Graham Storrs's Blog, page 8

Adding or Subtracting?

Way back in the Eighties and Nineties, I used to work at an R&D lab in Cambridge (that’s the real Cambridge, not that upstart in Massachusetts). Mostly I worked on artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, but I also got to play around with virtual reality and a lot of what was going on involved augmented reality. By the time I left Cambridge in 1994 and went off to work in Zurich, AR had become a hot field among the industrial R&D folk. I remember having a long conversation with the then head of EuroPARC about what he felt were the two big research directions of the day and they were “wearable computing” and augmented reality. As it happens, I think we’ve just reached the point where the technology is able to give us some of what R&D people like me were dreaming of twenty years ago.

If you want to play with AR right this minute, you don’t need to run a year-long R&D project, you just pick up your Android smartphone and launch the Layar app. Or, if you’re one of those first penguin types who has all the toys, reach for your Google Glass specs. The technology is pretty crude still, but it’s here and it will get better.

In parallel, there have been recent strides in interfacing digital electronics to human neural tissue. This is terrific news for people with disabilities as it is enabling all kinds of sensory prostheses (like retinal and cochlear implants) and direct mental control of mechanical prostheses (like wheelchairs, legs, and arms). Again, it’s all very crude but it will improve. And when you put neural implants together with augmented reality, you really are starting to reach a place where cognitive prostheses are possible (like direct mental access to information, direct mind-to-mind communication, and the real-time manipulation of sensation to re-paint reality as you please).

It will make iPhones look like stone axes, and it isn’t very far away.

As a science fiction writer, it’s my job to look at this coming world and ask what it might mean for us, to try to imagine how these technologies might be used – and abused. In the case of augmented reality, I’ve been looking at what is gained and what is lost when AR is as commonplace as smartphones and TVs. It really could be an amazing world to live in. On the other hand, the technology doesn’t only offer opportunities for medicine and entertainment, it could also leave us exposed to a whole new world of deception and corruption. Just as email brought us Nigerian conmen, and mass media brought us Rupert Murdoch, ubiquitous augmented reality will also have its villains.

And that was the inspiration for my new novel, Heaven is a Place on Earth. The question at the heart of the book is, will augmented reality add more to our lives than it takes away?

Cover Reveal: Heaven is a Place on Earth by Graham Storrs

Here it is, the cover for my new novel, Heaven is a Place on Earth.

For those who know Brisbane, you’ll notice the background photograph is the Brisbane River with the CBD behind it, taken from Kangaroo Point. And, when you read the book, you’ll realise why there’s a quadcopter gliding towards us

I had a lot of trouble with fonts and colours, working through countless permutations before my various reviewers were not completely unhappy. Most of the text is now in Deja Vu sans bold with the word “Heaven” in something called “Destroy”. Designing book covers is hard when your aesthetic sense can be summed up in the phrase, “I don’t know much about art … etc..” Now that it’s finished, I’m just happy that no-one around me hates it any more. (Many thanks to Meryl, by the way, who gave me some great pointers.)

At the risk of driving myself insane, what do you think? Does it say “near-future sci-fi” to you? Does it have a hint of bleakness? A soupçon of sinister? Does it suggest something vaguely 1984-ish? Because those are all the things I was aiming for.

*Sighs* Yeah, I know.

 

New Book Coming

It’s an exciting time. I have a new book in the works and it will be published in early January (most likely Friday, 3rd January). It’s called Heaven is a Place on Earth. It’s a book about a woman, lost in a maze of deceit and deception, trying to find her way back to reality. Imagine a cross between William Gibson and Robert Goddard.

The cover isn’t quite there yet and the text is still in the final stages of editing and formatting but it’s nearly there. I haven’t even got the marketing materials (blurbs, tag-line, press release and so on) finished yet. As soon as I have all that and the cover, it will go up on Amazon for pre-order. Yes, Christmas is coming too!

Here’s my current stab at a description. If you can see a way to improve it, please let me know. These things are important.

