Lonesome Robot Press :: Science Fiction

Where’s my Permanent Undercaste of Developmentally Limited Slave Workers?
(And Other Failed Predictions from the Annals of Science Fiction)

Science fiction is littered with the failures of writers who should have known better to accurately predict the future… But it’s even more littered with the failure of reality to keep up with their warped ideas. Here I shall consider a few of my favorites.

 
Permanent Undercaste of Developmentally Limited Slave Workers
Brave New World

A knowledge work job for life, constant lusty adulation from lower caste members of the opposite sex, after work orgies, free drugs, and a workforce of fetal alcohol syndrome hobbit monkeys at one’s beck and call… Who wouldn’t want to live in Huxley’s world?

Moralizing neo-cons, that’s who!

As someone who’s devoted a lot of thought to transhumanism lately, I have to say that this book remains a challenging one. In some ways, Huxley’s argument in Brave New World looks like the sine qua non for people like Francis Fukuyama freaking out about the H+ movement. While we don’t have the technology to do some of the things described in this book yet, perhaps the intention is there? I do hope so, because it would be a vast improvement over the Epsilons-Shopping-at-Walmart stories people on the Eclipse Phase Facebook page came back with as soon as I took up this line of thought.

 
Pretty People Forced to Wear Hideous Masks to Make Them Average
Harrison Bergerand

Leaving the most recent Lady Gaga video aside, Vonnegut’s parable of an average American Übermensch forced to wear myopia-inducing goggles, a racoon coat made of metal racoons, and a grotesque mask hasn’t played out as advertised. As anyone in human resources will tell you, above average people are valuable. Your best approach is to put them in offices where all the C students don’t have to look at them, stack their workload so high that their brains don’t work much better than Harrison Bergerand’s Dad’s at the end of the day, and pay them enough to behave. After just a decade of this treatment, the combination of repetitive stress injuries, office chair-related back pain, and fat rolls sprouted from years of drinking and poor diet normally add up to the same handicaps forced upon Bergerand… no mask required!

Really, Kurt, you were over-thinking the problem.

 
Soviets on Jupiter (or Luna, or Mars, or Anyplace, Really)
2010: A Space Odyssey

Mr. Clarke, get real. The Soviets’ played-out, oppressive social regime and internal instability meant that they couldn’t get to the friggin’ Moon, let alone building a space ship capable of travel to the Jovian system.  Oh, wait… Americans can’t, either.

How embarrassing.

 
Reduction to the Status of Chattel for Women (May Substitute White People, Academics, Gun Lovers, Mormons, or Whatever Freaked the Author Out Most)
The Handmaid’s Tale

Although I actually think LDS paranoia about being oppressed for wanting to have lots of babies a la Ender’s Game is more entertaining, I’m including Margaret Atwood here because she’s such an ivory tower Henny Penny about being described as a science fiction author. Get over it, Margaret; no one’s going to force you to show up at Worldcon. It’s almost as silly as Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry freaking out about being called a goth band. Also, Ken MacLeod wrote a novel about talking squids in space, and it was fucking awesome, so you shut up.

I was going to write something about alarmist, overwrought narratives posing as plausibly framed social commentary, but look, I just ended up going off on Margaret Atwood for a whole paragraph instead. Whatever, moving on…

 
Food Pills
The Jetsons

I tried to make these when I was a kid by taking white bread and squishing it into the densest little dough bullets I could. When you added peanut butter and jelly, it didn’t work so well, but I’m sure modern food technology could do better than an eight year old with a rolling pin and time on his hands. Never mind that compressing a full meal into a pill would result in a pill that weighed about half a pound. The demand is out there. “But the Jetsons was a cartoon,” you protest. Pish tosh! Serious sci-fi writers kicked this idea around, too. Of course, if they had kicked an actual food pill they would have probably stubbed their toes badly and discarded this idea right quick.

