And then there’s Bruce Sterling, who says, "In normal circumstances, I’m not the sober, serious futurist that you will see in Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. This is me as a full-blown pundit, a brow-wrinkled journalist who attends the Davos Forum, networks with Californian corporate forecasters, and mourns the tragic loss of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Most of the time I really don’t care to work that hard. Because I’m a science fiction writer."
And a good one too, well deserving the "visionary" label the flap copy bestows on him. Yet he has also committed journalism, and his last nonfiction book, The Hacker Crackdown, was an excellent portrayal of the dawn of the cyber culture. Now he turns to the next half century of our–or our children’s–lives, noting that "Futurism doesn’t mean predicting an awesome wonder; rather it means recognizing and describing a small apparent oddity that is destined to become a great commonplace." He frames his effort with a well-known Shakespearean quotation: "All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; . . . And one man in his time plays many parts . . . the infant . . . school-boy . . . lover . . . soldier . . . justice . . . pantaloon . . . Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion . . ."
Infancy is biotech, not in the sense of genetically tweaked super-babies but in the sense of appliances–gengineered bacteria that do all sorts of marvelous things both inside and outside you. Studenthood is the information economy, computers, networks, robots, volatile economies, and lifelong learning. The lover has relationships with new-industrial blobjects. The soldier is the New World Disorder, terror, and fear. The justice is the new politics, greased by the Web so that "moral panic is the signature political motif." The pantaloon is money, business, the wealth to be gained from information. Oblivion is the end of all, the potential for slaughter and plague and environmental disaster and the inevitability of a new age dawning, whether we jump or are shoved.
Sound interesting? Sterling is longer on the poetics of it all, the meaning and feeling, than on specifics, but anyone who tries to emphasize the latter, I think, is doomed to failure. Sterling thus has a fairly reasonable chance of being able to say "I told you so!" in a few decades. And he’ll have done so very readably.
Recommended.
Bruce Sterling also has the lead essay (after the introduction by Pat Cadigan) in Exploring the Matrix: Visions of the Cyber Future. The book is riding the wave of a popular movie and its sequels, but that’s okay. Cadigan starts things off by claiming that despite the science fiction connection and the blockbuster commercial $ucce$$, there’s some serious intellectual discourse here. Then Sterling tells us that the heart of the film’s appeal ain’t the brain, it’s the heart: "You can’t be dead, because I love you." Kiss the tire-mushed kitten, and it will rise to purr again! Quick segue to Stephen Baxter, who stresses some of the logical and scientific difficulties in positing a perfect simulation for everyone to live in, and before long, there’s Mike Resnick saying the new AIs aren’t going to enslave us, they’ll worship us, since we’ll be quite demonstrably their creators. John Shirley chimes in too, as do Paul Di Filippo, Walter Jon Williams, Ian Watson, Joe Haldeman, David Brin, Alan Dean Foster, Kathleen Ann Goonan, James Patrick Kelly, and a few more, most of whom have written in one way or another about the future of AI.
Interpretations and riffs, criticism and praise, pop-culture film theory and gosh-wow pseudo-philosophy (could we be living in a matrix reality right now and not even know it?). Just the thing if you don’t like to think of yourself as giving in to mindless entertainment on the big screen. Take a copy of this book with you when you go to the theater, and everyone who notices will know that you’re into that intellectual discourse thing.
Sorry, folks. Sometimes I can’t resist the urge to try to be cute. On a more serious note, the book was planned for release at the same time as the first sequel, The Matrix: Reloaded. That will be old news by the time you read this, but there’s another sequel on the way, so the book works as part of the hype for that too. Unfortunately, to SF readers, there really isn’t much here besides the hype; we’ve seen it all before. Non-SF readers who loved the movies and grabbed the book because of that will discover a great many ideas they’ve never heard of before. (Where have they been?!)
Oh, well. Maybe they’ll become SF readers.
Bitter Waters, Wen Spencer,
ROC, $6.99, 308 pp.
(ISBN: 0451459229).
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The third installment in Wen Spencer’s Ukiah Oregon series–Bitter Waters–may be the best one yet.
The back-story is that centuries ago, the alien Ontogard arrived on Earth, planning to infect local lifeforms and replace their cells with their own. The result of such an infection is a "Get." This is the perfect disguise for an invader. But among the Ontogard was a mutant rebel, Prime. He sabotaged the mission, killing most of the invaders. Before he died himself, he infected a local wolf who became Coyote and in due time infected enough humans to form the Pack, dedicated to warring against Hex, the surviving standard-issue Ontogard villain, and his numerous evil Gets. He also sired on a local woman of the Cayuse tribe our hero, Ukiah Oregon. In Alien Taste, we learned that Ukiah had been a wolf child until caught in a trap and adopted, that he had the ability to detect and analyze DNA the way we might a pungent odor, that when he is injured, lost blood or bits of flesh turn into small animals, and that he can recover from thoroughly mortal wounds. He also doesn’t remember his origins, since memories run away with lost blood or flesh. He recovered some long-lost memories in Tainted Trail, when he and his mentor/partner, Max Bennett, took their PI business, specializing in tracking missing persons, to Oregon.
