Category Archives: scifi

More alt history

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Via The Reality-Based Community, a link to this overview of the work of Onken and Jones. It ties in to a question I’ve always had about the way events work – are there really pivot points, or are there broad trends that force thing in certain directions and we retrofit the specific causes (or – as things seem usually to be – a bit of both)?

The researchers also found that assassinations have no effect on the inauguration of wars, a result that “suggests that World War I might have begun regardless of whether or not the attempt on the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 had succeeded or failed.”

In other news, my friend Ray seems to have been involved with early efforts towards a transatlantic cable, discussing same with a favorite steam-vicky – Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Alt history

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Alternative histories can be a lot of fun – or they can be teeth-grindingly dumb. Part of the trick, it seems to me, is to find a good pivot point – a specific thing that could have gone differently – and then carefully work through the implications. Done poorly, it devolves into a “Well, my Goths invented the Gatling gun” – “So what? My Romans allied with Godzilla!” kind of exercise (complete with the smell of burning plastic and the pop of Black Cats – not that I’d know anything about it); done well, it makes you wonder about why things turned out the way they did.

All this is a long-winded way of pointing you at a Strange Maps post on a map of the Republic of New Netherland – maps and alternative history – nice match. While I’m on the subject, C.M. Kornbluth’s Two Dooms is alt history that is definitely worth a read.

A variation

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“I’m an angry Rhesus brain controlling a titanium body, from the government and I’m here to help.”

I don’t think this was the kind of robot (OK, properly this one’s a cyborg) overlord that Rogers was imagining. Unfortunately, given the way the world works, I think it’s a lot more likely that machine-phase overlords will turn out to be upset simians rather than cool, dispassionate intelligences. And just to clarify – I mean a different species of upset simian…

Loose end, tidied up

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After reading Pluvialis’ post on drowned cities (and other things) last summer, I spent a week or so racking my brain trying to remember where I’d read a description of a drowned Thames estuary, complete with underwater buildings being reinhabited. Courtesy of BLDGBLOG’s excellent interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, I’ve been whacked over the head with it – Blue Mars.

The concrete cylinder ended some three meters down, but the ladder continued, down into a big chamber, warm, humid, fishy, and humming withe the noise of several generators in another room or building. The building’s wall, the floor, the ceilings and windows were all covered by what appeared to be a sheet of clear plastic. They were inside a bubble of some kind of clear material; outside the windows was water, murky and brown, bubbling like dishwater in a sink.

Nirgal’s face no doubt revealed his surprise; Bly, smiling briefly at the sight, said, “It was a good strong building. The what-you-might-call sheetrock is something like the tent fabrics you use on Mars, only it hardens. People have been reoccupying quite a few buildings like this, if they’re the right size and depth. Set a tube and poof, it’s like blowing glass. So a lot of Sheerness folks are moving back out here, and sailing off the dock or their roof. Tide people we call them. They figure it’s better than begging for charity in England, eh?”

Follow-up on some posts

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I channel-surfed my way to a teevee program on the history of Soviet helicopters the other evening. There was footage of the Mi-12; it’s tough to envision just how big it is until you see it swallowing trucks whole. I did a YouTube search and came up with the following clip – it’s in French and interestingly enough what parts of the narration I understand match perfectly with the English version I saw. Mi-12 fun fact – there’s a shaft connecting both powertrains together. Both engines on one side could fail, but both rotors will continue to turn.

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Minor spoiler alert! I’ve posted on Alan Moore and Gerry Anderson recently and wasn’t surprised at all to find that Moore knows his Anderson. In The Black Dossier Mina and Allan arrive at a spaceport where they steal a rocket – a Pancake Extra-Large 4. They had been told that the Extra-Large models are named after how the previous models met their end (thus Shrapnel XL2). One guess as to how the Pancake meets it’s end (with a not-too-bright Perspex robot pilot at the controls).

Nice Hair!

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!Warning – contains minimal original content!

Some pix from recent web wandering united by funky pelage. In order of discovery:

Telstar Logistics’ Flickrstream yields a screencap from Gerry Anderson’s UFO.

