Stranger in a Strange Land (a book review post)

I feel like I'm a little late to the Heinlein game.
Which is silly.
But, for someone who grew up reading all the sci-fi/fantasy he could get his hands on, it makes me feel like I'm late.
What makes it silly, though, is that even if I'd read this when I was a teenager, I would have been reading it decades after it was originally published. Can you really be late to the game with fiction? Unless you're trying to be in on the cultural zeitgeist game, but that's a totally different thing.

At any rate, I'm not sure reading this when I was younger would have necessarily been a good idea. I was a pretty hard-line Fosterite all the way through my 20s. Oh, wait, I mean Southern Baptist. Not that Fosterite equals Southern Baptist specifically, but it certainly equates to any of the Evangelical denominations. Probably all the Protestant denominations. There's every chance I would have dismissed the book as blasphemous and been done with it.

Or, maybe, it would have helped to yank the stick out of my ass.
I guess we'll never know.
"Waiting is...," as Mike would say it, and I think I've read it at a fairly appropriate time in my life.

What I want to say about Stranger in a Strange Land is that it's barely science fiction, but that's not really true. To paraphrase Mary Doria Russell's response when her book, The Sparrow, was referred to as not really being sci-fi, "It has spaceships and aliens!" And so Stranger does have spaceships and aliens. But the sci-fi wrapper is to cover the philosophy underneath. Which is, actually, totally okay. Asimov said something about sci-fi being the perfect genre in which to write about anything.

Or, in this case, everything. Almost everything. It's a philosophy of... the world. A view of how things could be if we could just... get along? Love each other? His name is Valentine, after all. I don't want to be spoilery and say what kind of figure Michael Valentine Smith is, so I'll say, instead, that the first thing I thought of, the other first thing I thought of, was Billy Budd, Sailor. Billy Budd and Smith are very similar figures, at least in my vague memory of Billy Budd, which I haven't read in decades. Since most of you probably haven't even heard of Billy Budd, I'm not really spoiling anything, right?

But did I like it? I'm sure that's the question you're all dying to know the answer to, probably in some very human rushed sort of way, wanting me to get on with it. But that's not very Martian, you grok?

Yes, it's a very interesting and engrossing book.You can tell by how quickly this review is following after my last review. [And shut up to you people who are pointing out that it's been a full month since my last review! For me, especially recently, I flew through this book!] It's good. In fact, it's very good. I especially enjoyed the character of Jubal Harshaw; I suspect he's a personification of Heinlein himself, though I don't really know anything about Heinlein so that supposition could be completely baseless.

That said, the book does have a few issues, the first one being the way the lead female character is referred to by the male characters early in the book. They pretty regularly call her "little girl" or "baby girl," something which made me extremely uncomfortable. And, like I said, I'm completely unfamiliar with Heinlein, this being the first book I've read by him, so I don't know if this is a Heinlein issue or not. Or it could have been purposeful and for effect since the main male characters quit that behavior as they... well, as they become more evolved due to their experience with Smith. So is it an issue? I don't know, but I bet he wouldn't write it that way if he were writing it today.
Or would he..."

The real issue I have with the book, though minor, is a story issue. And this is what you could call mildly spoilery, so you've been warned.

Mike grew up on Mars. On Mars, dead Martians hang around after they're dead and, really, control everything. They're the Old Ones and are considered all-wise. But, when your soul gets to hang around for... forever... I guess it gives you a different view on things. If you got to hang around after you died, wouldn't you want tell people what to do?

At some point early in the book, we get a snippet from the perspective of the Old Ones. Which was fine. That's part of the sci-fi. Martians aren't the same as humans. The issue is that Mike spends a good portion of the book wondering about the human "Old Ones" and how to get to talk to them, which is also fine... right up until we hit a point where Heinlein gives us some point-of-view from a dead human. That part just didn't work for me.

Heinlein spends a fair amount of time discussing, through Jubal, how it is that we can't actually know the truth about religion, especially in a world where everyone insists that they know the one and only truth. That he later breaks that wall by giving us a view of what happens after death, at least from his perspective, undermines his point about that sort of truth being relative. Fortunately, there's not a lot of that in the book, because that would have had the potential of ruining the story.

All of that to say, if you're a sci-fi fan and pretty flexible minded, you'll probably enjoy this book. If you're not a sci-fi fan but, still, pretty flexible minded, i.e., you enjoy hypothesizing about the state of the world, you'll probably enjoy this book. If you're ultra-religious or think you have everything figured out, unless you have happened to figure everything out in the same manner as Jubal, you're going to want to throw the book against the wall and burn it. Or, maybe, it will help you get the stick out of your ass.

Life, Liberty, and the PURSUIT of Happiness (Part 1)

Let me make one thing very clear here before I get started:
The Declaration of Independence is not a legal document, not like the Constitution. There is nothing in it that establishes law or structures or anything of the sort. Nevertheless, we hold it as a foundational document, especially that part about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." So let's look at that for a moment:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Yes, I'm skipping over the equality part this time (sort of) because I talk a lot about equality. Not that I'm skipping it, I'm just allowing it to be understood that all (adult) humans have the equal unalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Also, there is nothing in this that is a pro-life statement. I'm not arguing that one way or the other, so we're going to use the arbitrary definition of talking about "adults." Children do not, under the law, enjoy full rights. If they were allowed to pursue happiness in whatever way they wanted... well, it just wouldn't end well.

I think the order of these three things is important, kind of like Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:

1. All humans have the unalienable Right to Life.
    (A robot may not injure a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm.
2. All humans have the unalienable Right to Liberty (freedom) except where it would deprive some other human of his/her Right to Life.
    (A robot must obey orders from humans except when it would cause a conflict with the First Law.)
3. All humans have the unalienable Right to pursue their own Happiness except when it would deprive some other human of his/her Right to Liberty and/or Life.
    (A robot must protect its own existence as long as that does not conflict with the First or Second Law.)

