Insistence of Vision and colonizing the Milky Way?

Well deserved! SFWA has announced that C.J. Cherryh has been named its 32nd Grand Master for her fantastic contributions to the literature of science fiction and fantasy. About time! Huzzah Carolyn. Truly a master and a grand one.

I've been asked to post online my recent story "The Tumbledowns of Cleopatra Abyss," which has been chosen for three "best-of 2015" anthologies... so here it is! Who asked? Well some of those planning to attend (and/or vote in) this year's World Science Fiction Convention! 

Also, it's a sampler-taste of the quality of storytelling you will find in my new collection, INSISTENCE OF VISION.   

See this rave review for Insistence of Vision. This one very, very perceptive. Only note the ticking clock. Just another couple of weeks for pre-order discounts!  

Post-Iowa Notes: NYT Nobelist economist Paul Krugman highlights ‘uplift’ in his analysis of the Iowa returns. His point being that we should choose to be more ambitious -- the one core thought that Bernie Sanders has contributed. Can we ‘uplift’ our society, our civilization? The American public mood is addicted to downer memes, despite every statistical metric having actually improved! While science fiction is filled with many negative stories, it is the one medium where perhaps 10% of the time, we see real optimism and hope.

Next? Be still my heart.  Will some university lit departments get over their smug postmodernist claptrap and realize that the most American-spirited of all literary genres may deserve some attention, study and tenured faculty?  Okay, okay, it shows that I truly am a sci fi dreamer.

== Will we colonize the Milky Way? ==

In a recent essay -- There is no Planet B: We're not colonizing the Milky Way any time soon -- my colleague, friend, and treasure of science fiction Kim Stanley Robinson encapsulates the reasons why he believes our classic fantasies of interstellar colonization are  at-best naïve and likely forlorn, ideas explored in his recent  novel, Aurora.

Still, I do feel a need to explain why I quibble with my bro. Like me, Stan's writing is often propelled and driven by polemic, which isn't a bad thing, when you are that smart and shine light - as he does - on real dangers!  Both he and I want to save the Earth and both strive hard for that. (I even named a novel after our world; beat that for commitment.) 

Alas, we differ not over general direction or sense of urgency - or a shared belief that humanity can improve - but over a matter of personality. KSR is (I believe) being progressively drawn into a leftist perspective of zero sum thinking... that it is a matter of either-or choices.  Either we devote our whole attention to terrestrial sustainability or watch our support system dissolve under the corrosion of greedy human civilization. 

Zero sum assumptions posit that attention aimed in non-core directions - e.g. outward - will diminish the value we devote to what we already have -- the only known place where life and humanity can flourish.

Again, I share Stan's sense of urgency, and we agree about the forces that today are endangering all of us through short-sighted, proto-feudal greed. Our lists of worst-villains probably overlap 90%! Where we differ is that I see many, many positive sum paths before us. While I am not a fizzing optimist like Peter Diamandis, I avow that as many good things are happening, as bad, and that studying what is working is just as important as railing against what doesn't.  

Moreover while the ancient foe of freedom and science -- feudal oligarchy -- is today's worst threat, by far, where we part company is that I see little to admire in the far-left's penchant for dismally simplistic prescription.

Circling this back to his recent article and novel... We see this failing in Robinson's dismissal of the very possibility of space - especially interstellar - colonization. 

Oh, without any doubt, science fiction was due for a corrective chiding, that the galaxy will not be settled as easily as humans just moved-right-in to the Americas. In Heart of the Comet (1984) Gregory Benford and I explored how necessary it will be for humans to modify themselves, in order to meet any new ecosystem more than halfway.  Still, Stan's polemical reasons for taking this position force him into an exaggerated declaration of near-impossibility for that hoary-classic sci fi dream.  In his novel, Aurora, he shows relentlessly all the things that can go wrong with an "ark" style generation ship... then, at the very end, he off-hand introduces a technology (a highly plausible one) that would make generation ships completely unnecessary, allowing humanity to bypass every problem he spent 700 pages describing. See my extensive review (and nitpicking) of his novel.

Oh, just to remind you, I am nitpicking one of the greatest science fiction authors ever to breathe. And a paladin of our tomorrows.

I’ll be on stage with Stan at UCSD’s annual James Arnold Lecture on May 5.

== Sci Fi and culture ==

The first issue of the peer-reviewed, open-access Journal of Science Fiction is up! Check it out! Also from the folks building toward the new Museum of Science Fiction — Science fiction is the story of humanity: who we were, who we are, and who we dream to be. 

Debates over “singularity” topics can be fervent and quasi religious, which should not be surprising, since the transcendentalists of conservatism and optimism are only channeling their millennia-old tussle with a new, scientio-techno gloss. Francis Fukayama and Ray Kurzweil fought it out, a decade ago. Now Richard Jones continues inveighing in Against Transhumanism - with a review and answer provided by Guilio Prisco.

