Steven Lyle Jordan's Blog, page 3

Verdant: Entangled to be released in March

I recently mentioned my efforts re-writing my first Verdant story, which carried in it the obvious suggestion that I’d be releasing it at some point.  Today I’m making it official:

Steven Lyle Jordan announces the upcoming re-release of the first Verdant novel, to be retitled Verdant: Entangled, in early March 2021.

Description of the novel follows:

If the satellites can’t repel Earth’s desperate masses, they’re doomed.

Yellowstone erupts without warning!… its hellish caldera creating the worst environmental disaster in centuries.  And the world immediately turns to the four city-satellites in Earth orbit—Verdant, Tranquil, Fertile and Qing—for salvation and refuge.  The satellites must fight off an inevitable attack and unwanted occupation from below, led by the President of the United States… finally forcing a desperate cadre of scientists on Verdant to take matters into their own hands…

Verdant: Entangled is a powerful story set in the 23rd century, fueled by an environmental crisis, driven by a diverse cast of characters and ultimately impacting the future of humanity.  This story features innovative scientific concepts and exciting human drama, set on a stage reaching beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Verdant: Entangled has undergone a new revision from its former version, titled Verdant Agenda, preserving the original story, but making it a better read… tighter, more thrilling and more consistent in tone.  The novel is also getting new cover artwork, created by myself, and will be produced as print and multiple e-book versions.

The release of the book version of Verdant: Entangled will coincide with the release of a cinematic script that will also be for sale or license to interested parties.  Contact the author for more information.

There will be more content and sale information following this announcement.  Stay tuned, and tell your friends what’s to come.

RUR: The worst thing that ever happened to robots

January 25th will mark the 100-year anniversary of a significant milestone in science fiction: The first showing of the play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots), in 1921. For those who don’t know, this was a play about artificially-designed servants, their desire to be treated like real people, and the robot rebellion that resulted in the extinction of the human race.

The robots in RUR weren’t, in fact, made from metal and plastic the way our modern image of robots are depicted; rather, they were created from laboratory-created biologic materials, and so could have been more accurately referred to as “synthetic beings” in modern vernacular. Nevertheless, they have become synonymous with the concept of the “mechanical man,” along with the word “roboti” coined for them by Czech writer Karel Čapek.

And in giving us these synthetic beings, and a name for them, Čapek was responsible for the worst thing that ever happened to the reference and depiction of robots, in real life and in fiction; a stigma that haunts robotics to this day.

In Czech, robota means forced labour of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters’ lands and is derived from the word rab, meaning “slave.” (Wikipedia)

There was no secret that the robots in RUR were intended to be laborers under human control—in other words, slaves. As the robots were performed by humans in odd clothing designed to accentuate their “different”-ness, they represented figurative stand-ins for “the enslaved other,” generally the poor, the immigrant, the minority, etc.  And in 1921 Europe and in America, the concept of enslaved peoples were still fresh in the minds of many, including former slave owners and the capitalists of the Industrial Revolution who struggled to maintain control over their workers.

Hence, the later rebellion of the robots suggested to society the very real concept of the rebellion of slaves (and workers) against their masters.  This was something the upper crust was already apprehensive about; so the robots not only represented one of their worst fears in the real world, but they became inexorably tied to it as symbols of that fear: Robots were strange, non-human machines capable of destroying and even replacing them.

Though RUR helped popularize the concept of robots in sci-fi, later science fiction stories and movies would emulate the play’s inherent fear: Only a few years later, Thea Von Harbou’s novel and Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis depicted a humanoid robot designed to replace human workers in the machine rooms.  The novel suggested that the robot—which had various names attached to it, including Futura (future man) and Parody (of a man)—was created by the story’s chief scientist in a synthetic way, similar to RUR’s robots; but the movie depicted a purely mechanical creation. The robot would eventually go on a rampage of seduction and sedition, drawing the poor, destitute and clearly dumb workers into rioting and destroying the city before it was caught and, like a witch of old, burned at the stake.

And Metropolis‘ robot wouldn’t be the last to instill fear in the hearts of readers or moviegoers.  Well- and cheaply-made robot monsters featured heavily in sci-fi movies, usually threatening a screaming heroine before being dispatched by the handsome hero. Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot stories featured capable but ultimately dumb-as-a-rock robots that threatened humans or each other until a clever scientist could break through their logical conundrum and save everyone (including the robot). Robots were commonly depicted on TV shows like Star Trek, and were always not-quite-human objects to be dispatched by the Enterprise crew.

As the real world developed, robots began to take places in factories, replacing human workers.  These real-world robots looked nothing like the humans they replaced, as their engineers optimized them for specific tasks that humans often could not do as well, or as fast, or as accurately in endless repetition.  Although humans lost jobs and livelihoods to these robots, they were grudgingly accepted into modern automated factories, improving products and lowering costs to prove their worth.

