About the book, Mulligan writes, “As part of McFarland’s series of critical explorations in science fiction and fantasy (SF/F), this collection of twelve essays analyzes works ranging from novels and short stories to films and computer games, through the combined lenses of postcolonialism, nationalism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism and the theories of SF/F criticism.”

He goes on to make the following recommendation: “Overall these essays are engaging and encompass a variety of concepts that consider not only a multicultural (or semi-homogenized) global postnationalism but also preserve space for Creole and Mestizo identities as dynamic hybridities. . . . This collection does lend itself easily to in- terdisciplinary work and situates well with similar volumes such as Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008), Hoagland and Sarwal’s Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World (2010), and from outside SF, Singh and Schmidt’s collection, Postcolonial Theory and the United States (2000). Given the number of shared sources and similarity of arguments, these essays would provide a valuable resources for an upper level literature seminar that uses SF/F to frame issues of globalization and nationalism in an American, Transatlantic, or Regional Studies approach.”

In addition to discussing some of the other essays in the collection, I was happy to read his comments on my essay, ” “: “Jason W. Ellis plays with expressions of cosmopolitan and individual identities in his elaboration of character creation and player choices available through the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Ellis mixes Kant with transnational systems of communication and interaction to argue for the ability of virtual interactions to move individual players (and fans) toward a cosmopolitan consciousness and interaction. (He did leave me wondering about the role of trans-faction groups in the game, such as the Earthen Ring, and their effects on cosmopolitan identity.)”

I wrote my essay included in the collection, “Engineering a Cosmopolitan Future: Race, Nation, and World of Warcraft” about 2.5 years before the book appeared, so I was not able to accommodate the changes made to the game with the Cataclysm upgrade (Blizzard released Cataclysm while we were in the editing process so I could not make any changes to my essay). I wish that I could have wrote about The Earthen Ring that Mulligan references, because it does have cosmopolitan potentiality.

From February 5 to 18, I researched in the Eaton Science Fiction Fiction and Fantasy Collection the University of California, Riverside‘s Tomas Rivera Library. As I mentioned last year, I was very appreciative to have won an R. D. Mullen Fellowship to fund my travel and accommodations for the research-oriented trip.

Professor Rob Latham administers the fellowship and the science fiction work at UC-Riverside, which includes an annual SF symposium and the biannual Eaton Conference co-hosted with the library’s special collections. He is a gracious host, and I enjoyed our conversations while I was in Riverside.

UC-Riverside is building a strong constellation in science fiction studies. Besides Latham at the helm, the university recently hired the science fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson into the creative writing program. Now, the university is conducting a new hire for a science fiction media studies person (I applied, but alas, I didn’t make the short list). I suspect more the university will continue to grow in this direction–at least, I hope that it does, because it can grow the SF program around the significant holdings of the library.

The Eaton Collection is located on the fourth floor of the Thomas Rivera Library and its hours of operation are from 9:00am to 5:00pm Monday through Friday. I planned my trip so that I would have two full weeks to work in the special collections to conduct research for my dissertation chapter on Philip K. Dick, his 2-3-74 visions, and his health problems. In the event that I found as much material related to Dick’s work as possible, I also planned a contengency set of materials on the following chapter on William Gibson’s work.

I am very happy to report that I achieved both goals and went a bit beyond my original set of documents thanks to cross referenced connections as well as new leads produced by my readings. Additionally, Reference Library Gwido Zlatkes turned me onto the two boxes of Philip K. Dick archival materials, which included some very cool autographed materials along with a full run of the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter and other rare magazines and fanzines (including the November 6, 1975 Rolling Stone article).

I began my research by reading the full thirty issue run of The Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter, which includes a double issue (#9/10) on cassette tape—one side being an interview conducted by Paul Williams with Dick and the other side Dick recording writing notes. The experience of fast-forwarding Dick’s posthumous canonization yielded more primary sources than I could have hoped for in letters and interviews. Interviews with Dick’s friends and former spouses also provide important corroboration and clarification of Dick’s sometimes-unreliable personal narratives.

References in the Newsletter, combined with other research done before my visit to Riverside, led me to other interviews, notes, and reviews in fanzines including: The Alien Critic (later Science Fiction Review), Algol (later Starship), and The Patchin Review, and magazines including: Locus, Vertex, Science Fiction Eye, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Analog.

After exhausting my leads in the collection related to Dick’s later fictions and personal life, I spent the last three days collecting research for the William Gibson chapter of my dissertation. I focused on the Locus reporting of Gibson’s success following the publication of Neuromancer in 1984 and later interviews with the writer in 1991 and 2003. I was pleased to find a fanzine co-edited by Gibson titled Genre Plat, but Gibson’s essay, “Blues for Horselover Fat” in the fanzine Wing Window provides the strongest evidence that I can use to bridge my chapters on Dick and Gibson.

To fill out the time that I was in the library, I also found photographs and reports of past Science Fiction Research Association meetings, including the one hosted at Kent State University in the mid-1980s where Samuel R. Delany was honored with the Pilgrim Award.

