A satirical combination of geekiness, spy craft and Lovecraftian horror, the Laundry tales by Charles Stross are fast-paced and entertaining reads.

The wonderful Tor.com has posted a Christmas flavoured Laundry tale: Overtime.

All bureaucracies obey certain iron laws, and one of the oldest is this: get your seasonal leave booked early, lest you be trampled in the rush.

I broke the rule this year, and now I’m paying the price. It’s not my fault I failed to book my Christmas leave in time—I was in hospital and heavily sedated. But the ruthless cut and thrust of office politics makes no allowance for those who fall in the line of battle: “You should have foreseen your hospitalization and planned around it” said the memo from HR when I complained. They’re quite right, and I’ve made a note to book in advance next time I’m about to be abducted by murderous cultists or enemy spies.

Read on and be amused!

I told myself that I wouldn’t jump in on this best of the decade that everyone else has been doing on just about every online printed source, but after seeing a couple of very good and a couple more very confusing ones, I went through my bookshelves and pulled out several books that were my favorite, and in my opinion, best genre books of the past ten years.

The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
This book was released earlier this year, and while I was unfamiliar with Mr. Bacgalupi’s shorter fiction, I was singularly impressed with his first novel, The Windup Girl. I’ve already reviewed the book in length here, but in retrospect, this will likely stand up as one of the best genre books in the past ten years. The Windup Girl is not only well written, it’s well conceived, which is just as important, I think, for a future world. Bacigalupi puts together a compelling, terrifying and ultimately believable near future, with relevance and everything that good science fiction should be.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Suzanna Clarke
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was one of the books that took me a long time to get into and to finish – I stopped and started it several times since I got it, but was never able to really get into it before I actually made the time to read. It’s a challenging book, with an older style of writing. Once I had gotten into the proper mindset, I was pulled right into Suzanne Clarke’s alternative world of Wizards, Napoleonic War and fate, and loved every minute from that point on. Clarke dispels with the very common notion of sword and sorcery fantasy novel by setting it in a far more relatable London, and approaches the subject matter in a far different manner than other books of the genre.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman
American Gods is another novel that I had to take my time to read, stopping and starting a couple times before really getting into the proper mindset that was required for Gaiman’s world. This sort of mythological story is an interesting concept, where belief begets creation, and there is a conflict brewing between the old and the new, with the protagonist, Shadow, caught in the middle. The story is a profound one, and one that I’ll likely return to someday.

Soon, I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman
Where a couple of the novels on this list have been akin to great feasts of old, Soon, I Will Be Invincible is a modern day family dinner, a bit rushed, fairly complete but really good. Author Austin Grossman creates an entire superhero mythology, split between a hero and villain, in a modern day setting. Where a number of comic books have stagnated, with the same characters recycled year after year, we are party to a mythology that is put together with the benefits of a realistic society. Grossman’s superheroes are just as messed up as the rest of us, and this is where the book is an incredible amount of fun, because it’s like the Marvel Universe, but all grown up.

The Magicians, Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman is the brother of Austin Grossman, and like his twin brother, he takes what was a well tread-upon world and tweaks it to become more relatable in The Magicians. Here, rather than superheroes, we are treated to wizards, and a magical academy. The style here is very different, and while there are similarities to Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia, they act more as references and influences than they do style and feel. Grossman’s Brakebills College is realistic where Rowling’s Hogwarts is not, and imagines the fantasy world as one akin to ours.

The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
I learned of Scott Lynch through a friend of mine, and when I picked up his debut fantasy novel The Lies of Locke Lamora, I was already pretty excited, and was impressed with Lynch’s style of storytelling – his fantasy world is different from the typical sword and sorcery take that a lot of fantasy novels seem to have taken on. Like other authors on this list, he has put together an incredibly well conceived world, one that was vibrant, dangerous and interesting all at the same time. Lynch’s follow-up novel, Red Seas Under Red Skies was just as good, and I’m eagerly awaiting the third installment of his series, The Republic of Thieves.

Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan
Altered Carbon debuted with quite a bit of buzz, when it was released. Richard K. Morgan’s first book about a noir mystery in a conscious/body swapping sounds like something out of the worst dregs of B-movie Science Fiction, but the result is a dark, exciting and intelligent SciFi thriller that I think of as Blade Runner, but more violent. The first of the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, Morgan weaves together a complicated and twisting futuristic tale, one that had me guessing throughout the book.

The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman
Where Harry Potter was the real fantasy show stopper of the decade (and for good reason), I’ve always thought that Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and the Amber Spyglass) was a bit marginalized. Pullman’s fantasy tale is more than that – it pulls in elements of science fiction and alternate worlds to put together an epic story that goes from a childhood fantasy adventure to discovering the nature of existence itself, while a war between two sides of that sort of question rages on across multiple universes. The Amber Spyglass, the conclusion to the series, is heavy with meaning, questions and utter brilliance, and is far above and beyond most genre books to begin with.

Coyote, Allen M Steele
Allen M. Steele’s Coyote was first serialized in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, and is still a joy to read after several sit-down sessions. Grounded in quite a lot of hard science fiction, Coyote tells the story of a near future colony of humans who steal a massive space ship from their fascist American government and find themselves on Coyote, the moon of a distant planet that was deemed a good candidate for colonization. The story follows several characters as they learn to exist on this hostile new world, in a story that is very reminiscent of the origins of America. The follow-up books in the series are good, but this is easily the best. While the story isn’t groundbreaking, it is a great deal of fun, covering a number of popular themes, chief of which is exploration and discovery, which helps to remind me why I love this genre so much.

Halting State, Charles Stross
Charles Stross is one of the preeminent science fiction writers of our time, and his novel Halting State demonstrates that he’s really clued in to what might happen in the next couple of years. Halting State is a book that I’ve talked about before, but what makes this stand out for me for the past decade is Stross’s understanding of how the future might work, from technology to politics to economics, all of which are brought in for this story, expertly woven into the actions of the protagonist, and really make this a stellar read.

City of Pearl, Karen Traviss
Karen Traviss has been making a name for herself with the tie-in world with Star Wars, Gears of War and Halo, but this first book in her own universe outshines them all. City of Pearl is a wonderfully realized book, the first in a six book series that puts together first contact, interstellar politics and warfare, environmentalism and bioethics. Spanning the course of several hundred years and across a couple of planets, this book puts all of that in with a number of intriguing characters and well conceived plot lines. The bonus is Traviss’s cynical attitude towards humanity, which makes this book a bit of a break from most of the human-centric stories that I’ve read.

Think about this, I think that this is a good list to have put together. In a very big way, the past decade has been the most formative when it comes to my tastes in books, music and movies, and where my interests in Science Fiction, Fantasy and related genres really came from. This decade marked my high school years, where I not only transitioned from a Star Wars only diet of reading material to the larger classics: Dune, Ringworld and Foundation, to name a few.

While I got most of my base from these classics, most of the books that I’ve picked for this list are far from the classics – at points, they take a lot of the best themes and turns them on their heads, realizes a number of well conceived notions in new light and makes the genre something new and interesting to read. While reading these books, I’ve come to realize that the field of science fiction is not one to be left mired in the b-movie territory that long characterizes it; it is a dynamic and interesting field, one that will continue to thrill fans in the future.

Charles Stross, author of Accelerando and other sci-fi books, wrote a fascinating post two weeks ago (thanks to Ari for linking it). He talked about the challenge of designing society for posterity: how to make a social order that could run a “generation ship” without falling apart.

Generation starships: they’re not fast.

If you can crank yourself up to 1% of light-speed, alpha centauri is more than four and a half centuries away at cruising speed. To put it in perspective, that’s the same span of time that separates us from the Conquistadores and the Reformation; it’s twice the lifespan of the United States of America.

We humans are really bad at designing institutions that outlast the life expectancy of a single human being. The average democratically elected administration lasts 3-8 years; public corporations last 30 years; the Leninist project lasted 70 years (and went off the rails after a decade). The Catholic Church, the Japanese monarchy, and a few other institutions have lasted more than a millennium, but they’re all almost unrecognizably different.

[...]

I’ve been (inconclusively) batting around some ideas with Karl Schroeder — how do you design a society for the really long term? There are a couple of levels to consider: notably, decision-making and economics. And it doesn’t look as if we’ve got any good solutions to either.

You should read the whole post; it’s fascinating stuff. And if you think about it, there’s a hidden question in there. A society that could remain stable aboard a generation ship – an enclosed biosphere hurtling through space – is, of course, a society that could remain stable aboard Spaceship Earth.

Too bad the question itself makes no sense.

Don’t get me wrong: “how do you design a society for the really long term?” makes perfect grammatical sense. You can even start imagining along those lines, as Stross and his friend Schroeder evidently did, for several ‘grafs worth of thought. But if you consider what those actual words mean – specifically, design, society and long term – the question becomes impossible. There is no way to answer it.

Let’s say Stross, or NASA, or even you, come up with a way to answer the question. And let’s say a generation ship – a vessel capable of interstellar travel along a lifespan of hundreds of years – gets built. Here’s what it’ll look like on Day One.

NASA Project Director: Okay, guys, remember what we told you …
Generation Ship Crew: Right, right, we remember.
NASA Project Director: … you’re an oligarchical commune with rotating leadership roles and multiple redundant judiciaries …
Generation Ship Crew: Mm-hmm, got it.
NASA Project Director: … lower the radiation shields every 400 days to prevent genetic drift …
Generation Ship Crew: It’s all in the three-ring binder. We’ve got it.
NASA Project Director: Okay. Just checking. Good luck, people!
(ship door seals; generation ship takes off)
Generation Ship Crew: SPRING BREAK! WHOOOO!

Okay, maybe things won’t fall apart that fast.

