Last night I woke up and not being able to get back to sleep read “Balancing Accounts” by James L. Cambias in the February, 2008 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I always love reading a good short story when my brain should be dreaming; it makes the fiction all the more vivid. “Balancing Accounts” is fun first person tale told by a robotic rocketship named Annie. There are humans in this story, but they are strange distant creatures and all the good and bad guys in this story are robots of one sort of another. These robots living out around the moons of Saturn have their own barter economy because making a living means earning new body parts to keep on trucking in the outer system. This is an entertaining story that I recommend, but it got me to thinking about another way to imagine the future of space travel.
What if all the Vikings, Pioneers and Voyagers had personalities? This isn’t a new idea in the science fiction world, where AIs are old hat, but I’m not sure if the idea has really been explored for all its worth. Let’s breed a mash-up of ideas from Vernor Vinge with Robert Zubrin theories. Zubrin champions the idea of living off the land for future space explorers. Send robots to Mars to set up factories to produce rocket fuel and other supplies so when astronauts go to Mars they have to blast off from Earth with less weight. Zubrin’s robots are like automated factories, but what if they had more intelligence?
With recent DARPA Grand Challenges to build autonomous vehicles it’s not that hard to imagine a whole series of challenges to build machines that build other machines. It would be great if we had nanotech now, but what if we could build self replicating machines on the scale of Spirit and Opportunity? How smart would they have to be? Smart enough to enjoy themselves and have fun?
I don’t think we’re ready to send people to Mars, and the public doesn’t want to spend the money on the project anyway. But what if we could send robots to the Moon and Mars and they’d be designed to build tunnels, living quarters, produce stores of usable chemicals, grow farms, and do everything so when people finally did travel to these places a nice home would be waiting for them. The six lunar missions were never about making a home on the Moon. The public doesn’t want to spend billions for a few rocket jockeys to dash over to Luna and gather up a bag of rocks.
Would the public feel more generous about funding manned exploration if the Moon and Mars were flipped into nice condo properties? Sure it would be more fun to do the work ourselves, but there’s sort of a chicken and an egg problem here. As long as the Moon and Mars are just a pile of rocks no one wants to spend money to go there. If we could program our robot pals as our space contractors and make some major improvements that might change.
Now read “Balancing Accounts” and think about all the fun these machines could have, and also think of all the fun we could have programming and building them. Robots don’t need air to breath, and they handle radiation a lot better than we do. To make the Moon and Mars good for humans, we need to live underground. We need tunnels and airtight rooms carved out of rocks. We need machines that can take local material and atom by atom assemble the molecules and chemicals we need to build a civilization.
Most science fiction seldom deals with the details of space travel. Walk up and down the aisles of Home Depot and examine all the building blocks of your home that you can. Pick up an item and try to imagine where it came from and how it was built starting with the mining of the Earth through all the factories it took to make the parts to build the object in your hand. If we want to colonize space we’ll quickly learn it won’t be practical to ship goods and material from the Earth. We need to build everything off planet. The only thing that we should waste rocket fuel on is people and very high tech items. I’m thinking we need to spend years of sending super-smart robots to pave the way for us. We’ll need hundreds if not thousands of varieties and they should be as smart as we can make them. They should also be made to last and be reconfigurable so each machine might mate with others to build even new machines.
If I was kid growing up in the old K-12 prison I’d study robotics while doing my time. Let’s do a mash-up of Sim City and Lego Mindstorms on the Moon. And while we’re at it, make it an open source project and give the little robots guys some AI so they can have the fun of exploring the final frontier if we can’t.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
Damn you James! 🙂 I have so many science fiction books piled up right now, including 3 separate short story volumes that I am currently reading, and now you have no doubt sealed my fate by ensuring that I will be driving by my local Barnes and Noble on the way home to see if they still have a copy of this left!
Intriguing ideas. Of course the first thing I thought of when reading your ideas of sending the robots on ahead was that there is certainly a story there. They go out, make this great world, then get to thinking, ‘hey, do we really want the humans coming here and screwing things up? No? then let’s get ’em!’.
On a slightly more serious note, it is interesting to think that had we as a people been more forward thinking about developing alternative fuel sources, more energy efficient products, etc. that maybe it wouldn’t be such a huge financial burden for governments to be looking at exploring and populating the galaxy. Sure, it is wishful thinking to some degree and I certainly care about my suffering fellow man (and, on occasion, my sufffering self!), but I wish more was being spent on space related projects. It is probably just the kid in me that still wishes I could take that ‘one small step for man’.
