Why Vernor Vinge Has Ruined SF For Me
Mister Skin
For a long time, Vernor Vinge's "Fire Upon The Deep" has haunted my mind.
I have read other science fiction novels that were as engaging as stories
(Cherryh's "Hellburner" for example) that had more memorable characters
(Zakalwe from Banks' "Use of Weapons" easily trumps everyone I can think
of in this regard) and were as brilliantly imagined (Walter Jon Williams'
"Metropolitan" comes to mind).
But there has always been something about "A Fire Upon The Deep" that
makes it stand out in my mind as being qualitatively different from the
rest, and I finally have figured out exactly what makes "AFUTD" different.
AFUTD --and the other works of Vinge, particularly The Peace War and
Marooned in Realtime -- are different because they present a vision of
the future that is so compelling and so brilliantly realized that I have
been evaluating every other science fiction novel I read -- indeed, every
other idea about the future I encounter -- in its light.
The "slavery in space" thread on this newsgroup is what made me finally
come to this realization. There was something faintly ludicrous about it
to me. I realized that it seemed ludicrous because it was presenting an
image of the future in which we are advanced to have space colonies
functioning as either actual or virtual independent societies, but no
account was being taken of any changes that might occur in the way people
think due to the influence of computers on the human mind. Certainly,
there is no mention of the possible influence of AIs or DNI linked people
in the thread, but it seems to me that controlling people on a space
station might be made easier through the use of partially sentient
computers -- they could take the "foreman" role -- but could be rendered
next to impossible in the presence of slaves with knowledge of computer
systems, or more likely, hostile anti-slavery elements outside the
slavers' domain with knowledge of computer systems.
There are a lot of other examples around. I enjoyed reading one of Keith
Roberts' Warstrider novels -- he had some interesting ideas on how combat
with nanoweapons might work, and he had some nice passages on how it
might feel to be linked to a computer/machine interface via DNI -- but
his grafting a society with widespread access to DNI links and computer
resources onto a feudal Japanese social system felt absolutely,
completely WRONG.
It seems to me that computers, and the ability to communicate via
computers, is already changing the way we think. Even if DNI never
becomes a practical reality -- and I'd hate to be in the position of
having to bet against that, especially since it's already been
demonstrated that you can get electric signals running between chips and
neurons -- it's ludicrous to imagine that our current interface, the
keyboard, won't be far surpassed in the years to come. Just a good
voice-recognition system hooked up to a computer terminal with access to
an advanced AI (i.e., one much smarter than humans) would have profound
implications for the nature of the human mind, of human culture and human
conduct.
In a sense, AFUTD has ruined me for a lot of science fiction, just as the
movie "Blazing Saddles" ruined me for a lot of Westerns, and "Monty
Python And The Holy Grail" ruined me for medieval epics. I can't watch
westerns or medievals without constantly being reminded of some wicked
bit of drollery from "Saddles" or "Grail" and I can't read science
fiction without being reminded of how Vinge handled the future in AFUTD.
Evan S Reese
Mister Skin (mrs...@mindspring.com) wrote:
: For a long time, Vernor Vinge's "Fire Upon The Deep" has haunted my mind.
Stefan E. Jones
In article <5e0kgg$2...@camel0.mindspring.com>,
Mister Skin < mrs...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>For a long time, Vernor Vinge's "Fire Upon The Deep" has haunted my mind.
[Comparisons to novels with better characterization etc. snipped]
>But there has always been something about "A Fire Upon The Deep" that
>makes it stand out in my mind as being qualitatively different from the
>rest, and I finally have figured out exactly what makes "AFUTD" different.
>
>AFUTD --and the other works of Vinge, particularly The Peace War and
>Marooned in Realtime -- are different because they present a vision of
>the future that is so compelling and so brilliantly realized that I have
>been evaluating every other science fiction novel I read -- indeed, every
>other idea about the future I encounter -- in its light.
Right. I know what you mean. What did it to me was not a book or books,
but an author . . . Bruce Sterling, speaking on a panel at I-Con. He
tore into the concept of space colonization and explotation with an
awesome grace; whenever I think of it I imagine a hot-blooded velociraptor
matched against an old-concept cold-blooded dinosaur. The latter is big
and blustering and impressive . . . but doomed. I couldn't take the
"Destinies" school of space SF seriously after that.
Vinge's notion of the Singularity was similarly mind-blowing and
paradigm busting. I always had a _feeling_ that there was something really
dippy about the notion of space empires and interstellar mercenaries and
"great houses" ruling the affairs of humanity. The mere possibility that
something like the Singularity _might_ happen leaves all this stuff in
the dustbin. If they don't at least address the issue, they are at best
pleasant romances set in future times. (Aside: I'm not a snob; I still READ
space opera, I just don't take it seriously.)
[Thoughts on the archaic nature of "slavery in space" snipped]
[Thoughts on how computer - human interfacing will change things snipped]
>In a sense, AFUTD has ruined me for a lot of science fiction, just as the
>movie "Blazing Saddles" ruined me for a lot of Westerns, and "Monty
>Python And The Holy Grail" ruined me for medieval epics. I can't watch
>westerns or medievals without constantly being reminded of some wicked
>bit of drollery from "Saddles" or "Grail" and I can't read science
>fiction without being reminded of how Vinge handled the future in AFUTD.
LOL!
FORTUNATELY Vinge is not the only one out there writing science fiction
that is aware of what lies ahead MOD our increasing understanding of
the human mind.
A few examples:
Swanwick's _Vaccuum Flowers_
Sterling's _Schizmatrix_
Bear's _Blood Music_
Kress's _Beggars and Spain_ et al.
(Yes, there are more, but I don't have time.)
--Stefan
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http://www.ini.cmu.edu/~sjones/
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Evan S Reese
: Mister Skin (mrs...@mindspring.com) wrote:
: : For a long time, Vernor Vinge's "Fire Upon The Deep" has haunted my mind.
: : (Cherryh's "Hellburner" for example) that had more memorable characters
: : (Zakalwe from Banks' "Use of Weapons" easily trumps everyone I can think
: : of in this regard) and were as brilliantly imagined (Walter Jon Williams'
: : "Metropolitan" comes to mind).
: : But there has always been something about "A Fire Upon The Deep" that
: : makes it stand out in my mind as being qualitatively different from the
: : rest, and I finally have figured out exactly what makes "AFUTD" different.
: : AFUTD --and the other works of Vinge, particularly The Peace War and
: : Marooned in Realtime -- are different because they present a vision of
: : the future that is so compelling and so brilliantly realized that I have
: : been evaluating every other science fiction novel I read -- indeed, every
: : other idea about the future I encounter -- in its light.
: : The "slavery in space" thread on this newsgroup is what made me finally
: : come to this realization. There was something faintly ludicrous about it
: : to me. I realized that it seemed ludicrous because it was presenting an
: : image of the future in which we are advanced to have space colonies
: : functioning as either actual or virtual independent societies, but no
: : account was being taken of any changes that might occur in the way people
: : think due to the influence of computers on the human mind.
Subject: Re: Why Vernor Vinge Has Ruined SF For Me
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <5e0kgg$2...@camel0.mindspring.com>
Distribution: world
Mister Skin (mrs...@mindspring.com) wrote:
: For a long time, Vernor Vinge's "Fire Upon The Deep" has haunted my mind.
: I have read other science fiction novels that were as engaging as stories
: (Cherryh's "Hellburner" for example) that had more memorable characters
: (Zakalwe from Banks' "Use of Weapons" easily trumps everyone I can think
: of in this regard) and were as brilliantly imagined (Walter Jon Williams'
: "Metropolitan" comes to mind).
: But there has always been something about "A Fire Upon The Deep" that
: makes it stand out in my mind as being qualitatively different from the
: rest, and I finally have figured out exactly what makes "AFUTD" different.
: AFUTD --and the other works of Vinge, particularly The Peace War and
: Marooned in Realtime -- are different because they present a vision of
: the future that is so compelling and so brilliantly realized that I have
: been evaluating every other science fiction novel I read -- indeed, every
: other idea about the future I encounter -- in its light.
: The "slavery in space" thread on this newsgroup is what made me finally
: come to this realization. There was something faintly ludicrous about it
: to me. I realized that it seemed ludicrous because it was presenting an
: image of the future in which we are advanced to have space colonies
: functioning as either actual or virtual independent societies, but no
: account was being taken of any changes that might occur in the way people
: think due to the influence of computers on the human mind.
I deleted the rest of your article, but the point is already well
made.
Unfortunately, I must agree with you. But with me it started with
MIRT back in 1986. I've read some pretty good stuff since then:
"Neverness", "Vacuum Flowers", "Harvest of Stars", among a few others.
But SF in general has become increasingly hard - even frustrating at times
- for me to read. A particularly good/bad example of this is Bujold. She
clearly has talent, but does she really believe that centuries in the
future we're going to have royalty and people who think and talk like
Victorians?
The problem is compounded - and Vinge's vision of the future looks
more plausible - with the explosive growth of the Internet and networks in
general, and the overall progress in telecommunications technology just to
name a couple obvious areas.
Besides, as I have often asked myself in recent times, why would I
want to read such poorly imagined fiction when I can read books like "Mind
Children", and "After Thought"? The ideas in these books have hardly even
been noticed in SF! I get better "SF" in Fortune magazine than in
Asimov's. I'm not even talking about the articles on technology, but the
ones on new organizational structures, trends in society and management
methods that describe new ways of thinking and doing.
I think that since SF was begun in the industrial/resource economy
stage, most writers just extrapolate from the America of about 1950 with
the same centralized harierarical corporate structures and control of
information.
Also, what Vinge does is probably too difficult for the
run-of-the-mill writer. Partly because of the problems I mentioned above
- reality outrunning fiction - but also, most of them aren't really
interested in thinking seriously about the possible futures, but of
ax-grinding, or alegory, making points concerned with the present human
condition - whatever that's supposed to mean. In other words, they
are just putting SF clothes on a mainstream skeleton; so it doesn't
matter if the imagined future doesn't seem plausible to someone looking at
present trends. The real point is the sermon. People like Lucius Shepard
Ursula LeGuin and Kim Stanley Robinson are big in this school.
I didn't mean to go on so long, but I feel strongly about this issue
- how could you tell - and I could say a lot more on the same topic. But
I'll quit for now.
"People are born with Legs, not roots."
R. Buckminster Fuller
Evan S Reese
Sorry about the double copying in the previous message. I was
inattentive.
RBKLEIMAN
On 2/14 Mr. Skin wrote;
>For a long time, Vernor Vinge's "Fire Upon The Deep" has haunted my mind.
>I have read other science fiction novels that were as engaging as stories
>(Cherryh's "Hellburner" for example) that had more memorable characters
>(Zakalwe from Banks' "Use of Weapons" easily trumps everyone I can think
>of in this regard) and were as brilliantly imagined (Walter Jon Williams'
>"Metropolitan" comes to mind).
>But there has always been something about "A Fire Upon The Deep" that
>makes it stand out in my mind as being qualitatively different from the
>rest, and I finally have figured out exactly what makes "AFUTD"
different.
>AFUTD --and the other works of Vinge, particularly The Peace War and
>Marooned in Realtime -- are different because they present a vision of
>the future that is so compelling and so brilliantly realized that I have
>been evaluating every other science fiction novel I read -- indeed, every
>other idea about the future I encounter -- in its light.
I agree that Vinge's novels present a fascinating vision - and I think
that "vision" is the correct term - of the future that is far more
compellng than most science fiction, and particularly more compelling than
most space opera. One major flaw of much science fiction is that it is
just the same old Western or Detective or Romance novel set in a
futuristic setting with words like "laser" instead of "gun". Many space
operas set up a universe that is exactly the same as the one we live in
circa 1997 but with fancier gadgets. Novels like" A Fire Upon the Deep"
or "Marooned in Realtime" are different - they show us dazzling
possibilities that are not reworked versions of our familiar social
schemes.
There are a lot of other great SF works that do the same - for example
Iain M. Banks' "Culture" universe, Daniel Keys Moran's "The Continuing
Time", David Brin's "Uplift" universe - I could name a dozen others. so I
think that you shouldn't give up on SF so easily. There are still plenty
of authors who are not just reworking the same very tired old themes and
settings.
I also like Vinge and Banks because they are great writers - both in terms
of style and in terms of content. Many SF novels are just so poorly
constructed (or edited) that the beautiful ideas are spoiled by the rotten
writing.
Bob
Kleiman (RKLE...@aol.com)
Stefan E. Jones
In article <5e293h$h...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>,
Evan S Reese <esr...@pitt.edu> wrote:
>: Mister Skin (mrs...@mindspring.com) wrote:
>: : For a long time, Vernor Vinge's "Fire Upon The Deep" has haunted my mind.
[DELETIA]
> I deleted the rest of your article, but the point is already well
>made.
[DELETIA]
> Unfortunately, I must agree with you. But with me it started with
>MIRT back in 1986. I've read some pretty good stuff since then:
>"Neverness", "Vacuum Flowers", "Harvest of Stars", among a few others.
>But SF in general has become increasingly hard - even frustrating at times
>- for me to read.
Testify, brother, testify!
>A particularly good/bad example of this is Bujold. She
>clearly has talent, but does she really believe that centuries in the
>future we're going to have royalty and people who think and talk like
>Victorians?
Careful. You're setting yourself up to be ROYALLY flamed!
People grow INCREDIBLY ATTACHED to comfortable, romantic views of the
future. They are easy to write about and ohhhh boy do the fans love it!
> The problem is compounded - and Vinge's vision of the future looks
>more plausible - with the explosive growth of the Internet and networks in
>general, and the overall progress in telecommunications technology just to
>name a couple obvious areas.
Not just telecommunications! We are learning really wicked stuff about
the brain & mind, evolution, astronomy and more that really pull the
chain on many of the cliches of SF.
> Besides, as I have often asked myself in recent times, why would I
>want to read such poorly imagined fiction when I can read books like "Mind
>Children", and "After Thought"? The ideas in these books have hardly even
>been noticed in SF!
You need to read the CHEAP TRUTH newslettes that the nacent cyberpunks
distributed in the mid 80s. Shirley, Sterling, and their ilk were saying
JUST THIS in an incredibly rude and direct manner.
http://www.ebom.com.au/adam/adamwww/cheapdl.html
> Also, what Vinge does is probably too difficult for the
>run-of-the-mill writer.
It's also due to market pressures. The Same Old Thing sells really
well.
Pardon me while I don my flame-repellant nomex suit.
--Stefan Jones
Erich Schneider
rbkl...@aol.com (RBKLEIMAN) writes:
>Novels like" A Fire Upon the Deep"
>or "Marooned in Realtime" are different - they show us dazzling
>possibilities that are not reworked versions of our familiar social
>schemes.
What exactly do you have in mind here? That is, what are the social
schemes in _AFUTD_ or _MIR_ that aren't reworked etc.?
This isn't a flame, just curiosity - I've read both novels (_MIR_
quite recently), and while grand things in terms of other types of
society are hinted at offstage, most of the stuff presented seemed
rather pedestrian.
Banks' Culture and the universe of Delany's _Stars in My Pocket Like
Grains of Sand_, now, those get me excited.
Wim Lewis
>- for me to read. A particularly good/bad example of this is Bujold. She
>clearly has talent, but does she really believe that centuries in the
>future we're going to have royalty and people who think and talk like
>Victorians?
I think it's just as foolish to believe that cultural progress marches
unfailingly onward and upward as it is to claim that biological evolution
does so. Both are random walks, influenced by events major and minute.
Just because the last few centuries have shown some trend or other
is no reason to assume that the trend will continue. (Of course, it's
even worse to assume that culture *won't* change, starting now...)
But my point is: attitudes recur. Some of them are influenced by
technological factors. Some aren't, at least not obviously. If I
were transported a thousand years into the future *or* the past,
and assuming no pesky singularities or language barriers got in the way,
I'd expect to find a mishmash of attitudes, some of which I considered
advanced, some retrograde, some incomprehensible, and some Just Like Home.
Royalty and hereditary governmental positions are not such odd
concepts that I wouldn't expect to see them again and again.
As for Bujold, if you argue that technology drives changes in culture,
Bujold is being perfectly consistent: until a generation or two before
the stories she's written, Barrayar *was* of an approximately Victorian
tech level. The other societies she writes about (Beta, Cetaganda,
Athos) all have decidedly different cultures.
On the other hand, if what you really want to read is a story about
how technology will change society in the next hundred years, it's
frustrating to read Bujold's work, which is not really extrapolative
in nature. Many of the Vorkosigan stories could just as easily have been
set in the 1800s; there's no reason for them to be set in the future
on other planets. (But there's no reason not to, either, and they're
great yarns.)
