Sci Fi News: from Cli-Fi to Post-humanism

On ZDNet, Simon Bisson offers up a cool list  of “26 essential science fiction novels to get you ready for tomorrow.”  It’s a great list, with works by Vinge, Brunner, Sterling, Stross, Naam, Stephenson, Nagata and others… though in a couple of cases I am a bit biased.

An interesting article asks10 science-fiction, speculative fiction, urban fantasy and dystopian authors to answer a single question: What will the next 10 years bring? 

How about a museum for the future? Actor John Rhys-Davies spends less than one minute entertainingly haranguing us all to support the new Museum of Science Fiction, planned for Washington DC!  

Isaac Asimov reads aloud his short story "The Last Question" in one sitting. It appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly and Asimov said it was "by far my favorite story of all those I have written."

Here’s a cute rumination.  You are offered eight different – mutually exclusive – superpower pills....Would you take the red pill, the blue pill, or the black pill? This notion is turned into a fun little story by Scott Alexander.

An interesting report on the increasing number of Native American and First Nations characters showing up as comic book superheroes.

==What Comes Next? ==

Who Will Inherit the Earth? David Tormsen offers an interesting rumination on who — or what — might replace humanity, someday. Here’s an excerpt that interests me, for obvious reasons:

"Uplifted Animals —The idea of raising animal species to human intelligence is an old one that dates back to H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau. Cordwainer Smith imagined uplifted animals as an oppressed underclass fighting for their rights, while David Brin’s Uplift series presented a universe where almost all intelligent creatures owed their sapiency to patron species, with humanity exploring the universe with intelligent apes and dolphins at its side....  

Some theorists, such as George Dvorsky, argue that we have a moral imperative to raise other species to our level of intelligence once we possess the technological means to do so. Dvorsky points to modern efforts to have great apes be granted the legal right of “personhood,” and he asserts that the natural next step would be to give non-human animals the cognitive faculties for self-determination and participation in a society of sentient creatures. The human monopoly on sentient thought gives us an unfair and unjust advantage over our animal neighbors, and if the means exist to allow non-humans like apes, dolphins, and elephants to achieve the cognitive means of political participation, it is our moral duty to extend it to them."

David Tormsen continues, “Others disagree. Alex Knapp believes that the costs in terms of animal life would be too high to justify it. In order to uplift a species, it would be necessary to make changes to the DNA on an embryonic level, leading to inevitable failed attempts before we got it right. Then there is the question of how to ensure that a successfully uplifted embryo would be gestated. Such experimentation would be morally wrong, with the potential for intelligent animals suffering physical abnormalities and early death due to human meddling. Even if successful, human beings would have no way to cope with the social and emotional needs a sapient chimpanzee, bonobo, or parrot would have. In other words, uplifted animals could be left emotionally traumatized due to ham-handed attempts by humans to raise them.  Some also worry that problematic aspects of certain species’ natures, such as chimpanzees’ violence and dolphins’ inclination for rape, would carry on into their intelligent forms. Some argue that intelligent self-awareness is an ecological niche that can only sustainably hold a single species, explaining why the Neanderthals and our other human cousins were wiped out …and assimilated. Creating intelligent animals could create evolutionary competition for humanity by potentially traumatized creatures with mental processes and value systems that we may not even be able to comprehend.”

Huh.  A balanced two paragraph cover on the idea.  Still. George is right.  Not only is it worth the risk, the worst thing we could do is ban such endeavors so that they will be done anyway, but in secret -- and therefore stupidly -- exactly the Crichton scenario I depicted in EXISTENCE.

== Visions of the Future == 

An interesting bio-piece on Peter Thiel - law professor, libertarian philosopher and investor: “One way you can describe the collapse of the idea of the future is the collapse of science fiction,” Thiel said. “Now it’s either about technology that doesn’t work or about technology that’s used in bad ways. The anthology of the top twenty-five sci-fi stories in 1970 was, like, ‘Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon,’ and in 2008 it was, like, ‘The galaxy is run by a fundamentalist Islamic confederacy, and there are people who are hunting planets and killing them for fun.’ ” 

And sure, Thiel's both brilliant and insightful -- especially about the plague of dozoisian angst that has festered in science fiction for decades, sneering at a now-seldom-seen can-do spirit. Still, he also misses the point. We progress by both believing we can solve problems and by relentlessly pointing out problems to solve. 

