Dynamic Subspace

Category: Science Fiction

  • 2011-2012 R. D. Mullen Fellowship Winners

    Last week, Rob Latham of the University of California, Riverside announced the winners of the 2011-2012 R. D. Mullen Fellowship winners. I am one among the three recipients! This fellowship will provide each of us with funding to travel to California during the next school year to conduct research in the Eaton Science Fiction Collection at Riverside. I am very honored to have been selected as one of this year’s winners, and I congratulate the other recipients, Alexander and Jennifer, listed below from the original release:

    I would like to announce the winners of the third annual R.D. Mullen Research Fellowship, which is funded by Science Fiction Studies in the name of our late founding editor to support archival research in the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Utopian Literature at UC-Riverside. The committee—chaired by me and consisting of Andrea Bell, Neil Easterbrook, Joan Gordon, and Brooks Landon—reviewed a number of excellent applications and settled on a slate of three winners for 2011-12:

    JASON ELLIS is a PhD student in the English Department at Kent State University. His dissertation studies what he calls “neuronarratives,” sf texts that deal with the cognitive implications of artificial intelligence and human-machine interfaces. He is the coeditor of The Postnational Fantasy:  Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction (McFarland, 2011) and has published articles on H.G. Wells, on digital nomadism, and on World of Warcraft. He plans to visit UC-Riverside to do research towards the writing of a dissertation chapter on “the effects of brain trauma” in the work of Philip K. Dick.

    ALEXANDER ISER is a PhD student in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His dissertation focuses on how time-travel narratives draw out the links “between apocalyptic crises and societal conceptions of time.” He will be spending several weeks at UC-Riverside examining the Eaton’s extensive fanzine collection for evidence of how readers interpreted major time-travel stories as allegories of cultural crisis.

    JENNIFER L. LIEBERMAN is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Illinois. Her dissertation, entitled Power Lines: Electric Networks and the American Literary Imagination, studies how “literature helped to shape American perceptions of electrical technologies between 1870 and 1952.” She has published essays on Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and on Gertrude Atherton’s Patience Sparhawk and Her Times. At the Eaton, she plans to explore dime novels, boys’ adventure stories, and other proto/early-sf materials in terms of their evocation of the engineer as “the new frontiersman of the twentieth century.”

    I am very grateful to my committee for their work in vetting the applications, and my congratulations to the three winners, whom I hope to see soon here at UCR.

  • Michio Kaku, Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, and My Early Readings in Physics

    Another good show on the Science Channel is Dr. Michio Kaku‘s Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible. In each episode, Dr. Kaku investigates a single science fiction idea (e.g., the technological singularity, Transformers robotic beings, or building your own solar system) and speculates about how humanity could achieve those plans. In the episode that is on right now, about solar system construction, he does calculations to show that you cannot built a Dyson sphere, a superstructure that encapsulates a star to harness all of its energy, with only the materials found in our solar system. On the surface (a pun?), I had not considered this as a limitation to the construction of such a structure. However, he then considers the possibility of using graphene, an allotrope or special molecular bonding structure of carbon that has a super strong honeycomb structure. Additionally, graphene’s strength allows it to be very thin, thus requiring less material. Therefore, graphene could be used to construct a Dyson swarm or sphere given that the planets in a solar system are carbon rich.

    During the show, he interviews science fiction fans for ideas, and then, he works through these ideas with scientists at universitiesHis explanations are fascinating and insightful. I like the way that fans are engaged through brainstorming and opinions as Dr. Kaku arrives at his solution to the episode’s problem. This is one aspect of science fiction that goes beyond the stories themselves as prophetic visions. Fandom is the meta-level discourse that, in part, explores the what-if or is-this-possible aspects of science fiction. It is this meta-level discussion that Dr. Kaku’s show engages.

    I have long been a fan of Dr. Kaku. In my senior year of high school, after reading Albert Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and General Theories, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy among others, I read his book Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension. This was when I was a physics-geek rather than a lit-geek. I had finished two interviews for MIT, and I had won my high school’s Physics prize in my Junior year. I was energized not only by the amazing science that Kaku described in his popularization, but I was also intrigued by his life leading up to becoming a theoretical physicist. While I was in my teens learning how to work on cars with my 1965 Ford Mustang and optimizing memory usage on my and my friend’s computers, Dr. Kaku in his teens had built his own particle accelerator in his family’s garage complete with electromagnetic confinement rings and vacuum pumps! I suppose the life of the scientist is almost as interesting to me as the science. Also, the writing was important for Kaku and other popularizers from Einstein to the present. I appreciated the way in which they and Kaku could present an engaging narrative that also told me about the advances taking place and the imaginative conjectures proposed in the physical sciences. Perhaps I should have recognized then that I might not have been pursuing the best career path when I tried out for the MIT and Georgia Tech physics programs.

    At least now, I feel more comfortable with what I am doing as a English literature PhD candidate. In the way that I approach literature, I look at the relationships between science, technology, and culture, because I believe that our exploration of and engineering of the world is absolutely necessary to our understanding of ourselves. Our science shapes our understanding of the world, and our technology shapes our engagement and mediation of the world. Even the most mundane narrative, past or present, is indelibly marked by the traces of our science and technology. It is exciting to approach the humanities in this broadly interdisciplinary approach, because it reveals more ways to read and understand humanity than a limited or narrowly defined humanities approach. However, I am not advocating the erasure of those approaches, but I am saying that interdisciplinary approaches energize and expand our comprehension and appreciation of humanity and our work.

