Darwin's Bastards

People who know almost nothing about what they're talking about are often more enthusiastic than the ones who know a lot, so they do all the talking, while the ones who know their shit stay silent and get red in the face.

— Sheila Heti, in There Is No Time In Waterloo

Darwin's Bastards is a very high quality collection of science fiction. It's so good that it doesn't even bill itself as being all Canadian. ISBN 978-1-55365-492-6. Well worth the read.

Spam now leverages social networks

I've been getting spam lately purporting to be from a former co-worker. Apparently they harvested her MSN Messenger list – it impersonates her hotmail account and sends to my work account.

This was probably due to a virus which hijacked MSN messenger, it's a notoriously problematic service: between the service outages, trojans and viruses, its usefulness is debatable. But even as Microsoft gets its security act together a decade too late, the attack is inevitably shifting someplace else.

With social networking sites asking for email passwords to "import connections", people respond quickly. After all, they say it's safe, and you can always change your password later (but you don't). As it has been pointed out, as an industry we've trained people to type passwords, and that's what they do – whether it's a good idea or not, and that's why phishing is so successful. But once they have your contact list they can keep that forever, and it's a wonderful tool for a spammer.

Facebook and Twitter are unlikely to misuse this data too egregiously, they are connected to real money and companies with reputations to protect. But Pownce, which is going out of business – what about their data? And tacky little utilities like Twitterank which spam your stream, you'd better believe they're warehousing your connections. And your private messages. And everything else. You can put these things together and draw meaningful conclusions about the people involved.

Science fiction has been talking about spambots impersonating your family and friends for years, but now it's happening for real, and expect to see a whole hell of a lot more of it. Expect to start seeing requests from friends and family, asking for money through new and unfamiliar websites (or even familiar websites that have been compromised). Expect increasingly strange and subtle requests: you may not even know what they're really trying to get you to do, or why. In short, this is going to get deeply weird, really fast.

Saturn's Children: an homage to Friday

Charles Stross was a bit embarrassed about the cover to his new book Saturn's Children. Charlie's a stand-up guy: he cares about people, women specifically, and I think he was worried people would think he was a creepy lech. But this book is about a lonely sexbot, and the cover doesn't just stand on its own: the book is a tribute to Robert A. Heinlein's Friday, and so is the cover. The book has an engaging milieu and a somewhat bewildering set of characters (personality versioning is hard to keep track of) and Stross maintains the pace and keeps the story moving. It's a good read, and a nice departure from the usual strong-AI-ate-my-balls story lines. It's packed with obscure Heinlein references and in-jokes:

"Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff—or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations or comfort the dying—when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?"

an inversion of a fatuous quote by Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love

Friday was one of my favourite Heinlein books: for a nerdy gay teenager, an oppressed bicurious gengineered courtesan spy was terribly compelling; plus she was black (covers lie), and she traveled the world in semiballistic missiles, tumbling into bed with various exciting characters of various genders. At the time young-adult fiction didn't really speak to gay kids; at that time gay fiction was exclusively boomers talking to their contemporaries about AIDS and Fire Island (not to say that I didn't devour those books, but they didn't mean as much to then as they do now). At the same time I was obsessed by comic books, particularly the New Mutants, teenagers who were hated and oppressed because their secret mutant powers manifested themselves at puberty. So for a science-fiction-obsessed gay boy, Friday presented a character with whom I could identify.

Cory Doctorow has spoken a great deal about why he chose to write Little Brother, a young adult novel about technology and totalitarianism. He read Heinlein when he was a boy: he explained that young people are very idealistic and looking for different ways of looking at the world. Friday did that for me, but I don't think of Saturn's Children as a young-adult book: it is more of a story-driven contemplation on the evolution of identity with technology. The references to Friday are creative and amusing, and the contrast between the two stories shows how the shape of the future has changed over the past twenty-five years. Saturn's Children is seemingly addressed to people of Charlie's (and my) generation.

1940 in science fiction: Slan

I picked up A. E. Van Vogt's Slan at the library. Classic scifi can be fun, and although it did keep me engaged, man this was bad. Since it was his first novel I guess I should cut him a break, but his narrative style was just terrible... he produced some of the most stilted prose imaginable: this guy was to smooth narrative as Jack Kirby was to life drawing.

And all through one almost endless week a snug-fitting, leech-shaped metal monstrosity hugged inch by inch over the surface of the ship, straining with its frightful power the very structure of the atoms, till the foot-thick walls of the long, sleek machine were ten-point steel from end to end.

Slan Chapter 12, ¶ 13

Here he exercised remarkable restraint by leaving two nouns desolate without the comforting presence of powerful adjectives. Elsewhere he also showed off his shiny new verb actuate with the insistence of a four-year-old showing off his shiny new wagon.

