the morning after

 Hallowe'en decor on a nearby house that gave me pause this morning.

view from a hotel window

We're at Levitation, the 2024 Eastercon, being held this year at the Telford International Centre (TIC). It's a new venue for Eastercon, and is nice and spacious (great for social distancing) and well laid out.  There are also nice gaps between items, so no need to teleport around the TIC.  So far, we've been to:

• a panel on SF and the Industrial Revolution -- a theme of the convention, given that Ironbridge is just down the road
• a talk by Kari on the history of the Welsh border -- also close by, and surprisingly ill-defined
• a talk about bones and forensics -- not all found bones are human: "the last time this bone was above ground, it was surrounded by cow"
• a panel on narrative point of view and tense -- which has moved from traditional 3rd person past tense to more 1st person present tense, especially in Young Adult fiction
• an enraging talk by Clute on the British Library's destruction of 100 years of dust jackets
• a panel on libraries, in the real world and in SF -- "getting my adult card which allowed 4 books a fortnight meant you were supposed to read 4 a fortnight!"
• a panel on Dr Who and the Industrial Revolution, including the 1985 story of The Mark of the Rani
• a panel on Educational Safeguarding in SF/F -- fictional schools seem very dangerous!
• a talk by Emma King on her unsuccessful applications to be an ESA astronaut, and the other successes that led from that 
• a panel on (fictional) Invertebrates in Space -- including interesting discussions of real invertebrates (on Earth), too

We're looking forward to more great stuff tomorrow and Monday.

We're staying at the hotel next door to the TIC, with the customary view over the car park:

at least we can keep an eye on our car...

We drove up to Telford yesterday, in our new electric car.  I still have a little range anxiety, so when we stopped for lunch, I did give it some juice, despite the prediction we'd have enough left when we arrived.  Note to self: when travelling on a Bank Holiday, charging points tend to be well-occupied.  The hotel has four of its own fast (22kW) charging points for guest use, that are not quite as eye-wateringly expensive (70p/kWh) as service station chargers (~79p/kWh), so I will fill up tonight, ready for the trip home.  A bit different from the 9p/kWh I can get at home on the overnight rate, though.

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Later: for more notes on the convention, see my website

dis-mantle-ate!!

 One of the blue roundels came loose on our dalek, and we had to dismantle it to repair it.

not so tough now, are you?

Once all the spider webs had been cleaned out, the roundel could be reattached, and the dalek re-mantled.

Conversation 2023: Eastercon day 3

This morning I remembered to take the traditional "picture from a hotel window".

not a great view; not great weather

The first panel today was on Overshoots and Other Anthropocene Narratives.  This was a discussion of a literary style proposed to cope with novels set in the Anthropocene: that they should start in the past, move into the present, then move into a future where its differences are a necessary consequence of the present.

Next was an interview with Guest of Honour Adrian Tchaikovsky.  He had written about 10 novels before his first publication success.  He started in fantasy, with his Apt series, but the SF novel Children of Time is SF, and he's not sure why it was so successful. [Um, that's because it's brilliant!]  He world builds first, and plots rigorously, except for the finale, which emerges as a consequence of the rest of the plot (so he didn't know how Children of Time would end up).  Gaming skills help world building, and SFF is all about world building

The BSFA lecture this year was about Classical References in Dracula.  I learned a lot of fascinating things about classical references in Dracula!

Then we went to a panel on Non-European Middle Ages.  Not only is there no agreed definition of when the Middle Ages were (roughly the fall of the Western Roman Empire [376-476CE-ish] to Columbus [1451-1506CE] / Copernicus [1473-1543CE] / Gutenberg [c1400-1468CE] ), the rest of the world does not have any such cognate period.  In particular, during this period, the Near East thought that Europe was stupid, rude, and didn't wash.

The panel on Alien Ecology started off by reviewing their favourite terrestrial ecologies: sulphur based deep sea vents, trees communicating via fungi, the interior of ant nests that provide niches for multiple species, and the importance of elephants.  There was also discussion of whether we would even recognise alien life, and if we would ever know enough to know if we were damaging an alien ecology.

