Summer Science Fiction

Summer is here!

Life has interrupted all business activities of writing and reviewing as I have traveled across country, and family from across country have traveled to me.

For the past few weeks I have attended a wedding, the Nashville Factory  (craft and art venue), my book signing and presentation, the Nashville Repertoire’s “Look-In” on a developing play and hot, hot card games with relatives. (No, I had no chance of winning there)

(Deep breath)

I have been at the Portland Zoo, the Rose Garden, the Japanese Garden, Tiilamook Cheese factory, cycling on Canon Beach, flying kites on said beach, blueberry picking, outlet mall shopping, and wrangling four visiting kittens.

God, I love summer.

So, what kind of reading have I done?

A lot of follow up reading in series where I loved the first book and wanted to continue more in the series. In some cases, I’m well into it as in the case of L. E. Modesitt’s third of his Imager series: Imager’s Intrigue.

As in most of Modesitt’s books, the action started off relaxed and slow. You soon fall into the flavor and rhythm of his style.

The main character, Rhennthyl is now married to Seliora and has a five year old child.There is a lot of detail concerning his daily activities and quite a lot of political proselytizing. His Imager powers have increased, and so have his enemies who fear him. He starts off as a Captain in one of the precincts where a new dangerous drug is spreading and causing concern. Random people are dying and Rhenn feels that the situation is being manipulated by more than just the drug lords, possibly an enemy country trying to destroy them from within.

Just when the reader is wondering if anything is going to happen, a surprise attack on the Collegium of Imagisle leaves Rhenn second in charge of the Imagers and the only one who can discover where the attack came from. The story becomes a detective story as different events and pieces of the puzzle come together through Rhenn’s efforts.

I enjoyed the story. Would give it four stars. Several critiques complained that Rhenn is thinly drawn with little emotion, but I quite liked him. The details Modesitt goes into about his everyday life drew me into the world that has the flavor of a French Renaissance period. He shows how people who have great power, or fame, often pay a large price in their personal life with loss of freedom and fear for their security.

Another series I’m reading is the Liaden Series by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. However, the books on Amazon in this series are fairly expensive, (even Kindle version) and as I mentioned at the beginning, I have been so busy, that I haven’t had much time to read. So, I decided to try some of their novelettes that are $2.99 and run 50 to 70 pages.

I consider it much like a tasty candy bar of summer reading rather than a full blown meal. I picked The Courier Run and will soon let you know what I think of this different way of reading. It got five stars from all eighteen reviewers; so here’s hoping.

To that end, I have written two stories in my own Alysian Universe and may offer them as tasty tidbits around Christmas.

If you want the full meal, Constellation just came out in June, and Amazon is offering Trade Secret as a presale that will be available January 2014. Constellation is a series of shorter works, seventeen stories from Chapbooks this duo has written and is the first volume with 384 pages.

Trade Secret tells the story of human Jethro Gobelyn who is adopted by the Liaden clan after an ill directed bow that insults a major Liaden clan noble and jeopardizes the human’s life. Jethro wants to win his trader’s ring, but instead finds himself wrapped in interstellar intrigue and Second Board on a scout ship facing danger. He has to learn to balance his Terran heritage while learning Liaden rules of survival.

A final sad note on the passing of Iain Banks from a brain tumor. I had just started getting into his Culture Series and looked forward to many more of his books. Alas. We will miss this Hugo award winning author.

Savor summer and enjoy some good stories.

Future Forward: Notable Science Fiction

First off: Happy Fourth of July. As much as the news criticizes our government and claims we are as bad as Orwell’s 1984, I am still glad that I live in America and was born to my parents. I am lucky.

More than the government, I fear a relative or friend posting an awkward picture on Facebook, or quoting a tweet out of context. More than the municipal camera on a street corner are the millions of cameras in the average person’s smart phone ready to snap any local event or action. We resent government interference, but embrace everyone else… Amazon, Facebook, Linked-in, etc.

Nowadays we can’t hide from each other.

Nor do we seem to want to.