But the entire premise of Stross’s question ignores an obvious hurdle: if some social scientist theorizes the Perfect Society for a generation ship, who’s to say anyone inside the generation ship is going to follow it? Especially once they’re light years away from the home world? NASA can tell the crew, “The engineers are in charge; if what they say isn’t law, the ship stops spinning and O2 stops filtering and you all die in six weeks.” But that doesn’t matter, unless every non-engineer aboard the ship also agrees.

To be fair, Stross isn’t suggesting that the Perfect Society be dictated from on high. He closes the post with the question, “What sort of governance and society do you think would be most comfortable, not to mention likely to survive the trip without civil war, famine, and reigns of terror?”

But the question is still irrelevant. Stross can prove, using all the equations social science has to offer, that (say) an anarcho-syndicalist state where the Chief Engineer, the Head Gardener and the Captain of the Dodgeball Team act as a non-legislative judiciary is the only stable state for a closed, high-maintenance biosphere that has to have a population greater than x in 450 years. But that proof is irrelevant to the people inside that biosphere unless they believe it. If I scrub the oxygen filters, I might be convinced after a few years that I’m the most important person aboard the ship. After all, without me, everyone dies.

And even if NASA somehow indoctrinates every member of the first generation of the crew in their Perfect Social Theory, there’s a reason this sci-fi construct is called a generation ship. It will take more than one generation to get where it’s going. Four and a half centuries from here to Alpha Centauri at 0.1c; that’s eighteen generations. Who’s to say your kids will hold to the anarcho-syndicalist ideal with the same fervor you did? Or their kids? It only takes one generation to decide the reactor only needs sixteen control rods instead of twenty for the entire project to fail.

Far more important than the question of what should happen is the question of what will happen.

So let’s say we lock 250,000 engineers, biologists, chemists, physicists and janitors inside an asteroid and slap it toward Alpha Centauri. We tell them, in the strictest language we know, what they have to do in order to stay alive. But once they get airborne, it’s anarchy – not in the “jungle savagery” sense, but in the “no recognized law” sense. What form of social order will evolve?

My guess: the same ones we’ve seen throughout history. The human race evolved in an open biosphere with no set instructions on how best to live. A generation ship changes two of those variables, closing the biosphere off from mutation and leaving a three-ring binder of Best Practices. But otherwise, we’ll probably see what we’ve seen throughout history: warring tribes, dueling factions, a period of disorder that leads to a strong preference for law and a powerful state that arises as a result. A quarter of a million of Earth’s best and brightest go in; forty-five decades later, Augustus Caesar steps out.

# # #

I am going to read a little into Stross’s post now.

I suspect that implicit in the definition of “Perfect Society” is stability. Stross hopes that the Perfect Society will in fact be so utopian that it will not change, because no one will ever have a reason to change it. Not only will it fulfill everyone’s needs, but everyone within it will recognize that it will fulfill everyone’s needs. It’s a perpetual motion machine, requiring only its own input to keep going.

(The first question – if you discover this perfectly stable social order, why do you even have to leave Earth? – might merit another post)

This implicit premise – if I’m right in ascribing it to Stross – highlights a regrettable belief in technocracy. Technocracy is the belief that if we only put the right experts or the right rules in place, the social order will run itself. Our current problems, like poverty, corruption, ignorance and violence, do not well up from human nature. They’re artifacts of an outdated culture. If we pass the right laws, we can get rid of anything we don’t like.

Both conservatives and liberals are guilty of this.

Conservatives follow it in the form of “legislating morality.” Outlawing abortion springs to mind. “If abortions are outlawed, then no one will have any abortions!”, conservatives believe, contra all sense and experience. In reality, outlawing abortions means that women will terminate their pregnancies in dangerous, illegal ways. You cannot change the desire of a woman to own her own body by passing a law.

Liberals follow it in the form of “managerial liberalism.” A recent example: the stimulus package! The federal government passes a $787,000,000,000 “recovery package” to distribute money to local agencies and companies. Shockingly, some of this money has gone to waste. The most recent example: four Congressional districts in Hawaii that don’t exist received over $40,000,000 in stimulus money. Similar bookkeeping problems exist in Arizona, where the fictitious 86th Congressional District has already received $34,000,000. “That’s not what we intended to happen,” say liberal economists like Paul Krugman (who argue that there wasn’t enough stimulus) and Dean Baker. Of course it isn’t. But your intentions are irrelevant. You cannot change the desire of people to scheme for a little extra once the money faucet gets turned on.

Whether on the Left or the Right, technocracy supposes that human nature and cultural trends can be changed by top-down legislation. Draft the right rules, put the right people in charge, and the generation ship that is our world can sail on, untouched and unchanging, until we all turn into Star Children and join the galactic Overmind. In the real world, though, unintended consequences always crop up.

We’re all trapped in this biosphere together, hurtling through the galaxy far below the speed of light. And if we don’t learn a willingness to rule ourselves, throw out the systems that don’t work and take responsibility for our own screw-ups, we’re not going to reach Alpha Centauri alive.

Somehow, without me noticing, the science fiction writers I remember from magazines of the early-2000s appeared on my bookshelf again.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been on a mission to find copies of the first SF stories I can remember reading—two of them I knew for sure came from an issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine; two of them might be in one of a number of old anthologies of my grandfather’s; and one of them might just be from a dream I had years ago and inflated into a dystopian epic (it happens).

In any case, after diligent Google searching and telephone inquiries with a used bookstore in Oregon, I was able to get a listing of the titles and authors of short stories in Asimov’s from 2002 to 2005.  The problem was that it’s a monthly magazine, and I couldn’t remember if my subscription had begun when I was a freshman in high school, or when my older sister first brought back those QSP-issued order forms for the annual magazine drive.

So: after nearly 7 years, I couldn’t remember the authors, or the titles (shoot, I couldn’t even remember the year).  This may have something to do with the fact that back in those halcyon days of yore, I was a very sweet, very impressionable middle-school girl who found herself horrified by the lurid cover illustrations and pulp fiction content of the publication—a semi-nude, iridescent faerie was not, after all, what Dune and Contact had prepared me for.

I read no more than two or three issues, tossed the rest out, and did not renew my subscription.  I would stick to the classics, I decided.

But for 7 years I’ve managed to vividly remember two stories—or at least, bizarre details from two stories—from one of the few issues I’d read.

The first was about a woman with some sort of genetically-engineered pets franchise: they had a strange name (ploompies?  ploofties?) and were globular, translucent, pulsing masses of the buyer’s own DNA.  And somehow, these creatures were so appealing that the owner could hardly help but bite into them—and get a taste of something sharp and metallic (in my orthodontics-oriented middle-school mind, that jagged pain you get from biting down on a piece of tinfoil with a filled tooth).

The second story had something to do with a girl and her dog; they lived in the “real world,” or rather, the physical world, because when she grew up, she would have to abandon her body and lived in a completely virtual world, like the Internet.  Some accident happens to the girl, and her body is lost—she herself is just barely uploaded in time, but the dog can’t be saved.

This isn’t much to go on.  But paging through lists of titles online, I spotted one called “Junk DNA.”  Alarms went off in the brainpan.  I bought a used copy of the January 2003 issue of the magazine, and checked my PO Box daily until it arrived.

The first story, about the bizarre pets (Pumptis, as it turns out), was indeed “Junk DNA,” by Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker.  And here’s the passage that had so stuck with me:

In a dizzying moment of raw devotion, Janna suddenly found herself sinking her teeth into the unresisting flesh of the Pumpti.  Crisp, tasty, spun-cotton candy, deep-fried puffball dough, a sugared beignet.  And under that a salty, slightly painful flavor—bringing back the memory of being a kid and sucking on the root of a lost tooth.

Why that particular imagery was so memorable, I don’t know.  More interesting is the fact that the genre of the story is one I’ve been raving about for the past few months:

“Junk DNA” is science fiction story about a business venture and all the backroom politicking that goes along with economics, invention, and the market.  Sound a bit like…?

(My post on) Cory Doctorow and Makers, his very recent epic of robotics, business, and the “New Work” (like the New Deal, but way more free market);

(My post on) David Louis Edelman and his Jump 225 series, for which “cyberpunk” hardly does justice as a classification—the corporate intrigue behind Bio/Logic and MultiReal (and how could there not be corporate intrigue with sociopathic entrepreneur Natch at the helm?) is just as intense as the science;

Charles Stross and Glasshouse, which won the 2007 Prometheus Award for “libertarian SF” (This, friends, is my life goal), or The Atrocity Archives, which is something of a spy thriller with a science fiction element closer to Lovecraftian horror than anything else (take a look at the January 2003 cover illustration and you’ll see where I’ve found a connection with Lovecraft).

Even one of the authors, Bruce Sterling, will be appearing on my bookshelf when The Caryatids arrives in the mail in a couple weeks.  And the last page of the January 2003 issue is a sort of preview of coming attractions feature, listing authors and stories for the next issue—one of them, by the way, is Charlie Stross).

To think, I thought these were new discoveries.

Mystery Story #2 also happened to be in the Jan. 2003 issue—“Pick My Bones With Whispers,” by Sally McBride.  This was a major lucky break, as I would never have remembered that the second story imprinted on my malleable brain had been the winner of the Pretentious Title Award for 2003.  (Is McBride trying to be ironic?  I sincerely hope so…)

And once again, the topics that fascinate me today, I discover, are absolutely nothing new.  The research I recently did on the millennial generation’s changing conception of the Internet (or, for them/us, Cyberspace)—from a tool to a place that has been increasingly explored since childhood—is all there in the saga of Lizbeth and her faithful virtual pup, Fritz:

Though I’m twelve, there’s still a lot I can’t do in the children’s Net areas, even if Fritz was letting me in deeper and deeper all the time.  There were dark places I couldn’t go, forbidden subjects I couldn’t get data on, tantalizing things I couldn’t see or join or do.  Sometimes it was humiliating to be a flesh-and-blood person.