Ginny had only dated the enigmatic Cal Copplin a couple of times when the police arrived to question her about him. He’d disappeared – something that should be completely impossible in the late 21st century when everyone was electronically tagged. And then Ginny received a recorded message from Cal, asking her to deliver a small package for him. Her decision to help him plunges Ginny into a world of fear, corruption, and massive deception. On the run from the police, a dangerous terrorist organisation, and a shadowy corporation, Ginny struggles to stay alive and free while she tries to understand what is happening and prevent a deadly attack on the government. But in a world dominated by augmented and virtual realities, nothing is as it seems, and the deception runs deeper than anyone could imagine.

So, let me know what you think. I’ll be doing the cover reveal soon and asking for reviewers of advanced copies.

 

Book Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Really good, new science fiction writers seem to be as rare as hen’s teeth these days. Who is the last one you can remember discovering? Alastair Reynolds? Cory Doctorow? (No, don’t include fantasy writers, we’re talking sci-fi here.) Whoever it was, it was probably years ago.

It gets to the point where you hardly dare pick up a new science fiction writer for fear of the disappointment to follow. So it is a great joy to find Ann Leckie, who not only writes with a strong, clear voice, but who writes science fiction that is intelligent, inventive, and richly textured.

Ancillary Justice is a simple tale of intrigue, betrayal, and vengeance but it is set in a future world that is finely drawn and beautifully imagined. The protagonist, Breq, is pursuing a personal vendetta against the Lord of the Radch, supreme ruler of the Radchaai empire. It has taken her 20 years of risk and privation, and she has visited many worlds throughout the galaxy, but the end is in sight as the book opens on the final few scenes of her quest.

The Radch is a powerful force within the human-occupied worlds and benign in many ways, but it’s economy depends on continual expansion and the subjugation of new worlds. Its methods of annexing new populations are brutal and efficient and have long relied on its massive warships, each capable of destroying a planet, each controlled by an artificial intelligence (AI), and each stuffed to bursting with armies both human and ancillary.

Breq, we soon learn, was once an ancillary—a human whose mind has been replaced with an AI and integrated into the ship’s mind. She was once number nineteen in one cohort of a large ancillary army controlled by the ship, Justice of Torren, until a catastrophe destroyed the ship and Breq’s fellow ancillaries, leaving her alone to pursue her own justice. The story of how that catastrophe came about and how Breq has coped with it is the essence of the book.

Yet it is the detailed world-building of the Radch and its surrounding human and alien polities that sets Ancillary Justice apart from most sci-fi you will find on the shelves. The cultures, the religions, the songs, the clothing, the languages—all beautifully done.

There are some writers (China Miéville, for example) who will dwell luxuriously on the details of a city and its inhabitants for hundreds of pages. There are others (like Ursula le Guin) who have a sharper, less elaborate style and can do the job in a tenth of the words. Ann Leckie is in this latter camp. Like le Guin, she also demonstrates a mastery of the technology of her world and trusts the reader to know enough science (or at least to have read enough sci-fi) to know what she means when she says a character will “take the tether” or “open a gate” in the appropriate context.

Ann Leckie also handles with confidence the tricky business of letting us see into the mind of an ancillary who is as aware of the minds of the twenty others in her cohort as well as of the ship itself, all of whom feel part of a single identity as well as having their own unique perspective and thoughts.

Of course, Ancillary Justice is a first novel and is not without some faults. The plot develops a definite wobble about three-quarters of the way through when Breq seems to realise what the reader has been uncomfortably aware of for some time, that her plan is probably completely futile. This makes the ending seem a little fortuitous for our hero. It is an ending that also raises the difficult question of whether, given the devastating consequences that must follow, Breq did a good thing or a bad thing—a question it would be good to see addressed in subsequent volumes.

The fact that Breq is an AI is part of the charm of the book and the character’s peculiar ways of thinking are very nicely and consistently portrayed; however, the story is a third person telling from Breq’s perspective and, after a while, the flat, almost emotionless voice of the narrator becomes wearing.

One longs for some more emotional colour, for a less monotonous voice. It is to the author’s credit that she maintains Breq’s voice to the very end (a small technical triumph, actually), but especially during moments of high drama that absence of emotion creates a disconnect between Breq and the reader.

