Super-Important Thoughts About Foundation So Far

This is not Isaac Asimov's Foundation. 

That's not necessarily a bad thing. The original trilogy is clunky. Most of it is characters plotting at one another in rooms of different sizes: Courtrooms, boardrooms, groundcars, abandoned factories, starship cockpits, hotel rooms, apartments. It's often hard to conjure up an image of what's happening, because Asimov provides so little descriptive detail. Until Foundation and Empire, its characters are mostly default white guys. Asimov's prose is workmanlike, but nothing exceptional (although he does have a gift for the occasional character detail - the "pudgy hands" of a man feigning murderous outrage, for instance).

So why is the trilogy considered a masterpiece? 

1. It starts with a grand idea, and sticks with it. For the first one and a half novels, everything is about how Seldon's Plan works out its psychohistorical necessity. In the second half, everything is about restoring the plan after it's fractured by a literally unforeseeable event.

2. It works beautifully in terms of the nuts and bolts of craft. There are no idle characters or story elements in these books: Every character has a purpose, and they work ruthlessly toward it without hesitating or whining or pondering their place in the cosmos. If you're looking for stories that drive forward like clockwork, Foundation is your SF go-to.

 3. It conveys a sense of historical time. Better, it has the audacity to try to convey a sense of historical time.  

So far, AppleTV's Foundation is none of this.

Positives: When it comes to lush physicality, Asimov was lacking, but the TV series is not. In fact, the opening episodes are the most gorgeous SF I've seen on TV in...maybe ever. The decadence of the Empire is laid out on the screen in saturated red, blue, and black with glittering gold and silver highlights. Architecture overwhelms people. Every space, every costume, is crammed with detail. It has grandeur. Also, the people of the Empire are all the colors of the rainbow, and not uniformly male.There are some interesting ideas that could have been the bases of their own series [like the "genetic dynasty" of the Cleons].

BUT...

The TV series seems to have abandoned the fundamental rules of psychohistory...and those are the core of the trilogy. Real quickly, here they are:

1. Psychohistory can predict the future, but only the futures of large groups, like nations, empires, planets, or galaxies. The larger the group, the more accurate the prediction.

2. Psychohistorical predictions don't work if those groups are aware of the laws of psychohistory or the predictions themselves.

3. As a corollary of #1, the actions of individuals almost never have much impact on major events. The best they can do is facilitate matters that are already inevitable. 

Anyone who has tried to write a story can see the trouble with these laws when it comes to narrative: If a character's actions don't matter in the grand scheme, why should a reader care? Asimov finessed the problem with stories in which the protagonists had foreground goals, while larger events took place in the background; with stories in which the characters' actions were full of derring-do but proved fruitless; with stories in which the characters take decisive action while fretting about the consequences of knowing too much about the future; with stories...well, you get the idea. He was brilliant at squaring the circle, and that's part of the fun of the trilogy.

The TV writers are less audacious, less interested in the idea, and more driven by Hollywood tropes that have been used a lot. In the TV version, psychohistory has devolved from a mathematical tool to an oracular power, a magical way of predicting the future. There is still lip service paid to the idea of math, but characters "see" the future basically by staring into a cloud of light motes which is meant to represent a mathematical display. [In the books, this "Prime Radiant" is just a convenient way of portraying complex formulae, the 20th century foreshadowing of a PowerPoint deck; on the TV show, it's portrayed as a semi-magical scrying device that can only rarely be activated except by those who are worthy.] At one point one character activates the display and asks her daughter if she can understand it. The daughter says "no," but this should never have even been a question: At least in theory, anyone with sufficient mathematical training should be able to figure it out, and no one without training should be able to. It's math, not magic; you shouldn't have to be a Chosen One to make it work...but you can see the Chosen One trope tugging at the writers' subconscious all the time.

They've also taken one of my favorite characters and changed him from a cigar-chewing pacifist politician based on Fiorello LaGuardia to a moody young "warden" with an enormous gun who knows she is "different" from the other settlers. Sure, not a Chosen One at all.

The series has not veered irreparably away from the Seldon Plan yet. But the primary indices don't look great.

