Great science fiction asks us to think about the very concept of being human, of the human experience. Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein all took their readers on investigations of what being human really meant, by asking unsettling questions of the type "What if (insert basic assumption about life here) were no longer true?" Asimov's Robot stories ask us to consider if our biology is central to our humanity. Clarke's amazing Childhood's End challenges us to imagine a humanity no longer limited by our need to live on this planet.

Karl Schroeder's remarkable "Virga" novels are asking some very unsettling questions, and providing very few settly-type answers.

His latest book, The Sunless Countries, his fourth set in the bizarre landscape of Virga, pretty much asks the question, "What if animals could use physics simulators? What if a dog or a wildebeest could provide itself with artificial augmentations? What the heck would THAT look like?"

Which is just a pretty nutty question to even ASK in the first place. I mean, what?

So there's characters appearing in this story who can talk, who can make use of completely over-the-top technology, but who aren't sentient. It's a bizarre conceit, made possible only by Schroeder's vision of where technology is leading us: towards the capacity to perfectly model natural processes. When this capacity is trivial to provide, argues Schroeder, we no longer need reasoning to provide us with advancements -- we can simply model natural selection, accelerate it even, and the improvements we desire will be made apparent to us. Once this technology becomes all-pervasive, then any entity capable of desire becomes capable of transforming itself, of developing whole new forms of technological marvels. Entities do not need to realise this is what they're doing. They don't need to possess awareness, just desire. Just hunger. Science itself becomes obsolete when the model's predictive power is faster, more reliable and more available to all.

(that'll really piss off Glenn -- I hope he reads this)

Except of course that reasoning, coupled with imagination (and perhaps given structure via constraints) can always envision solutions BEYOND what the model is capable of predicting, of making leaps the model cannot make. And it's becoming clear that the story of Virga is the story of the last enclave of life that is directed by scientific reasoning and human imagination. Everywhere else, we are learning, has been overtaken by this "artificial nature" that provides everything to everyone according to their desires. Only in Virga do people still puzzle out solutions to their problems. And because of this, Virga is both desired and suspected. How this will all play out is yet to be learned, but Schroeder is telling a fast, compelling story that only reveals its secrets in small doses. Just enough to keep you dying for more.

Perhaps Schroeder is preparing an elegy for science, or a last desperate plea for a beleaguered mode of thought. It's been forty years since the Moon missions. Creationism gets argued for in international media. And science fiction has been struggling without a great visionary voice for decades.

Now it seems we have writers like Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow championing a new, positive vision of the world ahead, something at last tearing down the cyberpunk dystopia that overtook everything in the 80's and erecting in its place a bizarre new world, crazier than the craziest Amazing Stories cover from the days of Hugo Gernsback. Karl Schroeder is staking out bold new territory in this space with giant bubbles of wine, flying icebergs and balloons orbiting distant stars.

And a creepy yet compelling discussion of what "human" means -- even more, what does "sentience" mean and why should we worry about it?

Labels: criticism, genre, sci-fi

Stuff is slowly but surely coming together. And by "stuff" I mean "awesome stuff".

People are coming on board. The RIGHT people. You know who you are. You, for example. Yes, you.

And so I'm thinking about what this thing is all about. I mean, of course there's dinosaurs, pirates, ninjas, monkeys and robots, and those pretty much speak for themselves, but really, what's in it for me?

Or perhaps even more importantly, what's in it for EVERYONE? Why bother?

So I'm working on a sort of MANIFESTO. A "What's the point of all this?" kind of document. Because as silly as the name is, and as ridiculous as the concept is, I really believe in DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND. I think this is a new sort of thing, a sort of thing the world could use. It's still a work in progress, but here's what I think I'm trying to do:

Create a fully-realised setting -- a fantastic imaginary world filled with fascinating characters and evocative places for storytellers to build from -- shared through a Creative Commons model that allows anyone to contribute to and use DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND in their own work.

So what does this do? Why would anyone want this? Well, it gives you:

• Open and free access to a fun and reasonably consistent stable of characters and places.


