May: Executive Summary

I did an indieview for Stephen C & MJ Ormsby's Ideas Captured. Actually I did it a little while ago. I have read even less science fiction and fantasy now. Roger Ebert is no more.

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Intriguing new series, Adventure Rocketship!, edited by Jonathan Wright. "The first in what is set to become a science fiction series of books Adventure Rocketship! explores the theme Let’s All Go To The Science Fiction Disco – focusing on the intersection between music, SF and the counterculture."

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Romulan Soup Woman from Punch Press: "Passing remarks, communiques, lineated critiques, speculative commentaries and inter-ludic disquisitions on science fiction, the culture industry, thermonuklearen terrors and crustaceous justitia from: Jo Crot, Benjamin Friedlander, Samuel Solomon, Anne Boyer, Verity Spott, Amaranth Walton, Joe Luna, Caitlin Doherty, Boyd Nielson, Samantha Walton, Pierre Joris, Justin Katko, David Grundy, Peter Manson, Amiri Baraka, Andrew Spragg and Die Zwei Owens. Texts proceptually appropriated from Douglas Oliver, Neil Pattison, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Buckminster Fuller and James Warhola. Komix by Hiram Kruller. Komix from a North Korean manga primer on political economy. 84 pages. Perfect bound." Also worth checking out: Sean Bonney's Letters on Harmony from Verity Spott's Iodine Press.

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He comes!

The Zalgo text generator.

He just wants to thrum and ∞ around your ankles. #Illumiaownati

Write words in cats.

#IllumiaownatedManuscripts #作成

It would be good if you could combine those. Dark kitten-glitch augury static.

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In The Atlantic, a compilation of DIY engineering from China. 

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Star Trek Into Darkness released this month. I don't think we should be making any more Trek stuff until this phenomenon is better understood:

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Karen Burnham bricologes some of the gloomier eschatological statements from a century of "state of the art" SF criticism (Locus). Jonathan McCulmont responds. Also note "no hard feelings"-type Twitter thread.

@spiralgalaxy I apologise, I think my post came out as more uncharitable than I intended it to be (if that makes sense) @pkincaid_critic
— Jonathan McCalmont (@RuthlessCult) May 10, 2013

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Iain M. Banks health update & mini-rant. For a long time, Iain M. Banks was cadging off Iain Banks, not the other way round.

The tall writer instructively stylistically imitates the very successful writer. (Guardian review of new Dan Brown).

Slight change up at Strange Horizons.

Jack Vance has died (Guardian obituary by Christopher Priest).

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The wheels come off of Kepler (Reuters).

Artist's impressions: New York discovers it had everything it ever wanted in its own back yard all along.

App that tries to untangle corporate ownership hierarchies as you stand in your supermarket, contemplating your canteloupe.

Bayesian probability and quantum mechanics (PDF).

Google Wallet (Gawker). hikingfan@gmail.com sends $200 to farnsworth@gmail.com for his share of the cabin. Fire and end times. Also: mapping Bitcoin adoption. "Let the record show that the citizens of Portland, Oregon liked bitcoin before it was cool."

Analysis of London's housing crisis (MetaMute). Cities are battles of not just matter.

On the physiognomy of judges. Poets as activists. Lexical open sorcery, incredible style, blame solidarity. (Militant Poetics conference in Birkbeck this month).

Limb regeneration: it's got legs, says new research (Wall Street Pit). I wonder if it might be tough convincing your brain it has its arm back? Or maybe it'd be like your new limb flowing down your phantom limb like a progress bar.

Smartspecs snap pics & hype apace. Big cyberpunk daddy clicks like, competitor CEO pans. Auntie takes pics with Google Glass and somehow there's still a thumb over each one. Google GLASS (Guardian).

Introduction to net-to-print art. Coast-to-coast, code-to-codex. I say: print the internet not for printing the internet's sake, but in case.

Cotard's syndrome: interview with a dead man (NewScientist). Cf. Adorno: late capitalism / industrial society "demands the coordination of people that are dead. [...] Accordingly, the destructive tendencies of the masses that explode in both varieties of totalitarian state are not so much death-wishes, as manifestations of what they have already become. They murder so that whatever to them seems living shall resemble themselves."

Surveillance and the Boston bombing (Wired).

German police warn of exploding ticket machines. You can get William Burroughs's The Ticket That Exploded (second from the bottom) & a whole heap of other PDFs at the Internet Archive.

"Magnetic fire" lit to reveal energy paths (Phys.org).

System of pretty pendulums converging on the integrated tick. (i09).

Cory Doctorow on 3D printed guns. ""Bad cases made bad law, and it's hard to think of a more emotionally overheated subject area. So while I'd love to see a court evaluate whether the internet should be treated as a library in law, I'm worried that when it comes to guns, the judge may find himself framing the question in terms of whether a gun foundry should be treated as a library." (Guardian).

Autonomous drone passenger planes.

