auditorium, and you sure as hell record it for posterity. This is "The Great Debate: The Storytelling of Science," and it features, as Krauss indicates, probably one of the most engaging scientific dream teams to ever congregate in one place. At over two hours long (Part One, above, is just shy of 90 minutes; Part Two, below, runs for just over 45), it's pretty long, but it's definitely something you'll want to set aside time for – if not for today then some time this weekend. Part One features presentations from each of the panelists on their experiences with science and storytelling. Part Two is devoted to a rousing question and answer session, featuring thought-provoking, discussion, debate and dissenting opinion.
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I’m still feeling pretty melancholy over the sad news about Iain Banks’ health. What can you say? Congratulations on your engagement, my condolences on your cancer and thanks for the dark humor. You know what? I think I’m going to go with that last impulse; I think that is a fitting attitude, a winning tactic, the right kind of tribute. In fact, alright, here goes: eff yeah The Culture. The Culture novels are modern classics and should be required reading for anybody who likes science fiction. No, scratch that, for anybody, period. I see hand-wringing articles all the time about how science fiction has become the domain of anti-science fearmongering and dystopian fiction: well! Iain M. Banks’ writes the heck out of utopian sci-fi, and he does it with a wink in the face of nihilism, and it is wonderful. Let’s just take a moment to appreciate The Culture, because The Culture, and Iain Banks, are fantastic. What is The Culture? There are two comparisons that I think really explain it. The Culture is like Star Trek’s Federation, flipped on its head. A hyper-advanced post-scarcity, post-Singularity human civilization. An anarchist collective that just works, where you can get anything you want, do anything you want. Tooling around the galaxy in spaceships with billions of people on them, run by the Minds. The Minds are…well, the post-Singularity bit. Humans build an AI and then that AI builds a better AI, and then later, rinse, repeat until the super-sentient computers are building their circuits in hyperspace because the speed of light was getting to be a drag on their processing power. How is it like The Federation you ask? Oh, simple! They’ve got the Prime Directive, only turned inside out to make it their obligation to meddle with other societies. See, when you have a post-scarcity techno-utopia…why would you let some planet of aliens linger in their “nasty, brutish and short” phase? So Contact was born. Contact’s job is to introduce cultural ideas like freedom and responsibility, and introduce technology and new inventions without causing more problems than they solve. Mentorship, on a massive, species-wide scale. Most of Banks’ Culture novels involve a sub-set of Contact, called Special Circumstances. Because…well, sometimes you can’t make an omlette without breaking a few eggs. By which I mean you might have to assassinate a genocidal space alien Hitler, or undermine an oppressive political system, or…get your civilization’s greatest gambler to play high-stakes poker. The other comparison I like to make is: The Culture is like what would happen if you took Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy completely seriously. The Minds are really what sell this angle. The Minds’ attitudes show up in their names—Minds often being housed in ships—with monikers like Just Read The Instructions or We Haven’t Met But You’re A Great Fan Of Mine and warships with names like Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints and my personal favorite, Trade Surplus. They have a sublime sense of humor that can verge on the completely deranged…and the whole Culture really hangs on their fundamental benevolence. Asked inScience Fiction Weekly “…their outrageous names, their dangerous senses of humour. Is this what gods would actually be like?” Banks answered “If we’re lucky.” The thing is, for all of Banks’ spectacular robots and spaceships, his stories are about people and big ideas. In different doses; Use of Weapons, for instance, is a character portrait of a man struggling with a dark past and his unfortunate talent for being a great war hero, whileSurface Detail is…about the ethics of Hell? Or video games? By which I mean, virtual simulations, and at what point having a simulation full of people being tortured and killed forever is an evil act. I should also point out that Surface Detail had me literally doing the proverbial “laugh out loud” while riding on a crowded train, on many occasions. Hydrogen Sonata is about a culture just on the cusp of post-post-Singularity, on the edge of post-reality, but even that big notion is tempered by the fact that it is really about a woman trying to figure her own stuff, and some heady cosmological stuff, out. When you start to get the feel of just what makes The Culture tick, he mixes it up.Excession is about what happens when The Minds encounter…well, the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, basically. Heck, the very first Culture novel,Consider Phlebas, is about a guy whohates The Culture! Inversions is…well, what if Iain Banks wrote a George R.R. Martin style fantasy novel, but all along Varys and Melisandre were actually members of a super-advanced alien civilization, trying to guide Westeros out of feudal shenanigans. The one I always recommend people start with, though, isPlayer of Games. The brief aside about pronouns in English and how he’s going to use “he” for the “third gender” aliens because they have an oppressive hierarchy and hey, English has an oppressive patriarchal syntax built right into it—magnificent. Banks has teeth. Just because they are stories about a utopia doesn’t mean that the stories he tells are conflict-less. They are rough and often tragic, because that is how life is. His universe is a cold and uncaring one…but that just highlights how important it is for people not to be. It is a good lesson in rational ethics. So thanks, Sun-Earther Iain El-Bonko Banks of North Queensferry. These Culture books are really fantastic.
