Science Fiction

Sunday’s post on the Unquestioned Assumptions of SF was a little strange as the post I was referencing was really more about pet peeves than unquestioned assumptions, so I figured that I should rename this post to add my own pet peeves to Matt Johnsons’s list. So without further ado:

• Aliens That Aren’t Really Alien: Most alien species you see in SF are basically humans with weird ears or bumps on their forehead. In other words, they’re just humans with superficial differences. Sure many of them will have strange customs or psychological ticks, but most of the time, such differences aren’t even as severe as cultural differences here on earth. The most egregious violator of this is Star Trek. Klingons, Vulcans, Romulans… they’re all just humans with various traits magnified (impatient aggression, steadfast logic, and passionate cunning, respectively). One notable exception in the world of film is Alien (though sequels tend to diminish the more alien qualities). In the world of literature, the big exception is Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought books, A Fire Upon The Deep (reviewed on this blog a while back) and A Deepness in the Sky (which I also wrote about once). Fire‘s wolflike aliens, in particular, were great examples of what is possible, but rarely even attempted in SF. Regardless, examples of human-like alien races far outweigh the truly alien aliens in SF, and that’s always bothered me. To be sure, this does present something of a challenge to authors, as it requires them to think in ways unaccustomed to humans.
• Monolithic Planet Ecologies: Star Wars is particularly bad in this respect – the ice moon of Hoth, the desert planet of Tatooine, the forest moon Endor, etc… The thought of an entire planet with only one type of climate almost boggles the mind. I’m sure there are some planets like this, but if Star Wars was any indication, every planet has one and only one dominant climate. Sometimes this sort of conceit can be used to good effect, as in Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent The Left Hand of Darkness, but it’s still a pet peeve of mine.
• Language: Rarely is language used as anything more than simple flavor in a story with alien species. Most of the time there is some sort of unexplained technology, typically called the “Universal Translator” or something, that will automatically translate alien languages. Rarely does the translation aspect receive any scrutiny. At best, we get some sort of throwaway reference to the universal translator, then the story moves on to other things. If you think of the way all the various human languages interact with one another and the inadequacies of translations, it seems really unlikely that alien species would even come close to being easily understood. For instance, human translators working to convert a text from one human language to another aren’t working in a vacuum – they bring their own cultural and historical context into the picture when translating that text. Take a Greek word like pathos; there isn’t really a single English word that corresponds with what Pathos represents. You rarely get that sort of depth in SF. One notable exception to this is Mary Doria Russell’s exceptional novel, The Sparrow. The novel has many themes, but the way it uses language to precipitate a tragic outcome is unsurpassed. Interestingly, Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash has a more thorough exploration of the nature of language than most stories with alien species (and Snow Crash doesn’t even feature any aliens!)
• Artificial Gravity: Another concept often relegated to a throwaway reference, there exists a lot of potential here that goes untapped. It’s not so much that it’s impossible to control gravity as that if we had that ability, the applications would extend far beyond being able to stand on the floor of a spaceship. Implications for weaponry are enormous, and energy manipulation in general seems ripe for this sort of technology. But no, we’ll just use it to simulate earth level gravity, thanks. I guess tractor beams could be explained in such a way, and a lot of SF does at least attempt to account for this by explaining that the spaceship is spinning in such a way as to simulate earth gravity, but it’s still a bothersome trope.

I think that’s all for now. I was going to write one for manned interstellar travel, but that topic is just too large (for example, it encompasses FTL travel, which is, in itself, a rather large subject) for a quick paragraph (Nevertheless, the way interstellar travel is depicted in SF is often tiresome and thoroughly unrealistic – one notable exception, Greg Egan’s Diaspora). One interesting thing about writing this post that I didn’t really expect were the number of exceptions to each of the above pet peeves. It turns out that there are a lot of books that really do address these issues (perhaps another reason why the phrase “Unquestioned Assumptions” is not appropriate for this discussion).

