Tag: science fiction

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick – A Science Fiction Book Review

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I won’t give a synopsis of the plot.  If you’ve seen the movie “Blade Runner” then you have an approximate idea of the world and the action of the story.  Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who kills androids that break free of their service as bond slaves for humanity on Mars.  He lives on an Earth where a remnant of humans remain who haven’t emigrated off-Earth.  The Earth is contaminated with radioactive fallout called “the dust’ that is slowly mutating and killing every living thing.  And many species have gone extinct and there is an almost cult-like love for animals that is expressed by owning farm animals like sheep and goats.  And the extension of this cult is something called Mercerism that expresses empathy for all living things (except androids).

Let me give my impressions of Philip K. Dick’s writing and style.  He is a very effective writer.  His characters are sparingly but clearly represented and his narrative is interesting and cleverly crafted.  He has carefully thought out many details of how this strange world works.  The interpersonal interactions between Deckard and his wife, his boss, the androids, the other people in his surroundings are all consistent and keep you immersed in the story.  He is a very talented science fiction writer.  And if this book is representative of his type of story, he is not for me.

If I would sum up this book in one word it would be “dystopia.”

Everything in this book is downbeat.  Deckard is depressed.  His wife is practically suicidal.  His boss is bleak.  The owner of the corporation that makes the androids is harried.  And finally, the androids are schizophrenic.  The only ones who seem cheerful are the tv comics meant to sedate the populace and the pet salesmen who sell overpriced animals and fake animals to the desperate remnant of Earth’s human population.

So, here’s the thing.  I think PKD is a major talent and I’m sure his reputation as a talented author is well deserved.  And I’m sure there is a large audience for his type of fiction.  Unfortunately, I’m not a part of that audience.  I’m not a hopeless dystopia kind of guy.  That doesn’t mean I need utopia.  I don’t mind crises and catastrophes.  But a story that has absolutely no one to root for just doesn’t inspire me to keep reading.  If everyone in the story is a neurotic basket case and no one can summon the will to try and overcome the awful things that are happening in the story; or if morally speaking, the “good guys” are completely indistinguishable from the “bad guys” then why the hell should I care who wins or loses?

So, yeah, this is a good book.  But it’s not for me.  I’ll probably read a few more PKD “masterpieces” to see if there’s anything for me.  If they’re all like this then I’m going to assume that the author was an extremely unhappy man and if I don’t want to end up that way myself, I should move on to greener sf pastures.

Catching Up with Becky

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So, now I have to start writing my next book.  And as I decided after finishing the last one, this time I must outline the story ahead of time.  Sure, it’s less fun than just starting to type and see where it ends up.  But it’s also so much less dangerous.  I remember in the last third of “The Sniper” I painted myself into a corner and I had to delete five thousand words and start off in another direction.  And I got seriously confused and had to do a bunch of outlining anyway, so I might as well do some big picture plot planning at the beginning and leave the fine tuning to my unconscious while it’s flowing through my fingertips.

But it’s funny.  It’s not plot events that have been running through my head lately.  It’s characters.  I feel like I want more people and different people showing up in the story this time around.  I want some humorous characters showing up.  I might even want a joke or two being told.  And I think I want an academic type and maybe even an actor.  I was listening to some Shakespeare recently.  It was John Gielgud reciting “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” from Macbeth.  And it struck me that a little poetry and a little philosophy might be a lot of fun to write into even a story like mine.  Now, mind you, I said a little poetry.  And it doesn’t have to look like poetry.  It just has to signify to me that maybe the character on the page has an immortal soul after all.

And as for philosophy, well, it can be practical philosophy.  It can be political philosophy.  And what could be more timely than political philosophy in this time of collapsing republics and demagogues.  Who knows, maybe Connors and Cutter may discuss the application of artificial intelligence to the problem of optimizing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in North America after the end of Boghadair’s War.  Perhaps a completely impartial intelligence could be conjured up to play Solomon to modern day Americans who no longer seem able to live and let live.  Maybe it can cut the baby in half in some modern sense and return us to a functioning society again.  And when I mention Solomon, I think it’s partially because I think there’s a religious (or at least spiritual) dimension to our problems and for which a spiritual solution is necessary.  And Christian revivals are a recurring theme in American history.  And I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking we all need a spiritual boost just about now.

