Cyberpunk Isn’t Dead
More ‘SF is dying’ stuff, only this time it’s very specific to cyberpunk. For those that don’t know what Cyberpunk is the subgenre of SF in which Neuromancer by William Gibson, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, The Matrix (and sequels), and various other technocentric films and books fit into. A recent article over at io9 indicated that Cyberpunk has been slowly declining in the last few years. The problem is that I don’t really buy that assertion. While they likely did a fair bit of homework and from what they found they may be somewhat correct, I think they are forgetting a lot of things that should be addressed. Here is a chart they used to show the fluctuations from year to year between movies (blue line) and novels (red line): The chart shows a steady decline from the early 90s into the 2000s. Something is missing. There’s no way that cyberpunk is falling out of favor here. The article suggests that perhaps the fall occurred because we are living in a highly technological world now and much of what was once considered SF might not be so anymore. I think this is only the crux of the matter, but we’ll address that first. Our definitions of cyberpunk are changing, unfortunately, and as we become more and more technologically inclined it will continued to change its meaning. However, even if something ceases to be SF doesn’t mean it can’t be called cyberpunk. Many technothrillers could very well be cyberpunk novels, even if nothing necessarily ‘new’ is presented. Cyberpunk isn’t as restricted by a time frame as space operas. I would say that there is probably a lot more cyberpunk out there than we realize. We just don’t know it because it’s not labeled as such, and since we live in a society that is constantly advancing, our definition of what makes something cyberpunk is changing and the line between that and normal technothrillers becomes very fuzzy. However, another issue with the argument, which is nothing against the io9 folks, as they did do a hell of a lot of homework to have to find all the things they did find, which would have easily taken hours, is that it seems we’re paying attention to a primarily English language market. What about China? China is the home of the world’s largest circulation SF magazine and their market for SF works is exploding. They eat it up like crazy there and some authors actually make a living having works translated and sold there. There is Russian SF too, which, while focused a lot on the uses of governmental failure and dystopic themes, does deal with cyberpunk elements from time to time. There are dozens of countries out there contributing to the global market of SF. There has to be a myriad of cyberpunk books and movies in such countries. Technothrillers are a big deal, and so are cyberpunk novels, even if you don’t think of many of them as cyberpunk. If cyberpunk is, in fact, seeing a significant decline in the U.S., that doesn’t mean it’s seeing that decline elsewhere. Some countries are significantly behind us as far as SF goes, and so they may just now be exploding with new cyberpunk themes. We should be paying attention and translators should actively seek to bring these works to the American market. One more issue with the argument is that so many SF works have cyberpunk elements built into them. This should say something about cyberpunk as a genre. It is unavoidably important! It has built itself into the fabric of SF and as long as SF keeps it around it will never die. This goes along with the notion that just because something isn’t labeled cyberpunk doesn’t mean it isn’t cyberpunk. Cyberpunk isn’t really going to go anywhere. It’ll probably become full reality and then it won’t matter what we all think about it anyway.
I Miss the Future
There’s something about the Golden Age of science fiction and the period I call “Post Golden Age” that still captures my imagination and keeps me interested in science fiction. Some might call it the ‘adventure’ and others might think of it as a sense of wonder. Perhaps it’s both. The thing is, science fiction is fighting a little battle right now. Technology has caught up with it, to some extent, and the more we learn about space travel the more we come to realize that we’re most likely never going to shoot off to the stars to land on Earth-like planets inhabited by intelligent aliens. Not long ago we lived in a society where cell phones were, for the most part, nonexistent. If you had a cell you looked like an idiot because it looked something like the picture to the right. Such bulky devices had practically no features–they couldn’t take pictures, record your voice, text message, play games, display information, surf the net, or do anything except call people. Not long ago there weren’t any computers like we have today. Any computers that existed were owned by the government and personal computers had barely even come into the market–those in the market could do little more than a standard scientific calculator can do today. We didn’t have electric cars or hybrids, at least not as an economic option. Space travel wasn’t being turned into a private enterprise by companies like Virgin Galactic, etc. and medical research was a long way off from growing a functioning ear on the back of a mouse. But today we have all these things. So much of what science fiction writers predicted would happen at some point in the future, even if their dates were wrong, has happened. To some it is as if we live in a science fictional world–I’m sure if we went back in time and showed Asimov what the world of today is like he would agree. This is a hurdle, a miniature battle for science fiction. What value does SF have in a world that is rapidly advancing to the point where many of the things that once were SF are now reality? Does science fiction still have something to say? You damn well better believe it! Science fiction has plenty to say about the future, the world, heck even the universe! So long as some people with crazy brains can think about things that haven’t happened yet, SF will exist. Certainly there might come a time when a lot of SF isn’t as impacting as it is today, but it will still have value. Science fiction doesn’t have to be loaded with technology or vast interstellar empires. It doesn’t require space ships or space travel. There don’t have to be vast networks of matrix-like worlds or super-humans with extraordinary powers due to evolution. Science fiction needs future. A powerful definition of SF might be that it is the future. Provided that a future of some sort exists there will be something for SF people to write about. Even in the event of the knowledge of our extinction there will be things to write about, and there is a TV program that takes on this very issue. What will science fiction have to say? Science fiction can talk about the environment, it can talk about what might be the future of a political decision, or the future of a new, advanced cell phone that has a built in AI, or a myriad of other things. Even if technology becomes dull because it’s ‘everywhere’, SF can still discuss societal changes and future issues of human rights, the evolution of ‘race’, the power of technology and its influence, etc. SF is a treasure trove, a giant metaphorical idea box where everyone can submit suggestions. Some of them will be heard and some of them will not. We might be living in a time where SF seems to be losing a little ground against the more escapist fantasy–I love fantasy too–but it still has value and importance because only science fiction can discuss the things that are more pressing in our future. Only science fiction can tell us what to expect. Science fiction is the future.