Bousquet reviews Christopher Coker's Warrior Geeks - war, posthumanism, existentialism, etc. "[...] if some readers find the warrior too martial and aristocratic a figure to share Coker’s lament of its decline, they would do well to consider the ethical import of the moves to delegate decision-making away from the individual human to synthetic intelligences, best exemplified by the project for ethical autonomous weapon systems articulated by the roboticist Ronald Arkin. Contra the latter’s views that unwaveringly logical silicon-based reasoning would attain a higher ethical standard, Coker argues persuasively that true moral agency is necessarily embodied and grounded in human capacities for emotion, empathy and imagination that no artificial intelligence can even begin to emulate today."

(This one's definitely on the reading list for my current project (Integration), which is partly about the technological augmentation of moral agency. Could technology in principle intercede throughout the spaces of vast, anomic, socially complex polities to repair social relations characteristic of an older strain of republican idealism, a strain which emphasised on small states, individual virtue and collective autonomy? If so, such intercessory processes would almost certainly not emulate categories of human rationality nor of human moral performance).

Radio 3 discussion on future warfare featuring Coker et al.

Londoners might want to check out the Taranis Paper Tiger salon this Saturday at the Ovalhouse, with fiction and talks (incl. Antoine Bousquet) on remote warfare, simulation, space and myth.

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Adam Roberts just read Iain M. Banks's Culture series from finish to start, with notes on each (except for one that's mostly just Heidegger puns), heaping on the praise, but mostly heaping it at one end (the earlier books).

Ken MacLeod in the comments: "I've sometimes suggested - though never really thrashed it out with Iain - that in some respects the Culture and its interventions are metaphorically late-Soviet rather than Western [...]"

I wonder how the Culture short stories and the four or so non-Culture sf books fit in?

I pretty much agree that increasingly as the series goes on "the idea of the Culture is one that dissolves away Dramatic Tension and Story Momentum by its very nature," but pace Roberts am more into the later ones anyway (though I'm only halfway into Consider Phlebas at the moment!). But maybe at some point I'll put together some thoughts as to why.

Meanwhile, here's my wee note, occasioned by some of Roberts's comments, about the Culture, holocausts, the good life as a neckbeard etc.

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Dear diary. Scarce math leaves. C'mon! Middling bucks. Mostly at the Birkbeck & call & under the Northumb. Editorial admin for new poetry review sheet (w/ Joe Luna), w/t Hix Eros. Saw McGyver, Mirror, In The Mood For Love. Reviewed Hamilton, Great North Road for Foundation. Reading Banks, Consider Phlebas & May, Intervention. Avid.

Additive law

"Inherent in the notion of regulating a technology is the regulatability of that technology. It's the idea that you can figure out who's making or using a technology and dictate terms to them. That's where computers come in. Computers make it possible for semi-skilled people to do jobs that used to require highly skilled people."

Excellent article by Cory Doctorow in The Guardian on 3D printed guns.

"Bad cases made bad law, and it's hard to think of a more emotionally overheated subject area. So while I'd love to see a court evaluate whether the internet should be treated as a library in law, I'm worried that when it comes to guns, the judge may find himself framing the question in terms of whether a gun foundry should be treated as a library."

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.

Indieview

I did an indieview about Invocation (Critical Documents 2013) etc., appearing today at the estimable IDEAS CAPTURED. Thank you, Stephen Ormsby!

In honour of this august blog post, the complete Invocation - Books I-VI - is free on Kindle for today only. Download free on Amazon (or order the paperback (£11.99+P&P)). Also I will free one third of my captive animals.

April: Executive Summary

"Meet the Thousands of People Ready to Die on Mars." I've gone the colour of my planet over this $40 entrance fee. I can't believe I've fallen at the first hurdle. There really seems to be no way around it :(

"Beaming into the Rat World: Enabling Real-Time Interaction between Rat and Human each at Their Own Scale." This obvious opportunity to give the rats control of human-sized robotic rats is being squandered. Please sign my petition here.

Fat traps under sinks to feed new east London power plant (BBC).

Flying cars (WSJ). Not-so-distant etc.: "The person at the controls of the TF-X would not have to be a licensed pilot, Dietrich said, because the most challenging elements of flying, from control coordination to precision navigation, would happen automatically under computer control." Still no sign of food pills (unless that's what BitCoin is and I've misunderstood some stuff). The TF-X feels a bit like a chopper. Maybe when we say we hanker for "flying cars" we actually mean something a bit more like "flying traffic jams"?

Touch-based interfaces (Phys.org). Also see Science Fiction Interfaces.

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Guns!

"World's first 3D-printed gun fired" (BBC). Extrapolative science fiction, this is your moment! Go go go go go.

Is this actually the first? Here's Cody Wilson of Defence Distributed talking to Glean Beak back in January. I guess there's probably a spectrum of gunniness. Where do you draw the line?

@nra No one would dare hijack a plane if every passenger were compulsorily armed.

