Shadows (and light) from science fiction: drowned worlds and brightnesses

Before discussing dark dystopias, here’s something more uplifting... 

The perfect, thought-provoking pre-order! Chasing Shadows is an anthology edited by David Brin and Stephen Potts -- in partnership with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination -- with stories and essays by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Cat Rambo, Vernor Vinge, Ramez Naam, Scott Sigler, Neal Stephenson, Aliette de Bodard, John Perry Barlow, Robert J. Sawyer and other science fiction luminaries—available January 10th from Tor Books (pre-order now).

Already posted at Tor’s site is the book’s Introduction, by James Gunn, and one of the novellas — “Feast War” by Vylar Kaftan — which portrays how a near future band of online foodies and wargame players do their own sleuthing to solve a deadly biowar attack that has all the authorities flummoxed! Drop by and have a look at one of the best themed anthologies, every tale offering a unique glimpse at what life just might be like in a future that’s filled - for worse or much better - with light.

== Dark Visions that match our mood ==

Veering to dystopias, I will start with a brief mention of a book that will get its own posting and analysis, soon. Several times I have spoken of the predictive power of Robert A. Heinlein. Among other things, he knew that underneath the American surface of tolerant, progressive pragmatism there simmers a spectacularly anti-future, anti-science troglodyte. 

A Nehemiah Scudder, who might leap upon a populist wave, much like 1930s Europe, only with a fundamentalist-zealous tinge, and proceed to shut down our Great Experiment on any contrived excuse. Heinlein had scheduled him for 2012, but there's still time. (Read more about Heinlein's vivid prophetic novel Revolt in 2100, now available on Kindle.)

Also look at Heinlein's short story “The Year of the Jackpot", in which several dozen insanities result when all sorts of statistical ‘cycles’ combine, at the same time.  

Is it possible then, that we are in a fluke? Heinlein’s Crazy Years? Certainly all the smart folks whose professions deal in actual facts and bringing about positive change did not want or see this coming… So might we just ride it out? Well, to do that… Survive. I urge you to. And keep hope. We'll get back to Revolt in 2100 in a later posting.

But more and more, it seems we are living in a sci fi story. In darker moments, watching neo-Nazi ravings, I am reminded of Ray Bradbury’s great story “The Sound of Thunder.” A tale of time travel and the Butterfly Effect. How one change could profoundly alter the course of history. Terrifying… and clearly prophetic. 

Watch a short -- and moving -- film version here from the Ray Bradbury Theater.

An interesting and fun article discusses how various robot and AI apocalypse scenarios play out in the movies....often following the three themes: direct attacks, social manipulation and runaway intelligence.

An excerpt: “At the Georgia Institute of Technology, a team of researchers have been attempting to teach human values to robots using Quixote, a teaching method relying on children’s fairy tales. Each crowd-sourced, interactive story is broken down into a flow-chart, with punishments and rewards assigned to various paths the robot can choose. The process particularly targets what the researchers call “psychotic-appearing behavior.”

"The question is this: how do you test to make sure the robot is effectively learning values? One possibility involves using a real-world testing methodology that puts the AI in increasingly complex environments and situations that challenge its training.”

See an excellent podcast exploring: Asimov and the Robot Uprising.

== Other Dire Futures ==

A quick look at books old and new...

Swastika Night, by the English author Katharine Burdekin, was first published in 1937 under the male pseudonym Murray Constantine. This dark dystopia, which predates Orwell’s 1984, portrays a nightmarishly feudal Europe, in which Hitler's fascism and male dominance have reigned supreme for seven centuries. All remnants of pre-war history, books, and art have been destroyed; Hitler has been elevated to a god. Boys are removed from their mother’s care at 18 months, indoctrinated in a male culture of violence and brutality. Women are regarded as sub-human, caged, subjugated and kept docile and ignorant; rape is acceptable and allowed. When Alfred, an English subject is presented with a secret history, he begins to question Nazi ideology and power, trying to spread ideas among those who have lost the ability to think for themselves.

