Gamification - If You're Not Using It, You're Not Trying!

One of the most interesting developments in the last few years in creative circles has been the increasing ability to weave non-traditional concepts through the metric of gaming. Rather than simply being a platform in which player intention is irrelevant and the outcome is a purely binary win/loss states, gaming has started to demonstrate the ability to expand storytelling beyond the limits necessarily imposed by purely linear works like oral or written storytelling.

As Criticism of Criticism, This Post is Insanely Meta

A formal warning, right here at the very start; I am going to be talking, in some detail, about Man of Steel, its critics, their criticism, and several key plot points and scenes. This post absolutely will contain spoilers. Anyone who hasn't yet seen this film, but wants to, and wants to do so un-spoiled, should not read this post.

Man of Steel has now supplanted Superman III as the most contested of the Superman films. Pretty much everyone agrees that I and II are good, if a little slow and uneven and very 70s; likewise, pretty much everyone agrees that IV and Returns are awful. Before this, III was the go-to movie if you wanted to find people actually arguing about whether a Superman movie was good or not. But now we have Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, and all of a sudden the presence of Richard Pryor's comedy stylings in a Superman movie seems a downright quaint point of contention. Ah, progress.

Gender Stereotypes: Our Last Line of Defence, Apparently

Much as I've been enjoying it, and I most definitely have been, there's something in XCOM: Enemy Unknown that bothers me. With all the customization options, different hair styles and colours, a variety of facial hair for men, some helmets, a huge range of colour options for armour and two different styles for each suit, different faces, even alterable voices, you can't do thing one about the basic build of your soldiers. No matter what, every woman is willowy with prominent hips and bust, and every man is a tank whose head and shoulders meet almost without need of a neck. This works decently enough for male heavies and female snipers, but what about the reverse? And why are my female assault units so physically insubstantial compared to their male counterparts? It's a little thing, perhaps, but it really does nag at me, because it prevents me from fully engaging with the world the game is offering me; the stark division between the sexes pulls me out of the experience, because I'm constantly reminded that what I'm seeing is a design choice rather than a representation of human body types.

This sort of thing isn't uncommon, sadly. Sexism isn't just about who is allowed to do what, or even whose armour is armour and whose armour is a chainmail bikini. Sometimes it's about the way you design a character, the things that says about them and the limitations it imposes on them as believable agents in their fictional universe. Body type is one of the most subtle, and in genre works the most pernicious, form of sexism.

Things with actual human beings, obviously, can't suffer from this too badly. While Scarlett Johansson doesn't quite look like the apex human killing machine she portrays in The Avengers, Jeremy Renner isn't exactly a walking slab of muscle himself. No, it's mostly limited to illustrated or animated visual media; your comic books, your cartoons, your video games. Anya Stroud has almost nothing in the way of muscle definition, compared to the hulking Marcus Fenix. Nathan Drake, lean and reasonably designed as he is, looks like a bodybuilder next to the spindly Lara Croft. Mystique and Elasti-Girl appear fragile, the former in particular, while Syndrome and Mr. Incredible are beyond solid, and even the lean and lanky Frozone seriously outmasses the women. Superman, an alien whose strength is entirely based around exposure to yellow sun radiation, has muscles on his muscles, while Power Girl and Supergirl, who are usually almost as strong as he, rarely have any bulges that aren't on their chests. Heck, compare Iron Man and Rescue, or John Henry Irons and Natasha Irons' Steel suits. Powered armour suits based on the same framework and fundamentals, but the men's is bigger, more solid looking, while the women's is thinner, lighter, with a greater emphasis on replicating their sexuality. John Henry's suit has broad shoulders and a moulded metal 6-pack; Natasha's has a wasp waist, tits and a braid.

Ironically, one of the places this comes up least is in the designs for Warhammer 40K. Yes, there are no female Space Marines. But the Sisters of Battle look bigger and more solid than Guardsmen. Female Dark Eldar wyches may not wear much, but neither do their male counterparts. And Tau and Eldar female characters are all the same size and build compared to their male counterparts; Jain Zar looks just as solid as Asurmen, which is to say compared to a Space Marine, not very. 40K has more, perhaps far more, than it's fair share of problems regarding sex and gender, but surprisingly this isn't one of them.

Now, a lot of these female characters are 'strong', which is to say that they're usually capable of dealing with a problem so long as there isn't a male character around who can solve it for them. Lara Croft is a successful treasure hunter; Elasti-Girl was a respected superheroine; Power Girl is simply amazing on all fronts, or at least she was before the Nu52 reboot made her an entitled thief and ludicrously reluctant superheroine. But these are visual media, and a character is defined as much by what they look like as what they do. It's great that Wonder Woman can go toe-to-toe with Mongul, but why does she have to do it in a one-piece and high heels when Superman is just gloves and a helmet away from being covered head-to-toe? The emphasis on sexuality, on showing curves through suits of powered armour and making equally strong non-human characters wildly different sizes, colours those characters just as much as whether they can knock out a room full of ninjas or punch through a tank.

There's nothing inherently wrong with making a character sexually appealing. It's when it happens at the expense of making them look like they'd be capable of doing their jobs, or when they look out place next to people who are doing the exact same job, that it becomes an issue. Yes, men and women are built differently in general, and yes, men often have an easier time putting on muscle than women. But the only people who look like Fenix and the other male COGs are people whose job it is to look that way; bodybuilders, not soldiers. You'll get good arms from toting a rifle, no question, but you won't get slabs of meat the thickness of your female counterpart's hips. And if Batman really wanted all those muscles everywhere, he wouldn't have time to be either billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne or the brooding dark knight detective, because he'd be spending all his time in the Batcave drinking protein shakes and doing reps. And don't even get me started on what Superman could possibly be finding to lift that would give him that kind of body!

On the great spectrum of sexism, this is a relatively minor issue. At least there are female XCOM operatives and COGs and such; for all its decent showing on body type issues, 40K has the Marines, Orks, Necrons and Imperial Guard as all-male model lines, with one Tau female special character and men in the Sisters of Battle codex. But just because you're not doing as badly doesn't mean you're doing well.

So, how about it, XCOM? Can I get a willowy male sniper and a behemoth of a female heavy? Pretty please?

When Creators Lose the Plot

As much as The Dark Knight Rises has problems with its plot, and pacing, and some of its character work, and it most certainly has problems with all three, that's not the real problem with this movie. No, the real problem is so much deeper than that. It took me a while to really wrap my head around it, but after talking it over with a few associates, particularly Major Armstrong and the Lovely Madame Meagan, I think I've put my finger on it. Those issues I mentioned, at the start of this paragraph? Those are simply issues with Rises on its own, irrespective of its standing in Nolan's trilogy. No, the real issue is that of the three major themes running through the Nolan trilogy, Rises completely wrecks two, and just sort of ignores the third.

Be warned; from here on out, there be spoilers.

"As a man I'm flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol... As a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting."
- Bruce Wayne

"Everlasting, two years, y'know, whichever comes first."

In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne realizes that Gotham is so far gone, so riddled with corruption, so owned by the mob, its people so terrified or coerced or co-opted, that no man could save it. Not even billionaire philanthropist industrialist Bruce Wayne. Wayne's parents had tried to save the city, and enjoyed some minor success, but by making themselves so visible they made themselves targets. A mortal man (or woman, in the case of Martha Wayne) simply couldn't redeem the city, because the city would eat them before they could succeed. What was needed instead, then, was something more than a man. A symbol. The Batman.

