Neuromancer annd Dead Idols

The voice at the other end of the phone was all charm, from the South by way of Vancouver, B.C.. I took a seat in the lobby of the posh Clift Hotel. I drank coffee, a tall Starbucks' Misto, from a cardboard cup. And I thought about the man I was about to meet...
Gibson. William Gibson. Celebrated novelist. The man who coined the term "cyberspace." Treated like a rock star by Wired. Sent to interview U2 some years back by Details. Recently asked to write about the Net by the New York Times.
At 48, Gibson has just published his fifth novel, Idoru (the Japanese word for idol). And so he is here, in San Francisco for a few days before heading on to the next city. Traveling the book promotion circuit, moving from one first class hotel to another, picked up by a limo and driven from interview to book store, book store to interview. Gibson is not the first to benefit from the '90s concept of author-as-celebrity, but he is, 12 years after the publication of Neuromancer, the novel that made him a star, certainly accustomed to the fine art of late '90s book promotion. "Writers are people who work away in the basement by themselves," he'll tell me shortly. But this, this book promotion thing, "is like being a rock star, only without the parties."

Probably one of the best introductions to an influential work I've read in agea. Gibson is more than a pioneer, he is a visionary, and the future before us is a testament.

The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball

So hook yourself up to an airshipStrap on your mask and your knifeFor the wide open skies are a-callingAnd oh, it’s a glorious life! 

—Conductors Recruitment Advertisement, 1890

I really enjoyed this short story about airship conductors in Lightspeed Magazine. The magazine is quickly taking my attention away from the likes of Omni and Analog.

Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End

Childhood’s End was published in 1953. It’s a truly classic science fiction novel, and a deeply influential one, and one of the books that makes Clarke’s reputation. It’s also a very very strange book. It does as much as any half dozen normal books, and all in 218 pages, and it does it by setting up expectations and completely overturning them, repeatedly.

The prologue of Childhood’s End is brilliant, and it stands completely alone. It’s 1975. There’s an ex-Nazi rocket scientist in the U.S. worrying that his old friend the ex-Nazi rocket scientist in the U.S.S.R. will reach the moon before him. You’ve read this story a million times, you know where it’s going, you settle in to a smooth familiar kind of ride. Then quietly without any fuss, huge alien ships appear over all of Earth’s major cities. And this is just the first surprise, the first few pages of a book that goes about as far from the standard assumptions and standard future of SF as it’s possible to go.

Spoilers! Everyone dies!

People talk about SF today being too gloomy — my goodness, Childhood’s End has all of humanity die and then the Earth destroyed. It’s not even relentlessly upbeat about it, it has a elegaic tone.

More: Wow! Wait, What? Wow!: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End | Tor.com

Designing the Perfect Engineer in Prometheus

Blockbuster film designer and creature creator Neville Page talks about the unlikely influences he used to create the engineer in Prometheus.  Page is currently designing elements of Ridley Scott's new Blade Runner.

Science Fiction and Individual Liberty

Classical literary science fiction has become far removed from modern sci-fi film. The latest Star Trek film is a stark contrast from the deep intellectual exploration of the themes of individuality versus collectivism, the role of the state, and an optimistic view of the future from works like Asimov's Foundation, Herbert's Dune, or the work of Heinlein. 

http://blog.independent.org/2013/08/01/star-trek-films-fail-because-freedom-has-progressed/

Doctor Puppet Episode 4 - Smoke and Mirrors

▶ Doctor Puppet Episode 4 - Smoke and Mirrors - YouTube

Peter Capaldi is the Doctor

*SPOILERS* Peter Capaldi is introduced to the world as the next Doctor! - Doctor Who - BBC One - YouTube

Doctor WHO

Peter Capaldi, who played the character "W.H.O. Doctor" in World War Z, will be taking over for Matt Smith as the 12th Doctor Who this fall. Only time will tell if he will fill the role as well as his predecessors.

World War Z

Getting ready to go see World War Z, expecting good things.

http://imdb.com/rg/an_share/title/title/tt0816711/

Faith and Childhood's End

Arthur C. Clarke on faith,  from Childhood's End:

"Profounder things had also passed. It was a completely secular age. Of the faiths that had existed before the coming of the Overlords, only a form of purified Buddhism-perhaps the most austere of all religions-still survived. The creeds that had been based upon miracles and revelations had collapsed utterly. With the rise of education, they had already been slowly dissolving, but for a while the Overlords had taken no sides in the matter. Though Karellen was often asked to express his views on religion, all that he would say was that a man's beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others."

"Perhaps the old faiths would have lingered for generations yet, had it not been for human curiosity. It was known that the Overlords had access to the past, and more than once historians had appealed to Karellen to settle some ancient controversy. It may have been that he had grown tired of such questions, but it is more likely that he knew perfectly well what the outcome of his generosity would be…"

Quatermass and the Pit on the Internet Archive

Lots of new content finding its way to the Internet Archive these days, including this first episode of the third Quartermass series. This is what the Internet was intended to become; an open repository of content. 

http://archive.org/details/QuatermassAndThePit-EpisodeOne

Clarke on Two-Dimensional Life

"The planet was absolutely flat. Its enormous gravity had long ago crushed into one uniform level the mountains of its fiery youth-mountains whose mightiest peaks had never exceeded a few metres in height. Yet there was life here, for the surface was covered with a myriad geometrical patterns that crawled and moved and changed their colour. It was a world of two dimensions, inhabited by beings who could be no more than a fraction of a centimetre in thickness."

From Aurthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, the author offers what reminds me of what Flatland must look like to a visitor, though I cannot imagine how a three-dimensional creature could survive under these pressures. 

Lightspeed

Arthur C. Clarke on near-lightspeed travel, from Childhood's End:

    "The important fact was that I knew how far they had to travel, and therefore how long the journey took. NGS 549672 is forty light-years from Earth. The Overlords ships reach more than ninety-nine per cent of the speed of light, so the trip must last forty years of our dine. Our time; that's the crux of the matter.
    "Now as you may have beard, strange things happen as one approaches the speed of light. Time itself begins to flow at a different rate-to pass more slowly, so that what would be months on Earth would be no more than days on the ships of the Overlords. The effect is quite fundamental; it was discovered by the great Einstein more than a hundred years ago.
    "I have made calculations based on what we know about the Stardrive, and using the firmly-established results of Relativity theory. From the viewpoint of the passengers on one of the Overlord ships, the journey to NGS 549672 will last not more than two months-even though by Earth's reckoning forty years will have passed. I know this seems a paradox, and if it's any consolation it's puzzled the world's best brains ever since Einstein announced it.

Continuum, an Agorist Review

Statism comes in all flavors. While Continum appears, on the surface, good science fiction, it comes off more as what happens when the government produces art. Remember Sandman, from Post-WWII Germany? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ojzpuMdSxc&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Continuum, while having a 90s feel in its writing, also has a slightly "off" presentation. Such anti-capitalist sentiments are only felt on the statist side, with anything but an aesthetic delivery. Corporatism is hardly acceptable, my Che Guevara was hardly more than a criminal thug with moral aspirations. Oh, the irony. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW1bFY11tFQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Travis: anyone that smart is actually smart. 

Continuum

You're welcome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDzP72R1wus&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Future Sights of London

London of the future, from Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End:

"London had changed enormously in the last fifty years. It now contained scarcely two million people, and a hundred times as many machines. It was no longer a great port, for with every country producing almost all its needs, the entire pattern of world trade had been altered. There were some goods that certain countries still made best, but they went directly by air to their destinations. The trade routes that had once converged on the great harbours, and later on the great airports, had finally dispersed into an intricate web-work covering the whole world with no major nodal points."

"Yet some things had not altered. The city was still a centre of administration, of art, of learning. In these matters, none of the continental capitals could rival it-not even Paris, despite many claims to the contrary. A Londoner from a century before could still have found his way around, at least at the city's centre, with no difficulty. There were new bridges over the Thames, but in the old places. The great, grimy railway stations had gone-banished to the suburbs. But the Houses of Parliament were unchanged; Nelson's solitary eye still stared down Whitehall; the dome of St. Paul's still stood above Ludgate Hill, though now there were taller buildings to challenge its preeminence."

Arthur C. Clarke on Theism from Childhood's End

"Profounder things had also passed. It was a completely secular age. Of the faiths that had existed before the coming of the Overlords, only a form of purified Buddhism-perhaps the most austere of all religions-still survived. The creeds that had been based upon miracles and revelations had collapsed utterly. With the rise of education, they had already been slowly dissolving, but for a while the Overlords had taken no sides in the matter. Though Karellen was often asked to express his views on religion, all that he would say was that a man's beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others."

Buddhism has always been the only faith in which I have ever placed any stock, and as I grow older it becomes easy to understand why. Many religions have an inherent function that is hierarchical and controlling, a form of coerced social order, and a lack of accessible education promotes the fears that drive the persistence of such faiths. Attempting to live a life free of coercion and violence, as Clarke offers in Childhood's End, I can only think of Buddhism as being compatible, even for those with a more scientific or skeptical disposition. 

Being both agnostic and agoristic, Clarke's vision for the future lays out a social change that comes through voluntary interaction and cessation of coercion and violence, with the Overlords merely showing humanity the destructive results of our own actions, intervening only to prevent harm to others. 

Its just a little Dalek...

Eight O’Clock in the Morning

He had to kill several more before he got into the studio itself, including all the engineers on duty. There were a lot of police sirens outside, excited shouts, and running footsteps on the stairs. The alien was sitting before the the TV camera saying, "We are your friends. We are your friends," and didn't see George come in. When George shot him with the needle gun he simply stopped in mid-sentence and sat there, dead. George stood near him and said, imitating the alien croak, "Wake up. Wake up. See us as we are and kill us!"

It was George's voice the city heard that morning, but it was the Fascinator's image, and the city did awake for the very first time and the war began.

George did not live to see the victory that finally came. He died of a heart attack at exactly eight o'clock.

