Science Fiction

This Thursday: My Reading at the Library of Congress

My first science fiction short story has just been published, and if you’re in the Washington, DC area, you can see me read it at the Library of Congress this Thursday. The story is called “Mathralon,” and it’s available as part of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two, edited by the incomparable George Mann. “Mathralon” is a somewhat unusual story. I’ve been tinkering with it for a year or two, off and … Read more

Building the Perfect User Interface (Part 1)

When I set out to create the world for my Jump 225 Trilogy, as I’ve written elsewhere, I started with a few technological principles:

  1. Imagine that we have virtually inexhaustible sources of energy.
  2. Imagine that we have virtually unlimited computing power.
  3. Imagine that enough time has passed to allow the scientists to adequately take advantage of these things.

I discovered that starting from these basic principles, there are almost unlimited possibilities. You can easily have a world that’s intermeshed with virtual reality. You can create vast computational systems that have billions and billions of self-directing software programs. You can have pliable architecture that automatically adjusts to fit the needs of the people using it. And so on. It’s actually fairly easy to figure out a technological solution to just about any problem if you don’t have those constraints.

science-fiction-machine.jpgThe interesting questions in such a world, then, are questions of interface. You don’t bother to discuss if you can accomplish your goal anymore, because the answer is almost always “yes.” You just need to know how you’re going to accomplish it, and who’s going to pay for it, and what happens when your perfectly achievable goal clashes with someone else’s perfectly achievable goal.

In other words: you’re at point A. You’d like to be at point B. How do you go about getting there?

Note that when I’m talking about user interface, I’m not talking about how you actually get from point A to point B. The interesting thing about this whole new science of interface is that it doesn’t really matter. We can treat all kinds of science and engineering as a simple black box and just skip right over it. What I’m really concerned with at the moment is how human beings translate their desires into actions in the physical world. How do you tell the black box you want to go from point A to point B?

It seems like a ridiculously easy question, but turns out it’s not. Let’s just take a very simple example of a black box that we all know: the toaster. You might think we already have the perfect user interface for toasting bread. You stick bread in a toaster. There’s one big lever that turns the sucker on, and a dial that tells you how dark you want the toast. How can you improve on that?

Well, wait just a second — the desire we’re trying to accomplish here is to take ordinary bread and turn it into toast. And if you think of user interface as the way you go about accomplishing this, the user interface for toasting bread is much more complicated than you might think.

You need to buy a machine to do the toasting, and you need to plug that machine into a power socket. (The right kind of socket for your part of the world.) And not only do you need a bulky machine that takes up counter space, but you need a dedicated machine that really does nothing else but toast bread and the very small number of specialty foods designed to fit in toaster slots. If you’re trying to toast bread in my house, you need to know that the toaster and the microwave are plugged into the same outlet, and using them at the same time will blow the fuse. You need to experiment with every new toaster you buy to find exactly the right setting — and yet, chances are that you burn toast at least once every couple months. How inefficient is all that?

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Robert J. Sawyer Praises “MultiReal”

I knew that attending the 2007 World Fantasy Convention would be a good idea for my career, I just didn’t know why. You always hear a lot of jabber about how networking is so important, it’s always good to have friends, blah blah blah — but you rarely get any concrete examples. Well, here’s a concrete example. In one of my blogs about my World Fantasy experience, I mentioned that I had finally met Hugo … Read more

Who Should You Nominate for the 2008 Campbell Award?

Well, it’s that time of year again… time to make your nominations for the Hugo and Campbell Awards in preparation for this year’s WorldCon. Here’s the link to the official Hugo Award Voting site, where you can download the ballot. I’m absolutely loathe to do this, considering that I scrupulously try to avoid any hint of self-promotion on my blogs. But I suppose I should mention that this is my second and final year of … Read more

William Gibson’s “Spook Country”

William Gibson has said many times in interviews that he knew very little about computers when he wrote his groundbreaking, genre-spawning novel Neuromancer. And yet somehow, all the way back in 1984 he managed to not only anticipate things like Internet culture and wetware, but to understand them better than many of us do even today.

William Gibson's 'Spook Country' Despite the fact that he’s now a best-selling — nay, legendary — author, I doubt that William Gibson knows much more about international crime and high-tech freelance spies than you or I do. And yet somehow, in his latest novel Spook Country, he manages to not only understand this world, but to extrapolate it and scope out its implications better than anyone else.

Look at how effortlessly he explores a new medium called “locative art.” Locative art is what happens when you mash up GPS units and virtual reality. Think Second Life, if the whole thing was overlaid on top of the real world and accessible through 3D goggles.