Edelman’s Moral Quandaries (Pt. 4)–Dropping Nuclear Options
The concern over nuclear weaponry and nuclear power plants (or nuclear anything really) has been strong ever since we bombed Japan in WW2. As Edelman says: Once upon a time, two countries were idiotic enough to play a high-stakes game of chess where the stakes were the survival of the human race. You don’t like my way of governing? Fine, then let’s blow the whole place to hell and you can’t govern any of it. Figuring out how to get rid of these weapons so that nobody has the power to scour the planet clean is one heck of a challenge. There’s no Cold War anymore, but the odds of a nuclear war breaking out in either the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent are still much too high for us to ignore. (Personally, I don’t think the threat is going anywhere until some theoretical point in the future when we’re living so much of our lives virtually that physical threats just don’t make sense anymore.) Let’s face it, nuclear ‘anything’ has been a source of concern not only in our society (U.S.A.), but in the world in general. Nuclear power plants were thought to be the wave of the future of energy production, and in some ways they are. But in order to get to that point we had to pay a terrible price, and that price was of our international security. Other countries paid the same price, such as Russia, who, when they were the U.S.S.R., tried desperately to beat the U.S. in a deadly arms race and eventually in a space race that, while enormously beneficial, created even more problems for the world at large. While the U.S. space program has and will be the marker of great discoveries on our planet, in our solar system, and in the universe, it has also helped develop new ways to destroy other people and was built, in some respects, with the intention of doing so. ICBMs are, by nature, useful only in destroying targets far away and while the technology that created them did eventually spark a very promising space program that continues to be of value today, it also showed the world that the U.S. wasn’t playing games anymore. “We can hit you anyplace, anywhere, and any time.” What happened to this idiotic arms race was that we all came to realize how dangerous the world had become and how stupid it would be for any nation, organization, or individual to drop a nuclear weapon of any kind on anyone else, especially someone who has the means to retaliate with the same firepower. If the U.S.S.R. had at any time bombed the U.S. or an ally, who knows if the world would still be here, or if any of us would be alive (this is, of course, assuming that the U.S.S.R. actually had the financial means to deliver a payload of nuclear weaponry to any location outside of their sphere of influence, which, historically speaking, may have been nearly impossible at the time of the Cold War). This, I’m sure, sounds like a purely negative argument on the part of nuclear creations, but there are some very good benefits of what was a frightening time in the world. Nuclear power, despite its faults, is efficient and, generally speaking, easy to use. Chernobyl and other such incidents were not markers of a failed network of power facilities, but an indicator of how stupid human beings can be when they try to mess with things they don’t yet understand (this is not a bash on Russia, as there were events in other locations where nuclear facilities became an issue, including the U.S., but Chernobyl is a prime example that everyone knows about). But there are benefits to the use of nuclear energy. Nuclear plants often use a large man made canal as a natural coolant. Such plants rarely, if ever, pollute these canals, but because the water is warmed up by the heat of the reactor, it provides a wonderful environment for a lot of little critters that otherwise would be hard pressed to find homes due to human expansion. This is prevalent in Florida where human encroachment has displaced a lot of gators and such. The downside of power plants, obviously, is nuclear waste and the risk of leaks and explosions. That’s not to say we can’t find a use for nuclear energy. There is a use, at the moment, but the inevitable is that we are going to have to go with better sources that don’t have a downside (i.e. solar, wind, currents, etc.). Edelman is right that we have to wean ourselves off of this notion of keeping nuclear facilities and weaponry for protection or out of necessity.Of course, nuclear power plants aren’t Edelman’s primary concern. He’s concerned with nuclear weaponry, and I have to agree with him on that. First off, there are huge consequences with the use of nuclear weapons: massive destruction, nuclear fallout, nuclear winter, radiation, and severe environmental consequences when wind blows radioactive particles around. We can’t use nuclear weapons without screwing things up. There’s no magic radiation-eating machine. This means that when we use a nuclear weapon on a target, nobody can live there again for a very long time. There aren’t any people living in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, unless something has changed that I don’t know about, although people were living around the area where Chernobyl is for quite some time before being evacuated. Second, nuclear weapons create fear and clearly we live in a time when such weapons may or may not be used. There are concerns that extremist groups may use nuclear weapons (suitcase bombs) on U.S. cities, and I’m not naive enough to say that such things are impossible. They are possible. That’s the problem. Nuclear disarmament is a must for EVERYONE, not just the U.S. It is idiotic for any nation to claim that the U.S. should be the one nation to disarm simply because we have used the