But seriously, it's pretty easy to take potshots at atom-age scifi, which was marketed mostly to teenagers and didn't exactly have a great deal of critical editorial talent applied to it. The ideas in the book certainly were groundbreaking at the time: nuclear energy, genetics, and even information science. The Library Journal says "essential for all libraries" and although that's a bit of a stretch, it's a worthy read for a true scifi fan.

Halting State

I bitched all the way through the first half of Charlie Stross' Halting State about how bored I was, and how I really didn't get it. Although the setup was slow, once the men from ONCLE came in it took off and went someplace I really didn't expect.

I'm not much of a gamer, and there are few games I've gotten sucked into (Ultima XII and The Sims, that's about it), but the vision of a future with pervasive mobile gaming woven into real life rings very true, and sounds very compelling (I mean fun). Stross delivers with new ideas in a fun setting (Scotland after independence from the UK) with logical progressions of the current geopolitical environment. My only complaint is that his usual characters pop up with new skins and do their usual mating dance, but that's pretty minor and wouldn't catch your attention unless you'd recently read Singularity Sky. My final verdict is that I highly recommended this highly technical and groundbreaking book.

Sustained futurism

(I know I keep going on about Mr. Gibson. Indulge me.)

William Gibson's fiction has aged better than most of its cyberpunk cohorts. Although Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired inhabits a similar milieu, and although it remains an enjoyable read, it hasn't aged as well. Gibson is a strong world builder who has succeeded in creating his own continüum, but more importantly his characters inhabit hard lives and have faint hope.

Marly stared at the perfect lips, simultaneously aware of the pain the words caused her and the sharp pleasure she was learning to take in disappointment.

Count Zero, Chapter 2, ¶ 20

The key to his success is that he focuses on the human elements, and keeps the technical elements as vague as possible, allowing the reader to focus on the human problems that remain embedded in the technological future, through the lens of our present. Gibson's fiction has been progressively moving from the far future into the near future (with a jog into an alternate past); he is most successful where he provides social commentary on real peoples' lives today: from the down-and-out to captains of industry.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Count Zero, Chapter 2, ¶ 2^nd-to-last

If that's not a truism today, then I don't know what is.

The unbearable pervasiveness of radical neoconservatism

I recently re-read Walter Jon Williams' City on Fire, and something jumped out at me: phrasing right out of Milton Friedman's masturbatory fantasies:

“There is a recipe for creating wealth,” he says. “It is simple enough. Reduce tariffs, reduce state spending, reduce controls on borrowing and lending. Protect the value of the currency while allowing free exchange, permit the citizens free access to foreign currencies. Permit the citizens to keep any wealth they earn [...] and tax with a light hand, with a tax code renowned for its evenhandedness and a revenue bureau renowned for its incorruptibility...”_p.114

“The companies will be sold. We anticipate no difficulty with that–they were all remarkably profitable, after all. The profits will help to finance reorganization in various other state enterprises, which will also be sold as soon as they can be made efficient. I convinced them, you see, that it had to be done now, while martial law was still in force, because a popular government would not be able to shrink in size with the proper ruthlessness. So the enlarged army will hold the metropolis together while structural changes take place[...]”_p.65

This is a capsule description of the 1973 Chilean coup and subsequent neoconservative sacking of the country (and of Argentina, Brazil, the US, Russia, Iraq, etc.). It certainly is a recipe for wealth, and for an rocketing disparity between the rich and the poor. As we have recently seen, it is also a recipe for opening the door to runaway corruption in the financial markets. It's a recipe, all right: it is a recipe for an entire smörgåsbord of misery to be visited on a society by its ever-more-wealthy ruling élite. Wealth is always measured as a differential, not as an absolute: a differential in income, in life expectancy, in everything that matters.

When this book was written this may have seemed like inevitable truth, promoted by a political class and media intent on reversing the 20^th century gains of the labour movement. The author is by no means a reactionary twit, but he couldn't help absorb some of the constant stream of bullshit that is constantly unloaded on us all. 1997 was just eleven years ago, but these really do feel like ideas from the previous century.

Asimov really is dead

I've been a subscriber to Asimov's Science Fiction magazine since I was a teenager. I have always loved scifi, from the juvenile wonders of Heinlein to the half-bug orgies of China Miéville. Short stories are the core of scifi, where the new ideas get kicked around, and sometimes they're good reading. Usually I could get at least one good story out of each issue.

