Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I have a secret obsession that many of you already know about - because many of you share it.

I collect songs about Apollo and the moon landings. Sometimes they appear at just the right moment. We were driving through the high desert plains of Utah last weekend, through red rocks and green trees, and I was reminded of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books, watching plants struglge to grow in thin air and dry red soils, as ice pellets fell from a cold blue sky. I found myself thinking that I'd never see that fantastic landscape for real, that as wonderful as robots on Mars were, there's nothing that beats the images of people walking on a new world - exploring that old high frontier.

The high plains were once that frontier, and it seems we have turned our back on the new one...

Then this song came up on the old iPod shuffle, an apt piece of poetry from the Bard of Barking:

When I was young I told my mum
I'm going to walk on the Moon someday
Armstrong and Aldrin spoke to me
From Houston and Cape Kennedy
And I watched the Eagle landing
On a night when the Moon was full
And as it tugged at the tides, I knew deep inside
I too could feel its pull

I lay in my bed and dreamed I walked
On the Sea of Tranquillity
I knew that someday soon we'd all sail to the moon
On the high tide of technology
But the dreams have all been taken
And the window seats taken too
And 2001 has almost come and gone
What am I supposed to do?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

Now my dreams have all been shattered
And my wings are tattered too
And I can still fly but not half as high
As once I wanted to

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

My son and I stand beneath the great night sky
And gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo And he says
"Why did they ever go?"
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cos where in the hell's that at?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get out of my room
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we're all just going nowhere

At his best (and this is one of his best), Billy Bragg can capture a complex feeling in just a few words. You can find a live version of the song here.

I guess I'll still keep dreaming...

3,000 entries and still going strong!

Could anyone coming over to either Maker Faire, FiRe, Baycon, Where 2.0 or TechEd (or just the Bay Area), pop over to marypcb and this entry.

There's something waiting for her in the UK that she needs over here, and it's proving a little tricky to get it posted or couriered. Don't worry - it's nothing illegal!

I've just finished reading a couple of Sean Williams' recent novels, Geodesica: Descent (written with Shane Dix) and the first part of his new Astropolis trilogy Saturn Returns. Both of the books were, as always from Williams, excellent reads. There's an interesting underlying theme to Williams' SF, which I can only describe as an investigation into the post-human condition, wrapped up in the shape of convincing, intelligent post-human space opera. That's a rare thing in SF, where a strand of small "c" conservative humanism often delivers is to static distant futures where nothing is truly different from today (Jack McDevitt's Seeker is a prime example of this - an excellent book and a powerful story of misguided idealism that could easily be set here and now, not thousands of years in the future).

Take the Geodesica books as an example. Most of the viewpoint characters are significantly modified from the human norm - even to the point of being completely alien. They respond to situations in ways we wouldn't, and make choices that we would never consider. As the story evolves a key baseline human (if you can call her that) makes choices to change herself, and ends up becoming something very much of the other. Meanwhile, an engineered guardian discovers how to manipulate hardcoded drives to his own advantage, while another posthuman explores the reasons for his choice in stepping away from the baseline. There's a Darwinian drive to the next in Williams' universes that pushes both the story and the world to change and grow. His worlds may be empty of the alien, but the diversity of his human cultures gives us much that is peculiar.

Astropolis is an ambitious work. Put aside the character who speaks in Numan lyrics, and you find yourself in a far future, millenia down the line. This is an old future that's run down and torn apart, where the transcendent post humans that guided a galaxy-spanning humanity (in all its modified forms) have been murdered. A near-baseline human main character is resurrected on the edge of the galaxy, and heads inward to find out just why he was killed and why. In a mix of space opera and Japanese samurai film he meets up with old compatriots only to discover that a different version of himself has betrayed them all, in different ways - and may be involved with the event that killed the transcendents. Williams has also thrown away the convenience of FTL, leaving us with a universe where events take millenia to unfold, and characters can dial their subjective clock rates up and down. Overclocking, modding - this is a crisply gothic world where the LAN party culture would be at home...

Both novels are excellent reads, that take the wide screen baroque of space opera and give us something that is unique and different, worlds that explore what it means to be human while looking through the eyes of our unfamiliar children.

Branch reaching out over the edge of Bryce Canyon, with sandstone ridges and hoodoos in the distance.

Bryce Canyon, Utah
May 2007

Looking down on the bright colours and contorted fractal shapess of the hoodoos and winding sandstone fins of Bryce Canyon, it's very easy to see just why the popular terrain generating software got its name...

Bryce Canyon, Utah
May 2007