My UC-Riverside visit was punctuated with a weekend visit to see Patrick and Sharon Sharp in Los Angeles. They played hosts and guides to my first visit to the strange world of LA–a place that actually felt like another country to me. We visited the Little Tokyo area for lunch and snacks and then strolled through the Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA) Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles photography exhibition (Weegee was doing amazing stuff with photography!). We also enjoyed the sunset from the top of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel (a fascinating hotel with interesting designs and spaces, but is it really postmodern? I think that a better case could be made for Riverside’s Mission Inn in that respect). I also got to meet their very friendly cat, Tonks.

I believe that the research trip (and my first trip to California for that matter) was a smashing success! I have many materials that I have notes on and many other materials that I need to review again. I also got to reconnect with friends and colleagues there: Pawel Frelik, Mark Biswas, and William Sun.

You can see my photos from around Riverside and Los Angeles on Flickr here.

The first letter, Sixteen Concerned Scientists: No Need to Panic About Global Warming, argues that the clarion call that human beings play a significant part in the warming of the Earth is a conspiracy fueled by money-grubbing alarmists. It is signed by sixteen engineers and scientists–none of whom are scientists who research Earth’s climate.

The second letter, Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate, challenges the first on three grounds: 1) listen to people who are experts (e.g., do you want your dentist working on your heart), 2) non-experts shouldn’t misquote experts (the first letter takes a quote out of context of the second letter’s primary author to support the first letter writers’ claims), and 3) “Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused.”

I strongly side with Isaac Asimov’s position on this kind of debate–where non-specialists feel self-important enough to pontificate in an expert manner on something that they might know the generalities about but obviously do not know as well as the experts. Asimov writes in his essay, “The Literature of Ideas,” republished in Today and Tomorrow and . . . :

To be sure, when a scientist ventures outside his field and pontificates elsewhere, he is as likely to speak nonsense as anyone else. (309)

I am confident that the signers of the first letter, all sixteen of them, are likely very good at what they do. However, their expertise in their businesses or fields of study do not make them good climate experts. To rephrase Asimov: By going outside their field and pontificating elsewhere, they are as likely to speak nonsense as anyone else.

This is one of the running punch lines of the television show The Big Bang Theory–Dr. Sheldon Cooper is a theoretical physicist and he believes that he knows everything about everything else. Unfortunately for him, this is not the case. His character knows a lot about quantum mechanics and m-theory, but he doesn’t know Radiohead. Sheldon’s attempts at being a know-it-all often backfire and reveal how little he actually knows outside his own specific domains of knowledge.

Similarly, I am earning my PhD in 20th century American literature with specializations in science fiction, new media, and neuroscientific topics. With these fields, I am carving out a very small niche for myself where I am creating new knowledge based on my research in a very small space. When I am done, I will know more about my specific focus of study than anyone else. However, I will not know more about neuroscience than my outside reader, Dr. Eric Mintz. I will be good at talking about neuroscience and integrating neuroscientific findings into my writing, but I will not a neuroscientist and you would certainly not want me working on your brain.

Thus, the experts should be the ones doing the expert work and informing the rest of us about what their findings suggest. The rest of us should consider their findings and discuss how their findings should inform our social and political decisions. Those are things that we all take part in. However, experts in other fields should not muddy the waters of public discourse by acting the part of experts while attempting to undercut the importance of an entire field of study based on hard science by real experts. There is another word that comes to mind about the behavior of the so-concerned sixteen so-called experts in the first letter: charlatans.

It was an exhilarating run this past year generating that much content, but I cannot realistically sustain it another year at this point in my life. I am finishing my dissertation, I am looking for work, and I am an officer in an important organization. Also, I tried to post things that I thought were interesting or important, but the need to write something every day meant that I often did not have the time to write a fully fleshed out post. I would like my writings to be more developed than the majority of my posts were this past year.

The thing that I relearn again and again is that I have to prioritize. Dynamicsubspace.net is important to me, but there are more important things in my life right now. Therefore, I am going to return to my earlier schedule of writing a post roughly once per week. These might be intensive writings about a particular piece of news, a review of a book, or a digest of things that I have been up to.

So, there won’t be as many posts as there were in 2011, but I will try to make up for it in greater substance in each post.

Now, back to writing the dissertation and waiting for a call back.

Good luck to everyone in 2012!

WordPress.com logs the visits of readers to my blog. I like to reflect on my writing and how it corresponds to these statistics. Below, I present a summary of the site’s statistics with some thoughts about the increase in visits that I received in 2011.

I was particularly interested in seeing how this year’s numbers compared to previous years, because I endeavoured to post more content this year than in any previous year as part of WordPress.com’s postaday2011 project.

My attempt at posting one new item each day has been a phenomenal success. I successfully posted one item each day save once. However, there were many days when I posted two or more items. By month in 2011, I posted 56 times in January, 42 times in February, 55 times in March, 47 times in April, 53 times in May, 42 times in June, 36 times in July, 42 times in August, 35 times in September, 43 times in October, 42 times in November, and finally, 39 times in December 2011. Each month, I consistently exceeded the number of days by the number of posts for a total of 532 posts in 2011. Since I began dynamicsubspace.net in 2007, I have written 1,239 posts.

