Quotulatiousness

May 12, 2013

SF novels for economists

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:38

Noah Smith cobbles together a list of science fiction novels that might be of interest to economists:

Diane Coyle has a blog post called “Classics for economists,” and someone on Twitter requested that I do a companion piece called “Science fiction for economists”, so here it is.

Really, most science fiction is about economics. What makes most future visions interesting is not just the technical particulars of the cool new Stuff, but the social ramifications. Here are some of the sci-fi books that I thought dealt with important economic issues in the most insightful and interesting ways. I also chose only books that I think are well-written, with well-conceived characters, engaging plots, and skillful writing.

1. A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge

2. Makers, by Cory Doctorow

3. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin

4. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow

5. Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge

6. Accelerando, by Charles Stross

7. Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

8. The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi

9. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein

10. Schismatrix, by Bruce Sterling

11. Permutation City, by Greg Egan

12. Reamde, by Neal Stephenson

13. The Game of Thrones series, by George R.R. Martin

In addition to the ones I’ve marked in boldface (that is, I’ve read them and agree they belong on this list), I suspect Stephenson’s Reamde would be worth reading, although I didn’t like Anathem and Smith lauds that as being Stephenson’s “#1 awesomest book”. The best comment on this post is the first one by Anonymous: “When Hari Seldon predicted his exclusion from this list a single tear rolled down his cheek.”

May 1, 2013

Charles Stross on how he conceived his Merchant Princes series

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:15

It’s all about the clichés, apparently:

I have a confession to make: I hate clichés. This is a problem, because a cliché is a good idea that has been re-used so often that it outstays its welcome.

Also, being a Brit of a certain outlook, I do not view monarchism or aristocracy with any degree of nostalgic fondness. The divine right of kings is a post-hoc justification for hereditary dictatorship (current poster-child: Kim Jong-Un) and the feudal age was one of total militarization of society, of petty lords with the right to hang any serf whose face they didn’t like, and of wars ravaging the land every generation.

Finally: I’m lazy and cynical, I get bored easily, and I have a warped sense of humour. Which is how I came up with this series. I grabbed hold of a bunch of clichés and rammed them together until I achieved fusion. And that’s how The Bloodline Feud starts.

Cliché #1: science fiction about people who can travel between different time-lines. The 500 kilo gorilla in this sub-genre is undoubtedly Roger Zelazny’s Amber series (if you count it as SF: I’d say the main protagonists’ outlook qualifies it as such), but honourable runners-up are numerous: Harry Turtledove, John Barnes, add to the list at your leisure. The ability to walk between worlds seems like a wonderful talent that can bring all sorts of benefits: but what if it wasn’t? What if you ran into all the same problems with earning a living, maintaining your personal safety and security, and staying out of trouble that you had in your home time-line? In fact, what if it made everything worse? It seemed to me that this was fertile territory to explore, so I stripped my world-walkers’ ability back to basics and put some onerous limitations on it. It’s not a get out of jail free card. And for added amusement, I decided to give them another handicap: a cultural one.

March 11, 2013

Science fiction’s blindspot on the looming corporate menace of the future

Filed under: Books, Business, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

Kevin Williamson wonders why the dystopic corporate giant of so many science fiction books and movies doesn’t seem to be getting any closer to reality:

That the future will be dominated by amoral international (or interstellar) corporations is a constant theme of science fiction and, not unrelatedly, of progressive political thought. The rogues’ gallery includes Cyberdyne Systems (Terminator), Weyland-Yutani (Alien), Omni Consumer Products (Robocop), and Charlton Heston’s friends at Soylent Inc. The gold standard of the genre is the Tyrel Corporation, from Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The film, which is indisputably a visual masterpiece, is much heavier on the theme of corporate dominance than the novel is, which is strange: The corporation of 1982 was a smaller and weaker thing than the corporation of 1968.

At its best, science fiction imagines a future that illuminates the present, but on the subject of the social role of the corporation, science fiction has long been backward-looking, out of touch with the reality it would analyze. The cultural imagination at large shares this error, though it is difficult to say how much this defect in science fiction is a result of the cultural error and how much it is the cause. But it would be difficult to overstate how deeply the specter of the villainous corporation shapes American political thought. The influence is more visible the farther to the left one moves along the political spectrum. Occupy Wall Street was probably at least as much influenced by science-fiction visions of corporate dystopias as it was by any kind of organized political thought. There were unmistakably Maoist elements to Occupy, but the sinister connotations of the very word “corporation” are by no means heard by only those ears attached to the addled heads of committed leftists.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was set in 1992, Blade Runner in 2019, yet here we are, well into the 21st century, and there is still no colossal Tyrel Corporation bestriding the globe, and nothing like the corporate sovereignties of Jennifer Government. As myth, the corporate dystopia remains undiminished in its power. But the function of myths is to illuminate reality, and the reality is that there is no Tyrel Corporation today, and none on the horizon. If you want to know what the corporation of tomorrow looks like, don’t think Cyberdyne — think Groupon.