Just for a moment, because there is SO much in this to talk about, and I'm not even through quoting the Declaration at you yet, let's talk about this whole happiness thing, because I think we have it all messed up. Actually, I'm sure of it.

See, we've come to believe, somehow, that our Right is actually to Happiness itself, not the pursuit of it. We Americans have come to believe that we Deserve to be Happy. Part of me wants to blame it on McDonald's and that whole "you deserve a break today" crap, but it has as much to do with the current of cult of positivity as it does anything else.

The real problem isn't even the Happiness itself; it's that we have somehow decided that Happiness is the primary Law. We've culturally decided that our own individual Happinesses come ahead of other people's Liberty and Life. And that's just fucked up. No, seriously, it is.

Here's from an actual conversation I had with someone back around the end of October/beginning of November last year (yes, that puts it heading into the election):

Him: But I want to make more money at my job.
Me: It's the Democrats who want to raise the minimum wage...
Him: Fuck that! I don't want to raise the minimum wage. I won't get a raise if the minimum wage is raised. In fact, I don't want it raised at all.
Me: But it would help...
Him: Fuck them! If they can't get a job that pays better than minimum wage, then they don't deserve to make more anyway.
Me: I was going to say it would help the economy, but that's an amazing attitude.
Him: I don't care about the economy. I just want to make more money.

Clearly, he didn't have any real concept of what the economy even is, and he was adamant in his disdain for minimum wage employs, lumping most of them in as "Mexicans, anyway, probably illegals" who don't deserve anything better than they're getting especially if it meant that he wasn't going to be better off.

And he's not the only person I've talked to with that attitude, just the most flagrant about it. He had, as most people seem to have, no qualms about his own "happiness" coming at the expense of others, and he believed it was his Right. At some point toward the end of the conversation, he even said, "I have a right to be happy," which is about where I quit, because there's no good way to approach that mindset. Sure, you can say, "Well, actually, no you don't. No one has the Right to Happiness," because the response is always, "Why not?" And, possibly, "If other people get to be happy, I should get to be happy, too." And, well, those people are already missing the point.

I have to add, here, that facebook culture doesn't help with all of this, but I'm not going to go into that. There have been plenty of studies showing the validity of "keeping up with the FB Jones" and how destructive that whole thing is. And, now, I'm wondering if that's a 50s thing, which would take this whole issue back to the Boomers, probably the most narcissistic generation in the history of the world. Seriously, there's a book about it which I want to get because it sounds fascinating.

What I do know for certain is that we, as a cultural, have to abandon this idea that we have a Right to Happiness and that it's okay for it to come at the expense of others. The pursuit of happiness is not the same thing as the happiness, and we have to give up on the idea that it is and on the idea that having a lot of stuff is what is going to do that for us.

In fact, your Right to pursue your own Happiness doesn't get to come at the expense of others' Rights to pursue their own Happiness. If you think it does, you're the problem.

Ant-Man (a movie review post)

Decades ago, Isaac Asimov asserted that science fiction wasn't so much as its own genre as it was a vehicle for other genres. As there was much dissent, he set out to write a sci-fi detective novel which became the first of his robot novels, The Caves of Steel. It seems that Marvel has set out to prove the same thing about the super hero genre. Sure, there's the pure super hero stuff like The Avengers, but we've also seen a war movie, an espionage movie, and, now, a heist movie, among others.

So, yeah, Ant-Man is structured as a heist movie, which is pretty clever. It's not a straight heist, though, there's a little, I don't know, rom-com(?) added in. You know, whatever kind of movie it is where the guy who has messed up and alienated his family has to put it back together again. At any rate, as Scott Lang says in the movie, "It's not just a heist."

Speaking of Scott Lang, Lang was one of my few worries about the movie going into it. As I've noted in previous reviews of Marvel movies (especially Iron Man 3), I do understand that the universe of the Marvel movies is not the same as the one for the comics, but I couldn't understand why they weren't having Hank Pym be Ant-Man when he was going to be in the movie. It was baffling. BUT! I think they did an excellent job of threading the Ant-Man origin story into what they did in the movie. Actually, I really like what they did with that. It adds some extra layers to the movie than just doing an "origin story."

Also speaking of Scott Lang, Paul Rudd was great. Okay, so, I already really like Paul Rudd, but he was great in this role. This is another case of Marvel finding an actor who would really own the part and make it his, because that's what Rudd did. However, it was Michael Pena as Luis who almost stole the show. He was brilliant, and the voice-over stuff they did with him was hilarious.

Michael Douglas and Evangeline Lily were both very good. Douglas probably about what you'd expect since he's always really solid. Lily was better than I expected because my main exposure to her has been in the horrible Hobbit movies, and, though those weren't her fault, her inclusion in those has been a sore point. I was also glad to see Wood Harris in the movie. His performance wasn't extraordinary or anything, but I like him as an actor, so it was good to see him in a high profile movie.

The only weak link was Corey Stoll who came off more as an over enthusiastic used car salesman trying to sell you a bad car than as a real villain. Fortunately, the movie didn't focus so much on him.

Also, the scene with the Falcon was awesome. I love Anthony Mackie in that role, so I was glad they included him. "It's really important to me that Cap never finds out about this."

Basically, this is another really solid Marvel movie and, while I would quite put it as high as Captain America or Iron Man on quality, it's close. Guardians of the Galaxy close. I would have gone right back in to watch it again if I could have.

Do You Know the Code?

Briane Pagel has a new book out. He says it's the best book he's ever written and, seeing that I have quite liked his other books (except for that pineapple thing), at least the ones I've read, I'm really hoping for good things from this one. I've already picked it up but, with the end of the school year and everything going on with my kids, I haven't had a chance to start reading it. I'll let you know what I think as soon as I do, though.