This sounds so much like one of the responses I got from an interviewee for my paper that it’s almost shocking.  She doesn’t use the Internet to the same extent of her peers—and so (like Lizbeth, albeit less dramtically) resists absorption into Cyberspace.  She told me:

“Everyone talks about how big the Internet is, and I know, because I can go on for hours and hours and still feel like I’ve never gotten into the core of it.  If the Internet was real life, I would be non-existent.”

This interviewee in particular doesn’t care for science fiction—she enjoys borrowing my DVDs of Firefly, but that’s about it.  No 2003 Asimov’s Science Fiction for her.  And still, she easily could have spoken those lines from McBride’s story.

This—like the theme and subject matter of recent novels by authors like Stross, Edelman, and Doctorow—tells me that there’s something in the culture today stories like “Junk DNA” and “Pick My Bones With Whispers” (I’m sorry, I still really can’t type that without cracking up) picked up on in 2003: the increasing interconnectedness of technology and economics, and the transformation of the Internet into an environment rather than just a tool.

Getting that old magazine in the mail today was like a wave of nostalgia, but after reading through those stories again, the sentimentality was gone—the things I missed and remembered for 7 years are mainstream now.

1. Want to learn to taunt your enemies like a reclusive megalomaniac dictactor with bad hair? It’s the North Korea insult generator.

2. What kind of political system is suitable for colonists on an interstellar journey? Sci-fi author Charles Stross flags some interesting issues.

3. Think movie acting can be bad? Try the 50 Worst Video Game Voice Acting clips.

4.  ”Sometimes his loose-limbed shuffle and sibilant drawl suggest Jimmy Stewart as a crackhead.” That’s The New York Times reviewing Nicholas Cage in his new movie, “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans”.

5. Crack that whip! Pearl Jam does Devo.

In addition to having the sixth planet of our solar system named after him, the god Saturn was renowned for his predilection for devouring all of his children, being aware of the prophecy that one day one of his children will cast him down from his throne and kill him just as he himself did to his own liege. He was aided and abetted in this, so the legends go, by his wife Rhea.

Read the full review here.

When the Festival arrives at New Rochard, a planetary colony of the New Republic, it announces its arrival in the form of a rain of mobile phones. People pick up the phones, which are a novelty for them and find that they can ask for anything they like, so long as they entertain the being on the other end of the line. For a world kept under strict control by hereditary privileged classes which have restricted access to technology and promoted state-sponsored religion and other forms of social control in its place, the end of the world (or at least the end of the prevailing social order) appears to have arrived.

Read the full review here.

Charles Stross‘ Saturn’s children: a Space Opera (Ace Books, 2008) is not what I’d call opera. Told from the perspective of Freya Nakamichi 47, designed as a sex bot for human pleasure, I would call it a good hard science fiction story. Freya’s trouble begins when she takes a job as a ‘courier’ for a secretive organization. On her voyages from Venus to Mercury, to Mars, to Callisto (a moon of Jupiter) and then finally to Eris (a dwarf planet bigger than Pluto and way out there) Stross explores various forms of interplanetary transport. Realistically. And, along the way, fills in an interesting history of the final era of humans to beyond their extinction in the 23rd century. What happens to the servants, slaves and helpers of humanity after they are gone is an interesting story line.
I picked this book up as it was being advertised heavily at World Con this summer and, at one of the Con parties, one of his fans told me that he was envious when I told him I hadn’t read any of Stross’ work. He said that I was in for a treat when I did.
I liked Saturn’s Children but I didn’t find it spectacular. But there’s no way I’ll give up on Stross (we have computer programming in both our backgrounds), I think I’d like to try Accelerando when I next try one of his books. It sounds like a cool idea.

Been getting a lot more reading done lately, but not nearly enough. There’s just too much good stuff out there. In a way, I’m glad the summer TV season wasn’t that compelling, and the fall isn’t looking much better. I have enough to do without a full TiVo sitting alone and unloved in the living room.

READING:

John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series — A new friend of mine suggested these books, and man, am I glad she did. Connolly is now up there with Lee Child as one of my favorite thriller writers of all time. He uses the themes of crime and evil to explore the nature of humanity, and how easily our world can slip into the next if we do not pay attention. It doesn’t hurt that he’s an absolutely lyrical writer with a seemingly endless knowledge of obscure subjects. (Seriously, how many people do you know who can quote the Zohar and describe the action of a Colt handgun?) Like Child, I am amazed at how much Connolly knows, and how effortlessly he slips that knowledge into the work. I’ve been rationing the books, putting off reading them, putting other books in between them. It’s been easier to do that because Connolly is also able to describe evil in heartbreaking detail. The deaths of his characters are not plot points or props; you feel the violation and loss, and sometimes it’s hard for me to take, especially when Parker reflects on the murders of his wife and daughter. But now I’m just going into a binge, and then I’ll be caught up with all the other Connolly readers, and like them, forced to wait until the next book in the series. Dammit.

Tom Holt, May Contain Traces of Magic — Another sort-of sequel to the JW Wells books, about the modern business of magic and sorcery. In this installment, a salesman who peddles enchanted gadgets — such as pocket genies that grant three, limited wishes, portable parking spaces and dehydrated water — starts a relationship with his in-car navigation system. Powered by a trapped spirit instead of a GPS chip, she offers conversation and advice. Funny and light and wildly inventive, as usual. Par for the course from Holt.

Charles Stross, Wireless — A collection of old and new short stories and novellas. Whatever Stross is on, I want some. The only side effects seem to be increasing brilliance and a gift for delivering entire philosophies in a well-turned phrase. (Example: the Devil as “the garbage-collection subroutine of the strong anthropic principle.”)

In addition to that, a ton of conspiracy reading, Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, H.P. Lovecraft, and too many comics.

(Photo of Neil Gaiman’s library from Shelfari, via Boing Boing.)

Air-goddess

For Fantasticon 2009 I arrived in Copenhagen already on the Friday, August 28th. Since I was free for a couple of hours I strolled around in the old university quarter of Copenhagen, the latin quarter, which I got to from Nørreport. I had planned to check out some antiquarian book shops in order to extend my collection of Niels E. Nielsen, and was lucky to find that there was a clearance sale so I bought a copy of Lilleputternes oprør. I also visited Fantask but the sf book shop in Stockholm is definitely bigger. After a smørrebrød and beer I went to the museum Glyptoteket, and walked from there to my hotel, Fy og Bi in Valby. It was a very cosy hotel and the name probably referred to the film studio close by. In the evening I went to the restaurant Riz Raz in the center of Copenhagen to eat together with the organizers and the guests of honour.

My hotel in Valby: Fy og Bi

Gwyneth Jones and Lea Thume at Riz Raz

Olav Christiansen at Riz Raz

On the Saturday I walked to Vanløse, and had time to print flyers and posters for Eurocon 2011 and Imagicon 2 at the library in the same house. The congress localities were nice and suitable, and I spent quite some time at the big book table where the fan Morten Søndergaard sold his collection of sf books. The program was surprisingly rich for a two-day con and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Flemming Rasch opening the con

There was no program in English directly after the opening, but already at 13.00 Charles Stross was interviewed by Niels Dalgaard. Stross’ story collection Wireless has been translated into Danish, Antistof. Stross remembers that he wanted to become an astronaut after the moon landing. He then wrote instead, but sent out his stories much too early. His first 10-15 years of selling were not successful. He studied pharmacy but felt that he was not cut out for that job. He “did not have a good 1980s”. He wrote on an Amstrad PCW but it lacked a word counter. [Oh, the Amstrad! I had one at home and one at my job, and I still think it was a lovely machine, with its Locoscript word-processing program and acceptable printer. Sadly, it was not compatible with later PCs.] He got a masters degree in computer science and went into that industry for a decade. Around 2000 the dotcom bubble burst when he was between jobs. He spent 2 months free-lance writing for computer magazines.

Charles Stross, Niels Dalgaard

He sent his first novel, that he called A Festival of Fools, to Patrick Nielsen Hayden who let it lie for quite some time, but actually had considered buying it. This space opera, targeted at the US market, was published after some years titled Singularity Sky, referring to a paper by Vernor Vinge on singularity. Stross’ real singularity novel is Accelerando, first published as a series of short stories in Asimov’s. He considers the sequel Iron Sunrise to be a better book than Singularity Sky.

He considers that scarcity of food is not necessary; it is due to bad distribution. He is not a big fan of capitalism, but not of communism either.

Stross does not want to write the same novel again and again. Readers tell the publishers that they want the same, but what they really want is the same experience.

In his novel Glasshouse there are references to the film The Village and the tv series The Prisoner. He wrote it because he was annoyed waiting for John Varley’s novel Red Thunder. Glasshouse is Stross’ own John Varley novel, the one he felt that Varley should have written. One basis for the book is the Stanford prison study in psychology, where half of the students were assigned to act as “prisoners” and half as “guards”. The experiment had to be cancelled after three days due to gross abuse and dehumanisation. “Glasshouse” is British military slang for a military prison.

His “Laundry novels” are written just for fun. He likes British spy thrillers and H P Lovecraft. Here magic is a branch of mathematics. The Jennifer Morgue is a “James Bond novel”.

He is infatuated in Woodehouse, but the parody Scream for Jeeves has already been done. Stross’ short story “Trunk and Disorderly” could be Woodehouse for the 21^st century?

