Mundane-SF

The singulatarian spectrum

2008-06-22T01:49:00.000-07:00

Mundane SF, like atheism, is so completely mainstream in science and futurology that it's rare that anyone bothers to mention it. The IEEE Spectrum magazine has published a Special Issue on the Singularity aka Rapture of the nerds, pointing out often forgotten issues like:

IT'S A LITTLE EARLY TO TALK ABOUT SIMULATING CONSCIOUSNESS ON MACHINES WHEN WE BARELY KNOW ABOUT THE NEUROLOGY OF A SEA SLUG

but that doesn't ever seem to dampen speculation by those who would also be counting on a painless replacement for fossil fuels in the next ten years, or anti-gravity cars.

The editors gave a good interview in this week's Scientific American Podcast.

Take home message:

God doesn't exist

There's no evidence that our pitiful technology is going to somehow invent God in the next ten or a hundred years

You will die like all other humans before you.

In actuality in the future we'll be wondering whether our great technology is able to perform basic requirements, like feeding us. The best scientists in the world using the fastest and most high-tech computers have made the predictions to within a practical margin of error.

Now pay attention to it.

John Horgan pwnts the Singularitans

2008-06-07T11:54:00.000-07:00

Via Andrew Sullivan, a great quote:

"Let's face it. The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision. The science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod has dubbed it “the rapture for nerds,” an allusion to the end-time, when Jesus whisks the faithful to heaven and leaves us sinners behind.

Such yearning for transcendence, whether spiritual or technological, is all too understandable. Both as individuals and as a species, we face deadly serious problems, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, poverty, famine, environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and AIDS. Engineers and scientists should be helping us face the world's problems and find solutions to them, rather than indulging in escapist, pseudoscientific fantasies like the singularity."

Today.

2008-05-08T18:52:00.000-07:00

So after all the hype, the flames, the bitching and counter-bitching, Interzone 216 finally hits the stands today. The Fix (disclaimer: also owned by TTA Press) is the first out the gate with a run down.

In case you missed it, here's the cover again:

and the TOC...

Introduction by Geoff Ryman

How To Make Paper Airplanes by Lavie Tidhar
Endra — From Memory by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
The Hour Is Getting Late by Billie Aul
Remote Control by R.R. Angell
The Invisibles by Élisabeth Vonarburg
Into The Night by Anil Menon
Talk Is Cheap by Geoff Ryman

Features:

Greg Egan: Beyond The Veil Of Reality
interview by Jetse De Vries

Alastair Reynolds: House Of Suns
interview by David Mathew

Plenty of book reviews

Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe

Laser Fodder by Tony Lee

Ansible Link by David Langford

2007 Readers’ Poll: The Results

Geoff Ryman on the radio - now edited

2008-05-07T12:44:00.000-07:00

As we all know, editing is very important. Geoff's interview on the Radio 4 arts program mentioned in this post has been snipped out, converted into an mp3, and couldn't be uploaded onto blogger because it isn't a video! It's just sound.

So I've parked it in some random directory reserved for pdf documents in my work web page on a server I own, because the internet doesn't have enough leeched-in connections of this.

So here it is, Geoff's 5 minute interview about Mundane-SF on the radio. I hope that link still works in 2108.

5 days and counting...

2008-05-03T15:04:00.000-07:00

And the buzz is starting. Besides Geoff's radio interview (see below),
Damien G Walter over at the Guardian blog has a write-up:

OK, I admit it, sci-fi is boring. After endless Star Trek re-runs, innumerable badly scripted Hollywood movies and a thousand video games with pixel-deep narrative, the once wondrous ideas of sci-fi have become yawn-inducing. Fortunately for me, beyond the world of tedious mass media sci-fi, lies the exciting world of literary science fiction or "SF" constantly producing new ideas to satisfy my hunger for wonder. Now a radical sect of SF writers and critics claim that SF needs to abandon all those wondrous ideas, and concentrate instead on the everyday and the mundane. All hail the Mundane Revolution!

Make sure to check out the comments section too. Best line of the week:

You obviously didn't go to Science Fiction finishing school.

To the BBC

2008-05-03T10:38:00.001-07:00

On the BBC on Friday

The Mundane Movement in Science Fiction

Should sci-fi writers create plots which feature futuristic space ships flying faster than the speed of light, or should they focus instead on today’s real scientific discoveries and the changing nature of the planet we live on? That's the debate that been sparked off by a new manifesto for Mundane Sci-Fi. Geoff Ryman, one of the founders of the movement, explains his aims to Kirsty Lang.

The May edition of InterZone Magazine is dedicated to Mundane Sci-Fi. It is published on 8 May.

Click here to listen to it quick. You only have another 6 days until it goes off-air.

"Cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past..."

