Brian Aldiss Passes

Brian Aldiss, the last great Grand Master of the SF's Golden Age, passed away this weekend.

One of the first hardback novels I ever owned was Brian Aldiss' first novel, Non-Stop, published in 1958. It is a slim volume with a massive starship on the cover. It was an early publication of the Science Fiction Book Club, a subscription service which sent (and still sends) hardback editions of SF and Fantasy books monthly.

At the time it came to me, in its cardboard box mailer, it was hard to find good SF. My choices were basically the book club or the drugstore across from my church, where I could purchase Ace Doubles, back-to-back paperback books in wire racks. Every month I awaited the arrival of the book club book, and getting Non-Stop is one of the highlights of my teenage reading life.

Non-Stop is a slim book, and its hero, Roy Complain, is very British for the descendant of passengers in the 23rd generation of a ship that made a trip to the star Procyon, a trip that should have taken them only six generations to accomplish. Things have gone wrong. Most of the people living aboard have forgotten their history and don't realize they're living on a ship traveling through space.

The plot involves Complain roaming around the immense ship and discovering the various peoples who live there and getting involved in their conflicts. Gradually the ship is described and eventually we discover what's happening to it and the fate of the passengers, which I will not describe for fear of spoiling the ending for you.

What I want to point out is not Aldiss' plot in Non-Stop, but his voice for describing and creating a vivid fictional world for his readers.  In my then-young mind, I could visualize the world of the ship through the poetry of his description, where the golden age of space travel and discovery had somehow gone awry. In subsequent novels and stories, his storytelling improved, but his ability to create vivid worlds was strong in Non-Stop and never waned in his other work, like the amazing Helliconia Trilogy. His end-of-the-Solar-System novel, The Long Afternoon of Earth, contains imagery of the demise of Earth and the devolved remains its human population that is reminiscent of and likely a tribute to H. G. Wells' novel The Time Traveler.

His writing bridged the golden age of stand-alone novels like Non-Stop, and today's series-mad marketing with Helliconia, published as a trilogy. He wrote many good short stories as well, including his famous "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," which became the movie "AI." He also wrote non-fiction, including The Billion Year Spree, a history of SF. He was an admirer of the classic science fiction of H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley and wrote sequels to some of their work. He edited volumes of the best of science fiction stories. He wrote travelogues and published poetry.

He was tremendously imaginative and productive, publishing good work into his eighties.  We will miss his poetic voice and his ability to create unique worlds in the style of classic greats like Wells and Shelley, in whose company he would be comfortable.

Review of The Peripheral, by William Gibson

Journal Review of The Peripheral, by William Gibson

I am a big fan of William Gibson, always have been since I read Neuromancer, that wonderful creative dystopian novel of future technology growing amidst the ruins of the past. I followed his brilliant career with pleasure through a half dozen novels.  Gibson’s characters are spare, cold, hard, intelligent people whose souls burst through at times of crisis, his settings, glued atop the ruins of a 20^th Century manufactured world.  His prose, terse, hip, and fluid, is always mesmerizing. 

Neuromancer’s novum, cyberspace, anticipated much of the technology of its time and influenced the technology being created then.  Almost by himself, Gibson created the SF subgenre of cyberpunk, which shattered the classic paradigm of the golden age SF of Asimov and Heinlein.  SF has further changed since then, and cyberpunk has faded from relevance, but SF tropes are not the same after Neuromancer.

In a quieter way, Gibson continues to innovate with his new novel The Peripheral.  Though cyberpunk is gone, this book reminds of a time when technology and hipness and protagonists mucking their way through forces beyond their ken were Gibson’s principle themes.  We have not seen this particular William Gibson in a while, and though I love his recent novels for their SFnal subtlety, I am enthusiastic about this latest novel, which harks back to Gibson’s cyberpunk’s thematic structures while remaining true to what is happening today, measuring trends and extrapolating memes and doing what SF does best: providing insight into our present and our near future.

