Science fiction! – and related projects that affect the world

Did you step out to view Mars during "opposition"? When it's both closest to Earth and fully illuminated at midnight? To prepare... listen to a free audio version of my story "Mars Opposition!" (found in Insistence of Vision.) A creepy tale of the weirdest invasion-of-Earth, ever! With perhaps a powerful message for our time. Then go out tonight and stare up in restored wonder.

Wasn't that conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter amazing?

And yes, this bog posting is a chance - (Post Inauguration!) - to catch up on news I've stored up for better days. And so, taking a brief break to look up from our current crises at vistas of science fiction! Though while we're on science fiction, I'll repeat one politically pertinent link to a passage by Robert Heinlein, who spent most of his life active as a Roosevelt Democrat. The highlighted paragraphs here will knock your socks off with his concern and prescience. Use them and certain solipsists we know will stammer into silence.        

== News and more from the future! ==

In case you missed these: the Hugo Award winners for 2020, including A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine for Best Novel, and This Is How You Lose the Time War,  by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone for Best Novella, Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemison for Best Novelette, LaGuardia by Nnedi Okorafor for Best Graphic Story ... and many other fine choices representing the best of science fiction and fantasy for the year.

TIME Magazine recently listed “Eight books that eerily predicted the future.” And Mental Floss lists nine. Can you guess what book is the only one on both lists? Yes, it's EARTH, though each list chose it for different reasons! But I’m glad to be listed with some awesome peers in the craft of peering ahead.

One of the oldest notions in fantasy is a hero’s confrontation with the supernatural. Humans are forever pondering some way to change the hand they’re dealt. From Gilgamesh and Odysseus to Faust and Daniel Webster, fascinating characters have tried arguing with fate or divine will… or the Devil.  And hence, in the genre of “debating the devil.” My just-released play “The Escape: A Confrontation in Four Scenes”  takes a hyper-modernist and rather science-fictional take on that theme, ready to share some fun with you, along with fresh takes on Genesis and Babel, destiny and randomness, reshuffling the deck and challenging the Grand Order of Things. 

(Groups volunteering to do Zoom table readings are welcome!)

On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert put out an amusing parody spoof: You owe Kevin Costner an apology for The Postman! Choice! But then... what am I, chopped liver? 

Hey, Stephen, I thought you were a sci-fi nerd!  Particularly relevant today... as we see would-be Holnist coup-attempts against America. It started last year with our oldest institution, the USPS. 

Coincidentally, I've just re-released a new and revised version of The Postman - in ebook and POD formats, with a fantastic new cover by Patrick Farley. (Actually your choice of TWO different spectacular covers!) And for teachers or book clubs... a discussion guide is available on my website.  

== Assertively looking ahead! ==

The Lifeboat Foundation has teamed its recipient of the Guardian Award for engagement in efforts to reduce humanity's Existential Risk -- or danger of self-inflicted extinction. "The 2020 Guardian Award has been given to David Brin in recognition of his long-term interest in existential risks. Um, well, gosh. Thanks. Though if there was ever a 'generous' activity that came tinged with self-interest....

Staying pertinent....  How can we aggressively change memes so our citizens think more long term? I'm sure some of you are aware of Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation, building the Clock of the Long Now. One cute aspect, they put a zero in front of all dates! So this year is ... 02021 ... (Kinda cool looking? Though it made 02020 creepy.)  If we all did that, it might help spread a sense that we are ancestors with obligation to a palpable, if yet-unborn, future.

Of course the notion of time as a river with many currents and eddies is an ancient one. It inspired my own artistic extrapolation in my very first nominated short story "The River of Time," here in the eponymous collection.

In their latest near-future Washington thriller - Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution - P.W. Singer and August Cole – authors of the novel most-read by military officers everywhere: Ghost Fleet) – return with a fast-paced adventure exploring a near-future when robotics and AI both empower creative citizenship and amplify the destructive ability of terrorists.

In Existence I have scenes about how the most advanced AIs and robots may need to have childhoods. After all, that is how we humans did it, with extended neoteny. Now go enjoy a sweet story about fostering a robot child, by Tobian Bucknell.

== Sci Fi on TV ==

It won't be easy. It will take a lot of imagination and smarts to make Asimov’s Foundation into a TV series folks can follow. I wish them luck. 