For Saturn’s Children he picked Heinlein, but the late Heinlein instead of the juveniles. The plot is one of Heinlein’s three plots, “The Man Who Learned Better”. Nipples go “spung” in the story and apparently it is not about a human but instead a sex robot.

Halting State is a serious novel. The computers are faster and the bandwidth increased. Cyberspace will be draped over the reality. In a sequel there will be vat-grown meat and the transplant industry will produce human meat that might also be used as food, i e in cannibalism.

Dalgaard mentions the name Stroctorow for the collaborations with Doctorow, and Stross admits to some similarities. Traditionally sf was defined by travel and speed, but the speed revolution has ended. Instead there is a revolution in information processing. The sf of the 50s and 60s was written for engineers, but traditional sf does not talk to the engineers of today.

Stig W Jørgensen, Klaus Æ Mogensen, Charles Stross, Niels Dalgaard

The science of near-future science fiction was discussed by Stig W Jørgensen, Klaus Æ Mogensen, Niels Dalgaard and Charles Stross, who actually dominated the discussion. Brunner’s “black tetralogy” and Christopher Priest are examples of near-future sf, but today there is very little. Vampire stories may be near-future but are hardly sf. Real near-future sf is very hard to write. An example is that when the financial crisis hit it stole his plot. Sf about near future has dealt with surveillance systems which know where all mobile phones and cars are. Rather, probably genomics will change the near future. It is getting cheaper, and by portable gene scanners the entire human genome may be analysed. Then proteomics and artificial organisms will have an immense impact. 3 D printers may be used for illicit handguns or for making copies of the anatomy of your neighbour’s daughter…

“Property” will change. “Intellectual property” is not transferable, since you do not lose it when you keep your copy. The scarce limits that are constructed are just fakes. However, artists should be paid for their work but a better way has to be found. According to economic theory infinite supply leads to zero cost. The real problem is how to cope with the excess of information. Karl Schröder writes far-future sf with the opposite of singularity, where all subjects of research have been researched, or are to difficult to pursue further.

Stross is angry with Bush. The money spent in Iraq could have been used for five Mars programs.

The worst horror scenario might be the grey goo, with self-replicating nanomachines. However, this is what bacteria are.

Ellen Miriam Pedersen, Gwyneth Jones, Ralan Conley

Jesper Rudgård Jensen, Knud Larn

The panel Men travel to Mars, women live on Venus was manned (sic) by the moderator Jesper Rudgård Jensen, Knud Larn, Ellen Miriam Pedersen, Gwyneth Jones and Ralan Conley. Knud Larn doesn’t distinguish between male and female writers, but thinks that feminists opened up a portal to other kinds if writing. Although he is not gay himself he finds stories involving homosexuality interesting. Gwyneth Jones finds gender important from a historical point of view, when women started to emerge as readers and practitioners. Also, feminism in the real world had an impact in the 70’s. She also interprets the early sf stories: They are basic adventure stories and the reward is access to females. The symbolism of male rockets penetrating the female void indicates the deeply sexual content of sf in the 50’s and 60’s. Ralan Conley thinks that there is more versatility in female roles in sf than in fantasy, where the roles are either a damsel in distress or an amazone. There are few horrific women in horror stories. Interestingly, the term android is used for sexless, but gynoids for sex machines.

Gwyneth Jones indicated that female writers are subjected to disqualification. As an sf writer she wants to write about science but encounters that “women should write about womanly things”. She thought that things had changed when she started writing, but found that it is very difficult for a woman to be accepted as an sf writer. It is hard to get the readers to accept the science. Interestingly, after the unmasking of James Tiptree, Jr., she was no longer in the top of sf.

Klaus Æ Mogensen gave a Science talk: Anarchonomy, where he talked about his work at the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies. “Anarchonomy” is formed from anarchy plus economics, and follows Peter Kropotkin’s definition of anarchism as a network society, explaining the workings of the internet. He gave several examples of value for free on the internet, like Wikipedia, technorati, delicious, Myspace.com. These are examples of the process described in Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation (www.tinyurl.dk/2435). Another example is Ohmynews, an amateur journal on the net that is the most read in South Korea. The information overload necessitates someone who finds out what is worth reading.

Copyleft with a mirrored © sign is a symbol for free utilities like Mozilla and BitTorrent. There has also emerged social lending, without banks. The idea to give one laptop to each child (www.laptop.org) would lead to a decentralised internet that is impossible to police. Fab@Home is an open source project to make 3 D printers that can make Lego pieces etc., and in the “reprap” project self-replicating printers are made. These processes are good for the environment since there is less transportation and garbage can be used for the processes. Drawbacks are that there is no liability for the manufacturer, and that it is hard to streamline.

The idea to give information away for free is nothing new. Universities have given knowledge away (but there are signs today that this might change).

H H Løyche, Flemming Rasch

The Danish sf author H H Løyche was interviewed by the congress coordinator Flemming Rasch, but unfortunately in Danish so I missed quite a lot. Løyche first wrote a short story with time travel. He read both Perry Rhodan and Ballard. He has written short stories for a weekly supplement to the journal Jyllandsbladet, and he thinks his writing corresponds to about four novels a year. In the anthology Dystre Danmark he has an authentic story, but he writes mainly sf and detective stories. Two novels that he mentions are Støj, which is a detective story containing a climate catastrophe, and Mission to Schamajim. He has also made a threesided chess and a lot of posters, and his latest project concerns H C Andersen’s sf. In order to find that he read everything that H C Andersen had written, and he thinks that his novels are much better than the short stories. He found 27 texts that could be used for a collection of Andersen’s sf, e g about a civilisation on the bottom of the sea. He also made illustrations for these stories and for the front of the book. This has a comet over Copenhagen, since there were many comets during H C Andersen’s life which might have influenced him.

Gwyneth Jones

Gwyneth Jones gave a Kierkegaardish talk called Either/Or. In her North Wind there is a riddle from the bible, where Isak has to kill his son in order to have a future, but thereby also makes him lose his future. There is an opposition between an esthetic and an ethic way of living. In sf there is often progress or utopia. It can be a road to heaven or hell – but which is which? And how to build a good state, a utopia? Tom Paine wrote The Rights of Man in 1791 and the ideas have developed to the UN declaration of human rights in 1948. But there has also been a development of technology that took us to the moon. Where are the bodies of the space race buried? 

In early sf there was no conflict between progress and utopia, and many sf authors were happy to be invited as experts in the star wars initiative. Just as for Stalin “art serves the cause”; the perfect future is the reason.

Utopia itself brings on the violence, and Jones cites from Che Guevara’s diaries. Also in U K LeGuin’s The Word for World is Forest gentle people had to go to war to protect themselves. Jones referred to a statement by an anonymous sf fan, “if 95% of the human race doesn’t make it and 5% does, it is still worthwhile (e g to go to space)” that she found reprehensible, and she went on to cite U K LeGuin again. In “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” it is common knowledge that the good fortune of Omelas requires that an unfortunate child be kept in filth, darkness and misery. Those who cannot accept this walk away to an unknown fate. This is a devil’s bargain, and there is no guidance in the story. Who are subject to the worst tragedy, those who stay or those who leave?

However, Jones suggests that by small increments, small improvements in living it might be possible to achieve a utopia. “Small is beautiful”.

Jones also mentions her own story “Identifying the Object”, Karin Boye’s Kallocain and the film Bladerunner. Someone in the audience translated Sören Kierkegaard fittingly into “Grim Graveyard”.

Jesper Rudgård Jensen, Ralan Conley

Ralan Conley  was interviewed by Jesper Rudgård Jensen. Conley is an american who has lived in Denmark for the last 20 years. In the early 90’s he had free time that he spent on writing a novel, 700 pages on paper. He got a no from every publisher and instead wrote short stories to get some practice. He then wondered what market there could be and what he learnt he now spreads via his website. The idea is that authors could help each other via the web or email.

Conley writes epic fantasies which are really sf. He has done variations on the Jack the Ripper theme where he goes west. He likes the stories to unfold since he then entertains himself. Having an outline makes him bored. He types with two fingers and if he tries to use all he loses his creativity. He enjoys editing his stories afterwards. He likes to put people in extreme situations, like mining on other planets. In Tales of Weupp there is a planet where magic works.

Much sf is now being marketed as mass market stories, e g Michael Crichton’s. There are markets for short stories and about 700 such markets are listed on his website www.ralan.com. This page is funded by donations.

Michael Kamp, Gwyneth Jones, Lea Thume

In the panel Writing for children and young adults, Gwyneth Jones told that she started writing for children and thought that as she grew herself also her intended readers would be older. She worked as a script writer for the sf cartoon Tellybugs, where she made 3’55” stories for Chip, Sam and Bug. After that she wrote ghost stories for teenagers under the name “Ann Halam”. She likes writing for young adults, and mentions as inspirations Arthur Ransom, H C Andersen, Tolkien, C S Lewis and Diana Wynne Jones.

Michael Kamp tells us that he has published six books, which the libraries classify as 13+. He does not aim at teenagers and believes that you shouldn’t. However, the language should be understandable for teens.

Lea Thume thinks that children need books they have to grow into; they should have to “stand on tiptoe”. Jones responds that you should be as straight as possible. Simplicity should be an ideal. A successful example is Alan Garner’s Red Shift, which most children won’t understand although it is simply written. It has strong and strange sf ideas.

Kamp comments that you have to downplay the sex parts; the teens can take all the other stuff. Jones agrees and thinks that there is too much graphic description in Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, about a 16 year old girl who falls in love with a 14 year old boy. You should have pity on your readers: they might be embarrassed since they might read the book in class. These books would stand behind the librarian. Thume comments that this is not the case in Denmark where sex is treated in a very open-minded way. Still, Kamp thinks that sex should be avoided since it detracts the attention from the story you want to tell. As Jones says, pornography kills character.

