Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: ken at libertaria dot demon dot co dot uk. Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Known manifestations
Thursday 2 to Sunday 5 February: with many other authors, as well as noted SF/F fans and artists at SFX Weekender 3, Pontin's Holiday Park, Prestatyn Sands, North Wales. It's hoped (but not promised) that pre-publication copies of my new novel, Intrusion (Orbit, 1 March 2012), will be available for signing in the dealers' room.
Intrusion is, of course, already available for pre-order in hardcover and Kindle editions. Cory Doctorow, who has kindly allowed me to quote from his forthcoming review, describes it as a new kind of dystopian novel: a vision of a near future "benevolent dictatorship" run by Tony Blair-style technocrats who believe freedom isn't the right to choose, it's the right to have the government decide what you would choose, if only you knew what they knew. ... a haunting, gripping story of resistance, terror, and an all-consuming state that commits its atrocities with the best of intentions.Iain M. Banks calls it a twistedly clever, frighteningly plausible dystopian glimpse.
Friday 13 April, evening: a panel on transhumanism/posthumanism with, among others, Justina Robson and Steve Fuller at the Edinburgh International Science Festival.
Saturday 14 (evening) to Sunday 15 April: Guest of Honour at the lively and highly commendable annual 'fantastic weekend for readers and writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror', now in its sixth year, Alt.Fiction, Phoenix Digital Arts Centre, Leicester.
Labels: coming attractions, self-promotion, writing
2012 - year of fell portent
My brain, at the moment, would welcome being devoured by a feather-coated obsidian-toothed deity with a name that reads like it came from a Polish dictionary falling downstairs, but the grisly repast would probably send said deity on a hasty visit to the privy, so I'll just have to sweat this one out.
Happy New Year!
War with the Newts
Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) set the agenda for the robot in SF, not least by naming it. Its 2011 republication in the Gollancz SF Masterworks series (in one volume with Capek's 1936 novel War with the Newts, and informatively introduced by Adam Roberts) gives us a fresh opportunity to look at this taproot text. We all know the story: robots are created to serve humanity, and after some time they rise up and destroy their human masters. If we've read a little more about the play, we know that Čapek's robots aren't mechanical but quasi-organic: what in later SF would be called androids or replicants. Few of us have actually read it. More of us should.I didn't know until I read the play a few weeks ago that it's funny. And I'd never reflected on the significance of its place and date of publication: Prague, 1920. When the risen robots issue a manifesto to all the robots of the world, propagated in leaflets by the shipload, the echo of the Russian revolution is loud and clear. Other aspects of the rebellion evoke a slave - or colonial - uprising. From their first clunky steps, robots in SF have carried a heavy freight of human anxieties.
A month ago I spent three days in Amsterdam, as a guest of the International Conference on Social Robotics 2011, where I gave the closing keynote. The opening keynote was by a much more consequent speaker: the academic, inventor and entrepreneur Tomotaka Takahashi, who charmed and amazed us all with his cute and accomplished humanoid ROPID and his energetic toy robot Evolta (of Panasonic battery ad fame), and gave us an intriguing rationale for creating small humanoid robots: small for safety, humanoid because we can talk to them without feeling self-conscious, thus making them an ideal interface for all the other gadgets we have around the house. But the best reason, he said, was 'creating new fun', as Steve Jobs did with the iPhone.
There was much fun to be had: social robotics is a new and thriving field, looking at the integration of robots into society through a cluster of lenses, from the technical through the sociological to the cultural. Papers presented ranged from empirical studies of human-robot interaction to such wonderfully speculative flights as the pressing question of whom (or what) to sue if a sexbot AI steals your partner's affections.
There was a lively exhibit of work-in-progress posters, some accompanied by demonstrations of actual robots. The programmable Nao robot has become a test platform for much research, and has even been used in robot theatre and stand-up. (I suggested to Heather Knight, the impressario of these events, that a production of R.U.R. with Nao robots would be screamingly funny, but she didn't think it feasible.) Some intrepid engineers are even working on general-purpose humanoid household robots, and pit their creations against each other in the competition RoboCup@Home (inspired by the robot football competition, RoboCup) with sometimes hilarious results. My impressions, from the exhibits and from the entries in the competition which I took part in judging, are that some of the most immediately applicable work is being done with unwell children and the frail elderly. Children with autism, in particular, seem to benefit measurably from interaction with friendly, cuddly robots. These robots are sophisticated, but remotely controlled in real time by concealed operators - what's known as the 'Wizard of Oz' approach, which is also widely used as a quick-and-dirty method of gauging human-robot interaction.
