No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded)

So I was going to treat you to another fiblet today, but when you intersect previously-unposted excerpts with spoiler-free excerpts the overlap drops down into the single digits and the piece I wanted to post still needed a bit of work anyway (too many colons).  Which is what I was working on before this happened:

Yes, that is the Queen & Beaver in the background. Yes, that is a Glass from Google clinging to the bridge of my nose. I am told that they are not yet available in Canada.  It was just my fine luck that Brad Templeton happened to bring his up from the states and wear it to our lunch date.

It was a mixed experience. The display itself was wonderfully crisp — it felt a little like being a terminator on training wheels — but the Queeve has the self-proclaimed Worst Internet Connectivity In The World, so any tactical intel beyond Brad’s own life-log amounted to an icon of a Cloud with a sad face lamenting “WiFi Unavailable”.  On the other hand, it was kind of nice to know that we were lunching in one of the few spots on the planet where the NSA’s grabby grimy fingers couldn’t quite reach. And the control interface, one you got used to sweeping forward to go backward, was a joy.

For all the hype and hate this thing has garnered, though, Brad’s thumbnail description of Glass’s functionality was refreshingly modest: it is, he says, something you use when it’s too much trouble to dig out your cell phone. There’s nothing GG can do at this point that a phone can’t do better (except actually cling to your face, I suppose— and even that advantage would be lost the moment Glass went up against a phone with a bit of duct tape stuck to its back).  There’s a whole volume of commentary embedded in that description — in the implication that we’ll happily spend hundreds of dollars to avoid the onerous inconvenience of actually reaching into our pockets — but then again, that’s just the kind of wry insight you get when you hang out with this guy. (Another example,  less welcome but more necessary, is that something I read in Discover magazine about driverless cars back in 1992 was probably bullshit.  Which means I now have to rewrite a chunk of my Finncon talk for next month. Great.)

Lunch was about four pints long (all mine, surprisingly; how can Brad Templeton not like beer?). After which I had to move up the street to the Duke of Somerset, where the BUG and I have our weekly Writing-and-Wine Thursdays. I was planning on selecting a fiblet during that interval, but somehow we ended up getting drawn into an extended tearful reminiscence over Flea the Raccoon. Then we went home and watched Game of Thrones until we passed out.

So here it is, Friday morning, which means I barely have time to finish the “Golden Showers: Forbidden Lust”  slide for Finncon before I start my final passthrough on Echopraxia.  So let me leave you not with a fiblet, but with an image Fata Libelli just posted to “capture the spirit” of their Peter Watts Interview, Part One:

I previewed one of those questions a couple of weeks back, here on the crawl.  It was about life.

You can see the connection.

So I’ve just sat through an entire season — which is to say three measly episodes, in what might be the new SOP for the BBC (see Sherlock) — of this new zombie show called “In the Flesh”.

Yeah, I know. These days, the very phrase “new zombie show” borders on oxymoronic. And yet, this really is a fresh spin on the old paradigm: imagine that, years after the dead clawed their way out of the ground and started feasting on the living, we figured out how to fix them. Not cure, exactly: think diabetes or HIV, think management instead of recovery. Imagine a drug that repairs the mind, even if it can’t fix the rot or the pallor or the eyes.

Imagine the gradual reconnection of cognitive circuitry, and the flashbacks it provokes as animal memories reboot. Imagine what it must be like when the sudden fresh remembrance of people killed and eviscerated is regarded, clinically, as a sign of recovery.

