Still Not Quite
Posted on | July 26, 2010 | No Comments
In the meantime, things happened and plowing through my RSS feeds I’ve noticed that although everyone and their grandmother picked up on Craig Venter and his synthetic bug – and who-ho, if it wasn’t the talk of the planet for a whole 15 minutes – and some even picked up on the LIFE replicator that turns out to be a horribly fancy glider, but a lot of intriguing stuff seems to have simply flown underneath the radar.
There was news about old stuff, about future stuff, really huge stuff and really tiny stuff. There was some stuff that is so abstruse I forgot why I bookmarked it and now I don’t understand a word from that article. There was also really simple stuff debunking some long-believed myths. There are some potential game-changers and some truly freaky blindsightish stuff, along with a healthy dose of humor nature directed against human pomposity.
So there, I’ve dumped it all. I’ve cleaned out the bookmarks and saved those I intend to use in writing that damn first novel (never), so hopefully I’ve set procrastination loose and the only thing to battle is work. Which, due to my unfortunate predilection for food and shelter, is not likely to go away any time soon.
Tags: ancient art > blindsight > crawl > life > news > organic transistors > photonics > serotonin > stellar crash > still alive > structure of matter > supermassive black hole > surgery > update
(Post * Post) Colonialities
Posted on | March 15, 2010 | No Comments
I will never trust a Boingboing! book recommendation again.
The incessant recommendations for Doctorow’s work are understandable and three books later, I learned to just say no to the self-hyping and avoid the heaps of propaganda layered with shallow plot and even shallower characters. I was intrigued by how they hyped Sterling, again, understandable since he is “Chairman Bruce” and all, but they just kept at it even when most everyone concluded how Caryatids was, frankly, shyte. Having encountered several of Sterling’s post-Schismatrix works, I knew enough already to avoid that book, but like a moth to the flame I just keep getting suckered back in by the shiny boing-beads.
At this point I was seriously wary of their recommendations, so I started cross-referencing them with other sources and, about a year ago, gave Ian McDonald a chance. They kept talking about River of Gods and Brasyl so much that I picked up the former and, to be honest, I was hooked. It was an awesome experience, though the ending did descend a bit into tropeland, but still, near-future India and the juxtaposition of that ancient place and modern technologies seemed like a beautiful execution of the gibsonian quip on how “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed”. Then I tried the “sort-of-prequel/sequel” Cyberabad Days but somehow it just would not hold my attention. No biggie, Brasyl was waiting, and I dipped straight into it, only to be hit by such empty rubbish descending into “news-of-the-week” deus-ex resolution space that I was, frankly, revolted, and a bit of that revulsion even managed to retroactively taint River of Gods.
We are dealing with a book on Brazil, which is sort of a red flag right off the bat, as if the author decided to make the rounds of third-world overpopulated countries and dig into the local stereotypes for fun and profit. I fully expect him to do either Mexico City or Hong Kong next, followed by Johannesburg (although he might opt for a different city in Africa, due to the unexpected success of District 9). To boot, he then throws in subplots unfolding in favelas and on beaches, involving football goalies and a young lass effectively utilizing capoeira in self-defense… the shriek of “steeeereeeeeeotypeeeeee” was already deafening, even without the other subplot involving a 19th century missionary priest in the jungle and a godawful play on the simulation argument that was already done (and as far as I’m concerned, overdone) by Robert Charles Wilson several years ago…
His insisting how capoeira was such an effective means of fighting simply kept poking me in the eye throughout, wrecking my suspension of disbelief and making it obvious that we are dealing with an armchair tourist writing about something he does not, in fact, know. I guess he was going for “flashy” instead of effective, since he could have went with a different stereotype there, sticking with a very Brazilian and very effective martial art – Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, but I guess sweaty dudes humping on the floor makes for crappier mental images than a lithe pixie doing spinning hand-stands with flashing knives in hand.
So McDonald ended up tainted by a miasma of armchairism, and from now on will warrant a far more careful approach to his works, even though his style did have me hooked (yes, I love unnecessary flourishes and wordplay). I sat down by the keyboard, opened up the admin panel for Screaming Planet and typed the title to this post, then the phone rang, or someone asked me something, or some urgent work needed to be done and that was that, until I fell prey to the hype once more and picked up Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigialupi. Biopunk! Dystopia! Book of the year! They dang well got me, particularly with that nifty cover with the elephant (megodont… whatever) and zeppelins and whatnot.