Genre Links For Jan. 17th
Yup, more links for all of you. I read so many blogs and I poke around with stumbleupon and can’t help myself. Enjoy: The Fix has a great article about writing Hard SF even if you’re not a scientific genius. Good stuff there. (Courtesy of SF Signal) Is sci-fi out of good ideas? This is probably a good topic for a later article, but read this one here and ask yourself if you think so. Here are some scribd articles on Cyberculture and A Cyborg Manifesto. Check them out. Alternately I found this book at Google about Young Adult Science Fiction. Sounds interesting. John Howe (yeah, that artist for LOTR) has a great post about worldbuilding. The Guardian asks why critics sneer at SF. It’s not really all that negative. Really it’s like praise for Alfred Bester. (Courtesy of SF Signal) io9 has this about new technology that uses hyperventilating to turn on computers. Well, it’s not that far-out, but it’s interesting to think what we’ll be changing in the future about how we turn things on and off. L. E. Modesitt, Jr. says everyone is wrong about what type of fiction is better: character driven or plot driven? Modesitt sayeth neither be good. I agree-eth. Need a crazy looking house made of steel? io9 can help you out with this article. Something straight out of a bizarre Star Trek episode or something. Apparently someone wants to turn Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End into a movie! Check it out here. (Yeah, I know, MTV…get over it). Roger Ebert (you know, that review guy) talks about the sad state of Catholics who bash Pullman and not C. S. Lewis. I really agree too. The Speculist has this article about the new $2500 car in India. Congrats India, you’ve done something incredibly stupid. Sometimes things done with good intentions are done in blindness. Ron Howard and Universal are talking about turning E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series into a movie. Well, they’re talking about getting the film rights, but for Howard that probably means “I want to make it”. We’ll see I suppose. io9 has an article about the new techniques in using embryos to get stem cells that don’t actually hurt the embryo. Yup, now all you people who are against embryonic stem cell research can whine and complain about the fact that so many of those embryos are destroyed later anyway because they have a shelf life. Hypocrisy abounds. I found this amazing video of this contraption this guy built in his home. You know, one of those weird things where the marble goes down the tube, kicks the dominoes that knock the man into the water, which causes and age to fall on a plate, etc. It’s not the same as that, but it’s still crazy awesome. Here’s some speculation about casting for The Hobbit. Some of the choices seem pretty good I think. A video that shows the size relationship of all the planets in our solar system and stars that are larger than our sun. It’s amazing really to think about how small this planet really is. Scientists have created a beating heart, here, and that means some crazy advancements are on the way in the near future for organ replacement. io9 has this crazy image of agriculture on our little planet. It looks crazy and weird. The Speculist brings you information about the new electric cars of our future. It’s looking really good for Chevy, who will have a useful model available in 2010 that could very well prevent the use of gas for regular commuters. Universe Today has this article that really boggled my mind. What if the world we live in is really a virtual reality? Futurismic has an article about rights for robots and what one Peter Watts thinks about the idea. I don’t know if I necessarily agree. What about you? Grasping For the Wind has this to say about formulaic fiction! Since everybody else is posting this, I will too. The Book Swede has the image of the side of Mercury we haven’t seen yet. It’s nothing special to me, but everyone else loves it. I’m just not impressed. Mercury is kind of like the pathetic planet that nobody else likes. Here’s the same image from Universe Today. List Universe has the Top 10 Sci Fi Inventions that should never have been. TechRepublic has the 75 SF words every fan should know. (Courtesy of SF Signal) And then there’s this article: Is There Nepotism in SF? (Courtesy of SF Signal) There you have it! I’ll have more for next week I’m sure. Now to more profound posting.