2008-04-15T19:47:00.000-07:00

Democracy Now:

"In Bangladesh at least 15,000 garment factory workers went on strike earlier today to call for higher wages to cover the soaring price of food. In South Africa, the country’s main union has kicked off a series of protests over increasing food prices. In recent weeks food riots have also erupted in Haiti, Niger, Senegal, Cameroon and Burkina Faso. Protests have flared in Morocco, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Mexico and Yemen....Here in the United States, food inflation has reached the highest level in seventeen years, and analysts expect it to get worse.

The Telegraph:

"A new Cold War is taking shape, around energy and food. The world intelligentsia has been asleep at the wheel. While we rage over global warming, global hunger has swept in under the radar screen.”

The Independent:

"The global food crisis became official yesterday."

Krugman:

"[I]t’s not clear how much can be done. Cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past."

[image courtesy of FT.com]

The Mundanista News Wrap-Up 03/21/08

2008-03-21T13:45:00.000-07:00

-Happy Iraq War Anniversary! To celebrate, Oil Change International has released a report on its 5 year climate and energy impact. Money quotes:

"Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends."

and

"If the war was ranked as a country in terms of emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do annually. Falling between New Zealand and Cuba, the war each year emits more than 60% of all countries."

-The Case for Cars! OMG you guys, Robert Zubrin has joined the ranks of DailyKos! *gasp* His mission? Destroy OPEC. (For great justice.) Because only by destroying OPEC and switching to methanol can we beat the arabs to Mars....er something. Best part: Methanol's only considered environmentally hazardous if you want to keep your optic nerves!

-Enough to make yourself sick. Almost ten percent of the U.S. population now suffer from an autoimmune disorder, with that number increasing each year. It now outnumbers both cancer and heart disease in causes of death nationwide.

-Water is for the weak! So because some crybaby hippies insist on bringing attention to the fact that people need water to live, and the fact that most people are in favor of people living, World Water Day is tomorrow. Enjoy it while it lasts. Oh, and by some strange coincidence, they're remaking Dune.

-25 reasons to read New Scientist. NS has a panel discussion of the 25 biggest future threats to biodiversity. Congratulations to the winners!

-My God, it's full of flaws! 2001: A Space Odyssey named one of the ten most historically inaccurate fims evar by Yahoo movies. (Clever, eh?)

Consensus Future

2008-03-18T13:06:00.000-07:00

Here's some great denial-breaking mundane sf thought from a Gary Westfahl essay just published on Locus Online:

It need not be said that science fiction today, more so than ever before, perceives itself to be in desperate straits; concerned reports of plummeting sales, shrinking income, and cancelled contracts are all too common. While many explanations can be advanced for these sad developments, I see the central problem as the genre's ongoing overreliance upon an exhausted, and clearly invalidated, "consensus future."

This consensus future was probably best articulated in Donald A. Wollheim's The Universe Makers: Science Fiction Today (1971), and has been most vigorously promoted by various incarnations of Star Trek — so much so that one might describe it today as the "Star Trek future." It's what I've been talking about all along — the idea that humanity will, in relatively little time and with relatively little effort, expand first throughout the solar system and then throughout the cosmos to inhabit thousands of worlds, bond with generally humanoid alien species, build a Galactic Empire or a Federation of Planets, and keep advancing toward an ultimate encounter with God Himself. Now, as I can confess from personal experience, it is very easy to grow tired of stories set within this overly familiar sort of future, and the events of the last fifty years, as I have discussed, certainly provide more than enough reasons for questioning its accuracy as a prediction of humanity's future.

In sum, as I mentioned in my essay on The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, this "consensus future" of science fiction is actually nothing more than a fantasy. And, if readers are going to be spending their time with fantasy, why shouldn't they go for the real thing, instead of ersatz fantasy masquerading as a prediction of humanity's future? Might this be the reason why fantasy is booming, and science fiction is floundering?

Nothing more than a fantasy.

It's the end of the world and he feels fine

2008-03-04T01:03:00.000-08:00

James Lovelock, popularizer of the Gaia Hypothesis, which has had several outings in Science Fiction, has given a recent interview:

In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful technological stuff". When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business," he said.

"And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's almost exactly what's happened."

On the subject of what the future holds now.

Most of the things we have been told to do [to prevent climate change] might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time... Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear... our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

...

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."

...

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

So, here's the question to all right-thinking SF fans out there.

Is it more enjoyable to write SF about space travel and aliens and how the act of shopping is going to drive the technological revolution, or do you want to write Mundane-SF that looks a bit funny now, but stands a chance of becoming increasingly relevant as time progresses?

Anyone can write a cyberpunk crime story today, but the people who look good are the ones who wrote it before the mainstreaming of the Internet. The technology was all there to see back in the 1980s; but precious few people recognized how important it was at the time.

