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!

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!

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.

The One Who Goes Home with the Most Free Books Wins

Okay, folks, I guess this makes it official. The first box o' books from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction just arrived. I have been invited to join their rotation of quarterly reviewers -- and my mission, if I choose to accept it, is to review lots and lots of science fiction.

Shsh!! Do you hear that mad cackling in the background? That's me, laughing all the way to my secret stash of vintage pocket protectors. What a scam this writing business is! First they pay me to write books I'd write for free anyway. Then they send me free copies of books I'd pay to read anyway.

Seriously though, I'm kind of excited about this reviewing gig. If nothing else, it gives me an official excuse for lying around reading bon bons and eating space opera. The mills of print publishing grind slow, so it'll be several months before any reviews actually appear in the magazine. But I'll link to them when they do. And of course we should all go out and subscribe to F&SF immediately -- not to read my bloviating but to support one of the last and best print venues for SF short stories.

And Speaking of Dragons . . .

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

Here Be Dragons: Worldbuilding, White Beauties, and SF Comic Books

I've been reading a lot of SF and fantasy comics lately, trying to get a fresh perspective on this funhouse of the imagination we call science fiction. What am I reading? Well, The Sandman, of course. And The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. And Carla Speed McNeil's Finder. And The Airtight Garage and The Invisible Frontier. And oh gosh is anyone else old enough to remember when Tank Girl was a funny independent comic instead of a pathetically lame high budget Hollywood movie? Sic transit yadi yadi yadi. . . .

I find switching between SF novels and SF comics thought-provoking. It gives me fleeting strobelight glimpses of an unmapped narrative territory that is neither the land of classic text-only SF nor the land of mainstream SF comics. And it provides a Through the Looking Glass view of my work as a novelist that jumpstarts my imagination and expands the horizons of the possible.

Here, in no particular order, are a few of the questions that my latest comics binge has left rattling around my head. . . .

Is the picaresque, episodic nature of most comicbook storylines a mere accident of history or an inherent characteristic of the medium? And is it incompatible with the novel form? Or is there some other reason that Stephen Baxter's multi-millenial galactic histories stand more or less alone among SF novels? And what does the visual element of comics add to the mix in science fictional terms? Is there a relationship between the drawing style of a comic and its ability to create suspension of disbelief or convey imagined worlds vividly enough to make them feel real ? What about the finished-ness of a comic, for want of a better word? I know that as a comics reader I can have widely different reactions to the pencils, inks, and finished pages of the same comic. And it's not always the finished pages that most capture my imagination! So . . . is there a point where polish turns to slickness and technical prowess becomes a barrier between the reader and the story rather than a means of encouraging suspension of disbelief? What is the most effective style for SF comics? The traditional hyper-realism of mainstream SF comics? Or a more evocative, abstracted style that leaves as much as possible to the reader’s imagination? We've seen that the highly elaborated styles of artists like Brian Talbot can be an effective vehicle for SF tales. Ditto with the architectural panoramas of The Invisible Frontier, and with Moebius's psychedelic line drawings (blasphemously colorized for US publication). But what about styles that aren't usually associated with SF comics? Say, the fantastic visions of Dave McKean? Or the evocative abstraction of Mia Wolff's illustrations of Chip Delaney's Bread and Wine? Do these styles bring something to the table?

The same kinds of questions can also be asked about novelistic techniques of narrative description . . . which we in polite science fictional society usually prefer to call Worldbuilding. And this naturally sets me thinking about M. John Harrison's critique of worldbuilding. I can't take his take on worldbuilding entirely seriously, despite how exercised people seem to have become about it. If nothing else, it relies a bit too much on the old debating device of defining something so narrowly that it becomes a caricature of itself and then knocking down the caricature instead of grappling with the real questions that a more nuanced discussion of worldbuilding-as-narrative-device might raise. Still, Harrison is unquestionably onto something. There is a point of diminishing returns to worldbuilding: a moment where anatomy turns into autopsy, where the story stops feeling like a live animal and starts feeling like a mounted specimen. Anyone who has written science fiction or fantasy knows how easy it is to stray across that line and kill a promising story. Writing good SF and fantasy means tapdancing along the razor's edge between fictional worlds that are too sparsely detailed to spark a reader's imagination and fictional worlds that are so exhaustively catalogued that they leave the reader no imaginative point of entry.

I believe that great science fiction lives in that middle ground. Though when I say "middle ground" the image in my mind is not of ground at all but rather of a kind of strange attractor that shuttles through Narrative Space mapping out the murky territory between leaving too much to the reader’s imagination and leaving nothing at all to the reader's imagination.