But in the fictional world, robots were almost always depicted as humanoid-shaped machines, often stronger or faster than men, but without the refined ability to think like men.  Book and movie robots generally went through mental malfunctions, similar to fevered or drunken rampages, that would cause them to run amok and destroy people and property.  They were still being depicted similarly to the idea of the “other,” especially the downtrodden slave or former slave, who was generally thought of as strong but stupid, more of a threat to society and “good people,” especially if given enough rope to act on its own behalf.

By mid-century, the dangerous robot was a well-established sci-fi trope, and was beginning to move beyond its humanoid roots.  Colossus: The Forbin Project presented a powerful computer that, when given control of the country’s defensive systems, promptly took over and killed any humans that threatened it.  Only a few years later, 2001: A Space Odyssey depicted the automated system of the space ship Discovery “going crazy” and killing all but one member of the crew in systematic fashion.  Today, the robots of the Terminator franchise’s Skynet have become synonymous with killer robots taking over the world.  And modern robots, like those of the Blade Runner movies, are often depicted as being every much a human’s physical and mental better, much more capable of destroying humans and taking their place.

In contrast, some of the most popular robots in fiction are part of the Star Wars universe, such as the very capable but non-humanoid and non-threatening R2D2 and BB-8 or the silent and efficient drones from Silent Running, the friendly robot Johnny-5 from Short Circuit or the titular robot Wall-E; it’s hard to deny that their lack of a humanoid shape contributes to their non-threatening appearance and their image as more of a pet than an equal.  Their exceptions demonstrate the rule, the cultural fear of the “other man” borne of Čapek’s concept.

The concept of the humanoid robot has been intentionally used to explore aspects of humanity in fiction over the years; but almost always as a negative object, either incapable of or unwilling to be more like “real human beings,” and somehow threatening the status quo or the very lives of those around it.  They are, at best, unpredictable and stupid, and at worst, potential terrorists.

As history has unfolded, it’s reasonable to argue that many real-world automated systems and products have been delayed, avoided or ultimately distrusted and unused by a public educated and informed by those old robotic stereotypes; and the cause can be directly attributed to the direct comparison between the concept and popular appearance of fictional robots with humans and slaves as they’ve been burned into our cultural framework, starting with RUR.  Čapek’s unfortunate turn of an image and phrase evolved into the science-inspired Golems of our modern nightmares.

Perhaps, if another name that didn’t mean “slave” had been used by Čapek… perhaps if his play’s synthetics had looked like vacuum cleaners, tool cabinets or beach balls… perhaps our mechanical helpers would be seen in a very different light today.  Perhaps we’d be more willing to use them, to trust them.  Perhaps this would be a more efficiently automated, more mechanically-trusting world. And perhaps we wouldn’t be as fast to cast a wary eye in their direction.

Fixing the future

2020 is almost over. But as good as those words sound, that doesn’t mean 2021 is going to be a picnic. If 2020 was a ravaging wildfire (which, literally and figuratively, it was), 2021 will be all about the effort to bring life back from the ashes.  2020 has had the effect of forcing us to dial backwards in a lot of areas, many of which we really can’t afford to be dialing back. And although our 2020 problems are far from over, we need to think of 2021 as the year we need to start getting back on track. We need to dedicate ourselves to the job of #FixingTheFuture.

As an example, our need for pandemic-induced isolation and avoidance of reusables has curtailed our use of many environmentally friendly products.  This might not sound like a big deal… to anyone who’s forgotten how much waste we were creating with disposable products from our favorite fast food places, grocery and department stores.  Starbucks, which had embraced the idea of selling reusable cups and allowing customers to bring them in for refills, has gone back to disposable plastic cups in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among its workers and customers.  Trader Joe’s  supermarkets have also forbidden the bringing in of reusable bags for shopping, forcing consumers to take their purchases home in disposable bags.  But that means a sizable increase in those waste cups, reversing what was a positive trend for our environment.

Our restaurants, similarly denied the in-house dining customers that represent their livelihood, have also been forced to use more disposable containers for their growing number of take-out customers.  Years of publicly cutting back on disposables have been reversed in a year.  If we’re going to change our restaurant and takeout habits, we need to at least do them with the environment in mind and do them properly, with reusable and even permanent products that won’t soon fill our landfills.

We’ve also been witness to a growing distrust of technology and the things it can fix, including the recycling issue brought up above, and more to improve besides: Energy generation and storage technology, communications, research and development, transportation and environmental recovery. Technology is our second-best tool for fixing most of our problems (the first best tool being cooperation); we need to stop being afraid of how our tools can potentially be misused, and use those tools to our best advantage. STEM promotion must be heightened, and we must be sure to not let our children fall behind in general education.

