The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon... Read More.
Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin
"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine
"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review
"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly
"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
By “expert” I mean world-class, whether or not you’re super smart or super talented.
I’m starting to lose my faith in innate “talent” after some recent reading. Two of the books are Talent is Overrated and Outliers. I’ve got another book on this topic coming, too, more on the inspirational side of things. Some of the basic points I’ve been thinking about are also covered in The Ten Thousand Hour Rule, and other variations floating around the internet for a few years, too.
When I was six, I thought that the thing that distinguished humans from the rest of the animal kingdom was our intelligence, so I decided that being smart was important. I am classically smart, and have a high IQ. That helps a little with some things, especially on the beginning steep part of the learning curve, but that advantage doesn’t compete well against sufficient deliberate practice.
I’ve climbed the hill of expertise several times in my life, although I don’t know that I’ve managed to put in 10,000 hours of serious work into anything. Maybe astronomy. Maybe writing. But I doubt it. It takes about ten years of serious hard work to get to the 10,000 hours, and without serious effort to improve the hours don’t count much.
I was good at drawing as a kid and considered going to college for art, and had aspirations to draw comic books. I like fine art, but I know what I love. I had a solo show of my drawings and paintings my senior year of high-school. As a teenager, I won prizes at science fiction conventions in the art shows. I kept up a bit in college and grad school, and have a few pieces that are good, but I knew how far I still had to go to attain a professional level of skill, and I lost my inspiration. I started requiring classes to draw, whereas I was writing nearly every day without outside prompting.
I was pretty good at chess, too, in high school and college. The first six masters I played I drew. I drew former world champion Boris Spassky (while he was playing 49 other people simultaneously). I had a closet full of trophies. I was the Missouri State Amateur Champion in 1986. I won a $500 chess scholarship. I let myself quit in college — I didn’t have the time to get better, and spending the time took away from my studies and social life. Six years of effort into chess, and I was on track to make master within another four I believe (I quit rated 1950, 250 points from master level). Also, I realized that there were some chess masters who weren’t very bright outside of chess — they tended to live in their parents’ basements and study chess a lot.
More recently, I put in the training to run a marathon. Serious hours per week, over about five months. I improved my running a lot, and did the marathon in about four and a quarter hours. My dad, an experienced marathoner in his day, thought I had the potential to run 3:30 if I kept working at it. I didn’t. Too time consuming. Serious runners, even quite old ones in their 40s and 50s, talk about seven years to reach their peak ability.
In fiction, we talk about writing 2 million words of crap before we get good. Most “new” writers are in their 30s and 40s, and 30 is a pretty normal age to break in after years of effort. Reading, writing, and critiquing for 10,000 hours over ten years it what it takes for most of us. I haven’t written 2 million words of fiction yet, although I may have written over 2 million words total. Writing 2 million words in 10,000 hours is a leisurely 200 words an hour — a little slower than I write and I’m not the fastest. Ballpark, it’s 10,000 hours to work through the crap. Again, I know some pro writers that I wouldn’t consider even of average intelligence, except they’re nearly geniuses at writing.
In astronomy, and the physical sciences, grad school is usually 5-6 years, and then there’s usually another 3-6 years of postdocs before getting a faculty position. That’s ten years, and while that’s also probably more like 40-60 hours a week, it’s probably more like 20-30 hours a week of the kind of practice that helps one improve. There are a lot of other things to do, too, in academia. And there’s the danger of getting good enough in a niche to stop pushing hard learning. I’ve seen a lot of professors, myself included, who hesitate to put in the hard work to learn new software, or keep up with the latest in the scientific literature, because we can coast on our past experience. I’m going to work harder on that in the future.
In the books cited above, they talk about chess masters who can play blindfolded and remember all the pieces on the board at a glance. I was able to do that when I quit chess. They also talk about more general expertise, developing mental models, patterns, that let larger quantities of information in the expertise to be grasped and retained easily and quickly — and I have experienced that myself with astronomy and writing both.
So, I don’t think I’m saying anything here too insightful compared to the books above, or the other blogs I’ve read about the ten thousand hour rule. I’m just putting my personal experiences up against those ideas, and finding they match up.
What I think my belief at six years old really let me do was to develop an attitude of relentlessness. I wouldn’t quit. I wouldn’t admit that I was too stupid to solve a problem. One of the books talks about how quickly people give up on math problems before deciding they’re “too hard” to do. American students give up after a few minutes, Asian kids after something more like ten minutes. In college and grad school, perhaps even high school, I worked on individual problems for DAYS until I understood them inside and out and had good solutions. That’s the kind of deliberate practice that brings expertise. One expert at math teaching said math ability was more a matter of attitude than innate talent.
The other thing I have had going for me is passion. I’m really deeply interested in things. I like to learn and to study, if it’s something I care about.
