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Scooped by James Keith onto Science Fiction Future |
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Dramatic Decline in SF & F Books Sold
Earl Marischal David Greybeard's comment,
January 29, 8:00 AM
Doesn't include ebooks or sales from Amazon.com.
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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. Delete the scoop?
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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. 
CAEXI BEST's curator insight,
May 15, 5:15 PM
Les futuristes les plus significatifs des 50 dernières années
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Science fiction is notoriously difficult to define, but Fredrick Pohl’s definition is one of the lovelier ones.
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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. Delete the scoop?
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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. 
Fab GOUX-BAUDIMENT's curator insight,
April 24, 2:42 AM
please,if your ideas are really innovative, contribute!!! We are suffering such a failure of imagination, here, in old EU.... Delete the scoop?
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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. Delete the scoop?
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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. Delete the scoop?
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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) Delete the scoop?
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“All Good Things...”
Captain’s Log: Worf and Troi have just finished a date on the holodeck, and their goodnight kiss is interrupted by Picard in his bedclothes wanting to know what the date is. He’s been moving back and forth in time. He can’t remember specifics—one moment he was in the past some time, before he took command of theEnterprise, talking to someone; another moment he was in the future, somewhere outdoors. His fleeting memories have such vivid sense impressions that they must be far more than a dream.
While he’s in the middle of describing it to Troi, he finds himself standing in a vineyard twenty-five years in the future. He’s interrupted in the tending of his vines by a visit from La Forge. Both men have facial hair—Picard is bearded and is retired from his ambassadorial career, La Forge has a mustache (and bionic eyes). La Forge’s wife Leah heard that Picard had been diagnosed with Irumodic Syndrome, and La Forge wanted to check in on him. Picard and La Forge head back to the house, but then Picard sees three people in rags jumping up and down and shouting. Then he finds himself suddenly on a shuttle with Yar, heading to the Enterprise for the first time to take command shortly before “Encounter at Farpoint.” Just as the shuttle approaches the ship, he’s back in the present, telling Troi that he just saw Yar. Crusher examines Picard and finds nothing. No indication of time travel, no indication that he’s even been off the ship. She also scans for Irumodic Syndrome, and doesn’t find it, but she does find a defect in his parietal lobe that could, down the line, lead to a disorder, including Irumodic. Picard gets new orders from Admiral Nakamura: the Romulans have diverted 30 warbirds to the Neutral Zone, and they’ve picked up an anomaly in the Devron system in the zone. Nakamura’s sending 15 ships to respond, including the Enterprise, which is specifically tasked with examining the anomaly in Devron. 
George Jackson's comment,
April 10, 3:18 PM
An excellent series finale. Ronald D. Moore & Brannon Braga achieved a very fine send off for the Enterprise crew.
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1. There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. 2. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans. 3. “My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre,” Ford muttered to himself, “and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes.” 4. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t. 5. “You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.” 6. “Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” 7. “Funny,” he intoned funereally, “how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.” 8. Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? 9. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. 10. Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now. 11. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in. 12. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons. 13. The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish. 14. The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied. 15. “Listen, three eyes,” he said, “don’t you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.” 16. “Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm. 17. Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. 18. The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. 19. “Shee, you guys are so unhip it’s a wonder your bums don’t fall off.” 20. It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination. 21. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another. 22. Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with. 23. It is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. 24. “Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.” 25. In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you’ve taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul. 26. He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like the wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way off. 27. “He was staring at the instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in his head while his house is burning down.” 28. There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath. 29. “You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.” 30. There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. 31. It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes. 32. He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife. 33. Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbor’s boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on. 34. The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying “And another thing…” twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument. 35. He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard, oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable infinity of the Universe. 36. “It seemed to me,” said Wonko the Sane, “that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.” 37. “Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.” 38. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79. 39. Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. 40. All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place. 41. In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. 42. Don’t Panic. 
David Seaman's comment,
April 6, 12:52 PM
Remember when trying to think "Don't Panic" it gets easier
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One of the few things Republicans and Democrats have been able to agree on in recent years is that the government should be spending more on basic scientific research — the sort of research that, in the past, has played a role in everything from mapping the human genome to laying the groundwork for the Internet.
Should the government be funding this sort of work? (AP) “Government funding for basic science has been declining for years,” Mitt Romney wrote in his 2010 book No Apology. “It needs to grow instead.” In his most recent State of the Union address, President Obama sounded a similar note: “Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the space race.”