In the area of security, personal and otherwise, we have a serious problem: Ineffective security and identification systems daily put us all at risk, from the smallest cellphone to the stoutest door to the largest government system, because we won’t improve our systems beyond easily-copied metal keys, easily cracked passwords and easily hacked plastic cards.  The result is multiple security steps to protect our systems, creating multiple points of confusion and frustration to get into even our simplest apps. Biometrics are far more workable and secure systems, capable of offering 1-point security steps as secure as (and faster than) our current 2- or 3-factor security systems, and we should be applying them to all our security and privacy needs. That will require us to get over our collective distrust of new technologies and techniques to do what must be done to properly secure our lives and property.

The past year has also shown us the fragility of many of our institutions, most notably our hospital and healthcare systems, which have proven wholly inadequate to handle real emergencies like the current pandemic. Our unemployment and business support systems, mostly government-run, are also demonstrably inadequate for seriously adverse circumstances.  And we’re discovering the realities of working from home, what does and doesn’t work. We need to commit to improving and supporting these institutions according to their present needs, and strengthen them to be able to handle the pressures of modern life.

And as long as we’re speaking about government, 2020 has given us a President and Congress so intentionally and immorally divisive and corrupt, that they’ve split our country almost literally in half, leaving us with a distrusting attitude against our neighbors that at times seem insurmountable.  And it has rolled back regulations designed to protect America’s workers, homes, common lands and environment.  In one sense, they’ve brought out the hidden antagonisms on our streets, in our corporations and in our institutions that needed to be revealed; but at the same time, they’ve prevented us from working out these differences to a common good. These are affronts that must be reversed.  Our social, political and institutional standards have been revealed to be archaic and regressing, and must be attacked and forced into being progressive forces again.

And that’s only internally. Externally, the government has lain with other governments with less than excellent human rights records, has suggested and encouraged war, and has squandered the reputation of this country with all others.  We need to re-establish our heritage of being a nation others can trust, who stand united, free and ready to help make this world better.

And in order to present a unified nation to others, we need to re-establish it within ourselves.  The deep-seated racism and hatred that has floated just beneath the surface of America has been brought fully to the top; and like an iceberg, has shown how much larger it is than anyone believed.  The us-versus-them, uber-individualistic frontier mindset hasn’t served this country well over more than a century, and it’s time to embrace the idea that really built this country: Cooperation, brotherhood and mutual support.

2020 hasn’t been great; but if we don’t intervene, we will see a 2021 that won’t be any better.  Truly we have a lot of work to do, to rebuild the country within and without, and to come back together as Americans to support a united nation and a better world.  I say 2021 should be the year we dedicate ourselves to #FixingTheFuture. So let’s take this last week of 2020 to loosen up, gear up, take a deep breath and throw ourselves adamantly into making 2021 and the future better; dedicated to the knowledge that it must be done, and We Can Do It.

Cultured, not slaughtered

Do you realize how close the human race is to being able to produce animal meat products… without killing animals?

It’s true, and it’s a perfect example of the improvement of life through technology.  Technology, it’s true, allowed us to capture and control meat-source animals to feed the world, and when combined with the things science had learned about animal husbandry, developed an industry that contributed significantly to the growth of mankind over the centuries.  But now we’re on the cusp of a sea change that will prove as significant to feeding the world as animal husbandry did.

This is significant, because today we’re being forced to deal with the holistic cost of keeping hordes of animals for meat production: The cost of feeding and supporting those animals; the medical costs of enforcing growth and health; the environmental costs of dealing with wastes and transporting animal products long distances to customers. We’re also starting to come to grips as a society with the moral implications of meat eating itself, the horrendous reality of factory farms and the slaughtering of intelligent animals in order to put food on our table… something that our ancestors had to do with survive, but in today’s world we can say isn’t as much of an absolute necessity.

The Bong Joon-ho movie Okja explored the ultimate development of the so-called “perfect food animal”; but it also dealt with the moral implications of creating intelligent animals destined for slaughter.  Admittedly the movie was more a satirical look at the future of feed animals; but the good news is, before we get to the world of Okja, we’re poised to have technology take us in the opposite direction.

Most of us are already familiar with the “almost-meats,” vegetable-based mixtures intended to simulate certain meats. Veggie-meats come in varying degrees of complexity, from the simple use of tofu in inventive cooking methods, to highly-complex mixtures that emulate specific meats.  These products have seen a growing acceptance, especially from vegans and those seeking to cut back on the fats and related elements of real meat.  For many, these can be considered the middle ground between animal-based products and the next level.

That next level is being developed now, thanks to a deeper understanding of the elements that make up meat products. Part of the next level is being brought to us by laboratory processes, the cultivation of the basic elements that make up animal products; the proteins, enzymes, bacteria and familiar chemical processes that serve to create the same animal products without involving the animals themselves.  As other companies find similar ways to make animal products, we’ll eventually see a reduction in animal use to make the same products.