 
Absurdist Totalitarianism
Brazil

The failure to appear of a preposterously Kafkaesque state where interrogators wear weird baby masks and dissidents get hung in garment bags aboard mobile armored hall closets would mark Terry Gilliam as one of sci-fi’s dimmest lights in the art of prediction, if not for the abject lack of imagination it displays on the part of the oppressive regimes we already have. Really, if glue-huffing African child soldiers could work out that neon wigs and women’s clothing would freak the fuck out of their opponents, you’d think the meatheads at Abu-Gharaib could have come up with something better than scaring people with dogs and making them form naked human pyramids. They could have been using, I don’t know, creepy octopus masks or something. Were I an Iraqi detainee, I’d pretty much poo myself instantly if some crazy white man dressed like a cephalopod came at me with a list of questions.

 
Unreliable Experimental Medical Procedures That Make Mice and Retarded People Smarter
Flowers for Algernon

Sadly, this is not a widely explored trope, but that’s okay, because Keyes had it in the pocket.  The key implication of his idea, though, has not inspired the type of vigorous exploration that, say,  virtual reality did. Which is too bad, because if you could perform an operation to make mentally retarded people more functional, just think of how you could improve all of the people who are technically of average intelligence but do stupid, stupid things all of the damned time.

And think of all the incidental spin offs you’d glean from the massive amount of human experimentation along the critical path to reach this outcome! It’s clearly a winner.

 
So There You Have It
Quit snoozing, reality, and try to keep up.

Dear Law Enforcement Personnel,

I’m not sure why you expect an honest, man to man answer about the Gates incident from a guy whose car or luggage you may or may not be about to search. Yet every time you see I live in Cambridge, you ask… as if I’m really going to tell you what I think while you’re inspecting my passport at the border or checking my boarding pass. And if you’re not looking for an honest answer, then you can go jump in a lake. Either way: please stop asking.

(This was mostly written last night.)

In an hour I’m heading to the Hugo Awards, then driving home to Cambridge immediately afterward. (Holy gonna be cracked the frak out at work tomorrow). I’m excited to be going to sci-fi’s version of the Academy Awards; hooray for being in a field where this kind of stuff is accessible to anybody who wants to show up! My head’s spinning with all I’ve taken in during the last few days, so this post is an attempt to assimilate some of it.

First off, I’m incredibly happy I came and feel very fortunate Worldcon happened to be nearby in one of my favorite cities this year. It made traveling up and giving it a shot with no real idea what to expect a much easier leap to make. My entire experience of cons to date had been with gaming conventions (Gen Con, Origins, and a few minor ones), and while there are similarities, Worldcon is a very different animal (and I gather the same is true of SF cons generally). Sci-fi fandom is a more cohesive, close-knit subculture than gamers, with a lot of traditions and odd little rituals. (Example: They have a thing for collecting as many stick-on ribbons as possible and hanging them from the bottom of their con badges, which are kind of huge to begin with. At Gen Con, you get to be awesome if you have an exhibitor’s badge, and that’s about it).

This was a working trip for me, but it was fun work. I went to a lot of panels, took voluminous notes, gave away a lot of chapbooks, visited all of the publishers in the dealer’s room, schmoozed, and listened to what a lot of sci-fi editors had to say. So. Much. Information. As far as the writing and editorial panels, the one person I didn’t get to listen to that I regret missing was Gordon van Gelder from Fantasy & Science Fiction. I also didn’t go to any of Tom Doherty’s panels, but I’m not trying to sell novels yet, so I can live with having missed that. I was hoping to see more workshops about electronic publishing, but the one I did sit through was excellent. Bottom line: if you’re a writer, go to a Worldcon or another major SF con that has all the wheels doing panels. I feel like my knowledge of what’s really going on in the field is parsecs ahead of where it was five days ago.

The science and culture panels I went to were uniformly outstanding, and I wish I’d been able to go to more of them. Too often, though, they either conflicted with each other or with editorial panels I needed to attend. Get a bunch of sci-fi writers and fans with the appropriate real world credentials talking, and, well, how can it not be awesome? I’m going to devote another post to the panels (hopefully later this week, although Gen Con preparations might contravene that).