— Jo L Walton (@jolwalton) May 1, 2013

The only thing the 2nd amendment guarantees is the right to defy modernity. The instrument of that defiance is wholly arbitrary.

— Fritz Bogott (@fritzbogott) May 7, 2013

"For Man will never be able to 3D print the unbearable grief and shame of losing a loved one to inadequate firearm safety." -@nra #quote

— Francis Crot (@franciscrot) May 6, 2013

Here is Lara Buckerton, arguing for a holistic understanding of "arms" in the US Second Amendment, an understanding which includes the social and institutional infrastructures into which the actual hardware (the bit that goes BANG!) is woven. "What kind of civilian military counterweight ("militia"?) could exist, even in principle, to the latent USAF-backed tyranny of the government?"

3D-printed invisibility? (Phys.org)

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On the 15th of April I delivered a paper-poem at Syndicate in Inspace in Edinburgh, worked up from this post in March on the Amazon / Solid Gold Bomb "Keep Calm" T-shirts affair. Here's a bit of it.

B. 60%. 30%, Percentages include saddle, reins and so forth because for Tesco, Every Little Bit Helps.

C. There are all kinds of reasons the incident had such long dull resonance. Chief among these reasons surely is that the horse is a lovely animal. You wouldn't eat a horse, would you?

D. Maybe among those reasons is a certain quasi-repressed awareness of the deceptive status of all food products and indeed all commodities. It's almost relief: we knew there was something funny about that lasagna, something we knew all along . . . or them kicks, or that Kindle . . . or pancake mix . . . oh thank f . . . 's just horse meat! Nothing worse. But it is worse because, to put it in somewhat Marxian terms, all commodities contain human meat. 

E. Buried deep in the arcane dungeons of Volume Eleven of Das Kapital: "It is [...] the ultimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers."

F. Here’s Keston Sutherland on how "human labour in the abstract . . . mere congellations, semisolid, tremulous comestible mass, Gallarte, of homogeneous human labour" is gathered in commodities. "Marx’s German readers will not only have bought Gallerte, they will have eaten it; and in using the name of this particular commodity [...] Marx’s intention is not simply to educate his readers but also to disgust them." Maybe one good translation would be Spam.

G. Meanwhile, back on the virtual environment of Second Life, widos grief innocent townsfolk with Object Spam. Elsewhere Findus "horsemeat" lasagne appeared on eBay, starting at £70. The brand Find-us encloses a kind of pun, as if we can still save the horses. 

H. Part of the reason we tend to have objects in categories like “pencil” and “teacup” is economies of scale: it’s sort of cheaper to make many objects that are the same. But a flatter marginal cost, as with ubiquitous 3D printing, encourages experimental manufacture. Consider a material culture that must be lip-read, facets become poor heralds of the polygonic extension, the texture, heft, and hinginess affixed. Lip has a secondary etymology of edge, the lip of a cup or a crater. Think of objects more Lego-like, more mercurial and chimerical. Objects tied to specific locations, objects that are not robust in a similar way to how evolved computation is not robust. Think of a teacup that is slightly cheaper because only Rooibos doesn’t leak. Think of objects manufactured with glitches, or manufactured for purposes of debugging. Objects sporting easter eggs hidden by hackers or hacking algorithms. Objects with bloatware extension, physical features not intended by the proximal manufacturer, but perhaps of use or value to someone somewhere down the line. Think of hackers scouring dumps and charity shops for discarded objects in whose manufacture they have covertly intervened. Of objects infused with their own one-shot 3D printers to change shape when a condition is satisfied. E.g. an object called a “teacup until 2020, thereafter an edible pencil.” And possibly a puddle. The front of a teacup is currently a good indicator of the back a teacup not far away. In a world of Object Spam, a world of commodities behaving a little bit more like online viral ecologies, the far side objects might be a really scary place.

Think of real tangible griefer object spam. Changeist pictures crapjects, & scavengers “tossing aside misshapen busts of Mozart and two-headed Star Wars stormtroopers, pushing past a half-finished TV stand or crunching through the remains of several attempted drone-prints.” Think of objects shaped by all kinds of processes we associate with text -- cut and paste, cut-up, spinning, rephrasing. Not just rephrasing objects, synonymising them, but also building them according to the kind of rainmaking, satisficing, scattershot, perhaps post-ironic expression I talked about earlier. Objects dictated not by function or design, but by experimental glissandos up spectra along which it is guessed functions and design forms may lie. In Scotland we call groceries the messages because we are brilliant. Could the object ensemble even borrow form from that domination for which objectification & reification has been such a beguiling & false face?

Bad Lip Reading (YouTube).

Techno-literary paparazzo Chris Scott's photos of the Syndicate event.