On the other hand, having too many interests has been my downfall at some level. I’m a good astronomer and a good writer, but I feel like I could be great if I focused more. Boy, that’s hard though, isn’t it? Once you’re married with kids and a steady job, it’s hard to have the time required to train yourself to expertise. Even within your job, the situation is not always conducive to get better at. People get good enough, then many have a tendency to phone it in, doing well enough but not improving. Improving takes hard work, extra hours.
I’m 42. I still have time in my life to develop another expertise, or to reinvest in one of my partially developed areas and try to take it to master level (although it won’t be chess — I like the game now but my passion is gone). I still love the astronomy and writing, and they are the two things I’ve invested the most effort in and have paid off the most for me. I have to acknowledge that I am driven in part by outside recognition, and getting tenure as a professor and publishing novels has taken the edge off the push. I have to find the energy to want to be great for its own sake in a position in life where I’ve already been recognized as pretty good, much better than most, at a time when I am also considering marrying again and having a family while I’m still young enough to properly manage it.
Anyway, this is some reflection and soul searching on my part. There are a limited number of hours in my lifetime left to do this, and everything else I like to do (socializing, traveling, playing games, etc.). This is the really hard part, knowing its there if I want it, and having to make the decision to go for it. Again, or continuing, without settling for good enough.
And for those of you reading this, know that you can become world class at almost anything, physical limitations permitting, if you put the work into it. You may not become the best in the world, but you can compete with them, or just make a decent living in a dream job, or perform for adoring crowded of some size. But you have to make that time, and there’s sacrifice. I remember skipping movies with friends in grad school in order to go to work. I remember turning off the tv in order to get my three hours of writing time in. I remember seeing the chess set waiting for me in my room when I finished my homework.
A few years ago I compiled a list of online astronomy resources for writers following that year’s Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers. Every year there are new links we pass around and discuss, so I wanted to do an addendum, if you will, adding more links to the ones I’ve previously posted (and which I feel are still excellent resources).
Here are some of the additional blog posts of my own (many I used with my astronomy class this past spring) that I referred to at the workshop…or should have:
I spent too much time mining youtube this year so far…but I did find some good stuff. Hope I save some people some time by pointing at some good things above.
A pretty gory Mythbuster’s video suggestive of what would happen if you fell into a stellar mass black hole and the tidal forces got you.
Some resources that professional astronomers use, many of which you can use, too!
NASA’s Extragalactic Database (NED) — compilation of information about extragalactic objects, plus some other handy tools and review article library (Level 5).
Shelly Li, a Writer to Watch, and the Issue of Separating Writer from Story
July 9th, 2010
Shelly Li is about the most talented teen I’ve ever known in my life, and I’m proud to call her a friend. She’s 17 and just sold her first novel and has been regularly selling science fiction to high-profile professional markets like the Futures section of Nature.
I want to do two things here with this post. First, I want to plug Shelly and put her on your radar if you’ve never heard of her. She’s going to be around for a long, long time. Discover her now.
Second, I want to discuss writing about controversial topics and how strange and inappropriate it is to confuse the writer and the story they’ve written, and I want to use one of Shelly’s stories as a launch pad.
As a writer, I like to learn new things, try on different perspectives, and explore a variety of issues I find interesting or important. Sometimes in my work there will be a character a lot like me who will be my mouthpiece. Sometimes not. And sometimes the story doesn’t even reflect my worldview at all, but I want to just look at things differently for a while. It makes sense not to read too much into a story about the author, because you just don’t know. Some people think they can read a story and tell if someone is racist or sexist, for instance, and while the story probably provides clues, they might be totally wrong in the cases of very skilled writers doing a subtle point of view trick, or bad writers using biased research materials. A friend read one of my stories once and told me I had to be in love, but I was in between girlfriends and was not. I know a popular writer who got turned down from Clarion West because his horror story was so horrible he had to be kept away from other students (and I just thought writing a horrifying horror story meant you were a good writer!). I’ve seen enough people get it so wrong that I rant about it from time to time, and have little patience with folks who claim magic powers to know what someone is like from their writing, or in fact their art in general. Some artists who create scary stuff are nice, polite, and friendly. Some scary looking people create the sweetest things.
Now, back to Shelly. I’m not going to assume anything about her religious beliefs — I don’t know them and we haven’t discussed them. All I know is that it’s something she thinks about and discusses sometimes.
Shelly wrote an interesting short short story for Nature called “The End of God.” First of all, Nature only buys very short stories, so they are not usually excessively deep explorations of a topic. I almost think of short short stories as jokes. They have a set-up and a punch line. They need not be funny, but they’re so short that they have to have a quickly grasped point and an impact to take away. Shelly’s has that and it works, I think. Appreciate that they’re really hard to do well and if they make you feel anything, think a bit, and stick with you any length of time, they’ve succeeded at some level.
