Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 87
July 2, 2015
Temple State
Japanese Buddhism changed forever when Oda Nobunaga razed the Mount Hiei temples and broke the back of the Warrior Monk organization. But what if he didn’t? What if political unity emerged under the shadow, not of the Tokugawa Shogunate, but the Tendai Temple State?
“Good day, Lord Shiba. You seem troubled, full o f past regrets and worries. Plagued, perhaps by your attachment to your material possessions? Yes, that is why the Temple State seeks out those who accumulate too much wealth. *musket-cocking sound* Now let us relieve you of it.”
Biochemical magic
I found a library through a door in my house I’d never noticed before. In the library were not shelves of books but strings of beads, each stamped with one of 23 symbols. The strings hung limply from their racks, but when I touched them, the symbols glowed and the strings wound themselves into helices or wove themselves into sheets. Brought together, sheets and helices spun in my hands and locked into larger, more complicated structures. These structures in turn folded themselves into new shapes and joined together into the components of vast machines.
The machines were everywhere, copying the strings of beads, modifying them, carrying them out of the library into the vast, bustling city beyond.
~~~
Yes, this is an actually dream I had. Too much Neil Gaiman and molecular biology.
June 30, 2015
Platforming and networking
Last week on tumblr, I asked whether it was better for a writer to focus on building a platform (getting fans) or networking (finding colleagues and collaborators), and I got some very thoughtful responses:
nyctopterus said: Publishing isn’t what it used to be. I’d be tempted to forget it. I say the best way to build a platform is improving your craft, and keep producing. Raise your prices too.
linguisten answered: why should that be mutually exclusive?
skywhaler answered: In my personal experience it’s not viable to build a fanbase prior to releasing substantial work. The kind of audience gained when substance is lacking isn’t generally the kind to stick around when the substance comes
exxos-von-steamboldt answered: I think you need at least one published work first to act as the foundation/presentation of yourself and your work. Otherwise it is an unstructured, ephemeral concept. You’ll get stronger support through people knowing what they are supporting.
The moral: practice until you produce something good, and you’ll attract fans.
This is a rather different moral from what I absorbed when I first started researching the publishing industry. I thought then that I needed a “platform” that I could show to potential publishers as a guaranteed fan-base. Hi, I’m Dan Bensen, but you may know me better as the guy who edited the wildly successful Speculative Dinosaur Project. I’ve written a science fiction novel about dinosaurs, and if you publish it, lots of people will definitely buy it from you! But that didn’t work. And two years later, I don’t think platform building can work for me.
If I was already a web celebrity, publishing a book might make sense as one of many ways to monetize my fame. But I’m a novelist. Getting my novels published is the end in and of itself. I don’t want to put time and energy into reviving the Speculative Dinosaur Project, I want to write books! That’s what I enjoy, and (as I get more practice) that’s what I’m good at.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a lot of luck the past two years with reaching out and getting in touch with fellow writers and creative types, but that’s not the same thing as fans. Colleagues help you because they know you’ll help them. Fans help you because they love your work and want to see more of it. You can make colleagues by paying it forward and participating proactively and so forth, but you can only make fans by producing stuff for them to enjoy.
So I have been producing the podcast and the Wonderful, Awful Ideas, but while the WAIdeas are fun and the podcast has been useful in a colleague-gathering way, I don’t think I have all that many fans of either of them. If I have any fans, it’s from my art and The Kingdoms of Evil. In other words, things that were my primary focus, not stuff I churned out on the side to serve some other purpose. That shows me that platforming is something that only happens AFTER you’ve produced good work. After all, I can’t attract fans if I don’t produce anything for them to be fans of.
So my resolution going forward is to make more stuff that you can put up on the refrigerator. That’ll be art, short stories, and maybe even something longer…?
Stay tuned for more.
June 28, 2015
99 Speculative Philosophy with Eric Schwitzgebel
But are the REALLY happy?
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/99EricJune29.mp3
I’m talking with Eric Schwitzgebel about his new story Momentary Sage, his Philosophers’ Science Fiction / Speculative Fiction Recommendations, and the next moral frontier.
What’s this about a suicidal baby?
Steve Bein and the podcast I did with him about his book, Disciple of the Wind
Maybe don’t kill everyone?
Eric’s list of science fiction authors who philosophers like
Top four: Ursula LeGuin, Ted Chiang, Philip K. Dick, and Greg Egan
There are no marching orders in philosophy.
Dan admits to not having read Philip K. Dick
What’s the difference between robots and animals?
Our moral duty toward artificial intelligence
Nick Bostrom and Hedonium, a substance that feels only pleasure
Why Save the Mechanical Rainforest?
John Searle doesn’t think something programmed can be conscious
Turbofanatic and the screaming laptop!