Some of the trends and memes the The Peripheral focuses on: the garbage patch, post-humanism, quantum tunneling, designer drugs, and especially the remote piloting of a variety of devices, the peripherals.  Gibson is at his best tucking these ideas into a plot with mystery and danger and violence.  The book takes place in two settings:  a declining American hinterland of a small Southern town with a vanished middle class, unemployed, disabled veterans, and a post-apocalyptic London rebuilt by micro machines, assemblers who try to reconstruct a vanished world destroyed in the Jackpot, a series of wars, plagues, and environmental disasters that wipe out most of humanity in our near future.

In this future, humans meddle with the past—or  rather, a past, since the act of meddling results in that past detaching from the future, going its own way in a quantum multi-verse.  In one such past, a timeline called “the Stub,” Flynne, a young woman whose employment is to be linked to a peripheral—a helicopter drone—witnesses a violent murder in the future in London—and finds her life in jeopardy as forces from the future meddle in the Stub to destroy her before she can act as a witness and identify the perpetrator to future authorities.  On Flynne’s side are yet others from that future, represented by Netherton, whose employment a publicist has involved him in the murder, and led by policewoman Lowbeer, who tries to protect Flynne and use her testimony to bring the murderers to justice.

There is a race in both the Stub and in the future London, a battle of forces to bring and avoid justice that culminates in battles in both timelines with the outcome is very much in doubt until the end.  I highly recommend The Peripheral as an entertaining and thoughtful read, one that raises a lot of themes and issues that the future will have to resolve.

Summer's Here: A Time for Writing

It's one of my favorite times of the year--Summer! I love the heat, the Florida humidity is better than a steam iron for taking out the wrinkles in my clothes, and it's a great time for writing.

This summer I have an especially light schedule because I won't be going up to Manchester, New Hampshire for my almost-annual pilgrimage to The Never-Endng Odyssey, also known as TNEO. TNEO is one of the those privileges that Odyssey graduates get to experience, a chance to critique other graduates' current work, have your own writing critiqued, attend workshops on craft, and socialize with a great bunch of writers.

I'm not going for two good reasons. First, I lack the money to go, even though TNEO is not expensive--in fact, it's quite reasonable, especially if you consider what it costs to travel and stay on vacations. This was a tough year at school--our teaching salaries were curtailed, and students needed more materials and support than the school's budget could supply. So basically I spent my money on my students, instead, a worthy swap.

Secondly, I'm not going because I didn't get any time to write this year, which was really a madhouse year of effort and change. So, I'll take time to write over the summer and get things organized to continue writing in the Fall. That should ensure that I have good material to bring to next year's TNEO.

I also bet I'll get more sleep this way!

Does N = 1?

I wrote the following for a past edition of the Odfellowlog

Does N = 1?

By James Hall

“The skies of our ancestors hung low overhead.”
---Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way

Creation accounts from biblical Genesis to Aristotle’s Physics depict Earth and its life in the center of the universe. The accuracy of these accounts is challenged by science--modern astronomy tells us that the Earth moves around our sun, a modest G-type star in one spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, itself one of 125 billion galaxies in an expanding universe. Yet these creation accounts may be right in at least one respect: Earth may well be the center of the universe, as the only planet where intelligent, technological life has yet developed.

Many space scientists now believe that the origin of life, particularly intelligent, technological life like ours, may take the confluence of so many favorable factors that it has happened only once in the history of the universe—to us.

The Golden Age of Science, SF

The scientific revolution opened up the universe for us, and the potential seemed tremendous for numerous life-bearing worlds with intelligent technological civilizations. Early SF writers like H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote stories about an inhabited Moon and Mars. Golden Age SF writers like E.E. “Doc” Smith (whose Lensman series has just been republished), A. Merritt, and John W. Campbell created vast galactic empires with every star system inhabited with intelligent alien life.

Science itself grappled with the issue of extraterrestrial life. In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake, the founder of the SETI program (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) developed a formula for calculating how many intelligent, communicating civilizations might inhabit the Galaxy. (See below.) Carl Sagan used Drake’s equation to calculate that the number of interstellar technological civilizations in our galaxy might be as high as ten thousand. Today the recognized scientific discipline of astrobiology studies the conditions under which life can form and prosper in a variety of difficult environments.

