Bantam is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its SF/Fantasy imprint, Spectra, and I got a nice surprise when they made SPIN STATE one of the featured titles for 2003. They asked me to write something about the experience of writing the book, or writing in general, or SF in general. So being the indecisive type I picked all of the above....
Here's a link to the page on SPIN STATE. And here's a link to the main list, which makes for fun reading. Surprising how many of my favorite books these guys turn out to have published....
Another thing you'll notice is how many of the writers talk about working with Anne Groell, the senior editor at Spectra. Anne is one of the great unsung heroes of SF. She has worked with many of the top writers in the business, from Kim Stanley Robinson and David Brin to George R. R. Martin and Robin Hobb. In fact, Anne is the person who believed in Robin Hobb enough to give her a second chance when a string of badly handled books had ruined her sales numbers and most publishers had decided she was washed up as a writer. We all know how that turned out. And it was characteristic of Anne's steadfast belief that if you just keep putting really good books out there readers will find them.
One of the funny and endearing things about working with Anne is that, as Lynn Flewelling mentioned, she draws smiley faces on her manuscripts every time she likes something. So even if you get back a manuscript covered with red ink, there somehow seems to be at least one smiley face for every question, comment or correction. You wouldn't think it would matter. I mean we're all grownups and professionals, right? We ought to be able to take our medicine. Can you imagine the members of your average writing group drawing smiley faces all over each others' drafts? Heavens, no! And yet ... somehow Anne's smiley faces are like Mary Poppin's spoonful of sugar. They really do help the medicine go down. Though the slog from manuscript to publication can be long, when you are working with Anne it never gets discouraging. This ability to critique without crushing is part of her great talent as an editor -- and one reason why she has inspired so many writers to deliver of their best work for her.
Blueprints for Life
I recently learned that Dianna Wynne Jones is terminally ill. I'm sure this news is as sad for many of you as it is for me. She is one of the most cherished writers of my childhood and is largely responsible for my surviving middle school without loosing my sanity. If you want to send an email of appreciation to Dianna that her friends will read to her you can do so here.
Here's a link to an essay of hers about all the odd questions people ask her about writing children's fantasy. I've read and reread this essay many times with great enjoyment, and my favorite passage is the one where she explains that every good children's book is "a blueprint for dealing with life." I'd go further and say that every good novel is a blueprint for dealing with life. If it isn't that's only because grownup readers have gotten too ossified to learn from novels -- or because grownup writers have gotten too wrapped up in their own cleverness to remember why they started writing in the first place.
Thank you, Dianna, for some of the best Blueprints for Life I've ever read. I am so grateful that I got to read your books. And I so look forward to sharing them with my children and my grandchildren.
Here's a link to an essay of hers about all the odd questions people ask her about writing children's fantasy. I've read and reread this essay many times with great enjoyment, and my favorite passage is the one where she explains that every good children's book is "a blueprint for dealing with life." I'd go further and say that every good novel is a blueprint for dealing with life. If it isn't that's only because grownup readers have gotten too ossified to learn from novels -- or because grownup writers have gotten too wrapped up in their own cleverness to remember why they started writing in the first place.
Thank you, Dianna, for some of the best Blueprints for Life I've ever read. I am so grateful that I got to read your books. And I so look forward to sharing them with my children and my grandchildren.
F&SF REVIEWS
Well, I have been remiss. Again. I should probably stop apologizing for it. And I should certainly stop sounding surprised about it, as I think we are all coming to realize that I am remiss by nature.
Here is a link to my review column in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I have reviewing books there for just shy of two years now, with a special brief to focus on Hard SF. I truly enjoy this work. Actually, I can hardly call it work with a straight face. Large boxes of free books arrive on my doorstep on a regular basis. An amazing number of them are really good. And an amazing number of the really good ones are first novels, which are especially fun. I get to read and think and write about whichever ones I want. The hardest part of the job is deciding which two or three books I can actually give review space to out of the great multitude of books that deserve it.
Here's a list of what I've reviewed so far (and promise I'll try to be better about posting links to current columns in the future...):
August 2008:
Pebble in the Sky, Isaac Asimov.
The Null-A Continuum, by John C. Wright.
Lorelei of the Red Mist, by Leigh Brackett..
The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman, by Leigh Brackett.
The Martian General's Daughter, by Theodore Judson.
January 2009:
Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross.
Singularity's Ring, by Paul Melko.
Earth Ascendant, by Sean Williams.
June/July 2009:
Ink and Steel: A Novel of the Promethean Age, by Elizabeth Bear.
Hell and Earth: A Novel of the Promethean Age, by Elizabeth Bear.
Watermind, by M. M. Buckner.