So, yeah, I haven’t got a working plot outline yet but I think it’s time to start.  As I’ve said, I think Bogey will not be dragged into the main action any time soon but personally he’s tied intimately to several important characters and I’m sure he’ll interact with them.  Plus, I have to find out what happened with him and Becky.  That sounded interesting.

Space Fiction in the Modern Age

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With all the excitement about “Project Hail Mary” making a gazillion dollars at the box office I was thinking about how we get past the reality of the limitations on humans surviving space travel.  I mean what do we think about our interplanetary (not to mention interstellar) travelers bombarded with cosmic radiation and metabolically wasted away by microgravity?    Yikes!

First off, think of all the great old books and movies that have been rendered null and void by these realities.  Other than maybe the Moon, the old ideas of colonies are falsified by what we’ve learned.  No colonies on Mars and the Jovian moons.  No asteroid miners in the Belt.  All just flights of fantasy.  What’s an American boy from the baby boom to do?

Well, I guess the thing to remember is that one age’s wild guess is eventually replaced by a later age’s measured recalculation.  Jules Verne had men travel around the Moon by being shot out of a cannon.  Of course, when someone from the twentieth century crunched the numbers, they probably figured out that a cannon that could send a projectile around the Moon would reduce the occupants to a puddle of goo by virtue of the acceleration needed to reach escape velocity in just the few seconds that the “bullet” was inside the barrel of the “gun.”  And yet these twentieth century engineers didn’t just throw their hands in the air and say “Impossible.”  They invented chemical rockets.

And maybe that’s what will happen with space flight.  Even in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Frank and Dave have a rotating ring with pseudo-gravity.  Maybe a practical way to protect humans from radiation will also be perfected.

Or maybe the science fiction of the future will involve robot missions to the planets and stars but with some kind of instantaneous communication to allow humans to experience the sights and sounds of the robotic mission as if in the first person.  Or maybe they’ll fall back on good old “psionics” to allow humans to explore space-time without leaving the confines of Mother Earth.

Or maybe we go back to the suspended animation idea.  And we add to that a nice heavy duty radiation shield around the cryo-unit.  We can have a robotic autopilot and only thaw the humans at the destination.

Or how about intelligent robots whose memories can then be downloaded for humans to view or even “experience” as transferrable memories.  Or maybe we can build a wormhole in high orbit around Earth and pop out close to other planets or even exo-planets.

And none of these things have to be proven science.  They just have to be figments of our imagination that give us the framework for a story or a future that entertain us.  In a decade or a century what we know to be impossible will change again.  And so will what we find to be possible.  We are very clever monkeys and what is impossible today becomes possible in a different way tomorrow.  There’s no reason to give up our stories or our dreams.

Some Thoughts about Philip K Dick

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I was listening to an interview that Philip K Dick (PKD) made back in May 1979.  Now I’ve never read any of his stories.  Of course, I’ve seen Blade Runner and I have heard him described as one of the best science fiction writers of all time so I’ve always meant to get ahold of a few of his books and read them but between work and wife and kids and life I’ve just never had a chance.

So, when I saw this YouTube audio-file I listened to it.  It’s two hours long and some of it is kind of hard to believe.  But it is extremely interesting.  I would say PKD was a very intelligent man but I’m pretty sure his grasp on reality was extremely tenuous on certain subjects.  He believed that at one point he was possessed by some kind of spirit or intelligence that controlled him and fixed a lot of his financial and even health problems.  And listening to him describe this chapter in his life it’s hard not to assume that either he was dealing with some kind of split personality or he was suffering from schizophrenia.

