Jamais Cascio reveals futurism's secret: dungeon-mastering Dungeons and Dragons helps you build futures scenarios. It makes all kinds of sense. The scenario-runner is both situations aggregates and creates a stack of materials, manages the social interactions of participants, deals with eventualities.
Via IM Steven Kaye points out to me that running a game is no guarantor of being a fine futurist. Quite true. Think of the experience as a dojo for futurists, a field for learning, rather than an automatic sign of achievement.
If it's confessions time, I admit that running Call of Cthulhu campaigns is my gaming inspiration. It has the underground nature of D+D, plus madness. And books.
Where to begin to respond? From the start, or my start, I suppose. I can't think of another writer who so strongly influenced my imagination when I was a child and teenager. I remember so many stories and novels, and how my little mind was blasted wide open by possibilities. I remember the stories' physical housing - I can easily recall the covers of Rendezvous with Rama, 2001, Expedition to Earth, and every other short story collection, often fresh from the library, sometimes in my own precious paperbacks, as I devoured the books in car, or sitting outside on the grass. (I still have a Science Fiction Book Club Wind from the Sun, pages crinkly from the cheap printing, an elementary school notification slip caught in the inside front cover.)
These tales were pedagogical devices for me, as a boy. Each book, each story taught me science and storytelling. Clarke's elegant prose let me learn both without intimidation or at excessive speed, challenging me just past my ever-growing Vygotskian edge. Rotation for gravity - check. Not being able to land on Mars because your ship isn't aerodynamically shaped - ah, got it. Why don't we hear about the angry mob planning to attack the atomic spaceship? To build suspense, I see. How can a space elevator work? I get it. How do you capture an audience with a single sentence? I see, I see...
And fear! Some of his tales had powerful currents of terror. "A Walk in the Dark" (1950) scared the heck out of me - I remember reading it in an indoor tennis court, drenched in artificial light, waiting for my father to finish playing... and carefully keeping away from each tiny shred of shadow. Rendezvous with Rama (1972) was, for me, suffused with impending dread. Each new, cryptic discovery surely concealed some dire attack, especially as the humans worked their way ever deeper into the thing. And who else saw 2001's lunar and orbital monoliths, in movie or on page, with pangs of terror? Remember the piercing shriek from the movie, as the sun's light lanced the exposed artifact, astronauts clutching their helmeted heads in agony and surprise? Clarke gave us machine crusades against all life, people dying alone in space, men plunging towards the death on the moon, vast squids snuffing out explorers, a man awakening as a bodiless recording in an alien machine, and all of these terrors often enough within the slimmest stories. Reread "Billion Names of God" (1954), with whose final line I opened this post.
Alienation: Clarke was one of the writers who taught me, a child atheist without any religious knowledge, that the rest of the world had this current of belief to which I has scant access. "The Star" was probably my first encounter with destroy-the-world fiction - think of how enormous that is, to a child - and yet I had no real connection with its terrible irony. I knew the Overlords' appearance in Childhood's End (what an awesome reveal!) must have been terribly shocking to folks, but couldn't connect with it emotionally. I didn't realize until I was an adult that Clarke shared my dislike and alienation from religion.
And exhilaration. Clarke is peerless in evoking the classic sense of wonder, of course, to the point of my not really having to mention this. But I started this post thinking of my childhood with Clarke's writing, and I'm looking at my battered copy of Wind from the Sun, as I type this, and remember the soaring feeling that overwhelmed me at 9 when I finished "Transit of Earth." I can't hear Bach's Toccata and Fugue without remember that last astronaut striding across the Martian landscape to his death.
2001 occupied a huge swath of my imagination. The novel astonished me, and I reread it frequently. I read the heartbeaking short story, "The Sentinel." I read Worlds of 2001. I had a couple of plastic models. I made my own versions of the awesome spaceships out of construction paper (and was heartbroken when my mother didn't appreciate getting one for her birthday). All of this was before I saw the movie. When I did, I was surprised by how people were confused by the finale - surely they read the book, and understood the evolutionary step engineered by aliens, yes?