A shadowy region: Annihilation and its sequels Authority and Acceptance form the Southern Reach Trilogy, by Jeff Vandemeer. These surreal thrillers offer spine tingling suspense and dark layers of intrigue. The mysterious wilderness of Area X has been sealed off, abandoned for thirty years for unknown reasons. Eleven expeditions across the border have failed. Now four women are sent across the border. Known only by their professions (Biologist, Psychologist, Surveyor, Anthropologist), their mission rapidly begins to fall apart …Everything seems wrong -- as they find themselves transformed, their memories altered, unsure what is real and who to trust. Whatever has encroached upon Area X…it must be stopped… before the world becomes Area X. A chilling, haunting tale that will pull you in… and won’t let go.

Note: I am reminded of the series of eco-collapse novels penned by the great J.G. Ballard, whose The Crystal World, The Downed World and The Burning World all featured mysterious zones of danger and weirdness encroaching upon our normal reality.

Speaking of drowned worlds, do have a look at Kim Stanley Robinson's new epic peek at a daunting future, in New York 2140. After the ice caps have melted, Gotham is an enclave of Venice-like canals in a world devastated by deserts and floods and extinctions.  Yet (as the cover depicts) humanity cleverly finds new ways.  KSR's trademark mix of cautionary chiding and optimistic belief in scientific ingenuity is on display, in full force. You know in advance that you'll have to buckle down, in earnest study-mode, for some data-rich passages. Nevertheless, Robinson is a diverting and fascinating professor. And you have not gone to him for light, escapist sci fi. This is exploratory, grownup science fiction, of the first water.

See another drowned world novel, below. Also note: I portrayed Houston and other cities flooded and using gondolas, back in my 1989 eco-and-more novel, EARTH. Just sayin....

Afterparty, by Daryl Gregory offers an all-too plausible future where desktop printers can customize and manufacture designer drugs. Lyda Rose was part of the scientific team that set out to cure schizophrenia, manipulating the brain’s biochemistry with a newly developed pharmaceutical called Numinous. However, the drug had unintended consequences, causing people to see god -- or at least hallucinations of their own personal version of god. When Lyda is released from a mental institution (along with an angel doctor that only she can see), she tracks down drug pushers who have released the drug onto the streets.

From Tor: a wide-ranging list of science fiction and fantasy novels that explore issues of religion and god – including Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, Roger Zelazny’s excellent Lord of Light, Walter M. Miller's classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man, James Blish's insightful A Case of Conscience, and Arthur C. Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God. 

This issue is explored in great detail in Paul Levinson's anthology of stories and essays -- Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection of Space Travel and Religion - in which I have an article. As we move out into the cosmos, how will our sense of identity, humanity and spirituality evolve?

Okay, back to another drowned Manhattan! And more religion drugs! The Burning Light by Bradley P. Beaulieu and Rob Ziegler is a post-apocalyptic tale set amid the canals flooding the hollowed ruins of New York City, overrun by scavengers, pirates and slavers. The ruthless Colonel Melody Chu has a singular obsession, stopping an epidemic of the “Light.” Chu relentlessly drives her squad of exiled soldiers to track down junkies addicted to the ecstasy of the Light – as well as the “vectors” – often children, who give people access to it. The Light can make you feel like you’re touching infinity… but it also kills. Chu knew: “She had personally stared into the Burning Light – and the Light had stared back. She knew it was coming.” And yet, controlled, the Light may usher the next stage of humanity… This short novel presents a vividly textured, if dark future. 

Have we seen some common themes, yet?

And... a few recent novels in French: Les 5 romans SF du moment à ne pas manquer.

Jakub Rozalski

Finally, a reflection on shadows and light.... Scroll through these idyllic landscapes (by Polish artist Jakub Rozalski) of East European peasants and soldiers of the early 20th century -- haunted by nightmares of steampunk-ish robots and machines... See more of Rozalski's fantastic artwork on his website. I was just informed that there is a boardgame - Scythe - using Rozalski's artwork.

Oh, don't forget to pre-order Chasing Shadows! You will see the light. 

Honoring Ray Bradbury ... by Exploring Tomorrow

My friend Ray Bradbury passed away this morning. While 91 is certainly a ripe and full age, especially for a revered figure who leaves behind a vast and highly esteemed legacy, there is still a certain bittersweet, knowing that he worked until the very end. Science-fiction authors never retire, you see. The need to spin yarns — to weave dreams about tomorrow — is always the last thing to go.