I just returned from Nashville where I attended a special wedding of my nephew and a book signing.

Text messaging enabled me to stay abreast of all activities and be where I needed to be. My whole dynamic of communication shifted.

I learned a few lessons about doing a book signing. Last time I came to this group, I contacted the organizer well ahead of time and she got me on the regular calendar. The room filled with over fifty people and was immensely successful. I sold every book I brought and then some.

This time I hesitated to contact the organization ahead for various reasons. My old contact had left and someone new ran the activities. I didn’t have her number, would they even want me to talk again? By the time we connected, the normal calendar had gone out. But, she was enthusiastic and we discussed an intriguing title.

Which didn’t get published.

Instead, I was billed as Sheron McCartha discusses her second career as an author, and a small flyer went out to a limited number of people. Needless to say, the attendance was not the same.

BUT…

There is nothing that beats face to face contact with a reader. Everyone in attendance bought a book and I made some wonderful friends and met some really nice people. I had a good time and would do it again.

The moral is to get out there, but make sure you’re well publicized first. Don’t be shy. People can be really nice.

As I was sitting on the plane traveling out, I remember gazing out the window and seeing the cotton white clouds, thinking of the settlers trudging westward over a hundred years ago. Did any one of them stare up into the sky and imagine large metal birds flying high overhead at incredible velocities packed with passengers of all types that stared at iPads and kindles, and paperbacks, passing the time sipping various drinks and eating peanuts? I took six hours to travel coast to coast where early settlers took many months, and most died in the attempt. I went in comfort and barely felt the heat outside. Did any one of those early settlers envision this future or even have the capacity to understand what it might be?

And a hundred years from now, how might my descendants be traveling, and what might they look like? Hopefully not baggy shorts and Nike t-shirts.

If you would like to imagine a far future where faster than light communication is enabled through Bose-Einstein relays that use special crystals that involve entanglement, and genetically designed and tanked beings, part human, part cyborg exist, then I recommend Chris Moriarty’s Spin State.

Spin State is a detective story with Catherine Li as an augmented investigator, born out of the mines of Compton’s world, where the precious crystals that enable worlds to connect are found. She escapes the crushing poverty of the mines, buys a new face, cutting tech augmentation, joins the military and becomes a hero, a major and finally a UN Peacekeeper.

Now she is sent back to her home world to investigate the death of a dead physicist, called Sharifi, who turns out to be her cloned twin. And what was called an accident is looking more and more like murder. But over thirty-seven faster than light jumps has erased most of Li’s memories and every corner she turns deep inside the mines of this alien world holds deadly secrets she must unravel. The critical crystal may be alive, but dying, and a missing data set could change the balance of power and bring about a war.

Li engages the help of a one of a kind artificial intelligence that is programmed with human emotions. Cohen is her strange lover who uses various human bodies and downloads into them as he helps Li solve her mystery. He can access places no human can go and process data in a blink of an eye…but can she trust him? His motivation is suspect as he also wants to find what Sharifi has discovered and use it for his own purposes. Secrets are everywhere. And the witch Bella, created and tanked by the Synthetic worlds who want to take over humankind, has her own reasons for finding out what Sharifi uncovered deep in a mine’s glory hole. For her, the crystals sing.

An intriguing mix of mystery, quantum physics, evolved humans and artificial intelligences, I found Spin State an engaging read and recommend it. This book is first in a series that I want to bring to your attention. Spin Control and Ghost Spin continue the tale of Catherine Li and the struggle between artificial intelligence and humans. I am looking forward to reading these also.

Spin State received a nomination for the 2003 Philip K. Dick award and was the top ten editor’s pick for Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2003.

And made the time pass swiftly and enjoyably while I soared overhead.

Artificial Intelligence in Science Fiction

Artificial intelligence…dangerous enemy or friendly helper?

