Showing posts with label Banks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Banks. Show all posts

Monday, May 30, 2016

Names in SFF interlude: GSU Boaty McBoatface

Hi Jo, what did the name Boaty McBoatface symbolise for you?

Hi Soph, the name Boaty McBoatface perfectly captures the equivocal nature of scientific seafaring in the public imagination. The name has the virtue of reminding us that the object in question is a boat. Yet it also acknowledges our need to personify it, to give it a face. Perhaps on some level we recognize that the ocean is just as scared of us as we are of it: in making our vast machines in our own likenesses, we express our desire to meet monsters and gods on their own terms.

Sure. In the grand scheme of things, was "Sir David Attenborough" a better name choice than Boaty McBoatface?

I think the public are probably ahead of the curve on this one. I'm an academic researching the science fiction work of Iain M. Banks, and I'm intrigued by his approach to spaceship-naming. Different classes of warship are given nasty names - Murderer, Gangster, Torturer - as a reminder that what they DO is nasty. Banks was always suspicious of giving things dignified names. Banks was keenly aware of the complex relationships between exploration, scientific research, and military conquest. In his utopia, which is called "the Culture," spaceships always have strange and provocative names. They're called things like Big Sexy Beast and Unacceptable Behaviour and Very Little Gravitas Indeed and Someone Else's Problem. Whether or they're dignified or not, honourable or not, is a matter of what they ACHIEVE, not what they're called. Maybe on balance it's better to have silly names. I don't know.

I would definitely say that the Sir David Attenborough is probably the worst possible name. Why is nature so weird? One theory is that David Attenborough's gravel-and-syrup voice is so trustworthy, nature itself changes to conform to his delirious ramblings. Have you seen an aye-aye's thumb?

 I haven't actually. If you had a boat, what would you call it? 

I would be tempted by RRS Sir Jo Lindsay Walton. One of its smaller remotely operated sub-sea vehicles could be called Dave in honour of the government's suggestion. In light of the kind of data the vessel is likely to gather, another possibility would be to call it We're Fucked. Or there could be a compromise between sovereign and popular power, such as Davey McDaveface. The point is that every suggestion that I or anyone thinks of off the top of my head is better than the RRS Sir David Attenborough. Although it will probably cheer him up which is nice.

What angers you most, if anything, about the entire ordeal? 

Well, it would have been good if they had actually called it Boaty McBoatface. They sure missed a trick.

But what does the government’s decision say about democracy?

As many stakeholder engagement theorists will tell you, it is no good engaging people unless you also empower them -- and you know what, that means actually figuring out how to DELEGATE some power IN ADVANCE. No backsies. I suspect people are especially cynical about government consultations of all kinds. Often the policy direction has been pretty much already decided, and the consultation is just a bit of cheap market research, to figure how best to sell it.

Actually, it can be WORSE than that -- the consultation can start to market the policy, by hinting that they're going to do even more horrific stuff, raising fears, lowering expectations, and mopping up the energy of resistance. Then they can "compromise" by doing whatever they wanted to in the first place. That's why I don't think anybody is really surprised about Boaty McBoatface, except that we probably thought they'd let us get away with a bit of trivial silliness so that we could at least feel empowered.

So what's next for the Boaty McBoatface movement? Is this the end? Or do you foresee more petitions? Protests? Etc. 

Tactics must suit the context. In one sense, perhaps a name is a rigid designator which flares into existence at the baptismal moment, permanent and real. In another, a name is just what people call something - never mind what letters are printed on the side of the thing. Think about the Boris Bikes: sorry, Barclays! It's another bank that sponsors them now, isn't it? I can't even remember. Maybe they'll be Sadiqycles soon. The point is, the ship is called Boaty McBoatface, because that's what we'll call it. I'm sure if it comes up again in the news -- if it sinks or something -- VICE will respect the will of the people in its coverage.

OK, thanks Jo.