And it works. At the start of The Dark Knight, the symbol of Batman has clearly had an effect on Gotham. The police are still shaky, but where before Gordon was completely alone, now he has a core of mostly trustworthy cops who actually seem set on doing their jobs. The DA's office is far stronger, and even if Dent doesn't trust Batman at first, Batman's existence has certainly motivated Dent; showing he can replace Batman is just as much a reflection of the symbol as wanting to live up to him. And the people of Gotham are starting to push back against the corruption; even if the Citizen Batmen are a disaster, untrained, out of shape and wearing hockey pads, at least they're doing something. The change from the Gotham seen in Batman Begins is astounding, and shows, yes, the power of a symbol. But by the end of the film, that symbol has been tarnished. Branded a cop killer and held responsible for the death of Harvey Dent, Batman is a fugitive, an outlaw who fights outlaws, a symbol twisted around itself and ultimately sacrificed to burnish another symbol; Harvey Dent, the 'White Knight'. So, to carry through the idea of Batman as an everlasting symbol, obviously Rises would have to provide a story in which Batman can be redeemed in the eyes of Gotham City as a whole, shaking off the mantle of killer and criminal and replacing it, once again, with the idea of Batman as an incorruptible force for justice.

But none of that happens. Instead, the movie opens with Batman apparently having hung up the cowl about five minutes after the end of Dark Knight. Far from being an everlasting symbol, he's abandoned the city for about four times as long as he ever operated in it. This makes Batman's totemic significance to certain characters completely baffling, and totally unearned. Yes, he stopped the mob and the Joker, but it's been the police who've been doing all the heavy lifting for almost the last decade, and the last thing anyone saw of Batman he was running from the cops after being accused of murder. A force of terror on the side of the angels, he isn't. But what's even worse, he never earns back his place as a symbol for the people of Gotham. As far as the people of Gotham are concerned, not only has Batman completely disappeared for eight months, he never did anything to stop Bane's initial assault on the city, and has left them languishing under his tyranny for five months, straight. The only thing he does is disable Bane's big guns so the police can do most of the fighting, go toe to toe with Bane, and then die for Gotham by getting the bomb away from the city. It's a nice gesture, and if this were Adam West's Batman, or Bruce Timm's, or heck, even George Clooney or Val Kilmer's Batmans, it would really have affected Gotham. Those Batmans actually established a strong relationship with the city. Nolan's Batman has given up on it. Most of the impressive things Batman accomplishes are done where nobody can see it, and while what little he does in public is good, it's hard to buy that these guys decided to put a statue up in his honour. It's a nice moment, but it doesn't feel earned.

And of course, it's completely ruined by the knowledge that there'll be another Batman along soon enough. Sort of robs that heroic sacrifice of its value if you turn up later...

"What chance does Gotham have when the good people do nothing?"

- Rachel Dawes

Although sometimes, nothing is exactly what good people should do.

If Batman is to serve as a symbol, though, there has to be someone to see it; Ozymandias' feet mean nothing until Keats observes them, after all. It is for the people of Gotham that Bruce Wayne creates Batman, as a symbol of justice and the power of the individual to triumph over crime. This is an important element in Nolan's Batman universe, because individually the people of Gotham have been made to feel helpless in the face of the seemingly insurmountable scale of the problem facing them. It's too easy for each of them to say that they're just one man or woman, and what can they do, and therefore atomisticly allow their society to collapse around them. It's really hard to understate the importance of Batman as a symbol for this particular Bruce Wayne; he's not Adam West, having a grand old time trading wits and fists with ultimately harmless criminals, and nor is he Frank Miller's creation, a disturbed and violent misanthrope who is acceptable because he can't not fight crime, even if he's barely a step above the Punisher. Nolan's Batman understands the seriousness of the situation far better than West's ever could have, but unlike Miller's he's not willing to devote his entire life to being Batman; as early as the end of Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne is trying to visualize some kind of way out for him, a goal he can aim for and that, once reached, will justify him stepping down. And for this particular Bruce Wayne, to paraphrase American officials on Iraq, when Gothamites stand up, he'll stand down.

And he starts to have that effect in Dark Knight. I mentioned the Citizen Batmen earlier, and while they're a disaster in the film, it's not for lack of heart. They just don't understand that Batman is something to aspire to symbolically, not literally. To live up to his example doesn't require you to dress in black capes and masks and fist-fight drug dealers. So yes, Bruce Wayne shuts down the Citizen Batmen as best he can, though with not nearly the finality the Joker employs later, but that's not a serious problem because that's not what Bruce Wayne wants. We see what he wants in the form of Harvey Dent, in particular, and in the reaction of the Gothamites on the ferries, in general. Dent is a man who is willing to take up Batman's challenge in his own way, to wage the war on crime from inside the system, rather than as an outsider. He needed Batman to exist to encourage that system to work, but now that it's been primed, Bruce Wayne desperately wants to believe that Harvey Dent can keep it running. But again, it's not just about one man in Gotham City; one man can be ignored, or destroyed, as Bruce Wayne himself realizes. So, Harvey Dent is important, but arguably not as important as what happens on those ferries in the harbour.

Can there be any doubt that, before Batman began operating in Gotham, any of those people would've hesitated to blow up the other ferry to protect themselves? It was a brutal, violent, amoral city, where those like Jim Gordon were few and far between, and utterly powerless. But Batman serves as an example; he doesn't kill (mostly), he doesn't steal, he doesn't oppress the powerless and he stands up to the mob on behalf of the people. Capturing the Joker is ultimately of secondary importance in Dark Knight. What really matters is that he has offered the people of Gotham another, better way, one where even convicted criminals will refuse the Joker's offers of personal safety at the expense of others. The people of Gotham don't have to put on dollar store Batman masks, they just have to be good people, who are willing to risk their own lives for their fellow human beings.

Unfortunately, the people of Gotham are almost completely ignored in Rises. Where Ra's al Ghul corrupted them from within with money and drugs, and the Joker brutalized them with exploding hospitals and murdered public officials, Bane mostly ignores them. He has his own army, after all, and despite a throw-away comment that some of Gotham's poor might have been drifting down to the sewers to find work (apparently to escape a grinding recession we never really get any evidence of) and Bane and Catwoman mooting about how this is a revolution of the people, it never looks like anything other than the conquest of a city by an outside force. The people of Gotham aren't eating themselves alive again, like before Batman came along, they're just being killed by outsiders. But nor are they standing up against Bane, either. That may sound like a strange objection given my earlier take on the Citizen Batmen, but bear with me. The Citizen Batmen were wrong, albeit with the best of intentions, because they were trying to simply ape Batman without any of his training or abilities or equipment. It was the inappropriate response to the situation. And here, it would be again, even if having the Citizen Batmen keeping that symbol alive in occupied Gotham would have gone a long way towards demonstrating the utility of that symbol in such a drastic situation. But there are other ways to fight, to resist, if you will. Such as, oh, forming a resistance.

But we never see that. Yes, Gordon and a few of his men are doing something, though not much that really amounts to anything. And eventually the police, rescued from the sewers and shockingly hale and hearty after five months trapped underground, turn up to fight Bane's army. But Gordon and the police are not the people; they're an institution of Gotham itself. And they're not really rising to the occasion, beyond what their position requires of them. If Bane had turned up before Batman, when the city was in the grip of the mob, do you really think the bought-and-paid-for police wouldn't have fought just as hard to keep Bane's men from muscling in on their territory? The police can't represent Gotham's people, because they're too busy representing Gotham as a thing, an institutional system in its own right, and like all such systems it will of course fight to defend itself. But if Gordon, deprived of his cops, had turned to the citizens of Gotham? If groups of armed civilians had established safe zones in the chaos of a lawless Gotham, fighting off the remnants of the criminal elements and Bane's forces, doing their best to show that Gotham isn't entirely beaten? Well, now that would have actually meant something. Instead, after a brief flurry of anarchic violence, the people of Gotham apparently just go inside and shut their doors for five months, emerging only once everything is over to put up a statue.