I also believe that in some ways comics are better suited to navigate that territory than traditional text-only SF. Is that putting it too strongly? Well, okay, probably. I won't stand on the point. But I do think there is a region of science fictional narrative space that it takes pictures and text together to travel through. Books can't go there. Movies can't go there (in my opinion movies can't even go to most of the science fictional places books can go to . . . but that's another post for another day). Large swathes of this comics-only SF territory have already been charted by artists like Moebius and Brian Talbot and Carla Speed McNeil, among others. But a lot of the territory is still unmapped and seems likely to remain so, at least for the near-term future.

When medieval mapmakers came to a section of the map from which no explorer had yet returned alive, they would write Here Be Dragons. More recent (and less fanciful) mapmakers would just leave those sections blank -- a practice which prompted even more recent (and even more fanciful) explorers to call the blank spots on the map White Beauties.

Well, there are White Beauties waiting to be charted all over the narrative space of science fiction. White Beauties enough to fuel a whole new generation of independent comics. And maybe in the process of exploring that uncharted territory, those artists will also open up new narrative territory for us traditional science fiction writers. Who can say? But one thing I do know. Whatever those new stories are called, and whether they're published in prettyprint or prettyprint'n'pictures, I'll be the first in line to read them.

So here's to the mapmakers -- and to the intoxicating knowledge that we have not yet pinned down the butterfly of science fiction or rubbed the stuff off its wings that lets it fly. The depths remain uncharted. The dragons are still rampaging off somewhere out beyond our last-known GPS coordinates. The map still shimmers with White Beauties beyond all count and measure. From down here they look a little bit like stars.

"She's a Bestseller in Russia, Baby!"

So the Russian edition of SPIN STATE arrived in the mail today. This was a big surprise, since I haven't heard word one from Russia since the advance arrived lo these many years ago. I assumed that the translation had fallen through. Apparently not.

I say apparently not because a Ukranian friend's on-the-fly translation of the back cover copy bore only the most passing resemblance to the book I remember writing. On the other hand, I love the cover, which features futuristic onion domes and a sexy blonde chick who I have no idea who she is. Maybe she's a space princess.

The thing I love most about this cover, though? Check out the words up above my name. Even my one semester of college Russian is sufficient to translate "fantastiskyafiktion bestseller."

O-Daddy-O! Stand in front of the mirror and practice saying "I'm a bestseller in Russia" a few times. Doesn't it make you feel like a walk-on character in a Quentin Tarantino movie? Cue the surfer music. Fox Force Five here I come!

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

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

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

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

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

Philip K. Dick Award Finalists

First for some actual real news as opposed to the bloviating I think I can safely promise you will come to expect from me. . .

I spent a good part of last year reading new paperback SF novels as one of the judges for the Philip K. Dick Award. This week we announced this year's finalists. They are:

Grey by Jon Armstrong
Undertow by Elizabeth Bear
From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain by Minister Faust
Nova Swing by M. John Harrison
Gradisil by Adam Roberts
Ally by Karen Traviss<
Saturn Returns by Sean Williams

We had a bumper crop in new SF this year, and all seven finalists earned their spots after fierce competition. It was a privilege and a pleasure to read these books. Add them to your To Read list. I promise you will not be disappointed.

When Art Bites Life in the Ass

People have been telling me for years that I need to start a blog. I've nodded and made interested-sounding noises and, er . . . procrastinated.

Not that I called it procrastinating.

I called it Waiting For the Right Moment.

Well, this morning the Right Moment arrived when I opened up my laptop after a two week vacation, sat down to begin writing and found myself wrist deep in ants.

An hour and a half of laptop surgery later, I had established that the ants were not merely foraging in the intra-keyboard ecosystem of spilled cookie crumbs and coagulating coffee stains, but were actually building a nest in the interstices of my motherboard. Only those of you who have read SPIN CONTROL will understand just how funny and unnerving this was for me. I mean, had the ants read my book and decided that I was a soft mark who would abandon my laptop before resorting to a can of RAID like a normal human being? Or were they coming after me for a piece of the royalties??

Either way, I think it's fair to say that when your computer turns into an ant farm, it might be time to think about sitting down to write a wee tad more often.

So there you have it. The ants have shamed me into action. I hereby launch myself into the blogosphere which has survived so well without me for lo these many years. I wish I could promise to produce an actual self-respecting blog, and to update it with works in progress, scintillating commentary, and profound musings on the Nature of Art, Life and Science Fiction. But frankly I'm Just Not That Interesting. Plus, as the ant anecdote might have led you to suspect, I'm a lazy slob.

That said, I do make my living writing science fiction. And in the process, I spend a lot of time reading science fiction (and science nonfiction) and having random, fuzzy, non-goal-oriented thoughts about, uh, you know, whaddatheycallit . . . SFness? So let's not call this a blog. Let's call it a free-ranging, non-goal-oriented, intentionally time-wasting conversation about SFness.

I look forward to hearing from you!