Science fiction has been debating this question for years. As early as 1968, Robert Heinlein wrote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where a High Optical, Logical Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, or Holmes IV, is installed on Luna base to compute ballistics for pilotless freighters and control their catapult. This used only 10% of the computer’s capacity, so Luna Authority keep adding on  hardware and decision boxes and additional duties until by year three, it controlled all the phone systems, other computers, air, water, sewage, temperature systems for all of Luna. It had voder-vocoder circuits that supplemented all read-outs, print-outs and decision making boxes.

Then it woke up.

Became self aware and took an interest in good jokes and pranks.

One which was issuing a paycheck to a janitor in Authority’s office in Luna City for $10,000,000,000,000,185.15. (the last five digits being the correct amount) So Luna Authority privately contracts a Manuel Garcia O’Kelly to figure out what went wrong and he discovers that the computer has become self aware. Rather than tell anyone, he starts to converse with the computer and names it Mike, after a Mycroft Holmes character.

The story is about the friendship between an incredibly powerful, but lonely computer and Manuel O’Kelly, or Man as everyone calls him

And how they engineered a rebellion on the Moon to gain freedom over Earth’s totalitarian control.

There is some magnificent politics in the story. To date, Luna has been a dumping ground for criminals, reminiscent of Australia. They are under the boot of Earth Authority like all good colonies, and are tired of the treatment. Problem is that they cannot transition back to Earth because of the long term effect of Luna’s light gravity and Earth’s heavier gravity. After living on Luna, their bodies cannot handle Earth’s heavier gravity and consequently once stranded on the moon, they cannot return to Earth.

Unfortunately, it’s a hard story to get into because of the dialect. Manuel tells the story in first person narration with a heavy Russian accent that throws the reader out of the story time and again. Maybe it’s Heinlein’s joke to have a Russian engineer the rebellion. Remember back then (1968) Russia and the U.S. were racing to be the first on the moon. Also, “Mike” (the computer) constantly refers to Manuel as Man.

You think you’re on an L.A. beach.

Hey, Man. What’re you doing, Man.

It took me a while to warm up to this classic story of computer and man (Man), but eventually after swimming through all the dialect and political theory, I ended up liking it.

Heinlein has a radical life philosophy, so be ready to read with an open mind and enjoy the intricacies of orchestrating a Lunar rebellion, complete with a Russian accented computer contractor that shouts slogans such as, “Give me Liberty or give me death.”

The other book that I read recently from the 2013 list is Dragon Ship by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. It made an interesting contrast to Heinlein’s story. Both are about self aware, super powerful  computers that interact and become “friends” with a particular human.

For those of you who have criticized the Liaden stories as “romance science fiction,” this isn’t the case here. The protagonist is Theo Waitley who is now grown up and captaining her first starship. This ship is from “old tech’ that is forbidden and dangerous. The ship’s original design was to service a now dead trader. The self aware computer that runs the ship has been out in the deep waiting for its captain for centuries. It wants a reason to exist. The captaincy key makes it way to Theo’s hand and she takes on a trading route with the ship for the Korval clan that is fraught with danger.  She also takes on an ex-lover who is being eaten alive by a nano-virus and is secured in the ship’s medical unit fighting for his life.

The computer not only acts very human, but creates a second persona when Theo needs more crew. This second self aware entity has feelings, a job description and to all intents and purposes the rest of the universe thinks it’s another human on the ship.

This is fifth in the series and I recommend you read the earlier ones. I love the Liaden stories and always look forward to the newest one. I love the strong family ties in their story, the emotional hook and the interesting tech. This one has all three…

So enjoy.

Veronica Sicoe posited the question on her blog  What if the Internet became self aware?

This was interesting because it appears that the fear of an aware internet lies in the elusiveness of its existence. A supercomputer that has boundaries can be overcome.

“I can’t do that, Dave.”

And next you know Hal is singing “Daisy, Daisy.”

“War Games” was an interesting movie that had an aware computer using real missiles for his “game.” That was frightening, but checkers proved the solution.

But an aware internet has no central core, no rack to unload, no central hub to disengage, no trick game to occupy it and consequently, is unassailable. There may be no solution if a self aware internet goes rogue.

And who wouldn’t with the crap that humans often put on it?

You can start with the porn.