IO9 asks what issues SF should take on

2008-01-24T19:45:00.000-08:00

Io9 continues to kick much ass. Charlie Anders posits the following:

Now that an Omega Man remake has made it big, the time is ripe for some 1970s-style "message" science fiction. We need more ripped-from-the-headlines science fictional stories that deal with the issues we're all freaking out about. But we need more than just parables about global warming and ebil corporations.

The choices are:

Peak oil. (which Mundanes have been writing about and talking about for some time now, and Paolo Bacigalupi has even been winning awards doing it for some time.)

Subprime foreclosures. (Hmm. Fair topic, but tough to do in an SF setting.)

Refugees from genocide. (Too bad 'Pol Pot's beautiful daughter' was fantasy.)

The global war on terror. (Actually, having even more heavy handed "message" stories about the Global War on Terror would be about as useful to me as having the ability to whistle out of my asshole. Lions for Lambs anyone?)

Super-epidemics of drug-resistant organisms.

I'm actually in the middle of writing a short on the last one. Right now refugees from genocide seems to be leading the pack with super-epidemics following close. But honestly, this really gets to the heart about what this movement is about. Everyone seems to be focused on the Mundane Manifesto's call for limitations, and not so much on its call for relevance. You remember relevance, don't you guys? It's that stuff people experimented with a few decades ago, along with other crazy shit like drugs, love-ins, and the idea of science fiction being written for an audience bigger than ever-shrinking incestuous niche.

Pick up a newspaper, and you'll find that most of the things happening on the world stage---A crumbling healthcare system, climate change, nuclear proliferation, rising fuel prices, soaring food prices, depleting metal deposits around the world, an increasing capacity for government surveillance and the curtailing of civil liberties, the weaponization of space as 'the fist of globalization' as Tom Friedman put it, a neuroscience revolution that has more potential for social and ethical upheaval than at any time since Darwin, the increasing inequality between the richest and the poorest, control over the production of human embryos and the possibility of creating artificial life----looking around it seems that most of the issues of the day are, either centrally or in part, issues of science. And all the areas of science that are actually intersecting with and impacting people's lives just happen to be the areas of science that science fiction chooses to ignoring the most these days.

So for those of you still perplexed at what this whole Mundane thing is all about, or why some of us sound so angry all the time, maybe that helps enlighten our point of view. Science fiction is determined to only write about science when it has absolutely nothing to do with what's going on all around us.

Does anyone else see anything wrong or just a little bit negligent about this?

Does anyone else think that maybe there's something that SF does better than any other literary genre, that maybe being the literature of ideas that it has tools no one else does to confront these changes that are remaking the world?

Does anyone else think that as a genre, we can be doing a hell of a lot better?

The Mundanista News Wrap-up

2008-01-24T10:57:00.000-08:00

- Early signs might be pointing to a new Eco-Patents Commons movement taking shape soon. Via eco-geek:

Inspired by open source movement behind Creative Commons and the Linux OS, the WBCSD and these companies believe that by sharing patents that reduce pollution and waste, they will provide a spawning ground for new collaborations in efficiency and sustainability.

And this is just the beginning of this kind of intellectual property sharing – other corporations with environmental technology are being actively recruited to join the Eco-Patent Commons.

- Kite powered ship to cross the Atlantic. I remember Paolo's 'Yellow Card Man' vaguely referencing the future return of clipper ships in the post-oil world. Oh, and speaking of Paolo, he’s going to be on Wired Science’s blog Science Fiction Friday tomorrow.

- A new documentary called "Flow" just premiered at Sundance, about water profiteering, one of the biggest growth industries in the world as access to drinking water becomes more scarce. They call for a UN resolution declaring access to clean drinking water a human right. At the same time, an exhibit at NYC Museum of Natural History showcases coming global water shortage.

- Hey guys, did you know that apparently the U.S. economy is in the shitter? Well now some crank at Intel (what would he know about economics?) claims that we need to invest in something called "science" to get out of it. Several critics tried crunching the numbers to see if he was right before they then remembered that we Americans can't do math anymore.

- A new study finds that rich nations have caused 1.8 trillion dollars in environmental damage to the third world. The third world didn't immediately return requests for comment on the story, since they're all fucking dead.

[Got news?]

Asimov's Guestbook

2008-01-23T11:42:00.000-08:00

James Patrick Kelly's column in the March 2008 issue of Asimov's is devoted to the Mundane SF Movement. If that's why you're here, the comments for this post are a convenient place to declare that Geoff Ryman is your Personal Saviour and to pledge your complete devotion to Mundanity, or to rant about how the Movement is threatening your Way of Life.

History Channel show asks what happens when WE'RE history....