The real sin of the angst-merchants is not their wanting to issue warnings. It is the boringly-tedious sameness and lack of originality of their jeremiads.

In contrast -- somewhat -- a subset of science fiction called “Cli-Fi” concentrates on tales about the effects  of climate change. Dan Bloom, long a promoter of this trend, writes here about the growing number of academic/pundit voices who are using the term. Early examples go back to E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops (1909) and J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World (1962); more recent Cli -Fi novels include Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-up Girl, my own Earth, Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain, Ian McEwan's Solar, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, John Barnes's Mother of Storms, Stephen Baxter's Flood, and Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood -- all charting possible, often dire, environmental scenarios to come.

Femismo? It's the proper name of an entirely different view of sexual relations that aims not (as feminism does) at equality, but at altering the status quo in definitely unequal ways. Perhaps for the better! I am willing to read solidly delivered arguments that male dominance should not just be eliminated, but reversed into female dominance! There is a very strong femismo literary tradition in SF.  Here's a rumination that would certainly solve the "problem of maleness." But this goes too far... Humanity should be 90% female? Fortunately, most of this person's commenters are offended.  Still, given the blotchy record of male dominance, one can hardly blame some for fantasizing...

I did something similar in GLORY SEASON... only I portrayed it being done without violence or apocalypse or rancor, simply with some mild tweaking of reproductive processes — (most of the year, women only conceive their own clones) — not castration!  Seriously, see how it plays out!  The important thing is that SF should be about gedankenexperimentation (thought experiments) -- and uncomfortable ones too!  So long as they are done in a spirit of vigorous exploration and plausability and a sense of ultimate justice.

== Brin-news ==

My second short story collection, Otherness, is now back in print -- with a beautiful cover by Patrick Farley -- and some of my best stories including Dr. Pak's Preschool, Detritus Affected, The Giving Plague, Piecework, and Sshhh... 

A new audio version of my first story collection The River of Time, beautifully narrated by my friend, actor Stephen Mendel, is now available on Audible, Amazon and iTunes. The River of Time was also recently re-released in print and ebook formats. 

And, I have a new... third short story collection - the best yet - to be released soon!

== Sci Fi Snippets ==

Up the Amazon with the BS Machine: Wow, this is the Ursula K. LeGuin we all know, leveling her spear at a giant and yelling defiance at the marketing of literature.  

The original movie script for 2001. Fascinating.  It includes some different lines and includes the narration that Kubrick later dropped.

Christian Cantrell has released a new work of Hard SF: Equinox, a sequel to his earlier Containment, also works as a stand-alone novel. Equinox portrays a dystopian future with a bifurcated humanity: tensions boil over between a dwindling population who remain living in habitats on an environmentally devastated Earth and the Coronians, space-born descendants of scientists and engineers who were stranded aboard the orbiting ring station Equinox, when a planet-wide catastrophe struck. Their symbiotic inter-dependence - trading Space-Based Solar Power for land-based resources to be used in Molecular Assemblers -- is threatened when the Coronians upset the fragile balance of power with a desperate act...

Eric Dallaire’s sci fi novel SHADES considers a different kind of zombie. Dead people who leave debts must work them off as their corpse does manual labor, reviewed in Publisher's Weekly.  

A Chinese gaming and mobile Internet company has built its headquarters in the style of the USS Enterprise.

“Five one-hit wonders of science fiction!” a cool rundown on YouTube by Tony Smith of StarshipSofa.

Order your Ray Bradbury bookends – made from wood salvaged from Ray’s recently torn-down Cheviot Hills home. 

The Second International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots will be held November 16th, 2015 | Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE) 2015, Iskandar, Malaysia.  

Someone wrote in to ask if the old “Brin-L” discussion group still exists.  If so, it is one of the oldest communities on the web!  I did find the still active cover page … http://brin-l.com/  (That’s an “L”.)  Anyone care to try and join and see what happens? Report back!

Beyond Time - a free Science Fiction writing contest open for submissions. Accepting old and new stories of any length, both published and unpublished. Authors retain all rights to any and all works submitted in the contest.

