Tag Archives: science fiction

summer reading 2020

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Here’s what I read this summer (okay, full disclosure – I started in March):

  • The Stand. I suppose I decided to read The Stand because of Covid-19. Like most Stephen King books I have read (a short list consisting of The Running Man, which he wrote under a pseudonym early in his career and I didn’t actually realize was Stephen King until later, and The Shining, which I decided to read on a whim one Halloween), it wasn’t exactly what I expected, wasn’t as horrifying as I expected, and I thoroughly enjoyed it in the end. I read the extended version, clocking in at over 1200 pages, which includes information he intended to be in there from the beginning that was cut by the original publisher.
  • Futuristic Violence in Fancy Suits. Just dumb, fun escape reading, superhero stuff.
  • The Testaments by Margaret Atwood. Now, I’ve given Margaret Atwood a hard time on this blog before, not that she knows or cares. That was before I read The Handmaid’s Tale, and I take it all back. This is a sequel (actually, it sort of takes place loosely in parallel) to The Handmaid’s Tale. The Handmaid’s Tale is a special book. It’s particularly effective as an audio book, because it is supposed to be the audio testimony of a young woman of unknown fate. It is affecting, because it is something like a slave narrative or The Diary of Anne Frank, and you really identify with the character. Of course, the latter two are real while this is a work of fiction. If you haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale, you need to read it and then reflect on it for awhile before reading The Testaments, but I found The Testaments to be a powerful and affecting book as a supplement.
  • I decided that my theme this summer would be “books by Neal Stephenson”. I started with The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. I was looking for escape fiction and this one is about witches, Vikings and time travel. It is very long, and I got the idea he was just getting wound up at the end. I enjoyed the book.
  • Next in my “Summer of Stephenson” was The Diamond Age. This is a book about nanotechnology. Like many books about post-singularity technology (I’m thinking of Accelerando by Charles Stross, as good an escape fiction writer as any), I just didn’t enjoy it as much as I was expecting. It was hard to follow the plot and hard to relate to the characters. I applaud Mr. Stephenson for writing a different, creative sort of book, but it just wasn’t that fun for me. Mr. Stephenson and Mr. Stross should both talk to Vernor Vinge about how to make far future technology more relatable.
  • Last in my “Summer of Stephenson”, I’m listening to Cryptonomicon, his massive epic about World War II code breaking. It’s an interesting listen, although I tend to listen for a half hour here and there and then be ready for something else. I’m finding it’s good for passing the time on those insomniac nights.
  • Finally, I’m reading The Angle Quickest for Flight by Stephen Kotler. It sounded like a fun Dan Brown type thing, but it is turning out to be not fun for me. It’s a tough slog, but I almost never give up on a book.

In summary – Stephen King, fun, although I am not a “horror fan” per se. Vernor Vinge, fun. Anything by Charles Stross except for Accelerando, fun. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, very fun. Other books by Neal Stephenson, moderately to somewhat fun, although after binging on him for a summer I will probably take an extended break. “Fun” might not be exactly the right word for Margaret Atwood, but Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments are well written and powerful stuff you don’t want to come true. Her MaddAdam trilogy is moderately fun stuff you don’t want to come true, and come to think of it, it kind of closes the loop to where I started with The Stand.

I also watched some of the Netflix series Altered Carbon this summer. It reminded me how incredibly fun that book was, even Snow Crash fun. In fact, I would suggest Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson), Altered Carbon (Richard K. Morgan), and Rainbow’s End (Vernor Vinge) as a very fun cyberpunk trio.

Solaris

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I’ve been revisiting the fantastic descriptions of the alien ocean in Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, and I just want to share one part of one paragraph, which I hope does not constitute a copyright violation. His paragraphs are quite long however.

…if comparisons with Earth really have to be employed – these are formations larger in magnitude than Colorado’s Grand Canyon, modeled in a substance that on the outside has the consistency of jelly and foam (though the foam hardens into vast, brittle garlands, into tracery with immense holes, while some scientists have seen it as “skeletal excrescances”). Within, it turns into an ever firmer substance, like a flexed muscle, but one that quickly, at a depth of fifty feet or so, grows harder than rock, though it retains its elasticity. Extending for several miles between walls that stretch like membranes over a monster’s back and cling to its huge “skeleton” is the actual extensor, a seemingly independent format, like a colossal python that has swallowed an entire mountain chain and is now digesting it in silence, from time to time setting its body in slow, shuddering, fishlike contractions. But this is only what the extensor looks like from above, from the cabin of an aircraft. When you get close enough to it that the walls of the ravine rise hundreds of yards above the plane, the python’s torso turns out to be a moving expanse that stretches all the way to the horizon and is so dizzying it takes on the look of a passively bulging cylinder. The first impression is of a whirl of slick gray-green slime whose layers throw off powerful glints of sunlight; but when the craft hovers right over the surface (at such moments the edges of the ravine in which the extensor is concealed are like heights on either side of a geological depression), it can be seen that the motions are much more complex. They possess their own concentric rotations, darker streams intersect, and at times the outer mantle becomes a mirrored surface reflecting clouds and sky and shot through with loud explosive eruptions of its half-fluid, half-gaseous center. It slowly becomes clear that right below you is the central point of the forces holding up the parted sides that soar high into the sky and are composed of sluggishly crystallizing jelly…

Solaris, Stanislaw Lem

Like I said, that is one part of one paragraph. It goes on like that for a long time. There have been a couple movies, but it really is a case where a few words are worth a thousand pictures, and whatever you picture in your mind is better than anything the most talented movie special effects person could come up with.