Until then, here's Briane to talk about Codes!

Wherein I Hate Stuff For No Reason (a guest post by Briane Pagel)

I know this is the space Andrew has lately been reserving for his discussion of how to handle, or not handle, a bad (or, as it was, not-really-so-bad) review, and I think that’s important work. Someone has to stand up to bullies, and Andrew has a good platform from which to do so. That’s why I am extra-appreciative of his willingness to lend me his Wednesday slot in order to let me provide some thinly-veiled marketing in the guise of a LISTICLE!

P.S. WHY does everything on the internet have such a stupid name? Years into it, I still cannot bring myself to say that I tweeted something. I tell people “Oh yeah I posted a link to that on Twitter.” “Blog,” “Tweet,” “listicle,” etc. etc. It’s so degrading. I feel stupid whenever I talk about anything I do on the internet. People will say Are you going to try to publicize your book and I have to say Yes, I plan to… *sigh*… blog… about it.

Where was I? Oh, right: Listicle. People love lists! That was one of the things mentioned in an article I read entitled, “These 5 Amazing Things People Love About The Internet Will Change Your Life.” (Other things included cats and lists about cats.) So I’ve been making the rounds, promoting my new book, Codes, and it just made sense. What better way to discuss a near-future book about a corporation trying to perfect the process of human cloning by implanting computer-programmed personalities into them and marketing the result than to create a superficial list designed to generate fake controversy?

Did that sentence make any sense? It’s been a long day and I got lost in some of the clauses there.

Knowing that Andrew usually uses this space to discuss people’s reactions to bad reviews, I decided that the theme for my latest list would at least tangentially relate to that topic, and so I came up with the idea of reviewing shows and books I’ve never even seen, and, of course, panning them.

If you’re like me (and I pray you’re not. TAKE MY WORD FOR IT) then there are LOTS and LOTS of things you HATE, almost-sight-unseen. I am a champion at hating stuff before I know anything about it. I can dislike something practically before I know it exists. It’s a talent. Books, movies, TV shows, songs, certain shades of green… doesn’t matter what it is, I can hate it right up front. And, more than just hate quietly, I can -- based on that completely uninformed opinion review the bejeebers out of that thing I hate. YES! FREE SPEECH! ‘MERICA! Let’s get to it!

1. The Walking Dead: I have never seen this show, or even a preview for it. That has not stopped me from hating it so much that I have started disliking other shows if a commercial for TWD airs during them. Can we NOT have any more allegories about our society told through the zombie format? This thing is all over! I can’t go onto a web page without seeing some picture of a sweaty guy or girl holding a machete and looking fierce next to a headline about how TWD is really going to amazeballs you with the storyline this week. LET ME GUESS: They nearly get overrun by zombies but then hack their way out! Also, where is everyone getting these machetes in the first place? I am 46 years old and I have never seen a machete in real life. Do the zombies bring them? Do they sell them at the True Value ™ Hardware Store? In real life, a zombie apocalypse would feature 100% fewer machetes and 100% more “Dads holding a bed lamp they grabbed off the table.”

2. The New Star Trek Movies: This automatic-dislike probably began when they cast Chris Pine as Captain Kirk in the first “new” Star Trek movie. Looking at Chris Pine gives me the same feeling I get when I grind my teeth, only less pleasant. That was bad enough. But then I heard that in one of these movies they had Kirk driving around in a hot rod on Earth. You know what space operas don’t need? Drag races on planet Earth. But to top it off, they remade “The Wrath Of Khan.” YOU CANNOT REMAKE THE WRATH OF KHAN. That is like remaking a rainbow. Like remaking a glorious, rage-filled, fist-shaking, Enterprise-attacking, earwig-monster-injecting, desert-planet-inhabiting, Fantasy-Island-operating rainbow.

3. The Hunger Games. OH. MY. GOD. From the moment I first heard of this series of books I thought they sounded like the dumbest thing ever. Here is my understanding of the plot: some government starves all its citizens, so that they will send a bunch of kids to shoot each other with arrows in order to get a little bit of extra food. HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE? How would that system work? It could never! But then after all the kids shoot each other or whatever, the two (?) winners (?) get elected to the government or something, like Charlie winning the chocolate factory only Jennifer Lawrence didn’t even have to give back the gobstopper? NO DO NOT BOTHER EXPLAINING WHERE I GOT IT WRONG. The plot doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t have to, because it’s a book for teenagers, and teenagers love it when things don’t make sense. It lets them be convinced that adults don’t ‘understand’ them. That’s why I loved The Cure when I was seventeen, and why kids nowadays love The Hunger Games and its sequels, New Moon and whatever the third one was with Percy Jackson.

3a.Bonus hatred: I cannot stand Jennifer Lawrence. Not even a little bit. She is somehow the female version of that guy in 8^th grade who thought smelling farts was funny. Associating her with a movie makes me that much less likely to see it. If “J-Law” showed up on my doorstep with a giant pizza and a bootleg director’s cut of the next Star Wars movie, I wouldn’t even answer the door.

Let’s do one more. This is fun! How about:

4. Anything by Isaac Asimov. To be honest, I am not sure where this one comes from because I do not know really anything about Asimov other than I dislike him and everything I imagine he stands for. I know as a scifi-ish writer myself I am supposed to apparently love Isaac Asimov and everyone’s always talking about how he predicted the future and his laws of robotics and etc blah blah blah, but I can’t be bothered. I’m not even sure what Asimov is supposed to have written. Foundation, I think? I’d go look it up but I’d rather my browser not have a history of searching for Asimov stuff. Even I am cooler than that. I think Asimov wrote that story that got made into I, Robot, starring Will Smith, and can we as a society really take an author seriously anymore if Will Smith likes his stuff? I’m also pretty sure that in reality there’d be no way robots could be programmed not to harm humans, which I think was a ‘law’ of robotics Asimov pulled out of thin air and made people believe was a thing. It’s so dumb: suppose I was being held hostage by Chris Pine and Jennifer Lawrence and the only way I’m getting out alive is if C-3PO (do NOT get me started on R2-D2!) snipes them both with a laser rifle from across the road. OH WAIT there’s a LAW that he can’t kill them, only if he DOESN’T, then he’s harming a human by letting me die, right? That is NOT how laws work, Isaac Asimov. You don’t see gravity only holding people down if it’s nonparadoxical.