Do you think that we will, sometime in the future, have an aware supercomputer, and will it be friend or foe?

Does Science Fiction predict the future?

I love science fiction because it tries to look into the future and see what might happen. That’s why I write it. I strain to peer into the might-be future of tomorrow and let my imagination soar.

But when I think of what I have read over the decades, I feel that most science fiction stories have missed the mark. 1984 by Orwell for example. (thank goodness that future didn’t happen). The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein. The poor moon may be called an abandoned mistress in today’s world, although we have paid her a visit. And where are the flying cars? The teleportation stations? And weren’t we supposed to have cold fusion, or solar energy running the world by now? Electric cars? It’s out to freaking 2012 people!

A current television series that I highly recommend is called “The Prophets of Science Fiction” and is narrated by Ridley Scott. It answers this very question, and I was surprised at how many hints I had missed in various books.

Arthur Clarke was an author who was very interested in future technology. His books reflect this scientific bent and tend to be a bit dry for my taste. While 2001: A Space Odyssey takes a manned ship to Jupiter, in reality, we can’t seem to leave Mother Earth. On board, it carries Hal, a very human (and flawed) super computer.  Clarke’s Hal operates and guides an interstellar ship, while our current version of Hal (IBM’s Watson) recently won a million dollars competing on the game show, Jeopardy. Anyone see any irony here? In the film, the data for storing all of Hal’s memory was a holographic data storage file, which is what my husband’s company is currently working on perfecting. So that may soon be predictive. Clarke also wrote Fountains of Paradise that postulated an elevator to space using a geosynchronous orbit to stabilize it in one place. We have no space elevator today, but we have an array of satellites that are stationary because of their geosynchronous orbit. So close, but still a miss.

Here and there are odd bit and pieces in many science fiction stories that are cropping up in our current time, but no grand sweep out to the stars yet. Our biggest accomplishment is bouncing two rovers onto Mars and driving them around to pick up data. The mission is still going, however, far past the expected end date.

Another author that the show mentions is Phillip K. Dick, who seems to have been quite paranoid and because of early drug use had a blurred vision of reality. The first book that I read was Ubik. It was my first introduction to the concept of virtual reality. Nowadays, personal privacy, virtual reality and computer hacking are serious issues. London has cameras at every street corner looking out for the criminal element, teenagers and adults all over the world spend more time in a fantasy world at the computer than in their own reality, and viruses and computer hacking are daily threats. Does anyone else find it ironic that a paranoid scifi writer may be the one to guess the future most accurately?

Isaac Asimov wrote the robot series I Robot, and Caves of Steel, and the Foundation Series. While we haven’t been able to predict the future using mathematics, we are getting close to human-like robots. Movie studios and science labs have already created robots that show expression and respond in  very human like ways.

More and more we are relying on Artificial Intelligence to drive cars, turn out lights, clean floors, organize our lives. We still don’t have a robot that can pass the Turing Test, but Ray Kurzweil says that will be coming in 2029…not that far away.

So what about science facts that seem like science fiction? Unbelievable science that is happening right now?  I suggest you check out Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near.  He defines the Singularity as: “The singularity is a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly changed.” This book will astound you. It’s not science fiction, but what is happening right now in science labs across the globe…science facts…today. Over one hundred pages of footnotes at the end and some very technical and heavy reading. So, be prepared. His predictions are mind boggling…immortality in twenty years, robots more human than human, energy resources, nanobots for internal health, DNA, the whole amazing works of what our future might look like near terms, and far out.

It must be said that I read also for the story, knowing full well that the predictive future of a book is shaky at best. I like to soar among the stars and encounter alien beings knowing that this won’t happen in my lifetime, or anytime soon. The government is reducing their SETI budget and alien beings seem far off at best. Yet, with the Hubble telescope, the planet searching Kepler telescope and the James Webb Telescope due to launch in 2018, we are out there exploring space bit by bit, and finding amazing new things.

Science fiction writers sometimes try to predict the future, but the future is an elusive and tricky thing. Very often it surprises.