Get your dose of science fiction by ear

Audio science fiction podcasts are available at http://www.starshipsofa.com/. If you think life is too harried and your reading time is cut beyond belief, then this podcast blog might be the answer, if you have an MP3 player or phone that will play back MP3 files.

One of particular note is "The Vicar of Mars" by Gwyneth Jones. You can find it on this site, read by the author.

Isn't modern life cool?

Science Fiction on the Web: Pioneer One

A friend just told me today about an exciting series on the Web: Pioneer One. Here is what I know about it so far. You can watch it via YouTube.

About Pioneer One
http://www.pioneerone.tv/about/
Pioneer One Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoYnnsiicwE
Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One
Pioneer One Episode 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68RD46kl8ng
Episode 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG-iLENGDrk
Episode 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32YBygD3_iM
Episode 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbThDmSGCNM

I am not a futurist

This blog post essay is from a science fiction author from Britain.

You can verify her post's contention by rereading lots of the 50's and 60's SF (or a smattering sample thereof) to see that, although they write about a far-distant future for the most part, they are writing ABOUT today's issues and concerns.

Even if authors try hard to think they are cutting edge or beyond when they write about the future, if they are going to be successful, they HAVE to write for the audience who will read or purchase their material. As an example, it would have been fairly fruitless for someone in the 1920's to write a body of literature exploring a future with race relations as we find them in the 21st century reality. The world and the reading public just was not ready to embrace the ideas that underlie the day-to-day workings of our world.

Comments are welcomed.

Asimov's fictional model used now

I grew up reading science fiction. One of my very favorite authors was Isaac Asimov. He brought hard science into his stories in ways that made them ever so much more engaging and "real" to me as a science-enthused youngster of the 1950's. My favorite of his longer works was his Foundation trilogy (at least in the fifties...he later wrote several surrounding stories to expand on that future world).

The stories of this series were started by exposing readers to a brilliant mathematician named Hari Seldon, who used his skills to forecast actions of the many worlds in his civilization far into the future. Imagine MY surprise when I find out current, real-world arithmeticians are using current computers to work down the path he created in his stories!

Here is the abstract of the work done:

The Seldon model combines concepts from agent-based
modeling and social network analysis to create a computation
model of social dynamics for terrorist recruitment.
The underlying recruitment model is based on
a unique hybrid agent-based architecture that contains
simple agents (individuals such as expatriates) and abstract
agents (conceptual entities such as society and
mosques). Interactions between agents are determined
by multiple social networks which form and dissipate
according to the actions of the individual. We have implemented
a Java-based toolkit to evaluate the dynamics
of social behavior and the specific dynamics associated
with terrorist recruitment described by expert social scientists,
creating an architecture for simple adaptation to
other group phenomenon.

A fellow science fiction fan/ham radio operator sent me this link today (it is a Portable Document File). I'm pleased to expose you to it.

And researchers at Virginia Tech are using 163 variables from 100 gigabytes of population data to help them to determine possible influenza spread. Discussion of the effort can be found here.

Comments welcomed.

Robot bartenders and liquor organs

The wonderful Make blog contains this piece about robot bartenders:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/05/robot_bartender.html

And separately:

"Gallegher Plus"

(May 31, 2004)

From the November 1943 issue of ASTOUNDING, this is one of the five 'Gallegher' stories by Henry Kuttner. (Although they were first published under the Lewis Padgett name, his wife C.L. Moore has said she had nothing to do with writing these stories; a bit unusual, as the two usually collaborated on most of what they wrote.)

These tales are very clever and well constructed, with a surreal sense of humour. I personally found them more amusing than hysterically funny, but of course we all have different ideas on what's hilarious or not. The basic premise is that a young man named Galloway Gallegher drinks pretty much nonstop. When completely sotted, his subconscious comes to the surface and takes over but, instead of being a monstrous Mr Hyde, this Gallegher Plus is an inventive supergenius who cobbles together astounding devices from materials at hand.

The next morning, crawling about poisoned by his hangover, the regular Gallegher is faced with a bizarre invention he has no memory of constructing and which he has to deal with. Since our hero has absolutely no technical knowledge, he is completely lost when faced with this unlikely gizmos. One such invention is the recurring sidekick in the series, a narcissistic robot called Joe. (Joe by the way is a delight, obsessed with his own mechanical beauty and filled with withering remarks about we repulsive meat creatures. "I'll get you a robe. Your ungainly body offends my aesthetic feelings," he informs his creator, fresh from the shower.

In this particular tale, Gallegher is suffering his usual morning hangover as he realizes that most of his backyard was vanished, the soil apparently vaporized by a goofy looking contraption he must have worked up the night before. Giving the matter some urgency, Gallegher finds he has promised to come up with inventions requested by three different people, all of whom advanced him large sums of money he no longer has. Faced with summonses to appear in court and harassing messages from his clients, Gallegher has to muddle through the situation and solve all his
problems at once.

