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"Once we had our data, we divided it up into works set in the Near Future (0-50 years from the time the work came out), Middle Future (51-500 years from the time the work came out) and Far Future (501+ years from the time the work came out)."
"Battle Royale and The Hunger Games are young adult novels in which governments force teenagers to kill each other. Comparing these books to classic works by William Golding and Robert Sheckley suggests that, while becoming more skeptical about governments, we've become more trusting about our own nature."
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At the close of the Korean War, it came naturally to Sheckley and Golding to portray people as the problem and government as the solution – Takami and Collins, writing in our times, begin with the reverse assumption, and to make this comparison is to sense how far, in the intervening decades, the pendulum of consensus has swung from Hobbes towards Rousseau. Books like Battle Royale ↑ and The Hunger Games ↑ would have seemed too subversive of adult authority to have been published or perhaps even conceived in the 1950s – but does this mean we have become less naïve, or just that we have become naïve in a different way?
"The infinite bookshelf is already a problem for us. To add to the fun, once we enter the world of ebooks, nothing ever goes out of print. So works going back many years or decades are presented with equal priority to the latest new titles.
Upshot: we badly need better curation. Amazon and their competitors could present the results of author searches pre-sorted by time since publication and by language and by series. But that's barely a start.
Genre, in the ebook space, is a ball and chain. It stops you reaching new audiences who might like your work."
Some typologies on length and style of fictional series.
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I’ve talked before about the different kinds of series, which I summed up as:
Style One, The Lord of the Rings, one book with extra pieces of cardboard.
Style Two, Doctrine of Labyrinths, where you have some volume closure but need to read the books in order.
Style Three, Vlad and Vorkosigan, where the cumulative effect of reading all of them is to give you a story arc and more investment in the characters, but it doesn’t really matter where you start and whether you read them in order.
Style Four, Union Alliance, where the volumes are completely independent of each other though they may reflect interestingly on each other
"It's as a response to that cultural void that science fiction becomes genuinely interesting. In the midst of an ever accelerating technological revolution, science fiction has emerged as the literature best able to articulate the relentless pace of social change. And as that technological revolution has spread outward from the western world, so the symbols and archetypes of science fiction have become a shared language for understanding the new world we are entering."
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The geek culture that made Marvel comics part of its mythology has, like all other cultures, been repurposed by capitalism as a way of selling products to the mass market. And with an estimated 25% of under-34s self-identifying with the geek demographic, it's arguable that geek culture is really just a response to a lack of culture, a generation who have grown up alienated from any sense of cultural belonging, and are left clinging on to Hollywood product
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There may only be a small wave of translated SF reaching the anglophone world today, but the internet is quickly unleashing much more. I'm only beginning to scratch the surface myself. Who are the other international SF authors we should all be reading today?
"In fact, said Stephenson, we already have much of the fundamental technology we need to fulfill such science fiction ambitions as large scale solar power production, or routine space flight. Instead, he said, we need to start looking at the non-technological obstacles to these advances, citing insurance as a key example. The development of alternative space launch systems has been curtailed by the unwillingness of the insurance industry to underwrite satellite launches on systems for which there is no good model of the risk involved. Turning to the audience of mostly MIT students, Stephenson said "maybe some of you people need to go into the insurance industry instead of writing code."
"Which got me wondering whether the future that is already here might include a class for whom space travel is not merely an interesting idea, but one that is affordable."
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The diminishing marginal utility law dictates that the more money we have, the less utility we get from any additional incremental gain. And this bites the top 1% very hard indeed.
Examine the world around us from the point of view of someone with a net income of $5M/year ...
Food is essentially free; you can afford to spend $1000 per meal, three meals a day, in the most expensive restaurants in London or Tokyo or Manhattan, and not make a dent in your income. (Oddly, even the hyper-rich don't typically spend $1000 on lunch every day: a more realistic expectation might be to dine out expensively twice a week, for $100K/year, and have the best of everything in-house the rest of the time, with a live-in chef, for another $100K/year.)
Clothing is essentially free; want a different $5000 suit for every day of the week? That's going to set you back only $35K! Spouse wants a dozen designer evening gowns a year? That's still going to be on the low side of $200K.
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There are some things that having an income of $5M/year, or even $5Bn/year, can't buy you.
First on the list is health.
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"I came to utopia by accident, having painted myself into a corner with an idea for a trilogy: three science fiction novels consisting of an after-the-fall novel, a dystopia and a utopia, all set in the same place, and about the same distance into the future. The idea came to me in 1972, and I didn’t know how to write a novel then, so the plan needed brooding on. Some sixteen years later, the time came for the utopia. I had written the after-the-fall novel, The Wild Shore, and the dystopia, The Gold Coast. The utopia was the only one left."