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Guns! In a review of Peter F. Hamilton's Great North Road (2012) I've been writing for Foundation, I try to think a bit about taste, vulgarity, and space operatic / military sf images of the future. Does putting laser pistols in your far future commandos' paws subtly undermine the cultural profile of US military hegemony, such that it will (/ "always already has...") retaliate by stopping up rivulets of cultural capital, making it that bit more difficult for you to achieve a kneejerk acceptability?

"If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude," advises prophetic USB stick Johnny in William Gibson's "Johnny Mneumonic" (1981), as he puts a medieval halberd into his fanny pack.

Neal Asher is perhaps an example of an author whose far future atmospheres contain an adroit spritz of the primitive. In his tale in this month's Asimov's Science Fiction -- "The Other Gun" -- combatants don't die in a hail of bullets so much as: succumb to fast-acting fungal contamination, get bitten to death by dinosaur fangs, or deliberately crushed under a huge slamming door.

Do inclusions of technology which has not advanced sometimes act as a kind of flamboyant demonstration of restraint? Does such restraint aim to close (or just to blur) the gap between the kind of extrapolative rigour on which much science fiction builds its reputation, vs. the kind which it can actually exercise? Though when you realise you're suggesting "squashing people with doors" as an example of restraint, it could be time to take stock.

TV Tropes: Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better. 

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Susan Gray's (ShittyKittyPhD) mysterious sf playlet, "Switchboard" (PDF) is about gender, art (perhaps along the lines of artists like Jen Southern, Esther Polak and Christian Nold), surveillance, big data, and - especially - about representation of social complexity, and about understanding each other under conditions of social complexity.

"Typical of humanity. Dialogues are just monologues that have converged." Compare Charlie Brooker's only slightly reductive grump, in which he approvingly quotes a book about making Doctor Who: "Dialogue is just two monologues clashing." Of course a solo playwright / screenwriter is always aware at some level of dialogue as a masking of their (internal) monologue, a bifurcation artifice. Also cf. the different implications of "converging" and "clashing" (and others words - "cohabiting," "coalescing," "co-nquering," "integrating," "interleaving," "superimposing," etc.). It could be the difference, for instance, between a street that is two one-way streets superimposed, or side-by-side. (I don't know: I don't cognitively converge, although I do have a licence).

There's a significant stratum of academic-ish language in the scene, and it made me think of Bauman (ambivalence) and (inevitably for me) Habermas (communicative rationality vs. instrumental rationality), but also Walter Benjamin: "Für Männer: Über-Zeugen ist unfruchtbar," "For men: to convince is to conquer unfruitfully," or "to conquer without conception." Although, appropriately, I have no idea what he means. 

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"Yet, for some individual or group, the mainstream media blackout was not enough; they wiped Facebook clean of our dissent too. We must take this as a note of caution and a reminder that Facebook and other social media sites are not free spaces, they are owned by corporations. If someone came and clasped their hand over your mouth in the street, there would be avenues for redress. If Facebook does the same, options are limited." (Scriptonite)

Does Facebook censor political content? 

"Yes and no is my best guess. It's worth trying to imagine, in concrete detail, how censorship might be embedded in Facebook's operations. Not that there aren't Evil Corporations (there basically are) but we shouldn't lose sight of the org hierarchy and processes of that Evil, how that Evil is embodied in the lives of various individuals committing various individual acts, according to narratives which let them sleep at night [...] Facebook needs to work out the signature of political speech and/or divisive speech being misreported as spam and find ways to protect it. There needs at least to be effective appeal functionality [...]"

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It's a hein lein!

Heinlein on censorship: "The whole principle is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak."

Heinlein on gun ownership: "An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life."

Tor.com Heinlein symposium. Not sure when this is from.

January 2010, Ian Sales on Stranger in a Strange Land.  "[...] look at that hyperbole 'the Hugo-winning bestseller they wanted to ban'. It doesn’t say who wanted to ban it – lovers of good literature, perhaps. If it was some religious group – well, don’t forget one such group also wanted to ban Watership Down, a book with a cast of rabbits."

From November 2012, Jonathan McCalmont on Heinlein's legacy etc., "Annoyed with the History of Science Fiction."

July 2011, Jo Walton on her least favourite Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, linking to a lot of her other Heinlein stuff on Tor.

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Damien G. Walter reveals the results of his indie SF-afari.

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Speculative Fiction 2012, ed. Justin Landon and Jared Shurin. Mur Lafferty, Ana Grilo, Thea James, Sarah Anne Langton, Joe Abercrombie, Daniel Abraham, Niall Alexander, Elizabeth Bear, Rob Berg, Liz Bourke, Maurice Broaddus, Myke Cole, Kate Elliott, Katherine Farmar, Chris Gerwel, Christopher Garcia, Daniel Goodman, Ana Grilo, Niall Harrison, Dan Hartland, Matt Hilliard, Kameron Hurley, Thea James, N.K. Jemisin, Paul Kincaid, Lady Business, Rose Lemberg, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Cynthia Martinez, Tim Maughan, Foz Meadows, Jonathan McCalmont, Martin McGrath, Aidan Moher, Ken Neth, Larry Nolen, Abigail Nussbaum, Christopher Priest, Stefan Raets, Adam Roberts, Tansy Rayner Roberts, CS Samulski, Penny Schenk, Ro Smith, Maureen K. Speller, Aishwarya Subramanian, Matthew Surridge, Sam Sykes, Gav Thorpe and Lavie Tidhar.