2008-01-22T15:17:00.000-08:00

Kevin Kelly at i09 has a great review of the history channel special Life Without People. And no, it's not about agoraphobes. If you missed it, there will be an encore on Wednesday at 8/7 PM central. It kind of reminded me a little of The Future Is Wild, and it's kind of sad when some of the best science fiction is TV documentaries. Most refreshing was to see David Brin as a talking head on the show, rather than denouncing it as evil evil anti-progress, anti-enlightenment propaganda.

Mundanespotting December 2007

2008-01-06T22:54:00.000-08:00

Mundanespotting December 2007

I had a little time to try some new short sf recently. I won’t be able to keep up in the near future (maybe I’ll be back for the major award nominees), but here’s a look at a recent month to see what the market is like.

I am covering these nominal December 2007 ezines:

Analog
Asimov's
F&SF
Interzone (#213)
JBU

Interzone is finally available from fictionwise. Fictionwise also now directly supports the Sony ereader. Thus, I’m getting a pretty convenient reading environment for most of this (less so for JBU—I use their RTF release with the graphics removed).

— “Stray” by Benjamin Rosenbaum and David Ackert (F&SF): fantasy
— “Odin’s Spear” by Steve Bein (Interzone): mountain climbing on Callisto in a traditional sf future. I was unconvinced enough that I didn’t read very far, but there may not be anything hopelessly un-mundane if you like this kind of space adventure.
— “Kukulkan” by Sarah K. Castle (Analog): aliens
— “‘Domo Arigato,’ Says Mr. Roboto” by Robert R. Chase (Analog): race to grab an asteroid to build a space elevator to get to the “wealth” of the solar system, but a robot puts a fly in the ointments, as it were. Thoroughly traditional space story. The technology to exploit all that “wealth” (or even make a simple step in that direction) is always conveniently 20 years away. Keep dreaming, and read this story if you like that stuff.
— “The Lost Xuyan Bride” by Aliette De Bodard (Interzone): historical fantasy
— “The Bone Man” by Frederic S. Durbin (F&SF): fantasy
— “Double Secret Weapon” by Tony Frazier (JBU): fantasy
— “Who Brought Tulips to the Moon?” by S. L. Gilbow (F&SF): another interesting sociological story by the author of “Red Card” from February 2007. The minimally convincing moon setting is not really important to the story, which has the Outer Limits vibe.
— “Reunion” by David W. Goldman (Analog): aliens
— “Second Banana” by Way Jeng (JBU): space opera
— “Icarus Beach” by C. W. Johnson (Analog): space opera
— “do(this)” by Stephen Graham Jones (Asimov’s): a kid brings a computer to life
— “Laws of Survival” by Nancy Kress (JBU): aliens
— “The Rules” by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s): the Corporate Power Elite respond to ecological crises in the near future.
— “Misfits” by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (JBU): time travel
— “The Lonesome Planet Travelers’ Advisory” by Tim McDaniel (Asimov’s): aliens
— “Darwin's Suitcase” by Elizabeth Malartre (JBU): time travel
— “The Art of Memory” by Barry N. Malzberg and Jack Dann (JBU): fantasy
— “Osama Phone Home” by David Marusek (F&SF): the Corporate Power Elite respond to terrorism in the present. My favorite story from this rather weak batch of mundane sf.
— “Finisterra” by David Moles (F&SF): historical fantasy or space opera or something otherwise otherworldly
— “The Men in the Attic” by John Phillip Olsen (Interzone): political dissidents are hidden inside a guy’s head. This is well on the cyberfantasy side of my personal mundane sf line. I can imagine lots of neat cyber stuff but I need to see some reasonable level of extrapolation—not just magical brain dumps with no serious changes in society to go with it.
— “Salvation” by Jerry Oltion (Analog): time travel
— “Christmas Eve at Harvey Wallbanger’s” by Mike Resnick (JBU): fantasy
— “Don’t Ask” by M. Rickert (F&SF): fantasy
— “Metal Dragon Year” by Chris Roberson (Interzone): historical fantasy
— “Molly and the Red Hat” by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Interzone): fantasy
— “Fossilized Gods” by J. Simon (JBU): fantasy
— “Strangers on a Bus” by Jack Skillingstead (Asimov’s): fantasy
— “Anything Would Be Worth It” by Lesley L. Smith (Analog): time travel
— “The Best of Your Life” by Jason Stoddard (Interzone): Somewhat interesting (if not entirely convincing) social extrapolation that is mundane enough for me. There is some cyberfantasy in the background that I can overlook.
— “Queen's Mask” by Barbara Tarbox (JBU): fantasy
— “Inheritance” by David Wesley (JBU): weather satellite goes AI as asteroid approachs to destroy civilization, or something like that. Too cyberfantastic for me to bother but others might be more patient and find something to like.
— “All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis (Asimov’s): aliens

That’s only four stories I’m calling mundane. A pretty weak crop, but at least it was not hard to get through because of all the obvious time travel and alien crap. Stay tuned for more mundanespotting….