Now based on what I’ve read about PKD’s fiction he was intrigued with the idea that reality wasn’t what we think it is.  That different people experienced radically different perceptions of reality and maybe none of these perceptions were particularly accurate.  And so, with this type of belief I could see how he might accept versions of reality that most people would find absurd.

Now, in the audio-recording he is asked by the interviewer about his use of drugs and their impact on his mind and writing.  PKD goes to great lengths to deny that he used LSD more than once.  He claimed that the drug he abused was an amphetamine that he used to be able to produce prodigious amounts of fiction writing.  The implication was that his drug use did not affect his writing by altering his mind.  And maybe this was true.  But listening to this man I got the distinct impression that even if LSD wasn’t the source of his delusions, that he was indeed substantially untethered from reality in a lot of his beliefs about the world around him.  In short, I think he was in some sense insane.

So, how does this jibe with his undeniable creative talent?  I think that both these things can be true at the same time.  Look at Vincent van Gogh.  He was undeniably a creative genius in his field of art but he was also a tortured madman who finally killed himself to escape his mental anguish.  So, whether PKD was driven insane by his drug use (of whatever substances) or whether his mind was damaged for whatever other reasons there might have been, his grasp on reality (or lack thereof) did not stop him from producing very entertaining science fiction.  And perhaps it was his delusions that actually made his stories so interesting.  Strange man.  Well, I’ll start with “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and see how I like it.  Maybe I’ll read some more.

More Movie Talk

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So, I had some fun re-imagining “THEM!” as a 2026 sci-fi reboot.  Alright what’s next?  Well, John Carpenter beat me to the punch with “The Thing.”  That was a reboot that in many people’s minds outdid the original (“The Thing from Another World”).  But a whole bunch of classic sci-fi movies have already been redone (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Invaders from Mars, War of the Worlds).  So maybe we don’t need another reboot.

As I said in my discussion of Weir’s “Project Hail Mary,” what we really need are new movies.  Sure, they’re mostly just variations on the million science fiction stories that are already written but even small differences can freshen up old ideas.  Instead of any more trash from the Star Wars industry why not give us some pulp?  Burroughs or Doc Smith or Howard.  Those stories were made to be put on the big screen (or the smaller one in my living room).  And I read where they’re working on bringing back Schwarzenegger as an older Conan.  That would be perfect.  A beat-up old Arnold playing a beat-up old Conan with the right writer and the right director could be the perfect swan song for him and a wonderful treat for us if they abandon all the woke crap and let Conan be the barbarian he’s meant to be.

And if we digress into fantasy, I wish they’d try again to make a movie or a series out of the Dresden Files.  Jim Butcher’s series of books are some of the most entertaining and filmable stories in urban fantasy.  Of course, I wish they’d start by doing justice to Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series first.  With the combination of interesting characters, vivid monsters and high caliber weaponry they would make a very exciting series of movies.  But I suppose instead we’ll get more nonsense like “The Rings of Power.”

But of course, what’s really needed by both the larger movie audience and the film-makers’ bottom line is a cable series based on Jake Barter’s “The Sniper.”  The combination of economically but vividly drawn characters and remarkable plotting make this story the most cinematically perfect vehicle for a studio to reap the harvest of multi-billion-dollar profits.  Joseph Boghadair is an iconic figure and the many fascinating sub-plots and characters will spawn a whole series of sequels and spin-offs that will explore the multi-faceted world that the author is creating.  New technologies and industries are waiting for Paul Connors’ empire to recover from the ravages of war and reap the benefits of the new political situation that Bogey’s “war” has created.  And the political changes that will sweep across North America will change life on the whole planet as better ways for humans to cooperate and socialize and organize themselves politically emerge.

I am toying with the idea of including some short stories in this “world” I’ve built and putting those out next as a short-term addition to the saga.  That will allow me to push off in several directions at once before I commit to any one story for the next novel.  Well, that’s enough for now.