Shelly’s story makes out atheists to be well-meaning but oppressive bad guys, at least from the perspective of the male protagonist. I point this out because in comments at the site and at PZ Myer’s atheist-oriented blog, the main character is made out to be a “she” — already people confuse the writer and the story. Especially with first person perspective, readers identify the author as the main character. It’s a short story, the “sir” in the first line of dialogue makes it clear…but I digress.
What amazes and disappoints me are how many comments amount to personal attacks on Shelly, or assumptions about her own religious belief. Some are amazingly condescending, suggesting that when she gets older she’ll gain deeper wisdom about religious issues.
You can’t read one short story by an author and know for sure anything that they believe about the world!
I myself have a story about faith I’ve wanted to write for years, but the project requires a lot of research and I haven’t gotten around to it. I suspect that readers of that story would be surprised to discover that I was an atheist. Faith is antithetical to reason, but it provides strength to people and I want to explore that in this story. We’ll see if I get around to it. I also want to write a novel called GUNWORLD, and I’m not a big gun guy, but I digress again…
Most of the time, especially when you read a body of an author’s work, you figure out their worldview and what they think about things. I think we have a pretty good idea about what Hemingway admired and what he feared. Tarantino is obviously a foot fetishist. I think it’s clear that Stephen King is clearly a murdering maniac…wait, this doesn’t work all the time!
Anyway, it’s hard enough for a new writer to take criticism of their work. It’s crazy hard to take criticism of themselves, and it’s unfair to offer it.
I’ve heard stories from editors about a writer who finds fat women attractive and apparently puts plus-sized gals into his books. An appropriate comment from an editor might be to advise him to slim the women down, at least some of the time, if he wants to find a more receptive audience (although a niche audience can be powerfully good, too, if large enough and faithful enough). It would be horrible to tease him for his preferences or to tell them that he’s a weird pervert. Or consider the case of a writer wanting to explore the mind of a chubby chaser and this was a one off thing and being accused of a sexual preference he doesn’t have. Straight writers do write about gay characters, and vice versa, and it’s ok. We follow our muses.
I remember having a talk at a convention with Tom Godwin’s daughter. Godwin wrote “The Cold Equations,” a classic of hard science fiction. In the story, a young innocent girl bravely commits suicide to save the lives of other people. Apparently Godwin, whose early drafts of the story did not have the girl die, got a lot of flak and was accused of hating women on the basis of this story, and it pained him very much according to his daughter.
So next time you’re going to rip on an author for views or attitudes you think they have, think twice. By all means rip on a story if you think it deserves some harsh criticism, but don’t be so sure you know what the author thinks. Sometimes we mean just what we say, and sometimes we’re turning things around to get a new perspective.
This is a true story. It’s kind of funny, kind of stupid, but it’s true and that’s the important thing.
I was a smart kid growing up, usually at the top of my class, always fiddling with one project or another. I was into the stars, dinosaurs, chemistry, science fiction, making movies, writing stories, chess, D&D. You know, the fun nerd stuff. Most of what I was about usually came back around to science in one form or another.
There were some feelings of insecurity, however, and ignorance about some fundamental things concerning a career in science. Not that I would have admitted it then. Probably not, anyway. I knew to be a scientist you had to go to grad school and get a PhD. I thought grad school was like law school or medical school and would require big student loans, but I also knew that science didn’t pay as well as law or medicine, so I didn’t really understand why people would put themselves through that. I figured there was something special about them, that they were beyond me, more dedicated or more talented somehow.
I went to Rice University and majored in electrical engineering. Engineering made sense. Four years of tuition, high-paying good job on the other end, and engineers worked with scientists on big projects like spacecraft that would scratch my science itch. Still, I liked astronomy so much that I kept taking courses in the field and wound up with a double major, adding space physics (the closest Rice had to an astronomy major).
My sophomore year I took the introductory astronomy courses, a two-class sequence, for major students. I got the highest score on the first exam, 100%, and the professor scribbled “Come see me sometime” on the exam. I felt sort of inadequate, not even being a major just yet. That would change soon, and I owed it to my professor. All the grad students in the department called him “Reggie” but even years from now he is imprinted on me as “Dr. Dufour.” He was a good professor and a good scientist. He was also a short guy, a bit overweight, with a hearing aid and a touch of a cajun accent. I thought of him as our own regional version of Jack Horkheimer, whose PBS segments about astronomy always ended with “keep looking up.”
Later that year my partner and I were trying to get some data for an astronomy lab. We wanted to use a bigger telescope (16 inch diameter) outside of town that we had access to, as the 6 inch celestrons from downtown Houston weren’t the best choice. We went out one weekend, an hour and a half drive to Huntsville, TX, and had all sorts of problems. The telescope was not used often and was cranky, and just didn’t work well. We couldn’t get any data for our project. Dr. Dufour promised to go out with us the following weekend and guaranteed data for us. We lit up like minature supernovas at that!
