MentatJack

It’s almost always a combination of things that instill in me a strong desire to read one thing in particular. It’s difficult to overcome the inertia of wanting to read EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING has a lot of mass. In this case, I’d been using a SF Signal Mind Meld to improve the Space Opera TagShadow. I’d also been rather disturbed recently by the accusations (1, 2, 3 and you can gather the larger picture from comments and links from those posts) against Night Shade Books. More important to the points I draw in this post, than my reasons for choosing what to read, a small piece of the EVERYTHING I keep trying to read is the Shine anthology… What I was drawn to in particular this morning was my copy of Iain M. Bank’s collection The State of the Art, which I purchased a while ago direct from NSB.

The Problem with Utopias and Labels

I approached the collection this morning with a desire to quickly grok the Culture, so I first read Banks’ notes on “A Few Notes on the Culture” at the back of the book before proceeding to read “A Gift From the Culture,” which seems to be the first Culture story Banks wrote. Reading about any utopia, even one as elegantly thought out as Bank’s Culture, causes me to immediately start looking for the holes. What type of people would find this particular utopia hell. This is what both makes me wary of the Optimistic SF anthology I mentioned and draws me toward it. The exceptions in a utopia, the arguments about edge cases, the dissidents, everything that perturbs equilibrium–these are the things that paradoxically create for me a believable and approachable utopia.

I was chatting with my wife, as we orbited the CSUN library on our nightly walk, about how my talent for web development (and previously physics) stems largely from my ability (and proclivity) to generalize. The same issue that’s fairly easy to see for utopias, simply the clichéd “the exceptions prove the rule,” is important for all generalizations. I can geek out over a more rigorous formulation of that idea, but I’d rather get to my point without your eyes glazing over. Talking about science fiction or any sub genres or pretty much any way we label the fiction we enjoy as rigidly defined by boundary conditions is like defining a utopia only by the things that make it desirable. Science fiction is NOT all set in the future and it’s those wonderful exceptions to that and other standard boundary conditions that draw me to writers like Ted Chiang.

Introducing the Utopia with some Noir

I love that Iain M. Banks introduces us to the Culture via a story that is pure noir. The main character in “A Gift From the Culture” is caught up in the seedy underbelly of a “primitive” space faring society that isn’t part of the Culture. Pretty much every element of the story is used to describe the Culture in contrast to a closer, darker, grittier future. That the main character (and his nature as a representative of the culture) is used as a force multiplier against the Culture wraps the whole incomplete description of the Culture into a tidy nugget that is just begging for elaboration. Lucy for us all, this was only Banks’ first gift to us from the Culture.

I knew that John Scalzi had a special relationship with bacon. I’ve had his Old Man’s War on my shelf since I reviewed Zoe’s Tale. I finally got around to starting the novel and was pleased that bacon entered the story before page 50. And it wasn’t just a passing reference. Bacon was integrated into a thought experiment which seems to have implications for the plot.

</Bacon>

The Tor edition of Metatropolis was released last week, and it’s a book very much worthy of entering its third incarnation. The edition pictured above was released by Subterranean Press last summer and this collection started as a production for Audible in 2008. I bought both of those previous versions.

The stories in this collection share a world. It’s a world where ubiquitous computing, augmented reality and other technologies have enabled the implementation of experimental social structures. These are NOT, as is stated in more than one story, utopias, but practical systems that might eventually offer a better way of life for their participants.

In the Forests of the Night by Jay Lake

This works fairly well as a straightforward spy story. It also does a great job of introducing many of the ideas and technology shared by all the stories. More so than the other stories it makes clear that there are powers in this world other than the city states that dominate this collection. Traditional governments and large corporations still exist, but they’re on no more than an even footing with the “civilization 2.0″ that’s popping up like mushrooms in this future. This story draws many parallels between political structures of the last century and the social networks of now. I find it quite interesting how at there seems to be a scale (network size or population) where the ideas really mesh.

Stochasti-City by Tobias S. Buckell

This takes the idea of the Mechanical Turk and has a field day with it. I’d not thought about how terrorism and urban warfare could be viewed through this lens. The story touches on these ideas, but it gets REALLY good when a combination of flash mobs and social engineering bring a city to its knees. Three cheers for jump starting a sustainable future, using loop holes in international law. The character arc of the protagonist was more of a hockey stick than an arc, but overall the story was strong enough to stand on its own.

The Red in the Sky is Our Blood by Elizabeth Bear

This story REALLY got me thinking about how many sustainable ideas are difficult to achieve without the existence of a capitalist/industrial structure to build off of. This is the stuff that GREAT science fiction is made of. The story itself involves the protagonist’s introduction into a meritocratic society. The events of the story bring into question the viability of the particular social experiment that nonetheless triumphs in the short-term. This story is the pragmatically optimistic heart of the collection.

Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis by John Scalzi

This was a simple story, told with the humor I’ve come to expect from Scalzi. Here we have a city where you are either gainfully employed or deported and the privileged slacker that has to learn the consequences of his actions. I like the speculative elements – genetically engineered livestock used for significantly more than food and the very real question of how to introduce any type of technology into a society with out the resources to make use of it. I found the story itself startlingly predictable, yet oddly satisfying.

To Hie from Far Cilenia by Karl Schroeder

This was unquestionably my favorite of the lot. The main plot follows an Eastern European investigator attempting to track down some stolen nuclear material. The investigation leads into a series of nested alternate reality games that make extensive use of the augmented reality glasses we’ve seen in other stories. To an extent this story is an allegory which describes the theme of the entire collection. This story appeals to the MMO gamer in me, the part of me that loves a good mystery and the part of me that gets frustrated by the very concept of geo-political borders. This is what you’d get if the China Miévile that wrote The City & The City tried his had at cyberpunk.