My Played-out SF Fads, Let Me Show You Them...

2007-12-31T14:13:00.000-08:00

Okay, this is going to sound like a broken record to long time readers of this blog. Obviously some of this is covered in Geoff's speech on the right, not to mention elsewhere.

But it's always zany to see other folks reaching similar conclusions themselves... (From A.R.Yngve's "Notes Toward Becoming A Better Writer")

All science-fiction fads, when you look back at them, seem naive. They are invariably rooted in the wishful thinking and cultural anxieties of their time and audience. But they were popular because they offered a phony wish-fulfillment "solution" to real problems, or articulated an irrational anxiety.

1.
Real problem: The reader, though intelligent and educated, is physically puny and gets sand kicked in his face by stronger, dumber guys.
SF "Solution": Psi powers ("I may look weak on the outside, but I have hidden mental powers!").

2.
Real anxiety: Where are the aliens?
SF "Solution": There is intelligent life on Mars (despite zero evidence to prove it).

3.
Real problem: Space is enormously huge. Traveling to other stars would take hundreds or thousands of years.
SF "Solution": Faster-Than-Light space travel (Ask Star Trek fans how the warp drive works. Yes, really. Ask them.).

4.
Real anxiety: People who don't understand computers are scared of them, and fear losing their jobs to automation.
SF articulation of anxiety: Evil intelligent computers take over the world (despite zero evidence of this actually happening).

5.
Real anxiety: You're going to die.
SF "Solution": When the Singularity comes, we'll all be uploaded into a giant computer network and live forever as digitized souls.

It's not that I dislike using one's imagination -- far from it. But when SF readers and writers confuse "If Only" with "For Sure," you get embarrassments like "psi powers" and "the Singularity Movement"... or the "Super Adventure Fun Club" (created by a science-fiction writer). People start mistaking obvious fictions for future reality. Intellectual speculation becomes Manifest Destiny.

Continue reading here.

(compliments of sf signal)

Weekly Mundanista News Wrap-up

2007-12-30T20:18:00.000-08:00

I'm trying out a new feature here, let me know what you guys think:

-What!?! You mean my 30 horsepower diesel powered leaf blower isn't actually environmentally friendly? New studies are showing that 'greenwashing' marketing may be the biggest openly deceptive marketing practice since 'more doctors smoke lucky strikes than any other brand'. According to numbers by the Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Trade Commission, of the 1,018 claims made, only one was found not to be complete stinking horseshit. And the FTC isn't too jazzed. They're now introducing new guidelines to reduce the levels of disinformation in ads from 'insulting' to merely 'brazen'. And since the guidelines are voluntary, we know they'll be followed.

-2007 declared the most insane year for weather ever. Hottest year on record in the northern hemisphere, in the US nearly 8,000 new highs were recorded in the month of August alone, record droughts in Australia coincided with record rainfall in China and England, all records for melting ice in the arctic were broken, ice sheets and Greenland and permafrost in Alaska melted to the lowest in recorded history. I think that's the most time I've ever said record in one sentence.

-Loss of deep sea biodiversity in the ocean predicted to cause global eco-collapse.

-It looks like climate change was in fact partly responsible for the natural disasters that plagued Latin America this year. This comes after a report from Oxfam earlier this year, tying global warming to the 4x increase in natural disasters that are hurting the developing world the hardest.

-The U.S. Military, long-haired tree-huggers that they are, are now determined to be on the front lines of alternative energy, with only completely benevolent purposes in mind of course. Two stories broke, one with the military looking into space based solar power, and the other with the Air Force intending to begin the switch to synthetic fuels.

Blame and Collapse

2007-12-26T19:49:00.000-08:00

Free will is a funny thing. It's the one thing, above all else, that people want to have both ways. We want it to justify our choices when we do something right, and then we want it to go away when we screw up and need to blame something else. Jared Diamond pisses off a lot of folks for seemingly doing the exact opposite of this, and puncturing both myths. First, in Guns Germs, and Steel he shows in detail why most of the progress and material gain of Western societies, at the expense of indigenous peoples, had very little to do with ingenuity and very much to do with environment and geography. It wasn't the superiority of its genes, its culture, or its institutions. Then in Collapse, he showed how societies can't simply shift the blame when they make key mistakes. If Guns, Germs and Steel was an "antidote to racism", then Collapse was an antidote to blind determinism. So it's no surprise to find Diamond a subject of controversy in tuesday's New York Times, in an article describing a conference just held by the Amerind Foundation, entitled "Choices and Fates of Human Societies".

The conference was apparently organized around the premise that Diamond "washed over the details that make cultures unique to assemble a grand unified theory of history." And that the message of Diamond's work is that "the haves prosper because of happenstance beyond their control, while the have-nots are responsible for their own demise."