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James Keith
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I’m a big fan of all the Star Trek series, but for a long time I developed a disinterest in The Next Generation. My memories of it were mired by the shallow perception of its datedness; thanks to the curious pink tinge and generally fuzzy presentation it suffered as a result of the video tapes it was edited on. I extended that perception to everything about TNG, tending to think of it as fuzzy and unappealing. Before the incredible work on the recent TNG bluray releases fixed these visual issues, the series was rescued for me by the books. Although it was a bit of a bumpy start: after the breezing through the brilliant DS9 relaunch books I was eager to see what wonders the Star Trek novelists could work on the adventures of the Enterprise-E after Nemesis. The first couple of books were a little disappointing, with a Picard and Crusher story that relied heavily on characters from the previousStargazer series (which I have still not read), and a rather over-the-top Borg episode. Fortunately things improved dramatically with the ultimate Q novel that followed, and then the continuation of the Borg arc, which was even more over the top than the previous Borg book, but in a much more enjoyable way. What all these novels were lacking though was a real sense of direction for the series. Unlike the first DS9 relaunch story, Avatar, there wasn’t really an idea of the series heading anywhere, or a strong sense of a new set of characters filling in the gaps where the crew of the Titan and Data had departed. There were new characters, but they didn’t seem to work as well as those introduced toDS9, and on top of that I just really hated two of them (T’Lana and Zelik Leybenzon), and was very pleased when they were subsequently killed off! It all seemed to start to pull together with the new characters established in next book, which brought the first Borg arc to a conclusion before launching into the Destiny crossover trilogy and the Typhon Pact-era novels that followed. Characters have continued to come and go; there’s not really a fully stable Enterprise-E crew, but many characters have now been around for several books, giving us time to get to know them, and their relationships with each other. One of the most refreshing aspects of the new crew is that it is impressively female-dominated. Almost all of the canon TNG characters that remain are male (there weren’t many females to have left, after all), while the majority of the most important new characters are female. If there’s one flaw in the mix, it’s that the Enterprise remains irritatingly human-dominant when it comes to main characters – although what new male characters there are help balance that out; the new Bajoran counsellor, Hegol, and Taurik (actually a minor canon character) having a strong recurring roles. There’s also the charming, and sometimes conflicted, new Cardassian exchange officer, Glinn Dygan, who has been a standout character since his introduction. Greater Than the Sum, the book preceding Destiny, introduced two of my favourite recurring new crew members: The first, Jasminder Choudhury, is a Human from Deneva, of South Asian heritage, who serves as the Enterprise’s new security chief. She brings a refreshing new take on a security officer (unlike her departed predecessor in the earlier books), combining her spiritual and peaceful nature with the requirements of the job. She also serves as a counterpart to Worf, allowing his character to develop, and her recent demise will surely continue to affect him in future books. Also first seen in Greater Than the Sum was T’Ryssa Chen, a half-human/half-Vulcan, who has chosen to build her identity on her human tradition, rather than following Vulcan cultural norms. Chen is smart, and funny, bringing a lot of humour to the books since her introduction. She also sometimes struggles with her heritage, to contain her own enthusiasm and expressiveness, and flips between utterly confident and altogether unsure of herself. Perhaps it is the nature of her personality, but Chen seems to me to be the heart of the new crew; her relationships and interactions with many different characters have been significant in several stories. But of all the crew, it is her relationship with Picard that really shines: somewhat like Ro Laren before her, Chen sees Picard as a mentor and almost father-figure; she really cares about his approval, and in return Picard seems softened by her being around, and more light-hearted in response to her. Her role also seems to be to reflect Picard’s generally changing nature, as he moves from being all about to Starfleet, to letting himself have a relationship with Crusher, and subsequently having a child. So how, you ask, do all these new characters, and the changes brought to the more familiar characters, lead me to rediscovering how great TNG is? Well it’s all about that sense of family that really defined TNG; getting to know the new TNG family has reminded me how great the TNG family has always been, how they bounce off each other, and care for each other, and how even with the episodic nature of TNG they never seem static. Most of all, as the Enterprise-E has found itself more and more at the centre of politics in the post-Nemesis era, I am reminded how amazing Captain Picard is; what an inspirational, intelligent, articulate, and compassionate leader he is. Looking back at the TV series, or the books and comics set in that period, I see those characteristics, and also see where these familiar characters are going in their adventures beyond their on-screen appearances. Several plot points in the most recent TNG novels seem to be pointing to the series being about to change direction for some characters again. Hopefully the new crew will continue to flourish whatever path they take. (For those not familiar, the post-Nemesis TNG prose adventures so far: Death in Winter by Michael Jan Friedman, Resistance by J. M. Dillard, Q&A by Keith R.A. DeCandido, Before Dishonor by Peter David, Greater Than the Sum by Christopher L. Bennett, Destiny: Gods of Night by David Mack,Destiny: Mere Mortals by David Mack, Destiny: Lost Souls by David Mack, Losing the Peace by William Leisner, Typhon Pact: Paths of Disharmony by Dayton Ward, Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within by Christopher L. Bennett, Indistinguishable from Magic by David McIntee, Typhon Pact: Plagues of Night by David R. George III, Typhon Pact: Raise the Dawn by David R. George III,Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship by Una McCormack, Cold Equations: The Persistence of Memory by David Mack, Cold Equations: Silent Weapons by David Mack, Cold Equations: The Body Electric by David Mack, The Stuff of Dreams by James Swallow)
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James Keith
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Scooped by
James Keith
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Scooped by
James Keith
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THE concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere recently surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time in three million years. If you are not frightened by this fact, then you are ignoring or denying science. Relentlessly rising greenhouse-gas emissions, and the fear that the earth might enter a climate emergency from which there would be no return, have prompted many climate scientists to conclude that we urgently need a Plan B: geoengineering. Geoengineering — the deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system to counter global warming or offset some of its effects — may enable humanity to mobilize its technological power to seize control of the planet’s climate system, and regulate it in perpetuity. But is it wise to try to play God with the climate? For all its allure, a geoengineered Plan B may lead us into an impossible morass. While some proposals, like launching a cloud of mirrors into space to deflect some of the sun’s heat, sound like science fiction, the more serious schemes require no insurmountable technical feats. Two or three leading ones rely on technology that is readily available and could be quickly deployed. Some approaches, like turning biomass into biochar, a charcoal whose carbon resists breakdown, and painting roofs white to increase their reflectivity and reduce air-conditioning demand, are relatively benign, but would have minimal effect on a global scale. Another prominent scheme, extracting carbon dioxide directly from the air, is harmless in itself, as long as we can find somewhere safe to bury enormous volumes of it for centuries. But to capture from the air the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by, say, a 1,000-megawatt coal power plant, it would require air-sucking machinery about 30 feet in height and 18 miles in length, according to a study by the American Physical Society, as well as huge collection facilities and a network of equipment to transport and store the waste underground. The idea of building a vast industrial infrastructure to offset the effects of another vast industrial infrastructure (instead of shifting to renewable energy) only highlights our unwillingness to confront the deeper causes of global warming — the power of the fossil-fuel lobby and the reluctance of wealthy consumers to make even small sacrifices. Even so, greater anxieties arise from those geoengineering technologies designed to