Maybe in my middle age I should start taking some robotics courses so that I can go up with your pave-the-way robots and keep them company! 🙂
I really enjoyed that story, James. Other than the fact that the ending (the battle scene) felt like it was a bit rushed, it was a fun little story. Clever use of language from the robots point of view. I liked it and am glad to have made the trip to B&N to pick it up. It has been far too long since I’ve purchased a monthly sci fi magazine (I’m a bad sci fi fan) and so I’ll enjoy making my way through the rest of it.
I wish I had more time to squeeze in SF/F magazine reading. SF is an idea driven genre, and I think the magazines are the cutting edge of what’s going on in SF. Back when I was in junior and senior high school my buddies and I would read SF just for the ideas. We didn’t worry about characterization or plot or writing, but it was the far out ideas that got us excited. We refer to stories not by titles, but by the ideas in them.
Books like Mindswap by Robert Sheckley, or Bill, The Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison gave us weeks of loud talking and laughing. If we found a great story in Galaxy or Analog we’d pass it around. I miss the days when I knew people who read the monthly SF mags. The internet is bringing that back.
Jim
Time, always the bane of readers! That is one of the main reasons I wish either time travel was possible or the ability to slow time…so I could read the ever growing pile of books and mags that keeps filling my house.
I’m probably not the very best science fiction fan in that I don’t buy into the idea that science fiction is getting stagnant, is failing, etc. But the reason really comes down to the fact that story is more important to me than ideas. That isn’t to say that I don’t get thrilled by the ideas, provided they are well put forth and their is still a semblance of a story there, but in the end the story has always been of utmost importance. That is probably why my absolute favorite science fiction is either more space opera-ish or more character driven (for example I just read Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead this past month for the first time and I was so taken up with the characters that I still cannot stop thinking about them).
On the other side of the coin the internet allows me (all of us) to get in on current conversations about science fiction and being a fan I consider myself one of the torch carriers for the next generation…I want to do my part to promote an interest in science fiction. To do that I really want to try to keep up with newer novels and the shorter fiction in the mags so that I can have an idea of what is going on now and can engage in intelligent conversation.
So after typing all that I guess I see how the ideas really are important to me, it is just that many of the ideas I am discovering for the first time are ones that you and your friends discovered long ago (Foundation novels, The Stars My Destination, etc). As much as I’ve enjoyed a few of the newer books I’ve read this year (The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman, Hunter’s Run by Martin, Dozois, Abraham), I get an extra thrill out of reading the classics. I love that sense of history and nostalgia that comes from reading books that were written before I was born and that thrilled the generations of science fiction lovers that came before me.
Oh, and by the way a couple of years ago I joined Sci Fi Book Club and picked up a volume of Robert Sheckley short stories called The Masque of Manana and it was AMAZING. Other than the two volumes of Neil Gaiman short stories that are my favorites, the Sheckley book is the best collection of short stories I have ever read. I realize they were handpicked out of the many stories he wrote so that may have something to do with the quality, but there wasn’t a disappointing one in the bunch and there were something like 40+ stories in that book. He is another author whose praises I sing all the time and try to get my friends to read.
My reading tastes have changed as I’ve gotten older, I read far and wide, and story and characterization are now the important elements that I seek out. I read a lot less science fiction. I want to read more SF, but I have a number of limitations that keep me from being the SF bookworm I was as a kid.
First of all, I do most of my reading by listening, and most SF books do not come out on audio. I can supplement my listening by reading my Kindle, which magnifies prints and turns ebooks into large print books. My old eyes can’t handle long stretches of normal print anymore. The audio limitation is good because it prescreens a lot of books – usually only the better books get audio productions.
For instance I just finished Old Man’s War by John Scalzi a couple weeks ago. Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End just came out, so I might try it. Currently I’m listening to Northanger Abby by Jane Austen which is about a gothic book fan two hundred years ago. I might go to Xenocide by Orson Scott Card next or I might try Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Proust was a Neuroscientist. Selection is limited with audio, but it’s often good.
I’m glad you discovered Robert Sheckley. He’s like the Gary Larson of SF humor. Carl, I’m like you in that I’m rediscovering SF and trying to find the new stuff, as well as reacquaint myself with the classics. My Classics of Science Fiction page is stuck twenty years in the past and I would love to find the time and methods to find the best SF books of the last couple decades.