Whuh? Considering the kind of flack Diamond has taken over the years, calling him a colonialism apologist is a little like calling Milton Friedman a communist. In fact, the entire impetus for Collapse seems to have been to show how people in the developed world (such as present day Montana) are right now 'responsible for their own demise', and may perhaps take most of the planet with them. The entire argument was that the modern day developed world is no different than any societies that have come and gone before. We're not special, we're not any more favored to survive despite doing everything that caused earlier civilizations to fail. (In fact, the "haves" of today have even less of an excuse since we have the entire tapestry of history as our guide.) While some societies might start off with more material wealth than others (whether it be because of the access to domesticatable crops and livestock or living in latitudes that are best for growing.), ultimately all are equally subject to the same laws of ecology, economics, and thermodynamics. There is no magic wand. If you make decisions that don't take these laws into account, you will probably not be around long to complain about it.

Talk at the conference was of "instead of seeking overarching laws" to "'contextualize,' 'complexify,' 'relativize,' 'particularize' and even 'problematize,' a word that in their dialect was given an oddly positive spin". (It's too bad the post-modern essay generator disappeared. You could have a lot of fun with that.) Overall it struck the reporter as "less like a scientific meeting than a session of the Modern Language Association."

So, pretty sad. I think there's something to be said for Feynman's adage that reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

KSR on climate change

2007-12-26T15:07:00.000-08:00

Thanks to anonymous comment in posting below. Here's his talk online. He's trying to tell google people what they could do to help with their resources.

See YouTube Kim Stanley Robinson On Google and Climate Change (embedding disabled).

Begins with statement by Republican Senator John Warner

What we will do in the next two or three years will define our future

There are plans. Can anyone help us imagine it? This is about the future, it's science fiction, it's Mundane-SF, and it's important. Does anyone think that their latest story about ET or space travel emerging from a world that looks as it does now will seem a little odd with this starts to really hit the fan?

Just as one credit bubble has burst.....

2007-12-22T19:24:00.000-08:00

One in five Americans expects to have to go into debt this winter just to stay warm.

"Heating bills are rising at a time when utility companies across the country are broadening electronic payment options for customers, including allowing credit card payments for utility bills. Personal finance experts say paying for basic living expenses with credit cards makes sense only if you pay off the entire balance each month. They also warn that carrying a revolving balance encourages people to live beyond their means while racking up interest charges that can plunge families deeper into debt."

If one looks at the numbers, a new credit bubble might be forming, as heating bills aren't the only thing that's going up. In the "UK, FOOD prices are likely to carry on rising after a year when floods, drought, biofuels and a growing appetite for milk in China have taken their toll on our weekly grocery bills." And in America, it's been the most expensive year in food prices in nearly two decades.

So it's increasingly looking like we are gliding into a future where those in the developed world will now be forced to reach for their charge cards for such extravagances as keeping warm, keeping food on the table, and (lest we forget the housing bubble) a roof over our heads...

The Two Stories

2007-12-21T20:16:00.000-08:00

"I really do believe that the increasingly intense disasters that we're facing: wars, terrorists, blowback, climate change...flow from this very dangerous story in which humanity is trapped. It's that same old story that tells us we can make a terrible mistake, and when we can no longer stand the sight of it, when we can no longer bear to live inside it, we can escape. We can escape to someone else's land, to a gated city in the sky, a "celestial green zone". This is the story we've been repeating now for thousands of years. It's why capitalism, imperialism, and the major religions have had such a fruitful partnership. Some are choosing to fight this with different narratives that essentially say the same thing. Stories that promise salvation and utopia, but only after much more death and destruction.

"It's in indigenous communities that we find narratives that flow from an entirely different premise: The earth is finite. Life is a cycle. There is no escape hatch. No boat is coming. We will not be elevated to the sky."

-Naomi Klein, wrapping up her 2007 Shock Doctrine tour in Chiapas.

BLDGBLOG interviews Kim Stanley Robinson

2007-12-20T03:05:00.000-08:00

Go read it!

Some highlights:

Robinson: It’s a failure of imagination to think that climate change is going to be an escape from jail – and it’s a failure in a couple of ways.

For one thing, modern civilization, with six billion people on the planet, lives on the tip of a gigantic complex of prosthetic devices – and all those devices have to work. The crash scenario that people think of, in this case, as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed... People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario... [P]eople kind of shrug and think: a) there’s nothing we can do about it, or b) maybe the next generation will be clever enough to figure it out. So on we go...

It’s almost as if a science fiction writer’s job is to represent the unborn humanity that will inherit this place – you’re speaking from the future and for the future. And you try to speak for them by envisioning scenarios that show them either doing things better or doing things worse – but you’re also alerting the generations alive right now that these people have a voice in history.

