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080824 12:04 Currently reading

Iain M. Banks, Matter.

Was it more honourable to starve than to steal? Many people would say yes, though rarely those who'd actually experienced an empty belly, or a child whimpering with its own hunger. Was it more honourable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to, unless you paid with money you did not have? He though not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable's job. Show any initiative or imagination and you were called lazy, shifty, crafty, incorrigible. So he'd dismissed talk of honour; it was just a way of making the rich and powerful feel better about themselves and the powerless and poverty-stricken feel worse.

080822 22:28 Cities

American cities are undergoing a demographic inversion:

Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.

080822 21:50 TV

The studios' latest trick: "we'll cancel your favorite show but we'll give you a couple more straight-to-dvd movies so that you don't go all Jericho on us."

... just when io9 told us that it's ok to be a fan of the show.

080811 23:49 Science / SciFi

One of the really handy toys from scifi is becoming reality: cloaking. I'd rather have replicators, though. That would move us to the post-scarcity society, rather than wasting time on something that has purely military uses. But since they're paying for it, i guess they have the right to invest in more agression rather than emilinating the causes for such agression... And after replicators, i'd like a teleporter, please.

080810 11:57 Movies

My thoughts exactly on George Lucas' announcement of a 5th Indiana Jones movie. I liked the 4th film but "Mutt" taking over the franchise? No! No way! Lucas has a history of squeezing the last penny out of a good thing and thereby turning it bad. Please leave it where it is and don't ruin it.

080808 15:17 SciFi / Comics

Dystopias revisited. While over at Tor.com someone muses about Robert A. Heinlein's juve novels, which are often set against a backdrop of an earth that isn't much fun to live on anymore, io9 asks "Why Does My City Scream?", listing Sin City and Gotham as prime examples for the City Noir, where our heroes' mission becomes more than fighting crime, it becomes a political and communal act.

Every other genre that fetishizes the smelly hopelessness of cities comes from noir, including cyberpunk and to a lesser extent steampunk. You have only to look at Syd Mead's bleak vision of future L.A. in Blade Runner, or read some of the atmospheric city descriptions in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Or look at some of the loving depictions of the decay of New Crobuzon in China Mieville's steam-punky Perdido Street Station. And then there's the noirish world of Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, where whole city blocks go to war against each other and everyone's a criminal scumbag.

Charlie Stross thinks that the reason why the U.S. is currently nurturing dystopian views is that they are plunging headlong into a period of declining Empire.

080802 22:07 TV

Update on my female-leads-in-high-heels-rant: io9 agrees with me in its article on how to reboot Farscape.

As his shipmate and love interest Aeryn Sun, Claudia Black was the perfect pre-Sarah Connor Chronicles beautiful, hard-bitten hero. She's feminine, smart, and tough — and she would never wear high heels to a fight.

080802 21:04 Food crisis

World-wide food production will drop by 20 percent in the next 10 years. Professor Dickson Despommier has the solution: vertical farming.

natural agricultural conditions aren't that great (what with hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like), so people need to bring agriculture inside by building large, vertical structures to cultivate crops in order to ensure a continued food supply.

080802 20:17 Politics

How Can We Revamp Democracy? 5 Answers From Science Fiction. I choose the Culture. Normally i would aim for anarchism but that's a lot of work and i'm lazy. Let AIs do the job.

Maybe the most famous example of government-by-AI is Iain M. Banks' "Culture" novels, in which the artificial "Minds" govern without corruption or undue favor. They're not entirely impartial, because they appear to have whims and idiosyncrasies in some of his books. But the main criticism people have leveled at them is that they're "too good." In place of laws, people in the Culture are governed by reputation and good manners, and even the Minds can gain or lose reputation according to their behavior. Only the best Minds get to be Hub Minds, controlling whole biospheres themselves.

There's also Sonsorol:

No one who loves freedom can hear of Sonsorol without longing, without envy, without nostalgia for something unknown but deeply desired... Sonsorol could be created anywhere - nothing stands in the way but false consciousness and the grim power of those rulers who feast on false consciousness like vampires.

080802 19:52 Tech replaces nature

Rejoice! The "Do androids dream of electric sheep" department brings you the Ridemaster Pro:

The £40,000 virtual reality riding machine combines a mechanical horse with a host of electronic sensors and a screen, to recreate the joys of an outdoor ride without the need for mucking out.

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