What makes the stories funny is that the dayime Gallegher (who is usually partly sober) has no memory of what the soused Gallegher Plus was up to. He has to go about his business as if he knows what's going on, making him something like a detective trying to solve his own mystery. In this particular case, after much turmoil and tense moments, he finds out the answers to the demands from all three clients are right in front of him. And he also learns why the gizmo plays "St. James Infirmary" while it's functioning....

The story seems to be set in some indeterminate near future – there are references to things like taxiplanes and dashboard teledirectories, as well as a man being hard to reach because he's away on Callisto – but it's not really necessary. Except for a few inessential details, we might as well be in 1943 Manhattan from the way everyone talks and acts. A man in a derby playing pinball in a saloon.... that's really not a futuristic image.

What gives the Gallegher stories a slightly bizarro atmosphere is the nonjudgmental attitude of the characters (and the narrator) toward our hero's alcohol habit. For at least the past ten or fifteen years that I've noticed, popular entertainment has really been dead set against drinking and smoking. Watching the Thin Man movies from the 1930s (where Nick and Nora seldom put down their glasses) or reading detective stories from the 1940s (where Mike Shayne seems to function better with brandy than with any sleep), I'm amazed to recall that until fairly recently, getting drunk was considered fairly amusing. (Remember that guy on the Jackie Gleason show who sang a beautiful song while plastered?)

Gallegher carries this to an extreme, even for that more tolerant period. It`s not like he's cold hard sober most of the time and just becomes Gallegher Plus after two martinis. No, this boy is hitting the sauce constantly. He has set up a "liquor organ" by his couch which dispenses various combinations of booze through a tube. At one point, he goes with a shady character on an alphabetical barcrawl ("You start with A – absinthe – and then work along, brandy, Cointreau, daiquiri, egg flip..."). They have to fudge a bit here and there, and must start all over after realizing they skipped 'N'. Egads, I can only imagine synthetic livers are inexpensive and readily available in this era.

Aside from being an ingenious puzzle story, in which the hero has to figure out what his other self did, while pretending to be on top of things, "Gallegher Plus" is filled with amusing little touches. The vain robot Joe says he will allow people to watch him dance if they wish, but at the same time he has no problem with the idea of breaking a few heads ("I like blood. It`s a primary color.") Four Gallegher stories by Henry Kuttner appeared in ASTOUNDING in 1943, with a fifth in 1948. They were collected in an anthology with the puzzling title ROBOTS HAVE NO TAILS. Now, if someone would only gather his Hogben stories about the superpowered hillbillies into one book...

Above quote excerpted from this page.

British speed to change: rocket car

Today I read a blog entry about a new Brit effort to capture the imagination of school children in order to convince them that they should pour their future educational efforts into science and engineering directions. A 1,000+ mph ground vehicle and huge engineering feats are planned.

The effort involves years of effort. Many people are involved in this endeavor (some of whom might lose their lives in the process...or gain fame; some may lose their fortunes...or gain more). The designers even think the possible future of their nation is at stake in some sense. They posit that if something like this isn't done, the country will sink into a morass of little expansion of ideas and become technologically moribund.

All this effort is based on adults' views of what the children of today are going to do with the world presented to them as they come into adulthood. It is a view that is slanted by the kids they see spending all their time with video games, growing less interested in the world around them (as represented by science) than the world of fantasy and play.

However, the world has always seen children play and use fantasies to either escape or deal with the harsh realities they see around them on their way to adulthood. I suppose these fellows see today's children as never giving up their play and fantasies in order to deal with the real world they will find as adults.

Is all this placing too much into these fellows' read of the path of growth of today's children? Will lives be sacrificed in vain? Fortunes squandered for nothing? Your comments are welcomed.

3-D image available of the Iwo Jima flag raising

Now, that subject is just one that I never thought I'd be either typing or uttering. How can technology go backward in time to bring such an image to fruition? Check it out. And don't forget to dig up those 3-D glasses you tucked away for a rainy day.

Each time we think that we've wrung about all we can from some situation or that we have all the information gathered into a definitive bundle, science and human ingenuity come forth to bring a new basket full of goodies to grandma's house!

When I was in high school, reading science fiction short stories at the library in about 1963, I recall reading one where scientists had figured out how to solve murders by being able to recreate the scene of the murder if they did so within a few hours of the crime, the scene remained undisturbed, and it occurred indoors. If you keep up with criminology science or (if you're not scientifically inquisitive in your reading) if you watch any or all of the current CSI crop of crime shows (or the new Bones) on television, you will just be boggled by all the science that has flowed together to create a 21st-century approximation of that step. Careful detective work by enough police technologists, enough thought on the part of the detectives, coupled with good writing of the show's authors, lead us to a logical conclusion and the solution of the crime.

As in another science fiction story I read not too long ago, the society's images will more and more be present to all on the worldwide web of computers connected together, making such images more common. Any big event will have multiple photographers recording it, side by side and from different angles, making 3-D and quasi-solid images viewable from all around more and more possible.