In closing, you’ll note that the only people I picked on in here are people who are dead, or who don’t matter, or who are Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pine and so deserve it. I don’t have to worry about anyone overreacting or calling me crazy or taking me to task for these entirely unfounded and ill-informed, and yet still 100% correct, opinions. Don’t forget to mention in the comments how much you agree with me!

Something I don’t hate: My book, Codes: Robbie had an ordinary life, until she walked into Gravity Sling. Now he’s seeing coded messages everywhere, being chased by shadowy big-corporation goons, and questioning literally everything about the world as he knows it. Some questions need answers. This Phillip K. Dick style debut science fiction novel raises questions about how people use technology and each other.

Links:

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianePagel

My blog: Thinking The Lions: http://www.thinkingthelions.com

Buy Codes on

Golden Fleece Press’ site: http://goldenfleecepress.com/catalog/fiction/

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Codes-Briane-Pagel/dp/1942195109

Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/codes-briane-pagel/1121816078?ean=9781942195115

The Asimov Genre

Does Asimov have so many books that he's become his own genre?
That's not my actual question, but I talk about it anyway.
Drop by today's Indie Writers Monthly post for my genre probe.
Wait... maybe I don't want to say probe...

Have Some Milk with Your Serial

Today is the release of part 4 of Shadow Spinner

"Part Four: The Cop" is available for the Kindle for FREE! Monday, Sept. 10 -11! Go get it now for FREE! Also, just to be nice, "Part Three: The Bedroom" will also be FREE! Monday only. Go grab them now and, remember, click the "like" button and come back later and leave a review. It would be a great help! Thanks!

And, now, on to other things... sort of...

I started this whole serial release of Shadow Spinner as a bit of an experiment. While I'm not quite ready to reveal the details of said experiment (I still need a few more releases to figure out what I'm seeing as results), I will give you some background on the whole serial thing and part of what lead up to my decision to do a serial release.

Marketing is my bane. I hate it. It's something I wish I didn't have to spend my time on, because it takes away from time I could be, oh, working on actual writing like on Brother's Keeper, because, yes, now that school has started, I have several kids a week (at least) asking me when it's coming out. Of course, I'm trying to finish Shadow Spinner first (okay, I am going to finish Spinner first), but they don't care so much about that because they just want the sequel to The House on the Corner. Then there's the part where I'm pretty sure I would have finished Spinner already if I didn't have to spend time doing marketing stuff.

All of that to say that one of the things I've seen kind of over and over again in doing marketing research is that serializations are BAD! Bad in the same way that adverbs are BAD, and not you or anyone else should ever ever ever release a novel in a serial format. It made me wonder WHY.

I mean, why not do it? There is a long tradition of authors releasing their novels in a serial format. Charles Dickens did it. He even used it to get audience reaction to his stories so that he could make tweaks to stuff before the book was finally released as a book. Heck, the whole end of Great Expectations changed between the serial release and the final book release. All of Isaac Asimov's early stuff was released serially. The whole Foundation Trilogy (when it was still a trilogy) was released that way as well as all of his early robot stuff (which turned into I, Robot).

Sure, it's not done so much today, but, really, why not do it?

So here's something about me that you might not know... or, maybe, you've managed to figure it out, I don't know. Anyway... Telling me that something is wrong or bad for no other reason than that it is wrong or bad is a pretty good way to get me to try doing it. Or, at least, to take a closer look at it to see why you're saying that. You need to have a good reason for what you're saying is what I'm getting at here. In a like manner, telling me "this is just how it's done" and so you should do it this way, too, is a good way to make me look at other options. Give me reasons not dogma.

[I just have to throw in here that my first, great Magic deck was built because someone said a deck couldn't be built around the Kird Ape. I became feared in tournaments because of that deck. Yeah, I know that's completely off topic: I blame Michael Offutt for bringing up Magic: The Gathering on his blog recently.]

At any rate, that question wouldn't leave me alone, "Why not do serializations?" I couldn't find any good reason not to, so I decided to try it out.

Which brings me to my point:

It appears that Amazon Publishing is setting up some deals for some serializations under a new imprint they're going to be starting up just for that purpose. First, I didn't realize that Amazon had its own publishing imprints, but they do (several, actually, including one for sci-fi), and, now, they want to add a new one just for serialized novels. They're looking at it as the "logical next step" in publishing, evidently, because people like things in smaller bites, and like them in forms that work on  their portable devices.

It looks like I'm not the only one to ignore the whole "don't do serializations" thing. And this is why you should ignore the whole "no adverbs" thing, too. People just like to say NO for no other reason than saying it. And you can't get good reasons as to why not, because they don't have any; they just know that other people said NO, and that's good enough for them.

I don't know how this whole serial release thing is going to work out in the end, but I'm glad, now, that I'm doing it. Not that I wasn't glad before, but, see, I'm not jumping on any bandwagon here. Not that there will be a bandwagon, but, if there is, I was here first!

Just sayin'...

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Zero Gravity and Zombies!

Well, I'm going with an easy one for "Z." Really, "Z" just proved to be the hardest letter to find something for. I even had "Q" and "X" from the very beginning, but "Y" and "Z"? Hours of digging... hours! And I never found any one satisfactory item for this last letter... but I'm going to give you zombies, so lay off.

No, not zombies in space; although, that could be interesting. They wouldn't need to worry about decompression, you know, being already dead and sort of decompressed already, so that could make things interesting. Okay, someone go write that book, because I'm not going to do it.