Next up: Cloning.  Companies are experimenting with taking samples of animal meats and using cloning and laboratory techniques to grow the meat cells on artificial scaffolds that will form tissues similar to the natural muscles on live animals.  If these “cultured meat” techniques work out, they’ll be able to recreate versions of any animal tissue, allowing people to eat meat without killing a single animal.  Some of the first uses could be products like veal that users avoid due to the particular cruelty involved with the preparation of such meats.

We might even see experimentation that will create new versions of meats and animal-based products… designer meats, cheeses, milks, etc, unlike anything that an animal can provide.  A hundred years from now, there could be a new cultured meat with a completely unique and distinct taste, with a low but flavorful amount of fat and a pleasing combination of included flavor notes, that could be the most popular meat in the world.  (Hopefully no one will call it McRib.)  In fact, someday the meats we know today, taken from real slaughtered animals, may be the least known meats to modern populations.

There will probably always be meats from live animals, maybe considered delicacies by by consumers in the future.  But hopefully, as our food production technology takes us forward, the increasing ease of producing cultured meats will far outshine slaughtered meat in the future, and give us not only environmental and financial benefits, but moral improvement, as we kill and eat fewer of our fellow animals on this planet.

Rewriting Verdant

I’d recently decided to work on re-releasing my first Verdant novel, using a promotional plan I’ve never tried before to see if I’d get a better sales result. In addition to the promo plan, I knew at the very least that if I did I’d need to do a fresh writing/editing pass on the book.  After examining one of my other novels a few years ago, I was sure there would be room for improvement in there, both in terms of story and overall quality.  So when I had the time blocked off, I started working on updating the text.

Doing a rewrite can be tough, and not just committing and starting the process; your mind may tell you that good work doesn’t need to be improved.  But I promise that if you look through your work, you’ll find some awkward phrasing that just begs to be rewritten.  And once you do that, you’re on the road. Just go with it.

I’d already known about some of my earlier bad writing habits—I used to write “for long moments” a lot, for some reason… and actually, I used “actually” far too much—but Word’s grammar check is good at picking up habits you don’t notice.  (Thank the gods for Word, since I can’t afford a live editor.)  I found myself removing all kinds of words and phrases that I reuse waaay too often.  I also managed to find places where I could tighten up passive passages and make them more active and immediate.

There were entire paragraphs that I originally thought were valuable background information for the story… but were really just unneeded history and exposition that ground the pace of the book down, in some cases, to a halt.  Hack, hack: I may have cut altogether a dozen pages out of the book just getting rid of all that stuff.  Too much youthful reading of Arthur C. Clarke, I think: Sometimes my writing sounds like a WWI Colonel regaling the occupants of his drawing room with fascinating tales of yore over sips of brandy…

And then there were the sex scenes… the totally overdone sex scenes that, at the time, I thought enhanced the story… OY.  Not that I have a problem with sex scenes; but depending on the overall theme and style of the overall story, a sex scene can feel unnecessarily tacked on; and if you don’t match the tone of the rest of the book, they can drag a story to a halt just the same as awkward history or exposition scenes.  And for this book, the proverbial “kiss-kiss-cut-to-morning” style was just a better option.  Hack, hack… much better.

The improved story even inspired me to create a new version of the cover, which I needed anyway since I’m changing the title to Verdant: Entangled.  Truth to tell, I was never happy with the old cover at any rate; the satellites I used were the only ones I could find to use rights-free at the time.  This time I found a satellite that much better fits the style I envisioned for Verdant, and is a better image besides.

The entire editing job required about a half-dozen full passes for grammar, clean-up, passive to active tense and phrases, trimming excessive exposition and history, more natural dialogue, and a few et ceteras.  Then a few more days to create the cover.  But the result was totally worth the effort, and helped me decide whether the book was worth re-releasing.  (Spoiler alert: Yeah, I think so.)

When it comes to improving your old material, you shouldn’t be afraid of just jumping in and redoing your old work.  It doesn’t even have to be one of your earliest books (and I shudder to think of some of those); as time goes by, your talents improve, your perspective changes, and your past mistakes surface.  Trust me, if you rewrite it, you’ll be happier with it.

The evolution of theater-going

I recently participated in another podcast of Are You Not Entertained by Remy X, in which we discussed the present difficulties of the movie industry (among others).  Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, movie and stage theaters are closed nationwide while people shelter at home and avoid crowds, and movie producers are sitting on revenue-making motion pictures that have no theaters in which to be played. And now, 2021 is expecting many movies to be released on streaming TV services and only some expected to reach the theaters that have weathered the storm of 2020.

Obviously no one could have predicted this situation, caused by our complete inability to deal with a global health crisis no one could have anticipated or been prepared for. /sarcasticRant  But in a way, the struggles being experienced by theaters and movie producers should not be completely unexpected, since this represents a point in the natural evolution of the entertainment industry.