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As a commenter notes, it’s important to keep your utility belt fully stocked with golf tees. I believe one of these lovelies will be featured a little further on…

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Via FLOG, Chris Butcher shows us a rockabilly ‘do that… words fail me. I’ll bet this guy smokes cigarettes as part of the persona – he’s taking his life in his hands every time he fires one up.

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Yhancik – billions of blistering blue barnacles! There are some Tintin pix in this post – about halfway down.

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More MoonBase loveliness from Poletti’s Flickrstream (worth looking at – lots of great images):

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Two musical notes (sorry)… The actress pictured above is Gabrielle Drake. The musical tie-in? Nick Drake was her brother. And – while nosing around for more background on UFO, I fell over a new-to-me early electronic instrument: the ondes Martenot.

Kornbluth

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I sometimes wonder if Cyril Kornbluth will be the next Philip K. Dick movie/screenplay-wise. Actually, he may already be – my ties to to the motion picture industry consist of being able to look up titles on IMDB. Two Kornbluth/Pohl collaborations I read ages ago have stuck with me to this day: Gladiator-At-Law and The Space Merchants. Gladiator-At-Law seems especially apposite nowadays, what with the housing finance mess (aka Big Shitpile) – revolving as it does around housing and arcane financial arrangements to obscure who controls what. I wonder whether Pohl or Kornbluth read Gangs of New York; one of the gangs in Belly Rave (a slum housing development originally named Belle Reve) is the Wabbits – surprisingly close to NYC’s Dead Rabbits. Wa-wa-wabbit twacks! Also – struldbrugs! The Space Merchant’s Chicken Little (a huge blob of chicken tissue that’s fed chorella algae -IIRC- and has hunks sliced off that become people food) resonates today as well – here’s a class on animal tissue culture and tissue engineering. I can’t wait for Ron Popeil to get involved – “Makes beef jerky for around $3 a pound, and you know what went in it, because you made it yourself!”

Kornbluth hit the silver screen at least once – The Marching Morons fathered Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. I loved the Marching Morons when I first read it – in my defense, I was fourteen – since then, well… It’s great fun, but when you’ve finished there’s a strange odor in the air. I smell eugenics. We’ll ignore the statistical cold water as well – tons of dopes, tiny elite – what are your chances of rolling lucky seven in the can’t-choose-your-parents crapshoot. That’s right – in all likelihood, you’d be one of the pinheads. The Marching Morons does give me an excuse to introduce a great new word: tlonian – adjective applying to a product that has metastisized off the screen and into the real world (see: Holiday Inn) and post a video of an AWESOME new tlonian product from Idiocracy, Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. I love Borges.

Stross II

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Human memory is an odd thing. It’s not particularly accurate and it is often manipulated – by the memory’s owner and by other parties. Sometimes this is a bad thing – think about the satanic abuse hysteria of the 1980s and the whole ‘recovered memory’ controversy – and sometimes it’s a good thing. We’re not all saints (even the saints aren’t); not having to remember every time we’ve been less than what we think we are is a blessing. What are people going to be like when they have a detailed objective record of the world immediately around them and their interaction with same? Will we be better people – less likely to ignore the cry for help? Will we be the same ol’ folks, just closer to insanity as we get our noses rubbed in the disconnect between our internal model of ourselves and the real way we act? Or, will we photoshop the hell out of our recordings to bring them into line with our sense of identity?

Everything old is new again. From the comments on Stross’ transcript, let me highlight a couple of good points.

In some ways, it’s a step backwards to an earlier time. An average medieval peasant wouldn’t have had the same concept of privacy we do — he most likely lived in the same room as his whole family and some animals. All of his neighbors new what was going on, and he regularly confessed to his priest. He didn’t get lost, because he had lived in the same place most of his life. *

The qualifier (in some ways) is important – level of detail and public accessibility are important differences. In the Monty example, Mary Kalin-Casey is not objecting to peasant-level (walking by and seeing Monty in the window) loss of privacy – it’s the notion that he can be seen by anyone with an internet connection that bothers her.
On Stross’ self-driving car prediction:

Driverless vehicles were commonplace up until WW2; they were called horse-drawn carriages. I have relatives born in the Twenties who tell of napping while driving home from a party or something. *

True – and a hint about where things may be going on a slightly different front. Nanotech is a hot topic – the collision of nano and biology is where (I think) a lot of progrees will be made. After all, there are already molecular mechanisms – consider the mitochondrion.

