Robot lover

One of the old PhYW members (okaylah, old Phases Young Writers member is not oxymoronic any more since we're all in our mid to late 20s) posted a link to this story. Then Jerng got all excited and started putting together a personnel list for a firm to make them. Then Buswrecker, another old acquaintance who's a short Chinese guy who likes big bikes*, wrote:

"don't waste your time. buy a motorbike. quick before all the gas runs out."

Wahahaha!

*Nickname has nothing to do with his chosen mode of transport...it's a much longer story than that.

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Man, I need to write BADLY. It's been a long time since the last good blog post. I've had an essay on the cultural impact of Nipah virus on the back burner for ages, and I've got an idea for a funny story for the Futures page in Nature. Nature is awesome, it's the only real scientific journal (plus one of the other Nature Something family journals) I know that's got a page devoted to science fiction.

A thousand words

There are some LOLcats that are just funny, and some that have a whole story behind them:

more cat pictures

Without the caption, it's just a cat grooming itself. With that caption, suddenly it's no longer a cat, but a human transmogrified into a strange body but in a familiar setting, with the first few moments of stunned confusion setting in.

Who is this person? How on earth did they become a cat without realizing it? WHO did it to them? Are they in someone else's bedroom or their own house? What on earth will they do now? Etc.

Christus Apollo

[EDIT: Somebody pointed out in the comments (and I would REALLY appreciate your leaving some clue as to who you are or how to contact you, if you're trying to be helpful rather than just snippy) that this poem is under copyright as Bradbury is still alive, so I can't reproduce it here. Given that an awful lot of poetry is available on the internet, I didn't think about copyright - please don't call me a thief as if I'm purposely trying to deprive him of income or attribution. So I'm just going to quote a few of my favourite bits.]

[Originally posted on 26 March] Two days ago on Easter would have been a more appropriate time to post this, but I happened to be listening to Jerry Goldsmith's musification of it tonight.

A couple of years ago when the PhYW were trying to revive the Phases Young Writers community with a new website, Tee Shern Ren and I were doing the science section and I wrote this essay about what implications First Contact would have for Christ-followers. What do people think?

Thanks to Teacher Rowie for originally posting the full text of the poem. (Unfortunately she didn't include the breaks between stanzas and I don't have a copy of I Sing the Body Electric to check...) It's such a great poem that I'm surprised to find it so hardly on the Internet.

In some far universal Deep
Did He tread Space
And visit worlds beyond our blood-warm dreaming?
Did He come down on lonely shore by sea
Not unlike Galilee
And are there Mangers on far worlds that knew His light?
And Virgins?
Sweet Pronouncements?
Annunciations? Visitations from angelic hosts?
And, shivering vast light among ten billion lights,
Was there some Star much like the star at Bethlehem
That struck the sight with awe and revelation
Upon a cold and most strange morn?
On worlds gone wandering and lost from this
Did Wise Men gather in the dawn
In cloudy steams of Beast
Within a place of straw now quickened to a Shrine
To look upon a stranger Child than ours?
How many stars of Bethlehem burnt bright
Beyond Orion or Centauri’s blinding arc?
How many miracles of birth all innocent
Have blessed those worlds?
...
For in this time of Christmas
In the long Day totalling up to Eight,
We see the light, we know the dark;
And creatures lifted, born, thrust free of so much night
No matter what the world or time or circumstance
Must love the light,
So, children of all lost unnumbered suns
Must fear the dark
Which mingles in a shadowing-forth on air.
And swarms the blood.
No matter what the color, shape, or size
Of beings who keep souls like breathing coals
In long midnights,
They must need saving of themselves.
So on far worlds in snowfalls deep and clear
Imagine how the rounding out of some dark year
Might celebrate with birthing one miraculous child!
A child?
Born in Andromeda’s out-swept mysteries?
Then count its hands, its fingers,
Eyes, and most incredible holy limbs!
The sum of each?
No matter. Cease.
Let Child be fire as blue as water under Moon.
Let Child sport free in tides with human-seeming fish.
Let ink of octopi inhabit blood
Let skin take acid rains of chemistry
All falling down in nightmare storms of cleansing burn.
Christ wanders in the Universe
A flesh of stars,
He takes on creature shapes
To suit the mildest elements,
He dresses him in flesh beyond our ken.
...
Yet, still unsure, and all being doubt,
Much frightened man on Earth does cast about
And clothe himself in steel
And borrow fire
And himself in the great glass of the careless Void admire.
...
Christ is not dead
Nor does God sleep
While waking Man
Goes striding on the Deep
To birth ourselves anew
And love rebirth
From fear of straying long
On outworn Earth.
...
New Wise men Descry
Our hosts of machineries
Which write immortal life
And sign it God!
Down, down Alien skies.
And flown and gone, arrived and bedded safe to sleep
Upon some winters morning deep
Ten billion years of light
From where we stand us now and sing,
There will be time to cry eternal gratitudes
Time to know and see and love the Gift of Life itself,
Always diminished,
Always restored,
Out of one hand and into the other
Of the Lord.