Jones also adds that it is unethical to mention underage sex. [Personally, I think it is strange that you can describe an act of murder but not an act of love.]

Asked about recommendations Jones says that she can only answer what she liked. Among films her favourite is Kurosawa’s Tokyo Story that describes Tokyo before the war, and among books she prefers juvenile books written by U K LeGuin and Diana Wynne Jones. A favourite is Archer’s Goon. Kamp mentions Pratchett.

According to Jones, horror and ghost stories should be short. A puzzle detective story by Agatha Christie is about 30 000 words. M R James inspired Jones to write ghost stories, and she also mentions influence from H P Lovecraft and Sheridan Le Fanu.

Johan Anglemark asked the panel about the possible influence of role-playing games on the plotting in young adult books, and Jones considers that Sheri Tepper’s early books were heavily influenced by role playing.

Charles Stross, Gwyneth Jones, Niels Dalgaard

The last panel I listened to was about British science fiction, with the two GoHs, Stig W Jørgensen and Niels Dalgaard. Jones pointed out that the differences between individuals are much greater than the differences between US and UK authors, in the same way as they are greater than the differences between men and women. Still, Stross thought that there might be differences between US and UK sf. John Christopher, Wyndham and Christopher Priest wrote about an England where the best was over and the empire dead. There was a feeling that the British were let down – “hey, you were on the winning side, you don’t need any support”. Jones answered that British sf had stronger links with US than with the rest of Europe. She was born in a socialist utopia. US was worried, due to other socialist utopias.

Stross read Interzone in his teens and wanted new stuff, radical in an undefined way. Interzone was published by a “collective” that found out that they were actually slaves of David Pringle. Many new British sf authors were first published in Interzone in the 80’s. Britain did not get cyberpunk but instead a second “new wave”.

Damgaard mentions that Denmark had “cosy catastrophes” like in UK.

Jones sees herself more as a European author, and Stross as an american one. He answers that you have to sell to US to get a proper career.

Jones and Stross had different views on the early “new” space opera Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks, whether it was influenced by the Falklands war or the Vietnam war. Banks is a very British author who does not sell in the US. Peter Hamilton is right-wing and best-selling. Stross is surprised that Ken McLeod has won a libertarian award, and that he himself was nominated. McLeod is the son of a preacher and picked up Trotskyism at the university. Stross says that McLeod’s tetralogy describes different types of socialism in the four volumes [I missed that…].

British sf authors cheat since they can sell in the US and still have the healthcare of UK. In a space opera future the disadvantage of being British vanishes making it easy to sell in the US.

Jones comments on the “mundane manifesto” of Geoff Ryman. She finds it quite restricted, but when she sent in an invited short story to an anthology she could include FTL and aliens and still get it accepted as “mundane sf”. Stross read the manifesto differently: Go back to the basis of sf and skip the tropes. It is possible to write mundane space opera, and an example is Saturn’s Children. [True, actually].

Jones resisted writing space opera but her latest is definitely that. It features a capital similar to Brussels, and she feels that space opera gives you a good possibility to write about the present.

Michael Pargman and others at the book sale

I left the congress by the new driverless metro, strolled around in the center of Copenhagen for a while looking at the new theatre and opera buildings and generally had a wonderful time, to finally continue with the metro to the airport. A fantastic weekend!

Jamais Cascio has linked to and written about two articles on the US “health-care debate.” The quotes illustrate the lack evidence that what is occurring is actually debate, or that it has anything to do with providing effective health care to the citizens of that nation. Jamais has also written about this issue in terms of his own medical needs and self employed (read: no benefits) existence.

The first article is by design guru and author Adam Greenfield. It takes a systems thinking approach to examining what is actually happening in this “debate,” as opposed to what is being said. At the same time it deals with the spirit of the situation very well. Find it at Speedbird.

The second is by the renowned SF author Charles Stross and takes a more humanistic approach to the topic, reducing it to the essence that is the absence of mercy in the political body and soul of America today. It can be found on Charlie’s Diary.

All three articles are worth your time and consideration.

La primera década del siglo XXI está suponiendo para la ciencia ficción un período de ajuste a nuevos paradigmas y de replanteamiento de muchas de las ideas clásicas (algunos pretenden ver en ello una crisis agónica que sólo puede conducir al olvido). De forma cíclica, la capacidad predictiva de este género se pone en duda, y con ella, al parecer su validez. Los años postreros del segundo milenio supusieron un duro golpe para los más optimistas, que esperaban colonias lunares, coches voladores y la cura de todas las enfermedades conocidas. En lugar de ello, la ciencia (y, sobre todo, la sociedad) se empeñó en tirar para otros derroteros, dejando supuestamente a los escritores de ciencia ficción como gilipollas (y a los aficionados con cara de tontos).

Como diría Ebenezer Schrooge: ¡Paparruchas!

Basta echar un vistazo atrás para constatar que la ciencia ficción rara vez ha acertado una. Por cada visión profética hay un centenar de delirios sin fundamento, muchos de los cuales siguen arropando ideas interesantes hoy en día. La cifi no tiene nada que ver con el futuro. Su ámbito natural es el presente. Su truco consiste en proyectar hacia el futuro los miedos y las esperanzas de cada época, para examinarlos inofensivamente con cierto distanciamiento. Con un poco de suerte, en la base de estas fobias y estos anhelos se encuentra una faceta del espíritu humano atemporal, y la obra que los examina trasciende su propio marco de referencia directo y conquista una vigencia sin fecha de caducidad.

Así pues, los motivos de la crisis deben ser otros. Quizás que, pese a no necesitar un pleno de aciertos, se necesita una proyección sólida (o aparentemente sólida) sobre la que construir la ficción, y de un tiempo a esta parte cada vez es más difícil anticipar el desarrollo (y un desarrollo no catastrófico) de este mundo que se precipita cuesta abajo sin frenos y sin que desde nuestra posición podamos ver cuánta carretera nos queda.

Ello ha propiciado el ascenso a primera plana de dos tendencias. Por un lado la literatura de Futuro Cercano, que especula sobre algún aspecto muy concreto en un lapso no superior a los diez años (bastante menos en general). Vendría a ser como una prueba de laboratorio en que se modifica una variable manteniendo el resto constantes. Aunque utiliza planteamientos (e incluso lenguaje) del hard, su enfoque es sobre todo sociológico y las cuestiones que examina tienden más hacia la metafísica.

La otra gran corriente abraza la idea de la Singularidad para salvar de un salto la brecha y construir una especulación del otro lado.

El concepto lo introdujo en la ciencia ficción Vernor Vinge, hacia finales de los 80. Por aquella época, aplicando la Ley de Moore sobre el desarrollo de la capacidad informática, predijo que llegaría un momento en que una inteligencia artificial superaría las capacidades intelectuales de los seres humanos. A partir de ese punto, la progresión, que sería imparable, nos dejaría obsoletos (además, como estará fuera de nuestra comprensión ni siquiera podemos imaginar qué dirección tomará, es una barrera infranqueable, un agujero negro que no se traga la luz, sino la información). Lo cierto es que desde entonces las cosas han cambiado un tanto. La Singularidad Tecnológica tal y como la describió en su momento se antoja bastante improbable (la tecnología de las inteligencias artificiales sigue en pañales e incluso hay serias dudas de que pueda desencallarse en un futuro próximo). Sin embargo, el concepto ha calado en un sentido más amplio, pasando a significar una aceleración brutal de los cambios científico/sociológicos promovidos por el advenimiento revolucionario de una tecnología o un nuevo paradigma, con el mismo resultado para nuestros intereses: una evolución tan extrema que no podemos ni imaginárnosla.

El problema que se presenta al fabulador es evidente. ¿Cómo plasmar lo inimaginable?

Este pequeño inconveniente no ha detenido a muchos escritores que ven en el advenimiento de la Singularidad la única salida para una cultura, la nuestra que está acabando a pasos agigantados con los recursos disponibles mientras se dirige con ciega inconsciencia hacia una catástrofe maltusiana. Existen una serie de trucos que permiten mostrar un atisbo de un universo post-singularista, del mismo modo en que hay procedimientos para proyectar sobre una superficie plana estructuras tridimensionales. El verdadero problema radica en dotar de relevancia la visión ofrecida, convirtiéndola en algo más que un despropósito muy imaginativo. Y allá donde la ciencia falla (o renquea un poquito), hay que recurrir a la filosofía.

Existen varias ideas merecedoras de estudio en torno a la Singularidad. Las más obvias tienen que ver con ella misma: sus fases, sus consecuencias, su alcance… Por ello se utilizan a menudo escenarios protosingularistas o inmediatamente posteriores al evento, examinando el modo en que quienes la han vivido se ajustan a la nueva realidad. Además, existe un concepto estrechamente ligado a éste (o al menos estrechamente ligado si esperamos sobrevivir a la Singularidad): el transhumanismo, la superación de nuestros límites para alcanzar un nuevo estadio evolutivo (a raíz de esto, en la historia de la vida en la Tierra se han producido al menos cuatro singularidades biológicas, quizás cinco; a lo mejor algún día escribo una entrada o un artículo al respecto).

Sirva el rollo precedente como preámbulo necesario para examinar la relevancia de “Cielo de singularidad”, la primera novela de uno de los autores más destacados del momento, el británico Charles Stross.