Lately my enjoyment of this magazine has ebbed. The quality of the stories seems to be going downhill, and the circulation seems to be pacing that trend. Having subscribed for many years, there are many older stories I've read that I'd like to revisit, but I don't keep stacks of rotting acid pulp around the house anymore. You'd think that these stories would be available on the website, but you'd be wrong – the magazine remains steadfastly rooted in the past century: although they do sell a crappy DRM version through another publisher, the back catalog isn't available to current subscribers.

I really want to encourage people to write this stuff, but this medium's flaws are no longer tolerable. It's not that I'm cheap: I don't even mind the (stupid) surcharge for living outside the USA, and I'll pay for quality. But better stuff is now being published online, both in text and audio, which I really enjoy and which doesn't have embarrassing cover art. It is sad that a vehicle for a genre about the future stays so firmly wedded to the past, but there's a lot of that going around.

Themepunks coming?

Thirty months ago Salon.com serialized the first third of a novel-in-progress by Cory Doctorow: Themepunks. Set mostly in the near future in the dire swamps of Florida, the work is sprinkled with post-post-industrial economic upheaval, technical and medical wackiness. I enjoyed it a great deal, but kept anticipating for the rest: it left me hanging. Last night, kept awake by cold remedies, I browsed the contents of my ebook repository, popped open my copy of the first installment, and tore through it (nighttime cold relief my aching back). Since I keep up with Mr. Doctorow, I knew it hadn't been released, but wondered, so I searched, and lo: it will apparently be released 1 Jan 2009 by Tor (hardcover, 416 pages, ISBN 0765312794). That's too long to wait.

I am an inveterate Cory fanboy. Of course I'm hooked on BoingBoing, where Cory provides the best posts and I always read the excellent columns he produces. His books and short stories never come out often enough for my tastes, and his podcast has gone sadly silent. He'd better get cracking and turn out more stuff or one of these days I'm going to have to dust off the slash fiction I wrote featuring him and Jack Valenti.

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Update: Cory is publishing a book based on this work called Makers for release in November 2009, serialized weekly starting now at Tor.com.

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2nd update:Makers has been published, and is available at craphound.com/makers. Cory's best work yet, highly recommended.

Spooky

I finally got to read Spook Country, William Gibson's latest novel (a delay due to last year's municipal strike). By far his most politically relevant to date, it is set in the recent past, combining spyjinks, geek chic, nouveaux ethnic groups, and his usual theme of "lowlife meets high-tech". I especially enjoyed seeing my adopted city illustrated so vividly. The plot, while mundane, does not fail to surprise: strong characterizations and interesting plot devices keep the story humming along nicely. Without spoiling it, there is a satisfying tie-in to recent world events and reactions to them.

Wilson disappoints

After gushing recently about Robert Charles Wilson, I was thrilled that Axis, the sequel to his Hugo-winning novel Spin, had been reserved for me at the library. I dug in, and... well... it really disappointed; this one won't be taking any awards. Spin had big ideas and great plot tension, but Axis got all wound up and didn't really go anywhere interesting, with slightly wooden characters, a retread plot, and a maguffin that was a total letdown. Better luck next time, Mr. Wilson – maybe a sequel wasn't such a great idea.

Honestly, at times I was a bit confused, thinking I had already read it because it was so similar to Charles Stross's Missile Gap. It had the same lost-continent-on-another-planet shtick, the same weird things popping up out of the sand, and the same pointless roadtrip seasoned with marital strife. But Charlie used those elements to fashion a good story.

The Perseids

I picked up Robert Charles Wilson's The Perseids and Other Stories because I had enjoyed Spin (which won the Hugo), The Chronoliths, Blind Lake, Darwinia, and Bios (but not so much A Hidden Place). I started reading it without reading the jacket copy as is my custom: I usually prefer to avoid spoilers. It fit with his usual gloomy themes; imperfect characters (especially the men), loss, and cracks in reality. His plots skate the edge of despair, and these short stories were no exception.

As worked through the book I realized that they were all tangentially interrelated, beyond the setting in Toronto: centered around a book store and a few recurring characters. Mr. Wilson is an American who has lived in Toronto since 1962, somehow without actually becoming Canadian until last year. But with this book he definitely makes his mark on the Canadian science fiction canon. I never knew he was Canadian (his books are not usually set here) but it always had a slight out-of-country flavour, a certain remove when discussing society. His remove goes beyond nationality, however, and puts the human condition in a smaller context of a larger, hostile universe.

Cheerleader of the Apocalypse

Peter Watts is one of the most delightfully pessimistic authors I've ever read. His breakout novel, Starfish, gave me temporary serotonin depletion before it energized me with vicarious grim satisfaction. The cozily hopeless ambiance of inescapable doom continued in the next three books of the Rifters trilogy (yes, it is a four-book trilogy, okay?), but evolved from a self-pitying wide-eyed hopelessness into a grimly enthusiastic, squinting near-nihilism which... somehow... strangely... never failed to lose hope. It is precisely my cup of tea, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the environment, natural disasters, biology, software, and the evolution of geopolitics. Mr. Watts is Canadian, and used to work at the Vancouver Aquarium, and many of the settings are familiar: Vancouver, Toronto, Sudbury.