So it’s notable that the exact opposite is, in fact, about to occur. Thanks to budget pressures and the looming sequester cuts, federal R&D spending is set to stagnate in the coming decade. The National Institutes of Health’s budget is scheduled to drop 7.6 percent in the next five years. Research programs in energy, agriculture and defense will decline by similar amounts. NASA’s research budget is on pace to drop to its lowest level since 1988. As a result, scientists and other technology analysts are warning that the United States could soon lose its edge in scientific research — and that the private sector won’t necessarily be able to pick up the slack.
“If you look at total R&D growth, including the corporate and government side, the U.S. is now at the low end,” says Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). “We’re seeing other countries, from Germany to Korea to China, make much bigger bets. And if that persists for long enough, it’s going to have an impact.” So how dire is the situation, really?
Let’s start with some basic charts. Over the past decade, federal spending on R&D has grown in real terms, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (although it’s shrinking as a percentage of GDP). That’s been driven largely by Bush-era increases in defense and life-sciences spending:
At its peak in 2009, the federal government funded some 31 percent of all R&D in the country, with private firms and universities financing the rest. The array of federal programs is staggering, from semiconductor work at the Pentagon to climate-change research at NOAA to clinical trials for cancer at the National Institutes for Health. About half of the spending here is “basic” research and half “applied” research.
Yet as a recent report from ITIF explains, this landscape is set to shift now that Congress is putting strict limits on discretionary spending. If the sequester spending cuts take effect on Mar. 1, total spending on research and development will drop to 2007 levels and grow only slowly thereafter (below, black line). Federal R&D spending will decline sharply as a share of GDP:
How worrisome is this projected stagnation in federal R&D spending? A lot depends on how valuable you think government research actually is — and on that point, the debate can get surprisingly contentious. There’s a long, long list of world-changing innovations that can be traced back to federally funded R&D over the years. The Department of Energy’s research labs spawned digital recording technology, communications satellites, and water-purification techniques. Pentagon research laid the groundwork for the Internet and GPS. The current shale-gas fracking boom couldn’t have happened without microseismic imaging techniques that were developed at Sandia National Laboratories.
But that’s not necessarily the best way to look at things. The key question here is how much of this innovation might have happened without government involvement. And as Stanford’s Roger Noll explains in this NBER essay, economists have fairly nuanced views on this.
Many economists agree that private companies tend to under-invest in very basic scientific research, since it’s hard for one firm to reap the full benefits from those discoveries. So the federal government, which now funds 60 percent of all basic research in the United States, is likely irreplaceable here. What’s more, studies have found that many types of government R&D spur private companies to conduct their own additional research. That is, the two are complementary, not substitutes.
But the situation is murkier for other forms of public R&D. Many government programs are focused on advancing commercial technologies in specific industries — and those could well be crowding out private-sector activities. What’s more, some government R&D programs are so focused on demonstrating their usefulness to Congress that they stick with “safe” research that the private sector would have done anyway.
When the Congressional Budget Office reviewed the evidence in 2007, it concluded that government-funded basic research generated “substantially positive returns.” And it found that, on the whole, government R&D helped spur additional private-sector R&D rather than displace it. Yet the CBO also noted that some types of government programs may very well be crowding out private research. Likewise, a 2007 survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the social returns for many public R&D programs were “near zero.” “It’s not always cut-and-dried,” says Scott Wallsten, president of the Technology Policy Institute. “In theory there are certainly things that are good for society that aren’t profitable for private companies to do. Basic research especially. But when you move out from that, it sometimes becomes more questionable.”
Indeed, this is one area that has recently divided Republicans and Democrats. During the 2012 campaign, Romney heaped praise on basic research programs like ARPA-E, which funds long-shot energy research. But he criticized Obama’s support for programs that try to commercialize new technologies — such as loan guarantees for mature solar firms. In the near future, however, this debate is moot: When the sequester takes effect on March 1, it will affect all types of R&D, regardless of type or value. In the National Institutes of Health, because of the way grants are structured, the immediate 5.3 percent sequester cuts for 2013 will mean that little new research of any type will get funded this year, explains former NIH director Elias Zahouni.
Meanwhile, there’s the international context to consider. Atkinson points out that United States is in danger of losing its spot as the undisputed world leader on R&D — both public and private. Not only is the federal government paring back its research budget, but the corporate sector isn’t making up the gap either. “In most countries,” he says, “corporate R&D is up over the past decade. Ours didn’t, it stayed stagnant.”