Finally, I met some really excellent people (which I figured I would, I mean, they’re SF fans, they’ve gotta be cool, right?). I finally got to meet Jacob Weisberg of Tachyon, whose web site I redesigned several years back, although his awesome managing editor, Jill, wasn’t there. My roommate, David O’Neill, who I met on the internet at the very last minute, turned out to be an excellent fellow. He’s doing a cell phone startup out in Seattle; if I were a rich investor, I’d trust him to do good things with my money. I met James Bacon, a charming Irishman who seems to be something of a mover in British fandom. And I got shnoggered Saturday night with the absolutely delightful Camille Alexa, who edits flash fiction for Abyss &  Apex. I haven’t gotten to read her writing or anything she’s edited yet, but I’m now very eager to do so. I’m going to take a risk and say that you should go out and buy anything with her name on it, anyway, because after hearing her talk in panels, I highly doubt it sucks.

I met a zillion other nice, awesome people, too, and if I yammered on about all of them, this post would get really long, so I’m going to stop now.

In summation, yay Worldcon! Now I just have to figure out where the hell I’m going to get the energy to make it through Gen Con next week. Ha. Who am I kidding? I’m already vibrating with excitement for Gen Con, which is good, because I need to stay awake for a five hour drive after the Hugos.

Aujourd’hui Montreal, Demain la Système Solaire!

I Twittered the Hugo results as they came out. If you haven’t seen them yet, they should be visible on my Twitter feed if you’re reading this within a few days of posting.

Fire, flood, plague, famine, inbreeding, mass extinction events, infertility, supernovas, celestial cataclysms, germ warfare, nuclear holocaust, mass habitat destruction, voluntary omnicide, killer robots, hyperevolution, hard take-off singularities, apathy. The universe offers an impressive array of ways for a species to kick the bucket, and, not content to torment individual characters, I’ll be inflicting every single one that I can think of on humanity in this ball of yarns. For a taste (the first extinction is always free), I invite you to Extinction 1: Genetics.

Photo (pre-manipulation) by Lasse Czeloth (Robotnok) via Stock.Xchng.

Lonesome Robot Press is pleased to announce Empyrean, a pen & paper science fiction role-playing game set in posthumanity’s distant future. Inspired by influences as diverse as Cowboy Bebop; the original Traveller RPG; and the writings of Vernor Vinge, Peter Hamilton, Bruce Sterling, and Alastair Reynolds, Empyrean uses a richly developed Milky Way galaxy as backdrop for the meeting and clash of humanity and numerous alien races. Players can choose to portray characters from one of humanity’s many cultures and subspecies, AGIs, or aliens designed to be culturally distinct yet playable.

Although the possibilities for an Empyrean campaign are nearly limitless, the default campaign casts the player characters as the crew of an FTL (faster-than-light) ship. The rules and setting material focus on the challenges and opportunities for such characters, whether they choose to seek hire as mercenaries, ply the galactic trade lanes as merchants, or pursue more obscure goals. An elegant system of rules for modeling the technology levels and available resources in various star systems helps to determine the challenges and potential rewards of the missions upon which characters embark.

Player character roles are designed to encourage a cohesive “adventuring party” style of play, with some or all of the following possibly present within a PC group:

• Starship command crew: commanders, navigators, and helms
• Groundside ops personnel: drop ship pilots, groundpounders, infiltrators, and even bounty hunters
• Spacing professions: salvage crew, fighter pilots, and fleet ops specialists
• Social & sciences professions: biologists, linguists, astrophysicists, infobrokers, and trade negotiators
• Sentient starships whose robotic avatars can accompany the rest of a PC group groundside

A range of races and human subtypes are available as playable characters:

• Humans from planetary cultures, including the Normans, Aztlánistas, and Vegans.
• Humans from spacefaring cultures, including the technology-trading Ming Lu and the awesome mercenary fleets of Kombine Mercantile Marine.
• Lynn’Ryn, a race of tradition-bound blue skinned humanoids whose ancient culture teaches the discipline of manipulating physical reality at the quantum level.
• Al-Mogur, entrepreneurs and merchants who grow their ships from organic matter and whose science appears weirdly mystical to outsiders.
• Sovizen, humanoids descended from arboreal amphibians. Their aptitude for macro-scale building is unparalleled, extending to the planetary scale.
• Bagduarh, a race descended from flightless avian carrion eaters. They are new to the stars, having rapidly assimilated new technology gained from other races.
• Dholi Ghat, the children of the Mold, a race of rudimentary humanoids connected by slime mold implants in their bodies to the Bloom, a self-aware information network that is the only known method of faster-than-light communication.