This is only the beginning of what “In the Flesh” imagines. It also imagines government-mandated reintegration of the recovering undead (“Partially-Deceased-Syndrome” is the politically-correct term; it comes replete with cheery pamphlets to help next-of-kin manage the transition). Contact lenses and pancake makeup to make the partly-dead more palatable to the communities in which they once lived. Therapy sessions in which the overwhelming guilt of freshly-remembered murder and cannibalism alternates with defiant self-justification: “We had to do it to survive. They blew our heads off without a second thought— they were protecting humanity! They get medals, we get medicated…” Hypertrophic Neighborhood Watch patrols who never let you forget that no matter how Human these creatures may seem now, a couple of missed injections is all it takes to turn them back into ravening monsters in the heart of our community…

What’s science fiction’s mission statement, again? Oh, right: to explore the social impact of scientific and technological change. Too much SF takes the Grand Tour Amusement Park approach, offers up an awesome parade of wonders and prognostications like some kind of futuristic freak show. It takes a show like ItF to remind us that technology is only half of the equation, that the molecular composition of the hammer or the rpms of the chainsaw, in isolation,  are of limited interest. Our mission hasn’t been accomplished until the hammer hits the flesh.

“In the Flesh” rubs your face in that impact. It rubs my face in my own inadequacy.

Echopraxia has its share of zombies, you see. They show up at the beginning of the book, in the Oregon desert; through the course of the story, various cast members wrestle with zombiesque aspects of their own behavior. Echopraxia‘s zombies come in two flavors: the usual viral kind sowing panic and anarchy, and a more precise, surgically-induced breed used by the military for ops with high body counts, ops for which self-awareness might prove an impediment. Both breeds get screen time; both highlight philosophical issues which challenge the very definition of what it means to be Human.

Neither even tries to answer questions like: How do you deal with the guilt? Or How do you handle the dissonance of becoming a local hero through the indiscriminate slaughter of rabid zombies, only to have your son come back from Afghanistan partially-deceased with a face full of staples?  

“In the Flesh” does a lot of the same things I’ve done in my own writing. It even serves up a pseudosciencey rationale to explain the zombie predilection for brains: victims of PDS lose the ability to grow “gial” cells in their brains, and so must consume those of others to make up the deficit. (I’m not sure whether this is an inadvertent misspelling of “glial” or if the writers were savvy enough to invent a new cell type with a similar name, the better to fend off the nitpickery of geeks like me.) It doesn’t hold up to rigorous scrutiny any better  than Blindsight‘s invocation of protocadherin deficits to justify obligate cannibalism in my own undead, but in a way that’s the point: they’ve taken pretty much the same approach that I have.

The difference is, they’ve done so much more with it.

I used technobabble to justify a philosophical debate about free will. “In the Flesh” used it to show us grief-stricken parents dealing with a beloved son after he’s taken his own life—and come back. Side by side, it’s painfully obvious which of us used our resources to better effect.

I only wish I’d have been able to see that without the object lesson.

Art and updates, mainly: looks like I’m going to be back in Nantes this November for a return engagement at Utopiales, the massive French con that roots itself in Jules Verne’s home town. Caitlin and I were there back in 2010, and loved it. I am not just delighted to be going back, I am also surprised and deeply suspicious; it seems too soon for my name to have come ’round again. There’s a part of me that wonders if someone didn’t access an old guest list by mistake; or, worse, if this is some kind of cruel hoax.

Cover by Irek Konior

We’ll find out soon enough.

Keeping with the overseas motif, here’s the cover for MAG’s new short story collection, coming out this fall. To save you the trouble of typing into Google Translate, the title comes out as An Antidote for Optimism, and — as usual — the Poles seem congenitally incapable of producing cover art that is anything short of terrific. Given my strange and unexpected long-distance romance with that country over the past few years, it seems only right that this volume should represent the most comprehensive collection of my short fiction ever assembled in any language. Including my own website. (Which I really should rectify. Really, this time. Any month now.)

Finally, tracking north across the Baltic¹, the latest issue of Tähtivaeltaja gears up for Finncon with a special section focusing on Guest of Honor Aliette de Bodard (whom I look forward to meeting because I have not yet and she seems to be everywhere) and including a translation of my fan-fic story “The Things”, which made its first appearance in Clarkesworld a couple years back. This time around, “The Things” is illustrated by Olli Hihnala. I do not know whether these superb illustrations are more typical of his style than the naked dude with the rainbow-spewing bearcat-head breasts who is under attack by six-gun-wielding skeletal monkeys astride ass-blasting flying zebras that adorns his web site. I cite both as evidence that at the very least, Mr. Hihnala has range. And these pics are a great fit for the story: strongly evocative of the look of the Carpenter film, while at the same time adding a layer of visual metaphor across the literal viscera. If that makes any sense.