It's interesting we get this announcement just as the local election results are rolling out. Sometimes when things are opened up to a popular vote, you get bizarre results, like the continued election of Conservatives. Sometimes the public just perfectly nails it, as with Boaty. There is a lot of scary and exciting work to be done on what popular sovereignty means in a digital networked era. We know as a collective we can be brilliant or fucking stupid. To me it's pretty obvious that a secure welfare system and substantive economic equality are totally necessary prerequisites for democracy to even slightly work. Otherwise, everybody is too busy trying to stay alive and sane to work out who to vote for -- except for flashes of brilliance like Boaty, obviously.

OK.

Earlier:
SFF names #16: Alice interlude
SFF names #15: eggs interlude
SFF names #14: YA interlude
SFF names #13: Benedict Cumberbatch
SFF names #12: Luke Skywalker interlude
SFF names #11: Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver
SFF names #10: Bobby Shaftoe
SFF names #9: Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen
SFF names #8: Ged
SFF names #7: Shevek
SFF names #6: Buhle
SFF names #5: Parva "Pen" Khan
SFF names #4: Beth Bradley
SFF names #3: Rumpelstiltskin
SFF names #2: Lucy
SFF names #1: Winnie

Elsewhere: VICE: "We Spoke to Some of the People Upset about 'Boaty McBoatface' Losing to David Attenborough"
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Thursday, September 12, 2013

Useless Time Travel



"I want to consider a selection of short stories on the theme of useless time travel." From 2010, Jo Walton's "Five Short Stories With Useless Time Travel" (Tor.com). (More recently, Walton discusses "Three Short Stories With Stranded Time Travellers"). Here are seven suggestions of my own.


(1) Steve Aylett's Fain the Sorcerer (2006). I don't remember exactly how useful or useless time travel is in Fain, but I do remember a jester being strangled over and over again, which at least gives the impression not everyone's needs are always met all of the time. Pointlessness is moreover a significant theme in Aylett's writing; or perhaps more precisely, the theme is people, events, words and things that point towards co-ordinates outside legitimate, intelligible spacetime. See also Aylett's And Your Point Is? (2006); Patrick Hudson's review of Fain at Pointless Philosophical Asides; Benny Glass's pointless review of Fain.

Make some dal

(2) Arthur C. Clarke's "All the Time in the World" (1952). For one art thief, the power to freeze time turns out less useful than it at first appears. What's so special about this story is its form-content reciprocity: though it may exist as a short story somewhere, it mainly manifests as a permanent radio broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra's 7th Dimension between 18:00 and 19:00 (and "then again at midnight"). It is permanently on because the 7th Dimension seems to be one of those "curled up" dimensions we learn of from M-theory: there is simply no room for budget or for a wide range of programmes. A special smidge of genius has listener (who has a repertoire of "small Latin and less Greek") frozen in time making a quorn bolognese sauce or some thing with chickpeas and a bit of lemon.

The BBC's Auntie gardism is firmly in the tradition of Wells & Welles' notorious 1938 CBS War of the Worlds broadcast, which caused widespread panic by telling everyone aliens were coming. Though I could quite happily float, pendant with Vincent Price, Mau and Daphne, a few stray triffids and a couple of Doctors, till the twilight of forever, I can't help but feel there's some mismatch between the BBC's pointless time travel into its archives and the enormous wealth and variety of free genre content available digitally.

Original tantweetrum:





I bet there are legal, regulatory and self-esteem obstacles to syndicating/cadging content from, say, Pseudopod, Podcastle and Escape Pod, but the BBC is in a phase of flux, when a reasonable proposal may stand a reasonable chance of realisation.


Here's a quick side-universe (to prevent this entire point from tacitly being about how there's not really enough room on my kitchen surfaces for a laptop).

Heavy reliance on archival revival may create friction with the BBC's role as an ambassador and a publicist for the UK, with its public purposes related to citizenship and diversity (see especially parts 6, 9 and 10 of the Agreement, and perhaps even 83), and with its general remit to inform, educate and entertain.

Many listeners tune in in media res, and/or only absorb fragments and snippets of background noise. We can all agree Jane Garvey's voice is completely unrecognisable unless it is mingled with whistling kettle and buzzing toothbrush. With depressing frequency (no pun intended! Total fluke!) I find myself tuning in in the middle of outdated attitudes or language -- writing which would be considered offensive if it were new. The BBC need to think responsibly and carefully about the fact that many listeners do not listen responsibly and carefully.


