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

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…)

No time today; sick and snuffly and unproductive and today’s Micropone’s birthday so I’m gonna have to delay my entry on prosthetic group-consciousness in rats. Instead, here are two of those responsible for bringing Blindsight to Bulgarian audiences, along with the product itself:

The guy with the cross is Blagoy Ivanov, editor of Iztok-Zapad : the guy with the handcuffs is Hristo Blazhev -  fellow-editor and premiere Bulgarian book blogger.  I have no idea what they planned on doing with those things afterwards, but I hope they at least stuck the book in a zip-lock baggie first. (Not shown is the actual translator, Elena Pavlova, who appears to have been named after my favorite dessert.)

Here's a close-up of the cover art, by Georgi Panayotov. Not quite sure what actual scene from the book it's supposed to represent, if any, but I think it's a really nice piece of art in its own right.

Outta here. If any of you happen to be at the 360° Restaurant this afternoon, please accept my preemptive apologies for the germs I'll be explosively dispersing across your entrees.

Those of you familiar with Blindsight‘s Scramblers may remember this quirk about their physiology: they didn’t keep all their metabolism on the inside.

“I don’t think Rorschach’s magnetic fields are counterintrusion mechanisms at all. I think they’re part of the life-support system. I think they mediate and regulate a good chunk of scrambler metabolism… If I’m right, I’m not even dealing with complete organisms here.”

I kept it all fuzzy and hand-wavey — microscopic shards of magnetite in scrambler cells, dancing to the precise twitch of Rorschach’s filigreed magnetic fields — because I didn’t in truth have any idea how an inside/outside metabolism would really work. I thought it was a really cool idea, though.

Count on Nature to think of it a few billion years before I did. Are you ready for metal-breathing microbes?

Not scramblers, exactly. But definitely nonsentient. Photo credit Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

I wasn’t, not until last Thursday. That’s when I received an e-mail from one Jake Cohen, a dude who gets more out of my writing than some might consider normal. It happens, occasionally: someone drops a line mentioning that Blindsight inspired her degree in cognitive linguistics, or that an idea gleaned from Starfish allowed him to commit the perfect murder, or that Maelstrom‘s take on digital wildlife informed some project over at Lawrence Livermore that no one’s allowed to talk about¹. Jake, a microbiologist by trade, admitted to being especially fond of my rifters books. He pointed me to the Harvard lab where he’s about to start a PhD on hydrothermal vent ecology, and I dutifully clicked the link to check it out.

Which is where I encountered the photo caption “Extracellular electron transfer experiments at 1 kilometer below sea level in the Monterey Canyon”, slipping past almost too quickly to notice on Prof. Girguis’s splash page.

Extracellular electron transfer? Does that mean what I think it does?

I wrote Jake back, and yes: yes it does.  But don’t take my word for it, or even his: say hello to Shewanella oneidensis  — a bacterium that, while facultatively aerobic, can get by in anoxic environments by breathing metals². Here’s the money shot:

“…can also thrive without the gas if it must, thanks to energy-generating chemical reactions that transfer electrons from inside its cells to outside minerals that contain metals such as iron.”

—or, to quote my newfound go-to guy at Harvard, “[it] works mostly like a regular electron transport chain, except instead of the terminal electron acceptor being inside the cell, those bacteria use a carrier molecule to pick up those electrons and shuttle them outside of the cell to an acceptor they’re growing on.” Apparently this also raises certain commercial possibilities in the biobattery department.

Inside/outside metabolism. Holy shit.

I wish I’d known about this while I was writing Blindsight. You can be damn sure it’s going to make a walk-on in Echopraxia, though.

They're not saying it looks like this, though.

So Lever et al have found something in the rocks, deep below the Pacific seabed (Source paper; supplementary materials; Wired popsci commentary). It eats inorganics, notably sulfur—

(βehemoth assimilates several inorganic nutrients 26-84% more efficiently than its closest terrestrial competitors. This is especially problematic when dealing with sulfur.)

—it’s an anaerobe—

(“βehemoth doesn’t just predate other life, it predates photosynthesis. It predates oxygen. It’s over four billion years old. And all the other really ancient bugs we’ve found, the Archaebacteria and the Nanoliths and so forth, they’re still anaerobes to this day. You only find them in reducing environments. And yet here’s βehemoth, even older, and oxygen doesn’t bother it at all…

…Would there be any reason why someone—hypothetically—might want to take an organism like βehemoth, and tweak it?”)