But recent scientific discoveries paint a cautionary picture of life in the universe. The first scientific probes to Mars and Venus took them out of the SF writer’s portfolio of human settings. Jungle Venus was really a molten hell, and desert Mars, ice. The latest scientific probes continue to suggest that if life exists in our solar system outside of Earth itself, it is small, hidden and probably unintelligent.

The latest astronomical observations also cast doubt on an intersellar neighborhood crowded with technological civilizations,. We have failed to locate the noisy signals of all the type 1, type 2, and type 3 civilizations imagined by Russian astrophysicist A. N. Kardeshev, who hypothesized advanced technological civilizations capable of using the energy of an entire planet, star, and even galaxy to communicate with each other. No sign either of huge alien arcologies like the partial Dyson sphere portrayed in Larry Niven’s Ringworld, vast artificial structures that should be plainly visible to us even at great distances.

The Fermi Paradox

Space scientists now take seriously the paradox proposed by physicist Enrico Fermi, who asked why, if intelligent space-faring civilizations exist, haven’t they visited us? People have responded to Fermi’s paradox in different ways: some assert that alien astronauts have in fact visited and left their impact on the art and architecture of ancient civilizations, others that extra-terrestrials are around but keeping their distance. One recent ingenious explanation, by SF writer Steven Baxter, is that a powerful alien civilization has surrounded our solar system with a holographic image of an empty universe to deliberately mislead us.

But some space scientists use the Fermi paradox to advance another theory: life, in particular intelligent, technological life, requires too many things to go right to ever be common. Their answer, both to the Fermi paradox and the Drake’s equation, is that N=1. No one has visited because we are the only intelligent, technological life forms out there.

Dangerous Universe

Why does this “Rare Earth” hypothesis increasingly find favor with many space scientists? In part because astronomers have found that the universe is a much more difficult and dangerous place for our kind of life than we imagined.

The peaceful, passive galaxies envisioned by Golden Age SF writers don’t exist. The galaxies we observe today are dynamic, violent, dangerous places. The discovery of super-massive black holes in the center of many if not most galaxies, including our own, makes the center of these galaxies uninhabitable. Instead of containing inhabited worlds like Asimov’s Trantor, the center of our galaxy swallows star systems whole or exposes them to high-energy radiation and disruptive gravity waves. In some galaxies, the event horizons of the central black holes are so energetic that they become blazars, releasing enough energy to sterilize any carbon-based life within those galaxies.

But the danger to life isn’t just in the galactic center. Wandering hazards pose additional dangers to life-bearing systems. Smaller black holes passing near or through planetary systems can ingest life-bearing planets or throw them out of orbit. Rapidly-spinning neutron stars called magnetars can pass close enough to inhabited planets to flood them with focused beams of ozone-destroying gamma radiation.

Supernovae occurring fairly close to life-bearing planets (within 30 light years or so) may sterilize surface life or destroy ozone layers with gamma radiation, and these occur relatively frequently—one or two per century in our Galaxy. The most dangerous hazard of all may be one we know little about: gamma ray bursters, or GRBs. We don’t know how or why they occur, but GRBs are the most powerful explosions in the universe, far exceeding supernovae. No recorded GRBs have happened close to our Galaxy, but if they did, the gamma rays they generate might well be powerful enough to sterilize the entire Galaxy.

Rare Earth and the Goldilocks Effect

Even without galactic hazards, the conditions that create and sustain our kind of complex, carbon-based life require good fortune. Complex life evolves over billions of years in a continuously inhabitable zone of a suitable star. Large Type O or B stars burn out too soon; while small, slow-burning stars may not provide enough energy for life. Like Goldilocks, life requires a range of stars that are not too hot or too cold, but “just right.”

While simple, bacterial life is hardy enough to survive in a variety of tough environments, more complex forms of life appear to require the long-term nurturing environment of a rocky, terrestrial planet with a protective atmosphere, sufficient liquid water, and available minerals to create a technological society.

