Fantastika

It’s David Brin’s Earth; we’re just living in it

Climate change, science fiction
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Yesterday Norway officially opened what’s been called a “Noah’s ark for plant life”:

Dug deep into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, the “doomsday” vault is designed by Norway to protect the world’s seeds from global catastrophe.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a backup to the world’s 1,400 other seed banks, was to be officially inaugurated in a ceremony Tuesday on the northern rim of civilization attended by about 150 guests from 33 countries.

The frozen vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the globe, shielding them from climate change, war, natural disasters and other threats.

For those of us that have read David Brin’s 1990 novel Earth, this sounds eerily similar to the “Arks” he used as part of the background, wildlife refuges for animal and plant species that were dying out in the wild. Brin set his novel in 2038, but reality seems impatient. Brin must’ve been particularly well inspired when he wrote Earth, as these arks are far from the first “prediction” from it that have come true, as the Wikipedia article linked to above shows. What’s more, Brin put them together into a coherent vision of the near-future that to some extent seems to be coming true. Not in all particulars of course; science fiction cannot predict the future after all.

Brin wrote his novel at a time when, like now, environmental awareness was high. Acid rain had been known since the early eighties at least, while the disappearance of the ozone layer was common knowledge at the end of the decade and was finally acted upon then, decades after it first had been discovered, while global warming and the disappearance of biodiversity were just entering public awareness. That was a time when a fair few science fiction novels, unlike now, tackled climate change.

Coincindentally there’s a recent thread on torque Control on why it is that so few sf authors currently seem unwilling or unable to tackle climate change other than as background fodder. Perhaps because most of us, other than hardcore denialists, seem convinced it is happening and it can’t be stopped only migitated. Climate change as part of the consensus future, too big to ignore but also too immediate to make writing about it fun perhaps, unlike fifteen-twenty years ago.

The Execution Channel – Ken MacLeod

books and books review, science fiction
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Cover of The Execution Channel


The Execution Channel
Ken MacLeod
307 pages
published in 2007

The Execution Channel is MacLeod’s newest science fiction novel and a return to the sort of book he made his name with, after several more traditional sf novels: intensily political, near future novels in settings that seems to flow logically from our own times and as a reaction to contemporary political developments. In science fiction the urge to respond to current events often results in shallow, cliched tripe, but that’s never the case with Macleod, largely because he’s a better writer than that, but also because he doesn’t as much respond to a single event as to the general direction politics is taken. In his Fall Revolution novels he was partially responding to the accelerating pace of globalisation and the role of the US as a caretaker superpower, here it’s the War on Terror and the emergence of the hypersecurity state and the increasing brutalisation of our societies as a result of this, made visible by the concept of the execution channel. Which is exactly what it sounds like, a tv channel dedicated to showing state sanctioned killings.

MacLeod has been at his best so far when he’s writing near-future science fiction and The Execution Channel is about as near-future as you can get, set perhaps ten years from now, perhaps only five. It’s a future in which all the fears we’ve had and still have about the War on Terror have become true: American and British troops not just in Iraq and Afghanistan anymore, but all over the Middle East, while in Britain itself the security state has taken over, terrorism is rampant and this in turn has led to pogroms against Muslims. And then a military airfield, RAF Leuchars, is hit by what looks like a nuclear attack. From there on things get worse.

Read more…

Can litfic ever measure up to fantasy or sf?

"Literature", fantasy, science fiction
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Fantasy and science fiction writer and fan Jo Walton had an interesting post up today about whether mainstream, literary fiction can ever be as good as the best science fiction and fantasy novels:

In one section, she states that some well-regarded people think Middlemarch the best novel in the world, ever. I stopped and looked suspiciously at this, turned the idea around a few times, and cautiously considered that in fact perhaps Middlemarch did deserve to be considered in the same company as Lord of the Rings, Cyteen, A Fire Upon the Deep, The Disposessed and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. (That grinding sound you hear? F.R. Leavis turning in his grave?) But you know, not really. Because it’s just an awful lot easier if you get the world ready made for you. That’s my main objection to people who say mainstream and fanfic can be as good as original SF. People can juggle two balls awfully well, and Middlemarch and Dark Reflections both do that, in their different ways, about as well as it can be done. But that still can’t really compare to people who are juggling four.