I don't think it's a matter of excluding problematic material entirely, nor of trying to attach warning labels. It's a matter of proportion, and of not inadvertently brainwashing the British public with masses of subliminal vintage racism, sexism and homophobia.


(3) Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (1952), which is caught in its own time loop (it is a top contender for most republished SF story). The premise is that a time traveler who changes one small detail in the distant past may produce many large and strange changes in the present. The changes Bradbury depicts seem ridiculous (a sign hangs in just in the same place and says just the same thing, but with different spelling), and there is some special pleading to explaining why they think they can have a T-Rex safari in the first place, but it is a beloved and influential story.

There is also a fortuitous link between Bradbury's crushed butterfly and Edward Lorenz's seagull butterfly effect, which gives robust mathematical foundations to its be-careful-what-you-squish-for SF staple. Because the weather is a nonlinear system, outputs may be successively exponentially related to inputs, and today's hurricane/zephyr sitch could be contingent on whether a foreign butterfly got into a bit of a flap earlier that week. (Lorenz's first illustration featured a seagull, which he apparently changed to a butterfly at the suggestion of a colleague -- who knows? -- perhaps a Bradbury fan).

Such sensitive dependence to initial conditions is also a way of understanding the long-term unpredictability of nonlinear systems: since little things can count for so much, the only model which definitely captures a fine enough grain to predict the system's behaviour is the system itself. (It's for this reason I don't think Greg Egan's ingenious butterfly harnesses in Permutation City (1994) are feasible).

What's a bit unsettling here is that the time travel aspect could, in a way, be superfluous. If time travel is constitutively useless, because you can't predict the long term outcomes of your acts, and if it's the long term outcomes which are the really important ones . . . well, by that logic it's just human agency which is useless, time travel or no time travel. Bummer! See my recent snippet about Iain M. Banks and games. "One sensible-seeming route is to try to carve a small, resistant enclave within the universe’s grand complexity, for which and within which it is possible to take moral responsibility [...]"

Of course, in some fictional universes, the trick would be to nip back and forth in your time capsule crushing different butterflies till you get your ideal future (Hilary you can still count on me!!). Story Idea Guyz!!?!

(4) Tim Travel. My friend Dr Timothy Button suggested he might be up for the Edinburgh festival but didn't make it in the end. Why not check out his book, The Limits of Realism (2013)?

(5) Have derailed against BBC reruns, here's a rerun of my own, from June's Executive Summary. Social Media Time Travel would not necessarily be useless, but at least it would probably be a massive waste of time [travel]:
"Twitter has hinted at a feature under development to let users 'jump back in time,' synching their Twitter timelines with on-demand TV. 'Mr Costolo suggested that watching a major event without Twitter was like watching TV "with the volume off"' (BBC Newsbeat).  
There are a couple interesting things implied by this, roughly summed up as Social Media Time Travel. First, why not figure out how to allow new tweets in this retro mode? They'd have to be timestamped with the 'actual' moment when they were tweeted, but they could appear in the virtual past. You'd want to be able to hide tweets by people from the future, of course (spoilers etc.), and some more advanced app might let you filter what you see on the basis of both when other twerps tweeted and what filters they had active at the time. Perhaps another app would allow you to re-do your own tweets. All this would create a sort of branching structure: 'quit blowing up my alternate timeline,' etc. (Perhaps something clever could be done to associate competing versions of the past with different branches of BitCoin blocks, to extend this indeterminate, flickery ontology into the economic realm). Furthermore, in principle, we could start to extend Twitter backwards in time. Everyone from my generation remembers where we were during the moon landings: on Twitter. The extent of possibilities isn't completely clear to me; what's clear is that Costolo, Zuckerberg et al. should be studying stuff like Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself and Carruth's Primer, and assessing the risk of the downside scenario in which they were never born at all."
(6) Francis Crot and Nrou Mrobaak's Xena: Warrior Princess & The Seven Curses (2008). The poet of Ketchivan gets his fondest wish, for his mind to travel back in time to occupy his youthful body and circumstances, but he doesn't like it. You may also be able to discern a catastrophic time travel subplot in FC's Hax (2011). It stars Blood Diaper (who also did some of the illustrations for Xena).