In addition to unique PC races and a variety of interesting antagonists, Empyrean will eventually include spaceship combat rules at two scales: micro, for GMs wanting to include small craft and fighter combat in their games, and macro, for star system-spanning battles between capital ships. This and other features of the game setting and rules allow GMs to decide on what balance of hard sci-fi versus space opera elements they wish to include in their game.

Empyrean was co-authored by Jack Graham and Derek Swirsky between 2003 and 2009. The core Empyrean book will be released in two sections: a setting book detailing the game universe, and a separate rules book. The rules book uses the Eclipse Phase game mechanics published by Catalyst Gamelabs and developed by Rob Boyle and Brian Cross of Posthuman Studios. In accordance with the Eclipse Phase Creative Commons license, the Empyrean rules book will also be distributed under a CC license. Wherever possible, rules for Empyrean material will be made backwards-compatible with Eclipse Phase, allowing EP gamemasters to borrow from Empyrean.

Empyrean material will be released online starting in Autumn of 2009.

I’ll be going to Worldcon in Montreal this year. It’s my first one; should be interesting!

In honor of May Day, a bit more about the protagonist of another story, Arm.

Photo (pre-manipulation) from Wikimedia Commons.

“Whoa! Not a sci-fi post at all!” you say. Really? Allow me to share my thoughts. (If GRRM can do it all over his LJ, so can I!).

Part of my interest stems from my Chicago roots and the bizarre rabidness of Boston sports fans, combined with my perverse desire to mess with people. Part of it is that intense strain of homesickness that has in the past even caused me, a North Sider, to even (shudder!) say a few nice things about the White Sox during the World Series Run. But I can also offer an intellectual justification that has interesting extrapolations when you consider future socioeconmic models. To whit….

Even in a socialist, anarcho-communist, or H+ post-scarcity society, one will still be able to gauge the prosperity & economic health of a city, region, space habitat, or clade in part by the success of its athletic teams. And if, when one factors in the benefits of prosperity to culture, art, and intellectual life, getting excited about the place where you live in this way is A-OK.

Discuss.

Every story must have a beginning, a middle, and a boss fight.

Since most of the time I normally put into working on fiction has gone into Eclipse Phase lately, here’s an update on that… since I don’t have any new stories to post.

Editorial work is finished on the core rulebook, and it’s looking great. Final proofreading finishes this Friday. The major holdup has been the art, and now that I know a little more about how art gets done for an RPG, I can see why. The setting is the major challenge. Transhuman SF is still a fairly new genre, and it seems like a lot of artists either have a strong impulse to make it look like anime, or are still stuck in a mindset where everything should look like either Warhammer 40K or Star Trek. Fortunately, after finishing work on Cthulhutech, our amazing new art director, Mike Vaillancourt, stepped in and has been doing a great job getting the artists to produce stuff that fits our vision.

As for my contribution, I’ve finished my work on the core book, which was a combination of rules for some of the technology and setting material, including a Mercury-to-the-Kuipers guide to the posthuman solar system. I’m now working on sections in two yet-to-be-announced supplement books and have an assignment for a third. I’m not supposed to say what the books are yet, but I don’t think it could hurt to say what I’m doing/have done for them. Item one was an adventure scenario. The second is some more in-depth setting material and a few rules on Mars. The third is going to be more in-depth material on space stations and orbital habitats.

So I’m definitely a bit irked at myself for letting the fiction currently in the works languish, but I’ve been keeping pretty damned busy anyhow.