jameswharris

Will Robots Have All the Fun?

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

What Was Heinlein’s Most Loved Story?

After playing around yesterday trying to find ways to see how popular science fiction was, I decided to use the same techniques to identify Robert A. Heinlein’s most loved stories. The results, gathered on 1/22/8, were both predictable and surprising:

Starship Troopers	176,000
Stranger in a Strange Land	130,000
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress	96,700
“Gulf”	61,300
Time Enough for Love	58,900
The Puppet Masters	44,200
Red Planet	34,500
Tunnel in the Sky	27,900
Double Star	27,400
The Door into Summer	24,200
Citizen of the Galaxy	22,500
The Number of the Beast	20,400
The Rolling Stones	20,300
Space Cadet	20,200
Glory Road	19,400
Have Space Suit-Will Travel	19,300
Methuselah’s Children	19,000
I Will Fear No Evil	16,400
Destination Moon	15,400
To Sail Beyond Sunset	14,100
Time for the Stars	13,700
The Green Hills of Earth	13,500
Podkayne of Mars	13,400
Starman Jones	13,100
Orphans of the Sky	12,800
Beyond This Horizon	12,400
Farmer in the Sky	12,100
Farnham’s Freehold	11,400
The Star Beast	11,100
Between Planets	10,500
“The Menace from Earth”	9,390
Assignment in Eternity	9,090
The Past Through Tomorrow	8,970
“All You Zombies—“	8,170
Sixth Column	6,910
“By His Bootstraps”	4,800
Rocketship Galileo	2,250
“Life-Line”	864
“Jerry Was a Man”	744
“—And He Built a Crooked House—“	717

It’s not surprising that Starship Troopers is #1, that’s because it was also a successful movie, and it probably also explains the success of The Puppet Masters in the rankings. And you’ve got to expect Stranger in a Strange Land to be at the top because of its cult status. I have a love-hate relationship with that novel. My favorite Heinlein book, Have Space Suit-Will Travel is disappointingly far down the list. I’ve written extensively why it’s my favorite, so many of those 19,300 pages are mine – I guess I need to write a whole lot more.

I really don’t understand why Time Enough for Love has 58,900 pages on the web that mentions it. I find Heinlein after 1965 unreadable. Rocketship Galileo seems to be his least favorite novel, and it’s my least favorite Scribner juvenile, but I’ve read it a number of times, and recently bought an audio book edition. It’s still fun.

I can’t tell if Red Planet is really the highest rated Scribner juvenile because the phrase “Red Planet” may have come up on other pages about Heinlein’s stories set on Mars. I’d like to think Tunnel in the Sky is the top Scribner juvenile because it’s my second favorite Heinlein book.

I tried to gauge some of the short stories, but I’m not sure about the results from “The Menace from Earth” since it was also a book title. “Gulf” is rated very high, but that’s probably because it was a proto-story for Stranger in a Strange Land and might be mentioned in conjunction with that famous novel. I’m guessing “All You Zombies—” is his most popular story.

JWH

How popular is Science Fiction?

This morning I got up wondering just how popular is science fiction. Google makes a wonderful barometer of popular culture so I did a bunch of searches and put them into Excel. Since I mainly was interested in trying to find out if Robert A. Heinlein was maintaining his popularity after death, I tried to select enough writers for comparison to give a good gauge of things. I searched on names using double quotes to get more accurate returns. Like this: “Robert Heinlein”

To make comparisons to other genres and pop culture as a whole, I put in SF authors, mystery authors, classic authors, famous historical names, and some pop icons from when I was growing up and now. The results are thus:

God	495,000,000
Jesus	176,000,000
Science Fiction	145,000,000
Britney Spears	64,500,000
Beatles	63,300,000
Moses	31,000,000
J. R. R. Tolkien	21,900,000
Plato	21,000,000
Bob Dylan	20,200,000
Galileo	19,000,000
Charles Dickens	15,700,000
Stephen King	13,700,000
J. K. Rowling	12,200,000
Socrates	10,900,000
Beach Boys	9,190,000
George Lucas	6,870,000
Jane Austen	6,390,000
Tom Clancy	4,940,000
Terry Pratchett	4,870,000
George Orwell	4,770,000
Douglas Adams	4,380,000
Jules Verne	4,340,000
John Grisham	3,450,000
Byrds	2,750,000
Isaac Asimov	2,670,000
James Joyce	2,440,000
H. G. Wells	2,390,000
Kurt Vonnegut	2,190,000
Janet Evanovich	1,710,000
George R. R. Martin	1,580,000
Orson Scott Card	1,570,000
Jack Kerouac	1,520,000
Mary Higgins Clark	1,440,000
Frank Herbert	1,420,000
William Gibson	1,400,000
Michael Connelly	1,400,000
Audrey Niffenegger	994,000
Neal Stephenson	869,000
Robert Heinlein	733,000
Yann Martel	693,000
Sue Grafton	671,000
Edgar Rice Burroughs	636,000
Elmore Leonard	588,000
Cormac McCarthy	518,000
Arthur C. Clarke	443,000
Philip K. Dick	442,000
Michael Chabon	426,000
Connie Willis	288,000
David Brin	281,000
Harold Robbins	221,000
Theodore Sturgeon	214,000
Vernor Vinge	204,000
John Scalzi	182,000
Sara Paretsky	179,000
A. E. Van Vogt	128,000
Kage Baker	89,400
Roger Zelazny	52,100
John W. Campbell	33,500
E. E. Smith	21,000