Science Fiction and our Dreams of the Future

An essay in Wired: Is Dystopian Sci Fi Making us Fear Technology? ponders the pandemic plague of cheap dystopias and apocalypses and feudal fantasties that have metastacized and infected science fiction. Michael Solana muses that a certain amount of dire warnings can be a tonic, but it becomes poisonous in the kind of excess that we are now seeing, in which the fundamental rule seems to be “never show any possibility of a better world.”

“Fiction is capable of charting our human potential—with science fiction the most natural and forward form of this—so anything less than a push toward good through the medium is not only overdone at this point, but an incredible opportunity squandered. Every fiction is an illusion, of course. The very real danger here is man’s tendency to look to his illusion for inspiration, which is the foundation on which we build society. “

I make essentially the same point in a dozen places, across the last 20 years, but especially here, where I describe why modern film directors and authors are inflicting a tsunami of despairing tales upon us… not because any but a few of them actually believe it, but out of storytelling laziness, pure and simple. The “idiot plot” syndrome, in which it is just a lot easier to put your characters in dramatic jeopardy if you start with the assumption the civilization is useless and all our neighbors are foolish sheep.

Solana approaches the whole problem from more of an artistic plaint. But he concludes: “Our dystopian obsession has grown up in our nightmares as a true monster, which can only be countered by something truly beautiful. Simply, we need a hero. Our fears are demons in our fiction placing our utopia at risk, but we must not run from them. We must stand up and defeat them.”

Or, as Nick Bilton writes in the New York Times, perhaps "we need to imagine the nightmare so it doesn't become real." Certainly Orwell's 1984 and other science fiction novels offered us the self-preventing prophecy -- warning us away from their dark visions.  As Ramaz Naam reminds us -- In Defense of Dystopian Science Fiction -- “Dystopian fiction has also helped us pass down important mores about the freedoms we find central, and helped rally people against injustice."

The argument over what I have called a “plague of dystopias” in fiction - especially science fiction - is taken a step forward in this philosophical musing my my young friend, the New York artist John Powers, who counters Solana: "..the problems we face as a society today are problems that require us to act as a society," not by a "hero facing his fears." Powers goes on, "But dystopias are allowing our powers of problem-solving imagination to go flabby."

Powers concludes, "The project is to imagine a future society with problems, but not a future in which society is the problem." 

Indeed, nothing says "hope" better than expressing a belief in our ability to solve problems.

==Alternate Visions of the Future==

Can we imagine a brighter future? Science Fiction has frequently tried to do so...

And now, Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future is an anthology that brings together "twenty of today’s leading thinkers, writers, and visionaries—among them Cory Doctorow, Gregory Benford, Elizabeth Bear, Bruce Sterling, Geoff Landis and Neal Stephenson (not to mention me)—to contribute works of “techno-optimism” that challenge us to dream and do Big Stuff. Engaging, mind-bending, provocative, and imaginative, Hieroglyph offers a forward-thinking approach to the intersection of art and technology that has the power to change our world. " 
Sample a free excerpt on Scribd.

I've spoken elsewhere of the tedious obsession with dystopia that allows so many writers of producer/directors to be plot lazy.  It also spreads a poison, undermining our confidence that dystopia can be avoided, through hard work, good will and innovation. Well, Hieroglyph brings back that can-do spirit that once filled science fiction with a sense of adventure and wonder!

How did writers of the past imagine the future? "The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story by E. M. Forster. Published in November 1909, Forster's chilling story describes a future in which most humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. In isolation, individuals subsist underground in 'cells', cared for by an omnipotent, global Machine. Communication takes place via a type of instant video-messaging machine. It is through this speaking apparatus that people pursue the only activity available to them -- sharing ideas and what passes for knowledge. Read it here: http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html

In a brilliantly cogent essay, the wondrous Nancy Kress explains why her novels so often deal with genetic engineering. And why she almost never does the reflex tech-loathing thing, but tries to show both the good and bad possibilities that have come from every technology since fire.

Which SF books have had the most impact today? io9 offers one reviewer’s list of “21 of the most influential science fiction and fantasy books.”

Another list: Ten (Potentially) Great Movies that Failed...with The Postman at the top!