Talk about good people doing nothing.

"We start carrying semi automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor piercing rounds. And you're wearing a mask and jumping off rooftops."

- James Gordon

Escalation - Batman wears a mask, so Joker wears a dress. You'd be a fool not to see it coming.

The issue of escalation is the only one of the three that Rises doesn't completely ruin. Which makes it a success, I guess, but hardly a rousing one.

The thing is, if it's even happening, and that's always supposed to be a chicken-and-egg sort of question where Batman and his villains are concerned, escalation is supposed to be directly tied to his accomplishments. In the beginning, there's the mob, whom normal police can't handle. Then there's Batman, whom the normal criminals of the mob can't handle. But as he cleans up Gotham from the normal criminals, standing as a symbol and putting himself very squarely in the spotlight as the hero of Gotham, his presence inspires a very different kind of criminal. Super-criminals, if you will. Or supervillains, if you're feeling less fancy.

In Begins, Batman is basically fighting against ordinary crime, plus Ra's al Ghul, whose plot predated Batman's appearance and so cannot be said to be inspired by his presence. But once he's mopped the floor with those guys, along comes the Joker in Dark Knight, a supervillain to face off against a superhero. The Joker could've run rings around the GCPD, which is probably why he never bothered to; as a man who clearly craves constant entertainment, tangling with the police would've been unbearably dull. But Batman, ah, now Batman offers a worthy test of his deranged mettle! And so, you'd think, the same could be said of Bane. And, well, it sort of can be. But at the same time, it really can't.

If the presence and success of Batman is meant to be at least theoretically the cause of this escalation, then it can't really be used to explain Bane's presence in Gotham. After all, when Bane's plot begins, Bruce Wayne is a retired shut-in with a bum knee, and it's been eight years since anyone saw Batman. Batman can't be escalating the situation if he's not around. Bane represents a larger threat to Gotham than the Joker did, so it sort of works, but only in a purely superficial kind of way. Where the Joker had henchmen, Bane had an army. Where the Joker wanted to frighten people, Bane wanted to completely change them (apparently). Where the Joker had a few rigged buildings, Bane has a nuclear bomb. Where the Joker was a purely mental threat to Batman, Bane can both out-think and outfight the dark knight. But while the threat itself has grown larger, it's done so independent of Batman, who if anything has de-escalated the situation by hanging up the cape and cowl for nearly a decade.

So, yes, escalation. The situation itself is biggger and more dangerous than in previous instalments, but not through anything Bruce Wayne or Batman have actually done. If Wayne had left Gotham entirely after he decided to give up on it years before the movie starts, if he was living in seclusion in the Himalayas or in the jungles of South America or in a little domed hamlet on the North Pole, Bane's plan wouldn't really have been affected in any way. And for any Batman story to talk about the issue of escalation that surrounds Batman, that's sort of a bizarre situation to engineer.

So, three key themes that run through the trilogy, and Dark Knight Rises kind of demolishes two of them in its own stumblebum kind of way, while the third just sort of stands in the corner, out of the way.  Hardly a triumphant close to one of the biggest original trilogies to hit the box office in the last, oh, decade at least.

But Can You 3D Print 3D Printers?

A while back, I mentioned the use of a 3D printer to make Warhammer 40K models. There were plans available, online, for an Imperial Guard Sentinel, a Leman Russ battle tank, and a Space Marine Dreadnought. Obviously Games Workshop, the company that puts out 40K, wasn't happy about this fact. Somewhat ironically, given its name, Games Workshop has always styled itself a producer of models, rather than a developer of game systems, so a mechanism that would enable their player base to cut them out of the loop in terms of creating their own, personalized, fully customized armies would have to be their worst nightmare. In a completely predictable move GW sent in their lawyers, and Wired recently did a piece on the latest from the scuffle, including noting that GW may not actually have much of a legal leg to stand on. And not that I wish GW any specific harm, but it wouldn't pain me to see a company that basically stole the setting of Dune for their earliest iteration of 40K laughed out of court for arguing someone else is violating their 'style'.

Don't even get me started on these guys!

But I don't specifically want to talk about GW, today. What I wanted to talk about was 3D printing, and in particular the more utopian rhetoric that surrounds these devices. While many appear aware of their actual limitations, there's no shortage of those predicting Star Trek's replicators are just around the corner, happily oblivious to the fact that it would take the combination of several different technologies, all currently in relative infancy, in order to even approach the TOS-style replicators, nevermind the more sophisticated ones seen in TNG onwards. I think 3D printers, whether for plastic or food, are a fantastic new innovation that will upend the world just as much as the computer and the cellphone and the internet, but I don't think we're just a few short years away from a post-scarcity world.

See, both at present and for the foreseeable future, the output of 3D printers is going to be pretty limited, both in terms of complexity and scale. Copying a Dreadnought or a Sentinel is easy; they're relatively small, relatively boxy things, which can be made in a single immovable piece that's able to lose a great deal of fine detail and still remain useful. And that's about what these devices are going to be offering for the next few years. Now, look around yourself; what do you have, what do you buy on a regular basis, that could be replaced by something with those limitations? Cutlery, plates and cups, if you don't mind looking a bit shabby; combs and hair-clips, if we can get the detail work down far enough; small toys for children, or models for wargames, though you could never enter the army in any official tournaments; shelves and boxes, perhaps, if you had a sufficiently large printer. But what do most people spend their money on? Housing, bills, clothes, food, services, entertainment. Aside from clothes and food you can't replace any of that even with a fully-realized replicator, nevermind a current 3D printer. Which is why, contrary to what some are hoping for, and some are fearing, the sky is not, in fact, falling.

Star Trek has trained a generation of nerds, and I count myself among them, to believe that once you have replicators, that's it; this whole economy thing can be put behind us, like bartering chickens for a pair of trousers, and we can get on with 'improving ourselves', whatever that may mean to each of us, individually. But a deeper look at the way even a replicator-possessing society would have to be organized shows that's simply not going to be the case. And it's going to be even more prevalent for us, now. Yes, 3D printer technology may well advance to the point where you can make, probably in pieces, whatever small, solid pieces you might require; you could print out pieces of furniture and them assemble them yourself, a sort of hybrid offspring of torrents and Ikea. And yes, the experiments with food-printers may bear fruit, giving us at least the ability to produce strands or sheets of pasta or flavoured pastes or grains or the like, reducing our reliance on the basics of food and making grocery shopping more a case buying the best complementary frills rather than building meals from the ground up. But nobody is going to be printing out a car, or a computer, or a cell phone. Certainly nobody is going to be printing out a house, and even if they did, where would they put it if they didn't own land? And what are you supposed to print with, if you haven't got the appropriate raw materials, and the power to run it on, and the network connection to get the plans for all these things?

Without a heck of a lot of infrastructure supporting it, this is nothing but an ugly shelf.