The phrase “science fiction” did pretty well when compared to “God” and “Jesus.” But it’s a little weird to think that Britney Spears has one third the popularity of the world’s most famous holy figure, and she’s three times more popular than Bob Dylan or Plato, and a touch more popular than the Fab Four. Further it is quite revealing that the SciFi authors with the most popularity are the guys who write silly SF books. And how bizarre is it that James Joyce is sandwiched between Isaac Asimov and H. G. Wells?

As you can see, my guy Heinlein is just below the middle in popularity. Now I have to wonder if being alive helps or hurts. Jane Austen trumps Tom Clancy, and Philip K. Dick beats out Michael Chabon, but just barely and that’s comparing a lifetime of work, by an author with cult status and many movies made from his stories to a young writer with a very small backlog of books to his credit. How can we explain that? I can’t help but wonder if you get more press when you’re alive. Heinlein is just a touch more popular than Yann Martel who had just one bestselling book, The Life of Pi.

Doing a search on [“The Life of Pi” Martel] brings up 48,500 hits, and searching on [“Stranger in a Strange Land” Heinlein] produces 188,000 hits. Thus doing book to book competitions produces different results over comparing author names. I’ll save that analysis for my next post and compare a long list of books to see how that barometer works.

Cormac McCarthy just won a Pulitzer, and has a movie out with Oscar buzz and he’s about two thirds as popular as Heinlein, and a little more than twice as popular as Vernor Vinge who is probably a whole lot less famous. Heinlein is a legend in the science fiction world. Vernor Vinge is a rather famous guy among computer dudes, and since the web was created by said dudes, that may influence his overall popularity.

Now I have to wonder, if you want to be a famous writer would it help sales to get busted for drunk driving, have a notorious marital dust-up, shave you head for photographers – oh wait, maybe it’s all of that while being a dumb blonde wearing skimpy outfits singing suggestive songs? Would J. K. Rowling get more hits on Google if she wore fewer clothes? If you search on Marilyn Monroe you get 11,500,000 hits, so is being blonde and female a fame factor?

The main thing that helps I think, at least for writers, is if they have movies created from their books. Heinlein hasn’t been that lucky in this department, with his main success being Starship Troopers. Would Stephen King be as famous if none of his books had been filmed? After Have Space Suit-Will Travel becomes a movie it might generate considerable more than 9,550 hits. We’ll have to wait and see if I’m proven right. But generally when you search on a book title that has been made into a movie, movie sites come up first.

John W. Campbell and E. E. Smith were giants in their day – back in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. “Astounding Science Fiction” gets 63,200 hits, so Campbell’s magazine has remained more popular than his famous editing. Evidently writing the classic “Who Goes There?” which was made into a hit movie twice, as The Thing from Another World and The Thing, didn’t make Campbell a household name. Or maybe that’s a lesson for not writing under a pen name.

JWH

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007. The Road is a novel that will stun your soul. I found this stark metaphor about human nature so beautifully written I would use it as a textbook on writing. Although the term science fiction is seldom used when reviewing this literary work, its theme puts it squarely into that realm of storytelling and the sub-genre of post-apocalyptic fiction, like the magnificent Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. Predicting the end of civilization and the death of mankind goes back to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. The list of such tales is rather long, and the approaches to the idea vary widely. Some have hope, some are about rediscovery of ancient knowledge, and some like The Road, are a kind of last judgment of mankind.

For those who only watch their science fiction, think The Road Warrior or The Postman or Waterworld, usually featuring a few good people fighting against the lawless hordes of barbaric humans. However, these stories would be about overpopulation compared to The Road, which is set in a world so bleak the reader is not even sure if plants and bugs still live. Most post-apocalyptic novels are warnings to the present, telling us to get our shit together or we’ll end up like the people in this book. When I was young and read these novels they were exciting and adventurous and I’d fantasize how well I could survive. I’m much different at fifty-six and Cormac McCarthy’s story was like standing in front of a well lit mirror. I saw I don’t have what it takes. I would be one of the millions that died off quickly. And that’s depressing.