This Kickstarter aims at creating an anthology of age appropriate stories that all kids can identify with. “We have great stories, from a wide range of writers and a diverse set of characters – girls, boys, robots… everyone belongs here! Of the stories we've accepted so far, 80% have female main characters. We don't have girls who are prizes to be won, or waiting to be rescued. All of our heroines and heroes are on their own adventure, not a side note in someone else’s.”

My story “Chrysalis” has appeared in the latest issue of ANALOG Magazine. It portrays a pair of Nobel winning biologists — once upon a time they had been married — exploring the “hidden genome” to find a bizarre discovery… traits that the ancestors of all mammals gave up - possibly for good reason (!) - 300 million years ago.

If I had the self-copier from Kiln People, I would definitely play Civilization V and its coming new offshoot, Civilization: Beyond Earth! See the review on io9. Alas, limited lifespan! So, get thee behind me, Satan…

Plug: For that long summer drive. The audio version of EXISTENCE used Audible’s three best narrators! I helped assign roles and transitions. It is one of the best audio books out there.

Have you heard about Amazon's new e-book subscription service? If you subscribe, be sure to turn at least 10% of the pages of every book you get so that the author gets a royalty. Please SHARE to benefit your favorite writers! — (Passed along from Ransom Stephens)

==The 'Rebel' Genre==

Here’s a fascinating interview about the underpinnings of science fiction as a literary form. During George Slusser‘s 25-year curatorship, the Eaton Collection at the University of California, Riverside, became the greatest archive of science fiction and fantasy in the world. It contains more than 100,000 volumes, ranging from the 1517 edition of Thomas More’s Utopia to the most recently published titles in all languages. The collection also includes journals, comic books, and 300,000 fanzines.

This interview elucidates many ways that SF remains a “rebel” genre in the halls of academia. Indeed, even in those places where SF is studied and appraised by scholars, it seems that just a few authors - maybe a dozen - are deemed acceptable.

(Aside: at one point George suggests that “…writers like David Brin, Gregory Benford, Robert A. Heinlein are rejected on “politically correct” grounds.” Which I find amusing, since I have probably canceled Greg’s vote in sixteen out of the last twenty elections! (For the last few, Greg has seen the light and now rails against the party of Fox-n-Bush.) Indeed, my politics and overall zeitgeist coincide roughly with those of Kim Stanley Robinson! Though yes, I admit I throw in a Heinleinian libertarian zig and an anti-PC zag or two. As a contrarian, I don’t like polemical prescribers of any ilk. So yeah. That probably accounts for it.)

If literary SF matters do interest you, and you feel centers of excellence like the Eaton Collection are important, then you might read with dismay what SF-author Nalo Hopkinson says about recent attempts to undermine the Eaton and possibly eliminate it.

==SF and the Military==

All three of the US Army’s competing prototypes for the replacement of the Humvee (the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle) bear striking resemblance to the design that our team came up with in one of the pilot episodes for the 48 hour design challenge show The Architechs… a great program that the History Channel gave a pass on, during their ill-fated transition to becoming the Bigfoot Channel.

I wish you could see the “Humvee Episode” but that one never aired! (Perhaps some brash person will post it anyway — in this case, no one’s economic interests will be harmed.) Four star general Paul Kern (ret) took the episode with him, though, and I hear it was watched closely by all three current design teams.

Our other pilot — coming up with a dozen new ways in and out of burning buildings, was even better!

Ah, but the Army is already thinking science fiction for the next generation. They need … The Architechs!

== Space is also for dreams ==

A lot of the stuff on Daily Kos is — well — left-wing tendentious. But this story - if true - is worrisome: “Teacher Incarcerated For Writing Science Fiction.”  Okay, his self-published novel was about a school shooting, 900 years from now. And the Kos story tells us nothing about the details: e.g. whether the scenes might be perverted enough to indicate an unbalanced mind. Still, on the face of it, this sure sounds like something truly silly is going on.

I’ve written many varieties of super-short stories, e.g. those that are precisely 250 words. My six-worder was the lead story in WIRED’s spread of 6 word tales. (It had three scenes, action, conversation and pathos!)

Now see a site offering chilling Two Sentence Horror Stories! 

(Here are the six-worders: http://www.davidbrin.com/shortstories.html.

Watch out next year for DARK ORBIT by the up and coming talent Carolyn Ives Gilman.

Another breakdown on Chicano and latino science fiction, and here's a look at Cuban Science Fiction.