That Guy on Guns

A lot of folks know Robert Heinlein as one of the Big Names of the Golden Age of Science Fiction - from the 1930s to the 1950s. Some folks know his later, creepier stuff. And every Randian Objectivist nerdbro knows him as the guy who articulated their anarcho-libertarian power fantasies better than they ever could, from TANSTAAFL ("there ain't no such thing as a free lunch") to his famous [or infamous] dictum on guns: An armed society is a polite society. 

That's a quote from one of Heinlein's pulpier works, Beyond This Horizon, in 1942. It's gained enormous currency among gun enthusiasts since then, because it brilliantly encapsulates what might seem to be an obvious train of thought: People won't gratuitously insult, assault, or cheat someone who can kill them.

And that's too bad, for a couple of reasons.

So, Robert Heinlein-

- by know you've probably figured out that I admire him as one of the great science fiction writers and an impressively competent man (holder of patents, predictor of the Roomba & breeder nuclear reactors, trained all-in fighter, influencer of the '60s counterculture, etc.) if not for some of his later political opinions.

So it pleases me to announce that there's a video clip of an interview with him on the only (?) movie he worked on, an adaptation of his own YA novel Rocketship Galileo. (And as an extra added bonus, visual SF greats Chesley Bonestell and George Pal are also there.)

And here it is!

Warehouse of Wonder

So Warehouse 13 just had its season finale. I didn't watch it - which isn't necessarily a comment on its quality. When a series develops long-form arcs over seasons, it makes the assumption (and takes the risk) that you'll stay current on the backstory. By Year 3 or 4, I've usually detached from the show. I'll miss an episode here or there, and before you know it, the series has rumbled by without me. It happened with The Sopranos, with Mad Men. And it's true even for shows I really, really like (as opposed to respect): I've barely remained current with Game of Thrones, and I think that's one of the best F/SF TV shows ever.

But Warehouse 13 is the current incarnation of a dead trope: the SECRET GOVERNMENT WAREHOUSE that has accumulated all the world's legendary/magical items. It's okay to use the notion as a background somethin'-somethin' - e.g. the final sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where it's not only cool, but a sarcastic comment on the nature of government vs. individual heroism. Unfortunately, too many producers make it the central premise of their projects, or use it for additional cool points, and add nothing else. "Hey, look, it's Noah's Ark! Isn't that cool?" "Hey, look, it's Tesla's death ray! Isn't that cool?" "Gosh, I hope nobody finds out about this place, they could steal the Spear of Destiny and then we would all be in trouble!" Sigh.

The Librarian.
Area 51.
Warehouse 13.
Every fourth episode of The X-Files.

It's an idea whose time has come, and gone.

Defiance Is Getting Worse [SPOILERS]

Well, not as bad as Rob Bricken at io9.com thinks.

But then, Rob's anger at the season finale comes from a guy who is pretty invested in the show. Me, I was always lukewarm at best (check out my first post about it), but then my ears pricked up as the last few episodes (specifically the season's penultimate episode, "Past Is Prologue") seemed to be getting tighter, more rational, with the characters behaving in their own interests, instead of the plot's interest. But the finale let some of the air out of my slowly inflating interest balloon.

Some of the things that stood out in a bad way (instead of "stood out" maybe "sat down"):

1. The Rosewater sisters. I'm sorry, but they're just useless. Not the fault of Julie Benz and Mia Kirshner, the actresses; it's the writers. Maybe I missed it, but I never saw Mayor Amanda do much of anything besides make flat-footed speeches and say "that's wrong"; and the idea of a madame/hooker who falls in love almost immediately for the tough hero of the show is just so tin-eared that you want to reach through the screen, past the show itself to the writers room, grab O'Bannon, Murphy and Taylor by the collars and yell "Talk to a hooker! Just one, for research! God knows, you're all LA writers, you've certainly used them before."

2. Doc Yewll. She's a former mass murderer, smarter than most every other character, a techno-savvy cyborg with the skills and ability to kill - and she sounds like a tough dame from a 1940s gangster movie! (Way to go, Trenna Keating.) But she doesn't see the Earth Republic goons coming and gets taken hostage like a UN observer in Somalia. You'd have expected her at least to booby-trap her lab.

3. When Nolan and Irisa break out of the Earth Republic lab, it was every first-person-shooter visual cliché you've ever seen.

4. I'm sorry to say it, but the little kid they found to play Irzu has a thousand watts more charisma than Stephanie Leonidas, who plays Irisa. She stole the scene from Stephanie in less than 60 seconds. Maybe it was the fact that she sometimes smiled.