We all went out and Dr. Dufour struggled with the telescope as much as we had. And then some. We were students, too afraid to push things too hard. Not so for a professor to help his dedicated students…but his best efforts wound up with a frozen scope stuck in an odd position and his screwdriver sliding to the bottom of a deep shaft.
He cussed up the biggest storm of foul words that I’d ever heard a professional utter in my whole life.
My partner and I were a little shocked.
We never did get the scope working for us, and settled for the smaller telescopes and skies of Houston to finish the project, but that night made a big impact on me.
My professor, who I looked up to so much, was human like me. I could be a scientist, too, and perhaps someday a professor as well. It was a really important insight for me to have at that stage, and I will always be grateful for his effort, enthusiasm, and honesty. That night, and several more incidents during my time in college made me realize that Dr. Dufour was also a great person and caring professor that I was lucky to have. He is still an inspiration to me working with my students and thinking back reminds me of the responsibility I have as I exert influences on others today that may be deeper than I recognize.
Ten Mainstream TV Shows or Movies that are Science Fiction or Fantasy “Light”
June 18th, 2010
A few days ago I blogged about mainstream stories that I thought could be categorized as light versions of fantasy or science fiction. To qualify, the stories had to fail to reflect reality in some fundamental way without being obviously science fiction or fantasy. When that failure was over-the-top and great liberties are taken with reality, it’s mainstream fantasy (e.g., the movie 300). When the failure is a subtle one required to make the show work, but that isn’t how reality works, that’s mainstream science fiction (e.g., most detective shows, House, CSI). I use the word “fail” or “failure” but these things are done on purpose to specific effect.
I’ll start with repeating 300 here, a fantasized version of history, and intentionally so.
I’m not always such a huge Michael Crichton fan, as you may know, but his novel that inspired the movie The 13th Warrior was a brilliant piece of historical fantasy. There’s no magic or other elements common to fantasy. He just made up his own history and merged it in with conventional history. It really is cool.
CSI has led a generation of Americans who will sit on trials that there should always be forensic clues and that there’s huge amounts of money to be spent on pretty much any kind of crime.
House makes easy diagnoses look easy — doctors can tell at a glance what is wrong with someone. Again, infinite money to be spent. Corners to be cut. Rare diseases pop up all the time and are solved in an hour, usually saving the patient. Medical shows in general have convinced people that CPR works much more often than it really does.
Charlie’s Angels, as originally on TV did conventional stunts. When it moved to the big screen the fights and stunts started to defy the laws of physics.
Kill Bill is pretty obviously a fantasy. In additional to the conventions of Kung Fu movies, defying physics in the fight scenes, there is a very lovely bit about the airline that the Bride flies. They let you take on samurai swords and have holders for them on the seats! This is not the real world, even though it’s impossible to tell that from many other scenes.
Oh, another hugely popular mainstream fantasy: The Godfather. I remember hearing stories about real mafia getting a kick at how noble this movie made them out to be.
In the past, there were a lot of westerns and war movies that didn’t worry about getting anything realistic. They tended to reflect the propaganda of their times, with one-dimensional evil Indians and Nazis for our heroes to fight. I feel that both genres have veered hard for larger doses of reality in recent years. Think about Unforgiven that deglamorizes gun fighting, or Saving Private Ryan with its D-Day landing scene pulling no punches. The Hurt Locker looks like an another attempt at serious reality (although I have not seen it yet). War and death aren’t fun, is the message. But there are signs that this may be swinging back the other way with Inglourius Basterds, which is technically alternate history (and I won’t spoil it here if you haven’t seen it), but that’s what every fictionalized attempt at history really is, and even non-fictional history is only a reflection of past reality.
Tarantino’s partner in crime, Robert Rodriguez, has also pulled his over-the-top westerns with Desperado and the killer Mariachi gang toting guns and even rocket launchers.
Let’s finish up the list with something that’s obviously not very realistic, and very intentionally so, that mixes Frank Miller, Tarantino, and Rodriguez: Sin City. They make sure the cars bounce and careen along in ways that intentionally defy physics because they want a particular mood and style. That’s one of the more subtle things that isn’t real, but a clear indication that they’ve created their own world that is only superficially our own.
Any other suggestions of some big, popular shows or movies?
Mainstream Stories and a Metaphorical Science Fiction/Fantasy Dichotomy
June 13th, 2010
I was thinking about the movie 300, Nnedi Okorafor’a detractors, and this recent blog post and comments therein. Thoughtful people get upset by art, whether it is a book, movie, or just about anything. I think there are good reasons and bad reasons to get upset. A good reason is when you’re disappointed because something had the potential to be great and it had fatal flaws that kept it from reaching that potential. A bad reason is when you’re biased, close-minded, and think that there’s an anti-something agenda in everything you see.
