All posts by Paul Raven

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Excellent Bill Gibson interview

The best author interviews are surely the ones where the interviewer asks the sort of questions that you yourself would have picked, had the opportunity arisen. Granted, the list of questions I’d like to ask of William Gibson is long enough that I could keep the poor guy occupied with them until the heat death of the universe, but Aileen Gallagher of NY Mag‘s The Vulture column has whittled a few of them away on my behalf [via MetaFilter]. Here he is, rethinking terrorism:

You also wrote in Zero History that terrorism is “almost exclusively about branding but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries.” How so?

If you’re a terrorist (or a national hero, depending on who’s looking at you), there are relatively few of you and relatively a lot of the big guys you’re up against. Terrorism is about branding because a brand is most of what you have as a terrorist. Terrorists have virtually no resources. I don’t even like using the word terrorism. It’s not an accurate descriptor of what’s going on.

What do you think is going on?

Asymmetric warfare, when you’ve got a little guy and a big guy. [There are] a lot of strategies that the little guy uses to go after the big guy, and a lot of them are branding strategies. The little guy needs a brand because that’s basically all he’s got. He’s got very little manpower, very little money compared to the big guy. The big guy’s got a ton of manpower and a ton of money. So this small coterie of plotters decides to go after a nation-state. If they don’t have a strong brand, nothing’s going to happen. From the first atrocity on, the little guy is building his brand. And that’s why somebody phones in after every bomb and says, “It was us, the Situationist Liberation Army. We blew up that mall.” That’s branding. By the same token, you get these other, surreal moments where they call up and say, “We didn’t do that one.” That’s branding. That’s all it is. A terrorist without a brand is like a fish without a bicycle. It’s just not going anywhere.

And a vindication of Twitter:

I’ve taken to Twitter like a duck to water. Its simplicity allows the user to customize the experience with relatively little input from the Twitter entity itself. I hope they keep it simple. It works because it’s simple. I was never interested in Facebook or MySpace because the environment seemed too top-down mediated. They feel like malls to me. But Twitter actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter.

[…]

Twitter’s huge. There’s a whole culture of people on Twitter who do nothing but handicap racehorses. I’ll never go there. One commonality about people I follow is that they’re all doing what I’m doing: They’re all using it as novelty aggregation and out of that grows some sense of being part of a community. It’s a strange thing. There are countless millions of communities on Twitter. They occupy the same virtual space but they never see each other. They never interact. Really, the Twitter I’m always raving about is my Twitter.

Lots more good nuggets in there; go read.

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Charlie’s utopia: optimistic sf redux?

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Over half a year after the publication of the Shine anthology, Charlie Stross wonders whether we need more optimistic utopian thinking in science fiction, and indeed in general:

The consensus future we read about in the media and that we’re driving towards is a roiling, turbulent fogbank beset by half-glimpsed demons: climate change, resource depletion, peak oil, mass extinction, collapse of the oceanic food chain, overpopulation, terrorism, foreigners who want to come here and steal our women jobs. It’s not a nice place to be; if the past is another country, the consensus view of the future currently looks like a favela with raw sewage running in the streets. Conservativism — standing on the brake pedal — is a natural reaction to this vision; but it’s a maladaptive one, because it makes it harder to respond effectively to new and unprecedented problems. We can’t stop, we can only go forward; so it is up to us to choose a direction.

[…]

We need — quite urgently, I think — plausible visions of where we might be fifty or a hundred or a thousand years hence: a hot, densely populated, predominantly urban planetary culture that nevertheless manages to feed everybody, house everybody, and give everybody room to pursue their own happiness without destroying our resource base.

Because historically, when a civilization collapsed, it collapsed in isolation: but if our newly global civilization collapses, what then …?

Compare and contrast with this post from Jetse de Vries written during the Shine submissions period, as writers supplied reason after reason for why they couldn’t – or wouldn’t – write an optimistic piece:

In the real world, people face those huge challenges (overpopulation, war, environmental degradation, pollution, greed, climate change and more) and try to overcome them. In the real world, the majority of people are optimistic. So why isn’t SF trying to address these huge problems in a near future SF story (not use them for implementing the next dystopia, but try to fix them, try to do something about them)? Why is SF extremely reluctant to feature an upbeat outlook?