Nevertheless, this is an excellent book by a writer who deserves a large and loyal following. It was an impressive first novel. By most writers’ standards, it would be an impressive last novel. Having created such an exquisite future world, it is good to hear that Ann Leckie plans at least two more novels to be set there. This is first-class space opera from a writer who could probably tackle any other sci-fi sub-genre with similar aplomb. Let’s all hope she keeps them coming.

My Passions

Something that promises to be exciting and fun happened the other day. I won’t say what it was because it’s a secret, but it got me thinking about the things I’m passionate about.

Anyone who has been reading my blogs for the past decade will know I can get very ranty about things. If you asked me, I’d say I was passionate about loads of stuff. Here are a few things that frequently trigger a rant:


Superstition (by which I mean belief in magical things – like God, fairies, astrology, and so on)
Predatory people who prey on the weakness or stupidity of other people to exploit them (and here I include not just bankers and scammers but also purveyors of “alternative” medicines, psychics, advertisers, politicians, drug pushers, and so on)
Wilful ignorance (which is primarily exhibited by supremely arrogant people with closed minds or limited intellects – like religious bigots (I include the Pope, Cardinal Pell, etc.), politicians, shock jocks, so many of the rich and privileged, male and privileged, white and privileged, etc., climate change deniers, and New Age types)
Liars (the worst offenders are big corporations and the cynical politicians they buy off – big tobacco, oil, mining, agribusiness, big pharma, all of which lie and distort the truth no matter what harm they cause, just to make more money).

I get really angry about such things and devote a lot of my time on specialist blogs, online news sites, and elsewhere trying to counter some of it. The problem is that it is so widely accepted throughout society that corruption and lack of compassion are normal, that nobody even sees it any more. (Recently, the Pope said the Catholic Church shouldn’t spend so much time talking about how bad it is to be gay or to have abortions but should focus on how to help and support people. This was widely reported as a good thing. But why? He didn’t say the church was changing its position on any of its hate-filled and repressive policies, all he said was they should stop talking about it. It was a marketing message about the church’s image. It was cynical and cruel in the extreme – urging Catholics, in effect, to ignore the problems of gays and women with unwanted pregnancies. Problems they have helped cause and will continue to help perpetuate.


See? I’m ranting again.


Notice anything about that list? That’s right, it’s all rather negative. But it’s true. The things that spring to mind when I think of what gets me passionate are all things that make me angry. In fact there are many more than the ones I listed but the others are rather small beer by comparison (people who can’t spell, publishers who “translate” books written by Brits and Aussies into American idioms and American spelling, parents who let their kids cry, cruelty to animals – especially when it’s combined with one of the big ones, like superstition, and leads to live export and cruel halal butchery of cattle, people who can’t drive, and on and on).

So I started to wonder whether there is anything at all that I’m passionate about that is actually positive.

I could start with my family, I suppose. I love my wife and daughter so much it hurts. But I don’t write passionate blog posts about them. I don’t do anything much about it at all, except be as nice to them as I can.

Then there’s my writing. You could say I’m passionate about that, perhaps. I have done it all my life, and by “done it” I mean I have written and thought about writing every single day since I was about 11 years old. In the past five years, it has become a major focus of my life, but is it a passion? Doesn’t a passion imply violent emotions? Do I stand up in front of audiences and demand my right to tell stories? No (although I sign the occasional PEN petition). Do I join professional bodies and work tirelessly for the betterment of writers everywhere? Well, no, actually. I did once join the Queensland Writers’ Centre but, after the first year, let my membership lapse.) Do I give up the things I love and suffer terrible privation for my writing? Again, no. I have always just squeezed it in where I can around my other commitments (mainly the ones to my family) and made do with that.

So not much joy there, then.

I could, I suppose, turn the negative passions on their heads and get a new list of things I passionately believe in:



Rationality (including the value of the scientific method, reasoned argument and evidence-based decision-making)
Empathy (which includes kindness to everyone and any creature that needs it, so long as it is in my power, allowing people their dignity, not hurting anyone, and never taking advantage of weakness.)
Education (for everyone who wants it or needs it, the availability of sound knowledge and the best understanding available to everyone, calling out people peddling misinformation, superstition, and lies, raising awareness of the blinkers of privilege and ignorance).
Truth. I would so like there to be a law that says no-one is allowed to lie in public or to children – with the onus on the liar to prove, based on the evidence, that what they say is true. How many corporate and political “spin doctors” would such a law put in jail? How many religious indoctrinators would it prevent from spreading their poison to young people? How many anti-vaccination campaigners would it get off the streets?

