Dynamic Subspace

Tag: Science Fiction

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Neuroscience, the Neuronovel, and Science Fiction

    Several conversations with Tammy Clewell on the neuronovel rekindled my interest in the biology of the human brain. As a result, I have decided to do some research on the neuronovel and its relationship to science fiction. The neuronovel, with its emphasis on the hardware of the brain over the software of psychology, is arguably a hard science fiction topic (albeit most lacking an extrapolative element). Additionally, novels traditionally seen in terms of psychological explanation can be re-read with neuroscience in mind (pun intended).

    I am building a list of science fiction novels and short stories that specifically addresses the neuronovel’s emphasis of brains over mind. What titles of novels or short stories from approximately 1950 to the present can you recommend that emphasize brains over mind, and the brain’s influence on one’s sense of self and understanding of the world. This would include brain trauma over psychological trauma, neuroscience over psychology, depictions of creating or developing brains and how that shapes one’s engagement with the world, introspection or internal dialog that might have a biological explanation rather than a psychological one, etc. Two sets of works that immediate come to mind are Asimov’s robots (they exhibit psychological problems, but there is an emphasis on those behaviors resulting from the way they are hardwired), and Dick’s VALIS novels (the author’s 2-3-74 events can be more simply diagnosed as the first in a series of unfortunate strokes).

    This is a very rough sketch at this point, so please bear with me as a work through it. All suggestions are welcome and much appreciated.

  • James Blish’s A Case of Conscience

    After a wonderful dinner at Mack and Sue Hassler’s house with my wife Y and our new friend Carter Kaplan, Mack lent me a copy of James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (1958). Mack knew that I had already presented a paper on James Cameron’s Avatar, and that I would present a revised version of that essay at the upcoming SFRA 2010 Conference in Carefree, AZ next week. He told me that Blish’s novel was related to Avatar either as inspiration or merely part of the cultural discursive currents that made Avatar possible today.

    A Case of Conscience is about a group of four Earth men on the distant planet of Lithia. They are each scientists in various fields who are studying the planet to make a recommendation to the UN whether Lithia should be made a safe port for future travel there by humanity. What drives the novel is the group of people largely absent from the narrative–the native Lithians. The adult Lithians, who stand 12′ tall in reptilian bodies and have a highly developed culture, cater to their four Earth guests who carry on their deliberations without any input from the Lithians themselves. It is only the innocuous gift of Chtexa to Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, the Jesuit biologist and narrator of the novel, of his not yet ‘born’ child Egtverchi that the Lithians are given a voice of sorts that is still unheard by the humans who play host. Ultimately, the humans are arrogant towards the Lithians and their culture. They cut down their “Message Tree” which enables their global network of navigation and communication, and through their experiments they destroy the entire planet after Egtverchi’s return. Most importantly, Ruiz, who submits the heretical belief aligned with Philip K. Dick’s cosmogony that the adversary or demiurge has creative abilities and that the seemingly perfect Lithian world and its people are a trap for humanity, cannot see that it is humanity that is at fault for their blindness to the possibilities in a vast cosmos for other points of view and other paradises that are not imbued with human-Christian dogmatic trappings.

    Ruiz is an interesting character who tries to work out the unique case of conscience of Lithia. He and his other evaluators of Lithia are each blinded by his own cultural and educational restraints. These humans who are on Lithia for some time never get around to studying the Lithians themselves, and it is only at the end that Ruiz learns how the Lithians procreate and develop into adults. This realization comes to Ruiz as a hidden danger, and a fact that leads him to think of the Lithians as creations of the Adversary/Satan rather than souled creations of Almighty God. Their perfections, in Ruiz’s worldview and experience, can only be aberrations of the design that he believes was put into effect on Earth. Even at the end, as he is intoning the rites of exorcism, he cannot see that it is human beliefs that has colored what Lithia is and how humans see Lithia.

    A Case of Conscience is a superb example of postcolonial science fiction. It starts off with the power of an Asmovian hard science fiction combined with the social. Lithians have a well developed society that the humans, even Ruiz who knows their language, does not actively work to engage. Even this seemingly interested character does not leave his plant specimens long enough to realize that the Lithians are far more interesting and important to any decision arrived at by the visiting human contingent than the other studies these humans are undertaking. Back on Earth, the social constraints of living underground, which comes about from the Cold War and mirroring Dick’s The Penultimate Truth, explodes when Chtexa’s child Egtverchi incites the human outsiders of society to revolt.

    Egtverchi is an outsider to human culture, but he is still a product of human culture. The Lithians do carry a certain amount of memories and ingrained abilities in their DNA, but Egtverchi’s acculturation and learning, particularly his developmental years under observation and scientific examination, mold him into a being divorced from his own people who can pass judgement on humanity as excluding certain individuals from the decision making process and full enjoyment of modern life. However, Ruiz, Michelis, and the others cannot see this. They cannot see that Egtverchi is a creation of humanity and it is not his Lithian-ness that makes him capable of inciting unrest on Earth. They cannot see that humanity had passed judgement on Lithia without understanding the Lithians or even caring that the Lithians had a society and culture or that the Lithians have agency and sovereignty. Ruiz and the others, even the Asian female scientist Liu Meid, use their own discursive background to assert authority over Egtverchi and the Lithians.

    A Case of Conscience is a powerfully moving novel that should be more widely read, not necessarily for its connection to Avatar, but as another science fiction work that challenges humanity to not be so bullheaded and domineering when it comes to excluded persons or groups. This novel would be a strong text for a postcolonialism course as well as other courses in which hegemony of various colors is challenged, critiqued, and questioned. It is a hard science fiction novel, which means that Blish does spend some time explaining his science. Nevertheless, his character development of Ruiz in particular carries the novel. Ruiz is depicted as a likable person who wants to do right, but he cannot see right outside of his situation as a Jesuit scientist. He requires his beliefs in Christianity to provide a basis for his logic. As such, his logic is human and male centric. The Lithians lose their appealing interest to him when he fits them into his domineering logic of Christian belief. For him, that belief cannot change, even allowing for his heresies, so the Lithians must be made to serve a particular preselected role within his belief system. I hope that you will read this novel, and in doing so, find yourself disheartened with human chauvinism. You may also find some relevant threads connecting the novel to America’s current conquests in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    And a final question: How many science fictions have Jesuit or religious order protagonists? I’m thinking of Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Stephenson’s Anathem, and MacDonald’s Brazyl.