Blood

I have too much of a taste for gore sometimes. I spent all of this afternoon sampling blood from chickens and while I didn't enjoy the heat, the smell, or the ache in my legs, there's something very satisfying about seeing the red stuff flowing smoothly into the syringe, or in garnet drops down the white feathers...

(Somewhere in between last Tuesday's draw and today's, they crossed the line from being baby chicks to young chickens. I had no idea feathers could replace fluffy down so fast, enabling three-foot leaps out of the hands of exasperated scientists. It gives you an appreciation of the progress between Velociraptor to Archaeopteryx.)

Also, I just finished a novel by Natsuo Kirino about a bunch of Japanese housewives who find themselves cutting up a series of dead bodies, stalked by a sadistic murderer, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

And finally, last week I spent some time on eBay and acquired McFarlane Toys' seriously perverted version of Little Red Riding Hood:
Is there anything about this figurine which is not, as the Americans say, Kick Ass? (In case you can't tell, the blobby thing at the bottom of the Big Bad Wolf's entrails is Grandma.)
She occupies the place of pride on my bookshelf, above where another McFarlane figurine, my old friend the xenomorph hangs. (The Alien quadrilogy is a whole another level of gore...)

Hey, at least I don't pretend to be a vampire and write emo poetry!

The Braided World

Just finished writing an Amazon review of a good book (The Braided World) I read a couple months ago. Had to rant about two annoying characters though.

I picked up Kenyon's latest, "The Bright of the Sky" from the new sci-fi shelf in the local public library and loved it so I went looking for more of her work.

The book takes place in the aftermath of a cosmic disaster which somehow "stole" information from Earth, including information in the form of genetic diversity. As a result, the human race is slowly dying off due to a lack of resistance against various infectious diseases. A mysterious message is received, giving directions to a planet in another star system. A small expedition funded by a wealthy retired singer, Bailey (forgot her surname) goes off to check it out.

They find a very Earthlike world, inhabited by humans with one startling difference: they, and other mammals, are not viviparous. They don't get pregnant. Males and females both eject their gametes into "birthing pools" and the babies grow inside symbiotic waterplants. Eventually we learn that this planet was created as a giant seed bank by some other extraterrestrial Good Samaritan to preserve Earth biology till after the passing of the "dark force" and the strange reproductive system was set up to speed up the restocking.

Sex, being totally dissociated from reproduction, takes place casually and publicly between friends (however, penetration is considered disgusting), which startles the visitors from Earth at first. The rest of the book is an exploration of how human culture might develop with such drastically different reproductive biology, while the original mission to recover Earth's lost genetic diversity becomes almost peripheral.

Despite the beauty of this planet - "The Braided World" refers to both the riverine kingdom of the Dassa and the interdependency of humans and the birth plants - it's no utopia. The Dassa and their neighbours are just as flawed, brutal, and prejudiced as Earth humans. Occasionally girls with fully functional reproductive systems are born as throwback mutants, called "hoda". Upon their discovery at menarche, their tongues are cut out and they become mute (or so we think at first) slaves for the rest of their lives. Hoda's lib becomes a passionate subplot and a personal mission for Bailey.