5. Why, why did Kenya Rosewater warn Stahma about what she was going to do? Really, kid? Give advance notice to your potential victim? How did you survive to own your own bordello in the first place?

So here's the thing...notice how most of these gripes have to do with female characters? And how the show runners are guys? Sigh. (I will admit that the most interesting character on the show is Stahma, Datak's wife. They got her and Datak right. And Nicky Riordan was fun as portrayed by Fionnula Flanagan, but she's dead now.)

However, unlike Rob, I *did* like the way that Datak finally loses control and sabotages himself. (I won't say how...spoilers). I thought it was perfectly in character; if there weren't the potential for Datak to do something like that, he wouldn't be nearly as scary as he is; it's necessary to make him unpredictable.

Maybe the real problem is that the writers are only comfortable with Nolan, Stahma and Datak as characters who actively drive the story forward; the rest feel too often like set dressing.

Still Thinking About eBooks...

I've just been enjoying a bunch of old SF as eBooks - David Brin, Dan Simmons, and some of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels.

eBooks are great for comfort reading.

A Little Happy Dance

My short story Can Sucker has made it to the second round of reviews for Escape Pod's science fiction podcast. Woot!

Zeb's Scene

In response to requests, here's the classic "freedom of religion" scene from Heinlein's Revolt in 2100:


Zeb lay back, smoking, and let me stew. I knew that he smoked and he knew that I disapproved. But it was a minor sin and, when we were rooming together in the Palace barracks, I would never have thought of reporting him. I even knew which room servant was his bootlegger. 'Who is sneaking your smokes in now?' I asked, wishing to change the subject.

'Eh? Why, you buy them at the P.X., of course.' He held the dirty thing out and looked at it. 'These Mexican cigarettes are stronger than I like. I suspect that they use real tobacco in them, instead of the bridge sweepings I'm used to. Want one?'

'Huh? Oh, no, thanks!'

He grinned wryly. 'Go ahead, give me your usual lecture. It'll make you feel better.'

'Now look here, Zeb, I wasn't criticizing. I suppose it's just one of the many things I've been wrong about.'

'Oh, no. It's a dirty, filthy habit that ruins my wind and stains my teeth and may eventually kill me off with lung cancer.' He took a deep inhalation, let the smoke trickle out of the corners of his mouth, and looked profoundly contented. 'But it just happens that I like dirty, filthy habits.'

He took another puff. 'But it's not a sin and my punishment for it is here and now, in the way my mouth tastes each morning. The Great Architect doesn't give a shout in Sheol about it. Catch on, old son? He isn't even watching.'

'There is no need to be sacrilegious.'

'I wasn't being so.'

'You weren't, eh? You were scoffing at one of the most fundamental-perhaps the one fundamental-proposition in religion: the certainty that God is watching!'

'Who told you?'

For a moment all I could do was to sputter. 'Why, it isn't necessary. It's an axiomatic certainty. It's -'

'I repeat, who told you? See here, I retract what I said. Perhaps the Almighty is watching me smoke. Perhaps it is a mortal sin and I will burn for it for eons. Perhaps. But who told you? Johnnie, you've reached the point where you are willing to kick the Prophet out and hang him to a tall, tall tree. Yet you are willing to assert your own religious convictions and to use them as a touchstone to judge my conduct. So I repeat: who told you? What hill were you standing on when the lightning came down from Heaven and illuminated you? Which archangel carried the message?'

I did not answer at once. I could not. When I did it was with a feeling of shock and cold loneliness. 'Zeb... I think I understand you at last. You are an-atheist. Aren't you?'

Zeb looked at me bleakly. 'Don't call me an atheist,' he said slowly, 'unless you are really looking for trouble.'

'Then you aren't one?' I felt a wave of relief, although I still didn't understand him.

'No, I am not. Not that it is any of your business. My religious faith is a private matter between me and my God. What my inner beliefs are you will have to judge by my actions... for you are not invited to question me about them. I decline to explain them nor to justify them to you. Nor to anyone... not the Lodge Master... nor the Grand Inquisitor, if it comes to that.'

'But you do believe in God?'

'I told you so, didn't I? Not that you had any business asking me.'