Now Hex’s Ontogard villains are in retreat, greatly reduced in number. Ukiah is back in Pittsburgh, quite happy to see his son Kittaning (remember those small animals), and the Pack is in the neighborhood, keeping watch. But someone is kidnapping babies, an agent of Homeland Security has questions about a cult whose members carry pictures of Ukiah and Kittaning, and the babies are turning up dead.
Agent Hutchinson is scary because of his source, but he seems a nice enough guy and he’s got his own agenda–he lost his fiancé to the cult. Ukiah and Max are sympathetic but puzzled, until . . .
Who’s that at the door? Just a man with a gun, dear. And yes, that’s Ukiah on the floor, bleeding mice. Kittaning is gone.
And the hunt is on. Ukiah doesn’t take long to come back from the dead once more, and as soon as the kidnappers send a ransom note with a caterpillar that used to be Kittaning’s finger, Our Hero can start tracking, right to the cult’s doorstep and a frightening discovery–the cult is using an Ontogard bioweapon as an aphrodisiac.
A bit of detective work discovers that the Ontogard once stashed secret bioweapons in a high-security storage facility. Those weapons are now gone, and the case is no longer just about Kittaning. The fate of humanity is at stake, and after a couple of dramatic chase scenes and major explosions, it still is.
Spencer has at least one more installment to go, and she just keeps getting better.
Poul Anderson leads into For Love and Glory by saying that in 1990 and 1991, he wrote a pair of stories for the "Isaac’s Universe" series. In due time, he decided he wanted to file off the serial numbers, rename the characters, the places, and even the alien species, keeping the originals as two episodes in a novel about several "spacefaring species, who come upon relics of unknown predecessors."
That seems a pretty thin description, so let’s meet the characters. Lissa is a human woman from Asborg, daughter of a wealthy, powerful family, who hies off on research expeditions to places like Jonna. Her companion is Karl, her name for a tyrannosaurian alien who speaks through a voder. On Jonna, they spot an anomaly and rush to investigate, only to find Hebo, a centuries-old human male, and Dzesi, a felinoid alien, sitting on top of a Forerunner artifact that is actually working. Not that they can tell what it’s doing . . . It certainly doesn’t seem to be interested in helping Hebo rein in his grabbier impulses.
So Hebo gets his finder’s fee and goes to Earth for a memory-scrub. Lissa returns to Asborg, until Orichalc, defector from the ophidian Susaians, shows up with word of something both mysterious and BIG developing way out yonder. For his help he wishes only a bit of real estate for his coreligionists, who are cruelly persecuted back home.
The mystery turns out to be a pair of black holes on collision course, and Lissa and her colleagues must negotiate with some rather prickly Susaians before they can intrude on the scene.
In due time, Hebo resurfaces, presents an audacious proposal on slim evidence, and nearly provokes a war before discovering some surprising truths about Forerunners, Earth, and even romance. Anderson is as always competent and readable, and if this lacks the verve of his past work, it remains well above much else being published today.
It is a sad thought that if Anderson were still alive, he might be working on a sequel.
Memory,
Linda Nagata,
TOR, $26.95, 416 pp.
(ISBN: 0312877218).
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In Memory, Linda Nagata takes nanotechnology in new and quite interesting directions.
At least, I think it’s nanotech. The world of the tale is cursed not with the infamous "gray goo" problem, but with "the silver," which rises from the ground at night like fog. If it touches a human (or "player"–vide Shakespeare, perhaps), that human vanishes. So do buildings, and even landscapes. But the silver also leaves "follies" behind–ruins, buildings, even cities, which may be dreams of the goddess, or the memory of the world, of a past that is many thousands of years deep. People live in "temples" protected by "kobolds," devices that grow in certain patches of soil, somehow spawned by the silver. The silver also affects the people, for they are quite literally reborn, not with memories of past lives, but definitely with stores of knowledge gained in past lives, which need only be awakened by exposure. And each has but one true lover, who may be half a world away. Many perforce live out their lives without a mate, at least until they can be reborn again.
Does this sound like an intriguing place to live? I think so, for despite its obvious hazards, it has charm and mystery in plenty. Now meet Jubilee. She is only ten when her older brother Jolly is eaten by the silver. A few years later, she hears of her lover in a land far away. A little later, on a night when the silver is rising and Jubilee is watching from the wall of her home temple, a stranger emerges unharmed from the silver and asks after her brother, as if Jolly is not dead, but merely lost. He also says he is Jolly’s father now, as if Jubilee’s father is now dead.