I even recorded 2001 on an audio recorder. Yes, when some tv station broadcast a chopped-up version, such was my obsession that I sat next to the tv, Radio Shack device in hand, patiently capturing those precious sounds. (Years later, I found that old, dusty tape, and played it back. I was horrified to hear an unearthly scream, about halfway in. Then I remembered my brother. He'd been fussing about during the recording. We had tussled, I'd smacked him, and he'd bellowed outrage, caught faithfully by Radio Shack. Years later, sibling hatred cross-cut with Jovian orbit.)
I don't mean to suggest that Clarke was a childhood writer for me, although nothing he wrote during my adulthood struck me with such power. He did his work for me early on, which structured who I am as a person. Learning of his death is like witnessing a geological catastrophe, seeing my landscape holed.
And yet what joy to have shared the planet with him, to have become a biological adult while he also rotated around the Sun. I'm not thinking of his Rama collaborations, but of seeing life imitate the science fiction he helped create. How can one not feel delight when watching Clarke's video greeting to JPL, as Cassini reached Saturn? It reminds me of Heywood Floyd calling home from Earth orbit, bearing his secret knowledge to the moon. Or hearing about a space elevator company, and thinking of learning about this from his stories. Or seeing science fiction turn to ideas he offered decades earlier: posthumanism, machine intelligence, religious populism fighting science, life emerging from interconnected computers (in 1950!).
You should read anything by him. And, right now, you could watch this video, where Clarke ruminates on turning 90. Listen to his three wishes, think about that lifespan, and be amazed by his optimism. I can't watch without crying, and smiling:
A fine information literature post crossed the nettime list transom this morning, concerning a recent sf novel:
Vernor Vinge (Hugo-award winning SF writer, and a computer scientist in a previous life) came up with the concept of "programmer archaeologist" in "A Deepness in the Sky". The book is set very far in the future, and to cut a long story short, the idea behind the programmer-archaeologist is that most programming problems have already been solved in one form or another. So a large part of the task of the programmer-archaeologist is finding previous solutions to the problem, and then stacking up emulators to make those programs work again.
The book is uneven, but the good parts are excellent. There are several fine revenge plots, a scary social organization, and an interesting augmented reality extrapolation.
How would you define the current moment? In your most recent novel, "Spook Country," the pervasive sensation is that the times are fraught.
Fraught? [Laughs] Fraught is very good. I was going to quote Fredric Jameson about living in the simultaneous apprehension of dread and ecstasy, but I've already done that today. Yep. Fraught. Period. ... Is there a downside to that blended reality? Or could it represent a change for the better?
People worry about the loss of individual privacy, but that comes with a new kind of unavoidable transparency. Eventually we're going to know everything that every twenty-first-century politician has ever done. It will be very hard for politicians and governments to keep secrets. The whole thing is porous. We just haven't really figured out quite how porous it is.
Note that Gibson picks peak oil as a major threat, and the interviewer misses it.
Molecular rights management is a meme experiment launched by Jamais Cascio. It's IP protection for nanotechnology. One imagines nanobots that can't be copied, or moved from a certain location, or applied to a different medium.
MRM is likely to emerge for two primary reasons: the continued need for intellectual property controls, so as to prevent a wave "napster fabbing;" and the need for security to prevent the production of controlled goods ("assault rifles," figuratively or literally).
A glimpse from the future as it approaches. Or looking forward in classic extrapolation, seeing two trends (DRM and nano) rise and intersect.
Nicholas Carr offers a fine description of a black swan case in the recent Skype outage. He starts by applying it to hedge funds.
Deviations from the patterns tend to be shortlived, and by making huge bets that the deviations will quickly return to the norm, you can make a whole lot of money. As we've seen recently, though, things aren't quite as simple as the hedge fund operators assume. Sometimes, very weird things happen and the deviations become either larger or longer-lived that expected, at which point the big bets can unravel in very unpleasant ways.
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