science fiction – Wis[s]e Words

In a better world we could all follow our obsessions this way

Published on May 7, 2024Leave a comment

Everybody has played Tetris right? I remember when my little brother got the original Gameboy for his birthday and that was one of the games he also got for it: everybody in our family played it. Simple but addictive, something you play for five minutes or an hour and you can put down again.

But of course there are always people who get obsessed even by this. Ever since it first came out on the Nintendo Entertainment System, people have been trying to beat it. But what does that even mean? That’s what this video tries to explain by diving into the history of people trying to beat Tetris:

This is not normally the sort of thing I’m interested in, but I got it through a Twitter recommendation or maybe it showed up in the Youtube algorithm and I ended up watching it when it struck me that this was the future we had always been promised. This is basically the sort of shit the people in the Culture fill their days with. Beating Tetris really doesn’t matter, it’s neither useful nor will advance your career but it is something that people rather than AI excel in: stting yourself arbitrary challenges as part of play. Throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties the assumption always was that automation meant we would need to work less and would have more leisure time to fill, but instead we got shittier jobs for worse pay. In a better world everybody could be a Blue Scuti and follow their obsessions like he did.

Event Horizon — Sci-Fi Sundaze

Published on March 24, 2024Leave a comment

In 2040 the research ship Event Horizon disappeared from orbit around Neptune. Now it’s 2047 and she’s back — but where has she been the past seven years?

The event Horizon orbitting Neptune

That’s what the crew of the Lewis and Clark has to figure out. What they didn’t know until they arrived is that Event Horizon was not just a normal ship: it was designed to test a warp drive that could take it to Proxima Centauri in a day. Obviously something went wrong and when they find the Event Horizon it’s a ship without power and without crew. As they board the ship, evidence of something gone horribly wrong is quickly found: mutilated corpses, frozen blood caked on the ship’s walls, etc. Power is restored and the gravity drive that provides the warp is briefly engaged, sucking in one of the crew members who re-emergences comatose. It also triggers a shockwave that cripples the Lewis and Clark and leaves them with twenty hours to fix the ship before they run out of oxygen. All of which is bad enough without the terrible hallucinations each crew member is starting to suffer from or the weird fascination the resident scientist — also the designer of the gravity drive — has with his creation…

The gravity drive consists of three rings covered in spikes and knobs orbiting a metal globe also covered in spikes

Any sane person would’ve been wary of the drive even before the hallucinations started: just look at the fucker. That gothic design just screams evil. Event Horizon is not a subtle film, squarely in that tradition of sci-fi movies warning about things we’re not meant to know. Sam Neill’s scientist character, Dr Weir, is very much in that same tradition of scientific villains driven by hubris, opposing Laurence Fishburne’s captain Miller, the commander of the Event Horizon whose first concern is for his crew’s safety. The situation deteriorates as you would expect from a horror movie following the usual pattern of crew members picked off one by one by either the ship or Dr Weir, until the last few survivors manage to escape — or do they?

I’m not the first one who made the connection between Evetn Horizon‘s gravity drive and Warhammer 40K’s treatment of warp space, far from it, but that was honestly the first thing that came into mind. Just the design of the ship is reminiscent of Warhammer 40K, let alone the idea that warp space drives you mad and is filled with demonic beings. But it’s not the only comparison that comes to mind. Hellraiser, where you can be summoned to hell if you solve a particular puzzle box, is another one, but there are also other connections to be made.

On some level you could see Event Horizon as a movie about alien contact. Something lives in warp space and ‘talked’ to the crew: it’s not its fault that contact drove them mad. Granted, Dr Weir’s actions are purely malevolent, trying to either keep the others onboard or killing them if they try to escape, btu that might just be him, not whatever entity contacted him in the first place. It might just be a Solaris situation, with an intelligence so different from ours communication is impossible, so bizarre that our minds cannot handle it. Forbidden Planet is another such movie this reminded me off, which also had some sort of creature killing off the members of an expedition to an alien planet.

A predictable, but enjoyable horror sci-fi movie.

Blame Gordon Van Gelder instead

Published on August 24, 2023Leave a comment

File 770 reports that the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is going to publish an actual fascist:

David A. Riley announced to readers of his blog on June 19 that his 11,600 word sword and sorcery novelette “Ossani the Healer and the Beautiful Homunculus” “has been accepted for publication – and by one of the most prestigious markets I have ever appeared in.” On July 5 he revealed that the story “will be published sometime later this year in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.”
[…]
David A. Riley’s history with the UK’s National Front became common knowledge in 2016 after Riley was included on HWA’s Bram Stoker Award Jury. The HWA appointment became news at a time when questions were already being asked of Riley due to his involvement in the relaunch of Weirdbook. Riley reportedly answered in a no-longer-available Facebook thread.

The news was broken by a tweet from Christopher Rowe, in which he quoted the editor, Sheree Renée Thomas, while its publisher, Gordon Van Gelder, has stayed conspicuously silent. Much of the ire about this decision therefore has taken aim at Thomas. And to be honest, if as an editor you think not withdrawing a publication offer is more ethical than not publishing an actual fascist, you are due some criticism.