At Salon Magazine's request, I wrote this tribute to Ray Bradbury: American Optimist. It was therapy-solace, on the day that my fellow Los Angeles High School alumnus graduated from our Earthly plane... leaving this particular world less colorful, less passion-filled today.

Ray was the last living member of a “BACH” quartet — writers who transformed science fiction from a pulp magazine ghetto into a genre for hardcover bestsellers. Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke and Robert Heinlein helped shatter barriers for the rest of us, establishing the legitimacy of literature that explores possible or plausible tomorrows. But it was Bradbury who made clear to everyone that science fiction can be art. An art form combining boldness and broad horizons with sheer, unadulterated beauty.

And love. Ray always spoke of it. Love of possibilities and imagination. Love of language, the rolling of phrases off tongue and pen. Also hope, without which, love is sterile.

Ray Douglas Bradbury was born in 1920, in Illinois, but at age 13 became a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, graduating from L.A. High School in 1938 … exactly 30 years before I did. Among many early influences on a fertile young imagination was the (way cool, to a child) fact that one ancestress had been executed as a witch in Salem, Mass., in the 1600s. He described the lasting impressions left by early Lon Chaney films, or when a stage magician touched him on the nose with an electric sword, commanding him to “live forever!” Like my own father, he nurtured his love of writing in free public libraries and while hawking newspapers on Depression-era street corners. And, as did many authors who followed, he got his start writing stories for mimeographed fan publications, climbing gradually upward while honing his craft.

Sometimes luck can strike like lightning. When Ray got the celebrated British expatriate  writer Christopher Isherwood to take a look at the manuscript for The Martian Chronicles, the resulting review launched Bradbury … well … not out of poverty, not yet, but into a career. One that later took him through Hollywood, scripting films like “Moby Dick,” as well as into television and punditry, all while helping raise four daughters and penning one luminous book after another, exploring the edges of the barely plausible.

But I’m not here to write a biography. This is an appreciation and, hence, in keeping with Ray’s own style, let me give way to impulse. To passion.

Indeed, I referred earlier to Ray’s fervent dedication to love and hope and the power of words that yank at us, compelling empathy. But there was another emotion that he would evoke, from time to time. One that always left a lasting impression on audiences, when he gave one of his popular lectures.

Onstage, Ray Bradbury could wax eloquently and vociferously angry at one thing, at one human trait — cynicism. The lazy habit of relishing gloom. The sarcastic playground sneer that used to wound him, and all other bright kids, punishing them for believing, fervently, in a better tomorrow.

Ray had one word for it. Treason. Against a world and humanity that has improved, prodigiously, inarguably, fantastically more than any other generation ever improved, and not just with technological wonders, but in ethics and behavior, at last taking so many nasty habits that our ancestors took for granted — like racism or sexism or class prejudice — and, if not eliminating them, then at least putting them in ill repute. Ray spoke of the way violence has declined, worldwide, long before Harvard professor Steven Pinker clarified the case, in his recent book “The Better Angels of our Nature.”

Yes, Bradbury’s stories and novels often plunged fearlessly into dark, foreboding themes. The world ends in The Illustrated Man and we decline into Big Brother levels of dystopia by the unusual path of liberal political correctness in Fahrenheit 451. We are reminded of villainy in Something Wicked This Way Comes. After reading Bradbury's short story, “All Summer in a Day,” the reader knows with utter clarity, how basic is the tendency toward cruelty, and that childhood is neither pure nor innocent.

Could anyone reconcile this chain of chillers with overall optimism?  Ray did. Human beings are fretful creatures, he said. Our skulking worries often cause us to shine light in dismal corners, and thus help us to do better! To be better.

Good literature has that power.  Indeed, science fiction offers writers a chance to create that most potent work, of which “Fahrenheit 451″ is a prime example. The self-preventing prophecy that so shakes up readers that millions of them gird themselves to prevent the nightmare from ever coming true. That’s power.