Edelman’s Moral Quandaries (Pt. 3)–B.P.F.&.D.W.
The acronym stands for: Balancing Personal Freedom and Division of Wealth.Edelman wrote: Westerners are inclined to see the political landscape as a spectrum between hard-core loony socialism (all the world’s wealth should be divided equally among its population, regardless of merit) and equally loony hard-core capitalism (everyone go grab your share of the pie, and if that results in radically uneven distribution of wealth, so be it). In Infoquake and MultiReal, I called these two poles governmentalism and libertarianism. Somewhere in the middle, theoretically, is a society where nobody’s starving and everyone can afford basic medical care, yet we still have ample freedom to make our own individual choices without governments taxing us to death. We’ve got to find that place, and figure out how to sustain it long-term. And here is what I have to say: YES! I live in a country that is so extremist and radical it’s scary. On the one side, as Edelman points out, there are the folks who want the government to pay for things that, quite frankly, it can’t afford, in exchange for sacrificing ones rights and taxing the crap out of anyone who so much as tries to earn a decent wage in a country that is growing more and more expensive. On the other side are the folks who want complete control of the government in exchange for the huge gaps we are already experiencing between the rich and the poor. This second area is one in which personal freedom means nothing even if people want it. Why? Because corporate entities have the power. Right now we don’t have a balance between the two. We have corporations trying to control things, and to some extent they do, and then we have the people who seem to want things that they really can’t have at this point. I’ll use healthcare as an example. We all want it. We all want to be able to afford it, but the problem is that the government can’t afford to adopt a socialized medical program. It can’t. You can try to run your little figures all you want, but right now, we can’t afford such a program. It will bankrupt us, and at this point we need to think of better solutions. With the Iraq War still going and Afghanistan not exactly complete, though forgotten, we have to make sure our troops have the money they need to do what they have to do. No, we cannot pull out of Iraq. I’m not a crazy Republican, but I’m smart enough to realize that pulling out at this point would permanently damage what little reputation we have. Iraq is weak because of us. Can any of you live with the idea of simply walking out of a situation we created without making sure that Iraq can defend itself from extremists? If you can, then I propose that every time some innocent Iraqi dies a letter be sent to you with that person’s picture and any relevant information about his or her life so that you’ll always know that someone died due to a cowardly act of simply walking away. We can’t walk. That’s just one problem we face right now, and one that isn’t going to go away for a few years at least. The next financial issue is social security. Baby-boomers are going to bankrupt that program so that all of us younger generations won’t have anything when we retire. Granted, you shouldn’t rely on SS for retirement, but some people need it to supplement other retirement funds. We have to fix this problem now before it can’t be fixed. That means finding new solutions that don’t involve raising taxes that can fund newer generations. An option might be a 401K type plan in which funds produced by your SS taxes are placed into considerably safe and secure stocks, i.e. low-risk companies that might lose you some money, but are very unlikely to ever just flat-out disappear. Why would this be a good idea? Well, for one, by having vast amounts of new money invested into our businesses we can expect to see our economy benefit from it, which will actually help secure your new SS funds for a much longer period of time. You’ll also be earning money just as you would in a 401K employer plan, which is good. You’re willing to take a risk there, why not with SS? If it means that more people might have even better lives in the future, so be it. That’s just one idea and there might be far better ones out there. The point is that we can’t afford universal healthcare right now, and honestly, we shouldn’t have a fully socialized health program. What do we need? The middle ground. We need a healthcare system that ANYONE can afford so that EVERYONE can get basic medical care and emergency care and not have to worry about if they can pay the bill. This means finding ways to reduce the costs of insurance programs, reducing prescription drug costs, etc. The whole lot of it has to be reduced. We need a system that still has you pay, but not pay until you can’t afford to eat anymore. How do we do this? I don’t know. I wish I did know, but I don’t, and I don’t have any viable solutions. I don’t know enough about the medical field to hazard a logical guess. I’ve dealt with considerable bills, however, and I understand what one has to deal with when you only have one health insurance card and it can’t cover the whole cost. That’s a little off the mark, but back to the topic at hand. Edelman is proposing that we find a middle ground where corporations can still bring in profits, as they should, and everyone still has a roof and food and is able to find work or get an education. One thing we should be doing is monitoring corporations, especially energy/fuel companies that claim shortages, but still bring
Edelman’s Moral Quandaries (Pt. 2)–Divorcing Morality From Religion