The concept of locative art is cool enough. But Gibson’s genius isn’t that he can think up this cool new technology; it’s that he already knows how we’re going to use it. In the first chapter of Spook Country, a locative artist demonstrates the technology by showing a holograph of River Phoenix’s corpse lying face down on the sidewalk — in the exact place where River Phoenix’s corpse actually lay face down on the sidewalk.

Now that’s cool.

(At the risk of self-pimping, let me mention that this locative art technology has a lot of similarities to the multi network I mention in my own novels. Except in my books, the “multi projections” you see in the real world are the result of an imaginary nanotechnological system called the OCHRE network. In Gibson’s book, this is real. Indeed, he supposedly consulted with high-tech wizard Cory Doctorow on the details. You could head out to Radio Shack and build a Spook Country-style work of locative art with a laptop today. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone’s doing it right now.)

The story of Spook Country is really the same story that William Gibson has been telling in all his novels since Neuromancer. It’s remarkable how similar all these books are structured. Take a somewhat jaded young professional, and throw her in the middle of a struggle between mysterious powers way over her head. Sometimes these powers are hyper-intelligent AIs, sometimes they’re multinational corporations, sometimes they’re anonymous government agencies. The conflicts they engage in always involve lots of money being thrown around and the use of cutting-edge technology.

The three jaded POV characters in Spook Country are Hollis Henry, a former cult rock musician turned journalist; Tito, an operative in a boutique Cuban-Chinese crime family; and Milgrim, a junkie who’s been forcibly “recruited” to serve as the translator for a rather vicious CIA type named Brown. Our three protagonists become involved in a clandestine spy game going on between two unnamed freelance espionage forces. What exactly the game is Gibson doesn’t reveal until the book’s final pages, but it involves stolen iPods, geohacking, and a race to locate one very particular crate that’s floating on some ship somewhere in the world. (What’s in the crate? I won’t spoil it, and it doesn’t really matter that much anyway — but I will admit to feeling slightly let down by the revelation.)

In a way, Gibson’s vision of the world isn’t so much different from Philip K. Dick’s. Both envision a world of Little People being tossed around by enormous godlike forces. But while Dick’s characters are paranoid survivors just hanging on to the edge of sanity, Gibson’s have a certain groundedness and indomitable spirit. Hollis Henry and Henry Case and Cayce Pollard and Berry Rydell may not know exactly what game it is they’re playing, but through the course of a Gibson novel they learn how to hustle it. They may get buffeted around by the forces above, but in the end they’re rewarded for it.

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End-of-Year Miscellany

So I’m in Houston, Texas right now for a big ol’ reunion of my wife’s family. Somewhere around 30 people in all whose political views span the spectrum between rabid leftists and rabid rightists. Actually, that’s incorrect. There really is no spanning of the spectrum; just a bunch of folks hanging out on each end of it firing dirty looks across the divide. I have little hope that there might be intelligent discussion about the … Read more

The Plot to Understand Second Life

Last night I had the privilege of attending a reading and interview of renowned science fiction author Paul Levinson in support of his book The Plot to Save Socrates. I stayed in my bathrobe the whole time, because the event took place on Second Life.

the-plot-to-save-socrates I had an ulterior motive for attending. I’m in the process of evaluating promotional ideas for my upcoming novel MultiReal, and the idea of doing a book launch on Second Life has cropped up in my discussions more than once. I created a Second Life profile many moons ago, just to poke around and see what the fuss was about. After a few days, I quickly grew bored with the whole thing and uninstalled the software from my PC. But yesterday, in the service of book promotion, I resurrected it and went exploring once again.

And after attending Paul’s Second Life event, I can now officially say I don’t get it.

This was no fault of Paul Levinson’s. I’ve shared a couple of panels at cons with him, and he seems like a friendly, intelligent, and interesting fellow. The reading itself was quite lively, and the book The Plot to Save Socrates sounds like that perfect combination of thought-provoking and nerdy cool. The plot in a nutshell: a grad student in the future decides to travel back in time to save the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates from drinking the hemlock. (Go read more about it on Paul’s website.) The interviewer herself asked pertinent, thoughtful questions.

But the Second Life aspect of the event basically went like this: I logged in and teleported to a virtual auditorium. I sat down in a virtual chair along with about 25-30 other spectators. The virtual Paul Levinson and the virtual moderator sat in virtual chairs on the stage, next to a virtual spinning copy of The Plot to Save Socrates. And then we all just sat there for an hour doing nothing while the two of them had a very interesting chat on audio.

So besides the novelty factor, what does Second Life offer to book promotion that you couldn’t get by holding your reading on, say, FreeConferenceCall.com or WebEx?