Stross, Google Street Views and Privacy

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Recently, author Charlie Stross posted the transcript of a talk he gave to a tech consultancy titled “Shaping the Future” .  It’s worth reading in it’s entirety; if you click through please remember to come back – I have some thoughts I’d like to share.

A side trip on our way to the meat of the matter… Stross identifies bandwidth – the ability to move information from place to place – as a key variable. It’s one of those things that’s getting faster, faster (think exponential increase). I want to recommend The Victorian Internet – a book that looks at the beginning of the communications revolution. Before the telegraph, information moved at the same rate people did – as fast as a horseback messenger or a clipper ship. The telegraph was an enormous change – one that left fingerprints that we see to this day. Baud – the speed measurement applied to modems (themselves becoming obsolete) – is named for Émile Baudot, a pioneer in the field. There are other examples; I’ll leave the rest to The Victorian Internet.

The focus of Stross talk is the notion of lifeblogging:

Today, I can pick up about 1Gb of FLASH memory in a postage stamp sized card for that much money [ten euros]. fast-forward a decade and that’ll be 100Gb. Two decades and we’ll be up to 10Tb.

10Tb is an interesting number. That’s a megabit for every second in a year — there are roughly 10 million seconds per year. That’s enough to store a live DivX video stream — compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution — of everything I look at for a year, including time I spend sleeping, or in the bathroom. Realistically, with multiplexing, it puts three or four video channels and a sound channel and other telemetry — a heart monitor, say, a running GPS/Galileo location signal, everything I type and every mouse event I send — onto that chip, while I’m awake. All the time. It’s a life log; replay it and you’ve got a journal file for my life. Ten euros a year in 2027, or maybe a thousand euros a year in 2017. (Cheaper if we use those pesky rotating hard disks — it’s actually about five thousand euros if we want to do this right now.)

Why would anyone want to do this?

I can think of several reasons. Initially, it’ll be edge cases. Police officers on duty: it’d be great to record everything they see, as evidence. Folks with early stage neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimers: with voice tagging and some sophisticated searching, it’s a memory prosthesis.

Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it’s all indexed and searchable. “What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?”

Think of it as google for real life. *

We’re seeing the beginnings of something like this today. My blog is not the only way I share information about what I’m up to and what I’m thinking – there’s also my Flickrstream (interesting word that was invented to describe people’s photo repositories, eh?), Twitter (short term, ephemeral stream of consciousness stuff), del.icio.us (public list of my bookmarks), and email (more – presumably – private). Others may add YouTube or other video services to the list and I’m sure there are many other bits of software I’m missing; I have little or no MySpace/Facebook knowledge, for example.

All this is fine as I wander around documenting what I want to document, writing what I feel like writing. But (there’s always a but), here comes Monty! Who is Monty, you ask? He is the cat in the window. A new feature of Google Maps provides street level zooms for select urban areas – the Google folks have vehicles driving around cities taking pictures. When the Google car came by, Monty was sitting in his normal perch. Later, when Google rolled out the new feature, Monty’s owner took a look at her neighborhood, saw her cat in her window, and got a little – understandably in my book – freaked. Ms. Kalin-Casey – one of Monty’s owners – writes,

The question is, where do we draw the line between public and private? Obviously, the picture of Monty isn’t very good, but who’s to say whether tomorrow, Google’s camera’s won’t be a lot better, giving clearer pictures and more detail? I’ve already seen one post online where the poster’s only complaint about Google pics is that the pictures aren’t sharp enough. (He wasn’t commenting on my pic, but on a picture of his own home.)

The opposing argument claims that what’s visible from the street is public. By opening my windows for some much-needed light and air, am I granting permission for my living room to be broadcast worldwide? I don’t think I am. I think if I open my windows, my neighbors and passers by might see the cat in the window. That’s substantially different to me than realizing that everyone in the world can potentially see into my home.