• A chance to show off one's creative chops in a variety of formats.


• The chance to provide an example of an entirely new model for content development and collaboration.

But I can't possibly do it alone. I can do some writing here and there, design some game mechanics and maybe throw in an idea or two, but other people have to get involved for this to get anywhere. We'll need folks to pitch in on character development (art and writing), setting development (landscapes, cities, organizations, all that good stuff), editing, illustration, even programming and technology as we adapt tools like wikis and whatnot to our needs...

I'm reading Jono Bacon's "The Art of Community" which is helping concretize my ideas around what needs doing, and it's just getting me all the more excited.

Mad, am I?

I'll show them! I'll show them all!

[madlaughter]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

[/madlaughter]

Labels: DINO-PIRATES, gaming, setting design

Here's a cool (and weird) image, of part of the Maldives from space. The Maldives are a chain of islands in the Indian Ocean, a little to the southwest of the tip of the subcontinent. On the other side of India, past the Sunda shelf (which incorporates the Malay peninsula and the large islands just off the coast; there is a gigantic flooded landbridge that connects southeast Asia and Australia) in the South Pacific, there are a lot of these kinds of islands too, called atolls. Atolls are formerly much larger volcanic islands, not unlike the Hawaiian islands, which have coral reefs build up around them, while the volcanic peaks, over millions of years, erode down and eventually disappear under the water. The coral reefs are a self-renewing resource, since corals continue to grow on top of other corals; after a while, the circumerence of the island is all that is left as a kind of hollow ring of low beaches and reefs, with a shallow lagoon in the center, which can often encompass many, many square miles.

Labels: DINO-PIRATES, setting design

Okay, I don't want to say too much about this just now, and I CAN tell you that certain details here are already due to change, but look, there's a piece of the puzzle, okay?

DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND is going places. Some of the most amazing people I know are involved in this, and they're outdoing themselves. And it's going to be shared. I think I know how to handle the licensing so that this crazy setting can belong to everyone, and still provide sustainable revenue.

I've discovered something in my life: the more you share, the more you have to give. Generosity rewards with abundance. When you hoard and snarl and struggle to hold onto every little scrap, little scraps are all you get. But when you share your ideas and your time with others, they respond with THEIR ideas and THEIR time.

It can be nerve-wracking at times -- other people's ideas are often intimidating to me. What if they're not as good as mine? What if they're BETTER? What if they take over and everyone forgets about me? Forgets that it was my idea in the first place? What if somebody takes my idea and makes all the money, and I have never have another good idea ever again?

But what if I do? What if I'm a FACTORY of ideas? What if everytime I share an idea with someone, they share back half-a-dozen ideas? Great ideas?

What if I operate from a basis of confidence and trust? If I have trust in myself and the others around me, faith in our ability to generate great stuff, then sharing my ideas freely becomes the only reasonable choice.

I'm not talking about abandoning copyright or giving away money or business opportunities. But SHARING isn't about giving away. It doesn't mean I don't value my own labour -- it's the opposite. I value my ability to create, and so I have faith that what I create is worth something to others. I don't have to operate from a basis of fear and suspicion.

DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND is an imaginary world full of imaginary people. But it's worth something. I don't know exactly what, but I have faith. Wait and see.

Labels: DINO-PIRATES, gaming

This one's been sitting on the burner for quite a while but I think it's done. I was overwhelmed by the preacher's speech in Lars von Trier's Breaking The Waves, and when casting around for something to contrast it with, came up with the soothing yet seductive tones of Monica Bellucci's discussion of ecstasy and pain. Once that pattern was in place, coming up with a simple piano riff and some string chords was pretty straightforward. I kept trying to dress it up a little but that never really worked. It feels delicate, like it needs room to breathe.

The simplest composition I think I've created so far. Steph says it sounds the most like me. You'll have to decide if that's a good thing.

A Moment Of...