Anyway...

We're heading back to Jules Verne land. As a complete aside, I'm astounded at how often the same few names come up over and over again in this series: Verne, Wells, Asimov, even Gibson. I didn't plan it that way, but you end up back at the same visionary minds time and again. Heck, da Vinci even pops up several times, and he didn't write! Not that he didn't write... oh, never mind!

So! Jules Verne... He really kick started this whole zero gravity  thing by making space weightless. I bet you didn't know that, did you? Before Verne, space was not weightless. All planets and moons had the same gravity as Earth and everything. But Verne made space weightless and all of that changed. You do know I'm kidding, right? Some of you people are just SO literal!

There was Verne and, then, there was Wells, and they both had these trips to the moon and space having no gravity, and we found out that it was true! And, then, all space sci-fi had weightlessness, of course, and that presented issues... like, how do you drink from a cup when there's no gravity to hold the liquid in? And, over time, sci-fi authors identified many of these things that would be issues and addressed them in various novels and short stories, and some of these things have worked their way into reality. And, no, I'm not going to do any kind of exhaustive list or anything. Sorry. It's the last day, and I'm just not doing it.

However, I am going to point out one of the things I find interesting. Moving from place to place in a space ship or space station presents some problems. At the moment, they're not huge problems, because our vehicles and things are still fairly small, but, still, NASA wanted a way for astronauts to be able to walk around, and one of the first things they experimented with was magnetism. Why magnetism? I'm gonna just say that it's a safe bet that that came to mind as early as it did because that's the method so many sci-fi authors used to enable people to walk around in space ships: magnetic boots. But NASA found they didn't really work. Sure, they kept you from floating around, but, if they made the magnets strong enough to hold you in place, that's exactly what they did; they held you in place. Forget about walking.

Looking through references to older science fiction literature, I found a lot about magnets. Magnetic tables, magnetic cups, magnetic everything... Of course, all of this was written before electronics, especially computers, were really a thing. At this point, magnetic anything is entirely out of the question. Oops! Set that magnetic cup down too close to the computer and erased the landing instructions! Darn! Hate when that happens! Still... it's all a very interesting progression, especially when you look to see how sci-fi changed to accommodate reality afterwards and how those changes affected future developments in the space program. And, hey, they're still working on that artificial gravity stuff, so, if that ever actually works, that's entirely from sci-fi. No matter how it happens, I think. And all of that may also lead to anti-gravity...

At any rate, if we ever do decide to get off of our butts and really explore the solar system, it will be interesting to see what other ways sci-fi informs reality. It's about time we had miners out there in the asteroid belt! Speaking of miners... I just saw an article about how James Cameron and a bunch of other billionaires have founded a company to explore the possibilities of mining the asteroid belt. Yeah, they are doing that now. Not the mining part, but they expect to be within the next 20 years. So... yeah...

And now... zombies...

And, man, I just really don't want to do this. I have a philosophical difference with zombies, but I've talked about that before, and I've talked about talking about that before, so I'm really not going to get into it. Let's just say that "I don't believe in zombies" and leave it at that. But I did the whole cyborg menace, so, I guess, I'm being fair. Even though cyborgs are actually real and zombies are not, more people believe in zombies, which gives them the same kind of realism as learning to speak Klingon, and we all know about that, now, don't we?

The very first (recorded) zombie walk was all the way back in 2001. In California. It was successful enough that they had one again the next year, and it is now an annual event in Sacramento. So, yeah, not just in CA, but in the capitol of CA. The idea caught on fairly rapidly, kind of like a zombie disease, and these things happen all over the world now. Guinness has a place in its records, now, for Zombie Walks. The largest one record was in Mexico in November of 2011 with nearly 10,000 zombies in attendance. Amazing!

Movies and TV and books... zombies are everywhere. I do appreciate Shaun of the Dead, though, and think Simon Pegg is brilliant. Like I said, I don't believe in zombies despite the fact that they do seem to be all over the place and people have actual survival plans in the event of the coming zombie apocalypse, but, maybe, it will be a shame if that apocalypse never happens. Well... at least, they'll be ready for the cyborgs!

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: the Yeast-Beast Machine

First of all, yes, that just sounds gross. It does. Sorry for that. And, I would bet, you are all wondering what that is (well, maybe not Rusty, since he seems to have read all the sci-fi authors whose names start with the letter "B"). But before I get to that, I'm going to jump back to a very famous guy in this series, Isaac Asimov.

In Asimov's book, The Caves of Steel (1953 (as a serial)), as I've said before, the whole planet is just one big city. Being one big city, there's not a lot of land left outside the city and certainly not enough to grow enough food to feed the entire world. Instead of growing crops and raising livestock, the food is grown hydroponically. I'm wishing I had a better memory of what it was exactly (or had the book where I could get to it (but it's in a box somewhere in the garage)), but it was some kind of protein that could be flavored in a variety of ways and formed the basis for the standard diet of the people of Earth. It was food grown in a vat.

I don't really know if this idea precedes Asimov or not, but it was certainly picked up by other sci-fi authors.

In 1963, H. Beam Piper used the idea in his novel Space Viking. The space ships contain hydroponic carniculture vats in which they grow some sort of meat or meat substitute. Protein nonetheless.

In 1970, Frank Herbert's novel Whipping Star introduced us to pseudoflesh.

Even Neuromancer (William Gibson) mentions some sort of meat vats (although, I'm not remembering the details).

The term Yeast-Beast was introduced in David Brin's 1994 short story, "NatuLife." The Yeast-Beast is the device that produces the vat grown meat.

And, yes, I know all of this sounds really gross. Growing meat in a bathtub. Blech.

But!