Making Gaal Dornick female was a very very easy move. They'll need added sub plots to provide any action. Bear in mind that Benford's book and Bear's take place before the first novel - Foundation - and my own novel (Foundation's Triumph), which ties up all of Isaac's loose ends, takes place just after the exile to Terminus. Hari's last and greatest adventure.  

Immodestly, I assert I am likely a top expert on that universe and the show runners might want to chat?

Alas, this slur-attack on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series is an unsapient grunt, though typical of today’s much-declined National Review, which has William F. Buckley spinning so fast that Connecticut draws half of its power from his grave, fueled by the sustainable, never ending resource of idiocy.  

Still it reminds me of my own essay about Foundation, Robots and the argument that Isaac had with himself, decade after decade, first with the statistical "gas law" approach of psychohistory, then the human oligarchy of the 2nd Foundation, then the governance-by-sterile-eunuch robots model - which made the Galactic Empire not "roman" but more "Chinese"!  And finally Gaia-Galaxia. … And why things could not stop there. They just had to come full circle.

== Other sci fi miscellany! ==

You can watch the first episode of Marc Zicree's Space Command - featuring such wonderful actors as Nichelle Nichols, Robert Picardo, and Bill Mumy.

Tom Cruise is reportedly trying to film an action movie in space. Deadline reports that Cruise has partnered with SpaceX to make it happen. If it comes to fruition, the untitled project would be the first narrative feature film to be filmed in space.”

A U.S. Naval Academy instructor and part-time sci fi author appraises the most recent space battle that concluded season one of PICARD. Fun to see how future oriented the officer corps has become. (After all, I've repeatedly been welcomed to give talks and courses at the US Naval Postgraduate School.) 

And finally... 

Wow, shades of my “North American Church of Gaia !  (From EARTH.) A proposed non-religious systems of faith and rituals for lovers of the world.

Sci Fi news - some of it great stuff!

Again, you'll find terrific items for your gift list here... at least for your beloved science fiction fan!

Be sure to check out the Hugo Award winners for 2020, including the winner for best novel, A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine. The award for best novella went to This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, while The Expanse, by James S.A. Corey, won for best series.  A Song for A New Day by Sarah Pinsker won the 2020 Nebula Award for best novel, while Cat Rambo won for  her novelette, Carpe Glitter.... among the many remarkable SF titles from the past year.

Meanwhile I have been slogging through editings and revisions of five Uplift novels, including Startide Rising and The Uplift War and Brightness Reef. (The refreshed Sundiver is already available!) All were sprung from the House of Flightless Birds (Bantam/Penguin) and are shifting to Open Road, for re-issue in May! Alas, they had to be typeset using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) from physical books. OCR is much improved!  But I am glad to have a cabal of wonderfully nitpicking pre-readers! My 'irregulars' catch mistakes... some 40 years old! Oh, and there will be new introductions!

Meanwhile, there's plenty of diverting stuff on that gift list!  Including refreshed versions of The Postman, Sundiver and The Practice Effect, with new Patrick Farley covers and introductions! Oh and some fun new items...

== More Sci Fi news! ==

In Entertainment Weekly -- I was excellently interviewed by Clark Collis about The Postman and its pertinence to these troubled times... and the rise of neo-feudalism that it predicted, along with deliberate efforts by enemies of our Great Experiment to burn down our one American institution that predates even the Revolution. I go into much more detail… including how you can do small/important things to help, in this blog posting -- "The Postman Guy" speaks about the Postal System crisis and lists all the things you citizens can do (some of them amazingly easy!) to prevent this would-be Holnist coup against America and especially our oldest institution. Do drop by.  

Meanwhile, in a lighter vein – and reaching far more people – the Stephen Colbert "apologize to Costner!" video is choice. But hey Stephen, what am I, chopped liver? I thought you were a sci fi nerd! 

 

While we’re on the subject… Do you have a book club? Or a classroom that needs a study guide for a good novel and movie comparison? Here are three resources for THE POSTMAN!

 

a Postman class discussion guide.

 

A Postman reading group discussion guide.

 

The Postman Curriculum Web Site.

 

One of them was among the oldest such items ever posted on the Web! And still pretty good.