The future needs to be taken into account by the current system, which regularly steals from it in order to pad our ridiculous current lifestyle.

His comments lead strikingly on from this morning's rant over at the Myron Ebell Climate -- (chronicling his part in the suicide of the human species). Oh, and for a bonus he's seen through the nonsense of economic growth:

...the whole thing comes out of a kind of spiral: if only you could consume more, you’d be happier. But it isn’t true... [You] fall down a rabbit hole, pursuing a destructive and high carbon-burn activity, when [you] could just go out for a walk, or plant a garden, or sit down at a table with a friend and drink some coffee and talk for an hour. All of these unboosted, straight-forward primate activities are actually intensely satisfying to the totality of the mind-body that we are.

So pay attention all you Science Fiction writers of the future. This is the future, so put aside your time machines, talking robots, and so forth, and tell us what it's really going to be like. BLDGBLOG already has a warning for you not to be seduced by liberation hydrology, but I don't think we need that yet at the rate we're going, do we?

BLDGBLOG really has a lot to offer. What it needs, though, is a random article button to make it easier to dip into all that goodness.

100 year letter again

2007-12-10T11:00:00.000-08:00

As mentioned here last month, the hundred year letter project is on-going at DeSmogBlog and has collected one contribution from a professional fiction writer so far: Pete McCormack.

Although it's a challenge that ought to be squarely at the centre of the Science Fiction department, no SF fans or writers seem to have been drawn to it. Now I'm sure if pressed most mainstream SF people would give me perfectly reasonable sounding excuses about why they don't want to be involved, but the very fact that they want to make an excuses is something that is a recent phenomenon. Certainly, a similar hundred year letter project would have been welcomed by SF enthusiasts back in 1967, or 1977, or maybe even in 1997.

But here, in 2007, the Science Fiction community has abandoned the future; or the future has abandoned it and gone on its merry way, following the laws of physics and thermodynamics with absolutely no consideration for our fantastic dreams. What a shame.

It's Mundane but not SF we know it

2007-11-30T06:17:00.000-08:00

I read the news today, oh boy:

Sarah Hall has won the 2006/7 John Llewellyn Rhys prize, which celebrates the best fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama from the UK and the Commonwealth, with her third novel, The Carhullan Army, a tough portrait of life in a near-future Britain after the oil runs out.

The novel presents itself as the statement of a detained woman prisoner, and follows a narrator, known only as "Sister", as she escapes her regimented life of tinned food and rationed electricity to join a separatist female commune on the Cumbrian moors.

According to Hall, one of the inspirations for such a timely book was "the flooding in Carlisle, where I live". In January 2005, when many of Cumbria's biggest towns were devastated, "you didn't have to imagine [the breakdown of society] any more".

Hall, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2002 for her second novel, The Electric Michaelangelo, did not feel duty-bound to engage with the contemporary issues - climate change, fanaticism - that sit at the core of The Carhullan Army. Rather, she said, they were impossible to ignore. "You can't get away from all this stuff on the news. As a writer I feel like a tuning fork - you're picking up vibrations of things going on around you. You can't be impervious. But the duty of a writer is to write a good story, a f--ing good story"

The chair of the judges, Suzi Feay, hailed the strength of all the entries on the shortlist, calling them the books that "stuck out" amid the blur of the 120 books the judges considered. "We could remember even the weather in the shortlisted entries," she said. The shortlist revealed the strength of women's fiction - "for a while we thought we were judging the Orange prize".

She praised the courage and importance of the winning novel. "Sarah Hall's fierce, uncomfortable story of a radical dissident group holed up in the far north after the total breakdown of society seemed to all the judges to be the book that tackled the most urgent and alarming questions of today," she said. "The quality of The Carhullan Army was simply unignorable. We need writers with Hall's humanity and insight."

This is exactly what I've warning you about, boys and girls. Mainstream literature is doing an end-run around the outside of SF to connect with the real future of life as we will come to know it. Clearly the world is ready for this kind of thing, even if most SF writers are incapable of such imagination. What it is going to do is leave SF behind playing with its 1950's dated tropes of space ships and little green men like plastic children's toys stuck in a time-loop, never able to move forward beyond worn-out dreams we once had.

Without a tactical embracing of Mundane-SF, the genre will be dead within 30 years, cut-off like many other forms of literature, because it remained entrapped within its short-list of false tropes that permanently blinded it from the real story.

So it goes.

Everyone loves Amory

2007-11-28T04:49:00.000-08:00

It's an old joke. (I'm a mathematician, by the way.)

An engineer, a physicist, a mathematician, and an economist are spending the night in a motel. After they have all gone to sleep, a fire starts out in the engineer's wastepaper basket. He wakes up, fills a bucket with water, and douses the fire. He creates a big mess on the carpet, but at least solves the problem.