Sounds better, doesn’t it? And maybe I’m being too hard on myself for thinking that, because I don’t march, don’t run for office, don’t assassinate acupuncturists, because all I do is write about it, that I’m not doing enough to justify calling my beliefs passions.

Writing, after all, can change the world – and it frequently has.

Planning for Retirement

Timesplash has been free on Amazon for the past week (and is still free on iBookstore for some reason) so I’ve been looking at the book charts (because whenever Timesplash is free, it goes racing to the top of the charts and, you know, I like to pretend I’m successful).

When you see a whole page of book covers on your screen, and they’re the top 20 free Sci-Fi and Fantasy books on iBookstore, and you notice that your own cover looks absolutely nothing like any of the others, you do a double-take and you start to notice things – like that 15 of the top 20 books have pictures of women on the covers. And not hot ninja chicks in latex catsuits clutching ray guns of such penile proportions they would make an erotic vampire novelist blush, or supernormal warrior maidens with ten times more flesh showing than armour and a rack that’s sure to lead to back problems in later years. No, these particular cover ornaments are long-limbed, long flaxen haired, long flowing (but tight-bodiced) dress wearing elf-maidens of the soppyest, girliest, droopiest kind. The kind of women who, in the Sixties, would have been swaying around at folk concerts with headbands and flowers painted on their cheeks.

You also notice the titles – like that four out of 20 contain the word “Moon” and three the word “Kiss”.

And that yours is the only sci-fi book on the whole screen.

So, with nothing to do but procrastinate today (I wish!) I did a quick survey of the frequency of words used in the Amazon top 100 Sci-fi and Fantasy book titles. It didn’t take all that long and there were no surprises (except perhaps that Amazon’s SF&F category contains a much higher proportion of SF than Apple’s one does). It did reveal that the most popular word by a long way was “Witch”. The next four runners up were, “War”, “Vampire”, “Chronicle” and “Saga”.

So, in case I ever go mad, or senile, or run out of good things to write, I call dibs on the title, “The Witch War Saga”. In fact, I may not go mad, senile or uninspired; I may just turn bitter and cynical. I reckon that “The Witch War Saga,” with a suitably droopy blonde on the cover, even if it contained nothing but railway timetables, would outsell any damned sci-fi novel I could ever write – probably ten times over. I think this book will be my retirement nest-egg.

(And, of course, in a not untypical case of Life imitating Art, when I checked to see if someone had already used the title, I found two instances of very similar book series names. One is “The Witch Wars Saga” by Ashley Girardi. The other is “The Witch War Cycle” by Alan Burt Akers. So I guess there are at least two writers who are going to cross me off their Christmas card lists now. Which is a shame, because they must both be very rich and famous – and, if they’re not, it’s because neither used an elongated blonde on the cover. Time for a new edition, guys? Hey, don’t be like that. I gave you both a plug didn’t I?)

Strange Juxtapositions

Someone emailed me yesterday to say “Wow, you’re in an ad with Katy Perry and Iron Man.” It was a surprise, I must admit, not least because I don’t actually recall shooting an ad with these two pop culture icons. I could only assume the three of us put the ad together after a particularly intense evening of sipping the old Shiraz when Katy and Tony dropped in (she by helicopter, he under his own steam, of course) with a film crew and a script.

So it was mildly disappointing to discover it was just an ad from the Apple Store in which, Katy, Tony and I were being advertised separately but on the same page. It seems Katy has a new album out. Tony, of course, has his new Iron Man 3 film to sell. And me? Well I’m hawking my sci-fi thriller, Timesplash, and it’s Book of the Week on the iBookstore. It’s also free for a short while if you want to grab a copy.