Simply put, entertainment has constantly evolved, from its campfire story and cave drawing roots to the multiple live and digital venues and global conglomerates we have today.  The theater industry in particular has evolved over a century, presenting us with moving pictures, developing voices, emerging with color, and trying many gimmicky tricks over the years to build its popularity and fight off the advance of new mediums like television.  Many of its efforts have been successful, some have not.  But ultimately, in an industry as volatile and susceptible to outside influences as entertainment, it should be expected that, eventually, theater will fall out of favor and have to evolve in order to continue, or whither away.

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The pressures of the pandemic happen to be one of those outside influences, damaging the prospects and future of the theater industry while at the same time bolstering the growth of other home-based entertainment systems.  If the pressure continues for too long, it could finish theaters; they’d be forced to shut down, sell their buildings and let some new industry adapt them to some other use.  And if not this, sooner or later something else will cause the shift away from theaters, in favor of some other delivery platform, whether it be television, stored content on computers, broadcast through gaming platforms, casting from phones, immersive equipment, direct-to-brainpan uploads, or something we can scarcely imagine today.

This is called progress.  It’s the most significant natural byproduct of a technological society, and it can be suppressed, but never fully subdued.

And yes, it’s hard on the technology that must evolve to keep up, like theaters have been doing for the past century.  But the bright side is that it usually brings new and interesting changes to the industry in question, in its efforts to survive; and when it reaches the limit of improvement, it’s usually replaced with something better in some or all ways.  We always hope the experience won’t be too traumatic, and there will always be aspects of the old technology that many will miss; but either immediately or eventually, people accept and get used to the new technology, and we move on.  In fact, there have been few technologies that haven’t eventually bent to the will of progress over time.

I’ve often wondered if one of the oldest of technologies, the almighty printed book, could someday disappear, to be ultimately replaced by some existing or as yet unimagined media or delivery system.  It’s one reason why I, in contemplating the future of my novels, considered the likelihood that their future won’t be in physical book form, but in some other media… ebooks, audiobooks, games, screenplays, mnemonic injections, quark-streams or gravitic pulses in amber, I don’t know.

I also wonder if my choice of media hindered their success; maybe I should have chosen audiobooks instead of novels, or perhaps written them as screenplays instead of traditional narratives.  I’ve rewritten one of my novels as a screenplay; given its length, it ended up as a miniseries length, but it proved that I could do it.  I personally can’t imagine doing an audiobook, but if I find myself with time in the future (nyuk, nyuk), I may rewrite other books as screenplays, and any future stories of mine may go straight to script.

[image error]It’s not an easy choice; it can be incredibly hard to guess which technology will work out, or how.  (Revisit James Burke’s Connections series for refreshers.)  Tech can be embraced by the world either through acceptance or by necessity, as influences like pandemics can force a choice over the whims of popular opinion.  Ultimately, the evolution of technology isn’t always up to us; and even the best of work can fail if technology has moved on and left the work (or its creator) behind.

While we might expect medical technology to give us a solution to the pandemic, we probably didn’t imagine a health crisis would threaten the future of the entertainment industry.  Will theaters mostly ride it out… or will this be the crisis that forces them to evolve again or finally die?  And what other unsuspecting areas of technology will be impacted by this surprise health issue?  Only time—and progress—will tell.

Voting, moving forward, must advance

The U.S. Election in 2020 was not the fraud-based train wreck that Republicans (one, in particular) would have us believe; but it was rife with confusion, security risks, identity concerns, physical threats—from elements as large as human beings to as small as viruses—and widespread disenfranchisement, accidentally and intentionally, largely along the artificially-elevated social stratification of a nonsensical metric, differences in skin color.   All so the numbers of often-manually-counted votes could be given to special representatives who were, ultimately, free to discard those votes and themselves vote any way they chose, to elect the next President of the United States.  In an election “season” designed to take almost a year from start to finish.

If you didn’t know any better, it would seem as if the country’s voting system was designed in the 1700s.

Oh, wait. It was.

America’s Founding Fathers spent a lot of time designing a government that was intended to be fair and publicly accountable, acting in the country’s best interests as opposed to the whims of individuals looking to game the system.  They also created a voting system designed for the same ends.  In the 1700s, that meant accommodating adults who often had limited educations (through no fault of their own), received news sparingly (if at all) at the speed of carriers as likely to be on foot as by horse, and were much more isolated from their fellow citizens outside of their immediate district so as to know little to nothing about their fellows’ needs or desires.

It also meant that the process of voting had to allow for enough time for a back-and-forth between voters and citizens, to collect votes and return them to voting centers, manually count those votes and send that count to the seat of government.  Those votes were certified by signatures—even if that signatures was merely an X—because at that time, smaller communities knew each other and could vouch for a vote by an local farmer who couldn’t read.  Then men were inaugurated, and the resultant changes to government had to be communicated to the people of the land.  In the age of horseback (and often foot), that could take months.

