The Internet of Oh and One More Things

I'm not sure when it will be out, but I have another strange story coming out, this one in MIT Technology Review's Twelve Tomorrows which is  available for pre-order. (I took everything way too literally and put in loads of reviews of technology). There's some sweet hype from io9 here. io9 you do come from the future!

Informal acknowledgements to go with the story. The twenty-two words beginning “Mercifully, the whole thing” are from William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” and the forty-nine words beginning “You know how to take a book” are from Max Black’s “The Identity of Indiscernibles” (see Note). Other background reading which was really helpful included Vinyals, Toshev, Bengio, Erhan, “Show and Tell: a Neural Image Caption Generator”; Anh Nguyen, Jason Yosinski, Jeff Clune, “Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images”; Margalynne Armstrong, “Reparations Litigation: What About Unjust Enrichment?”; Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., “Repairing the Past: New Efforts in the Reparations Debate in America”; Brett Scott, The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money; Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English culture, 1830–1980; and Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors. And thanks to Tim Maughan for selfie drones (see my pre-emptive response to his Superflux Drone Fictions).

And really special thanks to Nathan Crock and Bradford Tuckfield for invaluable assistance in thinking through the PrivilegeCheck thing -- in way more detail than actually made it into the story -- and to Samantha Walton, Lucy Kemnitzer, Rob Kiely, Mark Bolsover, William Ellwood, & Sarah Hayden for all your help with writing & editing. And to my ma for receiving suspicious packages for me.

*   *   *

DeepDish SausageFest

Elsewhere: I think I finished this one before Google's DeepDream went viral and showed the internet what we had long suspected, that our monads are puppyslugs. But for what it's worth, this story definitely goes into DeepDream-type territory, so here's an interesting Medium piece by Kyle McDonald on more recent imagery generated through deep convolutional neural networks.

Earlier: I read TT 2014, by the way, and it has some great work in it (two of which are mentioned in my economic speculative fiction listicle. Speculonomics. Fictisticle.).

Later: There is more to story to tell about that world (because it's this world) so hopefully there will be some kind of sequel / prequel / interquel before too long.

Note: I figure NeurodiversiME partly works by scraping and sculpting content, so a few micro-plagiarisms are appropriate. Max Black ICE or whevs, come at me, orbs.

Pratchett's Satire

I think like a lot of us out there, I have been returning to the Discworld in quite a big way. I had one little thought about how Terry Pratchett’s satire (if that’s the right word) actually works.

It would be misleading to call Pratchett’s Discworld series a satire on heroic fantasy. What we actually find in Pratchett – including the earlier Discworld novels – is a highly flexible use of fantasy genre conventions, along with other kinds of intertextuality, for a variety of satirical ends. But that's not quite because "Pratchett's target isn't heroic fantasy" and rather "Pratchett's actual target is the world we live in." It's something else.

Rather, Pratchett’s satire tends to reconcile metafiction with worldbuilding. In other words, it dexterously balances itself between (on the one hand) artifice that asks to be interpreted in ways unavailable to Pratchett’s characters – the group “Dwarves with Altitude” in Soul Music (1994) cannot have heard of our own Roundworld Niggaz With Attitudez, just as the History Monks in Thief of Time (2002) are unfamiliar with Roundworld kung-fu cinematic cliches, even though they conform to them – and (on the other hand) a steadily accreting “secondary world” (cf. Tolkien 1947), which stands as if independent of our own, and asks its readers to become immersed in and emotionally coupled to it.

In part, such a reconciliation can happen because Pratchett’s points of reference are so diverse and diffuse. Even when an elephant wanders into the room, in the context of so much tacit megafauna, it needn’t necessarily hold our attention for long. Ankh-Morpork can serve as an example here: OK, obviously its strongest parallels are with London, but the city’s links with London and its links with other places – with New York, with Florence, with Rome (at various points in those cities’ history), as well as with fictional places such as Fritz Leiber’s teeming & labyrinthine Lankhmar – those links balance, cancel, contradict, ameliorate and complicate one another, so that Ankh-Morpork never settles down as a figuration any particular city.

That in itself is unremarkable. It is unremarkable that Ankh-Morpork possesses no perfect real-world or literary correlate, because most allegory is complicated in this way: it’s the ciphers, the perfect transpositions, the one-to-one correlations that are actually rare. And in fact, it’s exactly such one-to-one correlations which do make Pratchett’s satire remarkable. His work is capable of extremely specific and equivocal intertextual allusions, which somehow never ripple outwards to form a master key which would disrupt his worldbuilding. The River Ankh is a version the Thames, unmistakably; the Isle of Gods cannot not be a version the Isle of Dogs . . . and yet somehow Ankh-Morpork is unmistakably not just a version London. It is, for all its sins, Ankh-Morpork.

What I wonder is, firstly: does this sound right? Is it true generally in Pratchett's writing?

And, secondly: is it true when Pratchett writes about race?