January 2010:
Shambling Towards Hiroshima, by James Morrow.
How to Make Friends with Demons, by Graham Joyce.
The Last Theorem, by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl.
City at the End of Time, by Greg Bear.
Implied Spaces, by Walter Jon Williams, Night Shade Books.
June/July 2010:
Regenesis. C. J. Cheryhh
Up Jim River, Michael Flynn.
The Hengis Hapthorn Chronicles, Matthew Hughes.
Otlet's Other Web
An intriguing article in the New York Times today about Otlet's Mundaneum, a 19th century steampunk version of the world wide web. Does this make up for failing to feed and water my blog for the last month? No, I thought not. Oh well. Still a fun article.
MARTHA LEWIS ON BOARD FOR MAPS FROM THE FLOATING WORLD
Well, after mumbling for years about doing an online comic, I've finally arrived at the moment where it's time to put my money where my mouth is. I've been doodling around for quite a while now on a far future storyline about human-AI hybrids set in a post-biosphere civilization called the Floating World.
The name "Maps From the Floating World" is meant to evoke the famous Ukiyo-e woodcuts of 18th Century Japan. Ukiyo-e (usually translated into English as "Pictures of the Floating World") were the ancestral art form of modern Japanese manga: mass-produced illustrations for glamorous stories about the geisha, samurai, intellectuals and rich merchants who populated Japan's great 17th century cities. The original "Pictures of the Floating World" depicted a profoundly new environment in Japanese (and human) history: an urban universe on the cusp of industrialization, full of people uprooted from their rural past and looking for new stories and new ways of living.
In the large scope of human cultural evolution, it's only a few short steps from 17th century Japan's "nightless cities" to the overwhelming, disorienting, chaotic cityscapes of cyberpunk ... or from the floating world's geishas and ronin to cyberpunk's razor girls and keyboard cowboys. I've tried to draw a line between these two points -- iconic images of proto-industrial urbanism on the one hand and post-industrial science fiction on the other hand -- and project it into a distant future. The inhabitants of my imagined Floating World are also people uprooted from their past and trying to chart their course through a new reality. In this case, however, it is the post-biosphere reality of Life After Earth. The central figures in the story are the human-AI hybrids who map, maintain and repair the informational threads of the Floating World. In essence, they are cosmic systems administrators. But the system they administer is humanity itself, and it is so vast and so old that no one even remembers whether it's the real world or just a virtual echo of a world long-dead. I guess you could call these AIs gods ... if gods were fallible and mortal. The surviving human inhabitants of the Floating World just call them Tinkers.
Okay. So much for idle daydreams. What pushed this project beyond the realm of idle daydreams was meeting artist Martha Lewis.
Martha's work is truly amazing. It explores technological and scientific images in a way that explodes all the stale old assumptions and stereotypes we've come to associate with scientific (and science fictional) illustration.
Her paintings have the hypnotic, iconic, otherworldly quality of ancient maps. You can get lost in them. You can imagine futuristic monks meditating in front of them. You could even meditate in front of them yourself. The first time I saw one of her paintings, I had that kick-in-the-gut feeling of having Thus, I am very, very excited to be able announce that Martha has tentatively agreed to collaborate on the Floating World project.
At this stage we're still just throwing ideas at the walls and seeing which ones stick. But the eventual goal is to construct an online graphic novel that will be truly a creature of the web, written, drawn, and designed as fragments of linked hypertext. Eventually, we hope to weave a number of interconnected stories together so that readers will be free to navigate the links between various storylines in any order they choose, be it following the adventures of a favorite character or constructing a large scale history of the system as a whole. In essence, we would like the comic itself to function as a virtual Floating World ... one where each reader will be free to construct his or her own personal map of the territory.
All these grand plans are still a long way off, of course. But we
Of Futures that Were or Might Have Been or Never Will Be....
This is another low-news-content post, for which I apologize. I should have more concrete news soon ... or at least enough tie to write something substantive for your reading pleasure.
Meanwhile, in the course of researching another project I stumbled on a truly great SF-related website called PaleoFuture. This guy has had the brilliant idea of collecting futuristic images and posting them by decade to create a kind of archeology of futures past. It's great stuff, full of ideas to tickle your imagination, whether you're an SF writer or an SF reader.
Enjoy!
Book Crossing
Sorry for my prolonged absence. Actually I've been working like a banshee (though why banshees should be considered hard workers, except at screaming, is entirely beyond me). I have a number of projects in the seeding stage, and I should have more concrete news to post about them in the mid-term future.