(7) Paper Dino Software's Save the Date is a splendid little indie CYOA type game, where foreknowledge is never quite as useful as it should be. "This is actually kind of hard. I know what I think the game is about, but the game is kind of weird and experimental, even by my standards, and I don’t really want to say too much in advance. Probably best for people to play it without knowing what they’re getting into."

(8) See below for honourable mention: Retro Report's attempt at some useful time travel.
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Tuesday, September 3, 2013

The Player of Games of Games of Games ...

Oisin Murphy-Lawless has written a piece for the Scottish Book Trust about Iain Banks and games, prompting me to excavate this nugget on the same topic. It comes from a paper at the Crime Scotland conference in Göttingen last year, where the chat was all banging and the lanyards were all recycled at the end.

Living Chess in Portmeirien, 2007 (Chess.com)

If “Nobody is [God]” (Complicity (1996) p. 303), nobody has reliable knowledge of whether their actions will matter, or how they will matter, in the long run. One sensible-seeming route is to try to carve a small, resistant enclave within the universe’s grand complexity, for which and within which it is possible to take moral responsibility.

The importance of games to an author with the materialist predilections and preoccupations which I’ve already outlined may relate to the contrast that games provide to matter: overt abstraction, rather than mystifying reduction; a small scale, not a grand historical one; and a hermetic system of incontrovertible values. Once a point within a game within is won, it stays won, whereas any commendable action may be controverted into a reprehensible action retrospectively, when seen against a grand historical sweep.

But if games are a counterpoint to matter, Banks takes pains to ensure they’re an untidy one. Games in Banks's books frequently disregard their boundaries, and refuse to have outcomes which can only be internally adjudicated.

In Surface Detail (2010), for instance, issues over which wars might otherwise be fought are settled in immersive simulated realities, with suffering but without loss of life. As it happens, the party with whom the reader is likely to sympathise break the convention during the course of the novel, escalating the war into the material world.

More subtly, in Inversions (1998), DeWar and Perrund, a royal bodyguard and concubine respectively, form a friendship and indeed perhaps conduct a kind of courtship not only over but through countless bouts of a board game called Leader’s Dispute. Here, styles of play may be psychologically revelatory: for instance, as in Perrund’s charge that DeWar over-prioritises a particular piece, or her hearsay with respect to the dissembling hustler YetAmidous.

Player of Games (1988) portrays a civilisation whose political system is almost entirely encapsulated within a complicated game, evolved over millenia. The escalation of politics beyond this game’s boundaries seems unlikely, insofar as ideological deliberation is one dimension of gameplay. For individuals of this civilisation it is difficult to conceive of a political argument being stronger or weaker, more or less worthy of passionate loyalty, except in the context of its deployment within the game. The eponymous protagonist is a visitor from another civilisation, who overthrows the political system with an unprecedented style of play.

Untidy and spookily efficacious games are not, of course, confined to Iain M[aterialist] Banks's work. Iain Banks's Stonemouth (2012) includes the example of a Wee Malky, whose life is ended by a paintball bullet. Alban, the protagonist of The Steep Approach to Gabardale (2007), seeks to persuade his family's Extraordinary General Meeting not to sell their business to a voracious American corporation. Their business is based on a board game, Empire!, but Alban's behaviour itself, for all that it manifests an authentic moral dialectic, also has a distinctly gamified feel to it. (And Alban's mission to win (over) the EGM is in turn, in good family saga fashion, the occasion for all manner of intrigue, emotion, lust, vendetta, manipulation, revelation, and allegory of US oil imperialism).

The translation of psychological and other norms confirmed within games into other realms is likewise unpredictable.

For instance, another character in Stonemouth, Phelpie, is known is for taking excruciatingly long over his Poker moves. One possibility raised is that Phelpie is rather ponderously working through some probability mathematics, instead of playing instinctively; but there is a countersuggestion that Phelpie’s style of play is grounded sentimentally in extra-game factors: he likes to slow down the whole social situation, to blur and broaden what can be a macho, narrow competitive focus on the game. Either way, when he leaps on a gunsel in the novel’s dénouement, Phelpie’s transposition of his technique of card-counting into the more dangerous game of counting the number of rounds fired does not go as planned.