A fascinating review of“ Occupied” – a new Norwegian, near-future thriller about Norway attempting to shut down its own fossil fuel industry, followed by a Europe-approved Russian invasion.  Weird, but I am intrigued. 

Some of the most beloved movies ever were based on books. But just because we loved them doesn’t mean the original author did.  See: eleven authors who hated the movie versions of their books. I had more reason, yet am more forgiving than some of these folks.

A fun and pleasant musical reinterpretation of… Spock.  

And while we’re on music… I mentioned the score to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, elsewhere, but only with an amateur’s perspective.  This brilliant essay decrypts the score in fine detail and suggests that John Williams knew a lot more than J.J. Abrams is letting on.

Szymon Sokół offers up a beautiful compilation of Babylon 5 riffs.   One forgets how beautiful that series was.  Well written, breakthrough art and effects, fine acting, sometimes dark… but underneath it all, B5 joins Star Trek and Stargate and (somewhat) Serenity as among the very few optimistic science fiction dramatizations that actually believes in our potential.  In us.  

Huh. Science Fiction as vehicle for Jihadi Propaganda. "The Unit" by Yuito Abdillah, published in the German magazine Kybernetiq. Any German speakers here feel like tracking it down for a review?  “Despite claiming that this story is a work of propaganda, what exactly the author is advocating for is cloudy at best. The group’s affiliations are not totally clear, but a representative told Radio Free Europe that they “aren’t from ISIS.””

The original NCC-1701 is being lovingly restored at the National Air & Space Museum. They take their sacred responsibility very seriously ...

Recent news: eagles being trained to attack drones!  Someone pointed out where this might all lead… in this vivid action page from The Life Eaters.

Vote for your favorite science fiction authors on this crowd-ranked list!

Yipe.  I don’t normally tout products I’ve never used.  But this one puts together so many things we never knew we wanted.   Lily is the world's first throw-and-shoot camera. It lets anyone create cinematic footage previously reserved for professional filmmakers.  Lily is waterproof, ultra-portable, and shoots stunning HD pictures and videos. Straight outta scifi.   (Of course it is best for folks who get off their behinds and go outside….) 

Nitpicking recent (great) hard SF novels: AURORA and THE MARTIAN.

Is interstellar travel by bio-humanity even possible?  Not according to my dear bro and esteemed colleague Kim Stanley Robinson. Whose new novel AURORA follows one of the first… and possibly last… efforts to send a generation starship to a neighboring star. Naturally, any KSR book is worth rushing out to purchase… though like many of his other works, there is a very strong sense that the author has a point to make. 

Starting with the fact that he's been asked for thirty years: “Hey, Robinson, how come you never leave the solar system!” AURORA is – foremost – his answer.

Why? Because it cannot (in any reasonable way) be done. Aurora proclaims: “There. I left. For a bit. Okay? But there’s nothing interesting out there. And getting there is too hard. Let’s focus on fixing our home.”

In fact, I got no bones to pick with KSR’s Odes to Our Planet – (hey, one of my tomes is EARTH) – and its solar siblings. Moreover, I find his politics to be interesting, grownup and major contributions to our grand discussion of how advanced human societies may govern themselves. I tend to emphasize the role of regulated competition in the synergies that he seeks, that might offer our Enlightenment experiment extended success and wisdom. Still, I agree so often with KSR's general zeitgeist that it's actually refreshing to get a chance to pick at some disagreements, for a change!

Moreover, when it comes to Aurora’s stay-home message, he had to expect folks would accuse him of stacking the deck.

Of course Robinson's fundamental premise is one that I violate like crazy in my Uplift Universe… that Einstein’s law is the law. Let's start by assuming any interstellar travel endeavors that take place in the future must obey, and indeed use technologies that are within “squint” range of our own. We can see them in the distance as plausible extensions of things-currently-known. We are - for example - on the verge of achieving some kind of fusion and can collect traces of anti-matter… so it is not untoward to imagine an interstellar ship propelled by either fusion power or antimatter. Or else, since KSR veers away from those energy sources, let's instead picture a combination of electromagnetic launch plus laser boost from home, followed by a series of planetary swing-bys in the target system–

-- exactly the combination that I used earlier, in Existence. But no unobtanium. No warp drives. No uploaded people who get downloaded into new bodies at the other end. And… most tellingly – no suspended animation or deep sleep or cryo-storage.  Those are cheating.

I’m not so sure about that last one. If KSR cannot squint and see it as plausible, I sure can. Indeed, the technologies that he chooses to include are only ones that are hard and likely to remain just barely on the edge of possible -- especially the closed ecosystem methods needed for a generation ship.  Techs are excluded if their existence would make interstellar travel much, much easier.