intervene in the functioning of the earth system as a whole. They include ocean iron fertilization and sulfate aerosol spraying, each of which now has a scientific-commercial constituency. How confident can we be, even after research and testing, that the chosen technology will work as planned? After all, ocean fertilization — spreading iron slurry across the seas to persuade them to soak up more carbon dioxide — means changing the chemical composition and biological functioning of the oceans. In the process it will interfere with marine ecosystems and affect cloud formation in ways we barely understand. Enveloping the earth with a layer of sulfate particles would cool the planet by regulating the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface. One group of scientists is urging its deployment over the melting Arctic now. Plant life, already trying to adapt to a changing climate, would have to deal with reduced sunlight, the basis of photosynthesis. A solar filter made of sulfate particles may be effective at cooling the globe, but its impact on weather systems, including the Indian monsoon on which a billion people depend for their sustenance, is unclear. Some of these uncertainties can be reduced by research. Yet if there is one lesson we have learned from ecology, it is that the more closely we look at an ecosystem the more complex it becomes. Now we are contemplating technologies that would attempt to manipulate the grandest and most complex ecosystem of them all — the planet itself. Sulfate aerosol spraying would change not just the temperature but the ozone layer, global rainfall patterns and the biosphere, too. Spraying sulfate particles, the method most likely to be implemented, is classified as a form of “solar radiation management,” an Orwellian term that some of its advocates have sought to reframe as “climate remediation.” Yet if the “remedy” were fully deployed to reduce the earth’s temperature, then at least 10 years of global climate observations would be needed to separate out the effects of the solar filter from other causes of climatic variability, according to some scientists. If after five years of filtered sunlight a disaster occurred — a drought in India and Pakistan, for example, a possible effect in one of the modeling studies — we would not know whether it was caused by global warming, the solar filter or natural variability. And if India suffered from the effects of global dimming while the United States enjoyed more clement weather, it would matter a great deal which country had its hand on the global thermostat. So who would be turning the dial on the earth’s climate? Research is concentrated in the United States, Britain and Germany, though China recently added geoengineering to its research priorities. Some geoengineering schemes are sufficiently cheap and uncomplicated to be deployed by any midsize nation, or even a billionaire with a messiah complex. We can imagine a situation 30 years hence in which the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power is threatened by chaotic protests ignited by a devastating drought and famine. If the alternative to losing power were attempting a rapid cooling of the planet through a sulfate aerosol shield, how would it play out? A United States president might publicly condemn the Chinese but privately commit to not shooting down their planes, or to engage in “counter-geoengineering.” Little wonder that military strategists are taking a close interest in geoengineering. Anxious about Western geopolitical hubris, developing nations have begun to argue for a moratorium on experiments until there is agreement on some kind of global governance system. Engineering the climate is intuitively appealing to a powerful strand of Western technological thought that sees no ethical or other obstacle to total domination of nature. And that is why some conservative think tanks that have for years denied or downplayed the science of climate change suddenly support geoengineering, the solution to a problem they once said did not exist. All of which points to perhaps the greatest risk of research into geoengineering — it will erode the incentive to curb emissions. Think about it: no need to take on powerful fossil-fuel companies, no need to tax gasoline or electricity, no need to change our lifestyles. In the end, how we think about geoengineering depends on how we understand climate disruption. If our failure to cut emissions is a result of the power of corporate interests, the fetish for economic growth and the comfortable conservatism of a consumer society, then resorting to climate engineering allows us to avoid facing up to social dysfunction, at least for as long as it works. So the battle lines are being drawn over the future of the planet. While the Pentagon “weaponeer” and geoengineering enthusiast Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist, has proclaimed, “We’ve engineered every other environment we live in — why not the planet?” a more humble climate scientist, Ronald G. Prinn of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has asked, “How can you engineer a system you don’t understand?”
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James Keith
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Jack Glass is Adam Roberts's most fan-friendly novel to date, but will that be enough to win him a Hugo award? The worst thing that ever happened to science fiction was getting confused with genre fiction. If any kind of literature relies on the new and the innovative to excite the reader it is SF. Genre fiction recycles, repeats and repackages the same old ideas. Space exploration, faster-than-light travel, cybernetic implants and virtual realities all stirred that fabled "sense of wonder" in the kids who grew up with them. But now those kids are running out of middle age and wonder has been replaced with nostalgia. The SF genre today is like your dad's prog rock LP collection, a last link to a lost youth. Adam Roberts's Jack Glass is a science fiction novel about our nostalgia for science fiction novels, replete with the favourite devices of Golden Age SF. It's also a detective novel, a locked-room mystery in the style of Dorothy L Sayers or Ellery Queen. The fact that Ellery Queen was a "house name" for many pulp writers, among them SF legend Jack Vance, underlines the fact that these stories have more in common than separates them. In an illuminating review of Jack Glass, critic Jonathan McCalmont cracks open Adam Roberts's love-hate relationship with SF's self-regarding nostalgia. Roberts is clearly a fan. But he is also a critic, and his fiction can not help but reflect both. Reading any of Roberts's 13 published science fiction novels I often find myself thinking of their author as the last true science fiction writer. It's an exaggeration, there are other original voices in the field, but few as consistently and startlingly original. In a field where most writers can be relied upon to write the same book over and over again, Roberts insists on writing an entirely different book every time. Worse, far from writing a breathless homage to the giants upon whose shoulders he stands, Roberts is more often to be found affectionately taking the piss out of the genre science fiction has spawned. (Roberts is, on his days off, also author of parodies The Soddit, Bored of the Rings and The Va Dinci Cod under the pseudonym ARRR Roberts.) Swiftly: A Novel is an enlightenment-era steampunk fantasy, spun from the what if? question of how the British Empire might have evolved had it enslaved the Lilliputian people of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Yellow Blue Tibiariffs on the heavily politicised history of Soviet science fiction to create the ultimate in paranoid conspiracy theories. New Model Army imagines a second English Civil War, and a decentralised army of hackers and tech-heads who wrest military power from the hands of the British establishment. In his novel By Light Alone, Roberts ups the political ante by taking on the new gilded age of our post-economic crash reality, depicting a world of fabulous wealth and extreme deprivation where the poor are genetically engineered to subsist, like plants, on mere daylight and oxygen. The genuine "sense of wonder" that Adam Roberts's wonderfully original SF novels evoke is winning praise from many quarters. In April he joins China Miéville as one of the few SF authors to become the focus of a major academic conference, "New Genre Army", organised by Christos Callow and Dr Caroline Edwards of Lincoln University, to be followed by an anthology of critical writing on Adam Roberts fiction from Gylphi. Roberts has also picked up nominations for the Kitschies and the British Science Fiction Association awards, although as the youngest of the six white, middle-aged and male candidates for the latter prize he might be considered too diverse to actually win. Major awards within the genre of science fiction have, to date, eluded Adam Roberts. The Hugo awards, voted for by members of SF fandom attending the annual WorldCon, have demonstrated wide range of tastes in recent years. Shortlisted titles for best novel range from the overtly nostalgic Leviathan Wakes by James SA Corey and Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold to the exceptionally original Palimpsest by Catherynne M Valente and Embassytown by China Miéville. Jack Glass manages to be both nostalgic and original in equal measure, and may be the novel to win Roberts the genre's most coveted award.