Ah, the infamous ‘religion’ thing. Edelman has a clearly atheist viewpoint on the subject of religion. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and this isn’t in any way an attack on Edelman, but simply a point of explanation. His viewpoint is shared by quite a lot of people, including me to some extent. Religion is a wonderful, beautiful thing, for some, or it is a bigoted, ignorant cloud to others. Who holds the correct viewpoint is irrelevant.Having said that, Edelman presents this point on the subject of divorcing morality from religion: I don’t think anything good comes from the belief that we should refrain from murder, theft, and rape because someone wrote it down in a book five thousand years ago. Those of us who don’t believe in an all-powerful Being In The Clouds are just as capable of defining principles of morality and sticking to them — in fact, I’d argue that we’re more capable. If you want to continue to believe in God, great; but we can agree on moral principles regardless without the intervention of priests, pastors, rabbis, popes, ayatollahs, imams, or prophets. What I’m saying is that the species needs to be able to think moralistically in a way that’s inclusive of both religious and non-religious people. This is a very difficult idea to discuss. One of the reasons why it’s difficult is because our society is built upon religious principles founded by Christianity. The solution to this is to think about religious ideals as non-religious. In the U.S., most of us hold on to the same basic ideals. Murder, rape, molestation, extortion, theft, and similar are bad. Adultery is not an acceptable behavior, even though many people, religious or not, do it. But, for non-believers there is no need to believe in God or to follow codes of conduct presented in the Bible such as going to Church on Sunday and the like. I can’t say I necessarily agree with Edelman that non-religious folks are significantly more capable of adhering to moral laws than religious folks. Perhaps the reason this is said is that we often see and hear about religious people breaking their own ‘laws’, but are not exposed to the same treatment of non-religious folks. There aren’t any news reports stating that “the agnostic anti-believer was caught with a young boy last Tuesday”. The problem with religious people is that they often try to set rules that are unrealistic. The notion of sex-after-marriage is, socially speaking, an unrealistic desire. I certainly think this is a better option than the ones we are dealing with (i.e.: taped events, random sex, promiscuous sex, and the like). Regardless, it is unrealistic. Teenagers and adults are not going to follow this rule, or at least a lot of them won’t. If that were the case we wouldn’t ever have had to think about the issue of abortion, as there would be no pregnant teenagers. Well, that’s probably not entirely true. The number would just be drastically lower. The most important point that Edelman makes is that discussion of morality should be all-inclusive. When it comes to moral quandaries in politics, we should have input from both the religious and non-religious side, and both sides should work together to find good solutions. That goes for any type of political discussion among all types of politicians. There is no reason why only religious people should be allowed to define moral issues and one of particular interest is on the issue of science. Science, which I’m using since it is directly related to genre fiction, is something that must be understood before you can make policy on it. There have been many issues involving scientific discovery that have plagued those who considered themselves the makers of moral policy. At one point we had issues dealing with slavery, something which we consider now to be immoral. This became an issue of race and ethnicity and, in the U.S., the treatment of such races and ethnicities by Whites. We often consider this the White/Black issue, but it extended beyond that to Asians and Hispanics. What science has to do with these issues is that it was originally used to define race as a hierarchy, with Whites at the top and Blacks at the bottom. Science was, for a while, used as a basis for determining that Blacks are sub-human, or not-quite-human. With the advancement of technology, however, this was proven to be a load of crap. We found that aside from skin color, Blacks are not that different from Whites, and neither or Asians or Hispanics. In fact, we’re all basically the same, with the exception of minor genetic differences that vary from person to person. Science found out that there really aren’t any physiological differences that are consistent, even in skin color. But for a time the law held firm that Blacks weren’t the same and should be treated differently, despite the grand letter of science flooded much of the White world and began to gain acceptance. We all know the result and while racism still exists, it is not in a form that is outwardly condoned by the government. Jim Crowe is gone. Now, we are plagued by issues of stem cell research, the ethics of cloning, and even concerns over nano-technology and bio-manipulation. I’ll avoid the stem cell issue as that is a particular hot one, and move to the others. Many considered cloning to be mankind’s attempts to ‘play God’, and so it was determined that cloning technology should be stifled. We can clone some little cells and the like, but we’re not allowed to go around creating Dolly over and over, or any other such thing. The fact is that cloning is actually a part of our society, just not in a form you might consider to be ‘cloning’. However, many of the moral quandaries surrounding technology like cloning, and even bio-manipulation, are influenced by religious ideologies, and rarely, if ever, concerned with the reality of the situation. Cloning should be