Next we went to a panel discussing Adaptable Arthur, why the Arthur legends are such a rich resource.  There is zero historical evidence for Arthur: everyone has made up stories, added characters, and changed the plots, so there is no canon, and therefore no appropriation.  One important distinction: one can write Arthur, or one can write Arthurian (with no Arthur present).

And so to bed.

book review: Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Children of Time.
Pan. 2015

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A mad scientist in orbit around a newly terraformed planet fails to realise she has accidentally uplifted a spider civilisation. And when the descendants of the last flight from a dying Earth arrive to colonise, they find themselves embroiled in a potentially tragic game of Prisoners Dilemma.

This is simply marvellous. (I’ll grant the uplift virus as the one piece of magic tech allowed.) The millennia-long timespan of the spiders and humans is handled in two very different, but effective ways. The uplifted spiders are some of the best “aliens” I’ve ever come across: their bio-technology, their social structures, their language and communications, their ways of scanning a computer screen, are all so different, yet so plausible. And the ending, although somewhat rushed, works nicely to subvert the humans’ assumptions.

Great stuff.  Really looking forward to the sequel.

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For all my book reviews, see my main website.

don't uplift them

This window at work today looks like the setup for an Adrian Tchaikovsky novel...

at least they're on the outside ... for now

film review: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Miles Morales is a nerdy kid, sent off to a high powered school, but who prefers producing graffiti art with his shady uncle. One time, he gets bitten by a spider, and starts manifesting strange abilities. On returning to the place, he finds Spider-Man (Peter Parker) fighting KingPin over a huge accelerator; Parker hands Morales a data stick that can close down the accelerator. The accelerator has opened a rift in the space-time continuum, and several alternate parallel universe versions of Spider-Man fall through. Morales must gain control of his spider powers, and work with the other spiders to close down the accelerator before the universe is destroyed.

the gang’s all here

I confess when I started watching this, I didn’t know it is an origin story, and that there is a new Spider-Kid on the block. That means I probably missed some in-references. But even coming to this relatively cold, I still found it hugely enjoyable. It takes a while to get going, as Morales’ pre-bitten character is established. But the film is clever, and knowing, and funny, and moving, and self-referential: every Spider-character gets an increasingly funny origin-narration; Peni Parker and her robot are drawn subtly differently in anime style; there’s a Stan Lee cameo; Spider-Noir’s monochrome character is drawn using different sized black dots to make shades of grey; the tingling spider-sense seems to be of use only to detect the various other Spider-characters; Aunt May’s response to the various alternate Spider-beings is priceless.

I’m not sure about the message on studying: Morales has to work hard at his new school, where all the kids are bright, but to learn how to use his new powers, he seems to only need to want hard enough, and spung, he gets perfect control. No 10,000 hours of practice needed for super-hero skillz, it seems.

I did some surfing after watching the film, and discovered all these Spider-characters pre-exist in the literature. So I hope there are more films in this multi-verse: having a larger cast of the “same” super-hero riffing off each other gives very rich possibilities.

Highly recommended.

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For all my film reviews, see my main website.

book review: Thought X

Rob Appleby, Ra Page, eds.
Thought X: fictions and hypotheticals.
Comma Press. 2017

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Ra Page at Comma Press has commissioned several books with the same concept: a bunch of academics are paired up with a bunch of fiction writers; they share a technical concept, the writer uses it for a (usualy science fictional) story, the academic writes an after-word explaining the technicalities. I was involved in an earlier book (Beta-Life) themed on Artificial Life and Unconventional Computing; this book covers thought experiments and philosophical paradoxes. Caveat: because of my earlier involvement, the publishers sent me a free copy of this book, for review.

One of the reasons I read science fiction is for the way it can include technical information as part of the story. And as I was reading many of these, I was reminded of several other tales based on simlar concepts. The technical after-words cite technical papers for further reading; I thought that here I could reference other fiction (and a little non-fiction, I confess), for readers who want more.