En “Cielo de singularidad” se puede aplicar el viejo dicho de que la ciencia ficción es una literatura de ideas, pues toda la novela está concebida como vehículo para examinar varios de los conceptos anteriormente expuestos. Eso sí, sin descuidar que el objetivo principal de una obra de ficción es el entretenimiento (para lo otro ya están los ensayos). Como casi toda la cifi de los últimos veinte años, presenta una amalgama de recursos y estilos, difuminando las viejas divisiones entre subgéneros. A grandes rasgos, el modelo narrativo corresponde a la space opera militarista, mientras que el lenguaje (y el interés por la verosimilitud, incluso en las especulaciones más aventuradas) es propio del hard. En cuanto al núcleo filosófico, es heredera directa del cyberpunk (incluso se realiza un homenaje directo a uno de sus gurús, Bruce Sterling, más concretamente a una de sus obras postcyberpunk, “El fuego sagrado”).

El escenario escogido es el siglo XXV, tras una Singularidad acontecida a mediados del siglo XXI que no sólo trastocó la cultura humana, sino que forzó la intervención del Escatón, una entidad omnipotente del futuro lejano de la humanidad (véase la crítica a “La odisea del mañana” para análisis pormenorizado de esta idea). El Escatón dispersó a nueve décimas partes de la humanidad por la galaxia (la Tierra había alcanzado una población de 10.000 millones), agrupándolos por afinidades ideológicas en distintos mundos, junto con una cornucopia (un nanoensamblador capaz de producir cualquier cosa contando con materia que procesar, la tecnología responsable en mayor grado del advenimiento de la Singularidad) y el aviso/amenaza de que nadie debe jugar con la causalidad.

El gran problema de el viaje translumínico es que, como ya expuso Robert L. Forward en “Maestro del tiempo”, equivale a viajar en el tiempo, y esto provoca paradojas, lo cual supone un grave obstáculo para crear una ficción coherente, pues si se opta por el viaje a mayor velocidad que la luz (aunque sea mediante saltos hiperespaciales) hay que lidiar con este problema. Forward se decantó por correcciones a nivel cuántico que previenen la paradojas, aunque no supo tratar con el problema de la alteración de la relación causa-efecto (el talón de Aquiles de casi todas las historias de viajes en el tiempo, sobre todo de las que quieren rizar el rizo mostrando un círculo causalmente cerrado). Stross opta por utilizar las teorías de Tipler (aunque no deja de meter alguna pullita contra la identificación que realiza éste entre el Escatón y el Dios cristiano), para especular con una entidad preocupada por mantener intacta la relación causal que lleva a su propia existencia, prohibiendo (e interviniendo de forma activa cuando es necesario), la vulneración del principio de causalidad (a veces, aunque no queda claro, apunta a que el propio universo, uno entre muchos, podría verse en peligro si alguna raza inconsciente se dedicara a juguetear demasiado con el tiempo).

En este contexto, Martin Springfield, un ingeniero de motores, se encuentra en una de los estados surgidos de la Diáspora, la Nueva República, un asentamiento colonizado por tecnófobos centroeuropeos donde toda la ciencia (salvo la militar) se mantiene al nivel anterior a 1900 (previa a los primeros estudios sobre el átomo y la relatividad), cuando el planeta Rochard, una de sus colonias más remotas, es invadida por el Festival, una civilización alienígena nómada que promueve el intercambio de información (un artículo totalmente restringido por los dirigentes de la Nueva República). Así pues, Martin, junto con una observadora de la ONU, Rachel Mansour, se ven embarcados en la expedición de reconquista a bordo de los acorazados más nuevos de la Nueva República (tristemente obsoletos para los estándares de la civilización post-singularista), aunque al parecer casi todo el mundo mantiene una agenda secreta.

La acción salta entre los encontronazos de Martin y Rachel con la testarudez tradicionalista de sus reluctantes anfitriones y los acontecimientos en el planeta Rochard, donde la irrupción del Festival (que proporciona cornucopias a cambio de información), ha desencadenado una singularidad brutal: primero económica, al destruir la base de todo comercio poniendo a disposición de todo el mundo cualquier producto, después social, pues cuando se cumplen todos los deseos la necesidad de un gobierno desaparece, y por último transhumana, siguiendo los ideales revolucionarios de células extropianas (el extropianismo es una corriente filosófica transhumana que aboga por la mejora activa de la especie humana mediante cualquier medio aplicable, bien sea cibernético o genético, y sin otra cortapisa que la imaginación) modeladas a semejanza de las marxistas (estableciendo paralelismos, reforzados por la nomenclatura, entre la Nueva República y la vieja Rusia zarista).

Stross consigue pues mostrarnos la realidad singularista, siglos después de que ocurriera originalmente, forzando una nueva revolución en un mundo que premeditamente había involucionado hacia un estado anterior. Nos muestra el caos propio de la aparición de un cambio exponencial, sobre el que ningún sistema de control previo es aplicable. De igual modo, al embarcarnos en una nave de guerra que se empeña en utilizar métodos bélicos obsoletos (aunque a nosotros nos parezcan futuristas en extremo, pues implican agujeros negros de la masa de una cordillera como medio de impulsión, antimateria y saltos hiperespaciales). Su enemigo, el Festival, representa un paradigma más allá de su comprensión y sabemos, desde el principio, que la misión está abocada al fracaso, sin embargo Stross se recrea en mostrarnos tres realidades (como tres escalones para ir subiendo poco a poco hacia las alturas postsingularitas evitando en lo posible los mareos). Por un lado están los métodos de la Nueva República, que serían similares a los nuestros sólo que con una potencia de fuego infinitamente superior, a continuación su proyección de cuáles podrían ser las estrategias de su enemigo al disponer de cornucopias (mostradas en forma de ejercicios de adiestramiento) y por último la realidad del choque entre las dos culturas, que vendría a ser el equivalente de un enfrentamiento entre una tribu paleolítica y una división acorazada moderna.

Entremedias, Stross se dedica a examinar distintas ideas acerca del transhumanismo, la Singularidad, el intercambio libre de información (es un activista del software libre), la represión, los peligros de la libertad absoluta (preferibles al estancamiento de la represión) y, claro está, la causalidad.

Se trata de una obra riquísima en ideas que supuso una bocanada de aire fresco para el panorama de la ciencia ficción. Y ello pese a sus pequeños fallos, tales como una exposición que a veces se vuelve imprecisa (con ciertos discursos repetidos casi palabra por palabra, sin que se aporte nada nuevo), un pequeño bajón de ritmo hacia la mitad de la acción (al final toda la fraseología militar suena igual) y un desenlace curiosamente timorato, como si no hubiera sabido o querido ponerle la puntilla. Quizás sea el sino de la literatura postsingularista, que está repleta de conceptos y especulaciones pero carece de respuestas claras (algo que sin duda alienará a cierto sector del público).

Según mi parecer, una lectura imprescindible para comprobar qué se cuece en el horno de la ciencia ficción (y para cualquier medianamente interesado en el transhumanismo).

Otras opiniones:

• De Alberto García-Teresa en Bibliópolis
• De José Enrique León Alcalde en El Sitio de Ciencia Ficción
• De Pau Martínez Medrano en Cyberdark
• De José Luis Mora en Dreamers
• De Javier Romero en Stardust

Otras novelas del mismo autor reseñadas en Rescepto:

• La casa de cristal (2006)
  

Grüne 1 Mio., LINKE 2 Mio, SPD 4 Mio. Was ist das? Genau, Steinmeiers persönlicher “Deutschlandplan”. Passend dazu gibt’s heute drei Urlaubslesetipps aus dem Bereich politischer Science-Fiction.

Kim Stanley Robinson schreibt eher literarisch orientierte Science-Fiction. In der Trilogie Science in the Capital (Forty Signs of Rain (amazon), Fifty Degrees Below (amazon)und Sixty Days and Counting (amazon)) spielen wie schon in früheren Werke Umweltfragen eine große Rolle – hier gekoppelt mit dem Blick auf Verquickungen zwischen Politik und Wissenschaft. Die Trilogie zeichnet den Aufstieg des US-Senators Phil Chase zum globalen Ökopräsidenten nach – geschrieben vor dem Obama-Wahlkampf!

Der zweite Tipp ist eher netzpolitisch spannend: Charles Stross widmet sich in seinem Thriller Halting State (amazon) einer Welt in naher Zukunft, in dem das organisierte Verbrechen innerhalb von Online-Welten stattfindet, und die Computerspiele auf der Straße – und koppelt das mit dem Seelenleben von FinanzjongleurInnen. Ähnlich, nur noch etwas wilder und in Südafrika statt Großbritannien angesiedelt, Lauren Beukes Moxyland (amazon).

Zum Schluss noch was deutschsprachiges: Alien Earth (1, 2, 3 bei amazon)- drei dicke Bände des Freiburger Perry-Rhodan-Autors Frank Borsch (hatte übrigens für die Grünen kommunal kandidiert). Vor dystopischem Hintergrund (Deutschland treibt Hartz-IV auf die Spitze, Gedankenverbrechen werden bestraft, die Großmacht heißt Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika und Arabien) entwickelt Borsch eine packende Geschiche um gentechnische Mutanten und geheimnisvolle Außerirdische.

Erstveröffentlichung: blog.gruene-bw.de>

My rating: 4.5  of 5 stars

I really enjoyed Halting State, but that probably won’t be universally true. If you don’t have a hook into the world, I think you might find it difficult to be drawn in. I’d still encourage anyone willing to stretch to give reading it a try

In the year 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh constabulary is called in on a special case. A daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates, a dot-com startup company that’s just been floated on the London stock exchange. The suspects are a band of marauding orcs, with a dragon in tow for fire support, and the bank is located within the virtual reality land of Avalon Four. For Smith, the investigation seems pointless. But she soon realizes that the virtual world may have a devastating effect in the real one-and that someone is about to launch an attack upon both…

If you are a gamer (computer, D&D, anything of the sort); if you are a technology fan, wondering where we’ll go next; if you are fascinated by the implications of technology on society; or if you read science fiction on a regular basis, then you’ll probably enjoy this book. If you like a good spy novel/techno thriller, I  recommend you take the time to get into this book.