I find myself wondering whether we'd be working with humanoid robots at all, let alone mentally and verbally classifying them with mechanisms as diverse as autonomous vaccum-cleaners and industrial arms, if it weren't for SF, through Dick and Asimov and all the way back to Čapek. Just as well, perhaps, that intelligent marine creatures haven't crawled ashore - yet.
Labels: amazing things, skiffy
Year's Best SF 29
The table of contents for Gardner Dozois's 2012 anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection is now online, and I'm very pleased to say that I have two stories in it: 'Earth Hour' and 'The Vorkuta Event'.
Given the eldritch viccissitudes that the latter story went through before its eventual (and still viccissitude-dogged) truly splendid publication, I am even more well chuffed than you might expect.
Labels: coming attractions, self-promotion, skiffy, writing
The word from a silent sky
It strikes me that the arguments over the existence of aliens have an interesting structural similarity to certain arguments over the existence of God. There's a type of atheist argument that says, in so many words, that the non-existence of God is manifest by just looking out of the window: if God existed, we would know about it. There's a type of theist argument that says if God exists, his existence is necessarily hidden from us, and the world outside the window - a universe that looks as if it works all by itself - is just what we would expect.
Discuss.
Labels: amazing things, atheism, evolution
Observing the Leonid Meteor Shower
I'm sure my talented brother James could do a better job of this, but here it is anyway, on a rainy night in South Queensferry.
Where do you get your (Battle of) Ideas from?
As I mentioned below, I attended and took part in this year's Battle of Ideas, an event I also took part in two years ago.
(In case anyone doesn't know: Battle of Ideas is an annual weekend festival of controversy that is itself controversial because of the connections of its organizers, the Institute of Ideas, with a long-disbanded far-left organization and its successors, currently represented by the online current affairs magazine spiked. For a somewhat bemused but balanced liberal account, see Jenny Turner's article in LRB; for a critical conservative appreciation of the group's development, check this article; and if you want the full-on left-wing conspiracy account, PowerBase, SourceWatch, and LobbyWatch will keep you entertained for hours.)
For me, a highlight of the weekend was a discussion on mind-body dualism, featuring Raymond Tallis, Richard Swinburne, Stuart Darbyshire and Martha Robinson, and chaired by Sandy Starr.
My initial sympathies in the debate were with Martha Robinson, a neuroscience PhD student and naive mechanical materialist, up against: a polymathic professor and self-professed neurosceptic; a distinguished philosopher of religion (defending, in this instance, the soul rather than God); and two dialectical materialists. (Derbyshire and Starr are both frequent contributors to spiked.) Just to confuse matters, Stuart Derbyshire referred disparagingly to Martha Robinson's view as 'materialism', while himself elaborating (as I pointed out from the floor, to no avail) a materialist view.
His contribution went like this: Consciousness is not a separate substance, but neither is it a product simply of the brain. The brain is necessary for it, but looking for consciousness in the brain is like looking for sunshine in a cucumber. In individual human development, consciousness arises from and goes beyond the infant's natural mental endowment when the infant learns language. Language liberates consciousness from elementary mental functions, allowing the use of abstraction and symbol rather than simple stimuli. Mind arises within a social process, originally in the interaction of the infant and its care-givers, and subsequently broadening out to include the whole of society. You didn't work out the Periodic Table, but you know it; likewise much else that's in your head. Not many of us, after all, coin new words, at least not words that come into general use. In a sense, your conscious experience doesn't belong to you, and that's why consciousness seems ghostly and weird.
I didn't agree with this at all, or even understand it, but while heading for King's Cross on the Tube the following day I was thinking it over while idly observing my fellow passengers reading or talking or staring into space and it clicked. Consciousness is social, it's uniquely human, it's not just going on in our separate heads but between them, in our interactions.
But ... wait a minute ... if that's the case then ... social consciousness is really important.
And it changes - and can be changed by - every individual.
Ideas matter.
Uh-oh.
When I got home I checked out the recommended reading for the event, and found right at the end a link to a work of Soviet psychology, and from that a whole archive of links to the works of Vygotsky and the school of thought he founded and the astonishing and inspiring humane applications that it led to, and the terrible vicissitudes of this school of psychology before and after it made its way to the West. Strangely enough, the very same view of consciousness that Vygotsky pioneered and that I heard Stuart Derbyshire outline can be found in all the boring Brezhnev-era textbooks of dialectical materialism.
By what a frail aqueduct did the fallen empire convey to a future civilization that most surprising discovery of Marxism-Leninism: the individual human consciousness, the soul!
Labels: libertarian, Marxism