The causes for America’s private-sector R&D stagnation are complex, Atkinson says, ranging from impatient investors to unfavorable tax policies. But ITIF projects that the United States will soon spend less on all types of R&D as a percentage of its economy in the coming decade than countries like Australia and South Korea (though we’ll still spend a lot more in absolute terms, since our economy’s much bigger). Even China is catching up:
There are a few ways to interpret this chart. The sanguine view is that other countries are tossing more money at scientific research that will have positive spillover benefits for the entire world — including us. If China invents a cure for cancer, we all benefit.
Others worry, however, that the U.S. economy could suffer from the fact that a greater share of research is happening elsewhere. A 2012 report by the National Science Foundation, for instance, found that U.S. firms were now shifting much of their R&D work overseas. And the United States has recently developed a trade deficit in high-technology goods, after surpluses during the 1990s.
Many lawmakers seem to take the alarmist view. President Obama in particular has insisted that the United States can’t fall behind on R&D. A sample line: “We’ve got to make sure that we’ve got the best science and research in the world.”
Finding the money to do that will be difficult in an era when Congress is insisting on tight budgets. Some policymakers have tried to put forward novel approaches to R&D — like Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) idea for an “Advanced Energy Trust Fund” that would dedicate a portion of revenues from oil and gas drilling to energy research. (Obama embraced a similar idea in his State of the Union.) Other economists have suggested that the government should lean more heavily on prizes or tax credits as a way of funding innovation.
Yet many of those ideas are fairly small-bore. Getting R&D back to where it was at the height of the space race, as Obama has suggested, will either take a hefty portion of policy creativity — or a big shift in budget politics in the years ahead.
Further reading:
–The Congressional Budget Office has a good overview (pdf) of the economics of federally funded R&D, including a discussion of what works and what doesn’t.
–Elias Zahouni, who directed NIH during the Bush years, explained in this interview how the sequester would likely affect research in that agency.
–Over at Slate, Konstantin Kakaes disputed the idea that the U.S. is in a “research arms race” with China or anyone else. Worth reading as a counterpoint. Delete the scoop?
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Will robots put us all out of work? FT Alphaville's Cardiff Garcia and Izabella Kaminska discuss how technology is making jobs obsolete at a historically high rate, and how it may be accelerating.
We had a lot of fun making this short video, which is based on a topic that’s been discussed energetically in the blogosphere and elsewhere for a few months, and which has captured Izabella’s fascination for nearly a year. In addition to Izzy’s work, we drew on many blog posts and other readings in our discussion, and regrettably we didn’t have time to hat tip everyone in the video itself. We include those links below and thank their authors, and of course any misrepresentations are entirely our fault. Better than human – Kevin Kelly Will a robot take your job? – Gary Marcus Robots and robber barons – Paul Krugman Myth of the jobless recovery – Matt Yglesias The end of labor – Timothy Noah And special thanks go to Andrew Smithers and Martin Ford for the two charts we used in the video. Another wonderful set of links can be found at Izzy’s tumblr, which you should be reading in any case. And again be sure to check out her beyond scarcity series. Delete the scoop?
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Also in Slate, Matthew Yglesias ranks every Star Trek movie, television series, villain, and crew member.
Earl Marischal David Greybeard's comment,
May 18, 8:43 AM
I'd agree with that. Except the last two movies.
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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. Delete the scoop?
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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. Delete the scoop?
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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:
As Andrew Liptak quotes in his great piece on Brackett's planetary romances in Kirkus:
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:
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:
(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:
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:
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. Delete the scoop?
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10 – The Tantalus Field 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
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 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 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! 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 4 – The Agony Booth/Handheld Agonizers 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). 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. 2 – Mirror Spock (and his beard.) 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 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.
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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. Delete the scoop?
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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. Delete the scoop?
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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. Delete the scoop?
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A PERSONAL STATEMENT FROM IAIN BANKS April 3rd, 2013 in From the Author
I am officially Very Poorly.
After a couple of surgical procedures, I am gradually recovering from jaundice caused by a blocked bile duct, but that - it turns out - is the least of my problems.
I first thought something might be wrong when I developed a sore back in late January, but put this down to the fact I'd started writing at the beginning of the month and so was crouched over a keyboard all day. When it hadn't gone away by mid-February, I went to my GP, who spotted that I had jaundice. Blood tests, an ultrasound scan and then a CT scan revealed the full extent of the grisly truth by the start of March.