Giant Ant Suspension of Disbelief

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War Pig mentioned the rumor that there is a studio remaking “THEM!.”  My reaction is an unqualified, Yeah!  But I immediately thought to myself, “Hey wait a minute.  This isn’t 1954, it’s 2026!  What about the illogic of an insect fifteen feet long weighing thousands of pounds, breathing by passive diffusion of oxygen through spiracles?  And how about the other unscalable aspects of its anatomy and physiology like weight and strength of exoskeleton vs. the thick bones found in large land animals like rhinos and elephants.”

Sure, I’m being a spoil sport.  If we want giant ants living in the sewers of Los Angles we should get them.  And look how timely it would be.  Imagine a nighttime forage of giant ants finding it’s way to a homeless encampment just by smell alone.  Now, there is the danger that this could be considered cruelty to animals.  And most homeless could be considered poisoned bait.  After all, if an ant ate one of these denizens of the City of Angels might it not die from a fentanyl overdose?  I mean, that’s not really fair, is it?  The ant is just doing what millions of years of evolution (plus a century of radioactive fallout) has taught him.  It’s not his fault that Mayor Bass and Governor Newsom have put these temptations in his way.  To him they’re just appetizers.

So, maybe there should be some hand-waving and exposition to provide an infodump to explain how rapid evolution adapted the giant ants so that they now have an internal skeleton and an efficient circulatory system but somehow have preserved the external appearance of an ant.  And here’s where AI can come in handy.  In order to have the necessary gravitas to sell the audience on this cockamamie science of giant ant biology we will need Santa Claus.  We will need an electronic avatar of Edmund Gwenn to play Dr. Harold Medford.  He alone can walk us through super 8 film clips of ants.  However, we can recast the part of Dr. Patricia Medford.  For this part I would recommend Sydney Sweeney as she possesses unique personal assets which will not lend her scientific gravitas but which will boost the movie’s financial bottom line significantly.

All in all, I think a remake of ‘Them!” could be an enormous hit.  I think to make it more topical; it would make sense to recruit Donald Trump to play himself as the President who employs all the massive resources of the US military to combat these deadly and terrifying creatures.  Perhaps we can shift the anti-nuclear message of the movie if we show how nuclear weapons can be used for good.  Perhaps the outbreak in Los Angeles proves too far advanced and a decision must be made by Trump to nuke LA.  It can be stressed that almost all of the human population escapes (maybe only Bass and Newsom are being held hostage by the ants).  And so nuclear weapons become not only the cause of the problem but also the solution!  Then we can have Santa Claus and the hot chick give that speech where they talk about opening a door into a new world where anything is possible, even giant crickets in the inevitable sequel.

Rebooting Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

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I was watching a video where it discussed sci-fi movies that were going to have a sequel or reboot made soon.  And one of those movies was Starship Troopers.  Now the video spun the fact that the original 1997 motion picture lost money as a case of mistaken identity.  If you saw that movie you know that the director wasn’t faithful to the spirit of Heinlein’s book.  In fact, he used the movie to satirize the Heinlein plot as a story of fascism gone wild.  Paul Verhoeven used all the avenues available to him to paint the government in Heinlein’s novel as basically a nazi-like regime.  He even dressed the military officers in what looked like nazi uniforms.

And according to the narrator of the video the movie failed because audiences mistook the satire Verhoeven produced for actual approval of fascism.  Now I tend to believe that the movie failed because fans of Heinlein’s book read reviews that told them that the movie was a criticism of Heinlein’s story and not an honest presentation of the themes of the novel and stayed home.  This would seem to be a more reasonable explanation for such a popular book failing to attract its audience to the movie.

Now, the video debated whether the director who is supposedly making the new movie would copy Verhoeven’s lead and make the new movie a satire or would instead follow the book’s interpretation of the story.  I guess the guy making this video is hoping for a satire that clearly explains ahead of time that it is mocking Heinlein’s story.  This seems a wildly absurd idea.  If the original satire lost many millions of dollars, who would think it was a safe bet to try the same strategy again and expect a different result?

