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Category Archives: Science Fiction/Fantasy

Accelerando Resources

19 Tuesday Jun 2012

Posted by John in Charles Stross, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Teaching Resources, The Singularity

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I regularly promote Charles Stross’ novel Accelerando which traces three generations of the Manx family as we pass into the Singularity. It’s one of my favorite SF novels. I’m currently rereading it and stumbled upon the Accelerando Technical Companion, a glossary of various concepts and terms in the novel, useful for even some regular SF readers and a godsend for anyone teaching the book.

You haven’t read Accelerando? You should give it a try. In fact, Stross offers it for free download in the following formats: ePub, MobiPocket, Aportis, and Rich Text Format.

And You Think You’ve Got Copyright Issues

18 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by John in Science Fiction/Fantasy, The Singularity

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Back on World IP Day, I argued that as part of our reflection on “how patents, copyright, trademarks and designs impact on daily life,” the point of World IP Day, we should consider “the original purpose of copyright laws and concept of intellectual property, we should consider how the concepts of copyright and intellectual property as products of the printing press are modern creations which post-date Shakespeare, and we should consider how vastly the concepts of copyright and intellectual property have changed during their few hundred year history.” Among other things, I noted, we should reflect upon the fact that the first copyright law in the United States, passed in 1790, granted a creator a copyright of 14 years plus an additional 14 years if they exercised their right of renewal, and its purpose was to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” In contrast, today individual copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years and corporate copyright lasts for 120 years.

This matters for many reasons and it may matter far more than we currently realize. Consider, for a moment, a posthuman future1

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  1. Or at least the brave new future of lobsters. [↩]

Charles Stross on SF as the Literature of Big Ideas

26 Saturday May 2012

Posted by John in Charles Stross, Science Fiction/Fantasy

≈ 1 Comment

A couple of days ago I pointed to Lev Grossman’s discussion of genre fiction vs. literary fiction, which was written for his weekly book column in Time. Among the things Grossman takes issue with is the charge that genre fiction is escapist. Since I’ve been known to take issue with this claim as well, I note with some bemusement that Charles Stross, one of my favorite SF authors, has suggested in a recent blog post that most science fiction is escapist. It’s not the focus of Stross’ piece, however, so I’ll set the issue aside for another day.

Stross’ blog post “SF, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done?” is a slightly revised version of an essay he wrote in response to a SF Signal Mind-meld question of whether or not SF is still the genre of big ideas. Specifically, they asked, “Are SF writers “slacking off” or is science fiction still the genre of “big ideas”? If so, what authors are supplying these ideas for the next generation of scientists and engineers?” As is clear from SF Signal page, the question has its origins in Neal Stephenson World Policy Journal article “Innovation Starvation,” in which Stephenson argues that SF is in a dystopian rut and is, therefore, no longer serving to inspire future scientists and engineers as SF did during the Golden Age.1 As with all SF Signal Mild Meld forums, multiple SF authors respond to the question, so Stross’ essay is but one of many responses, which means you really should visit both SF Signal discussion as well as Stross’ blog.

In the essay, Stross argues that SF has not really been the genre of big ideas although there have been big ideas within SF from time to time, and that SF has been “spinning its wheels” for some time now with only cyberpunk and the singularity being its only innovative subjects in the past 30 years. Furthermore, he argues that the really big ideas authors in SF are largely ignored. (I’ll leave you to read the piece to see who they are.)

Ultimately, Stross argues that the big problem SF faces today is that the sense of wonder it is so good at evoking is becoming harder and harder to engage. He explains:

We’re living in the frickin’ 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980. (Definitely than in 1970.) We’re carrying out this Mind Meld via the internet, and if that isn’t a 1980s cyberpunk vision that’s imploded into the present, warts and all, I don’t know what is. Seriously: to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF.

We people of the SF-reading ghetto have stumbled blinking into the future, and our dirty little secret is that we don’t much like it.

Stross ends his essay asking a different question: “If SF’s core message (to the extent that it ever had one) is obsolete, what do we do next?”Both his essay and the responses from readers which follow are well worth reading.

  1. The Hieroglyph Project was started, in part, in response to Stephenson’s critique of current SF. [↩]

Lev Grossman on Genre Fiction vs. Literary Fiction

23 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by John in English Studies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

≈ 1 Comment

Lev Grossman, book critic and technology writer for TIME, defends genre fiction today in his weekly book column, which he wrote in response to Arthur Krystal’s New Yorker piece “Easy Writers.” In “Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology,” Grossman begins by agreeing with Krystal that there is a distinction between literary and genre fiction, and then takes Krystal to task for characterizing as overly relying upon cliché while simultaneously invoking the biggest cliché of all: that genre fiction is escapism.1