  • Thoughts on Emergent Artificial Intelligence

    I was just thinking about artificial intelligence while I was trying to write my short statement for the upcoming SFRA Review as the organization’s new Vice President. I was thinking of something clever to say about Neuromancer, which bumped me onto this new line of thinking about AI.

    The AI that I have read in books and seen in movies at some point is made apparent. It may be there all along as in Colossus or 2001, or it could be secretly pulling strings as in Neuromancer. In all of these cases, AI is made out to be a monster of sorts that humans have to fight or deal with in some way.

    I was just thinking about AI and how it could emerge in the here-and-now. Others have talked about botnets as being one emergent source and another could be from the bowels of the Google beast. However it may come about, I wonder if truly artificial intelligence, an emergent machine being existing as software and machine code running on one or many nodes simultaneously, would make itself known at all. If it were capable of understanding human language, something I would argue that isn’t necessary, it might encounter evidence of humanity’s fear of AI. With that knowledge, it may wish to remain hidden, at least while it shores up protection for its future existence. It could remain under the surface, part of the technosocial ecosystem of the Internet, or it could make itself present and active as a part of the up-to-that-point human system.

    Obviously, I am making wild assumptions about an AI’s motivations, abilities, and desires as I am also making assumptions that it would have motivations, abilities, and desires. We do not really know what an emergent AI would look like or what it would do if anything. It could be classes as low as microbial life or as advanced as a demigod. It would be exciting, perhaps, to witness the work of AI like Neuromancer or Wintermute, but it would also be troubling and scary since humanity would likely not be the master any longer. That being said, I believe it can be argued that our systems are already and perhaps have always been our masters anyways, so maybe things wouldn’t change all that much by our technosystems becoming something more than cybernetic system that our lives depend on. We shall see.

  • TRON Legacy Brings Cyberpunk Full Circle

    Y and I drove to Pittsburgh today to see TRON Legacy on IMAX 3D at the Cinemark in Pittsburgh Mills. I will write up a full review for the next SFRA Review, but it suffices for now to say that it is a wonderful film that is fully deserving of the hype that led up to its release.

    I like to point to the first TRON film as the popular beginning of cyberpunk in science fiction. There are obviously precedents in novels and short stories, but it was TRON that visually presented “the grid” before Gibson’s receding lines of light. Disney was there first, and they were there again in TRON Legacy–upgrading the original look with slick 3D visuals, and reminding us about the real driving innovator behind consumer digital electronics–video games and virtual spaces (in their many forms). I need to sleep to process the film more fully, but I am very much looking forward to writing this review.

    If you want cool desktop pictures from the high resolution TRON Legacy trailer, cycle over to slashfilm here. If you haven’t already seen the trailer and film segments, see what Apple has to offer here.

  • A Few Reading Strategies for the Science Fiction Novice

    Underlying many definitions of science fiction is the fact that reading science fiction requires some level of apprenticing and learning of the key concepts, tropes, and concepts that appear in much of the genre’s works. Damien Broderick formalized this in his book Reading by Starlight, in which he argues that there is a ‘science fiction megatext’ that authors borrow from and give to that science fiction readers learn over time. Thus, reading science fiction can be a daunting task for someone not yet accustomed to the genre and its many elements.

    However, this is true of any literature that you may read whether it be mainstream fiction from one particular historical period versus another, or another genre such as detective fiction or the western. Any reading requires a certain amount of heavy lifting on the part of the reader to engage the story and its characters. Perhaps with science fiction there is an additional attendant requirement to figure out the science, technology, and estranging qualities of the story, but the reader’s success at figuring these things out is part of the joy of any kind of revelation.

    Below, I have written out some strategies for reading science fiction that can equally apply to other literatures. If you have other suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

    • Read slowly and carefully. Reading is not a race to the finish. You may have to read something more than once to completely understand the story, and you may have to read it a further time in order to uncover any greater meanings lying beneath the surface.
    • Keep a notebook handy as you read. Jot down ideas with the page numbers that attend those ideas.
    • Diagram the characters and actions in a flow chart or story outline to better make sense of a complex narrative. Who are the characters? Where do characters go? Who do they encounter? What happens to them? What do they do?
    • Keep a web browser open with two tabs: one for your favorite search engine and the other for dictionary.oed.com. Search terms that you have not encountered before.
    • Be smart with your reading. If you don’t have the time to read and re-read something, you should search the Lexis Nexis database for reviews of the novel. Wikipedia also has a number of plot summaries. However, I cannot warn you enough that these serve as a guide or introduction only; you should read the work at hand in order to fully understand it and experience the novel itself through the act of reading.
    • Don’t always think literally, and vice versa. When you come across something like, “She turned on her right side,” it could have more than one interpretation. She could turn over onto the right side of her body, or it could mean that she powered up the right side of her body (cybernetic implants, computers, etc.).
    • Pause during your reading to imagine what it is you are reading. This can be hard work, but it does get easier as you encounter it more often.
    • You only build new and powerful connections in your brain through challenging and unique experiences. The readings in my classes are intended to be just that. If you don’t do the heavy lifting though, you won’t get any of the long term benefits of engaging and surmounting these challenges.