As for people who are upset at SF which doesn't include the Singularity:
we *are* in the Slow Zone, after all; look at the map in AFUtD. More
generally, there are a lot of processes in nature that follow a sort
of sigmoid curve; they look exponential until about a third of the way
through, and eventually they level out at a new stable point. Human-level
artificial intelligence has been 40-400 years away since the invention
of the stored-program computer. Perhaps it's impractical for some reason
we don't even have the means to express yet. Perhaps the same applies
to significant human enhancements via DNI. Perhaps, perhaps not. Wait
and see.
All this said, though, I do think that one of the hallmarks of great
SF is that it makes almost everything else look threadbare, unimaginitive
and obsolete by comparison, and Vinge's work frequently has this effect.
--
Wim Lewis * wi...@hhhh.org * Seattle, WA, USA
PGP 0x27F772C1: 0C 0D 10 D5 FC 73 D1 35 26 46 42 9E DC 6E 0A 88
Bill MacArthur
rbkl...@aol.com (RBKLEIMAN) wrote:
>On 2/14 Mr. Skin wrote;
>
>>For a long time, Vernor Vinge's "Fire Upon The Deep" has haunted my mind.
>
>>But there has always been something about "A Fire Upon The Deep" that
>>the future that is so compelling and so brilliantly realized that I have
>>been evaluating every other science fiction novel I read -- indeed, every
>>other idea about the future I encounter -- in its light.
>Novels like" A Fire Upon the Deep"
>or "Marooned in Realtime" are different - they show us dazzling
>possibilities that are not reworked versions of our familiar social
>schemes.
>
>Iain M. Banks' "Culture" universe, Daniel Keys Moran's "The Continuing
>Time", David Brin's "Uplift" universe - I could name a dozen others. so I
>think that you shouldn't give up on SF so easily. There are still plenty
>of authors who are not just reworking the same very tired old themes and
>settings.
>
>I also like Vinge and Banks because they are great writers - both in terms
>of style and in terms of content. Many SF novels are just so poorly
>constructed (or edited) that the beautiful ideas are spoiled by the rotten
>writing.
>
I've been a Brin fan for sometime and rasfw has keyed me into Vinge and
Banks to name a few. At the risk of embarrassing him again, I see Robert
Sawyer's work in the same light. I just finished _Starplex_ a couple of
weeks ago and found it comparable in scale with the aforementioned
writers' best. It has great ideas and he won the Nebula last year so the
quality of the writing is not in question. _Starplex_ is a tour de force
by a writer who is hitting full stride. I'm off to discover some of his
earlier work now.
In general, I wouldn't give up on SF. There a lot of good writers and
rasfw is a wealth of good info.
jonathan dale mccall
In <wimlE5M...@netcom.com> wi...@netcom.com (Wim Lewis) writes:
>(SNIP)
>I think it's just as foolish to believe that cultural progress marches
>unfailingly onward and upward as it is to claim that biological
evolution
>does so. Both are random walks, influenced by events major and minute.
>Just because the last few centuries have shown some trend or other
>is no reason to assume that the trend will continue. (Of course, it's
>even worse to assume that culture *won't* change, starting now...)
>But my point is: attitudes recur. Some of them are influenced by
>technological factors. Some aren't, at least not obviously. If I
>were transported a thousand years into the future *or* the past,
>and assuming no pesky singularities or language barriers got in the
way,
>I'd expect to find a mishmash of attitudes, some of which I considered
>advanced, some retrograde, some incomprehensible, and some Just Like
Home.
>Royalty and hereditary governmental positions are not such odd
>concepts that I wouldn't expect to see them again and again.
>
88
And apropos your comments, these recurring attitudes are in evidence
even in AFUtD. Witness those colonies on the edge of the slow zone
that have lapsed into medievalism, forgetting their technology and
knowledge of the outside universe.
Bryce
Love the Subject: line and the articles, guys!
Versimillitude is turned on its head: Characters and societies
-- especially societies -- which are easily recognizable as
mild mutations of their present-day prototypes set off my bs
detector every time. But the more bizarre and unimaginable the
characters and societies are, the more I feel comfortable
thinking "Yeah, this could happen.".
So I guess I'm a post post-modern reader.
Somebody gave Ursula K. LeGuin a nasty knock in this thread for
allegedly pasting modern morality tales into foreign settings,
but I have to strongly disagree-- LeGuin crafts characters and
societies that are internally consistent, realistically
complex, and believably bizarre.
So she isn't hot on human evolution yet, but not every writer
can be a Vernor Vinge. :-)
Bryce
signatures follow
+ island Life in a chaos sea
Not speaking for DigiCash or /.
the University of Colorado / br...@colorado.edu or
---* br...@digicash.com
Richard Melvin
>AFUTD --and the other works of Vinge, particularly The Peace War and
>Marooned in Realtime -- are different because they present a vision of
>the future that is so compelling and so brilliantly realized that I have
>been evaluating every other science fiction novel I read -- indeed, every
>other idea about the future I encounter -- in its light.
>
If you wanted to classify SF by the technology used in the background,
you'd use a list of questions like the following?
My initial list of such questions would be:
- Is space travel practicable?
- Are there other types of about-as-smart-as-human beings (i.e aliens,
robots)?
- will there be some kind of major catastrophe (nuclear war, etc.)?
- are vastly-smarter-than-current-human beings (e.g. AIs) practicable?
- are non-sentient information-processors (e.g. computers) practicable?
- is nanotech practicable?
- will society be organised im some radically different way than
democratic capitalism?
In all cases, it only counts if it's a major theme, with the
implications thought through to some degree. I'm also excluding any
'unique ideas' that form the main point of the story (e.g. time travel,
Bobbles, etc.) - I want to look at what's happening in the background,
as that defines reader's and author's expectations.
For example,
- current society has computers only (space travel just doesn't count,
as it has had no major impact on society).
- Asimov's Foundation has space travel only.
- Lot's of other 50's SF writers had space travel and aliens.
- Bujold's Vorkosigan series has space travel and feudalism.
- Gibson has computers, AIs and (some) space travel.
- Vinge has computers, nanotech, libertarianism and trans-human
intelligences.
- Aristoi has computers, nanotech and space travel.
- Banks has all of the above.
My current 'best-guess' at the future would be something like Sterling's
Islands in the Net, trending towards Vinge by the end of the next
century. But there are lot's of other possibilities. For example, what
if those rumours of somebody in a Scandanavian university discovering
antigravity actually turned out to be true?
I do agree that I find it difficult to take stories like Bujold's or
Cherryh's seriously as realistic versions of the future - the computers
in them are barely ahead of today's levels, with no obvious reason why
progress stalled. (In particular, any version of space combat that has
human involvement in real-time decisions is about as plausible as WW I
biplanes shooting down a stealth fighter).
Of course, this doesn't mean I can't still enjoy them as stories -
predicting the future is not, of course, the point of SF.
--
Richard Melvin
Turnpike evaluation. For information, see http://www.turnpike.com/
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Richard Melvin <rme...@radm.demon.co.uk> spake:
>- current society has computers only (space travel just doesn't count,
>as it has had no major impact on society).
Yep, it's had no major impact. It's a shame we don't use those satellites
for anything directly useful like telecommunications or observation of the
planet...
I otherwise like the list, but you should think before you say these
things - now if you said interplanetary/interstellar travel, that'd be
correct.
-- <a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"In headlines today, the dreaded killfile virus spread across the country
adding aol.com to people's usenet kill files everywhere. The programmer of
the virus still remains anonymous, but has been nominated several times for
a Nobel peace prize." -Mark Atkinson
Evan S Reese
Wim Lewis (wi...@netcom.com) wrote:
: In article <5e293h$h...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>,: >But SF in general has become increasingly hard - even frustrating at times
: >- for me to read. A particularly good/bad example of this is Bujold. She
: >clearly has talent, but does she really believe that centuries in the
: >future we're going to have royalty and people who think and talk like
: >Victorians?
: I think it's just as foolish to believe that cultural progress marches
: unfailingly onward and upward as it is to claim that biological evolution
: does so. Both are random walks, influenced by events major and minute.
: Just because the last few centuries have shown some trend or other
: is no reason to assume that the trend will continue. (Of course, it's
: even worse to assume that culture *won't* change, starting now...)
: But my point is: attitudes recur. Some of them are influenced by
: technological factors. Some aren't, at least not obviously. If I
: were transported a thousand years into the future *or* the past,
: and assuming no pesky singularities or language barriers got in the way,
: I'd expect to find a mishmash of attitudes, some of which I considered
: advanced, some retrograde, some incomprehensible, and some Just Like Home
: Royalty and hereditary governmental positions are not such odd
: concepts that I wouldn't expect to see them again and again.
That's precisely the point; I think your assumption is ludicrous.
You can expect anything you want if you make the right assumptions. I
cannot prove mine is any more valid than yours, but I believe there is a
lot of evidence to support it. There are many influences on evolution,
but it is hardly random. Royalty and hereditary government is hardly an
odd concept because it has occured throughout most of our history.
Believing that it could return is similar to believing that
hunter-gatherer tribes will reemerge. It's interesting that authors can
justify a return to royalty, but not a return to a hunter-gatherer
society - something that lasted a lot
longer than recorded history.
: As for people who are upset at SF which doesn't include the Singularity:
: we *are* in the Slow Zone, after all; look at the map in AFUtD. More
: generally, there are a lot of processes in nature that follow a sort
: of sigmoid curve; they look exponential until about a third of the way
: through, and eventually they level out at a new stable point. Human-level
: artificial intelligence has been 40-400 years away since the invention
: of the stored-program computer. Perhaps it's impractical for some reason
: we don't even have the means to express yet. Perhaps the same applies
: to significant human enhancements via DNI. Perhaps, perhaps not. Wait
: and see.
I agree with the signmoid curve model. It certainly seems to have
occurred in transportation speeds. But would anyone from a couple
centuries ago have ever guessed where that curve would level out? I
wouldn't claim that intelligence would go on climbing indefinitely, but
that when it levels out it will be out of our ken. qualitative changes in
evolution do take place: from rocks to cells to brains. To assume that
evolution will stop somewhere close to where we are now is untenable,
imho, of course - especially now that we are learning how to take charge
of the process.
Mr. Tines
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
On 14 Feb 1997 03:00:32 GMT, in <5e0kgg$2...@camel0.mindspring.com>
Mister Skin < mrs...@mindspring.com> wrote.....
[snip]
> AFUTD --and the other works of Vinge, particularly The Peace War and
> Marooned in Realtime -- are different because they present a vision of
> the future that is so compelling and so brilliantly realized that I have
> been evaluating every other science fiction novel I read -- indeed, every
> other idea about the future I encounter -- in its light.
>
> The "slavery in space" thread on this newsgroup is what made me finally
> come to this realization. There was something faintly ludicrous about it
> to me.
[snip]
This is a conclusion I came to, roughly from the opposite direction, a long
while ago myself. While externalising the one bad novel that everyone
supposedly has inside themselves, back in the late 70s, the setting I put
together had to be about 1200 years from now (timescales for STL travel,
terraforming, and eventual slow FTL conspiring together) - and I thought to
myself "Do I believe that this society would be remotely comprehensible?"
and answered "Probably not, but I'll just fudge it, and put in some wild
extrapolations."
Some of those wild extrapolations like widespread access to computer power
and communications networks have already happened.
And for many years after, I read very little SF, since much of it was to my
eyes "Spaceship Fiction" - some pulp adventure (often of a style of "The US
Marines conquer the Galaxy") or didactic work with 1950s SF trappings. It
was the discovery in the late 80s of cyberpunk (which I'd not touched until
well after the event, due to having read some truly awful mind-machine
interface stories in the late 70s), including the re-issue of _True Names_
that actually brought me back seriously to looking at the genre at all.
There are the occasional gems, like Vinge, Stephenson, Bear and a number of
sporadic others that just have to be sought out amongst the best-selling
Hugo-nominated "Hornblower in Space" drek. So I would say that for me a
more appropriate thread title would be "Why vernor Vinge Has Saved SF For
Me".
- --
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Beth and Richard Treitel
To my surprise and delight, esr...@pitt.edu (Evan S Reese) wrote:
> I think that since SF was begun in the industrial/resource economy
>stage, most writers just extrapolate from the America of about 1950 with
>the same centralized harierarical corporate structures and control of
>information.
Well, I think Neal "Diamond Age" Stephenson deserves a little credit
here. It has been noticeable, though, that much ScF combines
21st-century technology with 20th-century societies and 19th-century
economies, and the Really Daring stuff combines 25th-century
technology with late-20th-century society and 16th-century economies.
In the end, this shouldn't be surprising. We live in a civilisation
that has pretty fair control and understanding of its technology, and
rather little of its culture (there's a lot of speculation and Deep
Thinking but damn-all predictive ability, except in hindsight). As
for economics, there are reasons why it is sometimes called "the
dismal science".
- Richard
------
A sufficiently incompetent ScF author is indistinguishable from magic.
see also:
What is (and isn't) ScF? ==> http://www.wco.com/~treitel/sf.html
Richard Melvin
In article <slrn5gcsle....@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>, Mark
'Kamikaze' Hughes <kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> writes
>Richard Melvin <rme...@radm.demon.co.uk> spake:
>>- current society has computers only (space travel just doesn't count,
>>as it has had no major impact on society).
>
> Yep, it's had no major impact. It's a shame we don't use those satellites
>for anything directly useful like telecommunications or observation of the
>planet...
>
I'll stand by the 'no major impact' - it is perfectly possible to set a
novel in the present day without mentioning space travel - try writing
one without mentioning computers.
Matt Austern
wi...@netcom.com (Wim Lewis) writes:
> I think it's just as foolish to believe that cultural progress marches
> unfailingly onward and upward as it is to claim that biological evolution
> does so. Both are random walks, influenced by events major and minute.
> Just because the last few centuries have shown some trend or other
> is no reason to assume that the trend will continue.
It's foolish to believe in cultural "progress", but it's not at all
foolish to believe in cultural change. I don't necessarily expect
that 25th century society will be better than 20th century society,
but I do expect it to be different. It's wildly unlikely for it to
look all that much like late 19th century England, just as it's wildly
unlikely for it to look much like the 1960s US, or Meiji-era Japan.
Samuel S. Paik
>hunter-gatherer tribes will reemerge. It's interesting that authors can
>justify a return to royalty, but not a return to a hunter-gatherer
>society - something that lasted a lot
>longer than recorded history.
You obviously haven't heard the people who are trying to form
a new hunter-gatherer society. I'd say they are doomed to fail as
long as land can be owned by individuals (pretty much what
destroyed hunter-gatherers before).
Sam
--
408-749-8798 / pa...@webnexus.com
I speak for xyne KS since I AM xyne KS.
Resisitance is not futile! http://www.be.com/
Joachim Verhagen
esr...@pitt.edu (Evan S Reese) writes:
>: But my point is: attitudes recur. Some of them are influenced by
>: technological factors. Some aren't, at least not obviously. If I
>: were transported a thousand years into the future *or* the past,
>: and assuming no pesky singularities or language barriers got in the way,
>: I'd expect to find a mishmash of attitudes, some of which I considered
>: advanced, some retrograde, some incomprehensible, and some Just Like Home
>: Royalty and hereditary governmental positions are not such odd
>: concepts that I wouldn't expect to see them again and again.
> That's precisely the point; I think your assumption is ludicrous.
>You can expect anything you want if you make the right assumptions. I
>cannot prove mine is any more valid than yours, but I believe there is a
>lot of evidence to support it. There are many influences on evolution,
>but it is hardly random. Royalty and hereditary government is hardly an
>odd concept because it has occured throughout most of our history.
>Believing that it could return is similar to believing that
>hunter-gatherer tribes will reemerge. It's interesting that authors can
>justify a return to royalty, but not a return to a hunter-gatherer
>society - something that lasted a lot
>longer than recorded history.
Sure they can. "Great Sky river" is a good example of a new version of
hunter-gatherers, but there are lots of stories with people who have returned
to primitive hunter-gatherer cultures.
I do not know, whether social evolution is random (biological certainly is).
It it would be, old structures could reappear, but something completely new
is of course more likely. Anyway, I also like those stories better and that
is really the only important thing about novels.
> I agree with the signmoid curve model. It certainly seems to have
>occurred in transportation speeds. But would anyone from a couple
>centuries ago have ever guessed where that curve would level out? I
>wouldn't claim that intelligence would go on climbing indefinitely, but
>that when it levels out it will be out of our ken. qualitative changes in
>evolution do take place: from rocks to cells to brains. To assume that
>evolution will stop somewhere close to where we are now is untenable,
>imho, of course - especially now that we are learning how to take charge
>of the process.
That could be a reason, that it does remain the same. We might want our
kids to be normal. (Of course most parents want a completely normal
superior child :-)).