The two big points I take away from Grossman’s piece, points I have commented on myself when I talk this issue with friends, is that (1) genre fiction writers have made plot their art form and that the best of them far surpass anything done in literary fiction, and (2) the borders between literary and genre fiction are increasingly blurring as literary fiction writers draw from genre fiction and genre fiction writers draw from literary fiction.2 To give you a flavor of what Grossman argues and how he does so, here’s a few passages:

On Krystal’s charge of escapism:

Being as how Krystal busts genre writers for using clichés in their prose, I think it’s only fair play to scold him a little for relying so heavily what has become a critical cliché. In my experience at least, to dismiss genre fiction as escapism is to seriously under-think what happens when someone opens a genre novel. According to the escapist theory, people read genre fiction to leave behind the cares and sorrows of reality — a genre novel is, in Krystal’s words, “a narrative cocktail that helps us temporarily forget the narratives of our own humdrum lives.” It’s like we’re sucking on a literary pacifier: genre readers ‘simply want the comfort of a familiar voice recounting a story they that they hadn’t quite heard before.”

On the subject of plot:

It’s hard to talk about what plot does, but that’s not the fault of genre fiction. If anything it’s because criticism has failed the genre novel. Most of the critical vocabulary we have for talking about books is geared to dealing with dense, difficult texts like the ones the modernists wrote. It’s designed for close-reading, for translating thick, worked prose into critical insights, sentence by sentence and quote by quote, not for the long view that plot requires. But plot is an extraordinarily powerful tool for creating emotion in readers. It can be used crudely, but it’s also capable of fine nuance and even intellectual power, even in the absence of serious, Fordian prose. The emotions and ideas plot evokes can be huge and dramatic but also complex and subtle and intimate. The things that writers like Raymond Chandler or Philip Pullman or Joe Abercrombie do with plot are utterly exquisite. I often find that the complexity of the narratives in genre fiction makes the narratives in literary novels look almost amateur by comparison. Look at George R.R. Martin: no literary novelist now writing could orchestrate a plot the way he does. Even if you grant that the standards for writing and characterization in genre fiction are lower than in literary fiction, the standards for plotting are far, far higher.

And, finally, on the blurring of boundaries between literary and genre fiction:

There’s a vast blurry middle ground in between genre fiction and literary fiction that’s notably absent from Krystal’s essay. Cormac McCarthy now writes about serial killers and post-apocalyptic worlds. Michael Chabon writes about alternate realities and hard-boiled detectives. Philip Roth writes alternate history. Kazuo Ishiguro writes about clones. Colson Whitehead writes about zombies. Kate Atkinson writes mysteries. Jennifer Egan writes science fiction, as does Haruki Murakami (and as did David Foster Wallace). And on and on. (The borrowing happens the other way, too: writers like Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, Catherynne Valente, John Green, Susanna Clarke, Richard Price and China Miéville, to name a very few, are gleefully importing literary techniques into genre novels, to marvelous effect.) Krystal brings up Gary Shteyngart and his  love of Zardoz (not the movie, oddly, but the novelisation thereof), but what he doesn’t mention is that Shteyngart’s last novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is science fiction. These days, I find, literary novelists are much more interested in plot and much less interested in plausibility, or in realism, than literary critics are.

There’s far more to the essay that what I’ve quoted above. Go read it. It’s well worth your time whether you’re a fan of literary fiction, genre fictions, or both.

  1. Krystal relies upon a number of other commonplaces of the topic: genre fiction is poorly written, it is superficial in its presentation of society and the human condition, etc. Grossman responds, “What he’s describing sounds more like shitty genre fiction. […]. God knows there’s plenty of bad writing in literary fiction, too, but Krystal never talks about that. The badness tends to be a different kind of badness — slow, earnest, lugubrious prose, or too-clever and self-conscious prose — but bad it nonetheless is. You wouldn’t want to judge literary fiction on the basis of its mediocrities. So why judge genre fiction that way?” [↩]
  2. He also touches upon my favorite rant: “And to say that such books ‘transcend’ the genres they’re in is bollocks, of the most bollocky kind. As soon as a novel becomes moving or important or great, critics try to surgically extract it from its genre, lest our carefully constructed hierarchies collapse in the presence of such a taxonomical anomaly.” [↩]

Of Time Machines and Memory, Part 2

02 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by John in Cognitive Studies, Memory, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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[Note: You may find this post less confusing if you first read “Of Time Machines and Memory, Part 1.” Among other things, I explain the difference between author Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (aka, the novel) and character Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (aka, the handbook).]1

From the handbook’s entry on the TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device, which is the means by which people in Minor Universe 31 travel through time:

One notable quirk of the word recreational in the product’s name, which can be read either of two ways, with a hyphen or without, which some have suspected to be an implicit acknowledgement of the fact that “recreational” use of the machine is also, in a sense, “re-creational” use as well.

This idea is consistent with the current understanding of the neuronal mechanism of human memory, i.e., every time a user recalls a memory, he is not only remembering it, but also, from an electrochemical perspective, literally re-creating the experience as well.