Indeed, one gets the sense with Banks that a game is not necessarily a rule-governed practice so much an area in which various practices overlap and support each other with sufficient density to give rise to rules, which thereafter have a reflexive but always provisional effect on the zone of overlap. What is necessary for a game to exist is not consensus, but certain forms of family resemblance among the various normative regimes inhabited by different players. Any move is by definition a move in several different games at once.

In this sense I think Banks’s games are archetypal of a whole suite of imperfect models, heuristics and dynamic idealisations with which the complications of materiality are necessarily confronted, but which that materiality inevitably exceeds.

I would include the resources of genre in this category . . .

The paper went on to discuss genre, which was an okay direction to take it, but perhaps a better progression would be to explore Banks's coding and decoding conceits: messages manifest in pelvic squeezes, guano, gangster dentistry, laser scars, etc. I feel like there's an exciting nexus in Banks's books involving codes, games, chaos, and the space operatic grand scale. Maybe I'll get round to it eventually. 

In 2010, speaking at Transgressions & Its Limits at Stirling University, Banks was asked about the possibility of Culture movie. His response was that that would be fine and everything, but he'd probably be more interested in a game.
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Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Review: Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata


Great stuff, comprising mostly core Culture equipage -- your avatars, your drones, your sims, suits, digitised souls & above your the deeds of AI Minds in fussy, ornery, giving-Destiny-a-ginger-nudge (or maybe not) modality.

The chief civilisation chumming the Culture here, the Gzilt, are a lot sort of scummier & petty than I'd expected for a civilisation on the verge of Godhead, but it all makes sense in context, and what could have been a theological event is demystified as a socio-political one, in a manner thoroughly befitting the Culture mythos.

At first I felt a little short-changed by the Subliming sitch (it seemed wee bit similar to stuff in earlier novels, about the elegant & immersive & existentially distinctive daydreaming many Culture Minds get off on) but gradually the low-down in its various versions begins to suggest new questions, new opacities, & the rich evasiveness of Subliming is reinstalled regardless of the debunking.

The set-pieces & other ideas spilling out of Banks's notebooks are often so bloody good I'm prepared to let them slide straight into his novels without a second glance at their justifications; but I also think with Hydrogen Sonata Banks, by easing up on the world-building (compared with say Matter) & relying a little more on established ingredients, has given himself a canvas on which he can arrange these many various intriguing contrivances & witticisms without them coming across gratuitous.

That rich M. Banks tone / attitude is as captivating as ever – hot piping moral ambiguity, a materialist’s sense of the messiness of history, a sophisticated and sidelong relationship with sensawunda. Shtick abounds, and even the most brutal sequences are infused with understated humour. The heroic is accessed via the mock heroic. It's a big book but my only real grumble is that it wasn't even bigger.

Alfred Bork / Jeff Lint's warnings re The Space Gnome, His Glamour nevertheless stick with me.

Review first appeared on Goodreads. Elsewhere: Adam Roberts on The Hydrogen Sonata.  Lara Buckerton on The Hydrogen Sonata.
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Friday, May 10, 2013

Excess & Accessibility



"Dame Jesus Pro—wait, who?"

Rather excitingly, Adam Roberts is re-reading the Culture novels.

Roberts teases out a similarity between Banks's Minds and a certain kind of person, the kind that compensates for social and emotional illiteracy with a flamboyant "hail fellow well met!" A bit further on:

"The Novel, that mode of art of which Excession is an example, trades in empathy. This is where it comes from: in the eighteenth-century they called it ‘sensibility’ (Austen elegantly satirises the debilitating consequences of too much of this on an impressionable reader in Sense and Sensibility). That thing people criticise nineteenth-century writers like Dickens for—sentimentality—is actually just the same thing. And that’s my problem with this. This mode of (literally) torturous empathy is, precisely, sentimental—an inverted 21st-century sentimentality, but as emotionally manipulative, disingenuous and distorting as thing as plucking the reader's heart strings at Little Nell’s death. Because what’s obvious in terms of the way Excession interpellates us as readers is that we’re obviously not the genocidal ex-camp commandant. We'd never do anything so ghastly as that. Nor are we the barbarian-horrid Affront. We’re a Mind, obviously. Which is fine, and entertaining, and not a wholly ineffective way of dramatizing moral dilemmas (‘genocide is profoundly wrong’ can hardly be said too many times). But it tends to inculcate a mode of self-satisfaction."