Anyway, I think they’re just about perfect.

	Used with Permission. Click to embiggen.

“Catch.”

He turned, flinched, brought his hands up barely in time to catch the box sailing towards him. It might have held a large pizza, judging by size and shape; maybe three of them, stacked. Scasers, adhesives, bladders of synthetic blood nestled in molded depressions under the lid. Some kind of bare-bones first-aid kit.

“Fix it.”

Somehow Valerie had already stripped down to her coverall, geckoed her abandoned spacesuit to the wall like a crumpled wad of aluminum foil. Her left arm was extended, wrist up, sleeve rolled back. A Victorian junkie awaiting an injection. Her forearm bent just slightly, halfway down its length. Not even vampires had joints there.

“What— how did—”

“The ship breaks. Shit happens.” Her lips drew back. Her teeth looked almost translucent in the glassy light. “Fix it.”

“But— my ankle—”

Suddenly they were eye-to-eye. Brüks reflexively dropped his gaze: a lamb in a lion’s presence, no recourse beyond obeisance, no hope beyond prayer.

“Two injured elements,” Valerie whispered. “One mission-critical, one ballast. Which gets priority?”

“But I don’t—”

“You’re a biologist.”

“Yes but—”

“An expert. On life.”

“Y—yes…”

“So fix it.”

He tried to meet her eyes, and couldn’t, and cursed himself. “I’m not a medical—”

“Bone are bones.” From the edge of vision he saw her head tilt, as if weighing alternatives. “You can’t do this, what good are you?”

“There must be some kind of sick bay on board,” he stammered. “A, an infirmary.”

The vampire’s eyes flickered to the hatch overhead, to the label it framed: Maintenance & Repair. “A biologist,” she said, something like mirth in her voice, “And you think there’s a difference.”

This is insane, he thought. Is this is some kind of test?

If so, he was failing it.

He held his breath and his tongue, kept his eyes on the injury: closed fracture, thank Christ. No skin breaks, no visible contusions. At least the break hadn’t torn any major blood vessels.

Or had it? Didn’t vampires— that’s right, they vasoconstricted most of the time, kept most of their blood sequestered in the core. Valerie’s radial artery could be ripped wide open and she might never even feel it until she went into hunting mode…

Maybe give her prey a fighting chance, at least…

He tamped down on the thought, irrationally terrified that she might be able to see it flickering there in his skull. He focused on the bend instead: leave it, or try to reseat the bone? (Leave it, he remembered from somewhere. Keep movement to a minimum, reduce the risk of shredding nerves and blood vessels…)

He pulled a roll of splinting tape from the kit, snapped off a few 30-cm lengths (long enough to extend past the wrist— it was starting to come back). He laid them down equidistantly around Valerie’s arm (God she’s cold), pressed gently into the flesh (don’t hurt her, don’t fucking hurt her) until the adhesive took and hardened the splints into place. He backed away as the vampire flexed and turned and examined his handiwork.

“Not set straight,” she remarked.

He swallowed. “No, I thought — this is just tempor—”

She reached across with her right hand and broke her own forearm like a sapling. Two of the splints snapped with a sound of tiny gunshots; the third simply ripped free of the flesh, tearing a divot in the skin.

The fascia beneath was bloodless as paraffin.

She extended the re-fractured arm. “Do it again.”

Holy shit, Brüks thought.

Fuck fuck fuck.

Not a test, he realized. Never a test, not with this thing. A game. A sick sadistic game, a cat playing with a mouse…

Valerie waited, patient and empty, less than two meters from his jugular.

Keep going. Don’t give her an excuse.

He took her arm in his hands again. He clenched tight to keep them from shaking; she didn’t seem to notice. The break was worse now, the bend sharper; bone pushed up from beneath the muscles, raised a kotty little hillock under the skin. A purple bruise was leaking into existence at its summit.