I have cancer. It started in my gall bladder, has infected both lobes of my liver and probably also my pancreas and some lymph nodes, plus one tumour is massed around a group of major blood vessels in the same volume, effectively ruling out any chance of surgery to remove the tumours either in the short or long term.
The bottom line, now, I'm afraid, is that as a late stage gall bladder cancer patient, I'm expected to live for 'several months' and it’s extremely unlikely I'll live beyond a year. So it looks like my latest novel, The Quarry, will be my last. As a result, I've withdrawn from all planned public engagements and I've asked my partner Adele if she will do me the honour of becoming my widow (sorry - but we find ghoulish humour helps). By the time this goes out we'll be married and on a short honeymoon. We intend to spend however much quality time I have left seeing friends and relations and visiting places that have meant a lot to us. Meanwhile my heroic publishers are doing all they can to bring the publication date of my new novel forward by as much as four months, to give me a better chance of being around when it hits the shelves.
There is a possibility that it might be worth undergoing a course of chemotherapy to extend the amount of time available. However that is still something we're balancing the pros and cons of, and anyway it is out of the question until my jaundice has further and significantly, reduced. A website is being set up where friends, family and fans can leave messages for me and check on my progress. It should be up and running during this week and a link to it will be here on my official website as soon as it’s ready.
Iain Banks
Iain’s novel The Quarry has been delivered and will be published this year. For further information please contact Susan de Soissons on 020 7911 8069 / susan.desoissons@littlebrown.co.uk
James Keith's insight:
Terrible, terrible news. My very favorite writer. Delete the scoop?
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Whatever happened to science fiction that was, you know… fun?
I asked myself that question while watching trailers for this summer’s crop of sci-fi blockbusters. On the one hand, there’s the charmingly-titled Oblivion, in which Tom Cruise returns to an Earth ruined by ecological disaster, and discover new ways in which man’s inhumanity towards man has impacted the development of society. On the other hand, there’s After Earth (pictured), in which Will Smith and his son return to an Earth ruined by ecological disaster, and fight for their very survival while confronting their inability to relate as a family.
Both films are filled with the eye-popping special effects that make for box-office smashes these days, and the presence of such big names as Cruise and Smith won’t hurt things, either. And yet… There’s something particularly hopeless about the tone of both films; unless either film (or both) has a climactic Deus ex machina, it’s likely they’ll end with the Earth essentially destroyed, no matter how happy the ending is otherwise.Congratulations!, the message would appear to be, The day has been saved, but we still killed out planet — call it a semi-win?
There was a stretch of time — from the early 20th century through the beginning of comic books — when science fiction was an exercise in optimism and, what is these days referred to as, a “can-do” attitude. There appeared to be no problem that couldn’t be dealt with either by the one-two punch of positive thinking and, well, punching— or by intellect and inspiration: New inventions were dreamed up that automated everyday tasks and made the impossible not only possible, but commonplace.
The zenith of such optimistic science fiction was arguably the original Star Trek, which presented a vision of humanity that had transcended societal ills like racism and bigotry, resorting to violence only when the situation called for it. (Which, admittedly, seemed to happen on a weekly basis). Such strong belief in the ability of humanity to overcome its worst impulses continued all the way through the 1980s revival, Star Trek: The Next Generation, with an almost off-puttingly perfect crew demonstrating how boring life could be without outside stimulus.
Of course, Star Trek returned to life with 2009′s JJ Abrams reboot, and there’s a new installment this year. Surely Star Trek Into Darkness offers an antidote to dystopian science fiction?
Or maybe not.
The redirecting of Trek into a commentary about the nature of terrorism and revenge is an interesting choice, and one that seems at odds with traditional Star Trek values. That’s perhaps intentional; producers have spoken about making this movie for those who don’t like Star Trek, and it’s clearly been judged that this is the best way to reach new audiences. After all, while the idea of a humanity that’s evolved past its basest tendencies may seem far-fetched, the idea of wanting vengeance after a terrorist attack is, in this world, all too easy to understand.
