Last month, I spoke at a United States Army Training and Doctrine Command event billed as a mad scientist conference. That was actually quite an honor, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to, even though it was hard to spend three days thinking about threats based on new technology. I’ve got a blog entry up at my regular site that talks more about the conference, but suffice it to say I’ve been thinking about the military and science/science fiction. In the way of all attractive coincidences, I was also recently asked to write a military science fiction story. All that, and I’m basically a pacifist! Continue reading Playing Our Way To the Future: Consumer Science and Technology goes Military
Tag Archives: science fiction
NEW FICTION: BITING THE SNAKE’S TAIL by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Our second story of the new decade is yet another return visit from a Futurismic fiction alumnus. We loved Silvia Moreno-Garcia‘s “Maquech” enough to publish it back in 2008, and “Biting The Snake’s Tail” takes us back to an exotic and ecologically crumbling Mexico City… but this time it’s in a noir-ish near-future police story, where what you don’t see is even more important than what you do. Enjoy!
Biting The Snake’s Tail
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Cops don’t go into the alcazabas. They’ll do raids every few months and confiscate mod-drugs for the sake of the TV cameras, but they don’t care what happens in the alcazaba’s colorless alleys. The gang leaders have established their own code of conduct, so what happens in the alcazaba is the business of the people who live there and not of the outsiders circling and enduring these cities within a city.
That’s why it was so bizarre to see all those officers in their blue uniforms running around La Catrina. I bet they were also pretty surprised to see me there in full gear with Arkasha at my side.
Gonzalo hadn’t told me what was going on. All he said was I had to get to La Catrina fast. Therefore, I was wearing the exo and the helmet, just in case things were really nasty. Arkasha was an added form of insurance. It’s funny how many people will run at the sight of a large dog, but not of a gun. Continue reading NEW FICTION: BITING THE SNAKE’S TAIL by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Science fiction as a civilisational survival tool
Wow – it seems like everyone and their dog is talking about science fiction and its purposes beyond pure entertainment at the moment..
Via SlashDot comes a post at the Netflow Developments blog, where one Ryan Wiancko (who seems to be coming from more of a media/movies angle) stumbles across the term “speculative fiction” for the first time, and hypothesises that stories designed to make the reader (or viewer) think more deeply about some social or civilisational issue have the potential to save us from wandering into metaphorical minefields of our own making.
Speculative fiction however, if widely adopted makes it almost instinctive that we think about these situations and possible outcomes before they even arise. It puts our brains into a future simulator of sorts where we are running through countless of possible outcomes for our society every week, culminating to subconscious database of sorts of ‘what if’ scenarios that we carry around with us. Without this database in our heads we blindly charge forward through the jungle of our progress without any regard of potential cliffs that lay ahead until it is too late. With a mind that is constantly being challenged with deep thought-provoking what if scenarios we will hopefully be able to recognize some of the signs of these impending cliffs before we are spinning our tires in mid air about to drop 1000 meters to our doom.
Something about Wiancko’s post seems charmingly naive to me, and it’s not just the lumpy grammar… it’s because I went through a similar revelation myself, followed by a brief period of militancy wherein I attempted to spread the idea around (only to find that many other fans and writers had already reached the same conclusion, often decades before I had, much to my chagrine).
While I’m long past the point of believing that some sort of crusade is needed to assert sf’s potential power as prophetic thought-experiment and sociopolitical early-warning system, I’m still supportive of the idea (which is why I consider myself a fellow-traveller with the Mundanes and the Optimistics), and I’m impressed by the regularity with which it surfaces in the opinions of readers and viewers outside of what I would call “core fandom” (for want of a better, less pretentious and more rigidly definitive term).
But where does that notion come from – is it a meme that evolves inevitably from science fiction’s aesthetic, or is it a deeper human need that gets projected onto an artform that happens to embody some of the same forward-looking attitudes? A bit of a chicken-and-egg question, I’ll grant you, but hey – it’s Monday morning, and my mind is wandering. At the moment, I’m siding with science fiction being an outgrowth of the urge to speculate, but I’d be interested to hear defences of either opinion.
How fanfic starts
Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]
Will Gillis on sf’s changing face
I don’t know whether William Gillis wrote this little screed about the changing face of science fiction as a response or reaction to Jo Walton’s piece about the reading protocols of the genre, but it certainly serves as an interesting counterpoint to it. I like to read the viewpoints of smart readers coming from outside the loose tribe of fandom, because it enables us to see some of the stories we tell ourselves about the genre’s evolution in a different light:
… the modern age has given rise to a very distinguishable modern clique of SF authors interested in worlds with recognizable causal connections to our world. In a world deprived of anything more than an anemic NASA how we get there matters (or, alternatively, how it diverged). The other hallmark of the internet age is the density of the snarkiness, reference and speed of ideas — if Blade Runner signified the beginning of the shift away from abstraction with advertisements referencing real corporations, today’s authors plaster their prose with injokes. Rather than trying to abstract away, they embrace our inherent ties to the world as it is in order to milk a higher density out of our shared language. The internet has given everyone the sensation of having passing knowledge in every field, and modern SF authors are expected to be versed and deliver on many if not all fronts.
There simply isn’t the patience for limited-focus authors. And while I still heart Delany and Le Guin, I think this is a good thing. Nothing’s worse than sitting through a work full of intellectual spark on one front to find it dead on another. A great mathematics twist matched with a ridiculous carbon copy of the author’s culture transposed upon a ridiculously different environment. A finely constructed anthropological or psychological thesis with cliche and implausibly-portrayed tech.
Perhaps Gillis has hit upon the reason that the enthroned classics of the genre frequently fail to move new readers in the way they moved us when we discovered them… but having typed that out, it feels like a tautology. How about you – did the sf classics from before your time hold up to their reputations, or were they interesting in the way that archaeology is interesting?