"Science fiction is one of the great middle class cultural projects; an exciting, upmarket gated community where you need to show your credentials to get admittance. You’re allowed into science fiction because you understand the greatest middle class-empowering construct of the last 200 years – you understand science. You are welcome in science fiction because you understand that scientists and engineers and astronauts are heroes. You are welcome in science fiction because you understand that rationality and reasoning and hard work can fix anything. And most importantly, you are welcome in science fiction because you’re middle class and you understand that the future is yours for the taking." Tim Maughan, from "Science Fiction Is Here, It's Just Not Evenly Distributed."

"Intentions are meaningless if contradicted by our actions, and doubly so if we refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of dissonance between them. Victoria Foyt is not being bullied; she is being called out for having written a horrendously racist book in the first instance and then for completely dismissing her critics in the second. Trying to turn the existing conversation about the negative themes of Revealing Eden, the reactions of POC readers, Foyt’s behaviour and the general problem of race in YA into a discussion about the appropriateness of various reviewing techniques is, ultimately, a form of derailing: however important the issue might be otherwise, it’s a separate topic to the one at hand, and the STGRB site managers have done themselves even less credit than usual by so hamfistedly conflating the two. Subconscious racism is a real problem – but so is the refusal of would-be allies to acknowledge that, despite all their active efforts and intentions, it can still affect them, too." Foz Meadows, from "Racism, Revealing Eden, and Stop The Goodreads Bullies."

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Jonathan McCulmont on The Hugo Awards. And a long comments thread about a YA Hugo, rejuvenation factor, permission to translate a review of Windup Girl, communities, committees, lawns, comments threads, etc.

"Going by the comments on Justin’s blog, the SFF community appears to be stuck in two self-contained vicious circles:

Whenever an alienated fan feels inclined to express their concerns about the Hugos, established fans such as Kevin Standlee use an array of tactics (including mockery, tone escalation and flood-posting) to shut down debate leaving the alienated fans feeling not only disenfranchised but also increasingly angry and resentful over the Hugo Awards’ claims to universality and democracy.

Whenever established fans devote time and money to ensuring that the Hugo Awards are not only well-attended but smoothly run, a group of people with very little invested in the process appear and begin to question not only the outcome of the Hugo process but the integrity of the process itself. Whenever a fan attempts to correct a mistake or encourage further engagement, they are met with hostility. Given that these outliers appear unwilling to contribute to the Hugos, the only option is to ensure that the complaints and protestations are silenced lest they negatively impact the awards and the convention that hosts them.

I have been following these types of discussion for the best part of ten years and that decade has seen online reactions to the Hugo Awards become ever more aggressive and balkanised. People outside the process see the Hugo Awards becoming increasingly isolated and dysfunctional while the people who are heavily invested in the process fear the institutions slipping away from them, hence the orchestrated campaigns to not only preserve ‘fan writing’ as something that is done in the remnants of the traditional fanzine scene but also block any constitutional overtures that expansive and progressive fans might want to make to the vibrant and energetic YA and comics communities."

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"I am officially Very Poorly." A Personal Statement from Iain Banks.

"I can still remember how shocked and impressed I was by the end of the book. In terms of the games writers can play with the chronologies of narratives, it has long been a touchstone work for me." Ian Sales on cancer's latest fucking brilliant idea.

Some messages from fans.

Adam Roberts is moonwalking through the Culture novels.

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Me: scarce maths, scarce reading, scarce solo writing except Syndicate pres & Great North Road review. Some coastline wibble with nick-e & some lines & rhymes with Verity & Justin. Mini PiP/WFSPFN at Forest+. (Dropped by Iain Morrison's "Subject Index" Emily Dickinson project & Leiza McLeod and Iain's "This Is Not The Place" readings there too). Did avant radge with Sam & Justin for Calum & Sandy's Verse Hearse in Glas. There is a new SCREE. Justin Katko visit.

Veilbook

NHS privatisation gains its craggy taloned footing on a crucial moss-slicked stepping stone this week, in the context of under-reporting and misleading reporting by both the BBC and fully marketised news media.

"Yet, for some individual or group, the mainstream media blackout was not enough; they wiped Facebook clean of our dissent too. We must take this as a note of caution and a reminder that Facebook and other social media sites are not free spaces, they are owned by corporations. If someone came and clasped their hand over your mouth in the street, there would be avenues for redress. If Facebook does the same, options are limited" (Scriptonite).

Does Facebook censor political content? 