Otherwise, I just don’t know if this book will be worth it to you. But consider giving it a try.

Luckily,  I used to be a techie, and I’m still very interested in the issues surrounding technology.  I knew enough of the acronyms and concepts to be interested and able to go with it.

I had a slow time getting started with my reading. It felt like the same issue I have getting into Jane Austen– sometimes I can quickly slip into the language and the world, and sometimes it takes a while before the story flows. It certainly isn’t that it is badly written, just that it is different from what I usually read.

The book is set in 2018, and in many ways this view of the future is very similar to our current society.  High tech has been on a fast march, and once you look past the surface, evidence is everywhere.  All of the changes are based from current technologies, whether it is the increase in sophistication in on-line multi-player computer gaming, Virtual Reality goggles that allow you to add an additional layer as you walk down the street,  or remotely operated taxis to drive you to your destination.

The book is told from 3 alternating POVs– Sue (a police officer), Elaine (a forensic accountant) & Jack (a game programmer). Their viewpoints allow us to understand the world the story is set in, and introduced us to the other characters.  None of them had any prior knowledge of the crime they are tracking down, and the further secrets behind it, so we learn about what has happened as they do.

This isn’t a character-based book, but the three leads are fairly well fleshed out.

Once the background is out of the way the story really gets going, and it goes into full adventure mode– with chases, virtual battles, dangerous mistakes, giant leaps of logic, boy meets girl moments, and so on.

I found Halting State fun and mentally stimulating.

I read this for my Book Club M.  I think all of us present enjoyed it, although I would have been interested in hearing the view of our member who was on vacation and does not fall into any of the categories I listed above.

We spent some of our discussion time talking about how plausible the time frame of the book was, we didn’t convince each other in the end, but walking away with divergent viewpoints is fine.  The conversation drifted to technology in our lives, how much we do (or don’t) trust it, and where we thought high tech would take us.

I think this book was a good choice for our Silicon Valley based book club, which enjoys reading a wide variety of books.

As my (fortunately mild) dose of swine flu gets into it’s third day, I have been alternating my time between sleeping and re-reading Charlie Stross novels. The weirdness level of Singularity Sky  and Iron Sunrise  seem just about spot on, while my system mounts its counter-attack to the alien invasion. So far, I think the good guys are winning….

Satellite 2 is being held at the Crown Plaza Hotel today and tomorrow; GOH is Iain Banks, and your truly will be doing a coupla panels tomorrow afternoon. Should be a hoot, and last chance for a relaxation before diving brainfirst into book 3.

Shall post a con report-type beastie roundabout Monday morning.

Report Update

Well, the travel up from darkest Ayrshire kinda put a dampener on the 2-day event, but it was an enjoyable experience. Iain Banks was Guest of Honour, and also in attendance were myself, Charlie Stross and Ken Macleod, so Orbit was well-represented, shall we say! Banksie’s GOH speech was damn fine, during which we were treated to a reading of the prologue of his new book, TRANSITION, which really got parts of my brain salivating (if neural cells are capable of such) for the whole thing. Apparently, on release it’s going to be marketted in the US as an SF novel, but in the UK as a mainstream nov. From what I hear (from a certain writer whose name begins with S and ends in TROSS) its an apparently contemporary novel but set across a series of alternate worlds. Hmm, tasty.

Also making their presence felt were such stalwarts as  Duncan Lunan, Ian Sales, Neil Williamson, Jim Steel (along with the redoubtale  Ann and their sparky offspring, Emma), Mike Gallagher, Andy Nimmo, as well as sundry pillars of the Glasgow Fandom establishment – Vince Docherty, Mark Meenan, Ian Sorenson, and Cuddles – and doubtless a horde of others which my poor brayne cannot recall. Oh, and I think I spotted Juliet McKenna at one point.

On the Sunday, I had 2 panels, one at 1pm, CULTURALLY CHALLENGED, being a discussion of the benefits or otherwise of living in Iain Banks’ Culture universe; as well as myself, there was the Man Hisself, IB, and David Haddock, editor of the Iain Banks fanzine, the BANKSONIAN. This was a lively, fascinating exploration of the underpinnings of the Culture universe, and the consequences of living in a society which doesn’t have to deal with scarcity or money. A great hour.

Later, at 3pm, I was on a panel called MEDIA MOON which went into the use or featuring or involvement of the Moon in media Sf, which was agreed to be everything except for books. Ended up taking in mostly cinema and TV, and revealing a few curious facts about the link between werewolves and the moon; apparently,although werewolves have been a part of folk mythology for quite a long time, the involvement of the moon as a trigger is comparatively recent, from about the start of last century. This led to me suggesting that this was a Victorian sexual role issue, since it seems that only men were allowed to become werewolves and releashe the beasht inshide. Ah, but then a wily female member of the audience pointed out that the female equiv was the cat-woman! Then, hard on the heels of that, another audience member pointed out that there was in fact one instance in which Victorian women were permitted to demonstrate force and violence (as I’d previously asserted that Victorian women had tightly constrained roles in family and community life) which was in defence of her children.

I didn’t hang about for the evenings, sadly, other things to do. But I am toying with the idea of going to Novacon, this year being held in Nottingham, to which I`ve been several times for this or that convention. And Novacons are usually a good mix of relaxacon and panel activity. Just have to see how the finances add up in the weeks ahead.

PS – forgot to mention the groundbreaking discovery of a new way to measure the conceptual magnitude of fiction, to whit, the Sagan (I`m aware that others have previously asserted that a Sagan is equivalent to at least 4 billion, but I feel that our’s is more in keeping with the great man’s lifework). So, one Sagan is equivalent to the conceptual scale found in the novel, CONTACT; works of a lesser scale would be assigned a Saganosity rating along the lines of decisagans, millisagans and microsagans. Some cultural artefacts would be so lacking in any conceptual heft that highly sensitive equipment would have to be employed to determine their Sagan level – Big Brother, for example, would surely come in at the femtosagan range.

I’ve just finished reading Wireless, the latest short story collection from Charles Stross, which I am reviewing for Vector. It won’t be a particularly positive review; my pleasure in some of the individual stories was outweighed by my issues with the collection as a whole. However, one problem I didn’t have was that it was all doom and gloom. Such was Andrew Wheeler’s diagnosis:

Stross is without a doubt one of the most inventive and thoughtful writers in the modern SF idiom, and that makes it doubly unfortunate that his output so consistently takes the tone of battling to ever-so-slightly slow down the inevitable fall of night. Wireless collects some of the very best stories in modern SF, by one of the most important writers in the field — but, collectively, they form a singularity of depression and bleakness from which no optimism can escape.

My review, by necessity, won’t go into too much detail about the individual stories so I thought it might be helpful to go through the table of contents here and provide a different perspective to Wheeler:

1) Missile Gap – Ape shall always lose to ant. Negative
2) Rogue Farm – After the inevitable collapse of society a man can still have a wife, a dog, a plot of land and the nous to run troublesome posthumans off said land. Positive
3) A Colder War – Everyone has their soul eaten. Negative
4) MAXOS – Aliens are all Nigerian. Neutral
5) Down On The Farm – Life’s a riot with spy versus spy versus shoggoth. Positive
6) Unwirer – “Hi, I’m a journalist, I can fix the American government.” Positive
7) Snowball’s Chance – Even an itinerant Scotsman can outsmart the Devil. Positive
Trunk And Disorderly – PG Wodehouse is immortal. Positive
9) Palimpsest – Human civilisation either outlasts the galaxy or outlasts the galaxy and colonises known space. Positive

Two thirds positive! I think that counts as a sunny outlook on the future.

It is a few years in the future, 2018, and the world is a little bit more connected, a little bit more attached to the life online. People can more fully immerse themselves in the increasingly rich and developed virtual worlds in which they can shape themselves, their shape and their personality in ways which continue to escape them in the real world. New forms of interactivity provide games in which the real world and the worlds of the imagination collide and overlap: many people sign up as spies, for example, taking part in unexpected assignments on an urgent basis but rarely able to discern the higher level patterns that govern the nature of such a game.

Read the full review here.

The Setup

I’ve been tweeting my linear algebra experiments today. Here’s a quick rundown of my goal. I want to take the data (tags) people use to describe stuff (in my case books) online and visualize that in such a way that it’s readily apparent which things are similar. The easiest way to map a whole bunch of points (books again) is to plot them on a plane … which gives me 2 dimensions to work with. The problem then becomes one of reducing 1000’s of dimensions (one for each tag) into 2.

Principal Component Analysis is to tool for this job. From the wikipedia page, this is the description of PCA that informs my metaphor:

If a multivariate dataset is visualised as a set of coordinates in a high-dimensional data space (1 axis per variable), PCA supplies the user with a lower-dimensional picture, a “shadow” of this object when viewed from its (in some sense) most informative viewpoint.

I acquired a copy of an academic paper on PCA, but first I decided to see how far I could get with a simple example and the insight that wikipedia could provide. I got this far:

The discussion on the PCA page pointed me at the page for Sample Covariance Matrix which was much clearer on the actual method for generating said matrix. Now it looks like I need to calculate the Spectral Decomposition using the suggested method of Singular Value Decomposition. I’m a bit stuck at Householder Transformation, so I figured I’d document my progress so far.