May 2020 in Review

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You can’t say that 2020 has not been interesting so far. The Covid-19 saga continued throughout May. I certainly continued to think about it, including a fun quote from The Stand, but my mind began turning to other topics.

 

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • Potential for long-term drought in some important food-producing regions around the globe should be ringing alarm bells. It’s a good thing that our political leaders’ crisis management skills have been tested by shorter-term, more obvious crises and they have passed with flying colors…doh!

Most hopeful story:

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • There are unidentified flying objects out there. They may or may not be aliens, that has not been identified. But they are objects, they are flying, and they are unidentified.

Delta-v

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I recently read Delta V, a near-future space exploration saga by Daniel Suarez. I recommend it as a really entertaining and thought-provoking book. The story is about an expedition to mine an asteroid for water, metals, and other minerals in the early 2030s. There are no technologies in the book that seem implausible – in fact, I would say if anything that the author was conservative and assumed only technology that would be available today. (I’m writing this in 2020, just in case you are an anthropologist reading this in the impossibly distant future.) The story doesn’t have a villain per se other than “investors”, but there is a character that seems to be some combination of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, a sort of semi-villain with redeeming features. The author obviously did a lot of research on the physics, biology, and even chemistry of life in space, so be warned that while being entertained you might learn something by accident.

The Minnesota Diet

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In this short story by Charlie Jane Anders, a relatively near-future (it refers to events “way back in the 2040s”) smart city is beset by supply chain problems with automated trucks that no human can seem to control. It also seems like nobody can leave. I’ll try not to spoil the plot but I’ll just list a few of the technologies woven into the story:

  • automated passenger and freight vehicles. Algorithms seem to determine who gets what in terms of food, and the government is not functional enough to step in. You can rent a car but where it can go depends on its software license.
  • jobs seem to be mostly professional tech and amorphous “business”, plus service jobs to support them. No truck drivers, construction workers, assembly line workers, etc.
  • “bioplastic” seems to be the key building material, produced by crops and/or genetically engineered fungus. Using crop land for this stuff rather than food seems to be part of the problem.
  • augmented reality goggles, but people are also still staring at screens
  • vertical farms producing maybe a sixth of the food supply. These seem to mostly or completely automated.

The title is a reference to the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which was a World War II-era scientific study in which people actually volunteered to (partially) starve and then test out different ways to recover. According to Wikipedia it was a diet of about 1500 calories per day consisting mostly of potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, bread and macaroni for 24 weeks. It actually doesn’t sound all that terrible to me because these are relatively filling, satisfying foods. But 24 weeks sounds like a long, long time. I think I could handle this for 24 days if I was allowed unlimited seasonings and condiments, and maybe a beer or two on Fridays.

bee-delivered pesticides

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Now bees can be directed to deliver pesticides on behalf of humans. It sounds kind of sinister, but it is just a relatively harmless antifungal chemical in this particular application.

On August 28, the EPA approved the first-ever bee-distributed organic pesticide for the US market—a fungus-fighting powder called Vectorite that contains the spores of a naturally occurring fungus called Clonostachys rosea (CR-7). CR-7 is completely harmless to its host plant and acts as a hostile competitor to other, less innocuous fungi. It has been approved for commercial growers of flowering crops like blueberries, strawberries, almonds, and tomatoes.

Mulder and Scully could not be reached for comment at the time of this publication, but we were able to obtain this archived footage.

the singularity is…boring?

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I’ve read a couple near- to mid-term future books this summer that you could describe as being about the singularity. 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson takes place in…well, that’s not too hard to figure out. Humanity has populated most of the solar system, and people are still people but they have various augmentations to their bodies. Artificial intelligence is around although it is not clear just how intelligent it really is. The last book I read by Robinson was Red Mars, and like that book, I find that the world (really, the entire solar system) of his imagination is breathtaking and he describes it very vividly. The passages where he describes what the world is like and how it got that way are fascinating. His actual characters and plots…less fascinating. I just couldn’t get into them or care about them.

Accelerando by Charles Stross is kind of similar. He is pretty explicit that events in his story take place in the near future, say 2030-2100. Things are far more advanced and weird in Stross’s 2050 than Robinson’s 2312. Humanity spreads out to most of the solar system during the course of the book. People have radical augmentations to their minds, and artificial intelligence is a major factor. The world building is fascinating, the passages that describe how the world is changing are fascinating, and…the characters are forgettable, and the actual plot all but incomprehensible. It’s just beyond weird. I think his purpose was just to show what it could be like if things get really weird. Don’t get me wrong, I love Charles Stross. He is an excellent story teller when he wants to be, and I think he has just purposely written a very different kind of book here. Maybe he is just showing off his imagination, which is astonishing. Actually, he writes several different kinds of books, and if I had to randomly read passages from them without prior knowledge of Charles Stross, I would never guess they could be the same author. I’m not sorry I’ve read Accelerando but I’m not sure I would recommend it as light reading.