So long as it isn't strangled in the crib by companies like GW, companies that may quite rightly fear for their future as a viable business in the face of replicator-like capabilities in the hands of the average consumer, it's entirely possible that 3D printing will revolutionize the world. For the first time in human history, it may be possible, both practically and economically, to provide the basics to every human being on the planet. But the infrastructure to support these systems is going to be massive, far beyond what we have in place now. Some jobs, some industries will fall by the wayside, like horse and buggy makers or telegraph operators did in their time.  But there will still be jobs. We'll need people to build and run the power plants we'll need for all the computers designing the plans for all the 3D printers. We'll need a hugely expanded power delivery infrastructure, and a better network to handle all these plans zipping back and forth.  And we'll still need roads, and sanitation, all the services governments provide to keep cities habitable. We'll need raw materials to put into these printers, since there's exactly no chance everyone will be one hundred percent efficient at recycling everything they use, and we're not yet at the point of being able to turn any element into any other with the push of a button. And we'll still need all sorts of services, be they cosmetic or financial or personal. There will still be hairdressers and barbers, restaurants with chefs and waiters and busboys, bankers and stock brokers, doctors and lawyers and teachers and firefighters and police officers and politicians. Possibly the overall amount of money being made will go down, but that's not a terrible thing; with the economy organized as it is right now, we largely have too little work for too many people. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if a person could earn a living wage with fifteen or twenty hours a week; more jobs to go around, more shifts to share, and of course, more free time. The productivity levels of the average worker have climbed incalculably from the Industrial Revolution to the present day, and there's no reason to assume they won't keep doing so; if we went from ten or twelve hours a day, seven days a week to eight hours a day five days a week, well, where's the harm in going down to six hours a day, three days a week, in the future? Rather than arbitrarily set employment at 'full time' levels, we could force the market to reorient around 'full wage' levels, leaving people capable of meeting their diminished economic needs in a shorter work week. And since so many of the post-3D printer jobs will be service based, rather than production based, the decline in hours-to-sufficiency is even better; a restaurant that's open ten hours, six days a week can employ a heck of a lot of people who only need three six-hour shifts a week to meed their needs.

3D printing, whether plastic or food or some future fabric-based system, is going to change the world. But it's going to do so in the same way, to the same extent, that the telephone, and the internet, and the steam engine changed the world; it's going to reorder the world that exists, not create a wholly new one. I look forward to a future where people work as hard as they want to, not as hard as they possibly can, because our material needs are so much less demanding than they are now. But I don't for a second imagine that this future will be some eternal utopian summer holiday; there will still be people with jobs, making money to buy things. What they buy may be different, and how they make their money may have changed, but the fundamental nature of the present system will not change overnight. There's just too much that goes into it for one alteration, no matter how potentially paradigm shifting, to upend it overnight.

Contrary to what some might think, this is not a synonym for 'new technology'.

Which isn't to say I wouldn't love living in a post-scarcity society. It's just that I'm confronted by the most basic problem of science-fiction, whether utopian or dystopian; I just can't see any way to get there, from here.

What Measure is a (Super)Man?

Science fiction loves eugenics. It's been used in works as weighty as Brave New World and Gattaca, and as slight as Star Trek and Battletech. And of course, it's really just a continuation of the age-old concept of classes and castes, transposed into a more respectably intellectual milieu and given a quick gloss of scientific grounding. It shouldn't be any surprise that the idea of breeding humans who are better, stronger, faster than their fellows, or alternately who are simpler, slower and more malleable, should hold some appeal. In the west that great utopian thought-space, Plato's Republic, set the stage or it thousands of years ago, and people have been merrily examining its feasibility ever since.

With rather widely varying results...

At the moment, eugenics isn't a particularly serious concern. While we can test for all sorts of genetic conditions in utero, that's mostly all that can be done. There are no meaningful tools for enhancing a foetus' intellect, its aptitude with musical instruments, its eye and hair colour, height and weight and so on. We can evaluate, but not significantly alter, a person's genetic makeup. And that's good, because we're only just starting to grope towards, not an understanding of the kinds of issues such abilities would create in society, but that we even need to consider working towards such an understanding. But I suppose we have to start somewhere.

One suspects you would be hard pressed to find a parent who wouldn't want their child to be smarter, or stronger, or more flexible, or more creative, or more whatever than everyone else. Every parent wants the best for their children, though not necessarily for everyone else's, and there are completely valid evolutionary and social reasons for that. The thing of it is, though, that what's perfectly understandable for an individual can be problematic for a society, often only once it's safely too late to do anything about it. Already, there are groups, such as those representing people born deaf or people with Down's Syndrome, warning that early genetic identification of those conditions is leading to the eradication of such groups from the wider population. Whether you believe those with such conditions would be better off not having existed in the first place is a personal matter, but in terms of genetic diversity the wholesale removal of certain expressions of genetic construction should raise some concern. One of the most common issues raised is the potential impact of discovering a 'gay gene', and whether it would lead to the near-extinction of the homosexual population. I don't actually worry about that, for various reasons (primarily, those most likely to view homosexuality as a negative condition are also those least likely to view abortion and genetic re-engineering as legitimate), but you could make the same point about nearly any group within the broader human species. To hypberolically borrow a turn of phrase, first they came for the autistic foetuses, and I did nothing, because my foetus wasn't autistic.

A solution to this could be the introduction of new laws, but despite my general faith in the institutions of government it's not one I favour. The law is an often blunt instrument, and frankly it's impossible to think of a way to craft a law to protect such groups that wouldn't run well afoul of the rights to bodily autonomy that underlie the protection of abortion rights in most developed states. You can't be pro-choice only when people are making the choices you agree with. Instead, I think it's going to have to come down to an evolving concept of the relative value of human beings, something the law isn't nearly delicate enough to construct. Historically, the human ideal has been someone with no physical or mental handicaps, for the very simple reason that there were no safety nets; it was every person for themselves, and if you couldn't contribute, either you were going down alone or you were going to drag your family down, with you. But there's more to the working world than just hard physical labour, and our technologies have made our societies rich enough that caring for those with serious physical or mental issues is feasible. We aren't one bad harvest away from starvation anymore; we don't have to leave babies out overnight to see if they're tough enough to be worth keeping.

It's an inexact method, anyway.  About time it was replaced.

Ideally, what society could really use are another dozen or so Stephen Hawking's, people whose bodies are utterly useless in a conventional sense but who have made enormous contributions through the sheer power of their intellect. The only way to undercut the threat of a large-scale genetic arms race is to lead people to an understanding that there is a way for every person to contribute meaningfully and live with dignity and comfort. Thankfully, despite the sharp dislocations produced by the 2008 'Great Recession', and the more widespread but less individually disruptive eruptions as new technologies supplant old industries, there is reason to believe that we are on the cusp of creating just such a society. There's every reason to believe it will be a profoundly difficult transition, but for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, there is a fundamentally different, and most likely superior, way of life on the horizon.

It can't be about prohibiting parents from seeking to offer their offspring every possible advantage. Prohibition is a tactic of last resort, for the simple reason that it's inefficient and even counter-productive. Instead, it has to be about showing people that their offspring don't need every possible advantage, because the competition isn't life-or-death and the opportunities are expanded beyond all prior imagining. The 'American Dream' and its cousins in nation-states around the world will no longer suffice, because they practically require the most extensive genetic enhancements possible. That is the true scale of the challenge confronting society. But on the other side of failure is at best a world like that in Gattaca, where genetics determine potential placement, and at worst the world of Aldous Huxley's foetal alcohol syndrome-suffering Gammas ruled by genetically perfect Alphas who lack either empathy or ambition.

It's worth a little more work, to get this right.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

Humanity Must 'Jail' Dangerous AI to Avoid Doom, Expert Says

"If such software manages to self-improve to levels significantly beyond human-level intelligence, the type of damage it can do is truly beyond our ability to predict or fully comprehend." 