Labels: art, film, music

Dear lord, how I wish I'd thought of this. What a perfect opportunity, sitting there all these decades until some genius realised what could be accomplished.

Will it suck? Well, the odds aren't great, I guess. But will they make their money back? Oh how they will. My hat is off to these folks. Well done.



Via The Mad Pulp Bastard, of course.

Labels: film, pulp history, sci-fi

I can't quite recall WHY I read Illuminatus! (or more properly, The Illuminatus! Trilogy).

Steven King may have referenced it in Danse Macabre (still my favourite of his books). It may have gotten mention in Dragon magazine way back in the day.

In any event, my 1984 Dell printing was pretty much brand-new when I got it, so it was a good healthy number of years ago. It was like reading a nuclear explosion. I was sixteen years old, and the most challenging stuff I'd read up to that point was probably A Tale of Two Cities. I didn't know anything about drugs, about hippie culture -- I barely knew anything about politics and certainly didn't get more than the barest number of the thousands of references scattered through this bewildering -- but hilarious -- novel. Shea and Wilson basically invent the conspiracy theory tale in these 800-some pages (and apparently that's with 500 or so pages cut out) and none of their imitators in the decades since has even approached the invention and audacity that makes this book so overwhelming.

Geez, was that all one sentence? Whoa.

"It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton." What kind of opening sentence is that? The constant switching of narrator voice -- at points it's actually impossible to tell anymore who's speaking, and what point of view we're supposed to think they're presenting. Which is of course half the point. The book itself is a mammoth conspiracy tale, and like any good conspiracy, includes plenty of truths and half-truths in amongst the outrageous lies. And on page 722, the greatest joke of it all, the fourth wall gets blown away (is there a fourth wall in books?), and I the reader get pulled right in on the whole joke and it still works.

Like most genre-defining works, I think Illuminatus! actually reaches and even exceeds all the boundaries it creates. This book goes as far as any conspiracy book can possibly go, and then goes farther. There's really nothing left to write here - the spawning point is also the graveyard.

But there's something else that this mad tale has left us: the mashup. Because a conspiracy theory always has to be a mashup. The whole point of a conspiracy theory is to assert the connection between elements that otherwise do not appear to share anything. When George Dorn gets told that Abdul Alhazared, George Washington and the assassination of John F. Kennedy are all related to the ancient rulers of Atlantis, THAT'S mashup happening. The more elements you can tie together, the less probable your whole edifice becomes, the BETTER. And sometimes it seems like the mashup has become the default genre. From Kill Bill to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to, um DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, everywhere the mashing together of genres and massive "referentiality" are making up wholly new paradigms. Nowadays everyone knows what "steampunk" is, but fifteen years ago? Not so much. But it hasn't taken very long. Only five years back, the suggestion to "Define some genres" resulted in creative hilarity, and all of the genres defined therein count as mashups -- from "Trucker: The Cavalcade" to "Lovecraftian Ringwaldpunk".

I think all this fun stuff really does owe a big debt to Shea and Wilson's mad, psychedelic vision of the late 60's. Reading those dense paragraphs of lurid sex, violence, drugs and utter insanity (I'm making it sound pretty awesome, aren't I?) was and remains an absolute trip. This book is amazingly smart, amazingly well-informed and structured so beautifully it's almost impossible to see it -- the whole thing just flows from start to finish in a single uninterruptible stream. Crazy.

And the book remains one of those books that EVERYONE has heard of (or at least is familiar with the concepts it invented), but surprisingly few people have actually read. I don't think it quite qualifies as A One Nobody Knows, but sometimes it seems that way. But regardless, the idea of mashing together random references from history, pop culture and science has become an entire field of genres. Practically every comic book published nowadays owes a debt to this book, and plenty of Hollywood's output, too. It's definitely, in the words of Nuclear Platypus, "a real slobberknocker".

And if you don't get that, you haven't followed enough of the links I've so thoughtfully provided for you in this post. C'mon, start connecting some references here! Everyone's doing it!

Labels: criticism, DINO-PIRATES, genre, pulp history