From Eight O'clock in the Morning, the inspiration for the film They Live.

Clarke on Human Affairs

Arthur C Clarke, from Childhood's End, on the state of human affairs:

"I do not necessarily quarrel with Federation as an ultimate objective-though many of my supporters might not agree. But it must come from within-not be superimposed from without. We must work out our own destiny. There must be no more interference in human affairs!"

Sometimes, a chunk of tangible enlightenment jumps off the pages at me, and is a reassuring encouragement in such unstable times. Clarke is quite observant with an astute view that individuals must be left to make their own choices in life, for only by experiencing the consequences of our actions do we gain the knowledge to progress in life toward achievement, while intervention and prohibition prevents those learning experiences, and society suffers. Those who oppose intervention and actions by the state, like Clarke, are seeking progress from within. The state is simply unfit to exist. 

The Economics of Time Travel

Watching the sci-fi movie Looper, I find myself analyzing it from multiple perspectives, so needless to say I will have to watch it again soon. I enjoyed the film, along with the level at which it addressed the science involved in time travel; enough to attract viewers with a new twist, but not so much that it overwhelms the audience in it's complexity. This is good because it makes the film a fun ride without feeling like you've just prepared for a quiz. 

In a future in which government has given way to corruption and violence, "loopers" are assasins, with their targets being delivered from a future in which time travel is prohibited by law. As with government prohibition, the typical effect is that the market moves into the black, ignoring the law entirely. 

The guns are also varied and unique themselves, with much creativity on the part of the production crew. 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276104/

Quantum Vibe

An interesting online comic with a variety of important themes: http://www.quantumvibe.com/strip?page=507

From A Princess of Mars

A wonderfully-written section of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars, which details the appearance of the pseudo-bipedal Martains:

"Five or six had already hatched and the grotesque caricatures which sat blinking in the sunlight were enough to cause me to doubt my sanity. They seemed mostly head, with little scrawny bodies, long necks and six legs, or, as I afterward learned, two legs and two arms, with an intermediary pair of limbs which could be used at will either as arms or legs. Their eyes were set at the extreme sides of their heads a trifle above the center and protruded in such a manner that they could be directed either forward or back and also independently of each other, thus permitting this queer animal to look in any direction, or in two directions at once, without the necessity of turning the head.
The ears, which were slightly above the eyes and closer together, were small, cup-shaped antennae, protruding not more than an inch on these young specimens. Their noses were but longitudinal slits in the center of their faces, midway between their mouths and ears.
There was no hair on their bodies, which were of a very light yellowish-green color. In the adults, as I was to learn quite soon, this color deepens to an olive green and is darker in the male than in the female. Further, the heads of the adults are not so out of proportion to their bodies as in the case of the young.
The iris of the eyes is blood red, as in Albinos, while the pupil is dark. The eyeball itself is very white, as are the teeth. These latter add a most ferocious appearance to an otherwise fearsome and terrible countenance, as the lower tusks curve upward to sharp points which end about where the eyes of earthly human beings are located. The whiteness of the teeth is not that of ivory, but of the snowiest and most gleaming of china. Against the dark background of their olive skins their tusks stand out in a most striking manner, making these weapons present a singularly formidable appearance."

Doctor Who Ketchup

"What respectable man doesn't carry a trowel?"

From the BBC: An unmanned spaceship hurtles towards certain destruction - unless the Doctor can save it, and its impossible cargo... of dinosaurs! By his side a ragtag gang of adventurers; a big game hunter, an Egyptian Queen and a surprised member of the Pond family. But little does the Doctor know there is someone else onboard who will stop at nothing to keep hold of his precious, prehistoric cargo:

I've let the Doctor slip ahead of me a bit, so now I'm having to try to catch up. And what better way to play catch-up?

An unmanned spaceship hurtles towards certain destruction, unless the Doctor can save it, along with its impossible cargo... of dinosaurs! By his side are a ragtag gang of adventurers: a big game hunter, an Egyptian queen and a surprised member of the Pond family. But little does the Doctor know that there is someone else onboard who will stop at nothing to keep hold of his precious, prehistoric cargo.

A Princess of Mars...

I opened my eyes upon a strange and weird landscape. I knew that I was on Mars; not once did I question either my sanity or my wakefulness. I was not asleep, no need for pinching here; my inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth. You do not question the fact; neither did I.
I found myself lying prone upon a bed of yellowish, mosslike vegetation which stretched around me in all directions for interminable miles. I seemed to be lying in a deep, circular basin, along the outer verge of which I could distinguish the irregularities of low hills.

...from Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic series.

I have found that my desire to read to my children and my desire to read for myself has culminated in reading them a chapter each at their respective bedtimes from a book of my choosing. I have started working on Burroughs' first in the Barsoom series, hoping to instill in them a fusion of their existing adventurist spirits with the amazement of science fiction. With the voluminous size of this collection, I'll have many years of nightly reading before we explore Asimov's Foundation (and the submissions of later authors to the seminal classic in the genre).