Jim
One of the things I did this year was to go and make a list of all the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award winners. I put it in my blog list under Awards List, I believe. Not that awards are any true gauge of the quality of fiction, as most of my favorites were never even nominated, but I thought it might be worthwhile to at least try some of the newer science fiction and fantasy by authors who have won recently.
Sheckley was just one of those odd things where I saw a couple of authors I like talking about how great his short stories were and lo and behold there was that volume from SFBC. You are correct, there are some wonderfully humorous stories there, but there were some really good serious ones as well.
I listen to audiobooks on occasion, not near as often as my wife or my best friend, both of whom travel alot for their jobs. It is a shame that libraries don’t, or can’t, stock these better and yet I am often pleased with what my friends can find. Not sure if you liked Scalzi or not, but if you did the entire trilogy is wonderful. If you listen to Ghost Brigades and like it you might be interested in short story he wrote from the viewpoint of Jane Sagan called, The Sagan Diary. It was a limited edition from Subterranean Press but the neat thing about it is that several female authors agreed to record various chapters and it is available for free:
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004836.html
I daresay that it would make no good sense unless you’ve read or listened to Ghost Brigades first.
His book Android’s Dream is a separate story that you might be interested in. It is much more along the lines of humorous stories like Bill the Galactic Hero, although better written in my opinion. It also has a caper element to it that is quite fun.
I am certainly a fan of Ms. Austen’s works and most of the films inspired by her works. It has been forever since I’ve read Northanger Abbey and was disappointed to have missed the recent PBS version of it. I have Vinge’s Rainbow’s End on my To Read shelf.
I hadn’t thought about the visual benefits of the Kindle. I am kind of old fashioned in that I am hesitant about reading novels in non-traditional formats…I just love the feel of the book in hand. However vision issues, which I will be dealing with myself someday, make that avenue of reading a lot more attractive.
James – It’s funny you mention Northanger Abbey. My wife and I also enjoy Jane Austen. We started watching the latest production of it by Masterpiece theatre which we had recorded unfortunately our DVR messed up and about a half hour into it our recording messed up. We were really enjoying it so now I might have to rent the audiobook as well to finish this story.
The Robot story above sounds like fun. I read your other posts on Science Fiction and here’s my take. I agree with you that’s hard to find that same spark reading Science Fiction today as when I was a young adult. I’m 38. I think the main thing today is that it’s hard to find that same sense of wonder in anything like I did growing up. The interet and all the cable tv channels have made some much information available instatiously and computers can do so much now that these items seem to have taken away the magic of discovery in so many things. It’s hard to find that sense of wonder. I see it mostly through my kids eyes now ( ages 8 & 11 ).
The more I read; the more my imagination is kept alive though. Movies and tv just can’t compete with reading for me. The last few years I’ve tripled my reading output fueled by discussions with my best friend and others and it’s charged me up more and more on daily basis and really made me a happier person. Science Fiction and Fantasy stories being the main fuel for my fire. I steer more to character driven stories myself more so than idea stories.
Growing up I too often ignored classics so now I’m trying to retify that. Recent Science Fiction stories I’ve enjoyed in the last few years are: The Rolling Stones by Robert Heinlein, Friday by Robert Heinlein, Hunter’s Moon by George RR Martin, Gardner Dozies, and Daniel Abraham, Foundation by Isaac Asimov, The Minority Report from Phillip K. Dick, and Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and every story out by John Scalzi.
Recent fantasy stories I’ve enjoyed: A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Stardust by Neil Gaiman, and The Time Travelers Wife by Audrey Niffenger.
I wish you luck in rekindling that flame. I need to get back to reading The Stainless Steel Rat from Harry Harrision now. 🙂
Jeff, at 56 it’s hard to maintain a sense of wonder, but I work hard at it. I don’t think I’ll ever find that emotional roller coaster ride that comes with being thirteen, but I score my inspired highs in various ways. Discovering I can enjoy books like Pride and Prejudice helps. Reading lots of science magazines and watching lots of science documentaries help. Playing around on the Internet and publishing a blog helps. You and Carl are 38 and 39 so I think y’all have a lot of sense of wonder reserves in you. The future is still plenty full.
When the number of days before you grow less than the number of days behind you, your perspectives change. I’m still young at 56, but not as young as I was at 38. Aging is a real trip. I see science fiction much different today than at 13 or 38, and I have to be careful not to sound too negative. Only the very best SF works on me anymore, so I might be too quick to dismiss lesser work. But this aging cynicism has its advantages too – it makes me work much harder to be inspired and that is good for me. It’s important to never give up.
By the way, are your kids into reading?
Jim