The Data

I decided to take one of my most recent reads, Wonder Boys (WB) and compare it to Atrocity Archives (AA). To play with 3 variables (one more than the 2 I’ll end up plotting) and still end up with a nice 3×3 matix, I included Call of Cuthulu (CC). For the purposes of this exercise, I’m describing these three books with the following tags:

• Lovecraft
• Fantasy
• Modern

In the table below, I’ve set on a 1-10 scale how much the book relates to the particular tag. In my final application that would be compiled by the number of users tagging a book and the number of times each tag was used for that book.

We can quibble extensively over the qualitative nature of the data above (in general I love such discussions), but right now I’m solely interested in the analysis. No matter how I go about the calculation, I’m going to need a vector that represents the mean for each row:

This is how I’m going to calculate the covariance:

In the above equation, x is the 3×3 matrix defined by my table above. x-bar is the “mean vector,” (6,9,7) and N ends up being 3. The results, which I computed by hand, so as to reacquaint myself with the linear algebra:

Stay Tuned. In part 2 of this series I will figure out what to do with my pretty covariant matrix. There will likely be a part 3 with a pretty graphic and some thoughts on the whole experience.

A special thanks goes out to Wolfram Alpha for generating the image of the covariant matrix above.

If there are any friendly mathematicians out there that want to point me at some resources, I’d be eternally grateful. Also, my final build of the code to run all of this will probably be in Java, although I’ve been eyeing Scala as something I’d like to play with. Feel free to contact me if you’re interested in helping out on the coding side of things. And last, but not least, the end use for all of this is going to be a Quantitative Visual Book Recommendation Engine. I’m going to need a ton of user input for this, so feel free to let me know if you’re excited by this project and want to help in any way. As always, I can be emailed at mentatjack dot com with the username mentat1.

Glasshouse is now my favourite Charles Stross book. It’s about a person with a bunch of memory gaps who volunteers to join an experimental colony where the people are recreating the Dark Ages of the mid-late twentieth century on Earth. And as things go on, gaps in his memory fill in and things get awesome. It deals with the issues of the past and identity and how people are their memories.

There’s a chunk where I was actually “Oh shit, how is she going to get out of this?” which I don’t get from his more space operatic Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise where everyone seems so competent and brilliant Neal Stephenson should be writing them. A big part of Glasshouse’s appeal is that the main character, Robin, spends most of the book stuck in the body of a waifish orthodox human female (orthodox meaning piddly upper body strength, fertile, only two arms), when his past includes being a swordmaster, a tank and other big brutal direct things. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. If you like that sort of thing.

When scientists approach individuals vulnerable from recent memory/identity-reassignment surgery who remain unsure whether anyone is still out to get them and provide an offer of safe haven for a period of several years, it appears to be an offer perhaps not too good to refuse but welcome for all that. The safe haven turns out to be an iterative prisoner’s dilemma with open record scoresheets–that is, individuals assume the roles of people from the somewhat distant past of 1950s earth, probably somewhere in the USA, and are rewarded for actions that are in character and punished for actions out of character.

Read the full review here.

In theory, writing should be the easiest activity in the world. It is, after all, nothing more than speech captured on paper. Since everyone seems able to speak at nineteen to the dozen, dashing off the odd short story before lunch and a novel or so on your summer hols should be no problem. Except that, if you ask the few who can string more than two sentences together to make a coherent paragraph, there’s a lot of craft to learn before the paper version is worth reading. One of the key problems to resolve is the issue of narrative structure. Starting on page one, the author has to offer a coherent exposition of events, sufficiently interesting and credible to lead the readers through to a satisfactory ending.

One approach is like building a tower or digging a tunnel. Once the author sets off up the tower or down the tunnel, we are all obliged to follow, limited in what we can see because of the structure through which we pass. If you’re like Ted Chiang, you write something like the Tower of Babylon which, incidentally, won the Nebula in 1990. This should be the ultimate linear story of a man who climbs up the titular Tower, except the only discovery is that, like Ouroboros, what goes up, must come down. In non-linear stories, the events as described are not necessarily chronological or immediately related to each other. They exist like pieces in an unmade jigsaw until the author assembles them in some hopefully pleasing manner. The most common example is a multiple point-of-view structure that introduces a cast of characters that may not meet until the end or may not meet at all but influence each other indirectly. In the vast majority of all plots, we get to see an increasing convergence between all the narrative strands as the plot develops and more characters do meet.

Under normal circumstances, the author is modest and limits the cast of characters. This keeps the storytelling manageable. All of which brings me to The Revolution Business by Charles Stross. This is the fifth volume in what has been projected as a cycle of six although, unless everyone with nukes uses them in a MAD way, there could be a new series involving expansion into, or interaction with, different worlds as they are discovered. Stross has been attempting something only rarely seen. He has been building an upside-down pyramid, i.e. he placed the apex stone on the ground and then began to fan upwards and outwards without the structure falling over. It has four faces, one for each world and, as new characters are introduced and situations develop, the volume above the apex stone has been expanding. Frankly, I thought the whole thing too ambitious. It would have been an easy ride to take if the lead character, Miriam, had been the sole point-of-view. But Stross has been running multiple characters in each of the worlds (albeit the fourth world has merely been visited so far and appears enigmatically empty).

I thought the monumental effort was threatening to fall over in the fourth book, The Merchants’ War, but Stross seems to have more discipline in this latest episode and I feel more confident that the sum of the parts will prove an interesting whole when we can all look back and see how we ended up. The plotting here is more taut and, it must be said, all the better for being less ambitious. Much of the activity surrounding a subset of the lead characters is kept in outline. We see only as much as we need to see to get us where we need to go. It’s all building up towards an interesting high-stakes game in the final episode.

As one final thought, I was amused to see Paul Krugman’s endorsement on the front of the jacket. I find Krugman’s twice weekly columns in the NYT a fascinating read. My estimation of the man has been enhanced by his willingness to publicly endorse science fiction. Too few big-name intellectuals are prepared to admit opening the boards of an explictly SF book. As a world-renowned economist, I wonder what he makes of Mack Reynolds and Spondulix by Paul Di Filippo. Reynolds was a one-man army when it came to speculation about economics and, although it’s all a little wooden by modern-day standards, the ideas remain interesting. Spondulix is just good fun and should be read by all — it’s probably slightly better in the short version rather than the full novel. Di Filippo is one of the very best short story writers around.

It took me a rather long time to figure out why I like Michael Crichton’s books a lot more than Tom Clancy’s books. At first, I thought I liked them both for the same reasons. They were dense techno-thrillers. Except they’re not. Crichton wrote science fantasy adventures, while Clancy writes stereo instructions about spies and soldiers. The devil is literally in the details.

When I read the blurb on Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children, I thought I was getting something Crichton-esque because it said something like, “What happens to a sex robot when all the humans are dead?”

(You see, the first half of that question sounds sort of juvenile but then the second half gets you to wondering. Clever.)

But I think the problem with this book is that Stross is too clever, too hardcore for his own good. A little too much like Clancy.

This is a work of near-hard science fiction. If you want to cruise through it, you’ll need to summon up everything you ever learned about chemistry, physics, biology, computer science, astronomy, and economics, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a strong grounding in modern Japanese anime and manga design styles while you’re at it.

Many characters are described as bishojo, chibi, super deformed, etc. You get the picture…or you don’t.

The story: Centuries after humans die out, our robots have built a cruel and dysfunctional society that spans the solar system, and Freya the (left over, second-class citizen) sex-bot becomes entangled in corporate intrigue, conspiracies, and assassinations surrounding a Very Important MacGuffin as well as secrets about her own identity.

The read: There is a lot of science and pseudo-science sloshing around between these covers. Stross did his homework. Chemical interactions, space ship physics and economics, complex slave-based social structures, and the time/space arrangements of the planets are presented in painful detail.

We learn, over and over, from page- to chapter-length sections, that traveling in space is slow, expensive, boring, and uncomfortable. It’s not very interesting the first time, and it becomes exponentially less interesting by the fourth time.

However, science aside, the story embraces a bizarre cast of robotic characters of all shapes and sizes and trots along quite briskly and cleverly for the first two thirds of the novel. Along the way, we visit several planets, learn about the hyperviolent robotic society of tomorrow, and experience many of this society’s greatest fears, like green and pink goo (plants and animals).

The problems: First, Freya the sex-bot tends to experience life in a rather sexual manner. She has sex with half the robots she meets or travels inside. This seems clever at first, but becomes progressive less interesting as the sex becomes less and less recognizable as such. This is where Stross is clearly channeling his inner Heinlein. That’s the older Heinlein, the one obsessed with naked societies, not the younger one with the clever ideas.

Second, the plot is at first too slow and obvious, and then sudden accelerates beyond recognition. During the first two-thirds, as long as you keep up with the techno-babble, you know more than the heroine about what’s going on, and you spend a lot of time waiting for her to catch up.

For instance, at the beginning of the story she smuggles an object to Mars. She describes the object in dry technobabble, but you can instantly recognize it as an egg. She does not know what an egg is (apparently robots have little interest in bio-history), and when the bad guys come looking for the egg, she repeatedly insists she has no idea what an egg or a chicken is. This gets old really fast.

And you begin identifying the villains long before Freya does. This also becomes tiresome as she races to catch up with the reader.

Then at the end, Stross decides to wrap everything up at near-light speeds. This is confusing because our robotic characters, many of whom are Cylon-esque clones of each other, have been switching “soul chip” identities and the politics unravel as the identities blur together. Everything is wrapped up with a bow, and it feels fairly unsatisfying.

And my last qualm is really a quibble. The book is written in the first person (a “shrug”-class problem) and in the present tense (a “groan”-class problem). Not my favorite style.

Still, Saturn’s Children is chock-a-block with great science fiction ideas and settings and characters and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a douse of “hardcore” genre content. But if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself wishing there was a little less science and a lot more fiction.