A hundred pages in and I was not hooked at all. Quite the opposite, the book was boring me to death, and not because of a lack of action (although, in fact, nothing really happens in the first hundred pages or so, bar a brief industrial accident), but the sheer pretentiousness of it in slogging through a poorly constructed world reeking of inconsistencies and stereotypes was seriously breaking some deals. The shifty great white hunter liberating a Japanese hypergeisha from slavery to a local crime lord, battling a Thai muay-thai fighter and struggling with an (also) shifty yet wizened old Chinese man who thinks of all foreigners as “foreign devils”… it just goes on.
The true problem is that books like these are being touted as the pinnacle of the genre, “literary” books ripe for the mainstream. Awards (or at least nominations) are being tossed at them in troves for seemingly being worldly and dealing with “other perspectives”, yet these books are nothing more than poorly thought-out travelogues of white people working with second or third hand information on cultures they never actually experienced (or at best, experienced as tourists). Despite most people teaching humanistics in academia these days being pretentious tossers, these writers, and those heaping accolades at them should sit down for a good helping of Colonialism 101, in order to avoid embarrassing outbursts such as the recently controversial column by Norman Spinrad in Asimov’s, claiming that on the one hand, authors writing of alien cultures as outsiders is colonial, yet writers assuming that they can write from perspectives inside other cultures is not. This may be so with cultures that are made-up and therefore we can have no ways of verifying whether they are doing a good job, but with cultures that are real, when one detects cracks in the veneer regarding aspects one is intimately familiar with (such as the aforementioned case of capoeira), this brings the credibility of the entire book and the author in serious question.
As the good old saying goes, “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
Tags: bacigialupi > boingboing > brasyl > collonialism > credibility > doctorow > mcdonald > river of gods > Science Fiction > sf > stereotypes > sterling > windup girl
Je T’aime, Petite Croissant
Posted on | February 26, 2010 | 1 Comment
Like clockwork, every morning at 8:30, amid the wafting scent of olive ciabattas and glazed panini, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin moan and groan as they engage in simulated sodomy. My representative sample is not exact and there was most certainly no double-blind study involved, since I don’t arrive to the bakery at the exact same time every day, but nevertheless the frequency with which I purchase pastry and yogurt to the sound of buttsecks is unsettling. Is that like a wake-up song on a local radio station? Or do they only have a single approved CD that they play incessantly hitting the sexy spot every hour on the half-hour mark? If so, I can only pity the poor employees and perchance hatch a plot to exploit them manchu-candidate style.
On a croissant-related note, it would seem that a few major news sources from the west have caught up to the fact that with Constellation now dead, it would seem that the sole player left in the race to return to the Moon is China. This is a situation intriguing from multiple points, not the least of those ideological – China is one of the surviving sociopolitical systems of the sixties still kickin’ it with the same intensity. The western capitalism vs. Soviet communism dichotomy went to the shitter and morphed into a tangled undecipherable mess where ideologies are all over the place. China, along with similar-minded but resource-wise inferior states like North Korea, is the type of country where doing something for the prestige of it or simply to use it as a focal point for national unity would seem to be a valid motivation. Sort of panem et circenses for the early XXI century. Other countries are poking around up there as well, but none of them seem to be moving towards sending canned-monkeys into the Moon’s gravity well, and the fact that they are mostly neighbors with China and therefore, like all neighbors, in rather, ahem, delicate relationships, makes potential cooperation unlikely.
Of course, the Chinese themselves are in no hurry. Western media is grappling with ill-translated and even iller-understood proclamations from Chinese officials, trying to decipher whether the Moon-shot was canceled, planned not to happen, or simply not on the schedule yet. For the moment a recurrence of the space-race is highly improbable, since China is taking things one step at a time – first conduct unmanned exploration, and then see about getting men up there, and then see about building a permanent moonbase, all of this while in the west we seem to be obsessed about collecting reasons why sending people into space is not going to happen. While I’m not holding my breath (ten+ years would be one hell of a bout of apnea) and am fully aware that most space opera and even most hard-SF flies straight out the window when considering the realities of living in space, it would seem that it is not yet time to forget the idea of monkeys in space. Even if it might be time to forget the idea of western democracy conquering the final frontier.
Tags: china > constellation > ideologies > moon > moon mission > moonbase > Science > space exploration
Not a Sparrow Shall Fall
Posted on | February 16, 2010 | 1 Comment
And wouldn’t you know it, nigh on four years ago, Brad Pitt purchased the rights for himself to play the central character of the Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz. Having not read it at the time, I failed to notice this tidbit, but now cannot help but wonder how he will handle the surprise buttsecks bit. Oh? Whazzat? Spoilers? Don’t worry, the buggering comes in early and so the spoilage is minimal.
