Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

There once were two islands, one big and one small. The big island had a village, farms, people, even a parliament. The small island had a big house.

The big island was very pretty, and tourists came all summer on boats. They ate food, drank tea and beer, slept in the hotels, and bought crafts. Life was good on the big island, even when the storms came in winter and there were no boats.

Two billionaires bought the big house on the small island, and turned it into a castle. They wanted their own island with their own laws, but found that the big island's laws still applied to the small island, and there was a bigger island (and a bigger island yet) that ruled the big island.

So they lobbied and fought to change one old, old law, and they won. And that was good, because it was a bad law that made some people more equal than others.

"What now?" the billionaires asked.

And then they lobbied and fought to change the way the bigger island elected its parliament. And that was good, because it had been a parliament of land owners, not of people.

"What now?" the billionaires asked.

And they bought all the businesses on the big island and staffed them with their people, and they paid the island's people's wages.

"What now?" the billionaires asked.

And there was an election.

So the billionaires put up a slate of candidates for all the seats in the parliament. And the people of the island didn't like it, and many of them stood for the same seats.

"Vote for our people!" said the billionaires. "Or bad things will happen," they whispered.

And when the votes were counted just one or two of the billionaires' candidates were elected, and many of the islanders had seats in the new parliament.

The billionaires were not happy, and they closed all their businesses. The shops were closed, the hotels were closed, the pubs were closed.

But summer came, and with it came the tourists and their money. And the billionaires loved money more than loved the idea of ruling the island, and they opened all their shops again.

The moral of this story?

Sometimes a determined community can overcome the undemocratic nature of a slate.

Oh and this isn't really a parable. It's a true story.

Via Boing Boing, here's a video of Kim Stanley Robinson talking about science fiction as the new realism.

I've seen Stan give a version of this talk in a conversation at the always excellent FiRe conference (a TED-like cross-disciplinary futurist event we always try to get to). He's got a lot of important things to say about the world we've built over the last fifty years or so - and how we've leapt over the bow shock of the future, cushioned by science fiction. Actually, that's an interesting thought - that Toffler's Future Shock is the mach buffeting as we pass through the transonic transition of change. After all, how relevant is Toffler to the post-industrial, post-future 21st century?

And of course it goes both ways, as Stan says "When you slow down? Well, that’s another—you feel that too. This is like when your connection to the Internet goes out for three days, or your phone line, or when your cell phone dies—these moments when you’re suddenly not having the sixth sense of the cloud…"



Also, rather niftily, the latest YouTube Player now includes a right click menu item "Copy embed html". That simplifies linking to things. Another little dose of the future...

Sometimes you get the chance to bring several interests together. One of those was when one of our editors asked us to cover a panel at January's Consumer Electronics Show. Most people imagine CES to be nothing but halls full of teh shiny, and to be honest, that's a goodly part of the show. It's not the whole thing though - CES is so big that it manages to run two or three normal sized conferences alongside the various keynotes and special events.

This panel was particularly interesting. Inventor/entrepreneur Dean Kamen, actress Lucy Lawless, author Neal Stephenson and columnist Walter Mossberg would be discussing the influence of science fiction on technology. It was a fascinating panel, with Kamen and Stephenson providing an interesting counterpoint around their shared engineering backgrounds. It also turned out to be one that allowed us to write a piece that brought in an email interview with Charlie Stross and a brief look at one of my favourite novels.

The Consumer Electronics Show's (CES) myriad strands of conference sessions sometimes throw up the most unusual panels. One such event brought together a journalist, a science fiction writer, an inventor and an actress to talk about the influence of science fiction on the world of technology. The conversation ranged from the optimistic to the dystopian, and from the flying car to the handheld communicator.

Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, was sceptical about the role of science fiction. "The subtlety of the real world and nature and the surprising things in real science generally are even more exciting than the other stuff." But he also saw it "as a very valuable tool that will bring people to the table."

One influence kept coming back - Robert A. Heinlein's novels. Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson reminisced: "When I was a kid I read all of the usual suspects - the golden age writers - the one who stuck with me was Heinlein. I don't know why that is, but he stuck with me more than the others did."

Read on at IT Pro to see what Charlie thought...

A while back I wrote about the Dept. Head Rawlings series of hi-tech super-spy thriller "op-eds" on The Onion.

I suspect the anonymous author of the series may have read that blog post, as when I wasn't looking, Rawlings returned to the Onion, with a new problem, and a new member on his team at the Department for Special Acquisitions and Liquidations...

Which is why Mr. Bisson is here. Some of you know Mr. Bisson, and I'm sorry you have to see him again. His specialty has become less common since the heady 1970s, but his services are still quite useful to us.

[...]

Bisson, you have your assignment. I have faith in your, shall I say, unorthodox skills and experience.

While some readers may see this as explaining my tendency to suddenly vanish on unexplained foreign trips, I'm afraid I'm going to be sticking to my cover story still just a technology journalist and not, as Rawlings says, "the world's most seductive catamite assassin".

At least the problem with the Thanatos device seems to have been solved.

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.

The CGSociety's annual competition took a different form this year: producing CGI trailers and concept art for a hypothetical film of Greg Bear's Eon.



There's some really fantastic stuff there, like the image I've linked to, and this mix of CGI and live action. Greg Bear was one of the judges, and comments on the images.

We finally finished watching The Lost Room last night.

Another excellent piece of television - this time, the closest thing I've seen to a visual version of a Tim Powers novel. The story involves layers of conspiracy in a broken world, where mystery is wrapped in the mundane, and with one man in the position to make the choices needed to, if not set things right, then at least change the road that is being travelled.

That and the desert landscapes of the American south west...

Recommended.

Enjoy the fun of a Torchwood/Under Milk Wood pastiche courtesy of the one and only Verity Stob.

Come close now. Zoom in, chopper-shot to crane-shot, down over Roald Dahl-As-We-Expected Plass and its mobile phone mast fountain and, deep, deep below, in his secret underground headquarters,

SECOND VOICE Captain Jack,

CAPTAIN JACK
Hi. I'm Captain Jack Harkness.

SECOND VOICE the insomniac bicon; snug as a hobbit, pretty as a choirboy, immortal as carbon dioxide, wooden as a horse. He is passing the small hours sweeping up pterodactyl droppings,

CAPTAIN JACK
They get everywhere.

SECOND VOICE and cataloguing his prize collection of alien artefacts,

CAPTAIN JACK
One off gadget for choosing the quickest queue at Tesco, check. And one off purple wig for a girlie going to the moon, check. And one off bottle of stuff for getting pterodactyl pturds off greatcoats, check.

It says it all, really, it does...

Bruce Sterling's short short "I Saw The Best Minds Of My Generation Destroyed By Google" is in this week's New Scientist as part of a special report on social media and social networks.

Ted got busted because we do graffiti. Losing Ted was a big setback, as Ted was the only guy in our gang who knew how to steal aerosol spray cans. As potent instruments of teenage social networking, aerosol spray cans have "high abuse potential". So spray cans are among the many things us teenagers can't buy, like handguns, birth control, alcohol, cigarettes and music with curse words.

Click here for the rest.

The link will die in a few days, when New Scientist pulls the copy behind its paywall.

Here's a piece called City Glow by Chiho Aoshima, the creator of the rather lovely City Glow, Mountain Whisper in Gloucester Road tube station.



It reminded me of something.

Here's Tim White's cover for Neuromancer.



Rather similar? No?

Even down to the bird!

I suspect this is pure coincidence...