4 posts tagged “science fiction”
Dirk Moeller didn't know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out.
Great opening. Moeller is Earth's representative for trade talks with the Nidu, an obnoxious race who happen to be our planet's chief ally on the Celestial Council, which is like being friends with the high school geek. The Nidu have an advanced sense of smell, and a sophisticated vocabulary of scents and the messages they can carry; Moeller has a private vendetta, and a device in his rear end that converts his intestinal gas to the worst insults in the Nidu dictionary. When his olfactory prank turns deadly, Earth is in trouble.
As Nidu military starships move toward Earth, their ambassador throws Earth a bone - a major incident can be averted if Earth can help find an object needed for the Nidu coronation ceremony. Specifically, they need a sheep - a breed called The Android's Dream, whose electric blue-colored wool explains the Philip K. Dick reference in the name. Sounds easy, but someone is wiping out the last stocks of those sheep with a virus. The problem lands in the lap of a minor diplomat named Harry Creek, war hero, ex-cop, hacker with major skills, new to the secret agent game but a fast learner.
Scalzi's comic novel of interplanetary intrigue is funny throughout, but not in a wacky, Douglas Adams way. The action is tightly plotted, and even the most insane plot twists are made to seem plausible. The Android's Dream seems to me a science fiction cousin to the comic thrillers of Donald Westlake, or the sly, cynical spy novels of Ross Thomas.
You may remember Richard A. Clarke - Washington intelligence insider since the Reagan administration, broke with the Bush administration about the war on terror, wrote the bestselling memoir Against All Enemies. He followed it with a novel, The Scorpion's Gate; not surprisingly, a geopolitical Mideast thriller. Breakpoint is his second novel, and it's something different.
First, I had to get used to Clarke's writing. It's amateurish - stiff, simply drawn characters, dialogue that rings wrong. What keeps you reading is Clarke's insider knowledge, and the unexpected scenarios he keeps springing on you. The novel begins with a terrorist attack on America's internet capability. Seems there are ten little shacks on the Atlantic coast where fiber-optic cables come from Europe and enter our routers and switches, there's no or little security for them, and Clarke's not happy about that. When 7 of the ten go up in truck bombs, the FBI and Homeland Security go into action. Clarke has little confidence in these organizations - "the Keystone Kops... stumbling all over themselves as usual" - and makes his heroes outsider investigators for a Special Projects division in the Intelligence Analysis Center, a small, agile unit instead of a bumbling bureaucracy. So far, so good, if run of the mill. Things begin to get weird, though, when one investigator talks to a scientist, who begins discussing her work in transhumanism.
Breakpoint, which is set five years from now, has one foot firmly set in science fiction, and has more in common with William Gibson or Bruce Sterling than Tom Clancy. Hackers pull off miraculous works of data mining. A Marine unit in the desert is testing exoskeletons to give soldiers superpowers. A global computer science project is on the verge of giving the internet something akin to sentience (shades of Neuromancer!) In an appendix, Clarke lays out what in the book is still theoretical, what's being worked on and what is close to being realized. Clarke's last government job, in the Bush administration, was Special Advisor to the President on Cybersecurity; once more, he knows what he's talking about.
Recently, I saw the movie A Scanner Darkly on DVD, and I was pleased to see that a film adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story kept the original story and tone, and didn't just build an action movie around his plot ideas (see Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck et al). It made me remember that, back in my teens and twenties, Dick was an important author to me, as a pop culture author who played with philosophical ideas about the relationship between fantasy and reality, especially in an age when technology could alter the way your brain experienced the outside world. Dick wrung more changes out of the idea of virtual reality long before the concept was a familiar concept.
It occured to me that I hadn't read any Dick in a long, long time. Back in the 1980's, I had read the most famous and celebrated Dick books, and had moved into the second tier, where you never knew if a book was going to be a masterpiece, a dud, or (most often) something with good ideas that didn't work overall. I decided to try a book that I had missed in my earlier years.
Dr. Bloodmoney, written in 1966, turns out to be an after-the-bomb book. Dick paints a near-future portrait of life in San Francisco and Marin County, then drops the bombs and follows a large cast as they struggle through the early post-bomb days, and the years of building makeshift substitutes for civilization. Characters include Hoppy, a limbless handyman with robotic prostheses, whose affability hides a chilling megalomania; Walt Dangerfield, an astronaut stranded in a satellite who becomes the friendly radio host the earth comes to depend on; and Dr. Bluthgeld, the nuclear scientist whose guilt drives him completely, but secretly, insane. The portrait of a large cast of more or less decent people muddling through a hideous historical period reminds me of one of Dick's most famous books, The Man in the High Castle. Despite some harrowing descriptions, this may be the most hopeful after-the-bomb story I know; Dick believes that not even a nuclear holocaust can destroy the human connections .that civilization depends on, and can use to rebuild.
I was in a hospital, standing in front of an elevator, after dropping my wife off for some day surgery. The elevator opened, and out came a robot. First time that ever happened to me.
The robot, a boxy looking thing with a tiny screen where its "face" would be, slowly rolled out and moved smoothly to its right. It disappeared down the corridor, swerving to avoid a gurney. The staff seemed to regard it as no big deal, so I figured it was a medical robot, rather than something trying to kill all humans.
What I saw was a Pyxis Helpmate, a courier robot that can carry drugs, supplies, meals and stuff to different parts of the hospital. Apparently, staffing a hospital is so expensive that it's worth buying a big, expensive robot to carry things around. Even more impressive is da Vinci Surgical system, helping surgeons do minimally invasive surgeries. We are, in fact, living in the future times I read about in the science fiction novels of my youth, even if we don't pass anthropomorphic Asimovian androids going about their chores as we walk down the street.
So I've been thinking about robots, and here's a few links about them. Robots-Dreams.com is a robotics blog with some cool pictures and videos. Check out these fighting robots or this one doing traditional Japanese dancing.
The Philip K. Dick android was a very cool project, until its head got lost. Dick, of course, is the science fiction writer whose greatest contribution to robot fiction, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (filmed as Blade Runner), is one of four novels in the Library of America's PKD edition.
Pixar is working on a mysterious project called Wall-E - all that's known is that it seems to involve a robot, and is directed by Finding Nemo's Andrew Stanton. I assume we'll see a trailer for it with next summer's Ratatouille.
UPDATE: Here's a video of a Rubik's cube-solving robot, via Metafilter:
Also: Robot Jokes from McSweeney's.