In vitro meat has been being developed for a couple of decades now. And it was NASA that began the research as a possibility as a source of protein for long-term space voyages. It's also called hydroponic (there's that word again) meat, vat-grown meat, and victimless meat.

The first edible meat was actually produced over a decade ago, and, as of 2008, scientists claim the technology has developed to the point that it's ready to be made available commercially. The only real issue? People are turned off by the idea of eating meat grown in a vat. Well, that, and it's still expensive. Right now, bathtub meat would cost you more than animal meat, but, with the right backing, that might not stay true for very long. And being able to grow meat for consumption in developing nations could save a lot of lives. Currently, there are more than 30 laboratories around the world working on the development of in vitro meat.

As of February of this year, the first hamburger was made from vat grown meat. One of the biggest differences that vat grown meat could have for us is in time: It takes about two years to grow a cow big enough to slaughter to make that hamburger; you can make that same meat in just six weeks in a vat.

They do, however, say there's a slight issue with texture, but they're working on it.



Bonus "Y": Youth Eternal

Yeah, yeah, I know, we've been looking and looking for this for centuries. More than centuries. It's another of those staples of fiction and science fiction, and I'm not even going to go into all of that. I just want to say one thing about it, really:

Many scientists (geneticists) believe that this generation (my generation) will be the last generation on Earth that has to die. They're fairly certain they've identified the gene that causes aging, and they think they can figure out how to turn it off. If they can do that, no one would ever need to die of old age or old age related issues ever again. It's kind of a scary concept. With as many people as we already have on the planet, can you imagine what it would be like if no one ever died?

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Robots and Androids

Finally, we arrive to it: robots. So many of these fiction to reality posts have touched on robots or things robotic that I considered just skipping robots entirely, but, for some, that might be tantamount to ending a book just short of the climax and never finishing it. At any rate, robots have been, in many ways, what's driving this series of posts, so it wouldn't be exactly fair to leave them out, and I don't want any self-aware robots coming and asking me why I'd disrespect them in such a way. This post is also going to expand on my artificial intelligence post, so you might want to go back and read that one before going on with this one if you haven't already read it.

In many ways, the quest to develop or invent an "artificial man" has been as ongoing as the quest for flight throughout human history. These ideas extend back into myth and legend, and, as with flight, even Leonardo da Vinci had a design for a mechanical man. Maybe he even tried to build it. Instead of wading through all of that stuff, though, I'm going to jump ahead to our more modern view of what a robot is... except that we don't have a definitive view of what a robot is.

To facilitate the conversation, I'm going to define a robot as an electro-mechanical machine that has the semblance of intelligent behavior. These electro-mechanical machines can range from autonomous to remote controlled. This definition leaves out clockwork machines (which many people would like to say are the first examples of robots, but, then, that would, technically, make a clock a robot, and I'm not willing to go there).

Having said that, I will, however, go with Tik-Tok from Ozma of Oz as the first example of a modern robot in literature. Even though he was a clockwork, he was self aware and self motivating, making him a clockwork robot, not just a clockwork that looked like a man. It would be 15 years after the introduction of Tik-Tok before the word robot would be coined.

Tik-Tok

Speaking of, the term robot was first introduced in 1920 in a play, Rossum's Universal Robots, by Karel Capek. The word, basically, means drudgery, as that is the kind of work the robots in the play did. It doesn't end well for humanity.

As the 20th century progressed, robots became more and more common in fiction:

And, perhaps, the most famous robots ever (okay, not perhaps; we all know they are):

However, of all the fictional appearances of robots, it is probably Isaac Asimov's robot short stories and novels that have been the most significant, not least of all for his Three Laws of Robotics.

Surprisingly enough (at least to me), the first electronic robots were built in 1948 and 1949, Elmer and Elsie. The first truly modern robot was invented in 1954, the Unimate, by George Devol. He sold it to General Motors in 1960, and its installation began the modern robotics industry.

And this is where things get complicated. Complicated because the quest has always been to build an artificial human, not a mechanical arm, which is what the Unimate was. And for the last 50 years, that's what we've been trying to do. We've been trying to build the specific form of a robot that we call an android, which is what Asimov writes about, even if that's not what he calls them. But it is what we call R2-D2 and C-3PO -- droids. And here  is where we are today:

This is TOPIO 3.0, an android designed to play ping pong. He uses an advanced AI (artificial intelligence) that allows him to learn and improve his skill while playing. Basically, he adapts to the person he's playing against, learns how that person plays and adopts a strategy to beat the opponent. You can learn more about TOPIO here; although, I don't see a record of his wins and losses listed.

This is an Actroid, the most sophisticated android currently "alive." The newest model is named Sara

You can watch her explain how she works.

So... we're not quite to self aware, self motivating robots and androids, but we are stepping in that direction. In fact, robots are one of the biggest driving forces in AI research. Science fiction author Vernor Vinge (A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky) believes we are heading toward a "technological singularity" (a term he coined) in which we will technologically develop a greater-than-human intelligence. Because we cannot comprehend the kinds of changes that will occur after such an intelligence is created, he calls this an "intellectual event horizon." With all the research and development in quantum computing and quantum nodes, I have a hard time thinking he's wrong. [My friend Rusty (who drew this picture of me) has been going on about Vinge for some time, now, and, so far, I haven't read anything by him. Not because I haven't wanted to, but because I'm way behind on my reading and haven't wanted to try to work anything new into the stack until I cut it down some; however, after reading this stuff, I'm going to have to work Vinge in.] It's not that Vinge is the only person to have written about these themes; we see them in science fiction a lot, usually with a very negative spin on it (the Terminator franchise, the Matrix trilogy), but he is the first to state his view so concisely, and this idea permeates much of his work. It will certainly be interesting to see how the future progresses in regards to artificial intelligence and robots!


The Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Platforms

Okay, all you writer people out there, no, that's not the kind of platform I'm talking about! Geez, can't you people think of anything else?

No, what I'm talking about are moving platforms.