Meanwhile, allow me to commend to you a magnificent site called BOOKCROSSING. I stumbled on it recently while ... well, I don't remember how I stumbled on it. But bookcrossing is basically a kind of pay-it-forward karmic bookswap club. It provides an online registry of "travelling books" that people have tagged and released into the wild to find new readers. If you find a travelling book lying around your local coffeeshop or laundromat, you are supposed to read it, make a journal entry at the website, and release it back into the wild to find its next reader. A number of books have travelled the world so far, showing up in truly amazing places.
I find the idea fetchingly kooky. And though I'm too much of a book miser to give away books under normal circumstances, I am using it to help find new readers for some of my truly favorite books and writers. So far I've released one science fiction book: TIL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US by Mark Budz. Wonderful book, wonderful writer. I am hoping that the copy I tagged and released yesterday wins him new readers (and new sales too ... ahhhhem ... please note the amazon link above).
Meanwhile, allow me to commend to you a magnificent site called BOOKCROSSING. I stumbled on it recently while ... well, I don't remember how I stumbled on it. But bookcrossing is basically a kind of pay-it-forward karmic bookswap club. It provides an online registry of "travelling books" that people have tagged and released into the wild to find new readers. If you find a travelling book lying around your local coffeeshop or laundromat, you are supposed to read it, make a journal entry at the website, and release it back into the wild to find its next reader. A number of books have travelled the world so far, showing up in truly amazing places.
I find the idea fetchingly kooky. And though I'm too much of a book miser to give away books under normal circumstances, I am using it to help find new readers for some of my truly favorite books and writers. So far I've released one science fiction book: TIL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US by Mark Budz. Wonderful book, wonderful writer. I am hoping that the copy I tagged and released yesterday wins him new readers (and new sales too ... ahhhhem ... please note the amazon link above).
The Wisdom of Homer Simpson
Well, I don't know if this is science fiction, but it sure has made my day:
The Wisdom of Homer Simpson
Repeat after me, America: Stupidity got us into this mess, and stupidity will get us out!
The Wisdom of Homer Simpson
Repeat after me, America: Stupidity got us into this mess, and stupidity will get us out!
Quantum Teleportation Rant
This month's Scientific American has an article lambasting SF writers for getting quantum teleportation wrong. And though I'd like to be able to defend my colleagues, I have to say that my first reaction to the article was a hearty cheer.
I cannot count the number of recent SF novels I've read in which writers got quantum teleportation wrong. And I don't mean sort of wrong. I mean totally, unmistakably, irredeemably, inexcusably, unfudgeably wrong. The kind of wrong that no amount of goodwill or benefit of the doubt can help a writer out of. The kind of wrong that once caused a college friend of mine to get a mathematics exam handed back to him with the following sentence written on it in lieu of a grade: How did you become so terribly lost?
There seem to be three basic varieties of 'lost' wandering around out there. First, come the writers who simply use the words "quantum teleportation" as magic incantation. These writers appear to believe that quantum teleportation works something like beaming people up in Star Trek. Not much needs to be said about that, I think. Although -- funny story -- the guys who actually made quantum teleportation happen were big Star Trek fans and their early examples all have Spock, Kirk, Scotty et al beaming around the universe. So maybe it is sort of their fault. But, come on, guys. This is not new science. It's been over twenty years. Let's get it right already!
Then we've got the writers who use "Bose-Einstein condensates" as an FTL sky-crane. I have a queasy feeling that I may be partially responsible for this, but let me state once and for all for the record:. Bose-Einstein condensates do not magically allow causality violations. They're simply a substance that exists in an interestingly coherent quantum state which seems like it might be potentially helpful in managing quantum teleportation of large chunks of information. I speculated in SPIN STATE that BECs might make it possible to "broadcast" people through subatomic wormholes in the spinfoam -- essentially using quantum encryption to turn a short-lived, messy, unreliable FTL channel into a safe and reliable means of transportation. But if you take the spinfoam wormholes out of the picture you've just got a really massive quantum computer, not FTL travel.
Last but not least comes my pet peeve: painstaking descriptions of spaceships "dragging entangled electrons apart" at sublight speed so that later messages can be sent instantaneously. I know this may sound like it makes sense when you write it, but if any of your readers actually know their physics they will just feel bad for you because you obviously worked so hard to get it wrong. It is not the entangled electrons that you need to get past the lightspeed barrier. It is the information that you want to send via the entangled electrons. More specifically, it is the classical component of the message - the one that can't go by entanglement. And that component of the message can only be sent -- not to belabor the point -- when you send the information. So, yes, you could spend aeons dragging entangled electrons to distant planets. And you could manipulate the spin states of those distant electrons. But in order to extract any information from those spinning electrons you would still have to wait for a second classical message to arrive -- through non-causality-violating channels. In other words, even though you can send a 'message' instantaneously between entangled electrons, you can't read the message until the slow boat from China comes chugging into port.