Matthew Johnson lists out several Unquestioned Assumptions of Science Fiction. It’s an interesting list, though it suffers from the same problems all lists suffer from: I don’t agree with some of them, and I think there are some rather notable omissions. So let’s get started:

• Bionics: Johnson is basically saying that we have seen no evidence that a superhuman bionic man/woman could be created. He mentions the increasingly sophisticated use of prosthetics, but is correct in noting that there are weak spots in that chain, and thus someone with a bionic arm won’t really be guaranteed any advantage unless they become one of them full-replacement cyborgs from Ghost in the Shell. I’ll admit that SF has probably gotten a lot of this wrong, but there’s much more to bionics than just superhuman beings. In a more general sense, bionics is about applying natural biological systems and methods to the engineering of electronic or mechanical technology. And in general, this is something we’ve already done a lot of (for instance, velcro and lots of flight related innovations derived from birds). Even in terms of medicine, stuff like cochlear implants are rapidly approaching the point where the deaf can hear better than unmodified humans (there are, of course, other drawbacks to this). I know nanotechnology is used as a form of magic in some movies, but there is a ton of potential there. And something like a Respirocyte could theoretically result in “superhuman” powers simply by increasing the amount of oxygen stored in red blood cells. So no, I don’t see the bionic man or woman anytime soon, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable topic for SF.
• Uploading, or cloning for that matter: Johnson notes that this isn’t impossible, just that they’re also not “any kind of ticket to immortality for the simple reason that neither an uploaded version of your mind nor a clone with all your memories is you: they are both copies of you”. This is an excellent point, and I do believe he’s very right. While I’m willing to go along with the ride in a book like John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, I seriously doubt the subjective experience would be anything like what Scalzi describes (he handwaves the whole thing by explaining that consciousness is transferred, so it’s like a cut-and-paste, as oposed to a copy-and-paste – there’s nothing left in the old body. I can see how that sort of thing would be appealing to people though.) Interestingly, Scalzi proposes something completely different in The Android’s Dream, where the artificial consciousness is most definitely a copy (and we’re never entirely sure how good that copy really is). Anyway, Johnson does wonder why anyone would even want to do such a thing, and I do take a bit of an issue with that. I’ll expand on this later in the post, but interstellar space travel seems much more hospitable to some sort of electronic being than it does to biological lifeforms (again, more on this later). Another reason, assuming that the artificial construct can sustain creative thought, it might be nice to keep some folks around after they are gone. Maybe that would be a disaster – maybe Einstein would be a tremendous douchebag if he were still alive in mechanical form today, but it’s probably something worth trying. In the end, I certainly wouldn’t call this an unquestioned assumption. There exist lots of counter-examples, including the recently reviewd Diaspora, where artificial consciousness seems to have lots of advantages over biology (more on this in a bit).
• Sensors: I completely agree with Johnson here. The non-trivial challenges to sensors are numerous and I don’t see them ever working the way they’re portrayed on tv or in movies (books tend to be better, but still).
• Space Combat: Another one I mostly agree with, especially given the way it’s portrayed in most SF. This is a topic already covered on this blog (and others mentioned my post) years ago, so I’ll leave it at that. I do think there’s a fantastic movie to be made in the mold of The Enemy Below, but in space and with realistic physics (with some handwaving around the energy and motivational aspects of the whole thing – it could be entertaining, but it probably couldn’t be wholly accurate).
• Sol III: Quite frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this one before. The convention of naming the star, and then each planet around the star getting a number (i.e. the eighth planet orbiting the star Omicron Persei is referred to as Omicron Persei 8) does seem common, though I don’t find it all that troubling. I can see how it would be a pet peeve of someone though.

So that covers Johnson’s list. There are, of course, lots of omissions here. Perhaps I’ll cover those in a later post.

I’ve been reading a science fiction novel called Diaspora, by Greg Egan. The novel is initially set about a thousand years in the future, which is enough time to allow Egan to postulate all sorts of things without really having to explicitly delve into the morality of gene-splicing or consciousness transferral, etc… However, those sorts of questions emerge anyway because we, the readers, are still living our contemporary lives, where these issues are as relevant as ever.

The novel begins in a “Polis”, which is basically a network of artificial consciousnesses. Some of these are humans who have uploaded themselves, others are entirely artificial. Alternatively, there were apparently a lot of people who transferred themselves into human-shaped robots called Gleisners. Regular human beings are still around, and they’re referred to as “Fleshers” (for obvious reasons). At this point, there are tons of genetically altered humans, to the point where many of the variants can no longer communicate with one another (another class of humans, calling themselves “Bridgers” have been bred specifically to solve the problem of communication). Humans without any sort of genetic tampering are referred to as “Statics”, and don’t seem to be doing well.