In my head, this all starts about 20 years ago when I read The Caves of Steel (1954). If you haven't read Caves, you should. That's just all there is to it. It's probably my favorite of Asimov's books; although, I can't say it's the best. It is the one that has stuck with me longest, though, in that I have a clearer memory of this book, even after 20 years, than I have of any of his others, all of which I read after Caves.

Anyway, in Caves, the Earth is just one big city (sound familiar, anyone?), and the general method of transportation is via these moving walkways that run all through the (world) city. They are set parallel to each other, and each one gets faster as you move inward along the system. Of course, the faster ones take you to farther places, and the slower ones are for shorter trips, but the speed variation is to allow the user to hop from walkway to walkway without sudden, vast changes in speed. Sounds pretty fun, doesn't it?

As I've come to find out, Asimov wasn't the first to use this concept. No, Heinlein used it more than a decade before Asimov in his 1940 short story "The Roads Must Roll." Oh, but we go back even farther, because, guess who! No, really guess. H.G. Wells used this same concept all the way back in 1897 in "A Story of the Days to Come" and, again, in 1899 in When the Sleeper Wakes (later rewritten as The Sleeper Awakes).

But back to Asimov, there's this great chase scene in the book where they're running and jumping between these moving walkways, and I've always thought that sounded like so much fun.

Oh, you say, but moving walkways aren't new. Okay, you're right. They're not. The very first conveyor belt of people (okay, so I don't know if it was actually a conveyor belt, but it sounds cool) debuted in 1893 in Chicago, but it wasn't, in concept, a device of mass transit. That didn't happen until 1954 when one was built inside a railroad terminal in New Jersey. It was removed a few years later due to non-use. Moving walkways are common in limited usages, today, the most common being the escalator.

All of that may be about to change.

Not that I think that coveyor belts of people are going to become a common mass transit device. At least, not until cities do actually begin to grow together (kind of like Dallas/Ft. Worth, which is, in all respects, just one city at this point, I don't care what they say (I know, I've been there)).  However, there is a push for more efficient mass transit, especially in Europe, and moving platforms is one of the new ideas that is getting a lot of attention.

The problem, it seems, is that high speed railways are just too inefficient. People have to spend too long waiting for trains, too much energy is required to accelerate the trains, and too much to stop the trains. Basically, it would just be more efficient if there were a continuous trains that never stopped. Really, it saves energy. But if it was a high speed thing, how would people get on and off? Well...

Basically, you'd have the high speed train, and you'd have these little docking trains with small docking stations. People board the docking trains which then speed up and dock with the high speed train via an airlock,

and, then, the docking train would return to its station to pick up more people. The main train would never stop, get people where they need to go faster, and there would be no huge train stations, just these docking ports. Of course, the thrust of this plan is to give people a viable alternative to cars. If mass transit was both cheap and fast, people would be more inclined to use it. In Europe, at any rate, it seems that the main reason people use cars over mass transit is that they can get to where they want to go before they're even on the train to get there due to the long waits at stations, and this plan for moving platforms is a way to get past that.

Personally, I'm all for anything that gets cars off the roads. They're noisy, messy, and waste fuel. I was just reading the other day that we in the USA waste something like 400 billion (BILLION) gallons of gas every year sitting at traffic lights. That's why you should all buy Priuses. Priusi. You should each get one. Or switch to cars that drive themselves. I'm all for those, too. At any rate, I think this is a first step to the kind of mass transit that we see in the stories that I mentioned. If walking on a moving sidewalk got you there faster than driving your car, would you take it?

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Nanotechnology

Everything gets smaller, right? Well, except for cars. For some reason, us people in the US can't get over huge cars. From clocks to wristwatches, from mainframe computers to desktops to iPads, from cellphones

to cellphones.

Everything gets smaller except those stupid cars. And I just don't get that. About the cars. I totally get things getting smaller. I mean, not just is the cell phone smaller, but it includes all sorts of gadgets. Everything except a coffee maker, and I bet they're working on  that.

However, the greatest example of how things are growing smaller is nanotechnology. Just to be clear, nanotechnology is the study of the manipulation of matter on the atomic and molecular scale. Nanotech is important because materials act differently on the molecular level than they do at the macro level. Because of its incredible diversity, specialized sub-fields are already emerging.

Just to give some examples of applications in nanotech:

For medicine, testing is going on, right now, for little nanofactories in the body that can do things like fight cancer. They attach to the tumor and deliver medicines directly into the tumor reducing surrounding tissue damage to almost nothing.

Remember those carbon nanotubes from this post? With nanotechnology, they can be used to regrow bones and repair other tissue damage.

Nanotubes can also be used for water filtration, which is pretty incredible. They think they can eventually get it so that all contaminants can be removed.

Nanotechnology is also in development for more efficient energy usage and storage. For more memory storage in electronic devices. For increased power and higher beam quality for lasers through the use of quantum dots.

And then there are quantum computers... and that brings us back to this post, since quantum computers may be the next step in bringing that into reality.

But where does all this come from? Where did nanotech begin?

The fictional roots and scientific roots of nanotech, of tiny "machines," go back to almost the same place. Well, the same time. Arthur C. Clarke, in his 1956 short story, "The Next Tenants," describes tiny machines which are the first fictional example displaying the concepts of what we now associate with nanotechnology. In science, the first mention of these concepts followed a mere three years later during a lecture by physicist Richard Feynman. Had he read Clarke's story? No one knows.

There are a few short stories in the '60s and a novel with these concepts; although, none of them are really that important in and of themselves. It's all just planting ideas.

The term "nano-technology" came about in the '70s, but it was the '80s when nanotechnology really became a thing, both in science and in fiction. It was something that sort of came about by accident. At least, scientifically. There were a couple of discoveries, and, suddenly, science was, like, "oh, we can make nanotech stuff, now!" Fiction heard science say this, and ran away with it. At that point, the two became hopelessly entwined, because, as soon as someone starts writing about some application of nanotech or nanobots or nanowhatever, science says, "I think we can do that!"