Yes and no is my best guess. It's worth trying to imagine, in concrete detail, how censorship might be embedded in Facebook's operations. Not that there aren't Evil Corporations (there basically are), but we shouldn't lose sight of the various org hierarchies and processes and codes of conduct of that Evil, how that Evil is embodied in the lives of various individuals committing various individual acts, according to narratives which let them sleep at night. Like, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for evil people to do nothing."

(a) Say there's always somebody in a Facebook office ready to field calls from Key Stakeholders about their publicity concerns. Maybe you can get on that list by holding a lot of shares, buying a lot of FB ad space, a personal recommendation from senior management, etc. So there would be a phone call from time-to-time, raising concerns that a particular viral item is without factual basis, is libellous, or violates copyright. No proof would be necessary: just a plausible enough complaint to lead to a temporary (i.e. permanent) take-down. I can just about credit such an arrangement existing. It doesn't seem a particularly good fit for the events Scriptonite describes though. Who would have made that call? What would the pretence have been? I wouldn't quite rule it out, but ...

(b) More likely, we the public censored the article when creeps among us clicked "Report Story or Spam." We abused that function, because some of us, for a variety of reasons, get enraged by the wrong things. It is possible that Facebook employees then undertook sort of evaluation as to whether the content violated the Terms of Service. But I wouldn't be surprised if the take-down kicked in automatically, when some reporting threshold was reached.

We could try to generalise, BTW, about what kinds of item tend to get zotzed in this way. Something which is in principle incredibly divisive and vitriol-a-genic could rattle around safely inside a stovepiped network for ages, only being shared among people who can tolerate it. In other words, an exemplary risk would be an item which angers your friends, not just your foes. (I do find it difficult to get inside the psychology that wrathfully marks as spam rather than de-friends, a hint I might not have this quite right). I wonder if there were a lot of take-downs during during the 2011 riots? Also: I suspect these processes are pretty resistant, but not impervious to monetisation. Malicious reporting could be part of someone's job.

Anyway, the key thing is: it's still Facebook's responsibility to stop this from happening. But it's not a case-by-case responsibility (or not only a case-by-case responsibility). It's a matter of systems design. Facebook needs to work out the signature of political speech and/or divisive speech being misreported as spam and find ways to protect it. Their systems no doubt put a lot of weight on a list of stipulated trusted sources (The Guardian, The Mail). That's papering over the cracks. In fact it's not even paper. It's some kind of nang guacamole. Instead, Facebook need to design an architecture within which we can correctly crowdsource the initial judgment as to whether some particular item is legitimate or not, regardless of its domain. One complementary possibility is a transitional status for an item that is suspected of being spam, letting the self-identified digitally literate make up their own minds. If something is taken down, there needs to be obvious, effective appeal functionality, and there need to be swift, bold humans evaluating those appeals and giving reasons for their decisions. Of course in a crisis, Facebook is completely unreliable. But for day-to-day stuff, it's an amphitheatre worth fighting for. It's a Great Space.

(c) It's some kind of weird glitch which affected that article at random. Maybe stuff disappears all the time and we tend to notice more when we can attribute it to the actions of a vigilant antagonist. I think it's perfectly possible to prefer this option to option (a) whilst still having my distrust of corporate communications, corporate activities and corporate ideology and culture set to maximum.

UPDATE: Horrible Telegraph article by Willard Foxton makes queasy cause with me: "a small amount of code that Facebook's anti-spam algorithms recognised as spam embedded in her site; hence, people received a warning that the link was potentially dangerous by clicking on it. When enough people clicked "report spam", the post was automatically taken down."

Damien Walter's Indie SF-ari

Over at the Guardian, Damien G Walter reveals the results of his quest.

"Indie publishing excels in giving a platform to writers whose work is either too idiosyncratic for mainstream tastes, or just not what publishers are looking for at that time. My search this year revealed five books that fit these criteria."

The Vorhh by Brian Catling
Guy Haley's Champion of Mars 
The Theatre of Curious Acts by Cate Gardner
Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales 
A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer

Then again, how far can we trust the sanity of someone who has just read - or even just heard about - over 800 indie published SF&F novels . . .

March: Executive Summary

#MerchMarch!

Some cool T-shirts, and some not-cool T-shirts.

From Tim Maly's "Quiet Babylon's Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Library of Babel," object spam in Second Life:

Why is it always the T-shirts with the sexist slogans? Why are so few other clothes sexist in this way? Name three sexist macs.

Also: Neatorama's perfunctory timeline of the T-shirt. Also, a game: contort your T-shirt into a t-shirt. Now do an R-shirt.

Compare Pete Ashton's early comments on the T-shirts episode (& his later reflection on how those comments got widely disseminated, and led to phone calls from news networks, and getting called a sub human piss man and worse (not by the people ringing up from the news networks. Just by some twerts)).

Scott Lash on Bruno Latour's parliament of things: "Objects that Judge."