[…]

Imagining things going bad, technologies grossly misused, the world going down the drain is so goddamn easy that everybody’s doing it. So if almost everybody’s already doing it, then why do we need to keep stating the bleedingly obvious? Maybe some of that creative energy, that imaginative potential might be used for envisioning a solution?

Furthermore, with the amount of cautionary tales going around in SF today, we should be well on our way to paradise, as we’re being told ad nauseam what not to do. Imagining things going wrong is easy; imagining things improving is hard. It’s easier to destroy than create. I’m sick and tired of writers demonstrating five thousand different ways of destroying a house: I long for the rare few that show me how to repair it, or build a better one.

There’s an obvious difference in character here (Charlie is being rather more cautious and diplomatic than Jetse, perhaps), but it looks to me like they’re both driving toward the same destination by slightly different philosophical roots… and Jetse himself calls out Charlie’s piece as a vindication of the Shine project (albeit a somewhat belated one).

So let’s raise a recent ghost after a long year of tough times all round, and ask again: should science fiction be trying harder to think positively about the future?

And if not, why not?

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Pimp my prosthesis

For my money, a sure mark of a technology reaching maturity (and market acceptance) is when the purely aesthetic customisation options start to appear…

bespoke prosthetic leg

Bonus future-points for the fact that these are being made using rapid prototyping / 3d printing technology. Mass production, pah!

[ Can’t actually remember whose Google Reader recommendations this piece came out of, so – whoever it was – please accept my apologies and an ambiguously-directed hat-tip. ]

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Stuff worth reading

So, did you read Lori Ann White’s “World In Progress” yet? Well, you should do; not only is it Futurismic‘s last bit of fiction for the foreseeable future, but it’s also very excellent. Sure, I’m a little biased in that opinion… but indulge me, here, why don’t you? When have I steered you wrong before*? Personal redemption in a weird but all-too-believable near-future… try telling me you don’t need some of that in your life right now. Go on.

And once you’re done reading Lori’s story (no, no, carry on – it’s OK, I’ll wait), here’s another recommended read: Paolo Bacigalupi’s multi-award-winning The Windup Girl. I meant to write a review of this excellent novel back in late spring, but never quite got around to it… so in lieu of said review (and in light of many others), just take my word for it that if you’re interested in the sort of future-thinking we do here at Futurismic, you really should read this book. And those canny beggars at Orbit have just released a paperback version into the UK market in time for The Winter Festival Which Shall Remain Unnamed… so British readers, you have no excuse. Buy it for a friend, buy it for yourself… but just buy it, OK?

OK.

[ * Actually, don’t answer that. Just read the story; make a publisher happy, and make an author’s day. ]

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The arsenic aliens that aren’t

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Typical, really; the day I’m away from my desk, a big sf-flavoured story hits the blogosphere. I speak, of course, of NASA’s press conference about the discovery of “alien” life… not at the top of the gravity well, but at the bottom of an arsenic-laced lake in Yosemite National Park. From Wired UK (whose new page layouts are much easier on the eye, but disappointingly similar to their US counterparts):

The bacteria, found in the bed of Mono Lake, are believed to exist as a second form of life — using arsenic in cells in place of the phosphorous found in most living cells.

That suggests that they’ve developed entirely independently from our life, implying that if life has evolved twice on Earth, then it’s far more likely to have evolved off Earth too — especially as it’s believed by astronomers that among stars similar to the Sun, as many as one in four could have small rocky planets like Earth, at least some of which would occupy the same “goldilocks zone” that Earth exists in — neither too hot, nor too cold, for life to emerge.