Readers who enjoy SF with good world-building will like this book. Although Kenyon's skills aren't as mature as in "The Bright of the Sky", the braided world is a fully fleshed-out planet. You know it's good when you wish it was a real place you could visit. Like Octavia Butler's works, this is a more bio-driven SF rather than the majority physics-driven type of story. Kenyon doesn't get in over her head with the science or let it drown out actual plot. My only quibble is that the plant-dependent reproduction is at different points in the book said to be faster than normal pregnancy OR much less efficient.

The only two major characters I found unconvincing and annoying enough to somewhat mar the book were the anthropologist Nick Venning and the biologist Cai Zhen, who are both horribly stereotypical. Venning goes from being a wide-eyed kid who wants to go everywhere and do everything against the commander's advice (think Daniel Jackson in Stargate: SG-1) to being a raving murderous bigot after incautiously taking several doses of a psychotropic drug.

Zhen was annoying on two levels: one, that she's simply a mean person and every sentence that comes out of her mouth is a snipe. This could have been justified if her dialogue was humorously sarcastic instead of just plain vicious, or if she contributed something to the plot. I kept expecting some sort of shocking revelation, like her being impregnated by one of the Dassa, but no such luck. I felt like I had been led on since the other characters make a big deal of protecting her, as the only fertile Earth "hoda" - Bailey is postmenopausal. Even her extremely minor role in the story, sequencing the DNA of native organisms, could have been filled by a friendly robot (and I mean this literally; back here in the 21st century there already are robots that do that sort of thing). The other thing is that Kenyon seems to have subconsciously written in the stereotype of the ice-cold Chinese dragon lady. I'm not accusing Kenyon of racism (the diversity of cultures and persons in her novels is beautiful and honest), but of a worse crime for a novelist: writing a BORING CHARACTER.

Before anyone comments, I'm highly aware of the irony of a Chinese female biologist complaining about a book character who's a Chinese female biologist who complains too much... I'll stop now. Read it, it's a good book.

Immuno in space

I love how the authors of this paper are looking to the future:

The development of T cells in newborns and young adults living in the microgravity environments of space or on other planets may therefore be compromised, leaving these individuals susceptible to infectious diseases due to their inability to develop a fully functional immune system.

Woods CC, Banks KE, Gruener R, DeLuca D. Loss of T cell precursors after spaceflight and exposure to vector-averaged gravity. FASEB J. 2003 Aug;17(11):1526-8. Epub 2003 Jun 3.

So...we no can has babeez on spaceshuttle. Yet.

But I really hate journals that force paper authors to stuff all their figures at the end. Figures should be put as close as possible to the relevant text so you don't spend half your reading time flipping back and forth trying to see what goes with what - major pet peeve.

Warrior queens

Catherine Asaro is my new favourite writer. Her Skolian Imperialate series deals with a future where three human civilizations exist: the Allieds (Earth), the Skolians, and the Eubians/Traders. This is a rough outline of her history:

• About six millenia ago, unknown aliens transplant a bunch of humans from South America to another planet.
• The humans form the Ruby Empire, which has space travel and highly psi-based technology. The Ruby Empire is ruled by warrior queens who keep their men in seclusion.
• Ruby Empire collapses.
• A few hundred years ago, humans redevelop spaceflight.
• Genetic engineering accidentally creates the Aristos, a race of anti-empaths who derive pleasure from torturing psions. The Aristos rule the Eubian Concord.
• An Aristo project later creates the Rhon, extremely powerful psions who escape and establish the Skolian Imperialate, rediscovering and using ancient Ruby technology. The Imperialate is a semi-democracy with a parlimentarian system but the Ruby Pharoah (female, as in the ancient empire) and other nobles holding considerable power.
• About a century and a half from now, the Allieds develop spaceflight and meet the two other human empires.

I rather like Asaro's approach to gender relations - feminist without being the sort of dreamy New Age or the Valerie-Solanas-man-hating-radical types. Here's a sample from the preview of her latest, The Ruby Dice:

Across the amphitheater, the Majda queens were sitting at their consoles, tall and aristocratic. Only their women held Assembly seats; even in this modern age, they followed ancient customs that forbade their men to inherit power.