'Then you must believe in other things?'

'Of course I do! I believe that a man has an obligation to be merciful to the weak...patient with the stupid... generous with the poor. I think he is obliged to lay down his life for his brothers, should it be required of him. But I don't propose to prove any of those things; they are beyond proof. And I don't demand that you believe as I do.'

I let out my breath. 'I'm satisfied, Zeb.'

Instead of looking pleased he answered, 'That's mighty kind of you, brother, mighty kind! Sorry-I shouldn't be sarcastic. But I had no intention of asking for your approval. You goaded me-accidentally, I'm sure-into discussing matters that I never intend to discuss.' He stopped to light up another of those stinking cigarettes and went on more quietly. 'John, I suppose that I am, in my own cantankerous way, a very narrow man myself. I believe very strongly in freedom of religion-but I think that that freedom is best expressed as freedom to keep quiet. From my point of view, a great deal of openly expressed piety is insufferable conceit.'

'Huh?'

'Not every case-I've known the good and the humble and the devout. But how about the man who claims to know what the Great Architect is thinking? The man who claims to be privy to His Inner Plans? It strikes me as sacrilegious conceit of the worst sort-this character probably has never been any closer to His Trestle Board than you or I. But it makes him feel good to claim to be on chummy terms with the Almighty, it builds his ego, and lets him lay down the law to you and me. Pfui! Along comes a knothead with a loud voice, an I.Q. around 90, hair in his ears, dirty underwear, and a lot of ambition. He's too lazy to be a farmer, too stupid to be an engineer, too unreliable to be a banker-but, brother, can he pray! After a while he has gathered around him other knotheads who don't have his vivid imagination and self-assurance but like the idea of having a direct line of Omnipotence. Then this character is no longer Nehemiah Scudder but the First Prophet.'

*****

Now, at the risk of sounding insufferably preachy, I'd like to point out a little section of that scene that is often forgotten by the SF libertarians who hold up Heinlein as their spokesman. It's that bit where Zeb is talking, not about the individual freedoms for which they're fighting, but the obligations that he believes exist for an honorable person:

'I believe that a man has an obligation to be merciful to the weak...patient with the stupid... generous with the poor. I think he is obliged to lay down his life for his brothers, should it be required of him. But I don't propose to prove any of those things; they are beyond proof. And I don't demand that you believe as I do.'

Most of the Atlas Shrugged folks out there tend to forget that paragraph. And that's a pity - because that's what makes this scene generous. Expansive. Something wide open and admirable...unlike the "Screw You Jack" position of the crude Objectivist.

Star Trek and Star Wars and JJ Abrams

A few weeks ago, Jon Stewart interviewed J.J. Abrams on The Daily Show. After getting over the "Gasp!" moment when Abrams admitted that he didn't "get into" Star Trek - and then did a slow-motion walk-back and recover - I found that I was really, really interested by one question they were batting around: What was the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek?

They both agreed there was a big one. Stewart said that Star Wars felt like a Western, or a samurai move, a dueling gunslinger kind of thing. Abrams agreed. "Star Wars never felt like a sci-fi thing, but Star Trek does." And he's right, I think. But why?

I Wish Vernor Vinge Weren't So Freaking Smart

Some of you may remember how I've hyped Doc Vinge in the past. The man who predicted the Singularity (which allowed Ray Kurzweil to become king of the celebrinerds) and got to cyberspace before Gibson.

Well, my favorite Vinge work is A Deepness in the Sky, which contains half a dozen mind-blowing concepts, some of them utterly terrifying. One of the creepiest is the "Larsen localizers," the great-great-grandchildren of RFID chips: dust mote-sized computers that individually contain a tiny bit of sensing and processing power, but together form into an immensely powerful network that can monitor virtually everything that happens in the localizers' covered area. This leads to "ubiquitous law enforcement" - tyrannies that make Big Brother look like Ron Paul.

Well, guess who's working on Larsen localizers now, 14 years after ADITS came out? Just about everybody. Here's the original announcement.

Why Is That So Good, pt. 3 - "They Called Him Mahasamatman"

When I first read Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, it messed up my prose style for three years. I was only a teen at the time, so I was fairly impressionable; but still. Three years...

And it wasn't just my mind that got blown. George RR Martin himself, now the most media-successful fantasist since Tolkien, wrote that when he read the first lines of that book, "a chill went through me, and I sensed that SF would never be the same. Nor was it."