Now I can’t claim to know whether thirty years later there still exists a large enough audience of Heinlein fans to make a faithful screen adaptation of Starship Troopers a big success.  His original fans have aged pretty radically.  And the later generations are hardly the kind of people who would espouse a world view that requires military service as a perquisite for the right to vote.  So, I wouldn’t see any reboot of Starship Troopers as a guaranteed box office success.

But by the same token if it was made with state-of-the-art special effects and gave us an exciting glimpse of what interstellar warfare might look like, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was extremely popular.  There have been several very popular science fiction war movies in the last ten years and the special effects were very good in some of them and made the movies spectacular to watch.  If you take that technical capability and add a sympathetic hero and his journey through the military experience, I could see young and old viewers enjoying it.

Honestly, I’m not even sure this reboot is going to be made.  Hollywood has lost a lot of money in the last five years and I’m sure they’re getting nervous about big budget science fiction movies.  But I guess I’m secretly hoping someone will do Starship Troopers right, the way Heinlein wrote it.  Fingers crossed.

A Good Day to be a Writer

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Today I went to my tax accountant to discuss my “royalties.”  I waited until now because tax season is much too hectic to talk about 2026 issues to people in that profession.  I have had a few unhappy incidents with the tax man and I go way out of my way to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Now this is my new accountant.  In fact, he’s the grandson of my old accountant.  His grandfather is retiring soon so I’m sort of an inheritance.  When I arrived, I saw a kid walking in the front door and after waiting in the waiting room for a few minutes that same kid turned out to be my accountant.  But despite his youthful appearance he proved up to the job of assuaging my fears about ending up in an IRS gulag for high crimes and misdemeanors against the tax code.  Specifically, I was worried that maybe there was some kind of monthly reporting and payment I needed to perform for both the state and federal systems.  I remember when I was dealing with a state agency that required businesses to collect and pay sales tax monthly.

He explained to me that unless I was profiting to the tune of several thousand dollars a month, I wouldn’t need to send any money to the feds but even if I did, I’d be getting it back if I had enough “expenses” (like Amazon Ads and marketing fees) to cover the royalties I received.

At the mention of expenses, I barked a bitter laugh.  I told him the idea that I was profiting from my sales was laughable in the extreme.  Basically, a first book (barring some miraculous viral publicity) was a loss leader for the rest of the sequels.  He agreed that his other author clients had told him about what it took to grow a book business but he also warned me that the feds only give you three years to turn a profit before they stop considering it a business and declare it a hobby for which expenses are not credited.  Well, we’ll have to see about that.

So, we agreed I’d check back with him in June to see if I was any closer to needing to send some cash to the feds.  And he didn’t want to take a fee for his services today but I insisted.  The information I got had so eased my mind that I felt I would be robbing him of a well-earned reward if I didn’t give him fifty bucks.  I mean people who go to therapy to ease their minds pay their psychiatrists many hundreds of dollars and get less peace of mind than I did today.  I would have felt like a thief if I walked out for nothing.

And looking at my book’s Amazon page, I had two new very complimentary reviews.  One was from a friend of mine.  He disclosed our relationship but it was still a very good review.  And another one was from someone who was an Iraq War vet who enjoyed the scenes in the desert.  That kind of made my day.  So today is a good day to be a writer.

The Day After the Day After Tomorrow

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In the comments for yesterday’s post on anti-matter there was some discussion about the methodology for interstellar travel; matter/anti-matter annihilation as a form of impulse power versus the use of a worm hole to poke in and out of space as needed.  As was intimated (being turned inside out) the current understanding of general relativity does not present any clear mechanism for human beings to utilize such a phenomenon and remain alive.  And that got me thinking.