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I had also come to feel that many people, and especially many of my leftist colleagues, thought of science as merely the instrument of power — as the most active and effective wing of capitalism. This now struck me as wrong. To me it seemed that we actually exist in a situation that can better be described as ‘science versus capitalism’: a world in which smaller progressive concepts such as environmentalism, environmental justice, social justice, democracy itself — all these were going to be defeated together, unless they were aligned with the one great power that might yet still successfully oppose a completely capitalist future, which was science. I was thinking with a very broad brush at this point, almost mythologically you might say, but it struck me as an interesting story to tell, a new story with some possible analytic value. So I wrote the Science in the Capital trilogy with these thoughts in mind.
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Now the future is a kind of attenuating peninsula; as we move out on it, one side drops off to catastrophe; the other side, nowhere near as steep, moves down into various kinds of utopian futures. In other words, we have come to a moment of utopia or catastrophe; there is no middle ground, mediocrity will no longer succeed. So utopia is no longer a nice idea, but a survival necessity. This is a big change. We need to take action to start history on a path onto the side of the peninsula representing one kind of better future or another; the details of it don’t matter, survival without catastrophe is what matters. In essence the seven billion people we have, and the nine to ten billion people we’re likely to have, exist at the tip of an entire improvised complex of prostheses, which is our technology considered as one big system. We live out at the end of this towering complex, and it has to work successfully for us to survive; we are far past the natural carrying capacity of the planet in terms of our numbers. There is something amazing about the human capacity to walk this tightrope over the abyss without paralysing fear. We’re good at ignoring dangers; but now, on the attenuating peninsula, on the crazy tower of prostheses — however you envision it, it is a real historical moment of great danger, and we need to push hard for utopia as survival, because failure now is simply unacceptable to our descendants, if we have any.
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"The people who created modern fantasy, safe to say, were not normal. They led reasonably normal lives, perhaps, but the territory inside their skulls was well off anybody’s map. Think of William Morris obsessively detailing floral wallpaper designs while his wife Jane was off boffing Dante Rossetti; James Branch Cabell spending decades writing his arch, umpty-volume saga about human futility while the twentieth century sang its song of greed, progress, and mass murder; JRR Tolkien (catholic and married in a day when Oxford dons just weren’t) doing scholarly work on the Oxford English Dictionary while secretly transforming his linguistic obsessions into the neography of Middle Earth; and Mervyn Peake— well, just look at Gormenghast, will you?"
Review and commentary on R.A. Lafferty
"As a student of epidemiology and economics I feel duty-bound to apply my cursory knowledge of statistics to the novel natural cohort presented in the Hunger Games novel, as documented by author Suzanne Collins. I present a Hunger Games survival analysis: in a Cox proportional hazards model, which covariates are associated with the odds (or hazard ratios) being ever in your favor? A taste of what’s to come:"
"What fascinates me is the user interface by which the Plan is read and explored by "Speakers" -- the secret members/academics/bureaucrats of the Second Foundation. It is projected on the wall as a network of dense, interlocking equations by a device named the "Prime Radiant," and manipulated using a combination of gestural interface and thought control. Black equations were part of the original Seldon plan; red is used for those added by Speakers; blue is where unanticipated deviations from the plan have occurred."
Philip K. Dick
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
Eds. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, November 2011. 944 pp.
_____. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
1964. Mariner, October 2011. 240 pp.
_____. Ubik
1969. Mariner, April 2012. 240 pp.
_____. VALIS
1981. Mariner, October 2011. 288 pp.
_____. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
1982. Mariner, October 2011. 256 pp.
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Dick’s convoluted sci-fi plots are best read allegorically in any case, and I think Three Stigmata and Ubik deserve to be seen as two of the starkest parables of the Marxian concept of reification ever written. The entropic settings of both novels are indistinguishable from our mundane world of consumer capitalism, where meaningful distinctions between people and objects have collapsed: Humans have become mere things to be drugged and manipulated, while artifacts have become efficacious, quasi-spiritual agents. The characters in both books routinely emit a debased jargon full of advertising slogans and empty journalese, all the while moving through an object-world that seems vitalized by the very powers they have lost. Yet there remains the possibility, however absurd, of a kind of salvation, of some transcendent message that can break through the reified crust and put the characters in touch with their essential selves. This invasive signal, emanating from a higher dimension, is usually cryptic and distorted by noise, and can often be confused with the welter of garbage surrounding it. As Dick would put it in VALIS, “the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum” — and this is how the first inklings of Dick’s later oracles vouchsafe themselves in his early work.
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