That’s the edge that downbeat science fiction has over the more hopeful alternative. It’s easier to imagine a world where things go wrong, rather than right to believe in a future where we manage to screw it all up. Such pessimism and fascination with future dystopias really took hold of mainstream SF in the 1970s and ’80s, as pop culture found itself struggling with general disillusionment as a whole. Certainly, at the time, there was much to be disillusioned about; the optimism and hope of the late ’60s fell apart as the hippie dream of a new Age of Aquarius came face to face with a reality filled with an unpopular war, civil rights riots and all-new reasons to feel suspicious of and disappointed in those in authority, so it’s hardly any surprise that the future became a darker, less inviting place.
The problem is, science fiction seems to have become stuck in a rut of hopelessness. It’s difficult to remember the last mainstream science fiction project that didn’t include at heavy dollop of cynicism and surrender at its core, and that strikes me as a failure of the genre as a whole. Science fiction is all about imagining the new and unimaginable, surely. If we can’t imagine a world that isn’t a mess because of what we’ve done, shouldn’t we try harder?
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Talented artist Peter Markowski spends his time working for Warner Brothers, working on concept art for animations such as Green Lantern. When he's not busy with that he also does other art, including the following awesome concepts for a could-be nuTrek animated series. Wouldn't it be amazing if this became reality?: 
Demetrios Georgalas's curator insight,
March 17, 11:04 AM
When he's not busy with that he also does other art, including the following awesome concepts for a could-be nuTrek animated series. Wouldn't it be amazing if this became reality?: Delete the scoop?
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“FOUNDATION”, a novel by Isaac Asimov from the golden age of science fiction, imagines a science called psychohistory which enables its practitioners to predict precisely the behaviour of large groups of people. The inventor of psychohistory, Hari Seldon, uses his discovery to save humanity from an historical dark age.
A fantasy, of course. But the rise of mobile phones and social networks means budding psychohistorians do now have an enormous amount of data that they can search for information which might yield more modest patterns of predictability. And, as several of them told the AAAS meeting, they are doing just that.
Song Chaoming, for instance, is a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston. He is a physicist, but he moonlights as a social scientist. With that hat on he has devised an algorithm which can look at someone’s mobile-phone records and predict with an average of 93% accuracy where that person is at any moment of any day. Given most people’s regular habits (sleep, commute, work, commute, sleep), this might not seem too hard. What is impressive is that his accuracy was never lower than 80% for any of the 50,000 people he looked at. Alessandro Vespignani, one of Dr Song’s colleagues at Northeastern, discussed what might be done with such knowledge. Dr Vespignani, another moonlighting physicist, studies epidemiology. He and his team have created a program called GLEAM (Global Epidemic and Mobility Model) that divides the world into hundreds of thousands of squares. It models travel patterns between these squares (busy roads, flight paths and so on) using equations based on data as various as international air links and school holidays. The result is impressive. In 2009, for example, there was an outbreak of a strain of influenza called H1N1. GLEAM mimicked what actually happened with great fidelity. In most countries it calculated to within a week when the number of new infections peaked. In no case was the calculation out by more than a fortnight.
Politics, too, is falling to the new psychohistorians. Boleslaw Szymanski of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York state studies how societies change their collective minds. By studying simulated networks of people he can predict the point at which a committed minority can convert almost everyone else to its way of thinking. For an idealised model, the size of this catalytic minority is just under 10%. Tweaking the model with data from real networks such as Twitter and Facebook, he hopes, will allow these insights to be applied to the real world.
The boldest idea of the session, though, came from Dirk Helbing of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Dr Helbing is one of the leaders of the FuturICT project, the aim of which is to create a general computer model of society.
As Dr Helbing puts it: “We understand the universe much better than we understand our own societies.” But physicists do not understand the universe by tracking every atom within it. They do so by devising and combining laws (gravity, thermodynamics and so on) that each describe part of the system. Similarly, a model of society would not aim to simulate in detail every human being on the planet. Rather, by combining smaller, more specific models, of the sort outlined by Drs Song, Vespignani and Szymanski, Dr Helbing hopes he or his successors will eventually be able to describe whole societies. The Terminus man
That is a wildly ambitious project, but there could be some useful staging posts on the way: predicting when people are likely to riot, for example, or modelling the breakdown of trust between banks and customers that causes financial crises. This really is Seldon country, although Dr Helbing is quick to point out that a crystal ball is impossible. That is because the maths underlying complicated systems like societies are exquisitely sensitive to a model’s starting conditions. Small errors can quickly snowball to produce wildly different outcomes. But, decades hence, a kind of social weather forecasting that would make reasonably specific predictions, with a reasonable amount of confidence, over short periods may not be out of the question. Delete the scoop?
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