Not too long afterwards, the physicist's wastepaper basket catches fire. He wakes up, whips out his calculator, and determines the precise amount of water needed to extinguish the blaze. He fills the water glass with that exact amount; as the last drop lands, the fire is extinguished.

A bit later, a fire breaks out in the mathematician's wastepaper basket. He wakes up, sees both a bucket and sink, and then goes back to sleep content that the solution is trivial.

When the economist is woken by the smell of burning, he kicks over the wastepaper basket because he is assured that if no one is prepared to make any money out of saving the motel from the flames, then it is better for everyone to see it destroyed.

Recently one of our Mundane-SF contributors justified the unchallenging optimism presented in his story in the following way:

The mode of travel did bug me while writing the story; given a choice between assuming some new magic to keep planes flying in the sky and assuming we retreat to slower/older modes of travel, I decided to go with the first, rather than the second option. The basic rationale (ignoring the usual one of wishful thinking) was this: [1] supply always meets demand, and [2] the demand seems to be for faster and faster modes of travel. With the recent steady drumbeat of good news on energy-efficient transport, perhaps the first option is not too unrealistic.

Extra points for mentioning it; normally something so consistent with prevailing wisdom is not even held up for question.

I, personally, question it. I question it profoundly on the basis that this type of rationale is just an observation which too often masquerades as a natural law immunized from criticism.

In my experience, there are numerous things which are demanded, but which the market won't supply. It's pointless to go into details because the rationale that "supply always meets demand" is the front-line of an interlocking set of fall-back positions. Were I to exhibit a case where supply did not always meet demand -- and thus falsified the claim -- the response would be a combination of the following excuses:

Well, what you're demanding is not realistic.

What you're demanding is a niche product; nobody else wants it, and the market quite rightly services the majority.

You're being impatient. It'll happen in the future once the investment cycle is complete, and it'll phase in just in time.

If you think you've got a very good case, why don't you set up your own company and make lots of money manufacturing and selling your idea.

Theoretically, these claims are very difficult to overturn with any evidence, therefore they're weak rather than strong. Newton's law of gravity is strong because it would be falsified as soon as you showed two masses which did not attract one another according to his equation. The final position above, which forms half the definition of the word free in the phrase "Free Market" is unfalsifiable because it boils down to the tautology:

If someone else doesn't do it for you, then you have to do it yourself.

I mean, really, we have to work on a level above these petty moral truisms that bog down any progress.

What's this got to do with Amory Lovins?

Lovins is a dude who set up his own institute, consults for American auto makers, and writes books, such as Winning the Oil Endgame.

Most people oppose my position that we are heading over a cheap energy cliff where life will get a whole lot more interesting, with the world expanding to its proper size, the exurbs being evacuated, and politicians no longer able to solve problems by starting wars. It's a matter of faith that life will continue as-is with ever-longer daily commutes to jobs that are by and large pointless, that traffic jams will get worse, and that Black Friday will remain the cultural highlight of the year.

Such people who do like the world as it is, and disagree with my countervailing choice of predictions (predictions are so all over the place you can take your pick), don't usually have the information to argue, and just say it's wrong, because it is. Look, they say, throughout all of our history each generation has managed to overcome the challenges presented to it. Your father was ugly too, and yet he managed to find a woman to get married. His father the same. And so on and so forth. In fact if you look down any timeline of life, there's always an appearance of triumph over adversity, because those that have failed and died out are not properly represented. Our history necessarily presents a false case for optimism. More representative cases emerge from archeology. You might not like the evidence that there have been die-offs of civilizations from the pinnacle of their achievement, but you have to know about them before you can claim it's not relevant.

I often wind up doing the research for lazy people who know they're right, but don't know why. If you don't want to download and read the book (fully peer reviewed with accurate numbers about how the free market is going wean the United States down to zero oil use by 2050 in the absence of government intervention), you can watch or listen to his lectures which tell you all the information.

Quick summary: It's all done using safe and ultra-light carbon-fibre car bodies which save energy six-fold and ratchet up efficiency because lighter cars mean lighter engines, which means even lighter cars to carry them.

Anyways, those who doubt me can go on and watch these streams and doubt me even more. I don't need to state the case. Save to point out that I scratch a living in the CAM toolmaker industry writing software for cutting molds, and have attended Euromold for about a decade (I'll be there again this week), and it's all news to me. Simple things such as carbon-fibre kayak paddles still cost an absolute fortune. I'll believe in this material once I start seeing it in my everyday life.

Unlike most technologists, Amory Lovins makes actual predictions based on rigorously applying orthodox market economics. This is good. It means his claims are falsifiable, and so they embody information. If the evidence in the next 5 years goes against it, we can legitimately demand a more sophisticated account for the applicability of market economics than that it always supplies.