First, let me say that all fiction is fantasy. Historical fantasy, the hardest of hard science fiction, true crime stories, reality shows, everything. This point is easy to see when you think about it. To make any story, even reality-based stories, you edit. You cut out parts that are slow or boring. You change the dialogue to make it clear and easy to follow compared to how people really talk. You choose a perspective, how to display the story.
That’s all fine. That’s what makes writing stories art.
But then you can do even more. You can depart from reality as we know it. You can have the magic of fantasy. You can have the future predictions of science fiction. You can have unreliable narrators lying or omitting key information. You can have subtitles in movies. You can exaggerate, whether it is a string of amazing coincidences that move the story forward, stunts that subtly defy the laws of physics, business that defies economics, etc.
What is so clever about 300 is that it is an intentional exaggeration. Frank Miller isn’t trying to be true to history. He’s intentionally exaggerating. The evil priests have open oozing sores. The creatures are monstrous. The enemy looks like orcs. Their king is 10 feet tall. It’s MAINSTREAM FANTASY. Likewise with a movie like Charlie’s Angels, Shoot Em Up, or Crank. Everything is done with a wink and a nod as impossible stunt follows impossible stunt. They are not to be taken as literal reality at all, whether they’re messing with history, physics, whatever. They’re a form of fantasy.
So what then about mainstream science fiction? These are the stories that try to play by certain rules, whether they are reality based or only based on the story’s own internal self-consistency. Take CSI, for example. They try to abide by the rules of reality, but there are sums of money in that lab that are never seen by real labs, and there always seems to be a forensic clue that helps lead the investigators to a conviction. In any individual story, there’s no problem, but a pattern develops that isn’t our reality. Maybe the failed cases have been edited out, and never shown. Still, in the shows on tv the deck is always stacked in their favor. Juries now have unrealistic expectations about the quality and quantity of forensic evidence. Similarly with a show like House. In principle every story could happen, but House gets away with things time after time that he shouldn’t (medically, socially, economically, legally), and they pretty much always save the patient. Medical shows in general have much higher success rates for CPR than reality, leading to people having unrealistic expectations. These shows try hard to portray reality, but they don’t, and in an interesting way that makes me call it MAINSTREAM SCIENCE FICTION. Detective stories, medical stories, even lawyer stories, tend to fall into this category for me.
This is akin to the reason that I call Star Trek science fiction, and criticize the bad science it sometimes has, and give Star Wars a pass. Star Wars is a fantasy even though it has spaceships and robots. Star Wars isn’t trying to reflect reality in any way whatsoever. Even though it fails regularly enough, Star Trek does try. I’ll get upset with Star Wars for bad acting, stupid characters, etc., but not over the science. Star Trek, I’ll criticize the science.
A story like 300, I would say, beyond being mainstream fantasy, is not exactly a historical story. It’s inspired by a historical story, and has become it’s own version of that history without trying to be accurate in any specific reality-based manner. You can’t lump it in with science fiction or fantasy either, as it isn’t an alternate history like Inglourius Basterds. It’s an over-the-top stylized version of historical events, mainstream fantasy.
I think I’ll come up with lists of other examples over the next few days. Anyone want to suggest some?
Anyway, I think it’s inappropriate to criticize the history or politics of 300 the same way it is inappropriate to criticize the science of Star Wars. It’s just not that kind of story. It’s inspired by history, but it has its own version of it that is the story’s own reality. There are plenty of other stories that try to get everything right, even though it is impossible, and those should get the criticism.
It’s Got to be Tough to be an Astronaut (Poll on Future of Manned Space Program)
June 11th, 2010
I have mixed feelings about the path Obama has chosen to take with NASA. I hate it when discussions develop along mindless political lines, like how some conservatives say that private industry is always better than the government (it is sometimes but not other times), how some liberals and libertarians think that the government has no reason to be spending money on things like space, etc. There are big fundamental discussions that should be revisited from time to time, but it is clear that space is an important resource and deserving of exploration and that the government has funded much of what has been done to date.
It’s either the dawn of a bold new age of space excitement, or a convenient place to set down the book and forget to pick it up again until the budget is in better shape.
I suppose I’m thinking about the astronauts now because that is a job I’ve aspired to in the past and thought about applying for, and it is also the human-face of this change at NASA. I’ve met a few astronauts in my day and one of my former engineering professors even became a mission specilaist and serviced the Hubble Space Telescope. Reading Mullane’s book reminded me of dreams of space and how much it hurts when achieving those dreams is outside your control. I mean, no one can stop me from writing another novel, other than myself, but a political decision can sure determine whether or not an astronaut gets to go into space.