Like our Earth, these planets must be in a stable orbit, and the life there probably must survive major periodic changes, including ice ages, greenhouse effects, large-scale vulcanism, and asteroid bombardments. Complex life must evolve and flourish in this kind of environment, and with it species that possess intelligence, eventually language, and finally technology and science.

To many of the scientists who study the origin of intelligence, language, technology, and science, none of these factors seem particularly inevitable. It took billions of years for life to evolve from simple bacteria to complex, single-cell eukaroyotes. Millions of years passed while animals grew in complexity and intelligence. But not until Homo Sapiens came on the scene did a species capable of using speech, developing technology, and perfecting the scientific method.

Even then, it took an additional forty-thousand years of development to create a technological, scientific culture capable of advanced communicaiton and space travel.

We also can’t forget that technological civilizations will inevitably develop ample means to destroy themselves in a variety of ways—nuclear weapons, biological plagues, bombardment from space, or environmental destruction. Along with the knowledge to concentrate technological power must come the wisdom to use that power and survive. For any civilization to spread out of its small corner into the universe, it must survive long enough to make that possible.

Considering how long it took for complex life to evolve on Earth, and since only one species, humanity, has evolved both intelligence and language, and only one human civilization, the Western European, created a systematic scientific method and advanced scientific technology, it may be difficult indeed to find other symbol-using, scientific, technologically-advanced, space-faring civilizations.

Difficulties of Space Travel

The next major hurdle for intelligent, technological life may be the difficulties of space travel. Even if intelligent, technological life exists elsewhere, it may not find space travel as simple as it is portrayed in the conventions of science fiction.

Consider our own relatively quiet solar system. Outside of Earth’s protective magnetic field and its ozone layers, interplanetary radiation and the effects of long-term weightlessness make even interplanetary travel riskier for humans than SF writers ever envisioned it would be.

By breaking apart DNA and protein molecules, radiation poses a significant threat to living things. The radiation encountered by living beings in space includes gamma rays, high-energy protons, and cosmic rays. High-energy protons are accelerated into space by solar flares; galactic cosmic rays, or GCRs, are particles accelerated nearly to the speed of light by distant supernovae, some of which are quite massive (ions of iron, for example).

NASA has estimated that travel in deep space carries an increased risk of cancer


Will we find an accurate value of N? The next generation of space-based telescopes may find, within the next decade, evidence of life-bearing planets. SETI continues to try different strategies for separating signal from noise.

Rare Earth SF

Today’s SF writers have begun to adapt themselves to the idea that the universe isn’t teeming with intelligent, space-faring life. In Vernor Vinge’s Hugo-award-winning Deep series, his galactic civilization is composed of human-descended colonies, intelligent alien life is rare, and signals of alien technological societies whisper in the background, too distant to reach or comprehend. In Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder, the alien species are pre-technological or non-technological. The New Space Opera of British SF writers like Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, and M. Harrison frequently features humans interacting with dead or dying alien empires.

At its best, the uncertainty of about extraterrestrial life offers SF writers a fruitful plot device or fields of speculation on where the aliens really are. Steven Baxter’s Manifold series is based in part on the search for the missing aliens.

Now we’re just not sure. N (the number of technological civilizations) could be a huge number, or it could equal just one--ours.


Drake’s equation
N=Rf(p)n(e)f(l)f(i)f(c)L

N=The number of civilizations with detectable emissions.
R=The rate of the formation of stars suitable for intelligent life.
F(p)=The fraction of these stars with planetary systems.
n(e)=The number of planets with an environment suitable for life.
F(I)=The fraction of suitable planets on which life actually forms.
F(l)=The fraction of life-bearing planets on which intelligent life
F(c)=The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signals into space.
L=The length of time civilization release signals into space.

Finishing HaltinG StatE

I finished reading Charles Stross's HaltinG StatE the other day. I have to rate it very high on ideas, which come rapid fire in this book. It is, I think, Mr. Stross's first near-future SF book, so it was interesting to read his predictions for the near future. These included an independent Scotland (under EU auspices), and gamespace and gamers used as surreptitious spooks in spook country. I enjoyed the idea that gamers were recruited as volunteer secret agents without understanding that they were really being co opted by the security services of different countries. Nice touch there.