We are all capable of atrocities. But perhaps it's berks -- with their neediness, their disproportionate relief at finding an ingroup, their fetishization of a certain kind of reductive formal logic, and their really bad eye contact -- who are actually your real risk category? Roberts then sidles towards an apologia with help from Browning and Coleridge.

Two related thoughts blob up:

(1) It feels important that such self-satisfaction is lampshaded in a lot of Culture books. When Banks complicates and blurs the Culture's ethical perfection, that has something to do with sustaining impractical ideals, even if only as mascots or foci imaginarii. But when he qualifies the Culture's heroism with smugness, I think that's a bit different: a bit more directly linked into contemporary local political discourse, and the way in which charges of hypocrisy work to contain activism and dissent. Against one of Middle England's top sneers -- the sneer that the Good Guys don't really care about the people they help, that they are much more interested in themselves -- Banks very prettily passes over the "How can you say that?" comeback, and instead goes with: "Yeah, and?"

(2) If it's sort of a novel of sentiment, Excession -- with its many chat transcripts of its up-themselves do-gooder demigods -- is also sort of quasi-epistolary. In Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa you get a fantasy of private correspondence as a sort of Snopes.com for womyn's falsness, an authoritative place where society can go and look up a victim's precise virtue-to-complicity ratio. It is a fantasy which collapses in interesting ways as the epistolary novel evolves and declines -- especially through its interactions with the coded messages and secret identities of spy narratives -- and by the time we get to Banks' espionage epistolary space opera, okay, there is certainly that recognition that even "the most" private texts are constitutively public, and therefore constitutively unreliable guides to anybody's inner life . . . but I think Banks goes further, registering how consciousness itself is a lot like reading your own supremely untrustworthy secret diary, and how self-knowledge is always falling short of the sort of status and capabilities we are somehow forced to pretend it possesses.

Of course this isn't some quintessentially Banksian achievement. But just because it's an operational cliché in innumerable fields doesn't mean it's not maddeningly elusive, or that Banks's efforts to make it concrete are redundant. The trick in Transitions of (spoiler!) the Torturer unwittingly slowly murdering his future self seems allegorically invested in this territory. In Excession, a ship Mind succumbs to a cyber-attack and is made to tear itself apart. The masterstroke is that the compromised security isn't really spelled out: we know that such hacks are possible, but we see it from the hacked Mind's point of view, as an "internal" monologue of remorse, despair, and suicide. This sequence is all confabulation, an epiphenomenon of the hacker's agency . . . but it is simultaneously and paradoxically the (for want of a better term) true subjectivity of the Mind, its true reflection, emotion, desire and decision.

This is a version of self-ignorance which seems rooted in post-cyberpunk, and perhaps to some extent the Anglo-American philosophy of mind with which it slightly overlaps (compare something like Greg Egan's short story "Learning to be Me") rather than in anti-Cartesian continental philosophy or literary theory. But wherever it comes from, I wonder: what does it mean for empathy? How does it problematise putting yourself in someone else's shoes, when you can't even find your own?

For instance: could it suggest a slightly different angle on empathy and berkishness in Banks's Culture books? Perhaps an awful lot of their ethics is reducible to empathy, but perhaps that empathy itself is actually quite a tricksy and multifarious and broad concept -- at least inasmuch as it accommodates berk empathy (or bathetic empathy). That is: empathy which doesn't involve much replication of affect, much harmony of hearts, but an empathy which operates through a bureaucratic crankishness sometimes mistaken for evil's prerogative exclusively. The banality of righteousness.

PS: Compare Lara Buckerton, in a review of Roberts's New Model Army (PDF), on the frequent ingrown ghoulishness of war experts.
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