So, what do you think? Are we entering an exciting phase of the space age, or stumbling on the next step upward and outward?
Both science fiction fans and the general public complain about the failure of predictions of future technology. Where are the flying cars? Colonies on the moon? Jet packs? And food in pill form?
Well, the last one is probably the least plausible of the above, and it could be argued that we have the other technologies, or could have them, if the will and economics were there to support their development.
The food thing is one for which we seem to have gone BACKWARDS. Foods technology today has created overly processed stuff that is tasty, stuffed with calories, and making us FAT and UNHEALTHY. My time abroad, especially in countries like Brazil, is a constant reminder about how Americans in particular are fat and unhealthy. I myself am overweight, but let’s go for a ten-mile run and we can discuss the issue. I’ll get the weight back down, but boy, I have to exercise and watch my diet like a supermodel.
I suppose I know the answer, given a minimal insight into human nature, but why isn’t there Purina Human Chow?
We have well-balanced food for our pets and livestock, even if we don’t always feed it to them, including special blends for overweight animals, old animals, young animals, and they eat it. Male dogs seem to eat voraciously even if they’re not eating food. Cats are pickier, but they’ll eat the healthy stuff when they’re hungry.
Why not people? Why not something that will keep that fat-assed programmer in crunch time from packing on the pounds? Why is the most heavily pushed source of sustenance nutrient-free carbonated sugar water? Why is it is so damned hard to stay healthy eating at restaurants? We weren’t meant to have the sedentary jobs that are so common today, and it’s killing us.
For the science fiction fans, many of whom are “fan-sized” as I have seen more than one convention slyly acknowledge in their restaurant guide with respect to seating options (no booths please!), can’t we make some healthy People Chow and sell it as Soylent Green? How about some Logan Run style “protein from the sea?”
I’m afraid human nature is the real problem. We’re selfish gluttons for the most part, and we take care of our pets better than ourselves. We’re weak, pampered, self-indulgent. I know I am. Oh, I’m not terrible by most standards, but I could do better. I want to do better. I will do better.
Where’s the food of the future to help me out? I don’ need a pill, but something tasty, healthy, cheap, that fills all my nutritional needs, like we seem to manage for our dogs and cats, would help a lot. My palette is not sophisticated, and I can do any diet that is convenient and easy…and I’m sure we could afford to indulge once in a while if we started at a healthy body weight rather from inflated American bodies.
Themes in Science Fiction: Cultural Relativism and Absolute Morality
May 14th, 2010
Does Captain Kirk follow the Prime Directive — not to interfere with a developing alien species, or does he choose to do the right thing as he sees it?
Does the team on Stargate: SG1 let the people on an alien world follow their own laws, or try to impose their own moral sensibilities upon them?
This particular theme, that of believing in a clear right and wrong or in respecting a foreign culure’s right to have their own, differing morality is a classic for good reason. It is a reflection of the battle that our own civilization has been fighting for centuries, and continues to fight in new and varied ways with increasing globalization. Europeans went out into the world, bringing their guns, gods, and diseases, without much respect for the “savages” they found. There is a shared guilt that many westerners feel today about the general lack of respect for foreign cultures our recent ancestors showed, and for their many sins involving some of the most heinous crimes imaginable, including genocide and slavery.
To oversimplify, it has generally been religious people that have believed in absolute morality, and missionaries bringing Western religion to foreign ports of call were one of the driving forces of colonization. Liberal academics, with calls for diversity and ethnic studies, have been the ones pushing for relativism and refusing to acknowledge right and wrong without a cultural context. (Note that atheist Sam Harris, in his recent TED talk, is something of a liberal academic pushing for a scientific method to discover an absolute morality).
To let you know where I am coming from, I believe that evolution of our species and the sociology that lets us be successful has given us the basis of our morality. Moreover, genetic studies of various sorts show that there exists a diversity of morality among people (which lets evolution work, and muddies the waters for absolutists). And in addition to that, that morality is ultimately not culturally specific, but species specific.
Let me illustrate what I mean by those assertions, which are not unfounded but perhaps not so easy to prove. First, simply, our feelings of what’s right and wrong help us interact with each other in ways that overall work to the benefit of our species. We usually do the right thing, especially when witnessed by others, but we also recognize that there are situations where good people may disagree about what is right or wrong. For instance, how poor and hungry does someone have to be before stealing food is morally acceptable? How much personal risk is it appropriate to take on to save someone else? A group of other people? Etc. The Book of Questions features a lot of ideas involving morally ambiguous situations. And fiction, ah fiction, it’s really about putting characters into tough spots and seeing how they act and the consequences of those actions.
