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 found something I hadn't even known I was looking for.

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 are moving forward. I'll keep you posted on our progress. And hopefully I'll have some good stories and pretty pictures for you in the not-too-distant future.....

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).

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.