Hawking aside, this is one of the nicest things about being a writer – you end up in strange juxtapositions. It’s not just the surreal coolness of being in the same ad as Katy Perry and Iron Man, it’s also seeing your book in the Amazon charts on the same page as Joe Halderman, Jules Verne and George R.R. Martin.

Of course, Katy’s always welcome at my parties because she brings cupcakes. And Iron Man too. That dude can really break dance.

Hail, Mighty Robot Army!

When I was a little kiddie, I used to draw robots for my mum and explain how they’d do all her housework one day. Mostly, this quaint notion came from the comics and sci-fi novels of the time, so some of my robots hovered and had hose-like limbs, they could talk, and they were friendly, autonomous and very cute.

Well, my mum died 25 years ago and the nearest she got to a domestic robot was a washing machine with selectable programs.

I mention this because, a week ago, I ordered my own first robot off the Internet and it arrived yesterday. It’s a Roomba automatic vacuum cleaner. It bumbles around the floor, bumping into furniture and walls and sucking up dirt. It does the job it was bought for – surprisingly well – but,  honestly, it’s a pretty poor excuse for a robot. Its sensorium is extremely limited, it’s capabilities more so, and its intelligence… Let’s just say, I’ve seen smarter cockroaches. But it set me thinking, remembering my mum, my childhood dreams of the future, and my own career in IT R&D – which included several years of academic and industrial research in artificial intelligence.

People talk about the present with disappointment. “Where’s my flying car?” they ask. It’s a joke but, really, they feel let down. We didn’t move into space, we don’t have jet-packs, the modal age at death still hovers between eighty and ninety years, and there are still no cities under the sea. Where we have made progress – in the miniaturisation of electronic devices (especially computers), the improvement of telecommunications technologies, and the manipulation of nano-scale objects (particularly biological molecules) – people are mostly unimpressed. Yes, there’s the Internet, that’s great for watching films and playing games, yes we can carry our phones in our pockets – or, at least, we could once before they started turning into phablets – and, sure, someone cloned a sheep or something, and digital cameras are handy, but where’s my robot maid? Why can’t I take vacations on Mars? And shouldn’t we have teleporters by now?

And how come our stuff isn’t all that much better than our grandparents had? Fifty years ago, they already had jetliners and helicopters, computers and telephones, submarines and rockets, electricity and nuclear power, quantum theory and relativity, lasers and organ transplants. They already had plastic and antibiotics and TVs with remote controls and concrete skyscrapers and automated factories. Did progress stop when the Beatles sang “Love Me Do”? Has there been nothing new in the world for three generations except smartphones and microwave ovens?

I blame sci-fi writers for raising our expectations. If a few more of them had known a bit more science and technology, they wouldn’t have come up with so many stupid ideas that clearly couldn’t work without radical theoretical breakthroughs, or materials that were impossible in the foreseeable future – or any future. I also blame the rise of monetarism – you know, that laissez faire capitalist crap that teaches us the price of everything and the value of nothing – and consolidated ownership of the media (which killed democracy). There were – have always been – sci-fi writers predicting perfectly feasible and very exciting futures but most voters would prefer that the 1% gets richer than that we use our resources to fuel a bright tomorrow.

But let’s get back to the robots.

Today, the world is full of robots. There are probably more than 9 million of them at the moment – mostly working in factories and 72% of those are in Japan and Europe. But here’s the thing, they are all stupid. All of them. Compared to most robots, my Roomba is a genius. The problem isn’t with the robots’ bodies (although the engineering problems have always been grossly underestimated) but with their brains. If there is one field of endeavour which has consistently failed to deliver to expectations – or at all, really – it is artificial intelligence. Yes, we have a chess-playing machine that can beat a human, we even have a Jeopardy! playing machine that can beat a human, but these super-specialised devices took thousands of hours of hand-crafting by top-flight technicians. To get a robot to wash the dishes is still beyond even this kind of concerted effort. To get a robot to wash the dishes and put them away is a pipe-dream. We could easily wait another fifty years for something that clever to emerge.