The Road is about Mankind and Mother Nature failing to the max. Nothing lives but a few humans in a cold gray landscape. We do not know why things have failed, but by reading the book the reader will realize just how vital civilization is to our psychic well being. For me at least, reading this book made me understand that the value of being human is directly proportional to the success of society. Without our social structure life is no more meaningful than dirt.

With the dark clouds of global warming gathering over our heads I can’t help but read The Road as prophetic. If civilization collapses and economics failed and the western world fell into chaos like Afghanistan or the Sudan, we’d be reduce to the strong preying on the weak, but as The Road shows even this only goes as far as resources allow. If the machinery of society came to an abrupt halt, we’d have seven billion people scavenging for food eating anything they could digest. Humans would be worse than locus.

In The Road what nature or man didn’t destroy the remaining people ate or burned for warmth. The unnamed father and son, who are the main characters of the story, trudge along an unnamed road, constantly on the lookout for any dwelling that might still have something eatable within. The only sources of food appear to be the leftovers of civilization or the flesh of humans. In this story the man and boy avoid all other people thinking of themselves as the last good guys running from all the bad guys.

Bleak huh? While reading The Road you admire the beauty of the writing but are horrified by the vision it creates. This book has the power to turn a liberal into a conservative. This isn’t a book you read for fun or diversion. It’s a parable about human nature that will open up your philosophical veins. We’d like to think that the future is always bright because who remembers the dark ages. I think some people will read this book and want to arm themselves with enough firepower to kill a whole city. But no matter how much food and ammunition you store up you won’t be able to protect yourself and family. Anyone with anything becomes a beacon to the desperate. McCormac aptly illustrates that living like a cockroach is the superior survival strategy, if that’s what you want. You may realize it is this world or nothing.

People like to believe in heaven, and maybe millions would be anxious to leave this planet for the next world if such a collapse occurs, but the real lesson of this story is civilization, law and order, economic stability, cooperation and trust is what we really want out of reality.

I read The Road by listening to the Recorded Books edition read by Tom Stechschulte. This dramatic reading magnified all the best qualities of the novel and made McCarthy’s writing vivid. A MP3 sample can be found here. This sample is not typical of the book because it uses one of the few flowery writing segments referring to a dream. It does give a feel for the setting and the end of the sample shows the more common POV of the father. I wished the sample had included the dialog between the father and son because Mr. Stechschulte’s reading is dead on in characterization.I got my copy at Audible.com, but it’s also available at Amazon and iTunes.

Be sure and read Jason Sanford’s essay Dipping Their Toes in the Genre Pool: The U.S. Literary Establishment’s Need-Hate Relationship with Speculative Fiction, which goes much deeper than I do in exploring the debt the literary world owes to science fiction and other genres. I used to be in a MFA program and experienced the strong bias the literary folk have against genre writers. Sanford documents this in great detail. He also talks about Michael Chabon’s review of The Road and how Chabon tries to bridge the gap between the literary and genre world. Sanford also summarizes many of the literary reviews of The Road and how those reviewers failed to credit earlier post-apocalyptic novels. – Excellent read.

JWH

Inventions Wanted #5 – Cell Phone Voting

The news is full of reports on the failures of electronic voting machines. After the 2000 election everyone expected inventors would jump on the problem and produce a full proof voting machine. That hasn’t happened. I’m wondering if there isn’t a simpler solution. Why not use the cell phone for voting.

Imagine on voting day just picking up your cell phone and dialing the number and voting. Could it get any easier? Nearly everyone has a cell phone. And if it was easier to vote maybe more Americans would participate in democracy.

One of the major concerns of voting machines is whether or not they can keep accurate tallies. Cell phone companies seem to be quite good at keep call records. Another concern with voting machines is to make them fraud proof. Now here’s the problem with cell phone voting – big brother will know how you voted because accurate registration and verification tied to a system with perfect tracking means they could look up how you voted. However, there are solutions to that too.

Cell phones have unique numbers. They are registered to you. Your phone could be registered with the voting registration system. It would be possible to invent a voting system that would take only one call from every registered number. It would also be possible to separate identity from voting at some point, maybe with an encrypted key in case of recounts. That means there would be two systems. First would be the voting system via the cell phone and second a database system collecting votes. At some point they could separate identity or make a complicated mathematical system that could reconstruct the voting if necessary.

One thing I hate about presidential elections is we have to pick one guy who wants to solve all problems in the same way we do. In other words, if there are twenty issues, we want elect the candidate that closely matches the way we think about twenty subjects. I’d much rather that have referendums and just let us vote directly. That would change things so we vote for a manager of problems rather than a decider. In the debates we always hear each candidate talk about their solution to a problem. I’m much rather that politicians research all the good options and then put them through a series of public votes until we come up with a solution that the majority wants.

Easier voting would allow for more referendums. So why invent a complicate system that is usually set up once a year and few people participate in when an easier system may already exist that would get more people voting?

JWH