Stross also paints a vivid picture of a what a future cyber attack on a nation might look like. That alone is probably worth the price of the book.

That said, I wasn't as impressed with the characters and the plot as I have been with other of Stross's works. I thought that the whole plot seemed fairly contrived, that character and relationship problems were introduced at convenient times and not as part of their "natural" development, and I question whether some of the characters really needed a point of view in the novel. I saw the mysterious villain coming from a long way off and wondered why he wasn't neutralized earlier.

As I've already noted, the book begins slowly and only my previous experiences with Stross's work kept me reading. The ending is confused and lacks inevitability. (It's always troubling when the final-but-one chapter has to do the job of explaining exactly what happened during the book.) Ditto for the second-person points of view and the dense software language that a non-expert reader like me, who enjoys cypberpunk in general, found too much.

That said, the book doesn't miss the mark by too much. Stross's compelling future vision goes a long way to making this book a good read, and I would like to see more work in this setting by Stross. Perhaps what he needs is a good glossary like the one originally published in Dune. I'd rate it a solid "B" as new SF books go. If you are into the language of software, you might rate it higher.

Reading HaltinG StatE

It's spring break, time to relax and enjoy a bit of non-school reading. I've had Charles Stross's book HaltinG StatE (that title's no typo) on my table for a long time and decided to start reading it. Stross is a Scotsman and a writer of good hard SF (and some fantasy that I haven't read)

This book is a bit different from his earlier works like Singularity Sky and Accelerando, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed. It's set in an independent Scotland in the near future. The book was hard for me to get into at first. It's multiple points-of-view, second-person, were confusing. The early chapters were full of Scottishisms and Britishisms, foreign acronyms, local history in-jokes, and computer science tech words that were over my head and slowed my comprehension to a crawl. There wasn't much action in these early character-establishing chapters either.

If not for my earlier experiences with Stross, I probably would have put the book down. But I hung in, and things started to get interesting as an investigation into a cybercrime (the robbery of a virtual gaming bank) started waves rippling in the wider world. Now that I'm more than half-way into the book, I'm hooked on it, and learning a lot about the computer and gaming world that Stross is so expert in.

If you are a technophile, a mystery buff, or interested in near future predictions, you'll probably be as interested in the book as I am. It's a strong Idea novel, with good characterization, though I still don't understand the reason for the second-person p.o.v.--it's an unnecessary affectation, IMHO. I'll let you know when I finish it if its worth putting on your summer reading list.

What's Plotting?

On the Odfellowdiscussion list, an argument has been brewing about whether to plot or not. One of my fellow Odfellows, playing Devil's Advocate, has raised the point that some famous writers, like Stephen King, don't plot. (Or at least that's their claim.) Here's my answer to that:

Your point is indeed devilish. (And I like a good argument.) So let me counterpoint--Stephen King can easily be the exception that proves the rule. Prolific writers like King and Joyce Carol Oates aren't the norm in the publishing world--they're freaks of nature, writing geniuses that are probably impossible to emulate. To say you're not going to plot because Stephen King doesn't is like saying I'm not going use color in my painting because Rembrandt didn't---okay, but don't expect the same results.

Besides, King *does* plot. Look at page pp. 192-195 in his memoir, On Writing, and see the story he tells about writing Dead Zone. He definitely had a plan in mind writing that book and carried out his plan (i.e., his plot). King also mentioned that while he begins with character and situation, like most writers, he looks for "story" and that's the most important element of the writing he has to get right. What is "story" in this context but another word for "plot?"

Like King, I'll bet a lot of those successful writers who say they don't plot will tell you that they look for the 'story.' Stories have beginning, middles, and ends. In other words, they have plots. Perhaps these writers don't outline; perhaps they keep the stories in their heads; but they have a developing structure that moves them from beginning to end. They have a plot.