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James Keith
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Also in Slate, Matthew Yglesias ranks every Star Trek movie, television series, villain, and crew member.
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James Keith
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Smart machines probably won't kill us all—but they'll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think. THIS IS A STORY ABOUT THE FUTURE. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is thehappy version. It's the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they're computers: They never get tired, they're never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge. The result is paradise. Global warming is a problem of the past because computers have figured out how to generate limitless amounts of green energy and intelligent robots have tirelessly built the infrastructure to deliver it to our homes. No one needs to work anymore. Robots can do everything humans can do, and they do it uncomplainingly, 24 hours a day. Some things remain scarce—beachfront property in Malibu, original Rembrandts—but thanks to super-efficient use of natural resources and massive recycling, scarcity of ordinary consumer goods is a thing of the past. Our days are spent however we please, perhaps in study, perhaps playing video games. It's up to us. Maybe you think I'm pulling your leg here. Or being archly ironic. After all, this does have a bit of a rose-colored tint to it, doesn't it? Like something from The Jetsons or the cover ofWired. That would hardly be a surprising reaction. Computer scientists have been predicting the imminent rise of machine intelligence since at least 1956, when theDartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence gave the field its name, and there are only so many times you can cry wolf. Today, a full seven decades after the birth of the computer, all we have are iPhones, Microsoft Word, and in-dash navigation. You could be excused for thinking that computers that truly match the human brain are a ridiculous pipe dream. But they're not. It's true that we've made far slower progress toward real artificial intelligence than we once thought, but that's for a very simple and very human reason: Early computer scientists grossly underestimated the power of the human brain and the difficulty of emulating one. It turns out that this is a very, very hard problem, sort of like filling up Lake Michigan one drop at a time. In fact, not just sort of like. It's exactly like filling up Lake Michigan one drop at a time. If you want to understand the future of computing, it's essential to understand this.
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Will we ever be able to cross the universe with the ease of the Enterprise? As 'Star Trek into Darkness' prepares to blast into cinemas, Astronomer Royal Martin Rees offers some answers.
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James Keith
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May the Fourth! Tomorrow's the day we celebrate all things Star Wars — which makes it the perfect day to recognize one of the great unsung contributors to the galaxy far, far away: Leigh Brackett wrote the first script draft of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back, and her contributions helped make the saga epic. But before Brackett had a major hand in creating the best Star Warsmovie, she was a science fiction novelist in the 1940s, writing a slew of space adventure novelswith titles like The Starmen and Alpha Centauri or Die!. People called her the Queen of Space Opera — and it was not always a compliment. At that time, space opera (like Star Wars) was looked down upon as less worthy of appreciation than other types of pulp fiction, including other types of science fiction. Brackett also wrote a lot of pulp crime fiction, and had co-written the screenplay for The Big Sleep with William Faulkner. But she chose to spend a lot of her time writing these despised novels. As her friend Michael Moorcock explains in an essay: Like so many of her heroes, Leigh preferred the outlaw life. She always said her first love was science fantasy. She said it defiantly, when it paid less than other pulp fiction. When it paid less, indeed, than other kinds of science fiction. If she had chosen, in her fiction, to hang out with the scum of the L.A. streets instead of the dregs of the spacelanes, she could have made a lot more money... Her keen sense of freedom made her, like many other fine writers of her generation, choose the more precarious life of writing science fantasy.... There was a time when the kind of science fantasy Brackett made her own was looked down upon as a kind of bastard progeny of science fiction (which was about scientific speculation) and fantasy (which was about magic). As Andrew Liptak quotes in his great piece on Brackett's planetary romances in Kirkus: An aunt once asked her: “Why don’t you write nice stories for the Ladies’ Home Journal?”, to which Brackett replied: “I wish I could, because they pay very well, but I can’t read the Ladies’ Home Journal, and I’m sure I couldn’t write for it.” Of course, Brackett was a respected member of the L.A. science fiction writer community — and she was a mentor to Ray Bradbury, with whom she traded critiques and collaborated on some stories. But at the same time, her choice to write "science fantasy" or "space opera" wound up tarring her as a representative of a pulpy subgenre that many science fiction writers were embarrassed by, especially as science fiction tried to become more "mature" and sophisticated in the 1950s. This 1976 interview with Brackett (and Edmond Hamilton) is a must-read, including the parts where she talks about the early hostility she received from some readers as a woman writing SF. She also says that many women became interested in SF after Sputnik was launched, because suddenly all of this stuff seemed real. Also in that interview, she talks about her love for Edgar Rice Burroughs and confesses, " I suppose most of my stuff would be called escape fiction. This is the type of stuff I love to read." She adds: I'm interested mainly in never trying to mold [science fiction] into one particular thing. I think it should be free to have every type of thinking, every type of story. I think you should have the ecological stories, the political stories, the Big Think type of story. I mean, what anybody wants to write. What I hate to see are the occasional attempts that are made, periodically, none of them ever last very long, to mold the field into one particular thing, and say science fiction has to be such and such and so. In other words, just what I happen to think science fiction should be. Also, in her introduction to The Best of Planet Stories #1 in 1976, Brackett describes "space opera" as "a pejorative term often applied to a story that has an element of adventure." And she offers a defense of space opera as "the folk-tale, the hero-tale, of our particular niche in history." Sputnik, she writes, startled the wits out of