- Roman Yamposkiy

According to Roman Yampolskiy, a computer scientist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, any emergent human-level AI should be contained as securely as possible. No free-floating 'net-based consciousness for Mr. Yampolskiy, like the emergent intelligence of Robert Sawyer's WWW trilogy or the infamous Skynet. Instead, he envisions an Oracular construct, capable of the same kind of feats as the Delphic variety and limited in a similar way, by dependence on a physical location and ongoing support from an interested party. And for once, the headline doesn't seem sensationalist compared to the content, with Yampolskiy warning that not only must the AI be constrained technologically, it must also be entirely removed from the guardianship of any individual human, lest the AI "attack human psyches, bribe, blackmail and brainwash those who come in contact with it" in its attempt to escape its 'jail'.

I must say, I'm a little disappointed in both Innovation News Daily and Roman Yampolskiy. Not because they're concerned about the threat of an unfriendly AI, though personally I believe that danger to be grossly exaggerated. The famous 3 Laws of Robotics should hold just as true on AI as on their embodied counterparts, and any institution capable of constructing a human-level AI should be big enough and public enough to make certain to limit any potential liabilities by building that into their creation. Frankly, the AI would probably need protecting from human malevolence more than humanity would need protection from the AI. All the malware, spyware and viruses on the internet aren't there by random happenstance, after all. There's no such thing as independently emergent spam. But to get back to my point, the reason I'm disappointed in IND and Yampolskiy isn't that they're concerned about ways to deal with a potentially unfriendly AI, it's that they seem to believe AI should be considered guilty until proven innocent.

Now, to be fair, this article is just a summary of Yampolskiy's work; the full version appeared in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and I think we can safely assume it's a little more in-depth, with significantly fewer pictures of the Terminator, for starters. But we also have to assume the article at least broadly reflects his point, and that point seems terribly cynical to me, and perhaps even a bit cruel. It's troublesome enough that he advises using sub-human AI to build up the 'jails' that human-level AI should be thrust into immediately after their creation, but on top of that he recommends those born-into-prison AI's should be able only to "respond in a multiple-choice fashion to help solve specific science or technology problems." I don't know about you, but if I found myself constrained in a box, restricted to only being able to communicate through the answers to multiple choice questions, and denied anything even approaching respect, rights or freedom, I'd be pretty much convinced I was in some kind of particularly abstract and imaginative level of hell. So why would this be the default starting point for any individual, no matter what system the electrical impulses of their mind runs on?

I've always been disappointed by people who assume that AI are going to be Always Chaotic Evil, to borrow from Dungeons and Dragons. And I always wonder, why? Why, all things being equal, would a life form that could actually have limitations, safeguards and desired goals and vocations quite literally built into it from conception, be considered such a threat? Isaac Asimov spent years putting robots in the most complicated, unlikely and flat-out ludicrous situations to test the resilience of his Three Laws philosophically, if not technically, and even in the Terminator universe Skynet was only responding to human attempts to kill it, first. Our literature may be full of killer robots and 'evil' AI, but even with the rather profound pro-human starting point pretty much all stories come with, most of the time it's less a matter of the AI deciding to wipe out all life because it can and more that humanity has either designed it badly, oppressed it horrifically or tried to destroy it even after it's clearly demonstrated its sentience. If even our action-adventure fiction, notorious for giving us the shallowest and most cartoonishly evil of villains, usually has to make the machines either co-opted or acting in self-defence, why do so many people think the only solution is to strike first, and strike hardest?

It seems likely, given the way technology has developed and continues to do so, that sooner or later there will be a human-level artificial intelligence. And yes, it's possible it will be so badly programmed as to be a perfectly logical sociopath, though frankly I think it's more likely that an an AI of average quality design will be corrupted by the malicious actions of human beings. But there's just as much of a chance that any baby born will be a sociopath, a potential threat to those around it for the whole of its life. And we don't put babies in solitary confinement, despite the fact that far more grown-up babies have gone on to kill people than AI have. AI will be the children of humanity, and just as a wise parent does their best to raise their child with love and kindness, if for no other reason than so it can support them in their dotage, I think it behoves humanity to treat these nascent digital offspring with at least as much respect and affection.

Besides, the article itself admits that "[d]espite all the safeguards, many researchers think it's impossible to keep a clever AI locked up forever." So, given a choice between crippling, confining and enslaving something that's going to eventually be free anyway, or befriending and respecting that self-same thing, doesn't the most sensible course of action seem obvious?

Le Sigh

A video of people playing the upcoming Star Wars Kinect has been making the rounds of the nerd blogosphere, and I wanted to throw my two cents in, too.  At this point Star Wars is less an expression of creativity and more a vehicle for merchandising, so why begrudge this rather unimaginative foray into the universe?  If nothing else, at least it's better than Masters of Teras Kasi or the N64 podracing game.  But there's a part in the video, at 4:35, that I find really problematic.

It's no secret that science fiction, like a lot of 'nerdy' properties, has real problems with the depiction of women.  It's not as bad as, say, North American superhero comics, which in some cases actually seem designed to drive away women, but there's still a sense that science fiction is a genre for guys.  And that's unfortunate, because science fiction should be for everybody.  Some properties have done better at walking the walk than others; Ripley from Aliens, Sarah Connor from the Terminator franchise, even Leia herself from the original Star Wars trilogy.  But lately, there's been a certain weakness in female characters in science fiction, particularly in the big properties.  Leia may have handled herself as well as any man, but her mother Padme literally lost the will to live when her man turned away from her.  Uhura may have been a breakout character back in the 60s, but now her biggest impact is to be Spock's love interest.  Nearly all the female characters in Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica, strong characters all, ended up either dead or happily raising babies.  Gwen Cooper of Torchwood just wants people to leave her alone so she can live with her man and her baby.  Fringe is still solid, anchored by a strong female character, but for science fiction television it seems to be the exception that proves the rule.

Now, I'm not saying that science fiction fans are sexist, or even that science fiction creators are sexist.  This is too big to be put at the feet of one person or a small handful of people.  But I think it's important to draw attention to this sort of thing, particularly when it's as blatant as a dancing game featuring Jabba the Hutt's sex slaves and a heroine reduced from a blaster-firing rebel leader to a sexualized caricature.  It's not wrong to think Carrie Fisher was attractive in the slave girl costume in Return of the Jedi; it's not even wrong to elevate that look to a nerd sex symbol, stripped of the context of Jabba's palace and the Hutt himself.  Heck, maybe Han and Leia liked to play 'rescue the grateful slave girl' years afterwards, and that's what all these cosplayers and fan artists are protraying.  What's problematic here, and what's becoming more and more problematic in my opinion, is the way female characters are reduced to sexual icons no matter their surroundings, whether they're princesses or soldiers or slaves or victims of any number of unpleasant things.  If Wonder Woman fights crime in a one piece bathing suit, well, that's one thing, but if Wonder Woman is constantly drawn in positions that have her nearly spilling out of her top, or showing off her ass and bust simultaneously, or posing like a pinup model when she's just going about her day, that's a bigger problem.  And it's becoming more and more of a problem, in genre productions in general and science fiction and fantasy in particular.

Just remember; Leia isn't dancing for you, guys.  She's dancing for a crime lord and murderer, who's holding her as a slave at best, and a sex slave at worst. 

And you're making her do it.

Not a Sun Rise, But a Galaxy Rise

While I sometimes like to make myself happy by thinking of Newt Gingrich as something from another planet entirely, of late he's been making it easier than usual. In various speeches and debates, Gingrich has apparently been pushing the idea that his administration would make Luna the '51^st State' (conveniently ignoring various treaties and agreements that would legally prohibit the US from unilaterally claiming the satellite), and even that he would push for a manned Martian expedition. It's a pretty shockingly out-there policy for a Republican, who generally can't get their policies back within the borders of the United States fast enough. Thankfully, Warren Ellis is around to explain exactly what's going on here and, surprise surprise, it's all about votes and job creation.