 

And unrelated… A fun, informal interview on the creative process of authoring, on “Drinking With Authors!” (And yes, some beverages are involved.)

 

 

== First Nations. first in fiction ==

 

A fascinating article shines light on the burgeoning number and quality of Native American authors writing both science fiction and ethno-fantasies that revolve around First Nations peoples and themes and legends. I won’t claim any great insights except as a minor fellow-traveler. But I think this trend and the larger expansion of the genre enriches us all.

(A completely unimportant aside. My very first fictional character - Jacob Demwa the protagonist of SUNDIVER - was half Native American and half African; that was 1978. Then came Athaclena's heroic partner Robert Oneagle in THE UPLIFT WAR, and his mother the ethnically Amerind Prime Minister of Garth Colony. And let's add the Cherokee-led terraforming of Venus that is featured in STARTIDE RISING. So that's three for three, a very long time ago.  Just sayin'.)

And... see a list of my personal favorite science fiction titles -- and a list of recommended science fiction for young adult readers who want to explore the world of science fiction and fantasy.

== And more visionary stuff! ==

One of the very best podcasts around is Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur - a series of wonderfully detailed and cogent explorations about super-science possibilities that dissects almost every aspect you can list regarding interstellar travel, alien motivations, star drives, terraforming or the Fermi Paradox. This one - on “black holes as weapons” - naturally refers to my own novel EARTH (which he flatteringly calls his Book of the Month about 27 minutes in). But I highly recommend the entire series. (Though oddly, he doesn't quite mention my concept for gravity lasers! Though he comes close and hints.)

Here’s a very well-written… even moving… review of Stephen Baxter’s three NASA novels, including Voyage, Titan and Moonseed.

After fifteen years of translating Bulgarian speculative fiction into English a group of authors have compiled an anthology with the best Bulgarian-originated short stories and excerpts from longer works. Certainly there have been lately many efforts to promote science fiction from international sources, especially China, Africa and India and Latin America. And why not this hotbed of vivid sci fi!

Scientist Andrew Love has published a clever meta-tale , a critical essay about a civilization whose writers have been obsessed with tying together millions of disparate works into a fictional construct called “Earth.” Of course, as the author of… EARTH… I guess that makes me the worst offender! (This tale has some “wake up!” elements in common with my own tale “Reality Check”!) 

My colleague Bruce Golden has released his post-apocalyptic novel After The End, which speculates on what might happen after a rogue comet collides with the Earth, setting the entire planet on fire. The few survivors must contend with an alien spore that arrived with the comet, developing a symbiotic relationship with a native species. Not us.

Here’s a futurist image I haven’t seen in sci fi. Drones could save energy by taking the bus.

A lickable screen can create almost any taste? The Norimaki Synthesizer transmits a mix of glycerin-based gels into a small panel you press against your tongue.

  

RIP Barbara Marx Hubbard. I only knew her a little, personally. But she was a figure of much insight, courage and good.  As eminent futurist Glen Hiemstra put it, she “set out to change the conversation in the nation from what we wanted to get away from to what we wanted to move toward. To that end she traveled the nation and set up Positive Futures Centers, which were collections of local citizens come together, in town after town…. Barbara’s big idea was that the office of Vice President ought to operate the “Office for the Future.” This would manifest in the development of a “Peace Room” to rival the technology and scale of the War Room. In the latter, there is constant monitoring of global threats, and a place and a way for leaders to come together to confront the threats. The Peace Room, in contrast, would be designed to monitor the globe to map the opportunities that are emerging around the planet, to observe the real breakthrough ideas and programs wherever they are developed, and to plan the positive options to create a preferred future.”

== Is this a 'sci fi' pandemic? ==

So gosh, here we are in the long forecasted pandemic, and it seems nothing like what was portrayed in any sci fi, including my own! Who'd a thunk it would be so daily-mundane... so ambiguous in its after-effects - especially organic damage on the "asymptomatic" (including reported erectile dysfunction)... 

...or that a quarter of the citizens of the most scientific nation in the world would zombie-chant foreign propaganda that simple safety measures like masks - used by our ancestors effectively against the 1918 flu - will somehow transform all the people into what they already are --

-- zombie-obedient morons.

Stranger than fiction, indeed.