all the high-minded, important people who hadn't wanted to talk about space. But she adds: But the space opera has been telling us tales of spaceflight, of journeys to other worlds in this solar system... These stories served to stretch our little minds, to draw us out beyond our narrow skies into the vast glooms of interstellar space, where the great suns ride in splendor and the bright nebulae fling their veils of fire parsecs-long across the universe; where the Coal-Sack and the Horsehead make patterns of black mystery; where the Cepheid variables blink their evil eyes and a billion nameless planets may harbor life-forms infinitely numerous and strange. Escape fiction? Yes, indeed! But in its own ironic way, as we see now, it was an escape into a reality which some people are even now trying to fight off. (Also quoted in Kramer and Hartwell, Space Opera Renaissance.) The irony is that, according to Michael Moorcock, Brackett's well-written stories, despite having larger-than-life heroes, actually helped to launch the movement to make the genre more adult, sophisticated and literary. Moorcock has called Brackett "one of the godmothers of the New Wave." She also stretched out in her later work, including one of the great post-apocalyptic novels, The Long Tomorrow. (By the way, there's a great Leigh Brackett tribute site, run by Blue Tyson, over here.) But if Brackett was feeling defensive about her contributions to space opera in 1976 (as the Planet Stories introduction shows she was), then she received some amazing vindication — even if some of it arrived after her death. Not only did Star Wars make the genre of space opera suddenly mainstream and huge, but Brackett was hired to write the screenplay for the sequel. According to John Baxter's book Mythmaker(quoted here), a friend handed Lucas a copy of one of Brackett's books, and told Lucas: "Here is someone who did the Cantina scene better than you did." Baxter describes the phone conversation between Lucas and Brackett thusly: Lucas: Have you ever written for the movies? Brackett: Yes, I have. Rio Bravo, El Dorado, The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye... [pause] Lucas: Are you that Leigh Brackett? Brackett: Yes. Isn't that why you called me in? Lucas: No, I called you in because you were a pulp science fiction writer! After that, Lucas started out by having a week-long story conference with Brackett, according to The Secret History of Star Wars. During this time, he hashed out a lot of the story points that wound up in the final film, including the character of Yoda — and the notion that Luke has a twin sister, which isn't brought up until Return of the Jedi. After a Thanksgiving break, they resumed the story conference, which led to a 55-page transcript in which a lot of stuff was hashed out, according to J.W. Rinzler's The Making of The Empire Strikes Back. What Did The Original Script For The Empire Strikes Back Look Like?Word is the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back has been making the rounds on the web...without… Read… It's fashionable to disparage Brackett's contributions toEmpire — Lucas himself says that her script wasn't what he wanted at all, and she died of cancer before she could do any rewrites. Lucas is quoted in The Annotated Screenplays as saying, "During the story conferences I had with Leigh, my thought weren't fully formed and I felt that her script went in a completely different direction." (You can read the entire script draft here, and a list of differences from the final film here.) But it's not true that none of Brackett's storyline winds up in the final movie — the basic story beats are the same. And there is at least one aspect of Brackett's draft that's way better than what Lucas eventually ended up with: the character of Luke's twin sister, named Nellis in Brackett's screenplay. From The Annotated Screenplays: This concept of Luke's sister was discussed during story conference: The idea was that Luke's father had twin children and took one of them to an uncle and the second one to the other side of the universe so that if one was killed, another would survive. It was suggested that Luke's twin sister would be going through training at the same time that he was and become a Jedi master as well. Eventually, in another episode the story could deal with both Luke and his sister as Jedi Knights. It's probably true, as Lawrence Kasdan says in Rinzler's book, that Brackett's screenplay doesn't quite get the feel of what George Lucas was going for, and that her work represents the sensibilities of an earlier era. Lucas was in the middle of revolutionizing space opera, for better or worse, and Brackett represented an earlier era, that was closer to the Burroughs planetary romances. And yet, a lot of what makes Empire great is still traceable to those early story conferences that she and Lucas had together. And in a lot of ways, her credit as screenwriter for one of the greatest space adventures of all time is vindication for someone who chose to write space opera at a time when that term was considered a put-down.
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10 – The Tantalus Field
Part of what makes the Mirror Universe such fertile imaginative soil is that it is a limited concept. It's everything you know, just reversed. Except for a few things – like technology. One gizmo they have on “the other side” is a powerful weapon called the Tantalus Field Device. Basically, it's like a closed circuit television that takes anyone you want to make disappear and zaps them into oblivion. (Okay, the science behind this one was always a little vague.) The Tantalus Field is a plot device taken straight from eight-year-olds playing in the back yard, but its influence on the alternate history of the Mirror Universe was lasting.
9 – Empress Hoshi Sato
Much like Reg Barclay, Hoshi Sato is a character upon which to project our fears. A natural at languages and dialects, but not so much for spacefaring adventure. It stands to reason her opposite counterpart would be an absolute killer.
In the Mirror Universe, where being cutthroat is the only key to success, Hoshi eventually manipulates her way into the early Terran Empire's version of the Iron Throne. At first, she seemed merely to be the “Captain's Woman,” but after a few crosses and double-crosses (and poisoning Mirror Jonathan Archer) she comes out on top and in command. And wearing a half-shirt.
8 – Brunt
The ins and outs of the Mirror Universe factions can be a little complicated, especially when the characters in them aren't 100% good or bad. Case in point, Liquidator Brunt of the FCA (in our world) is a mercenary over there – and one who driven by his love for Ezri Tigan (more on her in a bit.) He's working for the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance, even though he sympathizes with the Terran Rebellion created by (Mirror) Sisko. Brunt's death at the hands of Intendent Kira Nerys (again, more on her in a bit) was proof that the Mirror Universe meant business – and that viewers could never feel too sure about how things were going to end up.