He still couldn’t meet her eyes.

He grabbed her wrist with one hand, braced against the cup of her elbow with the other, pulled. It was like trying to stretch steel: the cables in her arm seemed too tough, too tightly sprung for mere flesh. He tried again, yanked as hard as he could; he was the one who whimpered aloud.

But the limb stretched a little, and the broken pieces within ground audibly one against another, and when he let go that lumpy protuberance had disappeared.

Please let this be enough, he prayed.

He left the broken splints in place, laid down new lengths of tape adjacent. Pressed and waited as they grew rigid.

“Better,” Valerie said. Brüks allowed himself a breath.

Crack. Snap.

“Again,” Valerie said.

“What’s wrong with you?” The words were out before he could catch them. Brüks froze in their wake, terrified at the prospect of her reaction.

She bled. The bone was visible now beneath stretched skin, like a jagged deadhead in murky water. The contusion around it expanded as he watched, a bloody stain spreading through wax. But no, not wax, not any more; the pallor was fading from Valerie’s flesh. Blood was seeping from the core, perfusing the peripheral tissues. The vampire— warmed—

She’s vasodilating, he realized. She’s switching into hunting mode. Not a game after all, not even an excuse.

A trigger…

My wife has just watched a big chunk of her life disappear: every e-mail or Gchat she ever sent or received since 2007.

This is how it began:

In a moment of dumbness, Caitlin clicked on the link: believe it or not, given the specific context of the missive it was actually plausible that it came from the person whose name was attached. Ever since then, everyone on Caitlin’s contact list has been getting the same message (some of us twice), this time signed “Caitlin”. And this is a savvy hack indeed: those suspicious enough to actually write back, asking if this was legit (the e-mail certainly lacked anything even close to the BUG’s narrative voice) received another e-mail in response, assuring them in the same fractured English that yes indeed, Caitlin was the actual author. At the same time the little fucker deletes your Gmail contact list; unless you have a photographic memory or an offsite record of your contacts, you lose the ability to send a mass warning to those on the hit list. The most you can do is wait until various perplexed and angry people write back, one by one, and reply to them in turn.

Clever, then, but obvious phishery; I Googled a bit and learned that those who get suckered by this scam find themselves on a faux-Google page that tries to trick them into entering their Gmail login credentials. I also discovered that this agent doesn’t limit itself to e-mails; it’s starting to infiltrate blogs and impersonate actual posts (although even less convincingly in that context).

Here’s the thing, though.  While I’ve seen this fucker in action, and while I’ve found alerts at malware monitoring sites and on  Google forums, I haven’t found a single reference to its ability to wipe out the entire contents of one’s Gmail account. And that does seem to be the kind of thing that would warrant some sort of mention.

Caitlin lost tens of thousands of cloud-borne e-mails. She never bothered to make local backups, trusting Google’s servers for such security— and while Google does apparently offer archiving services for paying customers, the most they do for us freeloaders is recommend that we keep local backups. (We will save for another time my rant about why you should never trust your data to the fucking cloud, and why certain authors who smugly proclaim “We are not going to retreat from the cloud” either have their heads up their asses or are taking kickbacks from Google. Does anyone think the Cylons would have been able to pull it off if everyone on the Twelve Colonies had been running Xp?)

Things have improved between this paragraph and the last. One of the BUG’s IT-savvy friends has come down to our booth (we’re drowning our sorrows at the Duke of Somerset) and discovered that her MacBook Air has, in fact, retained a scrambled and intermittent local backup of sorts. All is not lost, only some; and while the date-stamps on the remainder are totally fucked, the text of the surviving emails seems to be intact.

Still. That was a fortuitous happenstance on a local flash drive. The definitive archive in the cloud is just gone — and from what we can tell, the surviving local subset will get nuked the moment we connect with that cloud. Something up there is still lurking in Caitlin’s account, hungry for kibbles and bits; it’s the Ebola of computer viruses, so virulent that it’s bound to implode from its own lethality before it has a chance to conquer the world.

