Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 65

SF Utopias and Dystopias

There was a discussion over at the Crooked Timber blog about the idea that most good SF is dystopian, rather than utopian, most likely because it's hard to write a ripping action tale about a utopia.

I added my two cents:

It makes more sense to talk about better societies than utopias. A lot of SF is about societies that are better than our current world. Or worse. The point is examine the ways in which societies can be better or worse and to talk about the possibility of change. Give people a look at what a society that is less sexist and racist and classist might be like.

If you consider that James Hansen may be right and Earth may end up with the same surface temp as Venus, SF that has the planet habitable in the future may be utopian or at least very optimistic. Or consider Jame Lovelock who has said that the human population will be down to one billion at the end of this century… Writing a future that does not have a major die off is optimistic. Robinson's Mars Trilogy is pretty cheerful, all in all, since I don't see humanity as going into space in a serious way. Certainly nothing as epic as the terraforming of Mars.

I got curious later and checked an online dictionary:

Utopia: any visionary system of political or social perfection.

Dystopia: a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

I'm not sure the words are true opposites. A utopia is perfect. A dystopia is only miserable. There are many societies on Earth today that are characterized (at least in part) by squlaor, oppression, disease and overcrowding. There is not one perfectly good society.

This leads me back to point above. It makes more sense to talk about better and worse societies here and in fiction.

There's a famous quote, I think from Asimov, that says: science fiction tells us two things. There will be a future and it will be different.

Science fiction tells us change is possible and inevitable. It tells us Thatcher's famous quote -- TINA -- there is no alternative to the status quo -- is a lie. The possible societies that SF describes can be better than the world today or worse. Often, they are rather better. But the crucial thing is: they are different. We are not stuck in the status quo. This is a message of hope. Dark SF is often a warning.
This is not bad stuff to read and write.

I Love the Hubble...

Big, bright, and beautiful, spiral galaxy M83 lies a mere twelve million light-years away, near the southeastern tip of the very long constellation Hydra. This cosmic close-up, a mosaic based on data from the Hubble Legacy Archive, traces dark dust and young, blue star clusters along prominent spiral arms that lend M83 its nickname, The Southern Pinwheel. Typically found near the edges of the thick dust lanes, a wealth of reddish star forming regions also suggest another popular moniker for M83, The Thousand-Ruby Galaxy. Dominated by light from older stars, the bright yellowish core of M83 lies at the upper right. The core is also bright at x-ray energies that reveal a high concentration of neutron stars and black holes left from an intense burst of star formation. In fact, M83 is a member of a group of galaxies that includes active galaxy Centaurus A. The close-up field of view spans over 25,000 light-years at the estimated distance of M83

Economics

I should state the obvious. I read a lot about economics, but there is much I don't really understand -- in part, I think, because I worked in accounting for years. I think like an accountant: there are problems that need solution, and there are resources. One uses the resources to solve the problems. It's very simple.

Here is a quote from the economist Dean Baker:

Economics is about making simple things complicated. The complexity both excludes most of the public from policy debates and also gives economists their status as masters of a complex discipline.

Complexity also obscures power relationships and the issue of ownership. Why do some people have so much? Why do many people work so hard and end up with little or nothing?
If a society is facing a huge problem -- global economic collapse and global warning -- why is it not possible to mobilize all the society's resources. Why are we told that ownership is more important than the survival of the human race?

Anyway, I write about economics a lot because I think about it a lot. I am not an expert.

Quote from Patrick

From Patrick, in honor of the Occupy movement:

Some days you're the bug. Some days you're the revolution.

In spite of my current bad mood, I am really cheered by Occupy, which is growing and developing new tactics: first occupations, then marches, anti-foreclosure actions, connecting with labor, moving money from banks.

As Big Bill Haywood liked to say:

The capitalist has no heart, but harpoon him in the pocketbook and you will draw blood.

Patrick

Patrick got laid off from his current part-time job. It paid $12,000 a year and was his entire income. The nonprofit that employed him (on a contract basis, so he can't collect unemployment) had some kind of crisis and he was laid off, because they can't afford to pay him.

Remember that Patrick is the expert on adult homelessness in Minnesota. You'd think in this economy, with high unemployment and many people losing their homes, someone could find a way to use his knowledge.

Instead the US is killing itself with the Death of Ten Thousand Cuts.

In honor of all this I will quote from Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon:

...Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.

We know how that turned out.

This may not be the most coherent post I have written. I am pissed.

NASA APOD

In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of a new star in the Nanmen asterism - a part of the sky identified with Alpha and Beta Centauri on modern star charts. The new star was visible for months and is thought to be the earliest recorded supernova. This multiwavelength composite image from orbiting telescopes of the 21st century, XMM-Newton and Chandra in X-rays, and Spitzer and WISE in infrared, show supernova remnant RCW 86, understood to be the remnant of that stellar explosion. The false-color view shows interstellar gas heated by the expanding supernova shock wave at X-ray energies (blue and green) and interstellar dust radiating at cooler temperatures in infrared light (yellow and red). An abundance of the element iron and lack of a neutron star or pulsar in the remnant suggest that the original supernova was Type Ia. Type Ia supernovae are thermonuclear explosions that destroy a white dwarf star as it accretes material from a companion in a binary star system. Shock velocities measured in the X-ray emitting shell and infrared dust temperatures indicate that the remnant is expanding extremely rapidly into a remarkable low density bubble created before the explosion by the white dwarf system. Near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, RCW 86 is about 8,200 light-years away and has an estimated radius of 50 light-years.