Of course, we’re scanning brains and building monster, billion-euro brain simulations right now, but, you know what? In ten years they’ll be saying, “Right! Now we’ve learnt all the things we didn’t know when we started, we’re ready to do it properly this time. Can we have another billion euros please?” And we still won’t be any closer to understanding what intelligence is, let alone being able to reproduce it in a machine.

So, as much as I’d like to draw robots for my daughter and tell her they’ll do all her housework for her one day, I will refrain. There is no point in disappointing yet another generation. She grew up in a world of specialist appliances with amoeba-level intelligences and she’ll probably grow old with them too – only there’ll be more of them. Today, I’ve got a “smart” washing machine, a retarded vacuuming machine, a car that knows enough to mitigate some of the worst excesses of its driver, and I’m thinking of getting a floor washing robot and one of those cute little squeegee-weilding bots that crawls around your windows on suckers.

Maybe my daughter will have a dish-washing bot and a cooking bot and a car that drives itself – and a lot of extra cupboards and alcoves to store her army of smart machines in.

 

 

Stop Looking for Progress

I’ve been reading Kurt Vonnegut’s letters lately. I’m about half-way through and I can see how success as a writer (or getting older) is liberating him to be more outspoken about his humanist views. It’s good to see, yet I’m starting to cringe because I already know that this is all going to end so badly. The bitter disappointment of A Man Without a Country is waiting there in his future like the sword of Damocles. That book was so painful to read because of the grief and the sense of betrayal on every page. We all felt it as George W. Bush dragged America down into shame and degradation but Vonnegut seems to have felt it more than most.

Perhaps because he had higher hopes for the world than the rest of us.

Maybe it’s because those letters have sensitised me that I’m seeing the same thing all over the place – not the despair but the hope.

It’s particularly obvious on Twitter – a social medium in which I actually enjoy indulging. People there are selected – by me – to be the voices I want to hear. For the most part they are writers, artists, geeks and scientists. They’re a pretty left-leaning, libertarian, environmentally-conscious, well-educated, articulate, and politically correct bunch. They try to stay positive and up-beat. (Many of them are trying to sell their books, so they would, right?) And they strive to find what is good and getting better in our world.

Yet, every now and then, a chink appears in the positive thinking. Some new GOP insanity, some vicious piece of oppression, or animal cruelty, some new evidence of sexism, or racism, or blatant fuck-you greed, will make them shake their collective heads and say what a retrograde step it seems. They’ll lament the lack of progress this shows and they’ll hope for improvement in the future.

Well, I’m sorry guys, there will be no improvement. People will be just as evil in 2100 as they were in 1900. We’re not on some gradual, upward path. The Omega Point is not pulling us towards social or moral evolution. We are what we are and we will always be the same.

Progress is a dated, 19th Century, pseudo-religious concept. The real world doesn’t work like that. Evolution is mere change. It isn’t “improvement”. People should stop looking for progress. The best we can hope for in human affairs is to mitigate our shortcomings.

There’s a lot we can do in the mitigation arena. A huge amount. We can do science, we can educate ourselves, we can build fair and just societies, we can pass laws that protect the weak, and on and on. None of that will make us one jot better than we are, but it will make our lives better. We just need to be be honest about what we’re doing and why.

 

Snowy – A Sci-Fi Story About a Cat.

We all love cats, right? I mean, they’re small, vicious killing machines that devastate our native wildlife and infest us with deadly brain parasites, but they’re soooo cute! Am I right?

I’m glad you agree.

And we all love science fiction too, yeah? I mean an awful lot of it is just Boy’s Own Adventure Stories with impossible tech, thinly disguised teenage power and sex fantasies, and wouldn’t know an ethical conundrum if it dropped from a skycrane and zapped it with a death ray, but the rest is pretty cool, huh?

So we’re on the same page, right?

Right!

So you’ll be pleased to hear that my story, Snowy, has just been self published, and it’s a sci-fi story about a cat. Good news, or what?

You can have the pleasure of reading this story-that-has-everything for a mere 99 cents – and it’s quite long, for a short, at 9,500 words. So that’s practically a hundred words for every penny! Just pop along to Smashwords or your local Amazon store (e.g. Amazon.com) and grab your copy.

And remember… CAT. SCI-FI.

‘Nuff said.