Several stories are based on special and general relativity: apparent paradoxes from its non-intuitive nature, and thought experiments by Einstein, master of such Gedankenexperimente. We start with Adam Marek’s “Lightspeed”, based on the Twin Paradox, where a person who goes of in a spacecraft moving close to the speed of light will find on their return that they have aged less that those who stayed at home. Here the traveller is a husband and father, leaving his family ever further behind on each trip he takes. This form of time dilation is a staple in SF, including Robert Heinlein’s 1956 juvenile novel Time for the Stars, featuring actual twins, and Joan D. Vinge’s 1974 novella “Tin Soldier”, which pairs a slowly-ageing cyborg with a time-dilated space pilot.

The next topic is the Experience Machine: is it better to live in reality, or experience more pleasure in a simulated world? The argument applies to drug use, too. Zoe Gilbert’s “Tether” gives us a story where the experience may be a magical hallucination, or such advanced tech that it is indistinguishable from magic; either way, the bliss of flying as high as a kite is irresistible. Examples of Virtual Reality and consciousness uploading abound in SF. Tom Cool in his late 1990s novels Infectress and Secret Realms delves into full immersion VR, and shows how, rather than being utopia, it can be used as the most sophisticated torture device ever invented. A few years earlier Greg Egan was exploring uploading, in Permutation City and Diaspora. The trope is common in SF movies too: 1999 alone saw The Matrix and eXistenZ.

Sarah Schofield’s “The Tiniest Atom”, a story of loss in war time, takes on Laplace’s Demon working in a Newtonian universe, where if you know the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, you can perfectly predict the future. Recently, chaos theory has shown that determinism does not necessarily imply predictability, because of sensitive dependence on initial conditions; one consequence is the Butterfly Effect, which has made its way into science fiction literature, with Ray Bradbury’s 1952 story “A Sound of Thunder” (presciently killing a butterfly) and James P. Hogan’s wonderfully titled 1997 story “Madam Butterfly”.

Annie Kirby’s “Red” moves from the technological to the psychological, and the thought experiment of Mary’s Room: a scientist is raised in black and white world, yet knowing everything there is to know about light, and the colour red; how will she react when she first sees that colour? (I always worry about the protocol of this experiment: the first time Mary gets a paper cut, or bites her nails over-enthusiastically, it will ruin the setup.) Here the protagonist loses her colour vision, but red plays a key role in why. I don’t know any SF based on this thought experiment (although gaining a whole new sense might be related), but the philosopher Daniel Dennett has written an interesting chapter on Mary in his 2005 book Sweet Dreams.

Andy Hedgecock’s “XOR” is a clever little double-loop variant of the Grandfather Paradox, where you go back in time and kill your grandfather, or make some other change, that alters the future so that you are no longer in the position to go back in time to kill your grandfather. Science fiction is full of Time Patrols, and Time Police, and Time Guardians, to stop this sort of thing in its tracks, and full of Time Criminals refusing to be stopped. Robert Heinlein has a couple of variants on this theme, with the time travel actually creating, rather than destroying, the timeline: his 1941 five finger exercise “By His Bootstraps” and his 1959 masterpiece “All You Zombies—”. There are several films in the sub-genre: The fun Back to the Future (1985), the bonkers Looper (2012), and the twisty Primer (2004) are just three examples.

Mary Louise Cookson’s “Bright Boy” is inspired by Maxwell’s demon, a thought experiment attempting to break the second law of thermodynamics. Here a little boy appears to have uncanny control over information and entropy. I’m not sure I know any SF that is explicitly about breaking this law, although many blithely ignore it.

The Chinese Room is an old chestnut in the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence: a man who does not know Chinese sits in a room following an algorithm to translate input Chinese symbols into output Chinese answers: where is the understanding of Chinese? Annie Clarkson’s “The Rooms” features a woman employed to converse with human-like robots, to help teach them their roles. But she is following a prepared script. Who then is the robot? SF is full of robots, but their intelligence and interior life is usually a given (or at least as much of a given as the interior life of any of the other characters). Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett take a long hard look at the overall argument in their 1981 collection The Mind’s I.