The book? Whew. I’ll skip the brief plot overview – Jesuits in space, making first contact, yaddayadda – and instead poke around its intriguing mix of almost credible verisimilitude and ultimate naïveté (gotta love those diacritics). I am having a really hard time delineating the two. After all, one of the subjects of the book is the constant dialogue on whether the events at hand are the work of divine will or mere random happenstance. If the former were true, there can be no quarrel with the seemingly improbable coincidences and slight utilization of handwavium, though the question of Epicurean theodicy would weigh heavily upon such a deity, as indeed, it does throughout the book’s framing for the prodigious flashbacks.
Should, however, the latter be the case, the flashbacks themselves become troublesome, with their attempts at imagining a viable method of interstellar travel and extraterrestrial life and civilizations falling just a pinch too short, thereby all the more to poke the discerning and scientifically minded reader in the eye (much akin to a slight, but unwavering toothache). This weighs heavy on segments of the book wherein the plot does little to advance, opting instead to linger on so nearly plausible yet entirely unfeasible technical details – a true crime for such a weighty tome.
In the end, though somewhat overlong, the book is quite satisfactory if you set out for a balanced discussion on the merits and place of religion in the world, divorced from both kinds of extreme fundamentalism. I know where I stand on the issue, but “The Sparrow” illuminates an “opposing” side that I can understand and live peacefully alongside, without considering it’s proponents, as is often the case in the real world, somewhat stupid fur uncritically buying into bronze-age bicameral fairy tales.
If however, you are looking for a plotty sci-fi romp around the stars or a light book to flip through on the beach, steer clear. This one makes you think, and pauses frequently to do so itself.
Tags: aliens > book review > first contact > jesuits > novel > seti > sf > sparrow
Life Without Walls
Posted on | February 12, 2010 | 2 Comments
Being an avid SF reader inundated with ideas of the singularity, of alternate planes and modes of existence, I frequently skip over seemingly more mundane cognitive shifts that, doubled-back upon, actually dig really, really deep into our preconceptions. For example, dwelling on the fact that potentially 63% of the total mass in the Universe might lie in the hidden sectors, with a mere 12% of it being actual atoms, and the totality of mass in the Universe is a mere 28% of its total contents (the rest being that dreamily mysterious dark energy stuff), one might think that we are ever so focused on finding non-terrestrial human-comprehensible chemical life in a rather puny segment of the potentiality. There are suggestions that, in these deliberations, scale, or even level of complexity might be used as an extra dimension, not merely as another version of “distance” but an actual dimension to be inhabited by life. There are also imagined worlds filled with life lying within substrates of varied levels of abstraction and “embeddedness” – from Egan’s wang carpet wavefront to Rucker’s denizens of mathematical sub-scaffolding of reality as we know it.
Of course, discussions on just what life is don’t seem to be drawing to a conclusion, but on this issue, I am of the opinion that “when we see it, we’ll know”, and even if we go for a stricter definition, I think the working collection of properties can be named pretty easily: replexity, fidelity, evolvability… either way you go, it’s a finite set of verifiable properties.
Stepping back a bit from the wild imaginarium of frontier thinkers and popping back into reality, an interesting bubble that got popped for me today was the idea of life having to deal with discrete packages of… living stuff. To be more specific – cells. I was pretty tightly locked into a mindset where imagining life of any kind involved thinking of discrete self-enclosed packages of replication, but of course, there is no a priori reason for this other than our being preconditioned by the fact that all life as we know it is cell-based, discrete in nature, with the primordial soup being a mere precursor for “life proper”. However, even as we speak there are people looking into ways to create in vitro artificial chemical life free from this constraint, based on the knowledge that although “… life-as-we-know-it requires membranous cellular compartments, but it can passage through an unencapsulated protoplast form (Kim et al. 2001), and any process for splitting and pooling the “soup” would suffice theoretically (e.g., rock cavities [Robinson 2005], tidal pools, and billabongs).” [source]
Apart from that wonderful word – and oh how “billabong” just bounces around the mouth – the real kicker is that these self-replicating sludgy soups are on a steady path to becoming reality right now, and having actual applications in our everyday lives – the chief among those being aimed at right now are pollution remediation and synthesis of drugs and plastics and, hey, why not, production of a sustainable replacement for naphta. Kickstart a sun-lit pool of sploogie into self replication, add the necessary base ingredients, and just sieve off that A-life diesel.
Hoping, all the while, that we don’t spill some where we shouldn’t and accidentally kick off a ßehemoth scenario, leaving us with no blade of grass. That is, unless it happens all on its own anyway.
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- sweet zombie jesus, this is attempted homicide. six sticks of grilled sausage with onions and fries in this sweat? time for a heroic charge. #
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