And so he is, eaten by the silver like his son.
Mysteries indeed. It is supposed to be impossible to pass through the silver unscathed–though there are tales out of legend. Jubilee enters the market (a sort of cyberspace) and learns that her stranger has been seen before and even has a name, Kaphiri. Before long she is on a quest for answers that will bring her face to face with the flawed history of her world, with a villain who wants nothing more than the end of all, and with a destiny that has awaited her for many lives.
Jubilee is an appealing character, and her world needs her desperately. But she has needs too, and it is a sad moment for the reader when it becomes clear that those needs must go unmet.
As usual, Nagata gives us an excellent read. Look for this one on award ballots.
Tomorrow Happens, David Brin, NESFA Press (P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701), $25, 223 pp. (ISBN: 1886778434).
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The guest of honor at Boskone 40 last February was David Brin. I hadn’t seen him since the early 80s, when he and I and David Gerrold were invited to Miami to brainstorm an "environmental Star Trek" show for the PBS station there. Nothing came of it, but we had a good time, and Boskone was kind enough to give David and me a chance to talk about the incident before an audience. It was interesting to see how well it all fit into David’s writings since then, for environmental concerns are very much at the center of his thinking. Of course, his thinking ranges quite far from that center too! Think of The Transparent Society (reviewed here in December 1999), in which he argued that the battle to preserve our privacy is threatened by increasing powers of surveillance, and our best defense may be reciprocal surveillance, or transparency.
In Tomorrow Happens, the collection NESFA published in honor of his guest-of-honor-ship, Brin displays the breadth of his thinking in twenty essays and short stories, all well worth the reading. As Vernor Vinge says in the introduction, "There are very few issues that escape David’s advocatorial interest. Many of his ideas are in the area of sociobiology, how we may harness the beasts within to be engines for good. Often his ideas are couched in flamboyant and colorful terms [and] contain sidewise thinking that just might make the world a better place."
Which, of course, has a good deal to do with why he was invited to Miami.
Why me is a different question.
The Fermi Paradox is simply stated: If the Universe is full of intelligent species, why haven’t they shown up yet? The idea is that at least some of those species should have been around for quite a long time, and even without faster-than-light travel, they have had plenty of time to spread.
So why haven’t they shown up? Are we in fact alone? Or first? Are the conditions that lead to life and intelligence rare? Are there aliens living in disguise amongst us? Or are we quarantined? Reservationed? Zooed? Or maybe there’s nobody there at all–not even us! (Sure, that could be it–if we are just simulations in some cosmic computer.)
In Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life, physicist Stephen Webb describes Fermi and his paradox in more detail, describes the basic ideas behind the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and lays out a variety of answers that have been suggested–most seriously, some a bit tongue-in-cheek–for why the search has not succeeded. He doesn’t neglect ideas donated by the SF community, such as Vernor Vinge’s Singularity and Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers. Nor does he neglect to offer his own rather bleak opinion, based on the "one gleaming, hard fact in the whole debate: we have not been visited by [extraterrestrial civilizations], nor have we heard from them." With just this one fact to work with, our biases have a great deal of room to work with, and in that work a great many obstacles to the development of a suitably intelligent species have been identified. It may, he says, be very unlikely that any species clears all the hurdles. It may even be so unlikely that only one species has done it.
So far. The Universe has a lot of its history ahead. And now that we’re here, and developing technologies such as genetic engineering, it may not be very long before we are no longer alone. David Brin called this process "Uplift" and got a long series of award-winning novels out of it (though it was the aliens who were doing most of the uplifting). Such a thought could have permitted Webb to end his book on a more positive (uplifting?) note. Instead, he noted that it would be a shame if we did ourselves in, for then "it could be a long, long time before a creature from another species looks up at its planet’s night sky and asks, ‘Where is everybody?’"
In November 2002, I mentioned the Starman Series by "Michael D. Cooper," the team of David Baumann, Jon Cooper, and Mike Dodd. These three gentlemen had waxed nostalgic for the Good Old Days of Tom Swift, Dig Allen, and other boy’s-SF-adventure series novels of half a century ago, in which the villains were capital-E-evil and the heroes were clean-cut, clean-mouthed, and clever, and decided to do something about it. Thus was born the Starman Series, which after the review appeared the authors informed me now runs to five books ($15 each for the first four and $35 for the fifth, The Lost Race of Mars) and a fanzine. I find there are also a fair number of mentions on the Web, including appeals to the SciFi channel to turn them into a show!
Last time, I called the series "good quaint nostalgic fun and a labor of love to boot." It still is, but the books may be hard to find. The series web site (www.starmanseries.com) is a good place to start.
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