In the chart above, you can see the number of unique page visits by month and year since I moved the blog from Apple’s mac.com to WordPress.com in March 2007. During the very first month of being hosted on wordpress.com in March 2007, I received 29 visits. So far, I have received 8,191 visits during December 2011. This is a tremendous increase in page views!

Considering the number of visits that I have received from year to year: dynamicsubspace.net received 3,772 visits in 2007, 27,882 in 2008, 32,458 in 2009, 48,245 in 2010, and approximately 76,121 in 2011. This translate to a 639% increase from 2007 to 2008, 16% increase from 2008 to 2009, 48% increase from 2009 to 2010, and 58% increase from 2010 to 2011. I believe that the increased content generation that I have done during 2011 has made the site more interesting to regular readers, and it has also created more content that non-regular readers find via search engines, social networks, and link sharing sites.

Further breaking down the visits to dynamicsubspace.net, the site has consistently increased its average visits per day. On average, the site received 14 daily visits in 2007, 76 visits in 2008, 89 visits in 2009, 132 visits in 2010, and 209 visits in 2011. This translates to a 443% increase in daily visits from 2007 to 2008, 17% from 2008 to 2009, 48% from 2009 to 2010, and finally, 58% from 2010 to 2011. These daily visit increases also, I believe, correspond with the increased content output that I have accomplished this past year.

One thing that I wonder though is how spammers influence these numbers. As you can see in the graph above, my spam filter has caught a substantial rise in attempted spam comments during 2011. It is because of this increased spam over the past two years that I began moderating all comments to dynamicsubspace.net. I would prefer to not moderate on the site, but I don’t want my noncommercial site to become a huge billboard that generates money for others (copiers of my content on other sites present a whole other problem). Also, Symantec reports here that email spam is the lowest in years, but I wonder if spammers are shifting their tactics to plaster the web instead of inboxes.

Here is to another successful year of dynamicsubspace.net. I have hinted at some lose ends that I will write more about in the near future. These will appear as I have the time to think about and write more about them.

Season’s Greetings from Y and me!

Christmas Playlist

57 songs, 3.2 hours

Winter Song Sara Bareilles & Ingrid Michaelson

Last Christmas Wham!

The Little Drummer Boy Johnny Cash

Happy Xmas (War Is Over) John Lennon & Yoko Ono

Christmas Day Dido

Christmas For Cowboys John Denver

O Come All Ye Faithful Art Garfunkel

Father Christmas OK Go

Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer Jack Johnson

Don Quixote’s Christmas Bonanza Gorillaz

Feliz Navidad Fenix TX

Christmas In Space Tori Amos

The Little Drum Machine Boy Beck

THE RETURN OF THE RED BARON The Royal Guardsmen – Snoopy And His Friens

SNOOPY VS. THE RED BARON The Royal Guardsmen – Snoopy And His Friens

SNOOPY’S CHRISTMAS The Royal Guardsmen – Snoopy And His Friens

The Chanukah Song Adam Sandler

Donna & Blitzen Badly Drawn Boy

O Holy Night Avril Lavigne, Chantal Kreviazuk

It Came upon a Midnight Clear Sixpence None The Richer

Little Drummer Boy Tori Amos

Xmas Cake Rilo Kiley

Gaudete Steeleye Span

Ring Out, Solstice Bells Jethro Tull

The Little Drummer Boy The Harry Simeone Chorale

Pavane Jethro Tull

Frosty The Snowman Leon Redbone And Dr. John

I Believe In Father Christmas Greg Lake

Christmas In Hollis Run DMC

O Holy Night Charlotte Church

Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer Elmo & Patsy

Run Rudolph Run Chuck Berry

Stille Nacht Andre Rieu

Ave Maria [After Bach] André Rieu

I Saw Three Ships Sting

Oi To The World No Doubt

Wonderful Christmastime Paul Mccartney

Sleigh Ride Leory Anderson

White Christmas Bing Crosby

Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Dean Martin

Holly Jolly Christmas Burl Ives

Here Comes Santa Claus Gene Autry

Jingle Bell Rock Bobby Helms

Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer Gene Autry

In The Bleak Mid Winter Bert Jansch

Silent Night Holy Night Sinéad O Connor

Walking In The Air Aled Jones

All I Want For Christmas Is You Samantha Mumba

Fairytale Of New York Pogues (Ft. Kirsty Maccoll)

Chanukah Song Part 2 Adam Sandler

In Dulci Jubilo Mike Oldfield

Stop The Cavalry Jona Lewie

Happy Christmas (War Is Over) John Lennon

What Child is This (Greensleeves) Mitch Miller and his Gang

Little Drummer Boy (Extended UltraTraxx Trance Mission Mix) CRU

Little Drummer Boy Dandy Warholes

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing Mormon Tabernacle Choir With Sissel

Happy Christmas to all!

I look around and I wonder if I will ever see a world where robots walk among us. Some folks, like David Levy, believe that this and more is right around the corner. However, I wonder if pro-robotics folks, myself included, will find our enthusiasm challenged by the antirobotic Luddites that Asimov writes about in his Robot, Empire, and Foundation stories? I say coexist, coevolve, and cooperate.