Now don't get me wrong. I am not against using quantum teleportation as an FTL workaround. Nor am I against the kind of technological hijinks that we SF writers like to call "speculative science" and the rest of the world calls bullshit. The thing is, bullshit is an art form. And if you're going to commit art, then you owe it to your victims to at least commit good art.
In the SciAm article, Jeff Kimble tells writers: "I have some advice. Just don't talk about teleporting people in your story." Wise words. And I have to admit that some of the more interesting SF I've read lately avoids the whole FTL issue by positing non-FTL-based interstellar civilizations. That said, quantum teleportation is just too cool an idea not to use. So where can writers go if they do want to use quantum teleportation in speculative FTL applications in an intelligent way? Well, actually ... read this. It will take you about ten minutes. And though it won't make you an expert, it will certainly keep you from making the really truly boneheaded mistakes I've described above.
And now if you are wondering how so many writers could screw up something that you can get right by spending ten minutes on-line reading about it . . . well, you said it, buddy, not me!
I cannot count the number of recent SF novels I've read in which writers got quantum teleportation wrong. And I don't mean sort of wrong. I mean totally, unmistakably, irredeemably, inexcusably, unfudgeably wrong. The kind of wrong that no amount of goodwill or benefit of the doubt can help a writer out of. The kind of wrong that once caused a college friend of mine to get a mathematics exam handed back to him with the following sentence written on it in lieu of a grade: How did you become so terribly lost?
There seem to be three basic varieties of 'lost' wandering around out there. First, come the writers who simply use the words "quantum teleportation" as magic incantation. These writers appear to believe that quantum teleportation works something like beaming people up in Star Trek. Not much needs to be said about that, I think. Although -- funny story -- the guys who actually made quantum teleportation happen were big Star Trek fans and their early examples all have Spock, Kirk, Scotty et al beaming around the universe. So maybe it is sort of their fault. But, come on, guys. This is not new science. It's been over twenty years. Let's get it right already!
Then we've got the writers who use "Bose-Einstein condensates" as an FTL sky-crane. I have a queasy feeling that I may be partially responsible for this, but let me state once and for all for the record:. Bose-Einstein condensates do not magically allow causality violations. They're simply a substance that exists in an interestingly coherent quantum state which seems like it might be potentially helpful in managing quantum teleportation of large chunks of information. I speculated in SPIN STATE that BECs might make it possible to "broadcast" people through subatomic wormholes in the spinfoam -- essentially using quantum encryption to turn a short-lived, messy, unreliable FTL channel into a safe and reliable means of transportation. But if you take the spinfoam wormholes out of the picture you've just got a really massive quantum computer, not FTL travel.
Last but not least comes my pet peeve: painstaking descriptions of spaceships "dragging entangled electrons apart" at sublight speed so that later messages can be sent instantaneously. I know this may sound like it makes sense when you write it, but if any of your readers actually know their physics they will just feel bad for you because you obviously worked so hard to get it wrong. It is not the entangled electrons that you need to get past the lightspeed barrier. It is the information that you want to send via the entangled electrons. More specifically, it is the classical component of the message - the one that can't go by entanglement. And that component of the message can only be sent -- not to belabor the point -- when you send the information. So, yes, you could spend aeons dragging entangled electrons to distant planets. And you could manipulate the spin states of those distant electrons. But in order to extract any information from those spinning electrons you would still have to wait for a second classical message to arrive -- through non-causality-violating channels. In other words, even though you can send a 'message' instantaneously between entangled electrons, you can't read the message until the slow boat from China comes chugging into port.
Now don't get me wrong. I am not against using quantum teleportation as an FTL workaround. Nor am I against the kind of technological hijinks that we SF writers like to call "speculative science" and the rest of the world calls bullshit. The thing is, bullshit is an art form. And if you're going to commit art, then you owe it to your victims to at least commit good art.
In the SciAm article, Jeff Kimble tells writers: "I have some advice. Just don't talk about teleporting people in your story." Wise words. And I have to admit that some of the more interesting SF I've read lately avoids the whole FTL issue by positing non-FTL-based interstellar civilizations. That said, quantum teleportation is just too cool an idea not to use. So where can writers go if they do want to use quantum teleportation in speculative FTL applications in an intelligent way? Well, actually ... read this. It will take you about ten minutes. And though it won't make you an expert, it will certainly keep you from making the really truly boneheaded mistakes I've described above.
And now if you are wondering how so many writers could screw up something that you can get right by spending ten minutes on-line reading about it . . . well, you said it, buddy, not me!
Data Storage for Immortals
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.
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.
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