My incident report from my e-vendory tower. "As seems to be the case pretty often with net culture, the theory we devise for it turns out to be applicable to things that pre-dated it." Has anyone seriously attempted to theorise ideology as code from the perspective of computer science, not semiotics, information theory and systems theory? For all that the humanities' construal of ideology draws on the imagery of programming, and stresses process and autonomous virulence, my sense is that the default analogy for some aspect of ideology would be inert data. Anyone want to give me some tips / a reading list?

"Or to put that another way, is Solid Gold Bomb now aware of just how much nasty is stuff is out there, waiting to be said?" Compare nick-e melville's planned/ongoing Imperative Commands project.

In South Africa the horse meat scandal may contain giraffe meat scandal. (Reuters).

A piece from last November about 3D-printing and crapjects (Changeist). "In my mind's eye, I picture the trashpickers of LA, wandering over a field of discarded chess pieces and napkin holders, tossing aside misshapen busts of Mozart and two-headed Star Wars stormtroopers, pushing past a half-finished TV stand or crunching through the remains of several attempted drone-prints."

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#MaughanMarch!

A short film based on Tim Maughan's short story "Paintwork":

Credits over at Wired. La Jetée cited as an influence. Bruce Sterling comments, "Very convergence culture. I wonder what it would look like if a hundred million dollars had been spent on it?" Maybe like it was influenced by 12 Monkeys?

Martin Lewis of Everything is Nice has an interesting review of Maughan's "Limited Edition".

"On one level, I honestly wanted them to get away with their Smash/Grab! Then I remembered myself." Like Lewis, Niall Alexander is reviewing the BSFA-nominated stories, except almost heroically law-abidingly.

"Limited Edition" itself available in Arc. Free, because they know you'd just nick it.

Also compare: my Crot riot Hax tumblr from August 2011. But I miss its old skin.

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#MiscMarch!

Keep Calm and Groupon. I may have been fired as Groupon CEO, but I have knowledge of a very advanced level of Battletoads. Basically this is still a win. (Wired).

Nima Shirazi on Argo. "Over the past 12 months, rarely a week - let alone month - went by without new predictions of an ever-imminent Iranian nuclear weapon and ever-looming threats of an American or Israeli military attack. Come October 2012, into the fray marched Argo, a decontextualized, ahistorical "true story" of Orientalist proportion, subjecting audiences to two hours of American victimization and bearded barbarians, culminating in popped champagne corks and rippling stars-and-stripes celebrating our heroism and triumph and their frustration and defeat." Compare some of Shirazi's earlier comments.

Solar-system-in-context-visualisation. @DJSadhu's "deep space hand cam." (Via Metafilter).

Max Planck (b. 1858), an inspiration to all workers in the field of theoretical physics, has piecemeal replaced his body with CMB measurement and imaging instruments, solar arrays, attitude control thrusters etc., and launched himself into a massively elliptical orbit to capture the oldest light in the sky. Planck's portrait of the infant universe (Phys.org).

Wired article: I will seek "most badass" moon in solar system.

"Visceral" attempt at playground autism simulator.

The lorem ipsum is a standard piece of dummy text used by typesetters. BLOKK is for "clients who don't speak Latin." Hipster ipsum: "Forage stumptown pork belly DIY, vegan do american apparel ad irure art party bicycle rights tofu carles. Try-hard et id fingerstache mustache. Enim single-origin coffee beard fap. Disrupt williamsburg farm-to-table, accusamus odio assumenda elit street art aliquip. Consectetur photo booth put a bird on it trust fund, blog actually sed meh wayfarers leggings +1 gentrify placeat. Whatever et YOLO VHS butcher, occaecat umami intelligentsia do mollit brunch food truck farm-to-table anim. Pitchfork vinyl organic, next level labore magna non bespoke salvia letterpress neutra pug synth 8-bit."

Joan Slonczewski on Charlie Stross's blog on mitochondria and outsourcing the human; mitochondria have been in the public eye in the wake of some slightly misnomered "Three Parents?" articles.

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Clarkesworld in March included: Alethea Contis on fairy tales. "Do we even know who our children are?" Compare Tolkien. Also includes Aliette de Bodard's tale of rebellion, e-ancestors, "The Weight of a Blessing." De Bodard talks through the process of writing it on her blog. Also includes: "The Last Survivor of the Great Sexbot Revolution," by AC Wise. Compare article about sexbots (h+), the uncanny valley, and "Shiri: buttocks humanoid that represents emotions". Roxxxy is the best-known existing sexbot. David Levy's Love and Sex with Robots (Amazon.com). SexBot at TVTropes. Black Mirror "Be Right Back" Q&A with Charlie Brooker. Wong Kar Wai's 2046:

Related: Kyra-Wardog on Clarisse Thorn's Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser (FerretBrain).

Also cf. weird to the Wise: "Where Dead Men Go To Dream" by A.C. Wise at Weird Fiction Review.

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#MarsMarch!

NASA's Curiosity continues pootling around Mars having infinitesimal adventures (BBC).