You would not know it from reading fiction, speaking with Occupy types, or listening to the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, but the corporation as we know it is in decline: The average size of a corporation as measured by personnel has been diminishing since 1975. In 1955 the largest U.S. company, General Motors, employed 576,000 people out of a U.S. population of 166 million; today Exxon Mobil, the largest U.S. company, employs only 82,000 people. Microsoft employs fewer than 100,000 people worldwide; Google employs about 54,000, and Facebook fewer than 6,000.

January 9, 2013

Will Defiance channel its inner Firefly?

Filed under: Gaming, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:17

Massively looks at the new trailer for MMO-and-TV-show Defiance and senses some Firefly DNA:

As you’re probably aware, the company’s Defiance MMO shooter is entering beta later this month. As you’re also probably aware, the game is being developed in concert with the TV show of the same name, both of which will debut in April.

Yesterday, Syfy released a slick new teaser for the show, and while it doesn’t feature any game footage or really mention the MMO at all other than in the closing tag line, we squeed a bit at the Firefly-esque music and the general awesomeness on display.

January 8, 2013

Charles Stross on vampires

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:41

Now that he’s committed the act of writing a novel that has vampires (The Rhesus Chart, the next “Laundry” story, to be published in July next year), Charles Stross examines the current role of vampires in fiction:

So what are vampires good for?

Leaving aside a whole bunch of different mythological tap-roots, some of which are quite interesting in their own right, the modern western interpretation of the vampire is largely the fault of Bram Stoker (although he, in turn, was working in a literary tradition with notable antecedents such as Varney the Vampire).

The interesting thing about vampires in fiction is what they’re used to represent. Vampires are the talkative reflection of our fears; unlike horde-shambling zombies they’re singular entities, intelligent and outwardly handsome, the exterior shell concealing festering horrors within. And the nature of the horrors in question changes with time. Back in Stoker’s hey-day, the fear of contagion, of the degeneration and insanity that went with syphilis, was clear: so was the clash of uptight Victorian public morality and private lascivious debauchery that went with it. (It’s no accident that Vampirism-as-AIDS was the big metaphor of the 1980s: blood, sex, and death are deeply intertwingled in our collective id.)

More recently, we have a whole bunch of other vampire metaphors. There’s the untrammeled greed angle, the psychopathic serial killer angle, the sexual predator. Vampires are rapists, non-consensual sadists and torturers, serial killers. They are, above all, parasites and sociopaths — you can’t be a vampire, a successful apex predator upon people, and feel much empathy for your prey.

So what do we make of that sub-species of vampire that fucks its food?

One of the weirder twists in the development of a sub-genre happened some time in the early 1990s, with the advent of the paranormal romance. In retrospect it’s fairly obvious what they’re for; they allow the reader to vicariously explore emotional aspects of BDSM without the troublesome need to find a partner with a roll of duct tape and a flogger who also understands the need for safe words. (This may also be a side-effect of changing gender/power relationships in society at large causing confusion, uncertainty, or dissatisfaction with traditional power roles: don’t tell the Pope. Ahem. There’s a really complex knot of issues here, including the implications of the demographic transition for human interpersonal and familial relationships, that is probably food for several PhD theses.)

November 24, 2012

Tim Worstall: Cosmic fun-spoiler

Filed under: Economics, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:42

Writing in The Register, Tim Worstall brings his evil economist gaze to the SF fan’s irrational belief that asteroid mining is the way of the future:

Isn’t it exciting that Planetary Resources is going to jet off and mine the asteroids? This is every teenage sci-fi geek’s dream, that everything we imbibed from Verne through Heinlein to Pournelle is going to come true!

But there’s always someone, isn’t there, someone like me, ready to spoil the party. The bit that I cannot get my head around is the economics of it: specifically, the economics of the mining itself.

In terms of the basic processing of what they want to do I can’t see a problem at all, just as all those authors those years ago could see how it could be done.

Asteroids come in several flavours, and the two we’re interested in here are the ice ones and the nickel iron ones. The icy rocks, with a few solar panels and that very bright 24/7 sunshine up there, can provide water. That’s the first thing we need in abundance if we’re going to get any number of people up off the planet for any appreciable amount of time. And we’d really rather not be sending the stuff up out of the Earth’s gravity well for them.