--
Joachim Verhagen E-mail:J.C.D.V...@fys.ruu.nl
Department of molecular biofysics, University of Utrecht
Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Home-page: http://www.fys.ruu.nl/~verhagen (Science Jokes & SF)
RBKLEIMAN
Erich Schneider writes:
>What exactly do you have in mind here? That is, what are the social
>schemes in _AFUTD_ or _MIR_ that aren't reworked etc.?
>This isn't a flame, just curiosity - I've read both novels (_MIR_
>quite recently), and while grand things in terms of other types of
>society are hinted at offstage, most of the stuff presented seemed
>rather pedestrian.
>Banks' Culture and the universe of Delany's _Stars in My Pocket Like
>Grains of Sand_, now, those get me excited.
I haven't reread either AFUTD or MIR recently, but remember that when I
read them I felt exhilarated, much as if I'd had a truly sublime bottle of
wine or a truly wonderful meal at Troisgros. In contrast, I happen to
enjoy some space opera too, even though most of it is not very novel, but
the feeling I get after reading most SF is what I'd get after a bag of
doritos - enjoyable but not really satisfying.
To get back to your query, I recall that most of AFTUD was set on a
primitive nonhuman world with group consciousnesses. I thought that this
was interesting, although I confess that I didn't care much for these
sequences as I dislike what you could call "primitive SF". I generally
like Brin and Bear a great deal, but still did not enjoy most of
"Brightness Reef", "Infinity's Shore", and "Legacy". The social
structures here were interesting to unique but just not what I personally
enjoy reading.
Most of the rest of AFTUD, as I recall it, dealt with the galactic
civilizations beyond the slow zone and I recall that they were either
"hinted at grand" or "described and grand" themselves. My recollection of
MIR is also that much of it dealt with simple matters - a whodunnit - but
that the setting of the post sublimation world, and the NAFAL universe
populated by Berserker like defense systems were quite unusual.
I did not mean that MIR and AFUTD were treatises on future societal
possibilities - just that the books were not set in universes where the
our own past was not grafted onto newer technologies. I don't think it
likely that a galactic civilization will ever spring up modelled on feudal
Japanese or Victorian societies, as many space operas suggest. I'm not a
sociologist and I don't enjoy books that are entirely concerned with
creating new alien worlds.
Finally, nearly all fiction must contain some pedestrian qualities - I
don't know if that's because the authors have the same limitations as us,
if it's to allow the reader to have some frame of reference for stability,
or if that's what you need to write in order to get it published. But the
best SF combines the pedestrian with the novel - the characters in the
Culture books behave much like you or I might if we had grown up in a post
scarcity society. They think about sex, and finding something exciting
and fun to do, and about trying to do something meaningful but usually
bumble about doing a half assed job of it.
I'm hard pressed to explain myself - perhaps in short I find that some
books still excite my "sense of wonder". Banks and Delany and Simmons
also do that for me.
Bob Kleiman
Matt McIrvin
In article <qQQ4gBAx...@radm.demon.co.uk>, Richard Melvin
<rme...@radm.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> - current society has computers only (space travel just doesn't count,
> as it has had no major impact on society).
Except for comsats. But those hardly constitute space travel in the
grand old SFnal sense.
It's interesting that people regard _AFUTD_ as such a departure from
old traditions. I regarded it as, in some ways, a space opera in the
Doc Smith line-- just with technological guesses based on more modern
ideas (and described with more modern prose style). I got the impression
that Vinge introduced the Zones so that he could *keep* technology from
exponentiating everywhere so rapidly that it ate the good story. (I
haven't yet read the Realtime series, in which he apparently let the
Singularity happen here.)
--
My home page: http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/
Sci.physics FAQ: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/faq.html
Larry Caldwell
In article <5e293h$h...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>,
esr...@pitt.edu (Evan S Reese) wrote:
> I think that since SF was begun in the industrial/resource economy
> stage, most writers just extrapolate from the America of about 1950 with
> the same centralized harierarical corporate structures and control of
> information.
There have always been revolutionary writers and seminal works. SF is
a work in progress, not a finished product. The history of the genre is
dotted with works no one will forget, floating in a sea of absolute crap.
I still remember the day a fellow engineering student handed me a copy of
the Ace bootleg of _The Hobbit_ and LOTR. I remember his name, and even
what he said when he handed me those books 32 years ago. I can't remember
much else about what I was reading back then, except that Analog serialized
_Dune_ the next year. The year after that, Zelazny's _Lord of Light_ was
published, followed quickly by Brunner's _Stand On Zanzibar_ and LeGuin's
_Left Hand of Darkness_. In the performing arts, "Space, the final
frontier" was the first decent television SF since Twilight Zone, and
2001 hit the theatres. 2001 was a big hit, but almost everybody ignored
Star Trek the first time around. The only people who watched it were
science fiction fans.
After that, SF entered a dry period and not much happened for a while.
In the mid 70's Moorecock started his Eternal Champion series, Zelazny
started writing about Amber and Terry Brooks started Shannara. The best
reading on the market was reprints of Dunsany, artistic excrement from
Harlan Ellison, and low budget fantasies by Peter Beagle. Star Wars
and ET moved SF into the mainstream movie culture, but they didn't raise
the general quality much.
In the late 70's and early 80's the first CP/M personal computers led to
some really big stories that had been waiting to be told. Silverberg's
_Lord Valentine's Castle_ was a monumental book. Silverberg, BTW, was
one of the original "new wave" SF writers when he was just a lad, and
reinvented himself nicely with LVC. "The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy"
was the media event of the 80's. Not much else happened. Stories tended
to be readable but not memorable.
The 90's have been characterized by the dominance of word processor
science fiction. It looks like writers are getting paid by the ton.
Almost everything on the market is twice as long as it needs to be,
with great attention to prose and no attention to concept. The entire
genre is desperately in search of an editor. Vernor Vinge is a notable
exception, who seems to know how to edit himself. The media event of
the decade has been Babylon 5, which sets an obesity record for word
processor products, being a single story that runs for over 70
hours of viewing time. It's been a revolutionary experience, and I'm
sure by the time the imitators are done we are all going to be very,
very sorry.
> Also, what Vinge does is probably too difficult for the
> run-of-the-mill writer. Partly because of the problems I mentioned above
> - reality outrunning fiction - but also, most of them aren't really
> interested in thinking seriously about the possible futures, but of
> ax-grinding, or alegory, making points concerned with the present human
> condition - whatever that's supposed to mean. In other words, they
> are just putting SF clothes on a mainstream skeleton; so it doesn't
> matter if the imagined future doesn't seem plausible to someone looking at
> present trends. The real point is the sermon. People like Lucius Shepard
> Ursula LeGuin and Kim Stanley Robinson are big in this school.
Raising the bar and writing a really outstanding book is too difficult for
almost anyone. _Stand On Zanzibar_ was an excellent book precisely because
it was about the present. In 1968, the concept of sabotage as a social
problem was so alien as to be startling. Thirty years later it is
pretty obvious. Social commentary can be very good science fiction
indeed, if it is well done. Heinein's _If This Goes On_ was social
commentary on the Billy Sunday evangelists angling for political power
in the South. These are not mainstream novels.
You hit it squarely when you speculated that great SF is too difficult for
average writers. They not only have to be able to write, they have to
have something to say. Vinge went from _Peace War_ to AFUTD because he
had something to say, and he abandoned a well established story line
to say it. He not only put an immense amount of work into the concept,
he did it well enough that his readers happily followed along.
> I didn't mean to go on so long, but I feel strongly about this issue
> - how could you tell - and I could say a lot more on the same topic. But
> I'll quit for now.
Feel free to continue. :)
-- Larry
posted and mailed
Evan S Reese
Beth and Richard Treitel (tre...@wco.com) wrote:
: To my surprise and delight, esr...@pitt.edu (Evan S Reese) wrote:
: > I think that since SF was begun in the industrial/resource economy
: >stage, most writers just extrapolate from the America of about 1950 with
: >the same centralized harierarical corporate structures and control of
: >information.
: Well, I think Neal "Diamond Age" Stephenson deserves a little credit
: here.
Absolutely! The best book I've read since AFUD came out and one of
the ten best of the last 20 years easily.
Bill MacArthur
mmci...@world.std.com (Matt McIrvin) wrote:
>It's interesting that people regard _AFUTD_ as such a departure from
>old traditions. I regarded it as, in some ways, a space opera in the
>Doc Smith line-- just with technological guesses based on more modern
>ideas (and described with more modern prose style). I got the impression
>that Vinge introduced the Zones so that he could *keep* technology from
>exponentiating everywhere so rapidly that it ate the good story. (I
>haven't yet read the Realtime series, in which he apparently let the
>Singularity happen here.)
FWIW I concur with your assessment of AFUTD. Vinge's success has a lot
to do with combining Smithian space opera with the unique Zone idea and
believable telepathic dogs. Vinge also understates the tension that
exists in AFUTD. Eg. The humans start to figure out that Steel is the
bad guy long before they reach the planet. Therefore, the climactic
scene reads much more plausibly than in similar -the good guy is really
the bad guy_ stories.
Dave Goldman
In article <erkyrathE...@netcom.com>, erky...@netcom.com (Andrew
Plotkin) wrote:
> They figure O.C. will be on the shelves for another sixty years. Well,
> not "on the shelves" immediately, of course. They'll start out with a
> line of cheap pulp magazines, throw in a few respected authors around
> 2020, and go for mainstream marketing exposure in 2043.
>
> With the usual sidestring of theme anthologies, genre crossovers,
> underground movements, and so on.
>
> Plus a definitive collection of the best O.C. stories of all time.
>
> Which will be edited by Harlan Ellison.
And will be published in 2087. Well, maybe 2088...
-- Dave
Andrew Plotkin
Larry Caldwell (lar...@teleport.com) wrote:
> There have always been revolutionary writers and seminal works. SF is
> a work in progress, not a finished product.
But the word is that it's scheduled to be finished in third quarter of
1998. There'll be a big wrap party, the SFWA and the Worldcon Committee
will formally disband, and there'll be lots of TV interviews with (now
former) SF writers. A few last "Best of SF" anthologies, and that'll be
it for SF!
Sure, it's kind of depressing, but keep in mind that all SF books in the
world will be instantly remaindered. (Including the huge stocks that were
moved to secret underground caches when the Thor Power Tools decision went
through.) We'll all have a chance to complete our collections at bargain
prices -- and then the collections will *be* complete, finally, with
nothing new being published. Which I know will save me *heaps* of cash
thereafter.
I understand that the SF shelf space freed up in bookstores will be used
for "ontic catharsis", a new genre which is in beta-testing as we speak. I
haven't seen it myself (you know how secretive those product testers are)
but I'm told that it's kind of an exploration of the emotional aspects of
existence and nonexistence, generally expressed using a convention of
everyday objects described in unusual ways. Sounds a little weird, but
hey, I'll give it a shot.
They figure O.C. will be on the shelves for another sixty years. Well,
not "on the shelves" immediately, of course. They'll start out with a
line of cheap pulp magazines, throw in a few respected authors around
2020, and go for mainstream marketing exposure in 2043.
With the usual sidestring of theme anthologies, genre crossovers,
underground movements, and so on.
Plus a definitive collection of the best O.C. stories of all time.
Which will be edited by Harlan Ellison.
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
Benjamin Chan
Evan S Reese (esr...@pitt.edu) wrote:
: Wim Lewis (wi...@netcom.com) wrote:
: : In article <5e293h$h...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>,
: : Evan S Reese <esr...@pitt.edu> wrote:
: : >- for me to read. A particularly good/bad example of this is Bujold. She
: : >clearly has talent, but does she really believe that centuries in the
: : >future we're going to have royalty and people who think and talk like
: : >Victorians?
: : I think it's just as foolish to believe that cultural progress marches
: : unfailingly onward and upward as it is to claim that biological evolution
: : does so. Both are random walks, influenced by events major and minute.
: : Just because the last few centuries have shown some trend or other
: : even worse to assume that culture *won't* change, starting now...)
: : technological factors. Some aren't, at least not obviously. If I
: : were transported a thousand years into the future *or* the past,
: : and assuming no pesky singularities or language barriers got in the way,
: : I'd expect to find a mishmash of attitudes, some of which I considered
: : advanced, some retrograde, some incomprehensible, and some Just Like Home
: : Royalty and hereditary governmental positions are not such odd
: : concepts that I wouldn't expect to see them again and again.
:
: That's precisely the point; I think your assumption is ludicrous.
: You can expect anything you want if you make the right assumptions. I
: cannot prove mine is any more valid than yours, but I believe there is a
: lot of evidence to support it. There are many influences on evolution,
: but it is hardly random. Royalty and hereditary government is hardly an
: odd concept because it has occured throughout most of our history.
: Believing that it could return is similar to believing that
: hunter-gatherer tribes will reemerge. It's interesting that authors can
: justify a return to royalty, but not a return to a hunter-gatherer
: society - something that lasted a lot
: longer than recorded history.
Have we really escaped royalty? Maybe so if we only look at government.
But I think the rich-and famous, i.e. the "royalty", wields great
influence in our society. We're still fascinated by the Kennedys, OJ
Simpson, Madonna, etc. Their influence is through the mas media rather
than through public policy. I believe the bottom line is that people just
are fascinated by other people's lives, especially if those people are
perceived to have more important lives than their own. In addition, I
really don't think people like comlete freedom. They don't want infinite
choices, nor do they want to make too many decisions (who will they blame
if things go wrong?). In this sense, I don't really see any Great Leap
for humanity anytime soon nor do I think we've already made this Great
Leap. But it sure if fun to think about it!
--
+-------------------------------------------------+
| Benjamin Chan, M.S., Assistant Statistician I |
| UC Davis Medical Center, Primary Care Center |
| 2221 Stockton Blvd., Room 3107 |
| Sacramento CA 95817 |
| Voice = 916-734-7004; Fax = 916-734-2732 |
+-------------------------------------------------+
Andrew Plotkin
Dave Goldman (da...@rsd.com) wrote:
> In article <erkyrathE...@netcom.com>, erky...@netcom.com (Andrew
> Plotkin) wrote:
> >
> > Which will be edited by Harlan Ellison.
> And will be published in 2087. Well, maybe 2088...
Oh, go ahead, ground my punchline. Dammit.
Stefan E. Jones
If you think Vernor Vinge had a deletorious effect on your enjoyment of
genre SF, try reading:
_Disturbing the Universe_ by Freeman Dyson
_From Eros to Gaia_ by Freeman Dyson
And while you are at it:
_The Immense Journey_ by Loren Eiseley
_The Night Country_ by Loren Eiseley
The words that come to mind when I think of these books are "profound"
and "wise." So much so that most SF seems shallow and smarmy . . .
greasy, starchy comfort food rather than dishes that challenge and
excite.
Dyson writes of space travel and the future of humanity and the process
and nature of science. Eiseley writes about evolution and our connections
with nature. These are themes that SF authors often tackle. I grew up
on SF and still read it; but after reading Dyson and Eiseley's essays I
simply cannot take the vast majority of of the works I cut my teeth
on seriously.
I am grateful that there are a few SF authors -- Vinge, Sterling, Kress,
Brin when he's writing short stories, Reed, and a few more I can't think of
right now -- who still write works of intelligent wonder.
--Stefan Jones
"Through how many dimensions and how many media will life have to pass?
Down how many roads among the stars must man propel himself in search
of the final secret? The journey is difficult, immense, at times impossible,
yet that will not deter some of us from attempting it. We cannot know all
that has happened in the past, or the reason for all of these events, any
more than we can with surety discern what lies ahead. We have joined the
caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can,
but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all
that we hunger to know."
-- "The Slit" from _The Immense Journey_ by Loren Eiseley
Mister Skin
In article <5e73oq$4...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> Evan S Reese,
esr...@pitt.edu writes:
>: As for people who are upset at SF which doesn't include the Singularity:
>: we *are* in the Slow Zone, after all; look at the map in AFUtD. More
>: generally, there are a lot of processes in nature that follow a sort
>: of sigmoid curve; they look exponential until about a third of the way
>: through, and eventually they level out at a new stable point. Human-level
>: artificial intelligence has been 40-400 years away since the invention
>: of the stored-program computer. Perhaps it's impractical for some reason
>: we don't even have the means to express yet. Perhaps the same applies
>: to significant human enhancements via DNI. Perhaps, perhaps not. Wait
>: and see.
>
>occurred in transportation speeds. But would anyone from a couple
>centuries ago have ever guessed where that curve would level out? I
>wouldn't claim that intelligence would go on climbing indefinitely, but
>that when it levels out it will be out of our ken. qualitative changes in
>evolution do take place: from rocks to cells to brains. To assume that
>evolution will stop somewhere close to where we are now is untenable,
>imho, of course - especially now that we are learning how to take charge
>of the process.