It’s conquered the BUG’s account, though. And the weird thing is, nobody else who’s reported this phish seems to have experienced anything remotely close to that level of lethality.

I know you people, as a statistical population if not as individual faces. A lot of you eat bytes for breakfast.

Any suggestions?

The ‘crawl’s been kinda quiet lately, mainly because I am (for the second time in as many years) on the last lap of this dumb novel. I am, in fact, committed to delivering the damn thing to  Tor before I leave for FinnCon — and I’m on track to do that, if I don’t let myself get distracted. As a result, any occasional posts you might read here over the next month or so will most likely be limited to Echopraxian fiblets.

(That said, I am typing this while sitting on our front porch, twilight deepening around me. I have fond hopes for a replay of last night’s three-way dust-up between rival gangs of cats, possums, and raccoons, all of whom converged pretty much simultaneously on the kibble we leave out here as an offering to the local wildlife. If that happens — and if I escape with all my toes and some decent pictures — I might post those too. Although I don’t know how long it might take to upload a toe using my Telus account.)

Anyway. While this project sprints for the finish line, others unwind around the world. One such is a little e-collection which is about to come out from Fata Libelli, in Spain— and over the past week or so I’ve been sneaking away from Echopraxia now and then to answer some questions they e-mailed me in hopes of spurring interest amongst their base.

Tonight’s impoverished offering, therefore, is an prexcerpt from that interview, with a bit of a semantic bent. Because we all know that if there’s anything more fascinating than watching a bunch of panelists sitting around arguing about the definition of “science fiction”, it’s gotta be watching a bunch of people sitting around arguing about the definition of “life”:

FL:

Your aliens have been widely praised for looking genuinely different, not just like green humanoids. Sometimes, those aliens are so weird (no genes, no cephalisation, hive minds instead of individual selves) that even the main characters have trouble identifying them as living beings. Is there a basic definition of ‘life’ suitable for humans, aliens and IAs?

PW:

Up until recently, Dawkins’s definition would have done just fine: Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Of course, that means that computer viruses have the potential to qualify as life forms, not just metaphorically but literally. I can live with that. A-life can meet Darwin’s criteria as well as any other kind.

The problem now is that we’re actually in the process of creating synthetic life — squishy bugs with real genes and metabolic processes — pretty much from scratch. Those things are undeniably alive, yet were not shaped by natural selection. You could make an analogous case for any conscious AIs not derived via genetic algorithm.

Darwin coined the term “natural selection” to distinguish it from the “artificial selection” that characterizes things like the selective breeding of dogs and pigeons. So perhaps tweaking Dawkins definition to “Information, shaped by natural or artificial selection” might be enough to cover the synthetics coming up through the ranks.

Or maybe it’s time to give up on defining “life” in terms of the way it was derived, or what it’s made of, and to concentrate instead on what it does. So: How about defining life as any complex of structured energy pathways that restricts entropy increase below some threshold rate?

What do you guys think? Anybody have any thoughts on where that threshold might lie?  Hell, judging by your past comments it’s pretty obvious that  most of you know how to define “entropy”, and I bet a few of you even know what units it goes by. Which, offhand, is more than I can claim right now.

Shhh. Something rustling under the porch…

So.  The 2013 Aurora Ballot came out a few days ago. Once again, I hadn’t been paying much attention because I didn’t actually publish anything last year.  Once again, I got a phone call telling me that whatever I talked about at last fall’s SpecFic Colloquium got me onto the ballot anyway, under “Best Fan — Other”.

Hell, I’ll take it.

Of course, the problem now is that the Ballroom at the Gladstone Hotel only held about a hundred attendees; Canadian SF fandom must number almost twice that many.  So the question is how to let those other folks in on what they’d be voting for (or against).  It turns out that videos were made of all the talks that day, but as luck would have it all the slides I presented during “Hive Minds, Mind Hives” ended up out-of-frame and the audio track was unintelligible to boot. (We will pause a moment here for the inevitable wisecracks about whether that word is more properly applied to the recording or the speaker.)  Helen Marshall— a ChiZine stalwart, and nominated herself in no less than three categories— was willing to upload that file regardless, but all you’d have seen would have been some gangly middle-aged dude gesticulating wildly while speaking in tongues, being interrupted occasionally by (what I’m pretty sure was) appreciative laughter.