His stories are grounded in real bioscience – and he provides wonderful notes and references in the appendices. Some of his pessimistic predictions about the timeline for weird bioscience, climate change and various enviro-disasters has been, if anything, optimistic.

"I thought I had years before this stuff caught up with me." _{(Footnotes to ßehemoth)}

His fourth (fifth) novel, Blindsight, is a deep-space adventure with a fun take on the nature of consciousness. And vampires. Good stuff.

All four (five) of his books (and many short stories) are available for free download on his site (which is awesome, shiny, rich & deep). I have donated twice to his tip jar (which he dedicates to the care and feeding of his cats); although I bought the books the first time I read them, I subsequently gave them away, but when wanted to read them again I could, so I really appreciate that he puts them online.

Print this book

I recently read the novel Roo'd by Joshua Klein: a near-future thriller that explores themes like body modification, poverty, and runaway corporatism. Although I had printed it in nearly invisible double-sided 4-up I was engrossed as I squinted at the pages on the poorly-lit bus. Although it was not without flaws, it ranked in my personal top 5 for the past year, and comes highly recommended, especially for code-heads of a literary bent. I would compare it favourably with Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, with some of the humour of the former and dark characterisations and settings of the latter. The author, a software developer, released the book for free download under a Creative Commons license. I gave the author five bucks, which is a damned sight more than he would have gotten through a publisher. A publisher probably would have made him change the title, though – I guess they're still good for something after all.

SF belongs to the boomers

The SFWA kopyright kops kerfuffle is back in the bloglines again. The details are engrossing and terribly boring, combining the contemporary debate on free speech and free society and the desire to maintain outmoded business models: whether the SFWA should be forward-looking or repeat the mistakes of the RIAA and MPAA. Copyright vs communism. Intellectual property vs creativity. The past vs the future. Yes, all of that. But really, it just illustrates the divide between people who still actually write stuff, and those who are living off work they (or somebody they used to fuck) did thirty years ago.

See, Science Fiction^® belongs to the boomers. They grew up with it first, and by sheer weight of numbers, they own it. They control the meaning of the words, which they have cemented in a museummausoleum where the corpse of the genre rots behind glass. SF is dead, and although some new work exists which might seem to carry on its tradition, it really doesn't matter because if it wasn't written by a baby boomer, it is most unlikely to be blessed by the anointed ones. [For some reason they like Neal Stephenson. And some nanotech. But that's it: it's like nothing has happened since 1985 otherwise.]

The new generation would like to make science fiction be about the future, or at least be an engaging commentary about the present, but the boomers haven't wanted anything at all to change since the early nineteen-eighties, and they're not about to let go now. They hold title to the trademark "SF" and they're not giving it up without being lowered into the crypt (and probably not even then).

Steampunk has escaped the deadly SF label; the rest of the genre's refugees need to build their own brand beyond the reach of the zombie corpse of SF, and abandon the corrupt institutions which shamble on, destroying any chance of a future. The boomers are never gonna let it go. It's dead, Jim.

Copyright Trolldom

A spat recently erupted between two SF writers, purportedly about copyright. Cory Doctorow posted a paragraph of Ursula K. Le Guin, and she took offense because the single paragraph was a complete story; puffed-up chests and finger-pointing ensued, ending with an apology.

The reason this is trollery is that this story is given away through multiple sources, and Cory Doctorow, by promoting it, was doing her a service. She doesn't see it that way, though, because she is stuck irretrievably in 1950. So she made a stink about it. And Jerry Pournelle and his cronies in the soul-deadening SFWA waded in, carrying pitchforks and baying for Doctorow's blood.

So why does the SFWA hate Doctorow? He writes new stuff that people want to read, he gives it away for free, and has been tremendously successful at it. He also contributes to the influential blog BoingBoing. He does not bow and scrape to the bunch of borderline-fascist ex-authors who run the SFWA, and he has the temerity to espouse socially liberal political philosophies. They hate that stuff. And since UKLG and Connie Willis are the token women in the group, these real men can defend their honour.

A tempest in a teapot, illustrating the fact that a bunch of has-beens feel that the Internet will take away a comfortable retirement based on royalties from outdated, poorly written crypto-nazi bullshit they produced a generation ago. Now UKLG's boring story will safely stay on her site where nobody will actually read it. Great call, Ursula!