It’s also true that those nickel iron asteroids are likely to be rich in platinum-group metals (PGMs). They too can be refined with a bit of electricity, and they’re sufficiently valuable (say, for platinum, $60m a tonne, just as a number to use among friends) that we might be able to finance everything we’re trying to do by doing so.

All terribly exciting, all very space cadet, enough to bring tears to the eyes of anyone who ever learnt how to use a slide rule and, as the man said, once you’re in orbit you’re not halfway to the Moon, you’re halfway to anywhere.

Except I’m not sure that the numbers quite stack up here. I’m sure that the engineering is possible, I’m certain that it’s all worth doing and most certainly believe that we want to get up there and start playing around with other parts of the cosmos over and above Gaia. But, but…

November 3, 2012

Firefly references on Castle

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:29

October 6, 2012

Here’s a potentially viable secondary market for SF hardcovers

Filed under: Books, Business, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:14

Charles Stross updates his readers on what’s in the writing and production pipeline, and in the process discovers a niche market that might just be viable:

[…] Because if there’s one thing guaranteed to annoy everyone, it’s embarking on a project that is bound to be at least a year late …

What’s the problem? Well, I only get one slot per 12 months with my main publishers, and they’re nailed down years in advance. And the 2013 slot is currently occupied by Neptune’s Brood, which I finished writing in July this year, about six months later than originally expected. Neptune’s Brood is notionally a space opera, but I prefer to think of it as a parable about the banking liquidity crisis of 2008; the setting is recycled from Saturn’s Children, albeit 5000 years later and without the overt Heinlein homage (and the characters). Unfortunately I’m a slow learner. A chunk of the action takes place on (or rather in) an aquatic super-earth with no land masses: consequently, the early cover art treatments rely on the theory that the book will sell best if, rather than somehow conveying the message that it’s about fractional-reserve banking fraud in a slower than light universe, the cover promises MERMAID BOOBIES!!!1!!

Hmm.

(I wonder if there’s a secondary market for fake dust-jackets for the easily-embarrassed reader, bearing the correct name and title but a different illustration? Signed by the author, even …!)

For example, here is the original cover for Saturn’s Children:

September 18, 2012

Don’t give up hope for warp engines just yet

Filed under: Science, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:28

As we all know, Star Trek‘s faster-than-light warp engines were mere plot devices, not actual ones. There’s no way to travel faster than light, so even our great-grandkids won’t be tripping off to distant (or even nearby) star systems. But wait … NASA’s Harold White looks poised to become the latest hero of the “we wanna go faster than light” brigade:

A top NASA boffin has outlined ongoing lab experiments at the space agency aimed at first steps towards the building of a warp-drive spacecraft theoretically capable of travelling at 10 times the speed of light.

The latest developments at the “Eagleworks” super-advanced space drive lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center were outlined by NASA physicist Harold White at a conference on Friday. The Eagleworks lab was set up at the end of last year to look into such concepts as the Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster and also so-called “warp drives” along the lines proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in the 1990s.

[. . .]

Unfortunately, subsequent investigation appeared to show that while the warp drive might work it would be unfeasibly power hungry: it would require a minimum amount of energy equivalent to completely annihilating the mass of the planet Jupiter.

However White and his NASA Eagleworks colleagues say that’s not necessarily so: it’s all down to the shape of the ring. An improved doughnut design, as opposed to a flat ring, would get the requirement down to something more like just annihilating the Voyager One probe craft.

Voyager masses in the region of 800kg, so by our calculations one would still need a lump of antimatter (or other reasonably compact super power source) which — if it were mishandled — would explode with a force of some 17,000 megatons, equivalent to several global nuclear wars all in one (or 600-odd Tunguska meteor strikes etc). This would inconveniently take humanity’s current atom labs billions of years to make, and there would be other practical issues (see our previous antimatter-bomb analysis here, and then there’d be the exoto-doughnut to fabricate etc).

August 4, 2012

Seeking Mars colonists for one way trip

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

Chris Brandrick on the first civilian recruitment drive for Martian colonization:

Just as NASA’s latest rover prepares to land on the surface of Mars, one Dutch company is looking to up the ante, with plans to send humans to the distant red planet. But before you sign up for travels to faraway lands, you may want to take note that the trip is a one-way deal, meaning you’ll never be able to return home to Earth.

Mars One, the ambitious company behind the planned mission, is hoping that a number of brave civilians will be willing to embark upon the mission to be the first to occupy the planet.

The company, founded by Bas Lansdorp, wants to send a number of humans to live on our neighboring planet indefinitely by 2023. The timeline for the mission will see Mars One send out a communications satellite in 2016, with a rover being sent in 2018 to find a suitable site for a settlement. Once the company finds a suitable location, it’ll send settlement units to Mars in 2020, which the existing rover will then set-up.