Very well put. I agree, you do not have to agree with the inevitably of
an asymptotic curve describing the advance of intelligence, to believe
that intelligence will increase beyond our present ken -- a sigmoid curve
which levels off sufficiently far in the future, at a sufficiently high
point, will get the job done. You might not have the equivalents of gods
on earth, but you'd have minds so far ahead of what we have now that the
way they work, and perhaps most significantly, the way they work
together, would be beyond our ability to comprehend.
Furthermore, heightened intelligence and communication in the culture as
a whole will have a cascading effect on human society -- more intelligent
minds in better communication will come up with more breakthroughs in all
fields of human endeavor.
I don't necessarily believe that actual changes in structure of the human
brain will be necessary for this to happen. We are already linking our
minds to computers via keyboards. Voice recognition is not far off, at
all (I consider this a less efficient interface, but necessary for many
people). Without any sudden breakthrough in DNI, we still may see
ever-smoother, more facile interfaces between the human mind and
computers. This has already happened to some extent -- the Mac OS and
Windows 95 are both much easier to use than DOS ever was.
The next killer app may be software that helps you write by helping pluck
the questions from your mind, and which then finds the answers almost
instantly via the Internet. Planning software that integrates
spreadsheets and databases with voice recognition so that you could sit
down in front of your computer and build a business plan in a matter of
hours, complete with market surveys.
As Vernor Vinge says, the singularity will probably happen accidentally
-- "We were just tweaking the parameters, and WHAM!"
Mister Skin
In article <fxtvi7s...@isolde.mti.sgi.com> Matt Austern,
aus...@isolde.mti.sgi.com writes:
>It's foolish to believe in cultural "progress", but it's not at all
>foolish to believe in cultural change. I don't necessarily expect
>that 25th century society will be better than 20th century society,
>but I do expect it to be different. It's wildly unlikely for it to
>look all that much like late 19th century England, just as it's wildly
>unlikely for it to look much like the 1960s US, or Meiji-era Japan.
The people who believe in the Singularity are not following a vague
notion like "cultural progress." They are looking at a mathematical
projection of trends in the rate of increase in human knowledge, changes
in the rate of change itself, etc. These trends tend to indicate that
about thirty years in the future, the rates will stop rising gradually
and turn into a jet-propelled dash into incomprehensibility. The shape of
such a curve -- a curve that rises gradually at first, but at a steadily
progressing rate, turns ever more sharply upward until it hits vertical,
or thereabouts -- is called asymptotic.
Those who don't believe in the Singularity assume a sigmoid curve -- one
which turns upward as the asymptotic curve does, but instead of gong
vertical, levels off and returns to its former gradual progression.
Neither side disputes that we are headed for change -- the only argument
is how great the change will be. Vinge assumes a virtual end to the
ascendancy of humans on Earth. Sigmoid curve proponents assume that
things will be different, but not THAT differently. That's not to say
that human life won't be very, very different than it is now.
I'm not a mathematician, so anyone who is more familiar with these terms
can feel free to correct me. Not that they need to be told that. ;>
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Richard Melvin <rme...@radm.demon.co.uk> spake:
>'Kamikaze' Hughes <kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> writes
>>Richard Melvin <rme...@radm.demon.co.uk> spake:
>>>as it has had no major impact on society).
>>for anything directly useful like telecommunications or observation of the
>>planet...
>
>I'll stand by the 'no major impact' - it is perfectly possible to set a
>novel in the present day without mentioning space travel - try writing
>one without mentioning computers.
Satellite telecommunications and weather forecasts haven't affected your
daily life? You don't receive news reports live via satellite? You don't
know about cell-phones, GPS systems, satellite TV (I see you're from the UK,
where there's, what, 4 broadcast channels...), or any of that?
This is entirely leaving aside the debatable R&D byproducts of the space
programs, since getting an accurate "what if we hadn't..." estimate is
impossible. They could be nil, they could be all of the non-military
technologies in the last 40 years, or most likely somewhere in between.
Satellites are an infrastructure technology, so you often don't see them
directly, but they *ARE* ubiquitous and have profound effects (compare to the
use of computers in the 50s and 60s - they'd had a massive impact, but were
mostly hidden from the public).
If an SF or "Technical Fiction" story set in the present ignored those
technologies where they apply, I'd laugh at it and throw it in the garbage.
Andrew Plotkin
Mister Skin (mrs...@mindspring.com) wrote:
> In article <19970217174...@ladder01.news.aol.com> RBKLEIMAN,
> rbkl...@aol.com writes:
> >I haven't reread either AFUTD or MIR recently, but remember that when I
> >read them I felt exhilarated, much as if I'd had a truly sublime bottle of
> >wine or a truly wonderful meal at Troisgros.
>
> describing from reading Banks' Excession right now, and I got the biggest
> jolt of it since adolescence (when I was MUCH more impressionable) from
> reading AFUTD. Novels like AFUTD seem to expand my sense of what is
> possible. A writer like Vinge, I believe, has the ability to look within
> himself and develop a sense of what he feels is an authentic vision of
> the future, then project that future in a way that draws us into it.
I've had a lingering sense of irony around this whole thread... stemming,
I think, from the fact that AFUTD seems *dated* already. Not the overall
vision, but the Usenet-parallel schtick.
Because, of course, it's an imitation of *1990-1991* Usenet -- which has
*already* changed immensely in tone and content. (Death of the Net
predicted in hindsight! Retrospective at 11.)
I also just read Excession (in US/Canada bookstores now, folks!) It is
indeed great. But is Bujold's Barrayar really a failure in *that* sense,
authenticity of vision? Not to me.
(I specify Barrayar because the other worlds in her milieu aren't nearly
as authentic. Mostly just sketches, and Cetaganda as shown in _Cetaganda_
*did* feel like implausible space-opera fluff to me.)
Karen Lofstrom
Mister Skin (mrs...@mindspring.com) wrote:
: You have to be pretty
: ignorant to go for the notion that some people are better than others by
: right of birth, if you are at the wrong end of a society with hereditary
: royalty.
No, royalty makes perfect sense when everyone in society is set in
his/her place at birth. Gender and birth order determine roles and
rank in the extended family. Family groups - clans/tribes/whatever --
compete for standing. All the rulers know each other and are related
to each other. In order to negotiate the intricacies of these
relationships and establish the personal ties that make things
function, you need to grow up knowing the important people. Having an
absolute ruler (or at least the pretense of one) is important, because
you believe that otherwise society would fall apart into squabbles and
self-seeking. Of course, this ruler is expected to be just, generous
and firm, and may find himself replaced by a coup if he doesn't live
up to expectations.
I lived in a small monarchy for 2 1/2 years. Makes sense as part of a
functioning society.
--
Karen Lofstrom lofs...@lava.net
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
You know, if you're going to send a death threat to the President you
should really PGP sign it, so we can verify it. -- Baron Fujimoto
Joachim Verhagen
Mister Skin < mrs...@mindspring.com> writes:
>In article <verhagen....@ruunat.fys.ruu.nl> Joachim Verhagen,
>verh...@fys.ruu.nl writes:
>>>hunter-gatherer tribes will reemerge. It's interesting that authors can
>>>justify a return to royalty, but not a return to a hunter-gatherer
>>>society - something that lasted a lot
>>>longer than recorded history.
>>
>>Sure they can. "Great Sky river" is a good example of a new version of
>>hunter-gatherers, but there are lots of stories with people who have returned
>Actually, bad example. The people in "Great Sky River" are anything but
>primitive. They have direct DNI interfaces that lets them access the
>memories of ancestors planted on chips, and preserve the personalities of
>tribe members by saving them on said chips. They have a whole host of
>artificial extensions to their senses that let them compete successfully
>with the Mechs.
That was why I choose this example and not some forgetable story about a
planet, where the decendents of a broken down spaceship fall back on a
primitive society. I do not believe that hunter-gatherer necessarily
implies primitivity.
>They are not actually hunter-gatherers, but refugees
>trying to survive being hunted to extinction by the Mechs. Without the
>constant pressure of the Mechs trying to wipe them out, they'd
>undoubtedly return to a very high level of civilization in very short
>order.
They did behave as hunter-gatherers, even in the citadel. High-tech
hunter-gatherers, but still hunter-gatherers. They do not hunt animals (In
"Great sky river" they can not even imagine eating animals) but mech for
the technology they use. It was just a situation where that
behaviour-pattern was usefull. In the esty the situation changes, but I do
not get the feeling that they go to a very high level of civilization when
they settle down at the end of the last book.
Joachim
Mister Skin
>You can expect anything you want if you make the right assumptions. I
>cannot prove mine is any more valid than yours, but I believe there is a
>lot of evidence to support it. There are many influences on evolution,
>but it is hardly random. Royalty and hereditary government is hardly an
>odd concept because it has occured throughout most of our history.
>Believing that it could return is similar to believing that
>justify a return to royalty, but not a return to a hunter-gatherer
>society - something that lasted a lot
>longer than recorded history.
Royalty and heriditary government show up frequently in SF visions of the
future because they hold a strong romantic appeal to many people, mostly
people who envision themselves as lords and ladies rather than serfs. I
don't have an ABSOLUTE objection to a return to royalty, but I think you
have to explain how it will work credibly in your future. My objection to
the feudal Japanese system in the Warstrider novels wasn't that I just
thought feudalism would never return, but that I felt a powerful conflict
between fedualism and widespread DNI and access to information nets. I
don't see how any society with information that widely available could
ever accept the notion of hereditary rulers. You have to be pretty
ignorant to go for the notion that some people are better than others by
right of birth, if you are at the wrong end of a society with hereditary
royalty.
Such notions might be FORCED on a DNI-linked populace for a time, but not
for long, I think.
Mister Skin
In article <02161997...@windsong.demon.co.uk> Mr. Tines,
ti...@windsong.demon.co.uk writes:
>There are the occasional gems, like Vinge, Stephenson, Bear and a number of
>sporadic others that just have to be sought out amongst the best-selling
>Hugo-nominated "Hornblower in Space" drek. So I would say that for me a
>more appropriate thread title would be "Why vernor Vinge Has Saved SF For
>Me".
Good point. Without writers like Vinge and Banks, SF would be an exercise
is style at best, and repetitive dreck of the sort that characterizes
much (but not all) of fantasy at worst. Writers who have the cojones to
look within themselves and find an authentic vision of the future, and
the knowledge to make that future believable, are the ones who make SF
more than just another genre.
Mister Skin
>>justify a return to royalty, but not a return to a hunter-gatherer
>>society - something that lasted a lot
>>longer than recorded history.
>
>hunter-gatherers, but there are lots of stories with people who have returned
Actually, bad example. The people in "Great Sky River" are anything but
primitive. They have direct DNI interfaces that lets them access the
memories of ancestors planted on chips, and preserve the personalities of
tribe members by saving them on said chips. They have a whole host of
artificial extensions to their senses that let them compete successfully
with the Mechs. They are not actually hunter-gatherers, but refugees
Mister Skin
In article <19970217174...@ladder01.news.aol.com> RBKLEIMAN,
rbkl...@aol.com writes:
>I haven't reread either AFUTD or MIR recently, but remember that when I
>read them I felt exhilarated, much as if I'd had a truly sublime bottle of
>enjoy some space opera too, even though most of it is not very novel, but
>the feeling I get after reading most SF is what I'd get after a bag of
>doritos - enjoyable but not really satisfying.
Well put -- I'm getting exactly the same exhilirating high you're
describing from reading Banks' Excession right now, and I got the biggest
jolt of it since adolescence (when I was MUCH more impressionable) from
reading AFUTD. Novels like AFUTD seem to expand my sense of what is
possible. A writer like Vinge, I believe, has the ability to look within
himself and develop a sense of what he feels is an authentic vision of
the future, then project that future in a way that draws us into it. Such
writers build a peak in Darien and invite us to share the view from its
summit, so naturally we find the experience exhilirating ...
Morgoth
I will agree that there is some sci-fi that is profound, and some
that is pure escapism.
Alot of the old pulp fiction is pure escapism.
Some that people consider pulp might actually be profound, it all
comes to what you get out of it.
Myself I love H. Beam Piper, and think some of his books are
profound in interesting ways. The nature of what is sentient. The
types of "barbarians" external and internal. It gives me ideas on
how society is, and what a couch potato is.
Morgoth
PMccutc103
"Mr. Tines" <ti...@windsong.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>There are the occasional gems, like Vinge, Stephenson, Bear and a number
of
>sporadic others that just have to be sought out amongst the best-selling
>Hugo-nominated "Hornblower in Space" drek. So I would say that for me a
>more appropriate thread title would be "Why vernor Vinge Has Saved SF For
>Me".
This is rather typical about what I find irritating about this thread. I
like Vinge and Stephenson and Gibson and the rest, but I also like other
stuff as well. However, among the fans of this type of work, there seems
to be prevelant a rather arrogant attitude about other types of work.
They seem to be saying: What _I_ like is serious, thoughtful,
cutting-edge, cool, hard-edged extrapolation, what other people like is
"'Hornblower in Space' drek."
The truth is that I rather doubt that the future will be like the future
envisioned by Lois Bujold, but I honestly rather doubt that it will be
like the future envisioned by Vernor Vinge, either. I enjoy reading Vinge
because of his weird ideas and settings, Bujold because of the strength of
her characters. If you read sf for one and not the other, than you are
likely to enjoy one more than the other. It doesn't mean that the people
who have different taste than you read "crap"; it just means they're
looking for different things.
One other thing. During the twentieth century, we've had a number of
important technologicial innovations: practical development of the
internal combustion engine, development of jet airplanes, computers, etc.
Now, it is possible, that new technologies -- nanotechnology, AI, direct
human/computer interfacing, somethign we can't even imagine -- will
further transform our lives. But it's also possible that the rate of
technological development will slow, and that there won't be new,
revolutionary developments in our future. We _could_ possibly be stuck
with incremental improvements of what we've got.
________________________
Pete McCutchen
PMccutc103
gram
Mister Skin (mrs...@mindspring.com) wrote:
: The next killer app may be software that helps you write by helping pluck
: the questions from your mind, and which then finds the answers almost
: instantly via the Internet. Planning software that integrates
Damn this computer! It always does what I think, not what I _want_
to think!
Ward Griffiths
--
Q: What do you call a christian who accidently read the bible with his
brain turned on? A: An atheist
Beth and Richard Treitel
To my surprise and delight, szb...@bullwinkle.ucdavis.edu (Benjamin
Chan) wrote:
>Have we really escaped royalty? Maybe so if we only look at government.
>But I think the rich-and famous, i.e. the "royalty", wields great
>influence in our society. We're still fascinated by the Kennedys, OJ
>Simpson, Madonna, etc.
And there's a younger Kennedy in Congress (?Joseph II), and either one
or two of George Bush's sons is/are state-level politicians (it's too
early in the morning for me to remember if they won their elections),
and somebody who knew the US political scene better could probably
think of more examples of proto-dynasties. In Indonesia and the PRC,
to name but two, it's clear that descendants of the Big Boss (and even
the medium-big bosses) wield extra power.
But except for North Korea, which has reinvented the god-king, I think
absolute monarchies are becoming quite rare. Inheriting power along
lines of marriage or descent is not so rare, and if you think about
it, it's not *always* a bad idea. The bad idea is to insist on doing
it to the exclusion of other succession arrangements.
- Richard
------
A sufficiently incompetent ScF author is indistinguishable from magic.
see also:
What is (and isn't) ScF? ==> http://www.wco.com/~treitel/sf.html
Richard Melvin
In article <slrn5gkm84....@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>, Mark
'Kamikaze' Hughes <kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> writes
>
> Satellite telecommunications and weather forecasts haven't affected your
>daily life? You don't receive news reports live via satellite? You don't
>know about cell-phones, GPS systems, satellite TV (I see you're from the UK,
>where there's, what, 4 broadcast channels...), or any of that?
>
> This is entirely leaving aside the debatable R&D byproducts of the space
>programs, since getting an accurate "what if we hadn't..." estimate is
>impossible. They could be nil, they could be all of the non-military
>technologies in the last 40 years, or most likely somewhere in between.
>
> Satellites are an infrastructure technology, so you often don't see them
>directly, but they *ARE* ubiquitous and have profound effects (compare to the
>use of computers in the 50s and 60s - they'd had a massive impact, but were
>mostly hidden from the public).
>
> If an SF or "Technical Fiction" story set in the present ignored those
>technologies where they apply, I'd laugh at it and throw it in the garbage.
>
Hey, a pointless argument about definitions of words - great!
I was using major to mean something like 'one of the four or five most
significant technologies of this century'.
You take it to mean 'anything that an average person will have had any
contact with'.