Please do not think this is the usual reverse snobbery of a certain kind of science fiction fan denying that traditional literary values are worthless; what Jo is saying is much more interesting than that. She argues that all other things being equal, writing a good literay novel is easier than writing a sf/fantasy novel, because in the second case the writer has not just to invent the plot and characters and such, but the entire world in which their story takes place and make this world accesible to their readers. Mainstream authors on the other hand do not need to do so, as they can confidently assume their readers has a certain familiarity with the world in which their novels take place.

It’s an interesting, almost seductive theory, but I don’t think it’s right. For I start I think that Jo both underestimates the work mainstream authors have to do to make their settings convincing and overestimates how much science fiction writers need to do. Just like a mainstream author does not need to explain what a car or horse is, neither does a sf writer need to explain how a hyperdrive works or what a positronic brain is. We know already, because we’ve seen these concepts in movies and television series, in cartoons even, not to mention some eighty odd years of science fiction stories. Meanwhile any mainstream author who doesn’t set their story in a setting that is right here and right now will have readers to whom this setting is new, who may not stumble over things like horses and cars, but who will stumble over say the position of women in society.

Take Jane Austen for example, writing in a society in which women almost literally had no rights at all, where women had to marry or face starvation. This is a setting that is almost unimaginable to a modern audience, yet the genius of Austen lies in making clear this essential horror even to us, without writing for us. That is a feat few science fiction authors can emulate.

Mainstream writers also have another set of balls to juggle that sf/fantasy authors need not bother with: making sure that the settings they create “feel real” to their readers. Asimov could imagine Trantor anyway he wanted it to look, because Trantor is not real. But Ian Rankin needs to make sure the Edinburgh of his novels is simular enough to the real one to convince those readers who know it….

So no, I don’t think sf writers juggle more balls than mainstream writers. Just different balls, at times.

Scratch another dearly loved sf myth

science fiction
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New research seems to show mordern human evolution is supercharged:

In a study published in the Dec. 10 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimates that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone — around the period of the Stone Age — has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution. Many of the new genetic adjustments are occurring around changes in the human diet brought on by the advent of agriculture, and resistance to epidemic diseases that became major killers after the growth of human civilizations.

“In evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations,” says Hawks. “And every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. What we are catching is an exceptional time.”

The findings may lead to a very broad rethinking of human evolution, Hawks says, especially in the view that modern culture has essentially relaxed the need for physical genetic changes in humans to improve survival. Adds Hawks: “We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals.”

Science fiction’s dirty little secret is that it tends to believe in pseudoscience more often than it does in real science; even supposedly “hard” science fiction is littered with impossible or just wrong science. The idea that evolution has “stopped” is one of them, usually used in a setting which contrasts the brave manly colonists of Proycon B with the teeming soulles dependent masses ruled by an incompetent, corrupt bureaucracy of Earth. So much for that idea.

Cory Doctorow

Art & Criticism, science fiction
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I’m not sure I actually like Cory Doctorow, either as a blogger or an esseff writer. Boing Boing used to be on my blogroll until it got too up itself for me, and I’ve tried his fiction but haven’t managed to finish any of it. Part of what annoys me about him is his relentless self promotion, part his equally relentless, somewhat naive techno exuberance. The combination just sets my teeth on edge.

A good example was linked to by Making Light the other day, a short called “Other People’s Money“, which was written for Forbes. The excerpt below showcases what I dislike about Doctorow’s writing:

“You’d have thought I’d learned my lesson by then, but no, sir. I am the original glutton for punishment. After Bubble 2.0, I took my best coders, our CFO, and a dozen of our users and did a little health-care startup, brokering carbon-neutral medical travel plans to Fortune 500s. Today that sounds like old hat, but back then, it was sexy. No one seriously believed that we could get out from under the HMOs, but between Virgin’s cheap bulk-ticket sales and the stellar medical deals in Venezuela, Argentina and Cuba, it was the only cost-effective way. And once the IWWWW signed up 80 percent of the U.S. workforce through World of Starcraft guilds, no employer could afford to skimp on health insurance.
The word would go out during that night’s raids and by the morning, you’d have picket lines in front of every branch office.

The whole story is like that, one long infodump laced with buzzwords and jargon to show what Doctorow thinks could be our future. It’s near future and of a type that I should like, like much of Doctorow’s work, as it’s simular to what people like Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling have also written. There’s one great difference though, in that their stories were grounded in a political and sociological awareness that I find lacking with Doctorow.