All posts by Paul Raven

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Science fiction series that suck

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Complete series of Nero Wolfe booksOver at io9, Charlie Jane Anders digs for the root cause of an accepted truism of genre (and, I think, all) writing: the longer a series gets, the more it starts to suck.

I guess you could put it down to the law of diminishing returns, which is far from being exclusive to media and entertainment. But whatever the cause, there are a number of cases where all but the most ardent uncritical fanboy starts thinking “you should have let it be”. [image by deadeyebart]

Anders uses the obvious (but extremely valid) example of the seemingly endless Dune saga; while I’ll agree that Frank Herbert‘s sequels were less than brilliant, their level of suck completely pales when held up against the Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson continuations.

Personally, as much as I’d jump in front of a speeding train for Douglas Adams it was plain to see by the last few Hitchhikers books that he should have moved on and focussed on some of his other ideas. Also, dreadful sequels and series in general are the main reason I gave up television completely eight years ago.

And if you want uncompromising sequel-rage, you should try asking Jonathan McCalmont about Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake books …

What are the sequels you love to hate? And which ones have you continued with – despite the suck?

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McLurkin and the Robot Swarm

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McLurkin swarm robotNo, it’s not the title of a new YA science fiction novel. James McLurkin is a researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, which has to be one of the most awesome jobs I can think of.

He’s interested in swarm robots (which we’ve mentioned here on Futurismic before, sometimes in a military context), and believes that the future of robotic development is modular, because it allows researchers to design and develop complex robots quickly and cheaply.

Chris Kiick of Hack-a-Day went to see a demonstration of McLurkin’s swarm robots, of which I am quite jealous. Apparently McLurkin has over a hundred of these things, though he only takes about a dozen out for shows to do tricks like “circle-the-wagons” and physical bubble-sorts. Even so, my inner geek suspects it’d still whip the hell out of a night at the comedy club.

You can find out more about McLurkin’s research at his own MIT website; there’s plenty of video of his swarm in action, also.

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Making the Wiimote obsolescent – massive multi-touch Missile Command

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Did you ever play Missile Command in the arcades when you were a kid? I’ll bet you thought (more than once) “man, how awesome would it be if you could just touch the screen instead of using that trackball!”

Steve Mason evidently thought so, and has taken advantage of multi-touch technology to make a wall-sized version for the serious win:

I know we don’t do many gadget posts at Futurismic these days, but I couldn’t let that one pass by. 🙂 [vid via Engadget]

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Carpet-bombing in cyberspace – the case for a military botnet

Bombs in an aircraft bomb-bayMore botnet news, this time in the form of military fist-shaking bluster! Here’s an article [via SlashDot] in the Armed Forces Journal that suggests the US military apparatus should build its own botnet for “the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace”:

“The time for fortresses on the Internet also has passed, even though America has not recognized it. Now, the only consequence for an adversary who intrudes into or attacks our networks is to get kicked out — if we can find him and if he has not installed a hidden back door. That is not enough. America must have a powerful, flexible deterrent that can reach far outside our fortresses and strike the enemy while he is still on the move.”

If I’m not very much mistaken, Colonel Williamson has only partially grasped the whole “internet as a non-locational space” thing.

“As much as some think the information age is revolutionary, local networks and the Internet are conceptually similar to the ancient model of roads and towns: Things are produced in one place and moved to another place where they have more value.”

Well, yes – things are produced in one place, sometimes (er, crowdsourcing?). But with the web, that thing can then be everywhere, all at once. Data is an infinite good. Colonel Williamson’s talk about roads-and-towns and “states competing against one another” goes a long way toward suggesting why traditional military organisations have struggled to combat terrorism – they simply don’t have a clue how it (or the internet) works.

But back to the carpet-bomb botnet – Colonel Williamson says that “[t]he U.S. would not, and need not, infect unwitting computers as zombies.” Instead, he thinks it best that the power be built up legitmately – which, again, kind of misses the point of a botnet, in that they’re designed to leverage an amount of hardware that would be financially impractical to buy, build and maintain. [image by TailspinT]

Here’s a better idea – how about a kind of “Milnet@home” project? Show your love and pride in your nation by letting it use some of your spare cycles for smiting the enemy! Come on – you’d trust Uncle Sam with your computer, wouldn’t you?

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Crime stats as sculpture – Mount Fear

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Another little gem spotted by the grinders: what would you get if you took the crime incident statistics for London and represented them as a 3D physical map?

Mount Fear - installation sculpture based on crime statistics

Mount Fear is what you’d get. In the words of its creator, Abigail Reynolds:

The terrain of Mount Fear is generated by data sets relating to the frequency and position of urban crimes. Precise statistics are provided by the police. Each individual incident adds to the height of the model, forming a mountainous terrain … The imaginative fantasy space seemingly proposed by the sculpture is subverted by the hard facts and logic of the criteria that shape it.

While it makes for an intriguing art project, Mount Fear surely presages a short-range extrapolation of geolocative mash-ups.

In other words, being able to call up the data used for Mount Fear and overlay it on Google Maps running on your mobile device would make your next flat- or apartment-hunting experience that little bit more reassuring.

Or should that be less reassuring?