It’s my feeling that we should know what kind of monitoring we’re subject to and when. Stores, airports, intersections, museums —there are security cameras everywhere. We’ve all seen overhead satellite photos for mapping purposes, but when does helpful mapping recon morph into home surveillance? When does it move from a grainy picture of the cat to a high-res image where you can see small details in my apartment? When do I have to choose between sunlight and unseen threats to privacy? *

Think about those sorts of reasonable concerns in a world where everything I see or hear, I record. I think jammer technologies will get hot, but regardless, our notions of privacy will need to be sharpened and thought through a little more thoroughly than they are today. I don’t have answers; I probably am not even seeing the real questions – we ought to start paying some attention though. As William Gibson said, “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.”

The Cold War on a Discworld

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Yesterday Charlie Stross did a web release of his novella Missile Gap. It’s well worth a read – Yuri Gargarin, transcendent intelligences and an ekranoplan! Hopefully, it won’t be giving too much away to mention that I’ve had a ‘social insects’ post rattling around in draft form for a month or so – motivated by the sudden hive collapse that’s been affecting honeybees recently.

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Update – when pondering discworlds, remember – it’s turtles all the way down!

Rockets and some autobiography

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A few days ago, I indulged my curiosity by doing a little web searching for unrealized spacecraft designs – I was motivated by having read Project Orion recently. The Orion designs relied on nuclear impulse power; they would chuck a shaped-charge nuclear bomb behind them, touch it off, and absorb the energy using a pusher plate, shock absorbers and a massive ship/payload. While noodling around I ran across a Nazi secret weapon project I’d never heard of before: Dr. Eugen Sanger’s Amerika Orbital bomber.

Reading about how this thing was to be launched, all I could think of was my favorite childhood TV show. A bit of background – the year I was to start school, my family moved to Newport, Wales for a year so instead of first grade, it was Infant’s One for me. Lest you think that I spent my time in Wales zoned out in front of the tube – well, it was different then (and there). If I recall correctly – no guarantees – there was one channel, it wasn’t broadcasting all the time and a significant portion of the programming was in Welsh. My time in Newport cemented my love of the outdoors and started my bibliomania; my teacher gave me a copy of this book as a going away present when we left to return to Phoenix (AZ). There was one thing on the telly (couldn’t resist) that I loved: Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5. If you’re not familiar with him, Mr. Anderson is the guy behind Supermarionation and shows like Thunderbirds and Stingray. Fireball XL5 was one of his earlier efforts; the eponymous rocketship was launched by – you guessed it – being propelled down a long track by a rocket sled. Convergent evolution or had Anderson or one of his people heard of Sanger’s work? You got me. I can tell you that World War II was still echoing in Great Britain in the early sixties in a way it definitely was not in the US. I started building plastic model airplane kits (Airfix!) while we were in Wales – Spitfires and Lancaster bombers were all I remember – no Vulcans, nothing contemporary. Who knows, but in any event, a good excuse for me to turn the clock back. I don’t miss the school uniform though!

Making Light & Mike Ford

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I’ve followed links in to Making Light twice in as many days. Today I thought I’d read around a bit and found that I’d arrived a bit too late. They are marking the passing of their friend John M. Ford who died Monday. I thought I’d quote two of the things he wrote (in comments!) on the site – just because I like them so much.

Against Entropy

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days—
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

—John M. Ford

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By John M. Ford, from the Infernokrusher thread:

[From Verona Total Breakdown (Liebestod), a forgotten early Infernokrusher work by Bill “Hoist This Petard” Shakespeare …

Ro-Mo. Your windows are still mirrored; taunt me not,
But show your colors, dare to challenge me,
These lips are two shaped charges, primed and hot,
That wait the go-code for delivery.
J-Cap. The flag is to the deadly, not the loud,
Yet aim as well as posing shows in this;
The worthy throwdown’s always to the proud,
And hammer down is how the hard girls kiss.
Ro-Mo. My draft is stopped; I struggle toward the clutch.
J-Cap. And would a charge of nitrous make thee run?
Ro-Mo. Too much; but what else is there but too much?
Let me take arms, and elevate the gun.
J-Cap. Small arms but hint what demolitions say.
Ro-Mo. Then, gunner, gimme one round.
J-Cap. On the way.