Here’s a shotgun. Blow off ASIMO‘s head.
District 9’s anthropomorphic prawns and Simon Roy’s…prawn-opomorphic prawns
Anthropomorphic Chauvinism!
The Expanding Circle (not written by Steven Pinker, but by Peter Singer)
Robert Sapolsky (baboon guy with beard) who introduced me to the Ikea lamp commercial
Maybe our gut intuitions don’t form a coherent whole
Developing the moralometer
Interstellar’s special effects predicted something about black holes
Solaris and His Master’s Voice
And we end things before one of Them hears us and catches on…
June 25, 2015
Pangea Nekra
All the Earth is dead.
We do not know how or why all the people of Earth were transported to the early Triassic, but we know the result. Drought. Starvation. Ruins in the red rock.
We were the luckiest, we think. Australia in the early Triassic is green and cool near the south pole, and connected to the vast, lush, uninhabited landmass of Antarctica. All we had to do was fight a war with the Indians to claim it.
Now our empire is large enough to bring us news of the death that befell the people transported to the vast desert of South America and Africa. Europe and North America can not have fared better, because the only voices we hear on the radio are speaking Chinese.
It is time to find out. Our ships are ready to sail the starved seas. The Empire of Oz must expand, or else die.
June 23, 2015
Alternatives to Sex?
This is kind of beside the point for Junction, since the aliens in question are non-sapient animals, but I guess I got into this habit writing New Frontiers. Just can’t stop thinking about alien sex!
Specifically, why have it? Why not asexual reproduction? Well, there have been whole books written on the subject, but the upshot is that it seems to be a good long-term strategy to scramble your genome a bit and to allow individual animals to choose who their genes will be scrambled with.
Does that mean that sex is inevitable? Greg Egan postulates an alternative, in which individuals swap genetic information with their neighbors, which they then incorporate into their offspring.
Alternate quantum physics weirdness aside, this sort of horizontal gene transfer should be familiar to us from the way real-life bacteria exchange plasmids (and eukaryotes occasionally exchange exogenous retroviruses). Why not scale up this system to work for large animals?
Animals accept retroviruses from other animals and put them in a “library.” The next time they accept a retrovirus, they compare it to the ones they’ve already captured. Is the animal getting a lot of copies of the same gene from different donors? If so, perhaps that gene is useful and should be expressed.
That system is vulnerable to abuse, though. Retroviruses may code for nothing more than making other retroviruses. In other words, they are parasites, and waste the host’s resources. I can also imagine donors sending out trojan-horse retroviruses containing destructive code to kill off their competition. The solution would be for the host to watch its potential donors while they compete with each other and judge which donor seems healthiest and best suited for its environment. Then select the genes from that one…and I’ve re-invented sex.
Okay, what if, in order to swamp out the parasitic genes that might otherwise hijack the swap, organisms would copy and swap ALL of their genes? And to avoid disrupting organs already in operation, these new genes are sequestered and saved until they can make a contribution to the next generation…hell, I’ve re-invented sex again.
OKAY. Here’s yet another possibility, this one I know works because bdelloid rotifers have been doing it for millions of years. When a rotifer is stressed, it expels the water from its body and forms a cyst. The cyst sits there for however long it takes for conditions to improve, at which point it fills with water again and comes back to life. During its hibernation, its DNA was damaged (since the mechanisms that usually protect and repair it were dormant), so it takes DNA fragments from other rotifers that it sucked up along with the water and uses them to repair its own genome. This strategy has the added advantage of keeping the genome stable while times are good and everyone is reproducing parthenogenically, but introducing variation when times are bad and some new survival strategies might be in order.
Abuse of the system could be more viruses, and there may be something like sexual selection where rotifers huddle together with healthy individuals in order to make sure they get access to good gene-fragments. I can see how this system might evolve in time back into something like sex (it’s just such a good strategy) but bdelloid rotifers have been doing okay since the Jurassic, so maybe asexual reproduction works after all :). At least the system’s good enough for me to use for my Martians.
June 21, 2015
I will often friend you: Bulgarian verb aspects
One of the hardest bits of Bulgarian grammar for me to wrap my mind around was the difference between the complete and incomplete aspects* of verbs. It’s not a distinction English makes (except in a few cases like “eat up” versus “eat”), native speakers don’t spend much time thinking about it, and the rules for transforming an incomplete verb (the way they appear in the dictionary) to a complete one are…inconsistent.
But, as with many productive grammatical features, complete/incomplete aspects make a lot more sense when we look at a new word.
Frendvam (френдвам) – To friend someone on a social networking site.
Okay, so frendvam is the incomplete aspect and the first conjugation. It means “I friend someone, either at this moment or in general.” In other words, it combines the English sentences “I friend someone” (in general) and “I am friending someone” (right now).