I don't mean to knock satellites (I used to work for ESA), but
commercially they are just not that big business (probably comparable to
helicopters, and nowhere near aeroplanes, let alone cars).
--
Richard Melvin
Turnpike evaluation. For Turnpike information, mailto:in...@turnpike.com
Doug Muir
I think the last couple of posts on hunter-gatherers have shown some
confusion between "civilization" and "technology".
Hunter-gatherers are, by definition, not civilized. The latin root of
"civilization" is civitas, city; for most of human history
"civilization" has meant people living in cities, or at least villages,
plus the supporting hinterland. Nomads and hunter-gatherers (two
totally different groups) were not "civilized".
Civilization became confused with technology because it is easier for a
city-based culture to develop and maintain higher technology. This
confusion has grown worse in the last century or two, as it is more or
less impossible for nomads or hunter-gatherers to support a First or
Second Industrial Revolution level of tech.
However, both nomads and hunter-gatherers could and did achieve
extremely complex *cultures*. Furthermore, both these lifestyles have
attractions that are sadly lacking in "civilized" societies. A
very-high-tech society might well turn to nomadism or hunter-gathering.
Neither of these themes have received much sfictional treatment --
Benford's books, as mentioned, and Poul Anderson's "A Message in
Secret", are all that come to mind at the moment. But such a society
might be more stable in the very long long run. After all,
"civilization" is only about ten or twelve thousand years old, and no
individual civilized culture is more than about three thousand years
old.
Elisabeth Carey
Beth and Richard Treitel <tre...@wco.com> wrote in article
<330e2605...@news.wco.com>...
> To my surprise and delight, szb...@bullwinkle.ucdavis.edu (Benjamin
> Chan) wrote:
>
> >Have we really escaped royalty? Maybe so if we only look at government.
> >But I think the rich-and famous, i.e. the "royalty", wields great
> >influence in our society. We're still fascinated by the Kennedys, OJ
> >Simpson, Madonna, etc.
>
> And there's a younger Kennedy in Congress (?Joseph II),
It's a small point, but there are actually *two* younger Kennedys in
Congress - Joe, one of Robert Kennedy's sons, represents what was
previously Jack Kennedy's district in Massachusetts, and Patrick, Ted
Kennedy's son, represents a [the?] Rhode Island congressional district.
> and either one
> or two of George Bush's sons is/are state-level politicians (it's too
> early in the morning for me to remember if they won their elections),
The younger George Bush won his election and is governor of Texas; another
son, Jeb Bush, lost his race for governor of Florida.
> and somebody who knew the US political scene better could probably
> think of more examples of proto-dynasties.
Recently retired US Senator from Kansas, Nancy Kassebaum, is the daughter
of Alf Landon. Richard Daley, Mayor of Chicago, is the son of Richard
Daley, Mayor of Chicago. Evan Byah [sp?], whose current political office I
can't recall offhand, but who is a significant rising figure in the
Democratic Party, is the son of Birch Byah.
And there are undoubtedly plenty of other examples, including examples more
important than some of the examples listed above. But in every case, the
ambitious descendant has to face the voters, and while the family
connection often offers and advantage, it *isn't* a guarantee of success,
even when Dad is still around, powerful, and popular. For instance, William
Bulger, Mass. senator from a Boston district and president of the Mass.
Senate for years, was easily the most powerful politician in the state, and
incredibly popular in his district. Last year, he left the senate and took
the position of President of the University of Massachusetts, and his son
ran for his old seat, with Dad's endorsement, and Dad's well-oiled
political machine backing him, and Dad's political allies all endorsing
him. Junior lost to a challenger who'd been written off by all the pundits
as having zero chance of defeating The Bulger Machine.
Family connections *help*, but they're not guarantees.
> In Indonesia and the PRC,
> to name but two, it's clear that descendants of the Big Boss (and even
> the medium-big bosses) wield extra power.
I don't enough about Indonesia, but the PRC is an instance of family
connections quite clearly only being worth so much - it's not the sons of
the Long March veterans who are stepping into their shoes.
>
> But except for North Korea, which has reinvented the god-king, I think
> absolute monarchies are becoming quite rare. Inheriting power along
> lines of marriage or descent is not so rare, and if you think about
> it, it's not *always* a bad idea. The bad idea is to insist on doing
> it to the exclusion of other succession arrangements.
Yes, often [but not always] being raised near the center of power means
learning the necessary skills early. If there's also a method for outsiders
to bring new experiences into the political power center, some degree of
inherited or semi-inherited power *can* work beneficially for the society.
Lis Carey
Beth and Richard Treitel
To my surprise and delight, "Elisabeth Carey"
<lis....@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>Beth and Richard Treitel <tre...@wco.com> wrote
>> In Indonesia and the PRC,
>> to name but two, it's clear that descendants of the Big Boss (and even
>> the medium-big bosses) wield extra power.
>
>I don't enough about Indonesia, but the PRC is an instance of family
>connections quite clearly only being worth so much - it's not the sons of
>the Long March veterans who are stepping into their shoes.
Agreed, and some of the "princelings" have got in trouble for using
their family connections. But in Indonesia, several of President
Suharto's children are in charge of billion-dollar companies,
sometimes by virtue of tax breaks or government permits that have not
been available to other, uh, business people.
Michael S. Schiffer
In article <330f7593...@news.wco.com>,
Beth and Richard Treitel <tre...@wco.com> wrote:
>To my surprise and delight, "Elisabeth Carey"
><lis....@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
>>Beth and Richard Treitel <tre...@wco.com> wrote
>>> In Indonesia and the PRC,
>>> to name but two, it's clear that descendants of the Big Boss (and even
>>> the medium-big bosses) wield extra power.
>>
>>I don't enough about Indonesia, but the PRC is an instance of family
>>connections quite clearly only being worth so much - it's not the sons of
>>the Long March veterans who are stepping into their shoes.
>Agreed, and some of the "princelings" have got in trouble for using
>their family connections. But in Indonesia, several of President
>Suharto's children are in charge of billion-dollar companies,
>sometimes by virtue of tax breaks or government permits that have not
>been available to other, uh, business people.
I'm not as skeptical as some about the reappearance of
hereditary power in the future. However, I think it's important to
note that the difference between the hereditary principle practiced by
some societies and plain old nepotism is the fact that it's a
principle. As long as there are filial and other family bonds,
someone with a rich or powerful parent or relative will often have a
leg up. But a high percentage of second or third generation politicos
in the government doesn't necessarily mean that the government is
tending towards hereditary rule, any more than the presidency of John
Quincy Adams heralded an Adams dynasty. As long as the real source of
legitimacy is something besides parentage or family, I wouldn't call a
system hereditary.
In the past, it has certainly been possible to make the
transition from a non-hereditary system to a hereditary one: the
office of Holy Roman Emperor was originally elected by various German
notables, and there was a serious challenge as late as the fifteenth
century (or possibly early sixteenth-- my memory fades) but by its
last few centuries was uncontestably held by the Habsburgs. Earlier,
the evolution of feudalism was characterized by the transformation of
vassals holding fiefs for life in exchange for service, to vassals
sons often being given their fathers' fiefs, to a vassal's heir getting
the fief unless there was some reason he shouldn't, to a vassal's heir
having a legal right to the fief.
On the other hand, there was a more general acceptance of the
idea that one's position in society could be inherited, which in the
West seems to have begun to decline around the Enlightenment. I don't
think it's impossible that this could return, especially if helped
along by actual serious genetic differentiation (i.e. genetic
engineering) or imagined pseudoscientific characteristics (Nazi race
theory could easily have been elaborated into a hierarchy within the
"master race"). I do think that it would require a major cultural
shift, but I don't think that this is impossible (and, in fact, I
think that some major cultural shifts are inevitable once you get a
long enough time stream).
I don't think that the analogy with hunter-gatherer cultures
brought up on this thread is really valid. Hunting and gathering
can't really re-emerge in an area in which agriculture has taken hold.
Both cultures generally want the same land, and agriculture can support
more people, so hunting and gathering gets squeezed out. I'm not sure
that non-hereditary principles of government have the same sort of
overwhelming competitive advantage. Certainly the meritocratic
bureaucracy of China coexisted fairly well with the largely hereditary
office of Emperor-- the Mandate of Heaven might stop favoring a
dynasty, but until then the office would be held strictly within a
family.
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS "I decline utterly to be impartial
Co-author: GURPS Alternate Earths as between the fire brigade and
ms...@tezcat.com the fire."
ms...@midway.uchicago.edu -- Winston Churchill, July 7, 1926
Jo Walton
In article <19970219205...@ladder02.news.aol.com>
pmccu...@aol.com "PMccutc103" writes:
> One other thing. During the twentieth century, we've had a number of
> important technologicial innovations: practical development of the
> internal combustion engine, development of jet airplanes, computers, etc.
> Now, it is possible, that new technologies -- nanotechnology, AI, direct
> human/computer interfacing, somethign we can't even imagine -- will
> further transform our lives. But it's also possible that the rate of
> technological development will slow, and that there won't be new,
> revolutionary developments in our future. We _could_ possibly be stuck
> with incremental improvements of what we've got.
And Vernor Vinge himself is writing a book about what would happen if this
were the case, about Pham Nuwen in the Slow Zone. I think it'll be
fascinating. I don't think any of this is prediction, I think it's all
something else entirely.
--
Jo - - I kissed a kif at Kefk - - J...@kenjo.demon.co.uk
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.kenjo.demon.co.uk/ contains nine of my poems
Browning's "Childe Roland" and six of Graydon's poems.
PMccutc103
esr...@pitt.edu (Evan S Reese) wrote:
>- for me to read. A particularly good/bad example of this is Bujold.
She
>clearly has talent, but does she really believe that centuries in the
>future we're going to have royalty and people who think and talk like
>Victorians?
Three points:
First, Barrayar is supposed to have undergone a reversion to a less
technologically advanced society during which the basic political
structure was formed. One does not have to be a Marxist to think that
feudalism might emerge independently (say in Europe and Japan) in response
to a similar set of circumstances. Similar circumstances obtained during
Barrayar's Time of Isolation thereby leading to a similar political
system. Barrayar's politcial system is atypical of galactic
civiliazations generally. (Even though Cetaganda may have been modelled
on Japan, it is probably best termed a "genocracy.")
I don't know if Bujold actually thinks that "will happen." But she gives
reasons -- pretty good ones, actually -- for Barrayar being the way it is.
Second, social systems can and do change and sometimes older patterns
reemerge. (Some) Greek city-states were democratic, as was the Roman
Republic. The fact that these democracies were replaced by other systems
did not prevent democracy from reemerging in England and then the United
States. Today, monarchism and royalty and the like are pretty much on the
outs; very few monarchs have any real power. I personally say "good
riddance," but such a system could reemerge in the future.
Third, Bujold's novels are not about extrapolating the future. They're
about certain characters: Miles Vorkosigan, his "brother," Cordelia and
Aral. Reading Bujold for the kind of thing you get in Gibson or Vinge is
like reading _Sense and Sensibility_ as a mystery novel. Well, it's a
lousy mystery. So what?
________________________
Pete McCutchen
Nancy Lebovitz
In article <19970219205...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
PMccutc103 <pmccu...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>One other thing. During the twentieth century, we've had a number of
>important technologicial innovations: practical development of the
>internal combustion engine, development of jet airplanes, computers, etc.
>Now, it is possible, that new technologies -- nanotechnology, AI, direct
>human/computer interfacing, somethign we can't even imagine -- will
>further transform our lives. But it's also possible that the rate of
>technological development will slow, and that there won't be new,
>revolutionary developments in our future. We _could_ possibly be stuck
>with incremental improvements of what we've got.
Even that could be a big deal--mere engineering improvements that make
what we have now a lot cheaper would have large effects.
--
Nancy Lebovitz (nan...@universe.digex.net)
October '96 calligraphic button catalogue available by email!
jonathan dale mccall
In <856440...@kenjo.demon.co.uk> J...@kenjo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton)
writes:
>(SNIP)
>And Vernor Vinge himself is writing a book about what would happen if
this
>were the case, about Pham Nuwen in the Slow Zone. I think it'll be
>fascinating. I don't think any of this is prediction, I think it's all
>something else entirely.
>
Indeed. Vinge's universe seems to have not the qualities of
extrapolation, which you might expect from Clarke or Heinlein, but
rather a sense of "subcreation" ala Tolkien. I look forward to future
books with slavering anticipation...
Cordially,
Jonathan
Graydon
PMccutc103 (pmccu...@aol.com) wrote:
: Third, Bujold's novels are not about extrapolating the future. They're
: about certain characters: Miles Vorkosigan, his "brother," Cordelia and
: Aral. Reading Bujold for the kind of thing you get in Gibson or Vinge is
: like reading _Sense and Sensibility_ as a mystery novel. Well, it's a
: lousy mystery. So what?
Heh.
The difference, of course, is that Lois Bujold's backgrounds are inside
the ambit of the possible.
I'm _really_ fussy about background in novels; Bujold is damn near the
*only* sf writer who doesn't make me scream these days. If you start
looking the science in the Vorkosigan books, you have to look pretty hard
to find an outright bogousity, which is _not_ the case in Gibson or Vinge.
--
Uton we hycgan hwaer we ham agen, | saun...@qlink.queensu.ca
ond thonne gethencan hu we thider cumen.
Jorj Strumolo
Elisabeth Carey <lis....@worldnet.att.net> writes:
EC> It's a small point, but there are actually *two* younger Kennedys in
> Congress - Joe, one of Robert Kennedy's sons, represents what was
> previously Jack Kennedy's district in Massachusetts, and Patrick, Ted
> Kennedy's son, represents a [the?] Rhode Island congressional district.
A. Rhode Island has about a million people in it, and has two reps.
-=-
Jorj.S...@chowda.com * Fido 1:323/140 * jo...@wsii.com
Oleg Tolmatcev
On 14 Feb 1997 03:00:32 GMT, Mister Skin < mrs...@mindspring.com>
wrote:
[deleted]
>But there has always been something about "A Fire Upon The Deep" that
>makes it stand out in my mind as being qualitatively different from the
>rest, and I finally have figured out exactly what makes "AFUTD" different.
>
>AFUTD --and the other works of Vinge, particularly The Peace War and
>Marooned in Realtime -- are different because they present a vision of
>the future that is so compelling and so brilliantly realized that I have
>been evaluating every other science fiction novel I read -- indeed, every
>other idea about the future I encounter -- in its light.
[deleted]
>
>In a sense, AFUTD has ruined me for a lot of science fiction, just as the
>movie "Blazing Saddles" ruined me for a lot of Westerns, and "Monty
>Python And The Holy Grail" ruined me for medieval epics. I can't watch
>westerns or medievals without constantly being reminded of some wicked
>bit of drollery from "Saddles" or "Grail" and I can't read science
>fiction without being reminded of how Vinge handled the future in AFUTD.
For me it was K. Eric Drexler's _Engines of Creation_ that ruined
most science fiction books. This book is non-fiction and it is very
well written. His ideas and visions are great and scientifically
correct AFAIK. And it is availaible on the internet.
http://reality.sgi.com/whitaker/EnginesOfCreation/
It is mainly about nanotechnology and its impact on our civilization
but also about evolution, society, singularity, AI, space exploration,
longevity, cryonic, etc, everything which SF readers are interested
in.
There are few exceptions in SF which were not ruined by this book
e.g. works of Iain Banks, Greg Egan, Greg Bear.
William Gibson's works are _no_ exception. I have just finished
_Virtual Light_ and it was typical cyberpunk, there was
nanotechnology, but it made only very limited impact on the society.
This made this book seem unrealistic to me.
David Kennedy
In article <vyk9obm...@csdl.tamu.edu>,
Erich Schneider <er...@bush.cs.tamu.edu> writes:
> rbkl...@aol.com (RBKLEIMAN) writes:
>
>>Novels like" A Fire Upon the Deep"
>>or "Marooned in Realtime" are different - they show us dazzling
>>possibilities that are not reworked versions of our familiar social
>>schemes.
>
> What exactly do you have in mind here? That is, what are the social
> schemes in _AFUTD_ or _MIR_ that aren't reworked etc.?
>
> This isn't a flame, just curiosity - I've read both novels (_MIR_
> quite recently), and while grand things in terms of other types of
> society are hinted at offstage, most of the stuff presented seemed
> rather pedestrian.
Erm... I have to agree. I heard great things about these novels, could
barely finish MIR (I read the omnibus version, cannot remember the
correct name for the duolody) though. It just bored me.
AFUTD was quite good, but let down in several ways. Most of it was
either terribly pedestrian or almost getting to something exciting,
lots of hints that were never fulfilled.
"Close but no cigar"
Tastes Vary (tm) but I cannot say that I'd give AFUTD more than a B
and MIR TPW a C+.