Dennis Tito's forecast private Mars flyby: poop shields up! Evacuative action!

Do you know of Mars One, the nonprofit-with-profit-elements that plans to put humans, hopefully including me, on Mars but doesn't plan to bring us back? Its financial model focuses on media revenues. Is this really possible?

A BBC reporter embedded with the French Foreign Legion in Mali takes the "Mars" angle.

A candle flame in zero G:

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The 64th Eastercon was held in Bradford at the end of March.

"Though you don't know it, at the heart of the Internet's magic is a router that can manage TCP/IP over destiny. It can send packets where they will fulfill the truest desires of true love, where they will turn farce into tragedy, where truth is weighed in the balance and whence inspiration comes." Some flash fiction Cory Doctorow wrote at the con.

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Syndicate: had the first in the series, with Sophie Robinson, Dorothy Butchard, Calum Rodger and Iliop. Prompted me to reinstall JanusNode (see TED talk titles) & fend off carious PiP with image macros.
No writing whatsoever. Reading: Peter F. Hamilton's Great North Road. Read Asher's "The Other Gun." Musil paused. Saw Lust/Caution, Charade, some Bradley.
No kip-ups. One leg squat. Khan: v. minor; intro to exponents, radicals, scientific equation, & some linear equations & functions stuff.

Some arithmetical knowledge seems to exist in me an odd hybrid form between a fact (e.g. 2+2=4) and a rule or set of rules in action (e.g. 2553+14885=32323). It perhaps relates to the different forms of doubt/reliability in the phenomenal experience of doing arithmetic. One way of describing the difference between those forms of doubt/reliability is as the difference between knowing that some procedure will work, and also knowing why it works. I think that's a pretty common way of putting it. I was wondering if that expression could mask alternatives though, or deter usefully baroque and obsessive explorations of that feeling? What is it that will satisfy you, phenomenally, that you know why a procedure works? I was trying out some percentages. "So-and-so has x in her bank account on Wednesday, y on Thursday. By what percentage has her bank account increased?" First of all, (a) smash capitalism. And (b), I could familiarise myself with the contour "y-x=z, z/y*100 is the answer I need." I think that I might feel I knew why I should apply that pattern, and not only which pattern to apply, if I can shift around one variable and the others correspond in the right proportions, and perhaps with the self-moving quality of dreams. The sense of the appropriateness of those proportions presumably comes from that moving system coinciding periodically with knowledge stored more like a fact. The ghostly joints briefly line up with 1 being 50% of 2, etc., and you feel that you have tested and confirmed your deeper knowledge of this percentages procedure. I wonder also if there's actually an interplay between visual and linguistic forms of knowledge here? If so, would some aspects evolve into another irreducibly arithmetic form, once you got really good? Compare perhaps those moments where a mathematics teacher completely fails to teach. "You can see that the answer is . . . you can just see that, right?" Is that only a failure of pedagogy or also of introspection? Also think of someone's mathematical capacities atomising along lines derived from the familiarities of expertise. Many bridges evolving into fewer. Disused connections subtly destroyed as one heuristic gets ninja-substituted for another, etc.

PiPLOL

Following Calum Rodger's discussion of his(ish) JanusLOLs at the Inspace event last week, I supplied PiPLOL services to last night's P(r)o(s)etry in Progress meeting (first drafts low on LOL but sassily snatched from the unbending decimating rigour of the Pip gauntlet). Two from poems by Iain Morrison & Lila Matsumoto:

JanusTED

TED talk titles generated by JanusNode (tweaked):

These days Islam can produce thousands of terabytes of data. How can we deal with all this data? Recent McCarthy award winning illustrator Imogene Intintinca started 'the Islam Project' to teach actual infants how they can get young, ignorant children involved in Islam from as young as seven.

You may not know as much as you think about ancient monuments! Oscar-winning intern Imogen Tawfiq, having lived with iatrogenic irascibility for 36 years, describes how (after over 300 tries) she and her team created a visually stunning, eco-friendly hydraulic ram that will change the way you think about adaptive robotics.

What can be learned about flying cars from the study of fleas? Gonzo unskilled laborer Ulysses Underwood shows how urban waste can connect urban waste with urban transportation systems.

Are problems with literature insurmountable? Oscar-winning lumberjack Lex Leblanc presents the optimistic business education packages she makes from leaves.

There are 30,000 indigenous creative industries practitioners in Eritrea. Lamp lighter Lure Leonardo, having almost lost his life mountaineering, wanted to study the CERN particle collider - until he discovered libraries.

Imagine if everyone on the planet could understand developmental disorders. Just back from a world bicycle tour, housewife Ette-ette Hugo Hugo Hemheu-Hug Mouse, having been severely beaten by rebels, wanted to study unprecedented amounts of data - until she discovered education.

Also: "Great Ideas demand precisely the opposite of TED thinking."
Umair Haque on TED talks: thinking, ideas, solutions, commodities.