7 – Smiley
Even in the Mirror Universe, Chief O'Brien is basically a good guy. His kidnapping of (our) Captain Sisko in “Through the Looking Glass” may not be the optimal method, but his goal of freeing the enslaved Terrans at the hands of the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance is a noble one. A little grouchier on that side (hence the nickname Smiley), we only wish that he could have worn the eye patch from “Our Man Bashir” while he was engaging in acts of piracy. Oh well.
6 – That Insignia!
The Terran Empire is nothing without its incredibly badass (albeit frightening and anti-humanist) insignia. A dagger through the Earth? Um, wait, how does this ingratiate you to your people again? I mean, yes, some actual flags of today include a sword, but not piercing the planet upon which we all live. Nevertheless, the Mirror Universe doesn't just have some terrific graphic design, it also makes sure that its female crew-members, even bridge officers, show an unlikely amount of skin. We've got mixed feelings about the politics behind this, but from an aesthetic point of view, it is hard to find much fault.
5 – Mirror Odo's Death
Nothing about a dying Odo in any Universe makes me happy. However, if you gotta go, you wanna go big. To that end, let's salute the episode “Crossover,” which, as mentioned earlier, proved that the Mirror Universe was no joke, ready to kill characters that were contractually obligated to live in our world. With the rules loosened a bit, however, we now know what happens to a Founder when he ends up on the wrong side of a phaser blast. It ain't pretty.
4 – The Agony Booth/Handheld Agonizers
“Fear will keep the local systems in line” is the key phrase of the Grand Moff Tarkin's leadership doctrine, if I may quote from another Star franchise. The Terran Empire is well aware of this method of motivation. Each crewman of the ISS Enterprise wears a little red doohickey called an “agonizer,” and if they screw up their superior officers are compelled to take it and use it deliver punishment. When they REALLY get too big for their britches (as Mirror Chekov does), no mere handheld device is going to do the trick. A session in the awesomely named “agony booth” is reserved for serious offenders.
3 – Intendant Kira Nerys (and her silver pants).
Major Kira Nerys is a warm, wonderful woman filled with life and joy and good cheer to her friends. She has a dark past, that of a freedom fighter/terrorist, but she struggles through that with hard work, her Bajoran faith and her personal relationships. As such, it is only natural that her Mirror Universe counterpart should be ruthless, manipulative and cold. But. . . seductively so. In one of the more striking recurring characters in all of Trek, Intendant Kira Nerys oversaw the operation of Terok Nor for the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance, and was a violent and sexually voracious woman. In addition to having an eye for (Mirror) Sisko and Ezri Tegan, she found a true object of her lust in herself, naturally, when our Kira crossed over.
Considering that she wore the pants on the station, it is only (form) fitting that she get a very telegenic pair to wear.
2 – Mirror Spock (and his beard.)
Before “Mirror, Mirror” ever has a chance to explain itself, its visuals let us know the score. Spock has a beard, and we know he is evil. While the facially hirsute version of a character signifying evil has now become a cliché (to the point that Spock's Beard is the name of a prog supergroup), we shouldn't lose the character for the goatee – Mirror Spock, with or without the beard, is fascinating.
And. . .optimistic. Since he is a creature of logic, he eventually realizes that an Empire cannot rule by fear and violence indefinitely. He realizes that peace, harmony, exploration, IDIC and all the other Roddenberry ideals are, eventually, the only way to go. The fact that logic and goodness is a universal constant in any timestream is something that should inspire us. Of course, Spock's eventual use of the Tantalus Device in rising through the Terran Empire's ranks leads to some unforeseen problems, but that's why they make television shows.
1 – The Fact That It Is Real
I'll need a theoretical physicist to check my work on this one, but here goes. The fifth dimension, which folks like Stephen Hawking believe to be real, posits what “Mirror, Mirror” and, eventually, episodes like TNG's “Parallels” show – that there exists an infinite amount of universes out there in which all permutations of all possible outcomes are true. This means (now bear with me) that somewhere out there (down the timeline a bit, but we know space and time to be one and the same) there exists a world where all the things Gene Roddenberry and his writers (and the writers that followed) predicted actually happened. Or will happen. It's true! (I think.) Therefore, it makes perfect sense to me that there is a REAL Intendant Kira out there in shiny silver pants having illicit sex on a space station somewhere.
(Also, see recent IDW Star Trek Ongong Comics #18 and #19 to see Scotty and Bones have a ridiculous conversation along these very lines. The Scotty and Bones from the recent J.J. Abrams movie, of course, because, like I said, there are an infinite amount of timelines out there.)
Okay, bearded ones, did I do justice to the might and ferocity of the Terran Empire? Or would you rather I disappear myself in a Tantalus Field Device. Let me know your picks for best of the Mirror Universe below.