So what I’ve done is re-record the talk, based on my original notes and what I can remember of the off-script bits. I laid that down behind a PowerPoint of the slides themselves, converted the whole thing to a variety of formats, and uploaded it to YouTube.  You can watch it right here:

It lacks the ambiance and spontaneity of a live performance, but at least you can both see and hear what I’m talking about. Be warned: it’s 40 minutes long. The cautious and/or busy among you might want to first check out the brief excerpt I posted leading up to the event itself, just to see if it’s really up your alley. I’ll also be posting a link to an archived file over on the backlist page sometime over the next few days, and of course some version of this thing will show up in the official Aurora voting packet.

But you saw it here first. (In more ways than one; since I gave the talk last fall I’ve recycled some of its ideas on this very ‘crawl.)

Okay, I was going to hold off on this until closer to the pub date, but I see the new collection has already landed on SF Signal and it seems to be getting some tweets and links, so: yes. I’ve got a collection coming out in the fall, from Tachyon Press. It’s basically a greatest hits package, a baker’s dozen chosen by editor Jacob Weisman. I’ve written a 4,500 word essay for the back end: not quite sure what the final title’s going to be, but “Are We There Yet? En Route to Dystopia with the Angry Optimist” is what I put on top of the page when I was writing it. It’s a rumination on dystopias in fact and fiction, and how I don’t really do dystopias myself no matter what you people say, and how getting arrested and maced at the border has so greatly improved my outlook. I think it hangs together as a coherent whole; I’ll post an excerpt or two closer to the release date.

I like the cover. I like the layout. I like the way the teaser text down there in the corner kinda leads one to think that Blindsight won the Hugo even though it didn’t. I’m a little surprised by the pull from the NY Times — it’s lifted out of context and not, I think, really descriptive of my work overall — but I get the sense I’m in a teensy minority when it comes to characterizing my own work anyway, so okay. “Seriously paranoid” is a punchy little eye-catcher at the very least.

I gotta say I’m a bit taken aback by the synopsis, though.

Not the story thumbnails, mind you: those rock. Whoever wrote that text did a bang-up job. No, what raises my eyebrows is the description of me: “a highly controversial author”.

Highly controversial? Seriously?

Grumpy, misanthropic, nihilistic, cuddly — I’ve been called all of these things before. I don’t necessarily agree with any of them (except maybe that last one), but at least I’m used to them. I don’t think anyone’s described me as controversial before, though (much less highly so). As far as I know, the closest I ever came to real controversy was getting charged with imaginary crimes in Port Huron, and even the jury that convicted me seemed to agree that it was the border guards who wore the asshole hats that time around.

Still. So long as it sells copies, I guess.

While we’re on the subject of collections with pretty covers, I was surfing around MAG‘s site the other day to see if my upcoming Polish collection had surfaced in their catalog (the title for that one translates as An Antidote for Optimism). It had not; but I see they’ve released a third edition of Blindsight. For some reason, each new edition gets spiffy new cover art— and man, I defy anyone to tell me that this new cover doesn’t kick all kinds of ass. I didn’t think it was possible to put a vampire front and center without descending into cliché almost by definition. But wow. (And just between you and me, if the vampire had been female this would have made an even better cover for Echopraxia.) I’ve liked every cover these guys have put out (and come to think of it, ArsMACHINA have also served up relentlessly awesome covers for the Rifters trilogy. Must be something in the water over there.)

Can’t wait to see what cover Fata Libelli slaps on the Spanish e-minicollection.

This is actually turning out to be a pretty good year, collections-wise.