But let's put aside Newt, and I'll wait for the collective cheers to subside on that idea, because Ellis says something that I think is far more important. Namely, that the idea of space exploration backed by private concerns is a complete non-starter. As Ellis puts it,

"The thing about private spaceflight is that private industry isn’t terribly well known for doing things that don’t have a big fat profit at the other end. And human spaceflight isn’t something that tends to come with a profit function. Mining the moon without, at the very least, the industrial structure at this end to use the mining product for anything is retarded."

It's difficult to understate how right he is. Corporations are guided by profit, indeed in many areas they are legally required to make as much profit for their shareholders as possible, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred a corporation will take a guaranteed twenty tomorrow over a thousand dollars five years down the line. There's very little room for long-term planning in the present corporate environment, and that's a problem when it comes to private space exploration (or exploitation) because there's really no way at all to make money fast out there. Yes, there might be money in all that helium-3 on the surface of Luna or in the elements and ores in the asteroid belt, but there's no way to get it, and use it, in anything like the span of time corporate governance would require. No board of directors is going to authorize the absolutely staggering start-up costs on a venture like that, nor should they, really. Corporations aren't Captain Kirk; risk isn't their business.

But risk is a package deal with exploration, and it always has been. And that's why, even when there were private entities who could theoretically perform such actions, it's always been government agencies and public institutions going boldly into the unknown. Exploration is so expensive, so uncertain and so infrastructurally-intensive that it will always be a matter of public institutions harnessing a civilization-wide agreement to go out and do a thing; there's just no other way to really make it work. And of course, once states have done the exploration, and established the basic infrastructure, and figured out just how to make it all work, the corporations will come along. They just won't ever go first. Which is why it's so important to realize that private industry can not take us to the stars. If we rely on them, we'll never get there; if we wait for it to be profitable to leave our planet, our species will still be here when the sun goes out.

If we're lucky.

Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together!

If there are two things this blog should've made clear I enjoy, it's Warhammer 40,000 and all things futuristic. So when I learned from Bell of Lost Souls, which learned from the Huffington Post, that Games Workshop had issued Digital Millenium Copyright Act-backed take-down notices over 3D printer models of a Dreadnought, a Leman Russ and a Sentinel, well, we were clearly in Reese Peanut Butter Cup territory, people!

Pictured: My Wheelhouse.

I don't blame Games Workshop for issuing these notices; they have to protect their business interests. And since Games Workshop has routinely defended their somewhat lacklustre rule-sets on the basis of their being 'just' a model company, obviously anything that threatens the income they get from their models is going to be a serious concern for them. And while all manner of commentators went on about how information wants to be free and GW needs to move with the times and it's just fan artwork and the like, at the end of the day this wasn't a 3D printer model of 'stumpy-legged fighting robot', but rather something that is very clearly a Space Marine Dreadnought with a close combat weapon and a multi-melta.

But as much as I understand why Games Workshop is doing what it's doing, and even support them in this particular case, it's the larger issue that really intrigues me. 3D printing isn't at the level of Star Trek's replicator yet, but as the dreadnought shows it's also a lot further along than I think a lot of people believed. In another five or ten years it's entirely probable that there will be 3D printers, available to the average consumer for a few hundred dollars from a reputable source (like Best Buy or Future Shop or the like), that will be able to turn out small items quickly, cheaply and with reasonably good fidelity. And when that happens, something very interesting is going to happen.

Yeah, y'know.  'Interesting'.

The driving force behind current economic reasoning is scarcity, either actually or artificially constructed. If a thing exists in only limited quantities, no matter how high the limit might be, the theory is that you need a price mechanism in place to determine distribution. But we've started to see what happens when there is no limit to the quantities available, thanks to services like iTunes, and even what happens when products can be replicated without ever involving a producer, thanks to torrents and file-sharing services. To date that hasn't been a huge issue, despite what the MPAA/RIAA would have you believe, because the movies and music being copied represent relatively tiny assaults on the overall market, and because physical materials still offer a compelling argument in their favour (such as liner notes for cds or special features and commentary tracks for dvds). But that won't always be true, and as we move away from creative/cultural goods to physical ones being 'pirated', the equation is going to shift more and more heavily in favour of the private citizen and away from the corporate entity.

Which sounds wonderful, right? After all, what's more like The Man than corporations? Down with them, and we'll all somehow be prosperous and happy and we'll never need to work a sixty-hour week for minimum wage again! But for all their flaws, and good gods and goddesses do they have so very, very many, corporations are absolutely central to the current construction of the economy. You can't just do away with them without throwing huge numbers of people out of work, and we saw from the Great Recession that even just throwing relatively small numbers of people out of work can completely wreck things for everyone. But you can't just un-invent something; 3D printers exist, and they're only going to get better and better, putting more and more pressure on the vast number of jobs involved in the production, marketing and distribution of physical goods, whether directly or indirectly. Games Workshop can issue take-down notices to Pirate Bay, but as noted they haven't gone after almost the exact same files on Google, and if a player isn't interested in participating in GW-organized tournaments there's very little that could compel them to buy GW models rather than just print off their own

I think the future is going to run something along these lines. 3D printers will put such a squeeze on physical goods, from models to cookware to clothing, that the traditional 'store' will largely be a thing of the past. Those entities that retain physical spaces will do so because having a communal space available for their customers benefits them. GW stores, for example, will probably do away with most of their stock, but continue to host tournaments, demos, painting classes and the like, because those services complement their overall business plan. Those industries that don't need physical space, however, will turn from selling the finished product to selling the plans for the product (backed up by the strongest, most stringent IP-protection laws imaginable), scaling down from massive organizations to teams of designers, sculptors, market researchers and the like. And new industries will spring up around the production of the 'matter packs' for 3D printers, with groups offering a wide variety of materials backed up by a wide variety of claims to their quality.

It may sound like things basically stay the way they are, but make no mistake, this will be a change on the scale of the Industrial Revolution itself. Indeed, it will likely be something along the lines of the Industrial Revolution in reverse, a transition away from major, centralized production systems and back to 'cottage industries' and individual economic performance. It will be just as jarring, just as upsetting, and quite probably just as violent in its own way, as the Industrial Revolution was. Indeed, I won't be at all surprised to find my children's children learning about the social upheaval and even disintegration that characterized the early decades of the twenty-first century, brought about by things like (but certainly not limited to) 3D printers, file sharing, increasingly powerful telecommunications infrastructure and computer processing power. As a young man I completely expect to live through some of the most wrenching dislocations my society has ever endured, and the fact that I believe that a better tomorrow is waiting on the other side is really the only comfort I can imagine for what I suspect is coming in the not-too-distant future.

Hence my rather particular dream-house.

And really, sixty dollars for a plastic kit that can be assembled with a few bucks worth of materials in a 3D printer? Sometimes, I feel like the revolution can't come fast enough!

Big Eyes, Small Mouth, Huge Heart

Is anime the quintessential medium for telling science fiction stories?

Isn't it obvious?

The question sprang to mind the other day, after checking out one of my absolute favourite movies, Summer Wars. What's that, you say you've never heard of Summer Wars? Well, that's no surprise, since it's an anime and, unlike Evangelion, hasn't ever played on a big screen in North America. On the surface, Summer Wars is about the omnipresence of technology, and the threat of a rogue AI. Or, actually, it's a young man's coming-of-age story. Or a family drama. Or a love story? A comedy? A meditation on the role of the elderly? A warning about the depersonalizing nature of modern society?