When Earth's people had finally discovered the Imperialate, they had scandalized the noble matriarchs of Skolia. Apparently on Earth, men historically held more power than women. The matriarchs claimed this was why it had taken Earth's people so long to reach the stars. They asserted that if women had been in charge, Earth would have achieved that pinnacle of technology thousands of years earlier. Their arguments conveniently ignored the fact that their ancestors had developed star travel because they had starships to study.

Earth's annoyed males responded by pointing out that Earth had achieved a far greater degree of peace than the Imperialate, which surely had to do with the fact that bellicose, aggressive women had been in charge of the Imperialate rather than peaceful men. Naaj Majda hadn't understood why Kelric found this so funny. She even acknowledged the Earth men had a point. Kelric told her to go read Earth's military history.

Asaro herself has had a really interesting career - she went to college to become a ballet dancer but ended up becoming a physicist - and a terrific SF novelist. Her writing is truly unusual in that the stories have both deeply emotional character development as well as "hard SF" math and physics.

SF&F quantitation theory

Quickie theory: the quality of a science fiction or fantasy author's world-building skills can be measured by the ratio of fan-generated wiki text : author's original text in novels and short stories concerning that particular universe.

I came up with this idea because there's a surprising number of Wikipedia entries regarding Garth Nix's Old Kingdom series, which is only 3 novels and one short story so far. (It's not a trilogy because he's promised at least one more novel.)

A good author should be able to write a world that is internally consistent, and describe its history, rules, characters, and other contents by context alone, spending minimal time on explanations that don't flow naturally into the story (e.g. Harry Potter being raised by Muggles and having to be shown around the wizarding world). The characteristics of being internally consistent and having a lot of interesting content that's touched on glancingly by the author gives fans a lot of material to organize into synopses, timelines, histories, protocols, etc.

I tend to dislike most books that give you a long glossary at the end, the exceptions being the Lord of the Rings and David Brin's Uplift series. Brin has a bloody menagerie of alien civilizations, but he focuses tightly on the experiences and feelings of individual characters in the narrative itself. As far as I'm concerned, if I have to keep flipping back and forth between the story and explanations in the back, I might as well be reading research papers.

I ran this idea past Krista who's one of my fantasy fiction buddies and she said it sounded workable. Anyone else agree?

You know you're becoming a poxvirologist when...

Gah. I re-read Stephen King's Carrie last night and every time they talked about the "TK gene", instead of "telekinesis" I thought "thymidine kinase".

It really isn't as scary as it was when I was 16...

Blackhawk typo

This is to the last person who commented on my blog and anyone else who goes to Blackhawk Church...there was a typo in their flyer...if anyone's interested in the Science Fiction and Fantasy group, the email address starts with "sfandf", not "fandf"!

Apparently the contact form on Blackhawk's site works okay, but then their emails end up in my spam folder. Sorry guys.

It's not like they didn't travel backwards before anyway

(totally unrelated: This morning I took the bus - because I was too lazy to put my new fender on last night and it's slushy on the roads - and there was this guy on a bicycle going the same way as the bus. The problem is, crusing speed for a cyclist is apparently the same as the average speed of a bus which loads passengers at every stop. So the bus would stop, the cyclist would overtake it, then when the bus started again it would swing into the next lane to overtake the cyclist. It seemed to me that the driver was swerving out far more than necessary, but I don't know how to drive a bus.

After about three or four repetitions of this, the bus driver was completely exasperated and shouted and threw the finger at the cyclist. The cyclist, watching the road as he should have, didn't notice at all. He did swing onto the sidewalk a bit later though.

Funniest road rage I've seen in a while...driver flipping off a cyclist. Seriously, we get no love. If we go on the road the drivers try to kill us, if we go on the kakilima the pedestrians act like we're trying to kill them.)

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And now for something completely different: they're going to make a new Star Trek movie with Kirk and Spock as young men, i.e. a prequel to TOS. And Adrien Brody is going to play Spock.

*all the nerdy girls swoon*

Some fler on Gizmodo called nzruss made a great comment about casting speculations:

I'd seen a suggestion of Keanu Reeves playing Spock role, but it was later determined (by group consensus) that he didn't have the range of emotion required to be a convincing Spock.

Explanation for non-scifi-fans - Spock is [half] Vulcan; Vulcans are supposed to be emotionless.