Let’s digress briefly and talk about dudes named Kim. According to Wikipedia, Kim was a popular boys’ name in the U.S. as recently as the 1960s. I don’t know any men named Kim and I had no idea. And no less a journalistic powerhouse than the Omaha World-Herald has published an exhaustive article on the subject.

One strange common thread between 2012 and Accelerando is the idea of dismantling entire planets and using them as raw materials for enormous computers.

I also read Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan this summer. I didn’t love this book either. And I love Richard K. Morgan. He’s another author that likes to experiment with completely different writing styles and even genres.

One strange common thread between Accelerando and Market Forces is the idea of bringing back some form of dueling or trial by combat to settle disputes between corporations. It’s a strange coincidence – then again, it’s entirely possible these authors talk and occasionally bounce bizarre ideas off each other. Corporations are not people, they exist to compete with each other and only the strong and nimble survive. They don’t need to be treated the same as people.

Strangely enough, after not thinking about dueling for more than five seconds for several decades, I just listened to a Stuff You Should Know podcast on dueling. It occurred to me that maybe dueling did serve one purpose in societies where people do not trust the authorities to administer justice fairly – perhaps it breaks the cycle of revenge. Normally in human societies, if someone wrongs you, a close family member or friend, and there are no civil authorities you trust to administer justice, you are honor bound to seek vengeance. The people you seek vengeance upon will then seek vengeance in return, in an escalating cycle of violence that leads to a lot of suffering and death. Maybe dueling, violent as it was, served a purpose because if your friend or family member was killed fair and square in the duel, justice was served and you were not duty bound to do anything more about it. I’m not saying this is good – the trustworthy civil authorities are the way to go. But one dead body is better than many.

I’m also reading some Agatha Christie, just because I never have. I am liking it but not loving it.

So…hooray for podcasts and boo for books I have picked so far this summer. Oh well, some summer reading binges are more fun than others.

I am actually half-seriously trying to write a novel this year. It’s hard. I just want to get my 80,000 words written down to prove to myself that I can do it. More likely, it will renew my appreciation for the people who do it all the time and are actually good at it.

Harry Reid believes in UFOs

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The truth is out there. Or at least, a lot of pilots have seen some weird things and militaries around the world have serious UFO research programs, according to this 2017 New York Times article. Here are just a few eye-popping quotes:

“I had talked to John Glenn a number of years before,” Mr. Reid said, referring to the astronaut and former senator from Ohio, who died in 2016. Mr. Glenn, Mr. Reid said, had told him he thought that the federal government should be looking seriously into U.F.O.s, and should be talking to military service members, particularly pilots, who had reported seeing aircraft they could not identify or explain…

By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it. “Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access program” limited to a few listed officials.

A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied.

solarpunk

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What is solar punk exactly? I’m not exactly sure, but this story in Longreads describes it like this:

A new type of science fiction, solarpunk takes as its premise the idea that climate change is unavoidable and probably will be severe, but demands optimism of its writers. A 2015 essay on the genre’s political ideals and inspirations by Andrew Dana Hudson refers to solarpunk as a “speculative movement, a collaborative effort to imagine and design a world of prosperity, peace, sustainability and beauty, achievable with what we have from where we are.” In practice, so far this has meant a bunch of short fiction and visual art, numerous explanatory essays, and a lot of enthusiastic conversation on social media and in online communities. But those associated with it tend to hold out hope that solarpunk could be a starting point for something bigger, something that could help propel a shift away from our contemporary sense of defeatism.

The article mentions a couple short story anthologies:

half the world’s power from the Sahara

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There’s a big idea to provide half the world’s energy from solar panels in the Sahara desert, using the actual desert sand as a raw material to manufacture the panels. An interesting article in Science says that wind and solar farms on such a large scale could actually change the local weather drastically by altering wind and surface temperatures, ultimately increasing rainfall and allowing more vegetation in the desert.

In this study, we used a climate model with dynamic vegetation to show that large-scale installations of wind and solar farms covering the Sahara lead to a local temperature increase and more than a twofold precipitation increase, especially in the Sahel, through increased surface friction and reduced albedo. The resulting increase in vegetation further enhances precipitation, creating a positive albedo–precipitation–vegetation feedback that contributes ~80% of the precipitation increase for wind farms. This local enhancement is scale dependent and is particular to the Sahara, with small impacts in other deserts.

Could this work on Mars? I guess not, because you don’t have the water vapor in the atmosphere to begin with. Unless you get that alien ice breaker thing from Total Recall (the 1990 version, again, I don’t recognize the 2012 version’s right to exist) – why do I keep coming back to this movie?