We love this stuff. We thrive on it. Talking about it, reading about it, watching it…all vicarious experiences that educate us about what is right and wrong, both through example and society’s response, and through our own reactions, our evolutionarily tuned sense of morality that constantly tests how we feel about what other people do.
Sometimes this stuff has too much baggage, and we ourselves have too much personal bias. Religion and nationalism give us a bias toward our own side and it’s hard to see other perspectives clearly. It’s possible, but difficult. A movie like Dances with Wolves gave people the ability to identify with the Indians rather than the Cowboys, something interesting and rare after decades of traditional western movies. A muslim today can see condemnation of female circumcision or the stoning of rape victims as not just an attack on acts many find abhorrent, but upon them personally even if they don’t like the practices either.
Enter science fiction. When topics can be too touchy to handle directly, science fiction lets you move them to alien worlds and shake some of that baggage free. Imagine reading some version of Avatar, perhaps with aliens that didn’t have quite so many obvious similarities to native Americans, back before Dances with Wolves — perhaps way before when the United States was actually at war with native Americans. At that time Dances with Wolves would have been impossible to do, but Avatar could sneak in since it is about aliens. Except it isn’t in most of the ways that matter to us concerning morality.
Now, I may not have picked the best examples here, but I suspect this point isn’t so deep to readers of science fiction.
What I want to say that may be fresher is that science fiction need not just express metaphors for conflicts here on Earth, and need not only explore human morality. A species with a different ecological niche evolved to have a different sense of well-being and different social structures could well be expected to have a different but equally valid morality. I’m talking something fundamentally deeper here than any cultural relativism. I don’t believe all human cultures are equally moral — they can all have messed up aspects to them that have been institituionalized for the benefit of particular special interests. I do believe that an alien culture could have elements that we would find personally morally reprehensible, but actually be not just acceptable but of the highest good for aliens.
This kind of story is hard to pull off. Perhaps the best I’ve seen and can recall know is the work of Nancy Kress, specifically the aliens of the story “The Flowers of Aulit Prison” (which formed the basis for her Probability series). I don’t want to spoil things, but because of the nature of a shared reality/consciousness, just how bad things like murder and kidnapping are differ significantly from a human perspective. It’s worth taking a look. Anyone know of other good examples?
We’re fascinated by moral questions. There are many situations where there isn’t a clear answer, and the less clear, the more interesting. And then there’s the power issue — if your own morality is offended, do you have the ability and will to impose your own values on others and accept the consequences?
That’s interesting stuff.
Almost any science fiction of any quality that involves aliens has elements of this conflict. Sometimes it’s humans in conflict over whether to impose our morality on aliens, or vice versa. Or simply the conflict that ensues once the decision has been made. One of the reasons Westerners could be so inhuman to other peoples was extreme racism — the others weren’t human, so the same morality didn’t have to apply. In the case of aliens, that is litterally true. In science fiction, all characters are perceived as human, emotionally perceived, even when they are anything but. It’s a mind trip to explore what the other can be like, to identify with that other.
This theme is never going to go away. For tribal creatures like oursleves, we will be unlikely to set aside this conflict, and explorations will remain endlessly fascinating.
So you get a large fraction of the hundreds of Star Trek episodes dealing with this, and ten episodes of Stargate: SG1, and a major theme of the Battlestar Galactica reboot (are cylons essentially worthy of treatment as people or are they glorified toasters?), in our science fiction. Avatar is a simpler version of some of those, but it did bring in over a billion dollars, and it wasn’t just the great special effects.
Cultural relativism, especially in the extreme form that involves aliens who may indeed hold a valid morality very different from our own, is fundamentally an intellectual exercise. One must set aside feelings to embrace it, and strive to see things from an alien viewpoint. The absolute sense of right and wrong comes from our feelings, and is strong and visceral — fundamentally human. It’s the heart vs. the mind, an ancient conflict with infinite dimensions for humans with our bicameral minds that rely on the interplay of these to reach decisions about how to act.
So even if a particular episode of Star Trek or Stargate is sort of stupid, themes of morality can hold us enthralled enough to watch to the end.
The Sound and the Fury about Stephen Hawking’s Alien Warning
May 11th, 2010
Last night I caught the much discussed Discovery Channel episode of Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking dealing with aliens. The initial clip on the website is “Fear the Aliens” which is the controversial bit. Hawking, unlike Carl Sagan, apparently thinks that we would have much to fear from technologically advanced aliens and that we should be careful about announcing our presence lest they come here and exploit us the way Europeans exploited Native Americans. Hawking…who lives in a culture that cares and reveres him despite the disease that has left him all but paralyzed. He is so revered that almost everything he says is much discussed. More so even when he is likely wrong.
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,†he said.
Prof Hawking thinks that, rather than actively trying to communicate with extra-terrestrials, humans should do everything possible to avoid contact.