> Banks' Culture and the universe of Delany's _Stars in My Pocket Like
> Grains of Sand_, now, those get me excited.
Agreed, especially Banks. Even when I think parts of his books
are contived, trite or plain silly they still stir me up nicely
and have me excited. Hard to explain why though.
The curious thing is that all the other books mentioned in this
thread are favourites of mine (esp. Vacuum Flowers which I found
after many years a couple of months ago).
--
David Kennedy, Dept. of Pure & Applied Physics, Queen's University of Belfast
Email: D.Ke...@Queens-Belfast.ac.uk | URL: http://star.pst.qub.ac.uk/~dcjk/
Hi! I'm a .signature virus! Copy me into yours and join the fun!
Elisabeth Carey
Jorj Strumolo <jo...@wsii.com> wrote in article
<F1AEF64CA8...@wsii.com>...
> Elisabeth Carey <lis....@worldnet.att.net> writes:
> EC> It's a small point, but there are actually *two* younger Kennedys in
> > Congress - Joe, one of Robert Kennedy's sons, represents what was
> > previously Jack Kennedy's district in Massachusetts, and Patrick, Ted
> > Kennedy's son, represents a [the?] Rhode Island congressional
district.
>
> A. Rhode Island has about a million people in it, and has two reps.
> -=-
Thanks. I wasn't sure on that point, and didn't have the means handy to
check.
Lis Carey
Evan S Reese
Benjamin Chan (szb...@bullwinkle.ucdavis.edu) wrote:
: Have we really escaped royalty? Maybe so if we only look at government.
: But I think the rich-and famous, i.e. the "royalty", wields great
: influence in our society. We're still fascinated by the Kennedys, OJ
: Simpson, Madonna, etc. Their influence is through the mas media rather
: than through public policy. I believe the bottom line is that people just
: are fascinated by other people's lives, especially if those people are
: perceived to have more important lives than their own. In addition, I
: really don't think people like comlete freedom. They don't want infinite
: choices, nor do they want to make too many decisions (who will they blame
: if things go wrong?). In this sense, I don't really see any Great Leap
: for humanity anytime soon nor do I think we've already made this Great
: Leap. But it sure if fun to think about it!
If I'm reading your message correctly, that is, you think there is
some equivalence between media stars and the divine right of kings or the
mandate of heaven, then I see no point in further discussion.
As for complete freedom, we're talking about a matter of degree, not
of total freedom versus slavery - something people in formerly communist
countries I think can appreciate.
Evan S Reese
Erich Schneider (er...@bush.cs.tamu.edu) wrote:
: rbkl...@aol.com (RBKLEIMAN) writes:
: >Novels like" A Fire Upon the Deep"
: >or "Marooned in Realtime" are different - they show us dazzling
: >possibilities that are not reworked versions of our familiar social
: >schemes.
: What exactly do you have in mind here? That is, what are the social
: schemes in _AFUTD_ or _MIR_ that aren't reworked etc.?
: This isn't a flame, just curiosity - I've read both novels (_MIR_
: quite recently), and while grand things in terms of other types of
: society are hinted at offstage, most of the stuff presented seemed
: rather pedestrian.
: Banks' Culture and the universe of Delany's _Stars in My Pocket Like
: Grains of Sand_, now, those get me excited.
I wouldn't argue with that. But Delaney promised us a sequel to
"Stars" and I want it, I want it, I want it! :-)
Now I feel a little better.
Evan S Reese
Wim Lewis (wi...@netcom.com) wrote:
: In article <5e293h$h...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>,
: Evan S Reese <esr...@pitt.edu> wrote:
: >But SF in general has become increasingly hard - even frustrating at times
: >- for me to read. A particularly good/bad example of this is Bujold. She
: >clearly has talent, but does she really believe that centuries in the
: >future we're going to have royalty and people who think and talk like
: >Victorians?
: I think it's just as foolish to believe that cultural progress marches
: unfailingly onward and upward as it is to claim that biological evolution
: does so. Both are random walks, influenced by events major and minute.
: Just because the last few centuries have shown some trend or other
: is no reason to assume that the trend will continue. (Of course, it's
: even worse to assume that culture *won't* change, starting now...)
: But my point is: attitudes recur. Some of them are influenced by
: technological factors. Some aren't, at least not obviously. If I
: were transported a thousand years into the future *or* the past,
: and assuming no pesky singularities or language barriers got in the way,
: I'd expect to find a mishmash of attitudes, some of which I considered
: advanced, some retrograde, some incomprehensible, and some Just Like Home.
: Royalty and hereditary governmental positions are not such odd
: concepts that I wouldn't expect to see them again and again.
We're not talking about a recent - over the last few centuries -
trend, though that is how Vinge characterizes it in MIRT; but an
acceleration going back at least as far as the emergence of our species,
and I think arguably back to the Cambrian explosion. I don't want to
write a long post on this, but just look at those timelines of the history
of Earth from "Cosmos" and a lot of other places. If you think that such
a clearly observable acceleration is suddenly going to come to a
schreeching halt in your Sf future of a century or two hence, I think you
better have a damn compelling reason.
"When an immovable force meets a removable object
it's curtains an' like that."
- Fred Flintstone
Evan S Reese
PMccutc103 (pmccu...@aol.com) wrote:
: "Mr. Tines" <ti...@windsong.demon.co.uk> wrote:
: >
: >There are the occasional gems, like Vinge, Stephenson, Bear and a number
: of
: >sporadic others that just have to be sought out amongst the best-selling
: >Hugo-nominated "Hornblower in Space" drek. So I would say that for me a
: >more appropriate thread title would be "Why vernor Vinge Has Saved SF For
: >Me".
: This is rather typical about what I find irritating about this thread. I
: like Vinge and Stephenson and Gibson and the rest, but I also like other
: stuff as well. However, among the fans of this type of work, there seems
: to be prevelant a rather arrogant attitude about other types of work.
: They seem to be saying: What _I_ like is serious, thoughtful,
: cutting-edge, cool, hard-edged extrapolation, what other people like is
: "'Hornblower in Space' drek."
I think the guy was just expressing his opinion, nan. Chill out. I
think - at the risk of putting words in his mouth - that what he and
others - including myself - are saying is that if an author is going to
claim that his/her story takes place in the future, and we don't see in
that future things that in some cases already exist or are expected (not
by SF speculators but by the heads of corporations who are in a
position to bring them to us in the next five or ten years!) that it
looks frankly stupid. If an author is going to pretend that technology is
going to stop advancing and some people who have thought seriously about
this issue think it will not - at least in a form recognizable to a
twentieth-century human - then said author either doesn't give a damn, or
- by the definition of the above people - hasn't thought seriously about
the possible futures. Imho, if an author wants to emphasize character, I
have no problem with that. Just don't expect me to believe in the setting
or in the events that took place between here and there, unless author is
going to explain how two hundred years from now we have governments, just
as an example, that people all over the world threw off in the twentieth
century, deciding they had had enough of putting some people above
others. (Not to mention seeing how much better other people lived without
them.) Why not just put such character stories in the past, or the
present? At least in the present, the technological background would be
more convincing than in this so-called SF set in the "future".
: The truth is that I rather doubt that the future will be like the future
envisioned by Lois Bujold, but I honestly rather doubt that it will be
: like the future envisioned by Vernor Vinge, either. I enjoy reading Vinge
: because of his weird ideas and settings, Bujold because of the strength of
: her characters. If you read sf for one and not the other, than you are
: likely to enjoy one more than the other. It doesn't mean that the people
: who have different taste than you read "crap"; it just means they're
: looking for different things.
: One other thing. During the twentieth century, we've had a number of
: important technologicial innovations: practical development of the
: internal combustion engine, development of jet airplanes, computers, etc.
: Now, it is possible, that new technologies -- nanotechnology, AI, direct
: human/computer interfacing, somethign we can't even imagine -- will
: further transform our lives. But it's also possible that the rate of
: technological development will slow, and that there won't be new,
: revolutionary developments in our future. We _could_ possibly be stuck
: with incremental improvements of what we've got.
Imho, always Imho, it's possible, but the question is what is more
likely. There are a great many things that are possible but highly
improbable; and the slowdown of technological advance anytime soon is
one of them.
Evan S Reese
line.com:>
Distribution:
Doug Muir (gov....@saipan.com) wrote:
: I think the last couple of posts on hunter-gatherers have shown some
I think you might be right. I think a sufficiently advanced tech
could free people from the need to live in cities since they could live
anywhere they chose. Already we're seeing examples of people able to work
remotely from wherever they choose to live, and more people are living in
multiple locations or nowhere permanently. (I think John Perry Barlowe's
lifestyle as described in the beginning of Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control"
might be a good example). But this would not be the kind of tribal
society with a chief and elders and such of what I believe to be the
traditional concept of a hunter gatherer society; but a much more fluid
multi"tribal" sort of existence perhaps something like that depicted in
"The Diamond Age", but not limited by geography.
My question about authors depicting royalty versus hunter gatherers
was of the type: "If you're going to depict what I believe to be a more
primitive - to me less desirable, usually tyranical - sort of society, why
neglect a kind of lifestyle that lasted much longer?" It was a poke at
the myopia of these authors and also a jibe at the romanticizing of the
past in general.
Vincent Archer
Matt McIrvin (mmci...@world.std.com) wrote:
> It's interesting that people regard _AFUTD_ as such a departure from
> old traditions. I regarded it as, in some ways, a space opera in the
It is.
> ... I got the impression
> that Vinge introduced the Zones so that he could *keep* technology from
> exponentiating everywhere so rapidly that it ate the good story. (I
He did.
If you read the annotated version of AFUtD, you'll see that he made the
zones exactly for this purpose, because he didn't thought one could make
a "realistic" space opera without putting constraints on the *possible*
technology.
But then, the Zones are artificial, so Powers apparently had the same
idea :)
--
Vincent ARCHER Email: arc...@frmug.org
Erich Schneider
esr...@pitt.edu (Evan S Reese) writes:
> : Banks' Culture and the universe of Delany's _Stars in My Pocket Like
> : Grains of Sand_, now, those get me excited.
>
> I wouldn't argue with that. But Delaney promised us a sequel to
> "Stars" and I want it, I want it, I want it! :-)
Find yourself a university library that has copies of the Fall 1996
issue of _The Review of Contemporary Fiction_, which contains a
nice surprise for all good little children.
--
Erich Schneider er...@bush.cs.tamu.edu http://bush.cs.tamu.edu/~erich
Evan S Reese
PMccutc103 (pmccu...@aol.com) wrote:
: esr...@pitt.edu (Evan S Reese) wrote:
: >- for me to read. A particularly good/bad example of this is Bujold.
: She
: >clearly has talent, but does she really believe that centuries in the
: >future we're going to have royalty and people who think and talk like
: >Victorians?
: Three points:
: First, Barrayar is supposed to have undergone a reversion to a less
: technologically advanced society during which the basic political
: structure was formed. One does not have to be a Marxist to think that
: feudalism might emerge independently (say in Europe and Japan) in response
: to a similar set of circumstances. Similar circumstances obtained during
: Barrayar's Time of Isolation thereby leading to a similar political
: system. Barrayar's politcial system is atypical of galactic
: civiliazations generally. (Even though Cetaganda may have been modelled
: on Japan, it is probably best termed a "genocracy.")
: I don't know if Bujold actually thinks that "will happen." But she gives
: reasons -- pretty good ones, actually -- for Barrayar being the way it is.
: Second, social systems can and do change and sometimes older patterns
: reemerge. (Some) Greek city-states were democratic, as was the Roman
: Republic. The fact that these democracies were replaced by other systems
: did not prevent democracy from reemerging in England and then the United
: States. Today, monarchism and royalty and the like are pretty much on the
: outs; very few monarchs have any real power. I personally say "good
: riddance," but such a system could reemerge in the future.
What Greek democracy? Were the women allowed to vote? What about
the slaves? I don't buy your examples. They were democracies only
insofar as South Africa was a democracy during apartheid.
: Third, Bujold's novels are not about extrapolating the future. They're
: about certain characters: Miles Vorkosigan, his "brother," Cordelia and
: Aral. Reading Bujold for the kind of thing you get in Gibson or Vinge is
: like reading _Sense and Sensibility_ as a mystery novel. Well, it's a
: lousy mystery. So what?
Fine, then don't tell me they are set in the future. Say that they
take place "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away".
PMccutc103
saun...@qlink.queensu.ca (Graydon) wrote:
>PMccutc103 (pmccu...@aol.com) wrote:
>: Third, Bujold's novels are not about extrapolating the future. They're
>: about certain characters: Miles Vorkosigan, his "brother," Cordelia and
>: Aral. Reading Bujold for the kind of thing you get in Gibson or Vinge
is
>: like reading _Sense and Sensibility_ as a mystery novel. Well, it's a
>: lousy mystery. So what?
>
>Heh.
I'm not sure what this means in this context, Graydon, but I think we
actually agree with each other on this matter. Ought we not savor the
moment rather than ruining it with such commentary?
>
>The difference, of course, is that Lois Bujold's backgrounds are inside
>the ambit of the possible.
I think it was in this post (it may have been another) where I defended
Bujold against the charge that she was just mindlessly doing "feudalism in
space." That is, Barrayar feels to me like a world with a history, a set
of plausible _reasons_ for being the way it is. (And I agree with the
other poster who said that Cetaganda was less fully realized.)
One critique: her future society has both genetic engineering and at
least some direct neural interface technology. I would have thought that
those technologies would have had a broader impact on the societies
pictured in her novels. Barrayar itself has an excuse, being a rather
backward place, but (for example) Beta Colony would have had such
technologies in full bloom for a long time, and it doesn't "feel" that way
to me, despite the presence of hermaphrodites. But then, maybe it's just
my aversion to successful social democracies talking.
>
>I'm _really_ fussy about background in novels; Bujold is damn near the
>*only* sf writer who doesn't make me scream these days. If you start
>looking the science in the Vorkosigan books, you have to look pretty hard
>to find an outright bogousity, which is _not_ the case in Gibson or
Vinge.
Well, I'm not as fussy as you, probably, so I don't pay that much
attention to bogosities, but I'm certainly not going to argue the point.
Regardless of actual scientific accuracy, Gibson and Vinge have a hard
techno-edgy feel to them that Bujold lacks. (A "lack" that some might
consider a good thing, not a bad one.) I honestly think that this is what
the posters are responding to when they express a preference for Vinge and
Gibson over "Hornblower in Space drek."
And I personally think that Bujold is underestimated by her critics, both
as a prose stylist and as a science fiction writer in the best sense of
the term. She is, in my view, a worthy successor to Asimov and Heinlein
and their ilk. The thing is, a lot of people don't _want_ a successor to
Asimov and Heinlein; they want somebody cool and post-modern, which Bujold
is not.
________________________
Pete McCutchen
Morgoth
Human Analogical Logic?
Human Analytical Logic?
Christopher Davis
ESR> == Evan S Reese <esr...@pitt.edu>
ESR> If you think that such a clearly observable acceleration is suddenly
ESR> going to come to a schreeching halt in your Sf future of a century
ESR> or two hence, I think you better have a damn compelling reason.
Vinge used the Peace Authority to delay the Singularity.
I think it'll be a little more prosaic than that...we're gonna lose ground
instead of progressing while we're stuck fixing all the Y2K bugs.
(Of course, we'll rapidly make up for it. Remember the Dow's dramatic
drop of 1987? It was up 2% on the year, which didn't beat inflation but
meant that the "drop" translated to a small slide over the longer term.
One stock I looked at was up about 16% on the year!)
--
Christopher Davis <c...@kei.com> <URL: http://www.kei.com/homepages/ckd/ >
"I conclude that the CDA is unconstitutional and that the First Amendment
denies Congress the power to regulate protected speech on the Internet."
-- Judge Stewart Dalzell in _ACLU v. Reno_
Christopher Davis
RM> == Richard Melvin <rme...@radm.demon.co.uk>
RM> I don't mean to knock satellites (I used to work for ESA), but
RM> commercially they are just not that big business (probably comparable
RM> to helicopters, and nowhere near aeroplanes, let alone cars).
In terms of first-order effects, true. I don't see satellites for sale
down at the mall.
Second-order and higher effects, though...
- Direct Broadcast Satellite. There are even several brands. It's great.
I can watch a Seattle vs. Cleveland baseball game (like cricket, but the
wicket is replaced by an umpire) despite being in Boston.
- Handheld GPS receivers. For under $200 I can tell where I am within
about 50m anywhere on the surface of the planet with a gadget that takes
4 AA batteries and fits in a pocket.
- Weather prediction. Hurricane Bob, say, had very little effect compared
to what effect it would have had on this area in 1947. Why? We were
far more prepared. This also helps air travel, which is after all
another major change in our technological base.