Zelazny was a member of SF's New Wave, the late '60s-early '70s crew that emphasized style and literary quality in speculative fiction. JG Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Sam Delaney and others stood up for the idea that SF was as worthy an endeavor as any middle-brow offering by Lessing or Mailer. Zelazny had earned a Master's in Elizabethan Drama from my own alma mater, but he was also a passionate explorer of myth, folklore, martial arts, and Asian religions. He incorporated all of it into his work, making him perhaps the first writer of speculative fiction since Tolkien to ground his most successful stories firmly in myth. He did this years before anyone had heard of Joseph Campbell, before Star Wars reinvigorated the Hero's Journey concept, before Bruce Lee and then anime conquered American culture and made all of us aware of kung-fu. He was the guy at the top of Everest, waiting to hand us sandwiches when we arrived to stick our flag in the peak.

Alpha Centauri Has Planets!

One, anyway. How cool is that?

Between our nearest stellar neighbor having planets, and the possibility that an Alcubierre FTL drive wouldn't require the dismantling of an Jupiter-sized planet for each trip, these are banner days for interstellar travel.

Now all I have to do is stay alive for the next 100 years to see the end of the 100YSS initiative, and I'll be good to go.

Oh...and get over my fear of falling, roller coasters, and high-g acceleration. But for a trip like that, it would be worth it. Worse comes to worst, I'd just take some Space Age, ultra-modern super-Valium.

Particle AND Wave

A little complementarity on Niels Bohr's birthday...

The walls between science fiction and fantasy are breaking down. Back in the day, it was either Tolkien or Heinlein. Not only was fantasy non-technological, it was almost always pre-technological. Horses, not cars; swords, not guns. Even fantasy ostensibly set in the modern world would often wend its way to a secondary world - through a wardrobe, for instance - where technology simply wasn't.

Then came wainscoting (which I've mentioned before) where magic does exist in the here and now, but is carefully hidden away from ordinary muggles...er, mortals. Obviously, the magic's hidden away in Harry Potter, but Rowling was far from the first to use the wainscot. Any pre-True Blood vampire story, for instance, has the undead hidden away. The Borrowers is classic wainscot. [Decades later, wainscoting is still going strong. Percy Jackson, Neverwhere, Highlander. Tim Powers turned history into wainscot fantasy with masterpieces like The Stress of Her Regard and On Stranger Tides.]  Fantasy and science fiction edged closer and closer. 

And then came the '60s. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," said Arthur C. Clarke. And in the '60s, writers like Michael Moorcock and Jack Chalker took him at his word, creating futures whose inhabitants no longer understood the forces that gave them their magical powers. But there was one writer who followed that avenue while delineating the philosophical difference: Roger Zelazny.

He created worlds full of characters who were literally deii ex machina - people with godlike powers granted by technology; so godlike, in fact, that they assumed the identities of the Hindu, Egyptian (and even alien) pantheons. But even while he was doing this, Roger never lost site of the border:

"It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy – it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool."  (Lord of Light)

Science and magic, SF and fantasy, reason and the unknowable, particle and wave - complementarity. The next big step in fantasy is bridging the gap, writing science and magic in the same story at the same time.

K.W. Jeter Is Following Me on Twitter.

Shouldn't you?
@excalibur61

Seriously - I'm in a fanboy daze. If it weren't for KWJ, we wouldn't have the Court of the Air, Perdido Street Station, Girl Genius, Lovelace and Babbage...

He is one of the progenitors of steampunk. Hell, he COINED THE TERM "STEAMPUNK." How many writers can honestly say they midwifed a whole new genre?

The man wrote two of the earliest steampunk fantasias: Morlock Nights and Infernal Devices (the latter of which was the earliest example of "clockpunk.")

Shout out to you, KWJ.

Classic F/SF Ideas: Franchise Government

A social system in which governmental functions like security, defense, and conflict resolution are maintained by private organizations, not public bodies; or a society in which the government no longer has a "monopoly of legitimate violence" - especially if some or all of those functions have been assumed by corporations. Derived from anarchist political theory, it is also a defining concept of cyberpunk and other forms of dystopian science fiction.

"The Ungoverned," Vernor Vinge
Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson