You are here: Home / Archives for SF

Have you voted? NPR Poll on Best SF and Fantasy

June 21, 2011 By 3 Comments

Sorry for the scant posting over the course of the last month. Two tight deadlines at the moment — and when push comes to shove I suspect most of you reading this would far rather have me finish GHOST SPIN than ramble on about life, science, and whatever.

That said, here are a few choice internet gatherings to keep you occupied while I’m finishing the final rewrite….

1. Gordon Van Gelder just forwarded NPR’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Poll to me and asked me to pass it on to everyone I know and tell them to vote. Done, sir!

2. I wrote a guest post at SFNovelists called “The Book is Dead, Long Live the Book!” in which I discussed the future of e-publishing. Lots of smart and thoughtful comments coming in, including ones that are making me rethink what I thought I knew when I wrote the post.

3. Here’s a lovely advance review of The Inquisitor’s Apprentice. Normally I feel deeply ambivalent about reviews. Either the reviewer doesn’t like the book, which sucks. Or they do like it but seem to have read a completely  different book from the one I wrote, which is … just … weird. And not in a good way. But this reviewer really truly got it. I feel so validated! I feel, like, I don’t know, tracking her down and earnestly shaking her hand. Or maybe I should just go all TR for a minute and give her a virtual “BULLY FOR YOU!”

 

Filed Under: whatever Tagged With: ,

Data Storage for Immortals

February 1, 2008 By 12 Comments

I’m in the middle of the first draft of GHOST SPIN, and it’s got me thinking about the practical problems of uploaded personalities. The biggest problem as I see it is one that people barely ever talk about: data storage. I mean, any way you slice it an uploaded human being is one bigass pile of bits.

There’s a lot of interesting physics research going on right now that could have implications for how we might this kind of massive data storage problem. For instance, by using Bose-Einstein Condensates to slow down the speed of light. Or, more cheaply, by simply broadcasting large streams of bit into deep space for subsequent retrieval. I stumbled on this piece about deep space data storage recently and it got me thinking….

Broadcasting is cheap, especially if you’re not worried about encryption (more on that below). I mean, basically, we’re already storing large amounts of data in deep space, including every single radio and television program ever broadcast. If you ask me, American Idol and Rush Limbaugh aren’t the way I’d advertise human civilization to any aliens who happen to be listening in. But as cheap, reliable data storage, broadcasting can’t be beat.

So. Now you can store your uploaded self for free. Even better, you can pick up the broadcast anywhere within Earth’s future lightcone, so your upload would always be on tap in case your current incarnation suffers an unforseen mishap. New body, new lease on life, but all the old sweet memories. It’s virtual immortality. The only catch is that you wouldn’t be able to access the data that was still in transit when you were downloaded back into your new body.

We’ve all read about characters who wake up in cloned bodies knowing nothing about their last life except that someone hated them enough to murder them. (Walter Jon Williams and Sean Williams have both written excellent novels based on this premise, which makes me wonder if their shared last name is just coincidence or something more sinister….) But murder is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to unencrypted personality uploads.

‘Cause here’s the thing. There are solutions to the missing memories problem. But none of them are free. And if there’s one thing we know with absolute certainty, it’s that when there’s a rock bottom cheap way to wriggle out of providing adequate health care benefits, some employer somewhere will inflict it on their employees.

Yep. I’m seeing pathetic hordes of uploaded personalities wandering the galaxy in search of their missing memories; coughing up exorbitant “download” fees to get their loved ones out of transmission limbo; playing legal shell games with the lawsuit-proof companies that hold their reincarnation service contracts. And spending multi-year “transmission lags” wondering what they don’t know about their last life because their employer decided not to optimize their upload.

Naturally, the skinflint principle would also apply to encryption. Encrypting your upload costs. But the cost of not encrypting? Knowing that anyone in your future lightcone can pirate an illicit copy of you and do whatever they damn well please with it. I can just see the advertising copy: “Some things are priceless. For everything else there’s EncryptoCard….”

There’s gotta be a story in this. I’ll get back to you once I’ve rounded up the usual suspects and managed to find some likely victims . . . er, characters . . . to inflict it on.

Filed Under: whatever Tagged With: , , , , , ,

And Speaking of Dragons . . .

January 24, 2008 By 2 Comments

. . . here’s a link to an article from Clive Thompson about why we should all read science fiction. I usually don’t go for this kind of “I only read it for the articles” justification of SF. But this one’s rather nice. Thompson’s conclusion: “Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.” Or, put rather more cleverly, “big-idea novels are more likely to have an embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge.”

Filed Under: other people's books Tagged With: ,

All Members of THE SPACE MERCHANTS Fan Club Please Get Out Your Secret Decoder Rings

January 15, 2008 By 7 Comments


One of the more interesting things that came up during the process of judging last year’s PKDs was the fact that no less than three of the five judges listed a single out-of-print book among their favorite SF reads of all time. I actually don’t believe this is a coincidence. Over the years I’ve encountered an amazing number of professional SF writers who consider Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s THE SPACE MERCHANTS, first published in book form in 1953, one of the finest SF novels ever written.

In the future of THE SPACE MERCHANTS, America is run by advertising agencies, the President is a mouthpiece of multinational corporations, and the population is divided into “ad men” and consumers. The ad men rule the world from their luxury high rises, while the consumers make and buy Chicken Little, Coffiest, and all the other cheap consumables that power the futuristic trickle-up economy. Consumers who strike it unlucky or ask too many questions get shipped down to Latin America as migrant workers on the nightmarish algae farms.

THE SPACE MERCHANTS paints a cynically prescient picture of post-industrial America that makes a lot of contemporary SF feel quaintly nostalgic. But the book’s real value is in its clear, economical, impeccably crafted writing. In 170 stripped-down pages it offers what amounts to a Strunk and White of effective SF writing techniques. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to write your first SF novel or your twentieth. Read this book — really read it, with a pen in your hand — and you will be amply rewarded. (You will also never eat Chicken McNuggets again, but that’s another story. . . .)

Sadly, however, copies are getting harder and harder to find. Gollancz and St. Martin’s Press have both valiantly fielded editions in recent memory. But at the moment THE SPACE MERCHANTS is out of print and seems likely to remain that way for the forseeable future. So let’s start a grassroots movement, fellow SPACE MERCHANT fans. Sign up here if you want to see it back in print. and
we’ll see if we can’t find some sympathetic editor and make it so.

Filed Under: other people's books Tagged With: , , ,