In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of...

In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of a new star in the Nanmen asterism - a part of the sky identified with Alpha and Beta Centauri on modern star charts. The new star was visible for months and is thought to be the earliest recorded supernova. This multiwavelength composite image from orbiting telescopes of the 21st century, XMM-Newton and Chandra in X-rays, and Spitzer and WISE in infrared, show supernova remnant RCW 86, understood to be the remnant of that stellar explosion. The false-color view shows interstellar gas heated by the expanding supernova shock wave at X-ray energies (blue and green) and interstellar dust radiating at cooler temperatures in infrared light (yellow and red). An abundance of the element iron and lack of a neutron star or pulsar in the remnant suggest that the original supernova was Type Ia. Type Ia supernovae are thermonuclear explosions that destroy a white dwarf star as it accretes material from a companion in a binary star system. Shock velocities measured in the X-ray emitting shell and infrared dust temperatures indicate that the remnant is expanding extremely rapidly into a remarkable low density bubble created before the explosion by the white dwarf system. Near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, RCW 86 is about 8,200 light-years away and has an estimated radius of 50 light-years.

The Current Financial Crisis in the US and Europe

From Brad Delong's blog:

I have been complaining for some time now that Reinhart and Rogoff think that the time is always 1931 and that we are always Austria--that the great fiscal crisis is about to erupt and send us lurching down toward Great Depression II.

Well, right now guess what? The time is 1931, and we are Austria.

Massive star IRS 4 is beginning to spread its wings. Born...

Massive star IRS 4 is beginning to spread its wings. Born only about 100,000 years ago, material streaming out from this newborn star has formed the nebula dubbed Sharpless 2-106 Nebula (S106), pictured above. A large disk of dust and gas orbiting Infrared Source 4 (IRS 4), visible in dark red near the image center, gives the nebula an hourglass or butterfly shape. S106 gas near IRS 4 acts as an emission nebula as it emits light after being ionized, while dust far from IRS 4 reflects light from the central star and so acts as a reflection nebula. Detailed inspection of images like the above image has revealed hundreds of low-mass brown dwarf stars lurking in the nebula's gas. S106 spans about 2 light-years and lies about 2000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).

Science Fiction

Literary fiction clearly bugs me. Most likely because science fiction and fantasy still don't get the respect they deserve from most of the literary community. But I don't know enough about contemporary literary fiction to criticize it.

So I will talk about what I like about SF & F.

What people think is important. But I am more interested in how people act and how societies change. Technology is important, science is important, because both change our lives and how we think. NASA's Astronomy Photo of Day opens our minds, and lets us see the extraordinary beauty of the universe. It can move us -- mentally -- hundreds of thousands of lightyears. The Internet enables us to hold conversations that go around the planet. For the first time, we can find out what's happening at the level of individual experience everywhere. The New York Times ignored Occupy Wall Street at first, and has not covered it well since it began paying attention. But we have the videos of cops pepper spraying and beating demonstrators, which were taken by cell phones and put on line. We've seen what the demonstrators look like, heard what they have to say. Their signs and stories are all over the Internet.

When I was a kid in the truly strange 1950s, science fiction was the only fiction that explained the world I lived in, which might at any moment be destroyed by nuclear war. Most adults pretended the problem did not exist. Nuclear war was no worse than any other kind of war. All you needed was a fallout shelter in the back yard or a school desk to hid under. But I remember waking up terrified when a siren went off in the night. Science fiction was real. MAD magazine was real. Comic books were real. Because all knew reality was strange and scary and uncertain.

I subscribe to New Scientist and Technology Review. Science and technology are moving too fast for me to keep up; and it isn't one kind of science or technology that is moving fast. They are all going like gang busters. I figure SF is the best way to describe this astoundingly fluid world, changing from moment to moment in a hundred plus ways.

Did you know that slime molds can run mazes? And they could be used in city planning, though no one is doing this yet? They will find the most efficient way to go from A to B; you could use them to lay out a highway system. How do I know this? Some guy ran slime molds over a map of Tokyo. They laid out a highway system as well as city planners.

What do you do with a piece of information like that? I imagine using slime molds to plan cities. Someone is likely to do it. I also think of an organism that is usually single celled, but can become multicelled -- two different kinds of multicelled, if I'm remembering correctly, one a network and one a kind of hierarchy. The guys on top of the hierarchy get to reproduce. I am trying to imagine an alien society which is usually an anarchy, but can form two kinds of social organizations when needed. In a sense, Occupy Wall Street is like this: separate individuals coming together to form a network with distributed power.

I guess I will give one more example or pair of examples: Margaret Atwood's famous novel The Handmaiden's Tale and Suzette Hayden Elgin's far less well known science fiction novel Native Tongue.

I started The Handmaid's Tale, but gave up on it. Atwood established her idea: the US has turned into a religious patriarchy that enslaves women. But as far as I got into the novel, there were no more ideas, and I couldn't see why I should read a depressing book that was going to go on and on, with nothing new happening. (Many SF fans loved Atwood's book, by the way.) Elgin began with the same idea, then added her ideas about language, which are respected among linguists. (She was a linguist, teaching at the university level.) And she added aliens. I finished Native Tongue and read the sequel.

One idea is not enough in this world, where change comes from every direction, unless you are writing a short story.