Not to mention Earth resources stuff (like Landsat) or the good old
commsat (you can even get a pocket combo GPS and satellite email
transceiver from OSC, I hear) or the upcoming cellphone-sat networks like
Iridium.
This stuff has to be taken into account for believability. If you have
some SF set in 2003 and the otherwise well-equipped character is lost in
the trackless sands of the Sahara because he wandered away from the
terraforming station and got lost in a sandstorm, you should probably
explain why he didn't bring along his combination pocket-phone/GPS or at
least why it isn't working.
Johnso...@norloff.com
In <5ekcvg$o...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>, esr...@pitt.edu (Evan S Reese) writes:
>
>line.com:>
>Distribution:
>
>Doug Muir (gov....@saipan.com) wrote:
>: I think the last couple of posts on hunter-gatherers have shown some
>: confusion between "civilization" and "technology".
>
>: Hunter-gatherers are, by definition, not civilized. The latin root of
>: "civilization" is civitas, city; for most of human history
>: "civilization" has meant people living in cities, or at least villages,
>: plus the supporting hinterland. Nomads and hunter-gatherers (two
>: totally different groups) were not "civilized".
>
>: Civilization became confused with technology because it is easier for a
>: city-based culture to develop and maintain higher technology. This
>: confusion has grown worse in the last century or two, as it is more or
>: less impossible for nomads or hunter-gatherers to support a First or
>: Second Industrial Revolution level of tech.
>
>: However, both nomads and hunter-gatherers could and did achieve
>: extremely complex *cultures*. Furthermore, both these lifestyles have
>: attractions that are sadly lacking in "civilized" societies. A
>: very-high-tech society might well turn to nomadism or hunter-gathering.
>: Neither of these themes have received much sfictional treatment --
>: Benford's books, as mentioned, and Poul Anderson's "A Message in
>: Secret", are all that come to mind at the moment.
An interesting sample of high-tech nomadic civilization (in almost the strictest
sense) is the "Cities in Flight" series written by James Blish (I think), about 30 years
ago. Cities develop means to escape tyranny on earth, by leaving it. These
"okie cities" become galactic migrant labor. As I recall, the stories explore a
Spenglerian, long-term view of historical development of civilization.
Michael S. Schiffer
In article <5ekdkk$o...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>,>PMccutc103 (pmccu...@aol.com) wrote:
>: Second, social systems can and do change and sometimes older patterns
>: reemerge. (Some) Greek city-states were democratic, as was the Roman
>: Republic. The fact that these democracies were replaced by other systems
>: did not prevent democracy from reemerging in England and then the United
>: States. Today, monarchism and royalty and the like are pretty much on the
>: outs; very few monarchs have any real power. I personally say "good
>: riddance," but such a system could reemerge in the future.
> What Greek democracy? Were the women allowed to vote? What about
>the slaves? I don't buy your examples. They were democracies only
>insofar as South Africa was a democracy during apartheid.
So they (and South Africa) were republics, by modern
terminology, rather than democracies. The point is that they (and the
Roman Republic) embodied non-hereditary principles of government, and
that hereditary rule made a comeback afterward.
Of course, modern democracies also have broad classes of
people who aren't allowed to vote, of course: children, for example.
Also, in some cases, third generation descendants of non-citizens who
haven't been allowed to be naturalized. What percentage of the
population (or which groups) must be enfranchised before the country
becomes a democracy?
As I noted in another post, China had a meritocratic class of
"gentry" which ran the bureaucracy, coexisting with a hereditary
Imperial system. As far as I know, no one ever suggested making the
Imperial office dependent on the examination system. Alternatives to
hereditary rule do not, apparently, always doom the principle of
heredity.
>: Third, Bujold's novels are not about extrapolating the future. They're
>: about certain characters: Miles Vorkosigan, his "brother," Cordelia and
>: Aral. Reading Bujold for the kind of thing you get in Gibson or Vinge is
>: like reading _Sense and Sensibility_ as a mystery novel. Well, it's a
>: lousy mystery. So what?
> Fine, then don't tell me they are set in the future. Say that they
>take place "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away".
Why is that more plausible? I'd argue that humans with social
systems that humans have had (however unlikely one may consider their
re-emergence) in the future is far more likely than humans having an
interstellar civilization in the distant past or in another galaxy.
Evan S Reese
Christopher Davis (c...@loiosh.kei.com) wrote:
: ESR> == Evan S Reese <esr...@pitt.edu>
: ESR> If you think that such a clearly observable acceleration is suddenly
: ESR> going to come to a schreeching halt in your Sf future of a century
: ESR> or two hence, I think you better have a damn compelling reason.
: Vinge used the Peace Authority to delay the Singularity.
: I think it'll be a little more prosaic than that...we're gonna lose ground
: instead of progressing while we're stuck fixing all the Y2K bugs.
: (Of course, we'll rapidly make up for it. Remember the Dow's dramatic
: drop of 1987? It was up 2% on the year, which didn't beat inflation but
: meant that the "drop" translated to a small slide over the longer term.
: One stock I looked at was up about 16% on the year!)
I think that Microsoft has contributed greatly to the slowing of
technological advance with their chronically late deliveries of new
operating systems. Can you imagine how much further along we would be now
if the first edition of Windows had shipped on schedule?
PMccutc103
esr...@pitt.edu (Evan S Reese) wrote:
>: Second, social systems can and do change and sometimes older patterns
>: reemerge. (Some) Greek city-states were democratic, as was the Roman
>: Republic. The fact that these democracies were replaced by other
systems
>: did not prevent democracy from reemerging in England and then the
United
>: States. Today, monarchism and royalty and the like are pretty much on
the
>: outs; very few monarchs have any real power. I personally say "good
>: riddance," but such a system could reemerge in the future.
>
> What Greek democracy? Were the women allowed to vote? What about
>the slaves? I don't buy your examples. They were democracies only
>insofar as South Africa was a democracy during apartheid.
Don't "buy" them in what sense? I didn't say that Greek City states had
been recapitulated in toto to every last decimal place in modern times.
Nor did I say that I thought they were "good societies." You are of
course correct that Greek City States were not democracies in the fully
modern sense; they had slaves and did not allow women to vote. As in
South Africa, that class of "citizens" was severely restricted. And you
could add that in the United States blacks were not generally allowed to
vote before the Reconstruction Amendments (and even after when those
amendments were often not enforced) and women were not allowed to vote
until the 19th Amendment.
Modern democracies, including the new South Africa differ from ancient
"democracies" in that respect, and, in case you're wondering, I prefer it
our way.
But my point was that the *idea* of democracy was big for a while, lost
currency, and then resurfaced. In the United States, that idea took hold
at first among a limited group (as in South Africa) and encompassed
progressively larger groups of people who counted as citizens. We began
as a society where white males with property were the only people allowed
to vote. Today, people under eighteen, resident aliens, and felons are
about the only people barred from voting.
>
>: Third, Bujold's novels are not about extrapolating the future. They're
>: about certain characters: Miles Vorkosigan, his "brother," Cordelia and
>: Aral. Reading Bujold for the kind of thing you get in Gibson or Vinge
is
>: like reading _Sense and Sensibility_ as a mystery novel. Well, it's a
>: lousy mystery. So what?
>
>
> Fine, then don't tell me they are set in the future. Say that they
>take place "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away".
The whole basis of your critique is that the stories take place in a world
that is supposed to have evolved from our own rather than in a dimension
(Middle Earth? Gor?) not visibly connected to ours? Why should that
matter?
You know, to tell you the honest truth, I think I gave away too much.
Vinge has a lot of handwaving about "the Singularity" and his books have a
cool postmodern feel to them, but I really fail to see how his vision of
the future is more plausible. I like his work, but I don't see him or
Bujold as fortune-tellers. But then, I don't see why fortune-telling is a
science-fiction writer's job.
More importantly, see my first point, which you conveniently ignored:
>: First, Barrayar is supposed to have undergone a reversion to a less
>: technologically advanced society during which the basic political
>: structure was formed. One does not have to be a Marxist to think that
>: feudalism might emerge independently (say in Europe and Japan) in
response
>: to a similar set of circumstances. Similar circumstances obtained
during
>: Barrayar's Time of Isolation thereby leading to a similar political
>: system. Barrayar's politcial system is atypical of galactic
>: civiliazations generally. (Even though Cetaganda may have been
modelled
>: on Japan, it is probably best termed a "genocracy.")
To reiterate: Bujold gives reasons, good reasons, _why_ Barrayar has its
system of government. Obviously, we don't know that things _will happen_
to a planet called Barrayar in that way. But for science-fictional
purposes it's enough that they could.
________________________
Pete McCutchen
HARRY R. ERWIN
If you study the collapse of complex societies, you find a common pattern
is rule by a small caste of decision-makers whose actions in their
self-interest destabilize the society as a whole. Survivability seems to
be associated with a broad franchise.
--
Harry Erwin, Internet: her...@gmu.edu, Web Page: http://osf1.gmu.edu/~herwin
PhD student in computational neuroscience (how bats echolocate)
Lecturer for CS 211 (data structures and advanced C++)
Senior Software Analyst supporting the FAA
Evan S Reese
Michael S. Schiffer (ms...@midway.uchicago.edu) wrote:
: In article <5ekdkk$o...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>,: >PMccutc103 (pmccu...@aol.com) wrote:
: >: Second, social systems can and do change and sometimes older patterns
: >: reemerge. (Some) Greek city-states were democratic, as was the Roman
: >: Republic. The fact that these democracies were replaced by other systems
: >: did not prevent democracy from reemerging in England and then the United
: >: States. Today, monarchism and royalty and the like are pretty much on the
: >: outs; very few monarchs have any real power. I personally say "good
: >: riddance," but such a system could reemerge in the future.
: > What Greek democracy? Were the women allowed to vote? What about
: >the slaves? I don't buy your examples. They were democracies only
: >insofar as South Africa was a democracy during apartheid.
: So they (and South Africa) were republics, by modern
: terminology, rather than democracies. The point is that they (and the
: Roman Republic) embodied non-hereditary principles of government, and
: that hereditary rule made a comeback afterward.
Ok, point conceded about republics. But I would submit that
conditions are very different now. People around the world can see how
others live, and more importantly, how they are treated or mistreated
relative to their neighbors. Technology brings more power to the
individual and thus a relative narrowing in the gap between the
capabilities of the ruler versus the ruled. Also, the realization begins
to dawn among the ruled that the rulers aren't really any smarter, or more
moral than they are; and they begin to wonder why they should let these
people tell them what to do - particularly when their form of government
results in their impoverishment compared to said neighbors. Certainly,
people are willing to tolerate dictatorial kinds of government if it
brings home the bacon, such as Singapore. If royalty can do this in other
contexts, then maybe it will reemerge. But, I think that if the rate of
change continues to accelerate - as I think it will - then no form of
government we have so far come up with will fill the bill, including
representative democracy. (Please note: I'm not advocating anarchy. I'm
merely saying what I think may be likely ahead if we cannot devise some
other form of government that gives people more of a feeling of
participation in the decisions affecting their lives.)
: As I noted in another post, China had a meritocratic class of
: "gentry" which ran the bureaucracy, coexisting with a hereditary
: Imperial system. As far as I know, no one ever suggested making the
: Imperial office dependent on the examination system. Alternatives to
: hereditary rule do not, apparently, always doom the principle of
: heredity.
I have often admired the examination system, and it worked
exceedingly well when the pace of change was measured in centuries or at
least several decades. That's no longer the case.
: >: Third, Bujold's novels are not about extrapolating the future. They're
: >: about certain characters: Miles Vorkosigan, his "brother," Cordelia and
: >: Aral. Reading Bujold for the kind of thing you get in Gibson or Vinge is
: >: like reading _Sense and Sensibility_ as a mystery novel. Well, it's a
: >: lousy mystery. So what?
: > Fine, then don't tell me they are set in the future. Say that they
: >take place "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away".
: Why is that more plausible? I'd argue that humans with social
: systems that humans have had (however unlikely one may consider their
: re-emergence) in the future is far more likely than humans having an
: interstellar civilization in the distant past or in another galaxy.
Sigh. My point - notice the quotes - was that both futures were
equally plausible, and that at least "STar Wars" didn't pretend to be a
future history; which actually makes it more entertaining because it
dosn't pretend to be something that it's not. The difference in
likelihood between the two is minute, imho, compared to the unlikeliness
of either emerging from the present.
Evan S Reese
PMccutc103 (pmccu...@aol.com) wrote:
: esr...@pitt.edu (Evan S Reese) wrote:
: >: Second, social systems can and do change and sometimes older patterns
: >: reemerge. (Some) Greek city-states were democratic, as was the Roman
: >: Republic. The fact that these democracies were replaced by other
: systems
: >: did not prevent democracy from reemerging in England and then the
: United
: >: States. Today, monarchism and royalty and the like are pretty much on
: the
: >: outs; very few monarchs have any real power. I personally say "good
: >: riddance," but such a system could reemerge in the future.
: >
: > What Greek democracy? Were the women allowed to vote? What about
: >the slaves? I don't buy your examples. They were democracies only
: >insofar as South Africa was a democracy during apartheid.
: Don't "buy" them in what sense? I didn't say that Greek City states had
: been recapitulated in toto to every last decimal place in modern times.
: Nor did I say that I thought they were "good societies." You are of
: course correct that Greek City States were not democracies in the fully
: modern sense; they had slaves and did not allow women to vote. As in
: South Africa, that class of "citizens" was severely restricted. And you
: could add that in the United States blacks were not generally allowed to
: vote before the Reconstruction Amendments (and even after when those
: amendments were often not enforced) and women were not allowed to vote
: until the 19th Amendment.
: Modern democracies, including the new South Africa differ from ancient
: "democracies" in that respect, and, in case you're wondering, I prefer it
: our way.
: But my point was that the *idea* of democracy was big for a while, lost
: currency, and then resurfaced. In the United States, that idea took hold
: at first among a limited group (as in South Africa) and encompassed
: progressively larger groups of people who counted as citizens. We began
: as a society where white males with property were the only people allowed
: to vote. Today, people under eighteen, resident aliens, and felons are
: about the only people barred from voting.
Ok, ok, I get the point. I really don't think it matters much for
reasons I posted elsewhere.
: >
: >: Third, Bujold's novels are not about extrapolating the future. They're
: >: about certain characters: Miles Vorkosigan, his "brother," Cordelia and
: >: Aral. Reading Bujold for the kind of thing you get in Gibson or Vinge
: is
: >: like reading _Sense and Sensibility_ as a mystery novel. Well, it's a
: >: lousy mystery. So what?
: >
: >
: > Fine, then don't tell me they are set in the future. Say that they
: >take place "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away".
: The whole basis of your critique is that the stories take place in a world
: that is supposed to have evolved from our own rather than in a dimension
: (Middle Earth? Gor?) not visibly connected to ours? Why should that
: matter?
It matters precisely for that reason. I don't know how to make it
any clearer. If you want to claim in a fantasy that animals have wheels,
fine; but if you want to claim that these animals evolved from, say,
horses, then you need a good reason to make me buy it. Especially when we
already have cars and aircraft.
: You know, to tell you the honest truth, I think I gave
away too much.
: Vinge has a lot of handwaving about "the Singularity" and his books have a
: cool postmodern feel to them, but I really fail to see how his vision of
: the future is more plausible. I like his work, but I don't see him or
: Bujold as fortune-tellers. But then, I don't see why fortune-telling is a
: science-fiction writer's job.
I don't think of them as fortune tellers either; merely that one has
thought about the future and the other has not. Besides, what hand waving
are you referring to? The acceleration he speaks of is observable to
anyone.
: More importantly, see my first point, which you conveniently ignored:
: >: First, Barrayar is supposed to have undergone a reversion to a less
: >: technologically advanced society during which the basic political
: >: structure was formed. One does not have to be a Marxist to think that
: >: feudalism might emerge independently (say in Europe and Japan) in
: response
: >: to a similar set of circumstances. Similar circumstances obtained
: during
: >: Barrayar's Time of Isolation thereby leading to a similar political
: >: system. Barrayar's politcial system is atypical of galactic
: >: civiliazations generally. (Even though Cetaganda may have been
: modelled
: >: on Japan, it is probably best termed a "genocracy.")
: To reiterate: Bujold gives reasons, good reasons, _why_ Barrayar has its
: system of government. Obviously, we don't know that things _will happen_
: to a planet called Barrayar in that way. But for science-fictional
: purposes it's enough that they could.
I didn't ignore your first point, I just thought that it was
unconvincing given that as far as I know Earth itself is "isolated" and it
hasn't slowed us down much yet.