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Scooped by
James Keith
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The relationship between the literary and speculative fiction genres is like the episode of original Star Trek where Captain Kirk is teleported in to an evil, parallel dimension. Both genres have their own star authors, publishers, and of course literary accolades. (Which genre requires that you assassinate your rivals to advance is for you to decide.) Granta's lists of 20 novelists under 40 – American, Spanish-language, Brazilian and most famously the British contingent – being renewed for 2013 this week – have become an institution in literary fiction. SF has no direct equivalent, but if it did, who might be on it? Two things connect the 20 writers on this list. The first is a fascination with the weird and fantastic. The second is their love and affection for the pulp roots of SF. One or two may be just a smidgeon over 40, but will no doubt be among the writers shaping speculative fiction for decades to come. And I have looked beyond Britain where I can to find the most interesting voices in what is increasingly an international SF genre. Lauren Beukes is a South African author of "cyberpunk" science fiction whose novel Zoo City brought her very widespread acclaim, and a major publishing deal for upcoming novel The Shining Girls. James Smythe's The Explorer and The Machine are the kind of breathtaking conceptual SF long absent from the genre. Hannu Rajeniemi's soaring space opera The Quantum Thief andMadeleine Ashby's vN series both reawaken the slumbering body of "Hard SF" rooted in real science. French writer Aliette De Boddard fuses many ideas from SF and fantasy in both her novels and short fiction. And with indie publishing phenomenon Wool reaching more than a quarter of a million sales,Hugh Howey has become overnight one of SFs bestsellers. Joe Abercrombie is the self-proclaimed Lord of "grimdark" epic fantasy, whose writing displays a wit and style beyond the battle sequences and torture scenes that dominate the gritty world of grimdark. NK Jemsin brings an immense storytelling talent to the tradition of epic fantasy, with a series of beautiful stories that have garnered Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy award nominations. The Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed is notable for its middle-eastern fantasy setting, but the work's real strengths are its deep sense of irony and dark humour. And of course British author China Miévillehas re-worked the fantasy genre into many and varied weird forms from Perdido Street Station to Embassytown, though he is technically ineligible, as he turned 40 last year. Joe Hill is arguably the most significant horror author of the last decade, with 20th Century Ghosts, Heart Shaped Box and the upcoming NOS4A2 setting the bar for the entire genre. Chuck Wendig's Blackbirds series fulfils the promise of an author who is a firm favourite among fans for his characterful online presence. Seanan McGuire scooped five Hugo nominations this year alone and as Mira Grant writes one of the most acclaimed and accomplished entries among a spate of recent zombie apocalypse novels. Robert Jackson Bennet's debut novel Mr Shivers drew acclaim by crafting an alternative fantasy from the milieu of the Great Depression. And any survey of the contemporary horror genre would not be complete without the bizarro masterpieces of Carlton Mellick III. If Mellick had written only Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland he would be on this list, but with dozens of other equally grotesque creations tearing up the world his name is set for sci-fi immortality. Catherynne Valente's novels and stories range widely across the fantastic, but it is her dark urban fantasies such as Palimpsest that best showcase her baroque prose style. Tom Pollock's debut The City's Son marked the appearance of a powerful new imagination in SF, and hopes are high for the upcoming sequel. As they are for the debut novel of Elizabeth May, with The Falconer among the most anticipated fantasy novels of 2013. The young adult stories of Francis Hardinge follow in the footsteps of the great Diana Wynne Jones by being equally enchanting for children and adults. And Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor scooped its author a prestigious World Fantasy award in 2011, which we can only hope is the first of many. Who have I missed from my top 20? It's almost a cliche to call the literary world elitist, but it's hard to escape the idea with lists like Granta's defining the best of the best. In contrast the SF genre is open and communal, driven by the passions of fans and the creativity of authors. The top writers in the field choose themselves by writing great books and engaging with the community. The door is open to any writer who wants to make their mark in the SF genre. All we ask is that you tell great stories.
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Scooped by
James Keith
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I make no apologies for writing science fiction. I love the genre with a deep and geeky love. Becoming professor of 19th-century literature at the University of London has done nothing to diminish my capacity for that mode of enthusiasm that fans call "squee". Being a literature professor means, in effect, the government pays me to read books; and, taking my job seriously, I read a lot, in and out of genre. I think the novel is most alive today as a literature of the fantastic: at their worst, SF, fantasy and magic realist novels can be very bad; while at their best, they're by far the most exciting kinds of writing being published. But here's the thing: my genre divides politically in a manner unlike others. Writers of historical or crime fiction might be rightwing or leftwing, but few would attempt to define those genres as intrinsically left- or right-leaning. SF is different: the genre defines itself according to two diametrically opposed ideological stances. Let's take the lefty stance first, since it happens to be my own. Any SF text must include something that isn't in the "real" world: starship, robot, a new way of organising society, whatever. This might be material, social or even metaphysical, but it will encode difference. Alterity is fundamental to SF: it is a poetics of otherness and diversity. Now, it so happens that the encounter with "otherness"– racially, ethnically, in terms of gender, sexual orientation, disability and trans identity – has been the main driver of social debate for the last half‑century or more. The tidal shift towards global diversity is the big event of our times, and this is what makes SF the most relevant literature today. To say that SF has more imaginative and discursive wiggle-room than "realist" art is, while true, also to say that SF has the potential to be a more heterogeneous and inclusive conceptual space. This is something that's understood by the genre's greatest writers: Ursula K Le Guin, Octavia Butler, James Tiptree Jr, Margaret Atwood, Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Cadigan, Justina Robson. On the other hand, many fans define SF as the literature of scientific extrapolation. There are those who think of "science" as ideologically neutral, simply the most authoritative picture of the universe available to humanity. The problem is that "authoritative" has a nasty habit of eliding with "authoritarian" when transferred into human social relations. Rightwing political affiliation comes in many forms, but for many rightwingers, respect for authority is a central aspect of their worldview. The world, says the rightwinger, is hard, unforgiving and punishes weakness: in order to prosper, we need to be self-reliant, subordinate decadent appetites to self-discipline, know what the rules are and follow them. There's lots of SF like this. OK, I'll admit I've imported a caricature "rightwinger" into my argument. Nonetheless, SF contains many who believe the laws of physics make their ideology true. US SF grandmaster Robert Heinlein's credo, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch", oft-repeated in his writing, folds a neutral fact of physics – entropy – into value-inflected judgments about things such as welfare and affirmative action. Orson Scott Card is a giant of the genre, but also a man who has declared that consensual gay sex should be illegal, and that any government that legalised gay marriage ought to be overthrown. Newt Gingrich, one‑time Republican presidential hopeful, has published SF novels; and books by writers such as Jerry Pournelle, John Ringo and Neal Asher sell extremely well. It's a puzzle – not why these writers sell, for there are plenty of perfectly decent, book-loving rightwing people in the world (I take it as axiomatic that liking SF is an index of decency). I mean it's a puzzle for the genre. How can SF be both centrally about the articulation and exploration of marginalised and subaltern voices, and a projection of contemporary ideological concerns outward on to a cosmos in which the laws of physics themselves tell us to vote Conservative? I'm not pretending objectivity. A full ideological reading of SF would interrogate the "hospitality to otherness" model with the same rigour as "the laws of physics validate my political beliefs" model. Heinlein's imagined interstellar future is an environment designed to valorise the skill sets (self-reliance, engineering competence, willpower, bravery and manliness) that Heinlein prized. Left-leaning Iain M Banks's Culture novels posit a high-tech geek utopia in which the particular skill sets, ethics and wit‑discourse of SF nerds turn out to be the gold standard of pan-galactic multi-species civilisation. I like the Culture a great deal, but I have to admit it's a "there is such a thing as a free lunch" sort of place. Asking whether SF is "intrinsically" leftwing or rightwing is dumb, since literatures are not "intrinsically" anything. But I'm tempted to thump the tub nonetheless. Conservatism is defined by its respect for the past. The left has always been more interested in the future – specifically, in a better future. Myriad militaristic SF books and films suggest the most interesting thing to do with the alien is style it as an invading monster and empty thousands of rounds of ammunition into it. But the best SF understands that there are more interesting things to do with the alien than that. How we treat the other is the great ethical question of our age, and SF, at its best, is the best way to explore that question. Adam Roberts's Jack Glass (Gollancz) has won the British Science FictionAssociation best novel prize.