*

Finally: some of you may remember that writer’s workshop thingy I participated in last year, the one presented by Starship Sofa.  Well, Tony’s doing it again; a Video Writers Workshop, this time with Mike Resnick and Paul Di Filippo. June 16th, live online, the usual £20 but if you’re one of the five who springs for £99 you also get one of those guys to personally critique your work in realtime. (I’d assume this last perk would be a private affair following the main event — at least, if there were the option of bringing in onlookers to watch the blood spill, I can’t imagine that Tony wouldn’t be advertising the fact. And charging extra.) (Not that it wouldn’t be worth it, mind you.)

If you’re at all interested in doing what I do for a living (such as it is), you should probably look into this.

An Enemy Within: The Bicameral Threat to Institutional Religion in the Twenty-First Century

An Internal Report to the Holy See by The Pontifical Academy of Sciences in conjunction with the John Templeton Foundation, based upon investigations inaugurated July 23—Sep 16 2093

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Background

The past century has witnessed what Sujeit describes as “a joyful if weedy renaissance of Faith in the face of the secular … an inevitable reaction to science’s vendetta against the soul”. This has been a source of ongoing consternation to the secular community. Surely, they say, the more science explains, the less we need to invoke the supernatural. Surely the “God of the Gaps” diminishes with each new scientific breakthrough. How then to explain not just the persistence but an actual resurgence of faith in a world where every last vestige of humanity can be “explained” by the invocation of some brain structure or chemical process?

Ironically, it is thanks to the empiricists themselves that we can answer this question. It has been known for generations that Faith flourishes most strongly when people feel threatened and powerless. What could be more threatening — what could make a soul feel more powerless — than an endless litany of scientific “discoveries” hammering home our utter insignificance in a vast and indifferent cosmos, reducing every flicker of the Human soul to chemicals and electricity, telling us that the very notion of free will is logically absurd in a mechanistic universe?^[1] Science itself has provoked this return to God — and once again we see His Hand in that precisely-designed mechanism ensuring that our faith is strongest when it is most desperately needed.

While we may thank this divine feedback loop for reversing the last generation’s exodus from the Church of Rome^[2], it has also played a role in a recent proliferation of cults whose elements borrow from a variety of pagan and pantheistic sources, and whose tenets pose a fundamental obstacle to Salvation. Such cults have always been with us, springing to life on stony ground and withering just as quickly. The Abrahamic religions, rooted in richer soil, have outlasted them all and continue to thrive even under the tumultuous conditions of the late twenty-first century.

These are, however, times of uncertainty; and in the face of modern challenges we may find ourselves tempted to turn our backs on the wider world (as have certain Protestant denominations). Such retreat in the face of adversity would not only go against the Scriptural admonition to “go and make disciples of all nations”, but also risks dire consequence in its own right. The Redeemer Gyland offers a stark case in point. It has been almost a year since the alliance between the Southern and Central Baptists broke down, and three months since we have been able to establish contact with anyone from either side of that conflict. (It is (more…)

From Pais-Vieira et al

You’ve probably heard about the rat-brain network by now — it showed up in the popsci threads back at the end of February, provoking breathless comparisons with Vulcan mind melds and The Matrix. And I gotta say, the coverage certainly sucked me in: an actual (albeit rudimentary) network of brains, linked together to solve problems? Hive-Mind stuff; Mind-Hive stuff. Something very much like it shows up in Echopraxia. It makes a cameo in “Giants”. The talk I gave at last year’s SpecFic Colloquium got into it big-time. Right up my alley.

Then you read the actual research paper and, well… not so much.

This is how they sell it; this, technically, is how it was. The brains of two rats, each connected to the other by an array of microelectrodes implanted in the motor cortex. One of them is presented with a stimulus; the other, with the means to act on that stimulus¹. If the second rat reacts correctly to the stimulus the first one perceives, both get a reward. Rat #2 — gifted with no clues or insights save those piped directly from the brain of Rat #1 — reacts correctly 70% of the time, far more often than the 50% hit rate that random chance would serve up.

Ergo, the rats’ brains are in direct communication via an electronic network. Technologicaly-mediated telepathy. Technepathy.

There are the rudiments of a B2B interface here, certainly. Motor cortices and embedded electrode microarrays. (more…)