Fast forward to the 2000s, and we find few real changes to that voting system of 300 years ago.  Yes, we can use automated systems to count ballots faster; and we can transmit information at close to the speed of light; But we are still allowing for months of time for voters to hear from politicians, taking votes on paper slips, physically moving them around the country, allowing almost three months to certify the ballots and finally inaugurate someone.

And those paper ballots are still subject to potential tampering, damage or loss before they get from the collection center, collection box or mail system to the counting location.  Ultimately, they are just paper, and paper is far from a permanent or durable medium.  Whereas we could be taking advantage of more modern systems available right now, to improve all of those voting issues.

[image error]The power of modern computing, for instance, has barely been applied to the processing or storage of nationwide voting systems outside of running manual counting machines.  Compare this to television programs that use computers to tally and provide results of phone-based voting in realtime, allowing the presentation of candidates, voting and results generation within the show’s hour-long run.

Security is clearly more of a factor in national voting than it is on a TV show; but today we have biometric sensor technology and 2-factor verification considered secure enough for financial institutions and government accounts.  They’re available on private owners’ cellphones and can be added to home computers.  People use them every day to conduct private and sensitive business, and often get messages by text or email confirming their activities or giving them time to cancel fraudulent transactions.  Surely such a system, robust enough for your bank and other money-handling establishments, can be used to verify identities well enough to establish voter security.

And back to the computers, which can not only tabulate and store those responses in realtime, but they can be separated and cross-connected to provide protected redundancy, encrypted data-comparison and further security.  The data they hold can be parsed out only as required to multiple parties, using the same security and verification processes, giving users a more comprehensive readout of voting data without compromising individual privacy.

And for those concerned about the potential volatility of computer-based data, those results can be copied in a coded fashion to any number of mediums (including, gasp! paper)—even all of them if you’re that paranoid thorough—to be stored in secure locations for later recalling if necessary.

This system, providing accurate one-person-one-vote data, will also remove the need for the Electoral College, the ability to re-allocate voter blocks at will by political appointees, and remove the effectiveness of gerrymandering nationwide.  Even Russia criticizes the U.S. for continuing to use the Electoral Congress; and gerrymandering, a system used to directly and deliberately take political power from African communities, is long overdue for being demolished.

With a system that can accurately record, tabulate and provide results literally seconds after the endtime of an election period, send voters confirmations for their votes at any time during or after the elections, and redundantly store that data in redundant locations, the time given to the voter-based processes and communicating data about those votes can be reduced to seconds instead of months.  It would also remove so many of the inherent risks of paper-based voting and the rigors of having to visit specific locations at specific times or worrying about deadlines related to remote voting.

Much of the rest of the time used for the election process includes time spent on campaigning, running commercials, etc… which can take up as much as a year, a period of time that only dilutes the candidate’s message the further it is from election time.  This should also be given to computers to handle.  Instead of annoying and misleading commercials filled with one-sided claims about a candidate’s record or capabilities, a central database available to everyone should store a complete and verified record of the candidate’s political resume, plus any comments from reputable news services on their actual performance, history and results.  A voter only has to look up a candidate’s name to see their resume, voting records and any (hopefully non-biased) comments made about them.

This record will be updated over time and will always be available to voters to do their own spot-checks.  And instead of dragging out the promotion process over months, voters can do their research at any time, one day, one week or one minute before election time.

I’ve advocated before on the increased use of modern computers, devices the Founding Fathers could have scarcely dreamed of, in modern government systems.  Those same computers, or systems tied to them, can similarly be used to bring modern voting into the 21st century as well.  It is well past time we used them, not only to make the voting process faster, more secure and more accessible, but to eliminate many of the areas where inaccuracy, fraud and security risks are present.  All of this can reduce our election “season” from a year to a single month.

We, as occupants of the modern world, need to start the process of bringing our voting process up-to-date immediately.  We owe it to ourselves to make sure our ability to access political information, make informed votes and see our votes counted properly in realtime, is as robust and accurate as our being able to access and use our financial accounts. Users will no longer tolerate financial transactions that don’t get recorded and verified within 24 hours of our making them; why should national voting be any less important, or any less securely and accurately handled?

A month of science links

Sometimes it seems I spend all my time on social media sharing memes or laughing at the latest antics of some pop star (or some politician who thinks he’s a pop star).  But in fact, I especially enjoy sharing stories about science that come up, or that I come across on my own at other websites.

The main reason I share them is to remind those who visit my social media sites (both of you, apparently) that, despite the pandemic, despite crazy politics, despite social unrest and climate change, and whatever they’re making fun of on TMZ, science is still happening, and it is accomplishing amazing things… some of which will hopefully, eventually solve so many of our present problems and future concerns.

Another reason I pick these out is that many of them might provide the kernal for an interesting science fiction story; you never know when a bit of new science development may suggest new possibilities and, intriguingly, new challenges.  Said stories might not even feature the science from these articles, but it might provide an extra layer to the story, the characters or even a better-detailed background, making the whole thing better to read.