Final Thoughts

I’d have loved to see Bacigalupi or Doctorow’s take on this world as they seem to have written more about these ideas than the authors in the collection. I guess that’s another way of saying read them if you like this and vice versus. The audio production was top notch across the board. I highly recommend this collection, particularly to fans of near future science fiction.

I loved Bacigalupi’s short story collection Pump Six and Other Stories ( my review ). Two of the stories were explicitly set in the same universe as The Windup Girl. “The Calorie Man” established the post-oil agri-tech that drives much of Windup Girl’s plot and “The Yellow Card Man” firmly establishes that Bacigalupi can believably write in the Thai setting of Windup Girl.

Bacigalupi writes DARK. The world of Windup Girl is a future where we didn’t make it to the stars. We ran out of oil, the superpowers crumbled under their own weight, and disease swept over both humanity and its staple crops. We survived as a species with a significant amount of genetic engineering. Unique genetic information and the knowledge to manipulate it are the ultimate commodity in this future. The plot swirls around a small nation that has the former and representatives of those with the latter.

The cast of point of view characters is unusually large. Knowing the motivations of minor characters adds a fractal complexity to the story. Everyone is working at cross purposes. I really like how the greed of an assistant, the gratitude of a child worker, and the desire for revenge all build a house of cards. The “main” characters inevitably discover how fragile their foundation is.

Lighter than air flight, pedal powered computers, liquefied coal powered luxury vehicles, giant elephants genetically engineered to efficiently convert crops into usable energy, a plague of invisible cats, and an discarded, over-engineered, beautiful young lady. The interesting mixture of technology makes this a fun read. It’s an important book for 2 reasons. It firmly avoids the anglo-centric nature of much science fiction. That would be reason enough for it to stand out from other books. The second reason is that it shows a world that’s only lightly extrapolated from our own. To mangle the Gibson quote slightly, this dystopic setting is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. Starvation, energy scarcity, and agribusiness as a powerful international player all exist today. It’s quite believable that they could be THE central issues in a not too distant future.

Like the Windup Girl, whose very existence is the result of narrowly avoiding the trash, the world Bacigalupi creates is ever so slightly hopeful in that humanity has at least managed to survive. It’s well worth your time to read and quite deserving of its Nebula Win.

I’d been meaning to write this review for a while. I saw a ton of tweets about this video today, but haven’t watched it yet. I suspect it might be awesome.

5 examples of why I love my wife.

She brought me these 4 anthologies back when she visited our favorite used bookstore in Tacoma, Washington. I can’t wait to start reading.

• The Year’s Best Science Fiction : Seventeenth Annual Collection
• The Year’s Best Science Fiction : Nineteenth Annual Collection
• The Year’s Best Science Fiction : Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection
• The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology – This is my favorite. Edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. It has stories by Asimov, Del Rey, Heinlein, Sturgeon, and others.

The fifth thing would be the Aloo Gobi she made for dinner tonight. I found the heirloom potatoes. She did her spice magic. Yum ensued.

Time for part three of this ongoing series about the technology in the Autumn Rain trilogy! First we talked about the LEO space elevator in THE MIRRORED HEAVENS. Then we turned to the O’Neill cylinders in THE BURNING SKIES.

Now it’s time to look at the most fearsome piece of technology of all.

In trilogy finale THE MACHINERY OF LIGHT, the United States and the Eurasian Coalition duke it out across the Earth-Moon system, waging total war in space. At first America sweeps all before it … but the Eurasians deploy two megaships to turn the tide of in their favor, each one powered by nuclear pulse-detonation. That’s a fancy way of saying the ship shits out nuclear bombs, channeling each explosion against a massive pusher plate to propel the ship forward. Like so much of the tech in my books, I ripped this one straight out of NASA blueprints – indeed, physicist Freeman Dyson was the original brainchild behind Project Orion back in the 1950s, as this was a spaceship that could have transformed planetary exploration and brought the rest of the solar system within reach. As described in Dyson’s son George’s book, the Orion project had revolutionary implications.

Then again, it does shit out nuclear bombs, meaning it ran afoul of arms control efforts between the U.S. and the Soviets in the 1960s. Plus it’s the kind of thing that would be built and launched in space. No one in their right mind would launch such a machine from the Earth’s surface. But when you’re fighting the war to end all wars, the last thing you care about is environmental impact statements….

And don’t forget. I’m running a giveaway of 3 copies of Machinery of Light.

I’m off work today, but the company I work for is never far out of my mind. When I find myself thinking about World SF, I get a warm feeling that I work for such an international company. When I read a good SF novel about software development I’m reminded that I LOVE being a developer and working where I do. And then, every time I’m in a bookstore and see George Mann’s Ghost of Manhattan (really should read that), The above chess set, sold by my company, comes to mind.

NOVICA == AWESOME.

Skiffy and Fanty posed the question. “What are your favorite new (first published in the last 10 years) science fiction writers?” For my money no answer to that would be complete without David J. Williams. His first novel trilogy began in 2008 with Mirrored Heavens and it’s a NONSTOP near future, earth/moon system, action sequence from the first paragraph of the first book to the last Machinery of Light.

Dave’s been writing about the large technological set pieces in each of the books. Read about The Phoenix Space Elevator and O’Neil Cylinders and he’ll start off June with a description of the explosive propulsion system of those ships you see on the cover of MoL. Once you’ve decided which of these three are the coolest, if you’d like to win one of 3 signed copies, email me with one of these three subjects: “Phoenix Space Elevator,” “Europa Platform,” or “BIG @$$ SPACESHIP.” Include a physical address where I can send the book. I’ll randomly select 3 winners from their respective pools 6/8/2010 and announce winners soon after.

Show Dave some love in the comments of his posts.