In the story, the industrious but apparently suspicious gleisners have discovered an odd astrophysical event which could prove disasterous to Earth (at least, to its fleshers). Two of the characters go down to the planet to warn the fleshers, but they’re met with paranoia and disbelief. One of the characters, Yatima, is a completely random mutation from a polis (he has no “parents”, even artificial ones), and he (or, I should say “ve” as they seem to be quasi-asexual, though even the artificial pronouns sometimes seem to have a gender connotation, but that’s a different discussion) is having some trouble understanding the objections to his suggestion that anyone who wants to can upload themselves to his Polis. In the scene below, he’s speaking with a static human and Francesca, who is a human bridger.

He gazed down at them with a fascinated loathing. ‘Why can’t you stay inside your citadels of infinite blandness, and leave us in peace? We humans are fallen creatures; we’ll never come crawling on our bellies into your ersatz Garden of Eden. I tell you this: there will always be flesh, there will always be sin, there will always be dreams and madness, war and famine, torture and slavery.’

Even with the language graft, Yatima could make little sense of this, and the translation into Modern Roman was equally opaque. Ve dredged the library for clarification; half the speech seemed to consist of references to a virulent family of Palestinian theistic replicators.

Ve whispered to Francesca, dismayed, ‘I thought religion was long gone, even among the statics.’

‘God is dead, but the platitudes linger.’ Yatima couldn’t bring verself to ask whether torture and slavery also lingered, but Francesca seemed to read vis face, and added, ‘Including a lot of confused rhetoric about free will. Most statics aren’t violent, but they view the possibility of atrocities as essential for virtue – what philosophers call “the Clockwork Orange fallacy”. So in their eyes, autonomy makes the polises a kind of amoral hell, masquerading as Eden.’ (page 119 in my edition)

The reference to A Clockwork Orange was interesting, as this isn’t a novel that’s been filled with pop culture references, but the concept itself is a common theme in SF (and, for that matter, philosophy). It’s not hard to see why, especially when it comes to something like a Polis. What does morality mean in a Polis? A consciousness living in a Polis is essentially living in an entirely virtual environment – there are minimal physical limits, property doesn’t really exist as a concept, and so on. The inhabitants of any given Polis are modeled after humans, in a fashion, and yet many of our limitations are not applicable. Some polises have a profound respect for the physical world around them. Others have retreated into their virtual reality, some going as far as abandoning the laws of physics altogether in an effort to better understand the elegance of mathematics. Would it be moral to upload yourself into a Polis? Or would that be the cowards way out and represent the evasion of responsibility that free will provides? Would one still have a free will if their consciousness was run by a computer? Once in a Polis, is it necessary to respect the external, natural world? Could anything be gained from retreating into pure mathematics? Egan doesn’t quite address these issues directly, but this sort of indirect exploration of technological advancement is one of the things that the genre excels at.

Strangely, one of the things that seems to take on a more dangerous tone in the world of Diaspora is the concept of a meme (for more on this, check out this post by sd). The way ideas are transmitted and replicated among humans isn’t especially well understood, but it can certainly be dangerous. Egan is pretty clearly coming down against the humans who don’t want to escape to the Polis (to avoid disaster), and he seems to blame their attitude on “a virulent family of Palestinian theistic replicators”. This sort of thing seems even more dangerous to an artificial consciousness though, and Egan even gives an example. These AI consciousnesses can run a non-sentient program called an “outlook” which will monitor the consciousness and adjust it to maintain a certain set of values (in essence, it’s Clockwork Orange software). In the story, one character shows Yatima what’s happened to their outlook:

It was an old outlook, buried in the Ashton-Laval library, copied nine centuries before from one of the ancient memetic replicators replicators that had infested the fleshers. It imposed a hermetically sealed package of beliefs about the nature of the self, and the futility of striving … including explicit renunciations of every mode of reasoning able to illuminate the core belief’s failings.

Analysis with a standard tool confirmed that the outlook was universally self-affirming. Once you ran it, you could not change your mind. Once you ran it, you could not be talked out of it.

I find this sort of thing terrifying. It’s almost the AI equivalent to being a zombie. If you take on this outlook, why even bother existing in the first place? I guess ignorance is bliss…

In case you can’t tell, I’m very much enjoying Diaspora. I’m still not finished, but I only have a little more than a hundred pages left. It’s not much of a page turner, but that’s more because I have to stop every now and again to consider various questions that have arisen than lack of quality (though I will note that Egan is probably not a gateway SF author – he certainly doesn’t shy away from the technical, even in extremes). I’ll probably be posting more when I finish the book…