But what if you want to talk about the future? The Bulgarian equivalent of English “will” is shte, but if you say shte te frendvam, it doesn’t mean “I will friend you,” it means “I will be in the process of friending you, but I will be interrupted” or “I will often friend you.” If you want to say “I will friend you once, like BAM!” you have to use the completed form: shte te frendna.
Frendna (френдна) – to friend someone once, like BAM!
In the same way, if you want to talk about the past (using the suffix –h) you can’t just say frendvah, that means “I was friending you, when suddenly…” or “I often used to friend you.” If you want to just say “I friended you,” you have to use the completed form: frendnah te.
So the completed form is super important to talking about the past or future in Bulgarian, but you can’t use frendna in the present tense, because that wouldn’t make sense. How can an action be in the present tense and completed?
The only time you’ll see frendna in the present tense is in places where in English we’d use an infinitive. “I want to friend you” is iskam da ti frendna. This as opposed to “I want to be friending you” (iskam da ti frendvam), meaning I don’t care if I actually complete the action. That’s why Bulgarian-speakers often use the progressive strangely when speaking English (“This is Boris, you should be laughing when he is making jokes.”)
So what do you get when you put it all together?
VERB STEM (something I NEVER see in Bulgarian dictionaries or text books! Argh!)
Frend– to friend (if Bulgarian had such a thing as infinitives)
FUTURE
Shte frendna– I will friend
Shte frendvam-I will often friend/be friending
PRESENT
(da) Frendna-(to) friend
Frendvam-I friend/am friending
PAST
Frendnah-I friended
Frendvah-I often friended/was friending
PAST UNCERTAIN (or “inferential” often called “present perfect”, but it isn’t)
Frendnal sam-I have friended (as you can infer from the fact that you are now my friend)
Frendval sam-I have been friending (but I’m not done yet)
IMPERATIVE
Frendnai!-Friend someone!
Ne frendvai!-Don’t friend someone!
(Yes, the complete aspect is the default for positive imperatives, and the incomplete for negative. There is probably some logic there)
ADJECTIVE (present active participle)
(impossible in the completed aspect)
Frendvasht (obekt)-A friending (object)
PASSIVE (past passive participle)
Frendnan (obekt)-A friended (object)
Frendvan-An object in the process of being friended (this form may be impossible)
NOUN (gerund or verbal noun)
Frendvane(to)-(the) idea of friending
(impossible in the incomplete aspect)
ADVERB (or adverbial participle)
(impossible in the complete aspect)
Frendvayki-Friending, I did something
Now can you figure out the forms for other new Bulgarian verbs?
Shervam (to share)
Baunsvam (to bounce—this one may just be used in my family)
*There isn’t even consensus on what they should be called in English. In Bulgarian, they are glagoli ot svarshen ili nesvarshen vid (literally “verbs of the complete or incomplete kind”), but are often translated as “finite” and “non-finite” or “perfective” or “imperfective,” which is easy to confuse for English perfect or imperfect mood.
June 17, 2015
Virgo triumphat Alexandri!
I just finished reading Nemesis Games, in which the characters wonder what would have happened if Darius III had not tried to retreat from the Battle of Gaugamela. The larger Persian army might well have won. Well? And then what?
Let’s say Alexander himself survives. There are good chances of that, either because he was good at not dying in battle or because he was captured and ransomed. He and his army still have control over a pretty big chunk of the known world, from the Danube to the upper Nile to (after some negotiations with the Persians) the river Euphrates.
So there is no Selucid Empire, and perhaps a smaller Maurya Empire with no vacuum to expand into. That might butterfly away Buddhism and Jainism, reduced to mere varieties of Hinduism. But there is still a Hellenistic period. In fact, with an Alexander allowed to die of old age, there might be a centralized Hellenistic Empire stretching west to include Carthage (cause who else did they have to invade?), running up against the territory of the expanding Roman Republic. Who wants to bet Alexander III does a better job against the Romans than Hannibal?
June 16, 2015
The Bottom of the Food-Chain
So let’s start at the beginning. You want to populate the living world? It starts with energy. Usually that energy comes from the sun, so the first issue I should tackle in designing an alien ecosystem should be harvesting sunlight.
Terran plants capture sunlight primarily with chlorophyll (there are a few other pigments that help out such as melanin, anthocyanin, and various carotenoids) which collects the energy necessary to drive the proton pumps that turn water and co2 into oxygen and glucose sugar. Sugar can then be oxidized to produce CO2 and energy when needed. an estimable process and one we’ll probably see evolve independently elsewhere, but are there alternatives?