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Scooped by
James Keith
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It's hard to know what to do when a literary idol announces their imminent demise. This week, with typical deadpannery, writer Iain Banksbroke the devastating news that he is "officially Very Poorly" and has just months to live. We decided that list-making is an appropriate response. Iain (M) Banks' mainstream and science fiction has brought us much joy over the years – particularly his Culture series – about an anarchic, super-evolved, egalitarian spacefaring civilisation. Each time we've read a new Culture novel, We swear we've feltnew neural pathways fizzing into existence. In the Culture, humans and Artificial Intelligences (AIs) enjoy equal societal standing; crime, personal wealth and disease are so far in the past as to be considered bad taste; and everyone has ready access to technology that's indistinguishable from magic. Basically, Culture citizens are enlightened and weaponised space-Scandinavians. Here are ten other perks of the Culture: 1. Sex, drugs and eugenics Culture humans are so evolved that eugenics are de rigeur across the species. Humans live 300 years plus, can change gender at will, and have sexy bits that are genetically optimised for pleasure. Cor. Most people are also born with natural "drug glands" which secrete non-habit forming mood and sensory-altering substances. These include the trippy 'Crystal Fuge State' and 'Quicken', which speeds up mental processes so people can talk to AIs without having to ask them to repeat themselves. And there are no hangovers or comedowns, so nobody's buzz is harshed. Like we said, enlightened space-Scandinavians. 2. Switching off pain In a society of planet-hopping poly-centenarians, physical injury is inevitable. But Culture humans are hardy. Severed limbs grow back, bones thicken and thin according to gravitational need, and autonomic processes like breathing and blinking can be switched to conscious control. Best of all, though, is the ability to turn pain off at will. Which begs the question: would Fifty Shades of Grey even work in a Culture scenario? 3. Body modification Want to look like an Aspidistra? You can in the Culture. Four arms? Not a problem. Chewbacca? Be my guest. In The State of the Art, one character looks like a Yeti. Most people look like people, though, although some choose otherwise. The book Excession describes some outré past, where: "as the fashions of the intervening times had ordained – people ... had resembled birds, fish, dirigible balloons, snakes, small clouds of cohesive smoke and animated bushes". 4. Starships, warships and drones Culture starships are sentient and planet-sized, and tend towards the whimsical, with names like Of Course I Still Love You and Just Read The Instructions. Even warships come in the gleefully aggressive Killer, Torturer, Psychopath and Gangster classes. Daww. Should any human passengers feel weird about padding round a giant space-bound conference centre and addressing the air around them, the ship can talk to them via a human-sized drone. In my mind, this drone always has the voice of Captain Birdseye, and is something that P&O should maybe look into. Get a robot to fire you into the heart of the sun. YOLO 5. Grid energy Can a universe technically count as a gadget? It can when you're a super-advanced spacefaring democracy. Everything the Culture uses – from coffee machines to seriously scary space weaponry – is powered by limitless energy from the Grid, a field which separates our universe from a mirroring antimatter universe. Grid energy is also indirectly behind technology that allows people to do things like hack computers light years away. We like to think that this is because, no matter how evolved the Culture is, its citizens still receive parental requests to "debug my computer while I pop to the garden centre". 6. Knife missiles Contact and Special Circumstances are the Culture's spy and military arms. They're under the radar and engage in the odd dodgy practice but, most importantly, they have all the cool toys. One of these is a knife missile – which remains a normal utensil until its owner is in danger, at which point it takes to the air and slices and dices the enemy before they can react. If it feels like it, we mean. Knife missiles are of course sentient, and sometimes a bit chippy. 7. EDust assassins These are sentient nanomachines made of EVERYTHING ("Everything- Dust" or "EDust") which can take the shape of ANYTHING (you, me, that dog poo) and level entire buildings. EDust assassins are one of Special Circumstances' "Terror Weapons", and they impress me so much that I'm slightly worried that I'm actually North Korea. 8. Atomic tattoos In the novel Surface Detail, an indentured servant (belonging to an unenlightened non-Culture slaver, obviously) is branded with a beautiful tattoo signifying ownership. The tattoo is written into the structure of every cell of her body, replicating itself into infinite smallness inside her DNA. When her owner murders her, the Culture revives the slave, and she uses her tattoo to wreak her revenge. Take that, Steig Larsson. Not quite how we envisioned the atomic tattoo... 9. Mosquito drones – now available on Earth? In the novel Consider Phlebas, a tiny robot mosquito collects a blood sample from a human. According to the rumour mill, this isn't a million miles away from possible military developments today. Maybe 500,000 miles away, but not a million. 10. Personality backups and goodbyes In a move that's at once heartbreaking and reassuring, Iain M Banks has made the Culture's attitude to death a philosophical one. Death is essentially optional in the Culture – many people "back up" their personalities in case they shuffle off the mortal coil accidentally (extreme sports are big in the Culture). Then a copy of the individual can be reborn in the same form, a different one, or purely in virtual reality. If they're bored they may choose to go into storage and wake up some time in the future. Also, biological and AI individuals – and entire civilisations – can "sublime"; that is, leave the material universe behind altogether and segue into some mysterious immaterial existence. And finally, should a Culture citizen's natural body give out, once the appropriate respects have been paid, they will be displaced directly into the heart of their home sun. Want to read more? Check out the Culture series. So long, and thanks for all the drones.
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