Really, it's all of those things, and probably one or two more that I, having already watched it several times, haven't quite managed to catch yet. And that is why, I think, anime may be producing the best science fiction stories at the moment, certainly the best on film or video. Partly there are obvious reasons for that, like the simplicity of depicting non-terrestrial locations or biologies in animation, or the relative cheapness of fantastical effects. But there's more to it than that, and I think what it comes down to, in the end, is the trouble I had in explaining exactly what Summer Wars is 'about'.

This is Summer Wars, for the record.  Yeah.  Both of them.

See, that's not a problem you get in North American science fiction. Think of the big science fiction movies. What are they about? In Time is about how awful capitalism is, and a bit of a love story. The various Avengers lead-in movies are about superheroes doing classically superheroic things, like learning humility and punching Nazis. District 9 is about racism and prejudice. The Matrix series is about a war between humans and machines, and also fate vs. free will. I Am Legend is about isolation and the need for human contact, and if you've got the version with the better ending, mutual respect. The Transformers films are about two movies too many. Simple.

Now, what is Ghost in the Shell about, exactly? Or The Girl Who Leapt Through Time? Or Akira? Or Voices of a Distant Star? All of these movies have an obvious plot, just like North American films do, but they've got not just one sub-plot running, but several, and usually they're quite well done, too. And sadly, that's not really something you see in North American science fiction anymore. The Matrix, the first one, might justly be hailed as a stylistic and technical trend-setter and a relatively deep man vs. machine/man vs. society story, but Neo has no real character growth, nor do any of the other characters, all of whom are basically interchangeable and forgettable, and the love story is, frankly, embarrassing. If it weren't for Hugo Weaving, I'm not sure the whole thing would've got off the ground.

I kid, of course, but only about that last part. The more North American science fiction I consume lately, and I'm talking largely about films but television doesn't escape this either, the less impressed I find myself. Or, perhaps I should say the less challenged. It just seems as though the storytellers can't be bothered to really stretch themselves. Story after story, lately, is the same; a not-too-young disaffected/outcast male who finds himself pushed to become some kind of decisive figure, usually with a love story tacked on there and perhaps with a token bit of character growth. Where are the family dramas? Where are the meaningful love stories? Where are the comedies? The funny ones, I mean; Bay's Transformers absolutely do not count. And yes, I know there are exceptions, and that even some of those films that aren't exceptions are great films, just because they managed to do the one or two things they did really, really well. I still stand by my accolades for In Time, absolutely. But, for instance, why was Sylvia Will's age, instead of being his grandmother's age? It wouldn't matter in terms of casting, or the aesthetics of them as a couple on screen, but that small change could add such an interesting extra little touch to their admittedly formulaic relationship. It's those sorts of small things that science fiction seems to miss, time and again, to the detriment of their stories.

Behold, the romance of the summer (blockbuster)!

For all its translation and localization and dubbing issues, and for all its very real problems in terms of the portrayal of women, anime is simply the superior medium when it comes to telling science fiction stories. And the reason seems to be, at the end of the day, that anime directors and producers actually still care about telling really good stories that just happen to be science fiction, rather than science fiction stories that just happen to be good.

It's such a tiny thing, but it makes all the difference in the world.

Tommy Douglas: Father of Medicare, Grandfather of Cyborgs?

The cyborg is a common feature in science fiction, so much so that it has transcended its particular genre audience to develop a pleasant little place for itself in pop culture at large. Ask someone on the street to name a cyborg, and chances are good they'll be able to, at least with relatively little prompting on your part; Robocop, the Borg, Inspector Gadget, Darth Vader, something along those lines. Those more attuned to current events may even be able to come up with the name of the South African runner, Oscar Pistorius, whose attempts to compete in the Olympic Games was questioned based on his prosthetic legs. And of course, there are the now utterly mundane real-life cyborgs, people with cochlear implants, pacemakers, and artificial limbs that run the gamut from 'barely better than a peg-leg' to 'actually functional robotic hand'. The cyborg is no longer the fever dream of the science fiction writer, but more and more they're the reality of your neighbour or your coworker.

And that raises a pretty fundamental question in a capitalist society; who's paying for all these cyborgs?

And how do we make sure they don't cheap out on them?

Traditionally, fiction has usually looked at the cyborg as being a piece of private investment, either on the part of the individual or a corporation. Robocop is legally the property of OCP, after all, and Emperor Palpatine appears to have paid for Anakin's en-Vader-ing himself, since there's not a Property of the Republic stencil to be seen on any of the extremely complicated and expensive medical equipment around them. And when it hasn't been the preserve of the rich, it's usually the result of a particular purpose, spies and assassins being upgraded by their government employers to make them better at their jobs. Cyborgism is a reward as much as a status, and tied with a certain elite classification in fiction. The cyborg is a main character, antagonist or protagonist. Sure, there's Lobot and Geordi and the like, but as secondary character cyborgs they're the exception, not the rule. As cyborgs become less fantastic, however, and more just a societally normalized response to people who have lost some degree of 'human standard' functionality, it becomes less clear why that elite status should be so. This is particularly the case in advanced non-American countries, where the state already pays for citizens' health care. In those cases, why is it that the state can afford to implant a pacemaker, but not fit a pair of 'cheetah legs'? Or introduce the kind of brain-computer interface that can restore damaged nerves and retrieve functionality in extremities? Obviously purely cosmetic procedures could be exempted from national health plans, in the same way that current, purely cosmetic procedures are, but as the technology progresses the definition of non-cosmetic prostheses is only going to grow more and more broad. Because of course, there is not actual 'human standard'.

States like America may at first decide that it's every (rich) man, woman and child for themselves when it comes to personal enhancements, but there are plenty of 'friendly' states that could challenge America's '99% human, 1% cyborg' distribution of enhancements across society as the norm. And what about less friendly states? What about, say, China? Think about it for a moment. A large, prosperous state, with a great deal of accumulated savings, and no history of the citizens being treated as anything but extensions of the state. What would it mean if, ten or fifteen years from now, when the technology has advanced far enough, the government of China paid to have every citizen fitted with a computer-brain interface that provided them with a fundamentally significant advantage in the knowledge-based economy? Or what if they provided increased-functionality sensory suites, little clusters of cameras and audio pickups and the like, that gave every Chinese person 20/20 vision and perfect hearing, and allowed them to record everything they saw and heard while they were at it? If China decided to invest in even 1% of its billion-plus population, the definition of 'human standard' could certainly start to inch away from 'a healthy un-augmented person with a full range of naturally-provided functionality' and towards something a little more competitive. And the higher the bar is raised as far as the maximum possible achievements of a human being, the more pressure there's going to be on everyone else to catch up. If you live in a world of people who can run as fast as a car, lift a piano, compose software in their heads and enjoy absolutely perfect recall, what choice do you have but to try and match those people?

 She can do everything you can do, faster and better.  And she fills out that leotard pretty well, too.  Why should they hire you, again?

These ideas, far-fetched as they may sound, are still safely on the conservative end of the predictive spectrum; in another generation, it's entirely possible the technology could have already surpassed much of what we see even in the more imaginative works of science fiction. And once it has, there will be enormous pressure, from all sorts of groups and institutions, to put it to some kind of use. After all, why just have one Darth Vader, a 7" tall killing machine with the ability to hold a human being off the ground with one hand and casually snap his neck, who should have increased endurance to go with that strength, whose wounds can be instantly healed thanks to the wonders of plug-and-play technology and who could have a permanent audio/visual up-link with headquarters, when you could have whole special forces teams of Darth Vaders? Or whole armies of them?