He explained: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.â€
The show is up in its entirety on youtube. I’ll embed it here, although I don’t know if it will stay up. Some companies don’t bother youtube much, and some are ruthless about getting shows removed. If you want to cut to the “fear the aliens” part, start at about 7 minutes in on part four.
It’s really a light documentary for general public consumption with lots of speculation and little science. I had planned to write something about this a couple of weeks ago, but it was a busy time and I didn’t get around to it. Everyone else did, however. I haven’t even read all the commentary. Some are at least as qualified as me, given that I am an astronomer and science fiction writer, but who is to say what is qualified when the only data we have is that there is essentially no data when it comes to aliens. We haven’t found them some places we’ve looked, and they’re not here enslaving/eating/mating/toying with us. Probably.
I wanted to compile some of the responses from some people I respect and from some other sources, too (not that I necessarily disrespect some of these, but I don’t know the authors so well). So when it comes to Hawking’s views on aliens…
Finally, some of the researchers in this field have expressed deep contempt for science fiction. This ready dismissal of the entire field of gedankenexperimentation by thoughtful and scientifically deep authors is nothing but flat out – and proud – ignorance. Such people dismiss – without having ever read them – mind-blowingly original thought experiments by the likes of Bear and Banks and Vinge (and me), which make up the only real library of what-if extrapolations that our committees could quickly turn to, in the event of a post-contact situation!
To call such explorations “simpleminded” and unimaginative and based solely on copying the human experience is to declare openly “I am satisfied that B-Movies typify ‘science fiction.’ I have never cracked the spine of a grownup science fiction contact scenario… nor will I, ever.”
That’s just dunderheaded and closeminded and especially unworthy of people who have earned great merit in other fields. People who now propose to represent us, if and when we meet the alien.
I tend to agree with Carl Sagan and see Hawking’s view as bad science fiction. Let me explain why. Any alien civilization that possesses the technology to visit Earth and exploit/enslave/destroy us can already find us whether or not we start shouting at the stars. Our planets will be totally detectable. They can see that we have oxygen and hence life in our atmosphere. They will likely be able to see the lights from our cities, if not more, and have a good clue about our technology level with or without listening for our radio broadcasts (with lightspeed delaying the report according to how far away they are). Furthermore, they will be so much more advanced than us that we literally will have little to exploit. They’ll have the time and energy to terraform if they care to actually live on planets and need not search out an Earth. Comets are a lot handier water sources than oceans deep in gravity wells, and we’d not be likely to be edible or tasty to them either. If they’re out there, can come here, and want to fuck us over, we’re screwed and being careful, quiet, and fearful will not save our asses. There’s also the case to be made that being quiet is not being neighborly and would make us be viewed with suspicion and concern, so we might as well talk. If talking gets us judged, well, so be it. I just wish Rush Limbaugh won’t be on the radio when the aliens listen.
I’m teaching the last week of my astronomy class, and the last topic I’m covering is exoplanets: how we find them and their properties as we currently understand them. The textbook I’m using is brand new, Foundations of Astrophysics by Ryden and Peterson, and covers some aspects of this hot subtopic pretty well, but it is a fast-changing area. A lot of the best material about exoplanets exists on webpages, so I wanted to compile some videos and webpages to complement the text.
Exoplanets have been found via a “Doppler Wobble” (the most common technique, transits (aka eclipses), heat signatures (e.g., with Spitzer Space Telescope), and directly imaged (with the Keck, Subaru, and Hubble Space Telescopes).
And finally, a long talk at Stanford by Geoff Marcy, one of the pioneers in discovering exoplanets. You want the real deal, here it is.
So, what are these other solar systems like? First a video, then some webpages summarizing what we know and tabulating the latest discoveries.
Now some general (and sometimes detailed) webpages:
exoplanets.org (basic catalog information and more — sortable lists so you can find the closest known exoplanets, for instance, handy for science fiction writers and SETI searchers at least)
A friend of mine in Brazil is giving a public talk today. She was charged with talking about “Journeys Through the Universe” and asked me to come up with some videos she could use. I’ll embed the videos I suggested to her below, but I wanted to add one link first to a really nifty set of space art that I think is just fantastic: 8 Wonders of the Solar System. It’s a really nice list, too, starting with the rings of Saturn. Check it out.
The first set of videos are variations of the old Powers of Ten video, starting with the opening sequence for the movie Contact:
What would it look like to fall into a black hole?
How about the look from a launching space shuttle?
And a journey through the solar system following the path of Voyager 1 — the music may not be for everyone:
Which is your favorite? Have a favorite one under this category that I missed?
, and enjoying it very much (he also wrote 
which is a great reference book for a hard sf author, by the way). I just finished the part about the uncertainty at the start of the shuttle program, with delays, concerns for the new systems working, angst about shuttle assignments.
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