Schrödinger’s Cat has long bothered quantum mechanics. Put a cat in a box with some poison that has a 50:50 chance of killing it. Is the cat dead, alive, or somehow both before you observe it? Here Margaret Wilkinson, in “If He Wakes”, has a protagonist who does not want to ask a fateful question, for fear of causing the very incident she is asking after. Greg Egan’s 1992 novel Quarantine explores different aspects of what happens when you open that box, and Jo Walton’s moving 2014 novel My Real Children explores a whole two lifetimes of superimposed consequences.

Several hundred years before Einstein, Galileo had a way with thought experiments. One, Galileo’s ship, shows that we could be enclosed in a ship and unaware of our motion relative to the sea; today we have this experience in cars, trains, and planes all the time. Claire Dean’s “People Watching” uses this idea to play games with the reader’s perspective: we are not where we think we are.

In “Monkey Business”, Ian Watson builds a world where the proverbial randomly typing monkeys are being monitored for their Shakespearean output. His world is growing more complex as a whole infrastructure is being built up to support the monkeys and the analysis of their outputs; there are even different factions of philosophical arguments about the success criteria. In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges published his story “The Library of Babel”, sufficient to file away all the monkeys’ outputs. William Goldbloom Bloch’s 2008 treatise The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel captures the sheer Vastness of this endeavour, along with other bizarre properties.

Sandra Alland’s “Equivalence” is based on Einstein’s Equivalence Principle: enclosed in a lift, you can’t tell if the lift is stationary on the ground and force pressing you down is gravity, or if the lift is in space and accelerating upwards. In the story, an acrobat who performs drops with aerial silk is confined in a windowless room.

Robin Ince’s story “The Child in the Lock” is based (mostly) on the philosophical argument about The Drowning Child: if we saw a drowning child, we would save it, even at cost to ourselves, so why don’t we spend at least as much saving the out of sight starving millions? The protagonist comes to a different conclusion: they don’t save the child, for several mutually inconsistent reasons that sound all too plausible. Although this story borders on horror, Ince gets humour in early with the line “Tom had been an actor but decided to take a break from it as he’d always been keen to get into telemarketing”. The story also obliquely refers to The Spider in the Urinal, where the best of intentions can lead to the worst of outcomes, or, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. Meaning well is not enough. There is a small sub-genre of SF stories about going back in time to kill Hitler, which just makes things worse.

Adam Roberts, in “Keep it Dark”, is trying out a novel explanation of Olber’s paradox, or why is the sky dark at night? If the universe were infinite and homogeneous, every line of sight should eventually end on the surface of a star: although they look smaller when they are further away, there are many more of them. Roberts goes for a solution based on the latest physics. One famous SF story about the sky being dark at night, but not as dark as expected, is Isaac Asimov’s 1941 novellette, “Nightfall”. And Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 story “The Nine Billion Names of God” has the night sky getting darker than usual, with one of the best last lines of a short story.

The book finishes as it starts, with another of Einstein’s thought experiments, here, chasing a beam of light, never catching it, but experiencing time dilation. Anneliese Mackintosh, with “Interia”, studies the time dilation of dying.

Thought X is a good entry in the long tradition of basing fiction on scientific fact. Here we have a wide range of thought experiments and paradoxes, with stories questioning, stretching, and interpreting them, then after-words explaining the scientific basis. The lucky reader thus gets the best of both worlds.

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For all my book reviews, see my main website.

Innominate Eastercon - Saturday

To start our Saturday at Eastercon, we visited the Art Show and the Dealers’ Room.  It is noticable how over the years there is a higher proportion of tables in the Dealers’ Room selling various artefacts—clothing, jewelry, models, etc—rather than books.  We also assured the Helsinki and Follycon tables that we were already members, and bought a pre-supporting membership for Dublin’s 2019 worldcon bid.