However, there are other circumstances in play. Thomas is a Black woman and as tonia ransom points out, the consequences of her deciding to cancel her offer might involve a little bit more than just online criticism:

I can not IMAGINE what Sheree is feeling like right now, but I’ll tell you what would be going through my mind:

– If I publish this guy, it hurts me and pisses off some readers.
– If I don’t publish him, I will get doxxed and me AND MY FUCKING FAMILY are in danger.

You cannot blame Thomas for not knowing who Riley was, you can blame her for not rescinding her offer but who is far more to blame is Gordon Van Gelder, who should not have left it to her to take the heat by staying silent himself. He has a duty as a publisher to a) not publish fascists and b) defend and protect his employees from fascists. The moment it became known who Riley was, he should’ve taken the lead in explaining why he would or would not publish Riley. Because he didn’t, it’s Thomas who is now getting both (deserved) criticism for the decision and hateful attacks by the far right. It’s doubly unfair because it’s also not clear whether this really was her decision to not retract the offer.

We should do better as a community, we should demand transparancy and honesty from Van Gelder as well.

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve

Published on August 2, 2023Leave a comment

Even to this day I occasionally find myself trying to “similarize”. I stare intently at a piece of the floor, blink to imprint it in my mind, then try to teleport to it. That’s the way van Vogt described it in his Null-A novels which I read as a very impressionable teen. I completely get where Ian Sales is coming from:

There are occasional moments when The Players of Null-A does that that thing which made 1940s and 1950s science fiction so compelling at the time: those wild shifts in scale, where battle fleets comprise hundreds of thousands of warships, and journeys cover thousands of light-years in a single hop. It’s horrendously implausible… but never quite manages to break suspension of disbelief. It’s a technique sf no longer uses, perhaps because these days the genre uses tropes differently, often uncritically, with no real knowledge of their meaning or history. But that’s an argument for another day.

Reading The Players of Null-A, I was bemused at how easily I’d been taken in by van Vogt’s writing as teenager. The two Null-A books, and a later sequel, Null-A Three (1985, Canada), are predicated on general semantics, a quack “behavioural system” proposed by Alfred Korzybski, as was “non-Aristotelian logic”, in the book Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933, USA). It’s complete nonsense, a sort of self-help by-your-own-bootstraps perversion of Kant’s “ding an sich” — which is given a far, far better fictional treatment in Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself (2015, UK).

His writing, like that of other utterly self confident bullshitters like Heinlein, is catnip to a certain type of bookish, smart teenager. He had that trick of taking you the reader in his confidence, flattering you that you were capable of understanding what he was talking about even though it was complete nonsense. A thing like general semantics would’ve come across as obvious crackpottery had you encountered it in any other context. It being used as the premise of a science fiction story actually gave it a certain credibility. There must be something in it if it can be used for science fiction!

It was a different time. I still have the read to pieces Meulenhoff omnibus edition of the Null-A novels my parents gave me for my fourteenth birthday, but I haven’t read them in decades. When you’re fourteen you don’t notice van Vogt is just a terrible writer; it’s the ideas that enthrall you. Nor do you notice how outdated and dumb those ideas are. When you’re reading science fiction for the first time everything is new and exciting, no matter how hoary it really is.

Analog One — John W. Campbell, Jr (editor)

Published on July 12, 2023Leave a comment

Cover of Analog One

Analog One
John W. Campbell, Jr (editor)
169 pages
published in 1963

There’s a version of the history of science fiction that goes a little bit like this. It was invented in the late nineteenth century by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells (in a slightly more progressive version, in the early nineteenth century, by Mary Shelly). Then, in 1926 Hugo Gernsback made it a genre, with the creation of Amazing Stories, the first ever science fiction magazine. Sadly however, the quality of science fiction published remained low, most of it being space opera, just more pulp fiction. All this would change when John W. Campbell, Jr became editor of Astounding Stories, one of the many Amazing Stories imitators. Together with authors like Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt and especially Robert Heinlein Campbell would create the Golden Age of science fiction. Post World War II science fiction having gained even more popularity, finally got the respect it deserved. No longer dismissed as ‘that Buck Rogers stuff’ fit only for infants, now, as Campbell’s editorial here has it, it’s literature to truly challenge yourself, for people unafraid to use their brains. In a symbolic gesture, in 1960 Campbell changed the name of his magazine Astounding Stories to Analog Science Fact & Fiction, heralding the changed status of science fiction. This is the context in which Analog One was published.

It’s a beautiful myth, but no more than that. The reality is that science fiction became respectable the moment the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That staple of the American imagination, the weapon that can wipe out an entire city, had become reality. Nothing really to do with Campbell, who in any case was diving deep into pseudoscience like the Dean Drive and Dianetics at this point. The new Analog too was no longer the top science fiction magazine either, with newcomers Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction taking its place. The writers who had made the magazine had left it, either like Asimov, leaving science fiction entirely for a while, or moving on to other magazines. Analog‘s decline is clear when you look at this anthology’s table of content: the biggest writers listed are Lloyd Biggle and Gordon Dickson, not quite up to the standard of a Robert Heinlein or Theodore Sturgeon.