As an example, here are the stories I’ve shared in social media in just the last month:

“Remote Control” for Diabetes Tackles Blood Sugar with Electromagnetism
Waymo Finally Opens Fully Driverless Taxi Service to Public
Drone-Jamming Gun Claimed to be One of the Smallest and Lightest
Middle Schooler Builds Tiny, Working Fusion Reactor
Top 10 Eco-friendly Hotels In The U.S.
Bio-convergence: A Quantum Leap in the Drug Development World
Physicists Build Circuit That Generates Clean, Limitless Power from Graphene
NASA Finds Evidence Two Early Planets Collided to Form Moon
Lab-Grown Meat Company Raises $55m In Funding
As Wildfires Continue in Western United States, Biologists Fear for Vulnerable Species
No Evidence That Hydroxychloroquine Can Prevent Covid-19, Concludes New Study
Ninety Percent of U.S. Cars Must Be Electric by 2050 to Meet Climate Goals
Second Alignment Plane of Solar System Discovered
Mars Express Spacecraft Has Discovered Liquid Water Ponds Buried Under the Martian Surface
Wastewater Predicts COVID-19 Outbreaks Days Before Diagnostic Testing
Moon Safe for Long-Term Human Exploration, First Surface Radiation Measurements Show
NASA Astronaut Plans To Cast Her Ballot From Space Station
Dynetics Human Lunar Landing System
Possible Sign of Life On Venus Stirs Up Heated Debate
Climate Change Denialist Given Top Role at Major U.S. Science Agency

See anything inspiring in there?  Well, if not, don’t worry… there’s always next month.

The future progresses. Star Trek should too.

I’ve been known to say that Star Trek is long in the tooth, that its recent iterations are the equivalent of flogging a dead franchise.  Given how beloved the franchise is, it’s no surprise I get push-back on that.

A lot of push-back.

And I get it.  People love Star Trek.  And so do I; I’ve only watched it for almost all of my conscious life.  But, seriously, there’s a reason why I want Star Trek to change, already.  And it goes back to Trek’s origins, and its creator, Gene Roddenberry.

When Roddenberry originally pitched Star Trek to Desilu Studios, he described it with this phrase: “Wagon Train to the stars.”  Wagon Train was a popular TV series featuring a group of people travelling across the untamed American west, and encountering other settlers and various dangers, like hostile Indians, wild animals and claim jumpers, along the way.  It was the model of jingoistic manifest destiny that early America was about.  The original Star Trek emulated this premise, and the premise’s familiarity with American audiences was a major part of its success.

[image error]Since then, Star Trek has created numerous spin-off series and a number of movies, including movie reboots and prequel series.  Its first sequel was Star Trek: The Next Generation, which depicted a new crew on the same mission as the original series, and the movies re-presented the first and next generation crews on cinematic missions (of varying quality).  Problem is, they myopically follow the same premise, Wagon Train to the stars, and refuse to consider the future of their own premise beyond simple updating of their familiar technologies.  (There is a single exception so far, which I’ll discuss later.)  And this is the problem with Trek: It’s not even trying to advance itself to keep up with history.

Eventually, the American west was settled, and the hostile and dangerous elements were tamed.  American TV followed suit, evolving from shows about exploring and settling the dangerous west to shows about the established settlements themselves… small towns and big cities that largely adhered to the laws of the government, with occasional problems and problem people.  In that era, shows like Route 66 featured characters traveling to and from these settled areas, providing extra hands or fresh perspectives to help out the locals and maintain the status quo (except where the status quo didn’t match that of the laws and morals of the land, and needed to be adjusted).

Eventually television shows settled into featuring characters in those home settlements, helping out their neighbors, or trying to navigate the stresses of modern life.  This is how America progressed.  And this is how I maintain that Star Trek should have progressed: Instead of being stuck in the same slice of American history forever, Trek should have given us new series that would explore later eras of the occupation of space.

Following the original Trek’s jingoistic manifest destiny phase, later series should have given us an era of newly-established settlements and the non-military, non-explorer people who go from settlement to settlement, or planet to planet, encountering people and helping them with their local problems, mostly that threaten to disrupt the settlement on a small or large scale. It could be a future analogue to Route 66, The A-Team or Knight Rider, centered around a small group who travels freely around the newly-settled Federation, meeting new characters every week and helping out.

[image error]Does this sound familiar?  Firefly very much featured this type of premise, a small group of travelers, moving about the newly-settled Verse, meeting new people and helping out where they can.  It represents the Route 66 era of the future, the next step after exploring and settling the frontier.

Later Trek series could then give us a fully-established world and characters established within it, living and struggling to get by in that not-so-perfect future.  This would be the equivalent of series like The Rockford Files, Breaking Bad or Moving On, stories about working stiffs dealing with the rigors of modern life as they try to make a living.