The first event was the BSFA lecture, an annual talk about “ideas of interest to SF fans, but not SF”.  These have been uniformly brilliant, but I was concerned about this one, as it was about Revolutions and Revelations in Hamilton, and I haven’t seen Hamilton the musical, and didn’t know much about it, not even that it was hip hop, or that it casts across race and, sometimes, gender.  [Yes, I do live under a rock, it seems.]  I needn’t have worried, prior knowledge was not a requirement, and Dr Sarah Whitfield gave a excellent presentation: informative, funny, and thought-provoking.  The talk included several YouTube clips, demonstrating how the work follows traditional musical theatre structures, such as the I Want song—illustrated with a clip from the Buffy musical episode unexpectedly accompanied by an audience sing-along—and also references many earlier hip hop songs.  In addition to lauding the staggering success of Hamilton, Whitfield was also careful to point out some of its shortcomings: its minimal coverage of Hamilton’s bisexual reputation; its “whitewashed” version of history, ignoring the contribution of people of colour at the time; the fact that it being lauded as “the most diverse musical ever” wipes out the extraordinary racism of Broadway and the history of PoC in early musical theatre.  This layered history, combining the historical events being depicted and the history of the medium in which they are depicted, provided a nice parallel with Will Tattersdill’s talk on dinosaurs the previous day.

Next off to Colin Harris’ Guest of Honour talk about his Life in Pictures: how he became an SF art collector, and his role in various SF conventions.

The panel Timeless Speculative Technology. Or Not discussed when tech in SF becomes outdated, and how to write about the near future without running into problems.  There are parodies that describe real life as if it were SF: how you walk up to a door, press a lever, push to open, and so on.  [I was tempted after this to write a parody of hotel breakfast buffet tech, such as how if one passes a slice of bread through the provided bread warmer multiple times, it eventually gains a gently singed surface.]  Tech should not be over-described – it should be real and almost invisibly embedded in the culture – but should also be somehow dreamlike, to evoke a different feel. It is easier to predict tech than its knock-on consequences: it is easier to predict the car than the traffic jam, and once you have predicted the ship, remember that there is now the possibility of shipwreck.  In Galaxy Quest the aliens had to reverse engineer the tech from what the actors were doing.  Computers are difficult for visual drama: hacking into a bank, doing taxes, and writing a love letter all look exactly the same.  MS-Word has the wrong metaphor, of a giant scroll: it encourages over-editing at the top of the scroll, rather than allowing more even attention across the document that you get with individual pages. The mobile phone, once magical tech, has now become so ubiquitous that there is a resurgence of period crime drama, to a time before so many plot tropes became unrealistic. That past was different: 25 years ago, think what would happen if you said “I have 500 people following me...”  The future is looking bleak, though.  However, Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels show how to imagine a way out of climate change; they demonstrate a responsibility to synthesise something positive, not wallow in dystopia.

Next was the George Hay Lecture, a science-themed talk at Eastercons.  Prof Debbie Chachra, a materials scientist, talked on 3D Printing, Biology, and Futures for Materials.  3D printed materials can be carefully designed to have even loading and strength just where it’s needed, and then they can come out looking remarkably organic.  Biological materials are fascinating; they have structure on all levels from atomic to macroscopic, and each level’s structure contributes to the overall properties. For example, spider silk is not only stronger than steel, it absorbs impacts, otherwise flying prey would just trampoline off a web.  Biology provides a form of nanotechnology: not the precisce atom-by-atom placement of The Diamond Age, but a more stochastic yet reproducible model where biological machinery creates organisms from the bottom up with many levels of structure.  We can engineer biology on the nano-scale, too. CRISPR allows DNA editing.  DNA codon degeneracy (64 triplets code for 20 amino acids, plus punctuation)  allows us to design in new amino acids.  We can create new DNA bases beyond ACGT.  This is all highly complex machinery, and we are only just beginning to understand what is possible.  However, materials are the infrastructure of design.

Bill and the Doctor running through corridors

Then everyone trooped into the plenary room, to watch The Pilot episode of Doctor Who, which introduces new companion Bill Potts.  This is very much an introductory episode, educating new viewers on the Doctor, the Tardis, and Daleks.  The Doctor is in hiding, from what we don’t know, teaching at St Luke’s University, Bristol, where he has an academic office larger than that inhabited by many Vice Chancellors, and gives a lecture course that has probably not had its official learning outcomes approved by any sort of Teaching Committee.  Once it was over, we flooded back to the fan food room – which had stopped serving 10 minutes earlier, because there was no-one around.  So off for a short walk around Pendigo Lake to find dinner: a lamb, avocado, and chorizo burger at the Gourmet Burger Kitchen; yum.