Moreover, even someday, when we’ve tamed our surface selves, growing up in our fair interactions and behaviors, partaking of a mature civilization, there will still endure, below the patina, a roiling, molten species, fevered with impulses and wild dreams. Far from becoming pallid beings, we’ll love to tell ghost stories by firelight and shiver at the touch of chill fingers up the spine. Why would we ever give that up?

Ray Bradbury saw optimistic progress and dark fantasy as partners, not opposites. On camera, during the moon landings, he could not stay in his seat! And he demanded that others get out of theirs. Long before Peter Finch did it in “Network,” Ray demanded that viewers stand up, step outside and shout!  Only, instead of cynical resentment, he insisted that we “get” what had just happened, how we had – all of us – just become a bit more like gods.

Those who yawn at such achievements, he denounced, calling them “ingrates.” And ingratitude he deemed one of the lowest human vices.

Ray was grateful, always, for what life had allowed a geeky youngster to do. I am thankful that he was my friend. And we who love both words and freedom of the mind should all feel gratitude today. For all those wonderful words.

And so long, Ray.  Thanks for all the stories.

=====

Speaking of Salon, my author's page as a columnist-contributor offers a review of articles that range in topic from transparency and freedom to Tolkien and Star Wars. From how to help Haiti to "Why Johnny can't code." From admiring Ray Bradbury to how the internet may be turning us into "gods." Unlike blog entries, these articles were crafted with meticulous and provocative (and eloquent!) care.

== Book Tour Events ==

In the coming newsletter and at davidbrin.com you’ll find a schedule of both live events and chances to meet/chat with me online. Virtual channels will range from Twitter to Reddit to a vivid new (beta) video chat room. Hope to either see or "see" you soon!

==Also in the Realm of Science Fiction == 

The New Yorker magazine published "The Science Fiction Issue," with stories and essays by Jonathan Lethem, Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, China Mieville, Junot Diaz, Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan, William Gibson, and others. Has the literary mainstream changed its collective mind about SF and its readers? Judging by its selections, what does The New Yorker think Science Fiction is all about?

=Was The Uplift War also good anthropology?=

Are human beings natural athletes? In All Men Can't Jump, on Slate, David Stipp contends that our greatest leapers, jumpers, sprinters and so on would seem hilarious to the animals out there whose four-legged gallops nearly always leave us in a cloud of dust.  Stipp goes on to make a point that I illustrated with Robert Onmeagle’s race across a continent in The Uplift War, that humans excel at one sport, above all - long distance running.  For about a dozen reasons, we are the masters at this art and it may have been crucial in both our survival and evolution.

Still, I must quibble with Stipp’s exaggeration, his claim that long distance running is our only physical species superlative.  Wrong.  To that you must add anything having to do with precision that a few (not all) humans can achieve. From the delicate movements controlled by finger and thumb, to tonal-sound control more accurate than any bird or whale, to the cosmically difficult task of accurate throwing.  Indeed, University of Washington researcher William Calvin, in The Throwing Madonna, shows just how special this last trait is, how difficult, and how it might even have pushed brain development toward capability for language.

Indeed, the maligned American pastime of baseball may be by-far the greatest and best sport by one criterion, when it comes to emulating and training for genuinely useful Neolithic skills! Think about it.  The game consists of lots of patient waiting and watching (stalking), throwing with incredible accuracy and speed, sprinting, dodging... and hitting moving objects real hard with clubs!  And arguing. Hey, what else could you possibly need?  Now, tell me, how do soccer or basketball prepare you to survive in the wild, hm?

=== And an Old Sci Fi Theme - Marching Morons? ===

Are electronic media and devices lobotomizing the new generation?  Or empowering all of us to reach ever-higher levels of awareness and effective citizenship? Read an excellent perspective on the pros and cons of the modern, wired lifestyle -  The Information: How the Internet gets inside us, by Adam Gopnik.

This New Yorker essay dissecting the debate between cyber transcendentalists techno-grouches covers much the same ground as my Salon Magazine feature, Is the Web Helping Us Evolve? comparing the technology pessimists to those who think the Internet is turning us into gods. Only Gopnik then forges into different territory, offering both greater erudition and some well-crafted insights that - honestly - I never contemplated before.

Compare the two. It is a tall wave that we're surfing.