[image error]And here is where we get to the exception to the Star Trek rule, the one series that bucks the manifest destiny trend… Star Trek: Picard.  Picard is about a retired military commander, whose peaceful life in an established Federation is interrupted by a mystery and a conspiracy associated with an old friend; so he gathers a group to help solve the mystery presented to him.  The world around him is established, as is his life within it; but there is a problem presented to him, which he longs to right.  Picard represents the Breaking Bad era of the future, just as Firefly represents the Route 66 era, both the next steps beyond Wagon Train‘s frontier era.

And after over fifty years of Wagon Train, it’s high time for Star Trek to give us more of either the Route 66 newly-settled eras, or the Breaking Bad life in fully-settled eras, stories about humanity’s next steps in settling and living in the future.

Concerned that stories set beyond the galaxy’s manifest destiny era won’t be Star Trek?  Fine.  Change the names, redesign the trappings and create the original series.  Call the first post-Trek series Star Worlds, and the post-Worlds series Star Life.  Call them whatever… but give us those series, please.  No more Wagon Train.  We expect the future to progress.  Star Trek should progress, too.

Why isn’t Close Encounters more popular?

An article on IO9 caught my attention the other day: It wondered why Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind isn’t popularly considered one of his best movies. The article examines the movie and its overall quality, which the author claims doesn’t explain its lower popularity among Spielberg’s other movies, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Jaws, Minority Report, etc, etc, etc.

I spend a lot of time wondering about why this is popular and not that, why no one talks about this old movie while they won’t stop talking about that one, why this is a classic and that is a joke, etc. I wish I could say I could apply the question to my old novels… but since none of them ever reached a level of legitimate popularity, the question just doesn’t apply.  (Yeah, yeah, poor me.  Shaddup.)

But it’s an interesting question when applied to science fiction films, because its answer says a lot about the changing nature of American society and science fiction films in the US. Honestly, the answer to science fiction movie and TV popularity came to me in no time; and the answer applies to most popular American science fiction (and fantasy) movies and TV shows of the last few decades.

Put simply, the popularity of certain forms of American SF and fantasy has a lot to do with the modern-day audience’s continually growing fascination with physical conflict and violence.

Early SF has had its violent moments, to be sure: Monsters, rampaging robots, attacking aliens and warring civilizations have been part of SF since it was SF. But a lot of SF was also about heady concepts like investigating alien mysteries, finding common ground with outsiders and dealing with futuristic technology and its impacts on society.  And yes, there is still SF that deals with these intelligent concepts without resorting to violent confrontations.

[image error]As time has progressed, however, audiences have steadily shied away from the more intellectual concepts of SF, in favor of more extreme action and exciting adventure. The introduction of Star Wars, with its spaceship skirmishes and chases, lightsaber and blaster battles and exploding planets, redefined the concept of the blockbuster and took over a market of movies and TV shows that formerly spent more time looking inward and seeking intelligent means of solving problems. And as newer movies have continued to ramp up on the levels of adventure and violence, trying to outdo the last box-office success, audiences have signed on with eagerness. Perhaps the ultimate examples of those are the superhero movies, with wildly-costumed characters and extreme action and punch-ups, which have become the most financially successful movies of the time.

When viewed through this lens, it becomes understandable why Close Encounters isn’t as popular as many of Spielberg’s other movies, and incidentally, why some of his other movies, like ET: the Extra-Terrestrial are thought of as “kid’s movies” versus “adult movies.” As good as CE3K is, about the most violent act in the entire movie is the army’s gassing a trespasser from a passing helicopter. Compare that to sharks and dinosaurs eating people, gunfire across battlefields, fighting archaeologists and peace officers, Nazis, and even CIA agents pulling guns on kids on bicycles, and suddenly CE3K seems downright pedestrian.

[image error]Take a look at other SF movies that bombed in theaters, and you’ll see a steady stream of minimal-violence movies. A great example is Steven Soderberg’s Solaris, which was a well-done and well-acted movie, but which had absolutely no on-screen violence. Peter Hyams’ 2010: The Year We Make Contact was also an excellent movie, but with no onscreen violence, it didn’t do well in the theater. And when Paramount brought Star Trek to the big screen, a series known for its intelligence and treatment of heady concepts, each of the heavy-action movie versions were largely more popular than the more intellectual stories.

By this measure, it seems that while serious science fiction might get you award nominations, ultra-violence is the thing you need to make popular and financially successful SF for today’s market, especially in movies… and CE3K just doesn’t hit that mark, due to its significant lack of audience-pleasing violence.

I wish I could just note the reality of the situation and be satisfied; but to be honest, I still believe SF’s greatest strength is its smart and futuristic concepts, its demonstration of people using their heads to overcome obstacles, and its nonviolent solutions to problems.  To me, turning SF media into more excuses for juvenile power fantasies cheapens it and dilutes its value as a medium and genre.  But perhaps, like older SF movies, I am an anachronism too.