Leaving aside the actual story for a moment, the meta-story – namely how excited the public can get about the possible announcement of alien life – is worth considering as well. I’ve got no criticism for NASA over the way they framed their announcement; it’s no more duplicitous than the PR operations of the average corporation or government, and I know which I’d rather be paying attention to. But as New Scientist points out, the possibility of actual evidence for extraterrestrial life – which is what a lot of people thought (or hoped) was on the cards – was embraced with a cheery enthusiasm by all sorts of news outlets. Perhaps the world’s gotten so weird lately that nothing can surprise us any more… or perhaps we’re still secretly hoping that sentient ET(s) will turn up, Intervention-style, and pull our collective homo sapiens backsides out of the frying pan we’ve been cheerfully heating up for ourselves. (The writer – and reader! – in me would still quite like the latter to happen, not because I think we actually deserve a species-level bailout, but because the frying pan would doubtless be succeeded by a very interesting succession of fires.)

Anyway, the important thing about the arsenic-alien-life story is that it’s not quite as big a deal as the headlines would have it. It’s still pretty fascinating stuff that connects to extremophile life, but – as explained by Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams – it’s not evidence for “shadow biospheres”, and doesn’t really tell us anything about extraterrestrial life that we haven’t already hypothesised.

Let’s leave the astrobiology aside for the moment and simply focus on the fact that life is fantastically adaptable in terms of biochemistry, and can pull off surprises at every turn. That’s always a result worth trumpeting, even if it leaves the wilder press speculations in the dust. After all, it’s long been assumed that the six elements that underlay the basic chemistry of life are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur. Despite persistent speculation, few thought life could exist without them.

[…]

Can these bacteria replace phosphate with arsenic naturally? Wolfe-Simon herself says thirty years of work remain to figure out exactly what’s going on, a comment on the preliminary nature of this work, which remains controversial in some quarters and is in obvious need of extensive follow-up. No shadow biosphere yet, but obviously the quest is ongoing because of its implications, and we’ve now received one very tantalizing piece of evidence that such things may be possible.

If life really did start here more than once — a finding that is not remotely demonstrated by this work — then we can talk about how likely it will have done the same thing on distant planets, upping the chances that we live in a universe where life emerges whenever given the chance.

And here’s PZ Myers, taking a break from being Dawkins’ bulldog to dig into the actual science of the paper:

You’d predict just from looking at the [periodic] table that arsenic ought to have some chemical similarities to phosphorus, and you’d be right. Arsenic can substitute for phosphorus in many chemical reactions.

This is, in fact, one of the reasons arsenic is toxic. It’s similar, but not identical, to phosphorus, and can take its place in chemical reactions fundamental to life, for instance in the glycolytic pathway of basic metabolism. That it’s not identical, though, means that it actually gums up the process and brings it to a halt, blocking respiration and killing the cell by starving it of ATP.

Got it? Arsenic already participates in earthly chemistry, badly. It’s just off enough from phosphorus to bollix up the biology, so it’s generally bad for us to have it around.

[…]

So what does it all mean? It means that researchers have found that some earthly bacteria that live in literally poisonous environments are adapted to find the presence of arsenic dramatically less lethal, and that they can even incorporate arsenic into their routine, familiar chemistry.

It doesn’t say a lot about evolutionary history, I’m afraid. These are derived forms of bacteria that are adapting to artificially stringent environmental conditions, and they were found in a geologically young lake — so no, this is not the bacterium primeval. This lake also happens to be on Earth, not Saturn, although maybe being in California gives them extra weirdness points, so I don’t know that it can even say much about extraterrestrial life. It does say that life can survive in a surprisingly broad range of conditions, but we already knew that.

I can’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment myself, really; cynical I may be (YA RLY) but I’d still love to hear we’d found solid evidence of truly alien life. But you know what? News that the life we already know works in weirder and more tenacious ways than we previously thought is enough to give me a sensawunda kick. I suspect that if you’re not continually astonished by nature’s diversity, you probably don’t yet know enough about it*.

[ * Yeah, I’ve been binging on documentaries from the BBC’s iPlayer service on these chilly evenings; so sue me. I might as well enjoy bachelordom to the full, no? 😉 ]