I’m not saying that Second Life is a bad place to hold a book event. If you’re the author, you get to see who’s attending the reading. You get a direct conduit to your own personal bookstore, along with all the tracking that entails. You get the potential of interacting with people who live in remote places you’re not likely to ever hit on the real-world book tour. Oh, and it’s free.

But as I sat in front of my computer and watched my avatar watch Paul Levinson’s avatar watching the moderator’s avatar, I tried and failed to figure out what potential Second Life has for literature over the next ten years. It’s kinda neat. It’s kinda fun. Is that it?

I tried to extrapolate, to think big. What if my name was Stephen King or Dan Brown, and someone gave me $500,000 and six months to put on a fabulous Second Life book event? What could I possibly do? Hire Second Life actors to put on a clunky little pantomime while I read? Create big virtual sculptures of the creatures in my book to hang over the stage? I have a difficult time imagining what I could do that wouldn’t just look silly. I suppose in 15 or 20 years when you can see 3D Hollywood-quality monsters zooming around while you read, that will be pretty cool. But Second Life is still a long way off. Right now they’re closer to King’s Quest IV circa 1988 than they are to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.

The problem is that literature is a very one-directional art form that doesn’t translate well into an immersive environment like Second Life. People are always talking about “updating” the reading experience, and so far it’s pretty much all been marketing hokum. Even if we all ditched paper and ink tomorrow and shifted over to Amazon Kindles or some other gee-whiz e-book reader, the basic reading experience wouldn’t change, only the distribution method. You’re still staring at a narrative of sequential words that you read from start to finish. What’s really changed about the narrative experience since the ancient Sumerians sat around the fire to hear The Epic of Gilgamesh? Only three things that I can think of: (1) writing, (2) paper, and (3) hypertext.

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Peter Watts Praises “MultiReal”

I had been planning to unveil this news at a later time closer to the book’s July release date. But I just browsed to the Amazon page for MultiReal and saw that the news is already out. So no use waiting. Peter Watts, Hugo Award-nominated author of Blindsight and the Rifters Trilogy (Starfish, Maelstrom, and Behemoth), expert in the ecophysiology of marine mammals, Canadian, and just all-around nice guy, has given an advance blurb for … Read more

World Fantasy Convention 2007, Days 3-4

Alas, all the late night boozin’ and schmoozin’ has caught up with me. I’m sick. As a dog is sick, so I, too, am sick. So I will complete my report here of the goings-on at World Fantasy by summarizing the last two days of the con. Even through my illness I do this for you, the people that read my blog, because I care about you all so much.

The highlights:

  • Scott Edelman strangling David Louis EdelmanScott Edelman and I bumped into each other several times and shared a plane flight home. As you can see by the photo on the right, the meeting didn’t go so well. (You can see more of Scott’s photos from WFC 2007 on his Flickr photo set.)
  • I had a long, rambling conversation with the inimitable Hal Duncan, beginning as a summary of his next work, continuing on to a discussion about the subtext of the Epic of Gilgamesh, moving on to Joseph Campbell and primitive mythology, and concluding with the psychology of the animal kingdom. Fookin’ great guy, that Hal Duncan.
  • Matt Jarpe and I came up with the brilliant idea of Photoshopping authentic photos so they look like they’ve been badly Photoshopped. He’s going to try to track down a photo of him and George R.R. Martin taken the other night, and make it look like he’s Photoshopped himself into it. Personally, I think we may have started a whole new art form, and I can’t wait to get started myself. (Who knows — perhaps Robert Stanek got there ahead of us?)
  • I finally met Patrick Nielsen Hayden, one of the editors at Tor! Patrick said that he didn’t recognize me without my hat, and that he reads my LiveJournal, and that he’s amused about how I boldface the important phrases in my blog posts, just like a Spider-Man comic book. (Eat yer heart out, PNH. ‘Nuff said!)
  • My reading of chapter 2 from MultiReal went off swimmingly, despite my horribly sore throat and need to sip water every four seconds. Nick Sagan praised my “excellent word choices,” and Paul Cornell continued to call me his “favorite current SF writer” (which hopefully he also repeats when I’m not in the room).
  • At the very classy party put on by UK publishers Orbit, I got a chance to meet the fabulous Scott Lynch (he of The Lies of Locke Lamora). I also had plenty of opportunity to act like a big shot and pretend like I know how to promote books online in conversations with Jon Armstrong (whose Grey came out from Night Shade this year), soon-to-be-published author Daryl Gregory, and also soon-to-be-published author David J. Williams.
  • Guest of Honor Kim Newman, Paul Cornell, and I had a great time poring over the SFWriter.com newsletter and catching up on all the Robert Sawyer news fit for Robert Sawyer to print.

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