Category: Science Fiction

    My power went off Tuesday afternoon just as I was getting home from work and didn’t come back on for twenty-six hours. It was cold and dark outside and I sat bundled up in blankets thinking about what I would blog. My two cats struggled for the warmest place on my lap while I listened to the loud winds. We sat in candle light and I imagine this is what it must be like living in Jane Austen’s time. That old saying about only missing stuff when it’s gone is brilliant because I sorely missed electricity. No cooking, no heating, no television and most of all no computer. The only gadgets that worked were battery powered like my iPod Nano and flashlight or the wired phones. I had just finished listening to Northanger Abbey this weekend, so the early 19^th century was still on my mind.

    Because I’ve also been thinking about lunar habitats I imagined what it would be like living underground on the Moon and having the power go out, or on a space station. It would be as black as a photographer’s darkroom. Out my window the low hanging clouds glowed dimly white from the sky glow of all the distant houses that had power, and I could see the black silhouettes of trees against them. On the Moon or Mars if you were underground it would be painfully dark. Of course emergency systems would cut in with light, or at least I hope. I’d assume they would have backup systems. Tuesday night I wished I had a backup system. But what if all systems failed? Imagine being in such a situation and wondering where the candles and matches are? When technology heads south we fall back on old ways.

    Then I started wondering about backup systems for my home. The next day the annoying sound of two generators filled the air. In 2003 during Hurricane Elvis as we Memphians like to call a storm of straight-line winds that knocked out the power to hundreds of thousands homes, I had thought about buying a generator too, but didn’t. My wife and I went without power for thirteen days in hot humid August. Years before that we had an ice storm that knocked out our current house’s electricity for a week or so, but then Susan’s parents lived here. From ten stories up, my Memphis neighborhood looks like a sea of trees with an occasional rock of a tall building jutting up. We’re very susceptible to high winds and ice. So is it worth buying a generator for outages that happen every three years? I’m starting to wonder.

    Between global warming, aging infrastructures, growing power demand, increased energy costs, frequent droughts and more bouts of strong weather, the idea of being energy self-sufficient crosses my mind more often. Certainly an old fashion wood stove would have helped during this blackout in the freezing cold. I have a gas fireplace, but it’s more for looks than heat. I wished I had solar panels for energy and heating, but the aforementioned trees put the kibosh on that solar tech. I’ve written about my desire for a solar energy tree collector before. However, unless I had an electrical storage system, that wouldn’t keep me from sitting in the dark at night.

    We’re very depended on civilization. I don’t know how many times during that twenty-six hours I walked around my house instinctively trying to flip on a light, or grab something to eat that required a stove. Jane Austen sure does overlook those details about how they lived without electricity. Of course her characters were all dependent on servant power. Servants arranged for candles, heated water, cooked with coal or wood. I was amused by Jane’s references to modern living as opposed to the primitive living in the gothic novels her characters read.

    This brings me back to generators. I wished 1950s science fiction was true and we all had a small nuclear power plant in the basement – or if cold fusion had panned out. Gas generators are noisy. So Tuesday night I sat in the dark and cold and imagined how to make gas generators less noisy. I suppose there are more expensive ones than those cheap jobs at Home Depot that might be quieter. I do know rich people can buy fall-over systems that go to work instantly when the power goes out, but alas, I’m not rich. I wondered if I could build a little soundproof concrete bunker with good ventilation for not much money. My goal would be to set aside one room in the house that had a small energy efficient air conditioner and heater and make it into my lifeboat room for when we had power problems.

    I don’t want to live like Jane Austen’s pre-industrial world. I want to have my own little spaceship home that is self-sufficient during bad times. I know I’ll never get to live on the Moon or Mars, or in a space habitat, but in the end we all live like Jane Austen’s world of family and friends looking for relationships and love, even the people who will live in outer space. That’s why we read Jane two hundred years down her timeline, and why future men and women living on other planets will be read her books too.

    The scary ideas of global warming, grid failures, economic downturns, worldwide pandemics, etc. make us fear losing the security of our homes. That’s why I like the idea of renewable energy and living off the grid, or having the grid as a backup. In one sense we all need to build self-sufficient lunar colonies in our own yards. Maybe I won’t be a space pioneer, but I might be able to be an energy self-sufficient pioneer.

    There’s a wonderful book, The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840 by Jack Larkin, about rural life in America before industrialization. Someday someone will write The Reshaping of Everyday Life 2010-2050, and it will be about how we adapted to the current problems. Let’s hope it isn’t about how we had to de-evolve technologically and all live like Jane Austen again.

JWH

 

    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

 

 

    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:

 

    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

    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:

 

    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