Steel-wool trees
Rather than carry out photosynthesis through living tissue, steel-wool trees extrude filaments of laden with arsenite, which oxidizes under sunlight to produce arsenate and carbon monoxide. Since this biome produces no oxygen (and indeed, oxygen is toxic to most of its inhabitants), it is violently incompatible with all surrounding biomes. It is theorized that this form of life was uncommon on the Steel-wool home-world when it was linked to Junction (~100 MYA), but became dominant after a later planetary catastrophe. The presence of more familiar photosynthesizers on the edges of the steel-wool zone support this hypothesis.
Kelp Trees
Kelp trees use methane and water to produce glucose and hydrogen, which they store in gas bladders to provide buoyancy in the air. As with the steel-wool trees, this form of metabolism is probably a relatively recent development, possibly in response to a global release of methane hydrate in the kelp-tree home-world’s past. The kelp tree zone now maintains an active methane cycle, which operates alongside an Earthlike carbon-dioxide-oxygen cycle. The need for methane puts kelp trees at a disadvantage that is only somewhat offset by the extremely efficient dispersal of their hydrogen balloon-seeds.
Kelp tree forests are common at high altitudes, along mountain ridges. How these colonies established a working methane cycle so far from their home wormhole is unknown. Native superstitions regarding tool-using aliens are entirely unsubstantiated.
Kinetotrophs
Kinetosynthetic “clappers” use motion to build up charge in piezoelectric crystals deposited in a hinge or bearing between the clapper’s vanes and its holdfast. This energy is used to ionize hydrogen to form a proton gradient and synthesize chemical energy-storage, similar to ATP synthesis in Terran organisms. The source of the motion may be the omnipresent wind currents of their tidally-locked home-world, or from the action of symbiotic animal life.
Even boring old photosynthesis can look very weird if you do it right. Consider, for example, the unmoving light-source of the tidally-locked home-world of the clappers.
Spangletrees
Like the clappers to which they are distantly related, spangletrees’ principle structure chemical is polyester. This material can be spun into structures of many forms, ranging from hard and waxy near the roots to the flexible, selectively transparent filaments that grow from the crown in place of leaves. Some of these filaments simply pipe sunlight into photosynthetic nodules at their base, but others redirect sunlight to clone spangletrees that bud of the roots of the parent.
This adaptation originally evolved to gain competitive access to a single unmoving source of light and energy on a tidally-locked world. A single colonial forest can feed sunlight to its colonies across the day/night terminator in exchange for nutrients. Even at the antestellar point (or “Night Pole”) of the planet, sunlight imported from the day side provides enough energy to drive photosynthesis. Spangletree filaments can also be grown to shade competitors or, focus sunlight and burn them.
Diatoms
Rather than stretching around an expanding skeleton of dead wood like Terran trees, diatom-zone plants excrete a “test” of transparent silicate plates held together by flexible silicone. For ground-covering “tureen grass” the test is flat and grows outward until its edge hits the edge of another tureen plate. Growing en masse, tureen forms an array of hexagons of various width (depending on the underlying ground). When a plate matures, it sporulates, converting all of its tissues into bead-shaped reproductive packets and removing silicone from its test, making it brittle. Animals can now smash the test to drink the nutrient soup inside, thereby spreading the spores. Other animals smash healthy plates (usually by disgorging sulfuric acid onto them first to dissolve the silicone component of their tests) and can be regarded as herbivores or parasites.
Under the soil, more symbiosis is going on with another species of sponge that creates glassy tubes that transport water and mineral salts in exchange for sugars manufactured by the plates. While the plates usually sporulate and die within a year, the aqueducts live much longer.
Treelike diatoms grow by extruding a glassy spire, around which a thin ribbon of water-filled photosynthetic chambers winds like the thread on a screw.
And no speculative biology would be complete without plant-animals…
Worm Trees
Diploid, sessile ‘trees’ produce monoploid, mobile “worms” (more properly “zoophytes”). In many species, zoophyte stage can reproduce parenthetically. Parthenogenic clones may remain in colonial swarms or split up, and take up many of the roles filled by Terran arthropods and annelids. Zoophytes swap genetic material through intercourse, which expressed when they germinate into diploid trees. Commonly, swarms of clones gather to create a many-branched or thicket-like diploid form. In one lineage, a fraction of the swarm does not germinate, and take on specialized roles to protect, gather nutrients for, or weed around their sibling tree.
Neotonous, permanent zoophytes never become sessile, but instead grow photosynthetic flaps as zoophytes.
June 14, 2015
98 Memory and Landscape with Rebecca Roland
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/98RebeccaJune15.mp3
Rebecca Roland‘s epic fantasy Fractured Days, the sequel to Shards of History.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
Dragons would definitely live here
What if Alexander’s army had had dragons?