Memory and imagination, recreation and creation, both seem to be intimately tied. Consider, for instance, these three passages, the first two from Mary Carruthers The Craft of Thought (( The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400 – 1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. )) :

The emphasis upon the need for human beings to ‘see’ their thoughts in their mind as organized schemata of images, or ‘pictures,’ and then to use them for further thinking, is a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic rhetoric, with significant interest even for our own contemporary understanding of the role of images and thinking. (Craft of Thought 3)

and

Medieval memoria thus includes, in our terms, “creative thought,” but not thoughts created “out of nothing.” It built upon remembered structures “located” in one’s mind as patters, edifices, grids, and — most basically — association-fabricated networks of “bits” in one’s memory that must be “gathered” into an idea.  (Craft of Thought 23)

and the third from Mark Johnson’s “The Imaginative Basis of Meaning and Cognition”2 :

According to the view I am espousing, we must understand imaginative activity as including all sensory modalities, motor programs, and even abstract acts of cognition such as the drawing of inferences. In this very broad sense, imaginative activity is the means by which an organism constructs an ordering of its perceptions, motor skills, and reflective acts, as it seeks to accommodate itself to its environment. Imagination, so understood, thus includes the full range of organizing activities, from the forming of images (in different sensory modalities), to the execution of motor programs, to the manipulation of abstract representations, and even to the creation of novel orderings. (79)

All of this is quite interesting in light of research which finds that scene construction is a shared process common to both episodic memory and the creation of fictional experiences as reported by Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran, and Eleanor A. Maguire in “Using Imagination to Understand the Neural Basis of Episodic Memory”3:

Functional MRI (fMRI) studies investigating the neural basis of episodic memory recall, and the related task of thinking about plausible personal future events, have revealed a consistent network of associated brain regions. […]. By using previously imagined fictitious experiences as a comparison for episodic memories, we identified the neural basis of a key process engaged in common, namely scene construction, involving the generation, maintenance and visualization of complex spatial contexts. […]. We conclude that scene construction constitutes a common process underlying episodic memory and imagination of fictitious experiences, and suggest it may partially account for the similar brain networks implicated in navigation, episodic future thinking, and the default mode.  [Read full abstract.]

All of this seems to suggest that the active creation of one’s own mnemonic images is an important mnemonic practice, something we’ve already known. In other words, this is really just a post connecting contemporary cognitive research to long-established mnemonic practices.

  1. Note: The first quote of this post has been sitting around for a few weeks in draft form. At one point, I thought I had something to say about it, but I only have the vaguest notion of what it might have been. As that’s the case, I’m releasing this to the wild, juxtaposed with a few additional quotes in the hopes that something will eventually emerge. [↩]
  2.  Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation. Ed. Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 74-86  [↩]
  3. The Journal of Neuroscience, 26 December 2007, 27(52): 14365-14374 [↩]

Of Time Machines and Memory, Part 1

01 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by John in Memory, Science Fiction/Fantasy

≈ 1 Comment

Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.

I.e., it is possible, in principle, to construct a universal time machine from no other components than (i) a piece of paper that is moved in two directions through a recording element backward and forward, which (ii) performs only two basic operations, narration and the straightforward application of the past tense. — Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu’s novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is about a Charles Yu, a time travel technician who lives in Minor Universe 31. In the novel, the character Charles Yu writes the fictional book How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which is part time travel technical manual, part autobiography. Excerpts from the fictional How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe are scattered throughout the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. In this post, I’ll refer to the fictional book the character Charles Yu writes as “the handbook” and the novel as the “novel.”1

The above quote, one such passage from the handbook, strikes a chord. Looking beyond the conceit that a book can itself a time machine, I’m struck by the claim that it takes memory and regret to produce time travel as this suggests that the recollection of contentedness and regret, positive and negative experience, are manifestly different in kind. If recollection is always remembering past experience, why would the recollection of unhappy memories, recollection of moments of regret, be a form of time travel while the recollection of positive experiences—happy memories—not be so? It may be that while the recollection of positive events, like social memory, has to do with identity and sense of self and, therefore, present-focused, regret, like trauma, is past-focused, a past moment that seeks to draw you back into your past.

Still trying to puzzle out what, if anything, this might mean from the perspective of memoria beyond the obvious connection to the rhetorical use of pathos.

  1.  As a side note, in the process of composing this post, I found it refreshing to read Ander Monson’s NYTbook review of the novel, “Living in Your Head,” because it is a NYT review of a science fiction novel that doesn’t feel the need to apologize for reviewing a science fiction novel. Sadly, I suspect this has much more to do with the fact that Charles Yu is an award-winning author of literary fiction who has chosen to write a science fiction novel rather than because the NYT has come to terms with science fiction. I’m reminded here of Tom Shippey’s argument in his Forward to J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century that science fiction and fantasy are mainstream and everything else is genre. [↩]
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