Five hundred years ago if you wanted to go from Portugal to India you would get on a sailing ship and circumnavigate the continent of Africa and then cross the Indian Ocean.  And when you returned from this trip thirty months would have passed.  Today, a direct flight from Lisbon to Calcutta would take about twelve hours.  Call it a day for a round trip.  That’s about 900 times faster than the old way.  A trip to Mars at its shortest takes about six months.  Adding in the return trip makes the whole voyage something like 26–34 months.  If somehow, we could increase our speed by the same 900 times we could go round trip to Mars in a day.

Of course that’s impossible.  But only in the sense that we would be trying to improve the same means of travel in the future case.  So, if you told Vasco da Gama he could make a round trip to India in one day he would assume you were either joking or insane.  Because the very idea of a jet plane was an impossibility in his world.  Before you can have jet planes you need Galileo, Newton and Maxwell.  In other words, you need the mathematics, physics, chemistry and engineering of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to know that a jet plane could exist.

What if the mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering of the twenty second, twenty third and twenty fourth centuries conspire to make the round trip to Mars only one day by finding a completely novel approach to travel.  What if wormholes really could be harnessed for human transport?  Then a day long trip would just be a convenience for meals whereas actual travel time would be zero.  But you argue, “wormholes are a theoretical aspect of relativity that have never been observed and if they exist would be as inimical to human life as a black hole would be.  And I would counter that feeding flammable liquids like octane into a machine that produces electric sparks and depends on metal parts rotating thousands of times per minute is much too dangerous a method for transporting humans from place to place.

So, I won’t say I know that we’ll ever reach the stars.  But I think anyone who says categorically that we cannot is making assumptions that cannot be taken as fact.  They are conjecture based on the current understanding of physics and engineering.  So, I guess we’re free to fantasize about galactic empires and worm holes and warp drives and anything that makes us happy.  And some days I want to read about the day after tomorrow and other days I’ll dream about galactic empires.  Why not?

Practical Applications of Riemannian-Bishopian Dimensional Translations – Part 1

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Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

Dunwich is a very odd place.  First of all, you’ll notice that it does not appear on any map of New England.  And this is both an advantage and a disadvantage.  On the plus side it limits the amount of traffic that traverses its roads.  On the minus side it’s darn hard to enter and leave it.  For instance, there are no gas stations in Dunwich so whenever I need to fill up the old gas tank, I have to find a way out of town and find my way back in again afterward.  And it’s not a matter of just heading down any road until you reach the town limits.  Strictly speaking there are no limits.  If you travel on Aylesbury Pike past Sentinel Hill for about three hours you’ll come back to Sentinel Hill again.  And if you turn off at Whateley Lane and go for about two hours, you’ll notice a singularity in the middle of the road.  And if you get too close to it, you’ll be pulled in and find yourself in the alimentary canal of Yog Sothoth.  And that’s not a good place to be.  So, you can see that commuting is somewhat problematic.  But for all of the locals it’s really just an acquired skill that is taught from father to son.  It’s all a matter of geometry.  Einstein believed that our space time was a variety of non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian.  And it is.  However, Dunwich has a different geometry called Bishopian after the famous Dunwichian mathematician (or wizard) Septimus Bishop who measured the curvature of Dunwichian space and codified the equations for translating back and forth between the two universes.

The mathematics is too complex for most people without advanced training to follow.  On a practical level if you close your right eye and squint your left and slam down the accelerator just at the right location on the Dunwich side, you’ll reach normal space.  And from normal space if you close your left eye and squint with your right eye while slamming on the breaks you can return to Dunwichian space from some well-known anomalies.

For the most part this kind of travel is a routine.  But every once in a while, something seems to go wrong.  I was driving at night in a snow storm in Dunwich a few years back and I sneezed too hard and must have activated an anomaly.  When I blinked my eyes open again, it was broad daylight and obviously a summer day in some warm climate.  I found out I was in Tallahassee Florida and it was six months in the past.  And this caused all kinds of problems when I got back to Dunwich and ran into my earlier self, watching tv in my living room.  I had a devil of a time murdering my doppelganger and sinking him in the swamp.  He seemed to know all of my fighting tricks and just refused to die like a good sport.  Some people are like that.