Okay, that's not exactly true... nanotech has become the "magic" in science fiction in a lot of ways these days. We don't really know what kinds of things are possible, yet, with nanotechnology, so science fiction likes to do whatever it wants and call it "nanotechnology," because no one can say, "No, it's not!" I have an issue with calling magic "science," so this kind of bothers me. On the other hand, I have no issue with calling science "magic." Part of the issue here, I'm going to trace back to Fantastic Voyage

(and it's later, loose adaptation Inner Space).

Fantastic Voyage gave us, more than anything else, this idea that nanotechnology was about tiny, little machines (and, no, when you're talking about things on the nano-scale, "tiny, little" is not redundant). This isn't what nanotechnology is about, but it's what sci-fi wants it to be about. So we get things like the replicators in Stargate which are nanobots that can build themselves into anything, but the implication is that they are molecular-sized robots or, as in Fantastic Voyage, something that has been shrunk. Nanotechnology is not about shrinking things. Even if nanotechnology may be able to be used to make things smaller.

At any rate, nanotechnology is a big thing in sci-fi, right now, and rightly so. The sci-fi is fueling the science, and the science is fueling the sci-fi. The science that lead to nanotech was kind of accidental. Well, there were a couple of different things that were developed, one of which wasn't by design, and, when they were combined, they realized that they could do these nanotech things. But would they have thought to put those things together if Clarke or those few other writers hadn't written about them, first?

[Note: Isaac Asimov did not write Fantastic Voyage. I don't know if any of you thought this, but I certainly did. I have the book! No, he only adapted it. It actually started out as a movie, and Asimov was hired to write the adaptation which was actually released before the movie came out, which confused matters even more, because even people at the time thought that the movie was the adaptation of the book. I say all of that to say this (because I found it interesting): Asimov improved the story. He felt that there were some logical inconsistencies in the movie, and he fixed all of those things in the book. After reading about them, I have to say that Asimov was correct.]

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Artificial Intelligence

"Artificial Intelligence," as a term, was not invented until 1956, but, as a concept, it goes back much further. As a term, it means the science and engineering of making intelligent machines; as a concept, it means man, through science, creating intelligence where there was none.

Generally speaking, when we think of artificial intelligence, which I will just call AI, we think of computers. Past that, we think of robots. Computers, games in particular, have gotten sophisticated enough that the term AI is already being applied to them even if it's not precisely correct. The thing is is that computers are capable of learning. Adapting. The only real issue is that we're not quite sure, yet, how to determine at what point something becomes capable of thought. Independent thought. Pondering. And how does something become self-aware, which is a component we seem to believe is necessary for intelligence.

At any rate, the idea that computers will achieve the ability to think and become self-aware has been a huge focus of science fiction since before computers were actually a thing. Let's just pretend that that part where humans are trying to build machines that have legitimate intelligence isn't really happening. Or has happened?

Anyway...

Although, Isaac Asimov was not the first person to write about robots, he was the first person to write about them extensively, and his robot stories and novels laid the foundation for all future robot literature. His work is so fundamental, in fact, that people sometimes refer to his Three Laws of Robotics as if they were an actual, real thing, not something from a short story.

I remember the first time I heard of the three laws. It was an episode of Buck Rogers. I was 10 or so. The robot Twiki had had some sort of problem and was being re-booted. He quoted the laws, and the doctor/scientist guy got all excited and commented in awe about how they were hearing (for what sounded like the first time ever) Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

All of that to say, that Asimov has been instrumental in our cultural understanding of what artificial intelligence is even though he was first writing his robots stories at least 70 years before artificial intelligence would exist. His ability to see the possibilities of what could be were extraordinary.

Why has Asimov become such a central figure in the foundation of literature involving artificial intelligence? Well, I think I have an explanation for this. Robots, machine men, were commonly being used as the symbol for how technology and the pursuit of knowledge would destroy mankind. Yes, this is in the 1930s. But, then, if you look at what was going on in Germany and what would happen in World War II, this is somewhat understandable. Basically, robots were only used as an example of the Frankenstein complex: the creation rising up and destroying the creator. Asimov wanted to change this. He felt it was a tired cliche and supported the view that knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge is bad or wrong. First and foremost a scientist, Asimov believed in  the pursuit of knowledge, so he sought to make robots into something more realistic in his writing, not just a symbol of technology leading to our downfall. Not that that is not still a common symbol and fear, but he broadened our horizons on the subject and set the foundation for modern artificial intelligence in fiction.

Just as an aside, the character Tik-Tok from Ozma of Oz is probably the first significant use of a robot with its own intelligence in fiction. The term "robot" hadn't even been invented yet. There are a couple of other earlier mechanical men in fiction, but those works have mostly faded with time, while Baum's Oz books are still read and enjoyed today. That makes Tik-Tok the first (significant) artificially intelligent machine in literature.

But speaking of the Frankenstein complex...

I'm going to make a leap here and say that Frankenstein is really the first source of artificial intelligence in literature and fiction. There are often earlier sources cited, but they involve the use of magic, and I want to confine this to intelligence created through scientific means. Of course, the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein was a human machine, but the intelligence created, the mind created, was new and unique. Shelley's novel may be the first example of technology, of man's creation, rising up against him. As mentioned, it is the name that has come to be applied to those types of stories.

I'm not going to say that we, as a race, are striving toward the creation of artificial intelligence because of fiction, but fiction writers certainly saw it coming long before science did. Because our cultural awareness is so influenced by what has gone before, I would find it difficult to believe that whatever is coming in the realms of artificial intelligence will not have fantasy and science fiction at its roots. It will not surprise me at all to find one day that Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics have, indeed, become reality.