Once it gets the settlement established, Mars One hopes to send a small crew that would leave Earth in December of 2022, and arrive in April of 2023.

Visiting Mars would be fantastic, but I think I’ll wait until a return booking is possible.

July 12, 2012

Firefly 10th anniversary TV special to air in November

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

James Hibberd has the details:

To celebrate the cult-favorite sci-fi drama’s 10th anniversary, Science Channel is shooting a new one-hour special chronicling the Firefly cast reunion at Comic-Con this week.

The special — titled Browncoats Unite — will include footage from Friday’s reunion panel, featuring several members of the original team including star Nathan Fillion and creator Joss Whedon. Plus, the cast is shooting an in-depth behind-the-scenes roundtable interview that will dive deeper into burning fan questions about the beloved series. Both the panel and the roundtable will be moderated by Entertainment Weekly‘s own Jeff Jensen.

June 30, 2012

A sneak peek at Lois McMaster Bujold’s next SF novel

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:55

If you’d like to get a taste of the next novel in the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold, the first six chapters of Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance have been posted for your reading pleasure.

June 29, 2012

Coming soon: The Apocalypse Codex by Charles Stross

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:21

His latest novel is number 4 in the “Laundry” series, as Bob Howard recovers from his injuries accumulated over the course of The Fuller Memorandum. It should be on sale in North America next week, and a couple of weeks after that in the UK and (I assume) other European markets.

If you want to order signed copies, right now your only option is Transreal Fiction in Edinburgh, who call me in to sign books. (I will normally sign anything you shove under my nose except a cheque, but I don’t have a signing tour scheduled for The Apocalypse Codex and this is a nose-to-the-grindstone working month for me.)

If you want to know which sales channel give the author most money, the order is: ideally an undiscounted hardback from a small retailer (like Transreal), followed by a discounted hardback from a big box store or Amazon or the undiscounted UK trade paperback, then an ebook, then a discounted trade paperback from a big box store … the book will be available as a mass market paperback or discounted ebook in July 2013, which makes the author even less money, but more than a remaindered copy or a pirate download or library loan.

Want a taster of the contents? Orbit, my UK publisher, are posting extracts over the next week, starting here … or you can look below the cut!

My connection to Charles is pretty obscure: we worked for the same company (in different countries) briefly, and I met him in that context for a few minutes (this was before his writing career had taken off). His political views and mine differ pretty substantially (he thinks libertarians are, at best, deluded), but he’s a very good writer and I’ve enjoyed reading everything of his I’ve encountered.

June 6, 2012

Cassy’s guide to naming spaceships

Filed under: Greece, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:13

You have to put a bit more thought into how you name your spaceships, people of the future!

Dear People of the Future,

Congratulations! If you’re reading this, you’ve just received a state-of-the-art spacecraft, and you’re probably about to take it on an extremely dangerous mission. Your journey may even concern the safety and continued survival of the human race.

But don’t worry! I’m betting your new ride is pretty sick. It’s probably got a warp drive and maybe a solar sail and lots of other technology I couldn’t even begin to understand.

At this point, you’re probably wondering: What should I name my spacecraft?

It’s good advice. Really. But I was surprised to find that there had been a USS Custer, a USS General Burnside, and even the USS Benedict Arnold.

H/T to John Turner for the link.

June 5, 2012

The US military’s SF research emporium

Filed under: Media, Military, Science, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:18

John Turner sent me a link to this amusing little survey of what the US military’s R&D organization is willing to admit they’re working on and how it might be helpful in case of an alien invasion:

As summer blockbuster season kicks into high gear, big-budget action movies like The Avengers, Battleship, and Prometheus remind us that there’s one thing that unites Americans: Our shared fear of an alien attack. They also remind us that when the invading space fleet arrives, humanity is not going to surrender without a fight to our intergalactic invaders. Instead, we will band together to fight off their incredibly advanced weaponry with our … well, with what, exactly? Are we really ready to battle our would-be alien overlords?

Luckily, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, as well as some of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, are dreaming up the weapons of the future today. With the help of everything from lasers on jets to hypersonic planes to invisibility cloaks, we just might be able to make the battle for Earth a fair fight. You may think we’re joking, but why else would NASA be uploading The Avengers to the International Space Station if not as a training manual? Here’s a look at some of the most space-worthy inventions being cooked up now.

An issue for any unmanned, armed vehicle (whether land, sea or air) is the security of communications from the controller to the vehicle. Recent use of such devices has almost always been in combat against relatively low-tech opponents who did not have jamming or hacking capabilities (although the UAV forced down in Iran may signal the end of the easy period for combat UAVs). Earlier discussions of benefits and drawbacks to unmanned fighters are here, here, and here.

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