Sci-fi heroines

Late night, at random: Even though I like both science fiction and fantasy fiction very much, I realised a few days ago that my favourite female characters are all in SF and not fantasy. The problem with fantasy heroines is that many of the writers are from new-agey backgrounds and tend to flavour their writing with strong feminist overtones. Mother goddesses give you power. Bonus points if you like girls. Extra bonus points if you like girls AND boys. It's only ok to like men if they're not macho and have long hair. It's just blatant and annoying. (Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mercedes Lackey, Tamora Pierce, et al.) And I don't know what's wrong with fantasy writers of this stripe, but they just CAN'T do good dialogue.

The problem with these writers is that they're from countries where women already have gained suffrage, at least nominal equality in education and the workplace, etc., quite some time ago, so they have a lack of imagination as to what it's like to live in a really old-fashioned culture. You can't run around making strident declarations of emancipation and jumping on horseback waving a sword straightaway the way these bra-burning heroines do. People wouldn't even persecute you - they'd just laugh at you like crazy.

Sci-fi heroines, on the other hand, are strong women making their way in a world which, no matter how developed or how far in the future, is to some degree still more influenced by men. They live in worlds where the ultimate arbiter of fate is how tough and ingenious you are (and obviously you have to be on the side of Good as well, this being fiction), which to my mind is much more realistic. I love Ellen Ripley. Love Kathryn Janeway. Love Cordelia Naismith, Samantha Carter, Mara Jade, Leia Organa, Molly Millions, Lilith Iyapo, Anyanwu, et cetera, et cetera. Starting to get into "Firefly" and Zoey is cool too.

On the other hand I find most of Anne McCaffrey's characters annoying, possibly because she's from the same aging-hippy background.

(Star Trek and Stargate SG-1 are written by multiple people, many of whom are women, Lilith and Anyanwu are from Octavia Butler, Cordelia Naismith is from Lois McMaster Bujold, so don't tell me it's cos I only like female characters written by men. =P)

The only strongly feminist fantasy writer that doesn't annoy me is Robin McKinley, not sure why. (I like Ursula Le Guin's "The Tombs of Atuan" because the main character was trapped in a female-only environment which was portrayed as being ultra - hee.) Too late at night to do analysis. Figure out later. [Incidentally, FlowerMoonFish told me why almost all McKinley's novels involve romance between the younger female lead and a much older male character - her husband is Peter Dickinson and he's pretty old compared to her.]

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
There's no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can't take the sky from me...

- "Firefly" theme

SF writer personality test, and Snape fandom

I have no idea who this is at all. Steve got Octavia Butler *sulk* I love Butler.

I am: Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs) A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Interesting Snape fansite with essays on why he didn't murder Dumbledore: I Trust Snape

Hybridisation

Some science fiction story I read a while ago (I think it was David Brin's "The Uplift War" proposed that in the future almost everyone will be a near-uniform shade of light brown - that is, ethnic groups will pretty much disappear due to mixed marriages. I doubt that will happen. I don't have any structured argument as to why...just a feeling that people will cling to ethnicity and race will persist long into the future.

Even space exploration and colonisation, should they ever happen, will tend to follow rather than erase ethnicity, since nations will end up claiming planets and constructing space stations by themselves, once there's enough to go around.

What I've been noticing is that certain kinds of mixed relationships tend to be unidirectional for the most part. There are lots of East Asian women (ethnic Chinese, Japs, Koreans) married to white men, but no E. Asian men married to white women that I know personally, and only one such couple that I know of. On the bus and around town here in Madison, I see lots of black guy - white girl couples, but I haven't seen any going the other way.

I don't know enough about black and white culture in the US to speculate about the latter, but I can come up with theories about the former till the cows come home haha.

I dunno lah...if I'm going to fulfil any stereotypes about Chinese women and white guys, let me be the arse-kicking kungfu assassin babe.

There's a frigging EPIDEMIC of yellow fever at my church. It's kinda funny.

On my mother's side, my sibs and I are the only Chinese grandchildren because my mum's younger sisters married, in order, an Englishman, a Malay, and an American. It's rather ironic that it's my Malay cousins and not us who can speak Mandarin, however, because they went to Chinese school. I feel so bananafied.