But let’s hop over for some other opinions. Starting with a pair of sagacious reviews at the Centauri Dreams site. The first, by my fellow “Killer Bee” Gregory Benford, addresses a number of the social aspects of KSR’s novel, including plot elements that seem designed to make the expedition more likely to fail.

In another fascinating followup, honorary Killer Bee Stephen Baxter dissects some of the physics and engineering behind KSR’s starship.

== My own riff re AURORA ==

Okay, my turn.

1- First, where I absolutely agree with Kim Stanley Robinson is over the biggest of all Big Lies in hard-SF tales about humans conquering the galaxy... the notion that it will be easy for ortho-humanity to colonize other earthlike worlds. A mere cloning of the European experience settling the Americas, stepping off the boat, inhaling the fresh air, chopping some trees and pushing back natives, building prosperous farms, then cities... this re-figuring of the American West in space is a standard motif, from Poul Anderson to Lois Bujold and a thousand other authors, and although it is so alluring a dream, it ain't necessarily so.

A point that Stan hammers repeatedly, in AURORA, is that living ecosystems defend themselves. They have predation pyramids and immune systems and it seems improbable that human settlers will just fit right in, finding it easy to eat but not too-easy to be eaten... or simply poisoned by a zillion incompatible chemicals unfamiliar and lethal to Earth biology.  Some authors have pointed out this problem before -- Ursula LeGuin, David Gerrold in his Cthorr series and I've poked at it. Indeed, the SF author with the biggest galactic empire of all -- Isaac Asimov -- gave himself an out by assuming that all 25 million human-settled worlds had been free of metazoan life when robotic machines came along to terraform them for humanity. (See this resolved and made clear in Foundation's Triumph.)

So, at one level, KSR is offering a badly-needed splash in the face with some cold-water reality, countering a hoary and overly-lazy old SF trope.  And yet... 

And yet, there is such a thing as way-overcompensation.  In fact, it now seems likely that alien life forms will use plentiful adenine as their energy molecule and as one of their nucleotides.  And the 20+ amino acids that we use in proteins just happen to be the ones that are most thermodynamically stable and easiest to produce and collect.  I am not saying there won't be bizarrely different biochemistries out there!  But if you take twenty life worlds out there, I bet some will supply most of what we need to eat, enabling us to supplement with transplanted foods.  The poisoning or immune system problems are bigger unknowns. But are you saying it will be forever beyond human science to analyze such things and reconfigure versions of humanity that would be capable of coping?

Indeed, this notion of us adapting to new homes is one that both KSR and I have dealt with, before. Trouble is... it distracts from AURORA's core polemical message.  And that message is a heavy one.

2- Alas, we keep running into the same problem, even among fellow members of our Promethean guild. To envision that your current set of problems might seem quaint to people just a generation hence. 

In this case, when an author uses tech-science difficulties to stymie his colonists, the question then arises… might not the next mission learn from these mistakes? One has only to squint and picture that successor ship finding Tau Ceti’s obstacles quite surmountable.

Especially since… and this is kinda crippling… (spoiler alert!) .... Earth eventually saves some of the returning colonists by sending them exactly such a trick of technology.  One that will change utterly the design of the next wave of starships, making them four or five orders of magnitude simpler, safer, easier, cheaper and quicker!  

In other words: okay okay, so generation ships are barely plausible. But then, in that case, how about skipping them to something better?

3- Another deck-stacking… Robinson presumes Solar System civilization is just barely rich enough to have afforded to send a few generation ship expeditions… but not (generations later) wealthy enough to make expeditions increasingly a matter of proliferating whim. In the end, the stay-at-home lesson boils down to an assumption of permanent (if relative) poverty.

Indeed, the simplest way to perfect your systems for a generation ship is simply to keep such a ship as a freestanding colony in the Solar System. There might be ten thousand such habitats in a rich civilization.  Pick a few that volunteer to have no physical contact with others, for a century. Many of the closed ecology problems KSR discusses could be old-hat and solved.

4- Ah, but a strong moral point against generation ships is the commitment of your grand-children to a stressful and dangerously limited life in which they had no choosing.  Stan does a good job conversationally weighing the ethical tradeoffs... if leaning on the scales a bit. But again, our conclusion is simply to find something better than generation ships.

For other scenarios about starships and generation ships, see Starship Century: Toward the Grandest Horizon, an anthology of stories and articles about our longterm future in space, edited by Gregory and Jim Benford.

5- KSR’s no-Captain premise may allow lots of colorful chaos, murder and plot-propelling societal collapse. But it also is silly. Even if the population aboard ship lives according to Robinsonian prescribed post-Marxian according-to-needs principles combined with Rothbardian no-coercionism and LeGuinian anarchic individualism (that predictably shatters under stress) they’d still have backup plans and those would include occasional emergency drills that familiarized them with age-old techniques. Those drills would include meritocratic selection of a ceremonial captaincy – AI -chosen, perhaps – that could assume command in a crisis. Should that arrangement then fail in order to drive the plot? Sure! But stacking the deck should be subtle. Even just a bit. It should not be based on everyone aboard having never cracked a single book about ancient eras of exploration.

6- What I find stunning is that in this book KSR indicts his own prescriptive utopia as brittle and incapable of resilience! I am sure the intended message was “if my super-mature society can’t handle an interstellar expedition, then no one can, hence forgetaboutit.” But that is not what the reader derives. Rather, the book’s take-away is just “my super-mature society can’t handle an interstellar expedition.”

Indeed, from the behavior of the denizens of Aurora, one is left to conclude something fundamental about this ship and expedition – that it was created by the folks back home, and carefully staffed, with one goal in mind – to be a “Golgafrincham B Ark.” A dig that should be self-explanatory, if you are sf’nally literate.

The most disappointing thing is that Stan Robinson is generally a master of problem-solving fiction, making him an archetype of what I believe to be the fundamental premise of Sci Fi, making it the opposite of traditional fantasy. The premise that children might – sometimes — learn from the mistakes of their parents. But not this time. By that metric, Aurora is, for all its tech-heavy recitations — alas – far more polemic than science fiction.

Do not get me wrong! Kim Stanley Robinson is a treasure of the science fiction genre.  Anything he writes is an eye-opener. In this case, his dissection of the Wild West mythology of colonization is a very important contribution to the adult-end conversation that SF should provide. Go give Aurora a read. 

And now, let's move on to another terrific - if flawed - best-seller.

== Nitpicks on THE MARTIAN ==

Hey, I agree that The Martian is a great book! That is... if you adore problem-solving fiction as a break from the tediously unimaginative and unhelpful gloom of this era of cheap dystopic hand-wringing.

Andy Weir’s The Martian deserves its plaudits and I look forward to the film.  

Still, a novel that’s sometimes called “competence porn” – presenting itself as a rigorously plausible Robinson-Crusoe-in-Space on every page – does merit scrutiny.  My pal Joe Carroll – the best space engineer I know – loved the book but offers up these cavils. (Let the techie crit commence!):

1. It seems unlikely that there would be enough light inside to grow useful crops except right near windows or LED lights.  Mars gets only ~43% as much sun as earth; the hab windows will be small; and LED area lighting is likely to be only a few percent as bright as outside.

2. His quantitative chemistry was sloppy.  He's confusing the pleasantly simple ratios of volumes of gas at the same pressure and temperature, with liquids.  You don't get 2 liters of liquid H2O from 1 liter of LO2 (liquid oxygen): 1 liter of LO2 weighs 1.14 kg and gives 1.14 * 18/16 = 1.28 kg = 1.28 liter of water.

3. Baselining a full 1 atmosphere for the hab, rover, and EVA (ExtraVehicular Activity) suits doesn't make sense to me (The International Space Station, ISS, uses 14.7 psi (pounds per square inch) but only 4 psi for EVA; Skylab used 5 psi).  I think it should probably be more like 6-7 psi.  That allows enough N2 dilution of O2 to make fires less of an issue in 3/8 gee. I think NASA would use 3-4 psi pure oxygen in the EVA suits.  When the suit pressure is comparable to the N2 partial pressure in the hab or rover, you don't have to pre-breathe O2 before EVA to avoid bends. 

4. I don't think his composite pressurized structures are very realistic.  Flat floored "tents" are very hard to do.  I think it would be far lighter, stronger, and safer to have a cylindrical pressure shell, with a lightweight raised flat floor inside, and space under the floor panels for storage. . I also think that 60 seconds from resin mix to strong cure may be reasonable for a patch material, but it makes a lot of what he did nearly impossible.  But if he let it get cooler than intended, he could stretch the cure time.

5. I can't see any reason for such high acceleration leaving Mars. I think the best initial T/W (Thrust to Weight ratio) would probably be less than 2 Mars gravities or less than 0.7 Earth gee. Even with a single stage and no throttling, that would probably be  less than 3 gees max to low Mars orbit, and approximately 5 gees to rendezvous with the rest of the crew in a hyperbolic flyby.

Ouch! Burn!  That is… if you are a real nitpicker! ;-) But... isn't that Weir's readership? Indeed, the pickiness of these nits only shows how terrific the general execution truly is.

For more fact-checking, see also: A Mission Controller reviews The Martian and The Science of The Martian.

Seriously, as a "space cadet" since way back in my days as a post-doc at the California Space Institute .. and currently on the advisory board of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts group and the B612 Foundation, I am thrilled to see "competence porn" rising in popularity.

Now, on to Matt Damon. Go for it Good Will Hunting.  Give us something for (forever young-minded) grownups.