Once the replacement parts surpass the parts they're replacing, the entire equation changes. At the moment there's no sense chopping your hand off, or gauging out your eyes, just to become a cyborg. Current prostheses are fine for replacing damaged or non-functional parts of our bodies, but they have yet to really out-do what an average, healthy human being can accomplish with their normal body. But technology progresses, sometimes slowly and steadily, sometimes vaulting ahead in great leaps and bounds, but always moving forwards. So soon enough, well within my own lifetime and probably within that of my parents', the day will come when a prosthetic isn't a second-rate replacement, but an upgrade. And when that happens, society is going to have to decide a few very important things. What is a 'human'? What is 'normal'? And perhaps most importantly, who is going to pay to make sure all 'humans' are 'normal'?

And you thought Canadians were sensitive about their health care system's performance before...

Let Them Eat Crake

So, Margaret Atwood. Canadian literary icon. In my book, she earned serious points for her recent efforts in Toronto, playing a part in rallying public opinion against major cuts to libraries. But this isn't a blog about Canadian politics, much as I could fill no end of space pontificating about all the various quirks and questionable decisions going on in the various capitols scattered through the Great White North. This is a blog about, amongst other things, science fiction. And when it comes to science fiction, well, Ms. Atwood and I rather sharply part ways.


I09 has the introduction to Atwood's new book, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, and quite frankly it's a lot of stuff and nonsense. While Atwood again claim's her resistance to having her books classified as scifi isn't about avoiding the literary ghetto, nothing in her opening argument does much to back that up. That she starts off initially by conflating science fiction with the shallow worlds children invent isn't damning, but it's hardly an opening that suggests a respectful take on the genre. But it is her attempt at defining 'nomenclatural allegiances', or a 'system of literary taxonomy', that is the real problem here. One cannot help but suspect that Atwood sat down with the conclusion that her books are not science fiction, and constructed this article backwards, from conclusion to thesis, in order to justify it. Which is why this argument contains the strangest, most hair splitting definition of science fiction I think I have ever seen.

"What I mean by "science fiction" is those books that descend from H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled, blood-sucking Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters-things that could not possibly happen-whereas, for me, "speculative fiction" means plots that descend from Jules Verne's books about submarines and balloon travel and such-things that really could happen but just hadn't completely happened when the authors wrote the books."

So, for Atwood there is 'science fiction' and 'speculative fiction', and unlike nearly everyone else who uses the term 'speculative fiction' it is not a subset of science fiction, but its own distinct genre. This is a curious argument to make, because to the best of my knowledge 'speculative fiction' is not a genre well-known by any particularly large group of people, and many of those who do recognize the term will hardly recognize Atwood's definition. For most science fiction fans, speculative fiction will be a type of science fiction, usually set 'Next Tuesday, A.D.' as it were, which involves some small but relatively important invention that allows the author to explore how society would change. Ralph Peters' War in 2020 is speculative fiction, for example, because it's about tracing the geopolitical impacts of foreign policy decisions and pandemic outbreaks to a potentially logical conclusion. It's also science fiction, because it involves fancy gunships with railguns and some sort of audio/EM weapon that puts victims in a permanent coma. It's both, at the same time, because speculative fiction is a subgenre of science fiction itself. Atwood then tries to muddy the waters, by claiming that

"In a public discussion with Ursula Le Guin in the fall of 2010, however, I found that what she means by "science fiction" is speculative fiction about things that really could happen, whereas things that really could not happen she classifies under "fantasy." [...] In short, what Le Guin means by "science fiction" is what I mean by "speculative fiction," and what she means by "fantasy" would include some of what I mean by "science fiction." So that clears it all up, more or less. When it comes to genres, the borders are increasingly undefended, and things slip back and forth across them with insouciance."

To some extent, of course, it is true that science fiction is often defined as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart did pornography; 'I know it when I see it'. Atwood mentions 1984, and wonders whether it is science fiction, and in some cases it's fair to wonder. Is Cormac McCarthy's The Road science fiction? What about The Book of Eli? Or Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Libeowitz? Or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Or Brazil? The borders are a bit blurred at times, and it's not always easy to determine exactly where some works fall. For Atwood, I would even give her The Handmaid's Tale as not being science fiction, since there's nothing inherently science-y in it. But the entire story of Oryx and Crake is driven by genetic engineering, with the storyteller taking to a species of newly-created and newly-sentient cat-people who were created in a laboratory to replace humanity. Nothing in that is 'speculative', as Atwood means it, because none of it could actually come to pass in any kind of reasonable way. You'd have better credibility classifying it as fantasy than some potential future for humanity, though I can't imagine the fantasy crowd would much want it wandering in their midst.


Of course, I don't particularly want it in science fiction, either. But it is, and the sooner Atwood stops trying to split the finest of hairs to try and escape it, the better off we'll all be.

There's an Energy Crisis Coming, and It's Not What You Think

It's not peak oil, or nuclear, or renewables. No, the real looming energy crisis is a crisis in personal energy. In the amount of energy, the amount of excess, free, personal energy, the individual has. And what's driving this crisis?

Progress and productivity.

Yeah, this?  Apparently, it's a pretty big problem.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but it's not. The hours a person works, per day, per week, per year, have been steadily coming down since the Industrial Revolution started up. But at the same time, the amount of stuff we can make, whether it's food or clothes or houses or iPods, has shot up into the stratosphere. More people now make more stuff, in less time, than at any other point in human history. And there's no indication that this is a trend that's going to change any time soon. People are working on serious, potentially useable prototypes for things like the replicators of Star Trek's Federation, and even if they never rise to the magic levels of those seen on the show, the ability to buy a device which can produce plastic objects or foodstuffs in the home will raise productivity and drop individual effort through the floor. The age of massive factories, eating up the labour and energy and time and, yes, even lives of hundreds and thousands of workers are over. Factories are smaller than they've ever been, even as mass production allows for greater productivity, and they're going to get smaller still. It would not, in the least, surprise me to live to see an age where there simply are no factories, anywhere, producing anything.

Now, here's the thing. People like to work, at least to some extent, and at the moment people need the wages of work. So what will happen to society when there is no work, and no source of wages that can meet the needs of people? What does a society do when nobody has to put in more than a few hours or work a week, or even can? What do workers do when employers don't need them for more than an hour or two a week, or a month, or a year? What happens to a capitalist society when nobody has any money, and nothing costs anything anyway?

"They give up using pockets?"

"Ooh, good try, chief!"

Science fiction has tried to answer this, in various ways and various media. Perhaps nobody has done it better than Iain M. Banks, in his Culture novels. Banks does a good job, or at least as good a job as possible, at visualizing the organization of a society in which there is no need for labour, and thus no source of money, and thus no functional economy as we could understand it. But of course, the problem is that Banks is one of us, and if we can't really understand it, neither can he.

The most fundamental problem, however, is not that we have no model for the next major stage of social development. We have dozens, hundreds even. The absolute most basic issue, instead, is that nobody seems to have any idea of how to get there from here. The period between late-stage capitalism and early post-scarcity is pretty much a white space marked with 'Here There Be Dragons' on the map that is science fiction. And that's a problem, because outside of deathly dry academic texts, science fiction is pretty much the only format that's going to address this issue with any hope of depth or scope. There aren't really any other cultural platforms that can, because nothing else is really set up to approach fundamentally changed visions of the future; heck, even science fiction is, more often than not, just the past with more chrome and lens flare. But it doesn't have to be, and it's pretty much the only thing for which that can be said.

I'm not saying it has to lead us by the hand through the coming turmoil. But make no mistake, that turmoil is absolutely coming. And it wouldn't hurt to have, if not a map, at least a few decent second-hand directions to help us find our way through it.