Michael S. Schiffer
In article <5ekn95$q...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>,
Evan S Reese <esr...@pitt.edu> wrote:
>: And I personally think that Bujold is underestimated by her critics, both
>: as a prose stylist and as a science fiction writer in the best sense of
>: the term. She is, in my view, a worthy successor to Asimov and Heinlein
>: and their ilk. The thing is, a lot of people don't _want_ a successor to
>: Asimov and Heinlein; they want somebody cool and post-modern, which Bujold
>: is not.
> I wonder how Heinlein would feel being lumped in with an author with
>royalty as a prominent feature of her future history?
I suspect that the author of _Double Star_ (Earth and much of
the solar system a parliamentary monarchy under the House of Orange),
_Citizen of the Galaxy_ (I seem to recall that the planet on which
Thorby was a slave was a monarchy as well as a caste society), and
_Friday_ (the final part of which touches on the court intrigue of a
monarchical planet) wouldn't especially mind.
Michael Kozlowski
In article <E5yrw...@midway.uchicago.edu>,
>> What Greek democracy? Were the women allowed to vote? What about
>>the slaves? I don't buy your examples. They were democracies only
>>insofar as South Africa was a democracy during apartheid.
>
> So they (and South Africa) were republics, by modern
>terminology, rather than democracies.
Nope. A republic is when the people elect representatives to govern them.
Greece was about as pure a democracy as has been seen in some time, and
forgoed (forwent?) the whole elected representative bit.
"Limited democracy" may be a more useful description.
--
Michael Kozlowski mkoz...@ssc.wisc.edu
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~mlk/index.html
"Weasels, weasels everywhere; Nor any drop to drink!"
Christopher Davis
ESR> == Evan S Reese <esr...@pitt.edu>
ESR> I wonder how Heinlein would feel being lumped in with an author with
ESR> royalty as a prominent feature of her future history?
_Double Star_ features royalty in a pretty positive light, no?
Michael S. Schiffer
In article <5eksud$q...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>,
>: So they (and South Africa) were republics, by modern
>: terminology, rather than democracies. The point is that they (and the
>: Roman Republic) embodied non-hereditary principles of government, and
>: that hereditary rule made a comeback afterward.
> Ok, point conceded about republics. But I would submit that
>conditions are very different now. People around the world can see how
>others live, and more importantly, how they are treated or mistreated
>relative to their neighbors. Technology brings more power to the
>individual and thus a relative narrowing in the gap between the
>capabilities of the ruler versus the ruled.
Not always, and not inevitably. The invention of agriculture,
for example, made possible much more stratified societies than
hunting/gathering or pastoralism seem to support. It's unclear
whether information technology will ultimately have an equalizing
effect or will stratify people according to education and aptitude--
both of which can be strongly affected by childhood environment (and
hence largely by heredity if not by genetics). Again, I don't think
hereditary rule is a likely near-term develppment, but the
consequences of future technologies depends on the technologies
available.
Also, the realization begins
>to dawn among the ruled that the rulers aren't really any smarter, or more
>moral than they are; and they begin to wonder why they should let these
>people tell them what to do - particularly when their form of government
>results in their impoverishment compared to said neighbors.
I really don't think that that realization was that long in
coming. There was never much pretence that medieval nobles, say, were
highly intelligent, nor was that the basis of their legal status. As
for morality, that was vested in saints, not noblemen, and it was rare
to see the two combined in popular imagery. The hereditary principle
seems to be fairly persuasive under a variety of circumstances, and
in part reflects a view of the world in which people can be said to
have proper places. That view isn't widespread right now, and I'm not
overly sympathetic to it, but it has been widespread in history. I
don't know that it's impossible that this view could come back. Note
also that in Bujold's world, there are clear signs that contact with
Galactic culture _is_ resulting in people questioning the place of the
nobility. It's just that they haven't managed to get together and
_do_ anything about it yet.
Certainly,
>people are willing to tolerate dictatorial kinds of government if it
>brings home the bacon, such as Singapore. If royalty can do this in other
>contexts, then maybe it will reemerge. But, I think that if the rate of
>change continues to accelerate - as I think it will - then no form of
>government we have so far come up with will fill the bill, including
>representative democracy. (Please note: I'm not advocating anarchy. I'm
>merely saying what I think may be likely ahead if we cannot devise some
>other form of government that gives people more of a feeling of
>participation in the decisions affecting their lives.)
I don't disagree that predicting forms of government for the
future is difficult, and a plausible new alternative is interesting to
see. (Bujold actually tries this in _Cetaganda_, though I'm not sure
that I think her idea is that plausible.) But I don't think it's
inconceivable that, under the right historical circumstances old
forms, modified of coursem could reemerge, just as the
U.S. government was modeled on ancient republics.
I grant that Bujold's future is in some ways rather timid.
But it's hard to know when a writer is being too timid and when too
bold: Heinlein's future would have had us on Mars and Venus by now,
but still using slipsticks and giant electronic calculators. Even the
near term is obviously very hard to get right-- even in terms of what
will be the important changes.
I like Vinge a lot as well, and I think he does a better job
of technological speculation-- but I think his political speculation
is, if anything, less plausible than Bujold's. (I just don't believe
in the stability of the society in "The Ungoverned".) But in the end,
I think that it's a matter of what sorts of stories one likes, rather
than one being good sf and the other bad. I do think that in a
thousand years technology will have advanced further than Bujold shows
and that this will have social consequences different from what she
shows-- but I could be wrong. And, in any case the _Foundation_
trilogy is great, even if I don't think a Galactic Empire is at all
likely. I don't have to think Barrayar is likely to find the stories
set there interesting.
>: As I noted in another post, China had a meritocratic class of
>: "gentry" which ran the bureaucracy, coexisting with a hereditary
>: Imperial system. As far as I know, no one ever suggested making the
>: Imperial office dependent on the examination system. Alternatives to
>: hereditary rule do not, apparently, always doom the principle of
>: heredity.
> I have often admired the examination system, and it worked
>exceedingly well when the pace of change was measured in centuries or at
>least several decades. That's no longer the case.
Of course, the pace of technological change was often a matter
of punctuated equilibrium-- when it came, a system would adapt, change
radically, or collapse. Right now, it's not clear what systems are
really robust under conditions of continuous, expected technological
change, but lots of systems haven't yet been tried under those
conditions.
>: >: Third, Bujold's novels are not about extrapolating the future. They're
>: >: about certain characters: Miles Vorkosigan, his "brother," Cordelia and
>: >: Aral. Reading Bujold for the kind of thing you get in Gibson or Vinge is
>: >: like reading _Sense and Sensibility_ as a mystery novel. Well, it's a
>: >: lousy mystery. So what?
>: > Fine, then don't tell me they are set in the future. Say that they
>: >take place "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away".
>: Why is that more plausible? I'd argue that humans with social
>: systems that humans have had (however unlikely one may consider their
>: re-emergence) in the future is far more likely than humans having an
>: interstellar civilization in the distant past or in another galaxy.
> Sigh. My point - notice the quotes - was that both futures were
>equally plausible, and that at least "STar Wars" didn't pretend to be a
>future history; which actually makes it more entertaining because it
>dosn't pretend to be something that it's not. The difference in
>likelihood between the two is minute, imho, compared to the unlikeliness
>of either emerging from the present.
I did catch the reference. :-) But my point was that I think
that one is infinitely more likely than the other-- the first has a
probability that's essentially zero, and is well suited for fairy
tales. (I don't mean that derogatorily-- I _like_ fairy tales, and I
think _Star Wars_ is a neat one.) The other is unlikely, but not, I
think, impossible-- and whatever one wants to say, the Vorkosigan
books aren't fairy tales. Obviously, I don't think they're as
implausible as you do, and I don't think their unlikelihood is a fatal
flaw. But if they're not your cup of tea, no more need (or can) be
said.
Evan S Reese
Christopher Davis (c...@loiosh.kei.com) wrote:
: ESR> == Evan S Reese <esr...@pitt.edu>
: ESR> I wonder how Heinlein would feel being lumped in with an author with
: ESR> royalty as a prominent feature of her future history?
: _Double Star_ features royalty in a pretty positive light, no?
Okay, I've already read a few messages telling me I blew it. No
more, I give in. It was an off the cuff remark for which I will no doubt
pay heavily.
Matt McIrvin
In article <5edsdu$9...@camel4.mindspring.com>, Mister Skin <
mrs...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> The people who believe in the Singularity are not following a vague
> notion like "cultural progress." They are looking at a mathematical
> projection of trends in the rate of increase in human knowledge, changes
> in the rate of change itself, etc. These trends tend to indicate that
> about thirty years in the future, the rates will stop rising gradually
> and turn into a jet-propelled dash into incomprehensibility. The shape of
> such a curve -- a curve that rises gradually at first, but at a steadily
> progressing rate, turns ever more sharply upward until it hits vertical,
> or thereabouts -- is called asymptotic.
>
> Those who don't believe in the Singularity assume a sigmoid curve -- one
> which turns upward as the asymptotic curve does, but instead of gong
> vertical, levels off and returns to its former gradual progression.
If you have a curve with an increasing slope (especially if it has the
fuzz inherent in any real-world variable), there are many ways to
extrapolate it other than a sigmoid or a curve with a vertical asymptote.
It could be exponential, mounting at ever-increasing speed but never
reaching a vertical asymptote. It could become linear or polynomial. It
could even bend over and *drop*, as in many gloomy scenarios involving
depletion of natural resources or nuclear apocalypse. I don't think anyone
believes that one can extrapolate the curve with any accuracy using, say,
analytic continuation.
It seems to me that any extrapolation involves assumptions that have
nothing to do with the data. It reminds me of the terrifying calculation
made in the sixties that human population would reach infinity by the year
2000, based on fitting a curve with a vertical asymptote to the data. The
conclusion was that some sort of total disaster had to happen before then.
Some years later it was reported that the trend was actually *above* that
curve-- which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the
asymptote would actually arrive. A curve with a vertical asymptote is
simply a stupid thing to fit to human population; exponential or sigmoid
curves make more sense based on theories of population dynamics, and, of
course, there are other, more complicated possibilities.
As for technological progress, I don't think that this is as easy a thing
to quantify as population. There are all sorts of measures. For some of
them (transportation speeds available to consumers) progress seems to have
leveled off completely decades ago. In others (computer processor speeds
available to consumers) there seems to be a continuing exponential
explosion-- but even there, it's unclear that a vertical *asymptote* might
be approaching, and given technologies always have physical limits that
have to be overcome by switching to new techniques, which could vary the
nature of the curve in an unexpected way.
--
My home page: http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/
Sci.physics FAQ: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/faq.html
gram
Evan S Reese (esr...@pitt.edu) wrote:
:
: I think that Microsoft has contributed greatly to the slowing of
: technological advance with their chronically late deliveries of new
: operating systems. Can you imagine how much further along we would be now
: if the first edition of Windows had shipped on schedule?
How much further along would we be now if the first edition of Windows
(and the Mac interface it apes) had never shipped at all, so people had
to be able to read to profitably use a computer?
Ward Griffiths (not a fan of gooey interfaces except at meals)
--
Q: What do you call a christian who accidently read the bible with his
brain turned on? A: An atheist
Daniel Sullivan
mkoz...@guy.ssc.wisc.edu (Michael Kozlowski) wrote:
>Greece was about as pure a democracy as has been seen in some time, and
>forgoed (forwent?) the whole elected representative bit.
"forwent" is correct. go:went:gone :: forgo:forwent:forgone
--Patrick Sullivan
Evan S Reese
PMccutc103 (pmccu...@aol.com) wrote:
: saun...@qlink.queensu.ca (Graydon) wrote:
: >PMccutc103 (pmccu...@aol.com) wrote:
: >: Third, Bujold's novels are not about extrapolating the future. They're
: >: about certain characters: Miles Vorkosigan, his "brother," Cordelia and
: >: Aral. Reading Bujold for the kind of thing you get in Gibson or Vinge
: is
: >: like reading _Sense and Sensibility_ as a mystery novel. Well, it's a
: >: lousy mystery. So what?
: >
: >Heh.
: I'm not sure what this means in this context, Graydon, but I think we
: actually agree with each other on this matter. Ought we not savor the
: moment rather than ruining it with such commentary?
: >
: >The difference, of course, is that Lois Bujold's backgrounds are inside
: >the ambit of the possible.
: I think it was in this post (it may have been another) where I defended
: Bujold against the charge that she was just mindlessly doing "feudalism in
: space." That is, Barrayar feels to me like a world with a history, a set
: of plausible _reasons_ for being the way it is. (And I agree with the
: other poster who said that Cetaganda was less fully realized.)
: One critique: her future society has both genetic engineering and at
: least some direct neural interface technology. I would have thought that
: those technologies would have had a broader impact on the societies
: pictured in her novels. Barrayar itself has an excuse, being a rather
: backward place, but (for example) Beta Colony would have had such
: technologies in full bloom for a long time, and it doesn't "feel" that way
: to me, despite the presence of hermaphrodites. But then, maybe it's just
: my aversion to successful social democracies talking.
: >
: >I'm _really_ fussy about background in novels; Bujold is damn near the
: >*only* sf writer who doesn't make me scream these days. If you start
: >looking the science in the Vorkosigan books, you have to look pretty hard
: >to find an outright bogousity, which is _not_ the case in Gibson or
: Vinge.
I won't argue with you about Gibson, but I would like an example from
Vinge. Not that it really matters; it is irrevelant to the subject under
discussion in this thread. (Bobbles have nothing to do with the concept
of the singularity, just to head off posts on that subject.)
: Well, I'm not as fussy as you, probably, so I don't pay
that much
: attention to bogosities, but I'm certainly not going to argue the point.
: Regardless of actual scientific accuracy, Gibson and Vinge have a hard
: techno-edgy feel to them that Bujold lacks. (A "lack" that some might
: consider a good thing, not a bad one.) I honestly think that this is what
: the posters are responding to when they express a preference for Vinge and
: Gibson over "Hornblower in Space drek."
It's not about the "coolness" or lack thereof of a certain book so
much as - especially in the case of Vinge - a view of the possible future
that resonates with me and others who have reached certain conclusions
based on observation of history.
Frankly, I'm tired of this thread; since I never claimed to be able
to prove my opinion as to the future, and am not really interested in
convincing others. Because even if I am wrong, the future will be a very
interesting place; and I'm not really interested in arguing about it.
: And I personally think that Bujold is underestimated by her critics, both
: as a prose stylist and as a science fiction writer in the best sense of
: the term. She is, in my view, a worthy successor to Asimov and Heinlein
: and their ilk. The thing is, a lot of people don't _want_ a successor to
: Asimov and Heinlein; they want somebody cool and post-modern, which Bujold
: is not.
I wonder how Heinlein would feel being lumped in with an author with
John Moreno
Michael Kozlowski <mkoz...@guy.ssc.wisc.edu> wrote:
] In article <E5yrw...@midway.uchicago.edu>,
] Michael S. Schiffer <ms...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
] >Evan S Reese <esr...@pitt.edu> wrote:
]
] >> What Greek democracy? Were the women allowed to vote? What
] >>about the slaves? I don't buy your examples. They were
] >>democraciesonly insofar as South Africa was a democracy during
] >>apartheid.
] >
] > So they (and South Africa) were republics, by modern
] >terminology, rather than democracies.
]
] Nope. A republic is when the people elect representatives to govern
] them. Greece was about as pure a democracy as has been seen in some
] time, and forgoed (forwent?) the whole elected representative bit.
]
] "Limited democracy" may be a more useful description.
Or you could say that their definition of competent adults was a little
different from ours - we don't allow severely retarded or certifiably
insane people vote either, does that mean we should be called a limited
democracy/republic?
Of course *our* judgment is much more logical and fair.
--
John Moreno
Bill Woods
Evan S Reese wrote:
>
>
> I wonder how Heinlein would feel being lumped in with an author with
> royalty as a prominent feature of her future history?
As has been noted, DOUBLE STAR and GLORY ROAD tahe a positive attitude
towards monarchy. And consider Prof. de la Paz's view: "In each age it
is necessary to adapt to the popular mythology. At one time Kings were
anointed by Diety, so the problem was to see to it that Diety anointed
the right candidate. In this age the myth is 'the will of the people'
.... but the problem changes only superficially."
--
Bill Woods
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program"
-Larry Niven
Mr. Tines
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
On 21 Feb 1997 14:32:41 GMT, in <5ekbm9$o...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>
esr...@pitt.edu (Evan S Reese) wrote.....
> PMccutc103 (pmccu...@aol.com) wrote:
> : "Mr. Tines" <ti...@windsong.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> : >
> : >There are the occasional gems, like Vinge, Stephenson, Bear and a
number
> : of
For some strange reason I completely forgot to add Greg Egan to the list
above.
> : >sporadic others that just have to be sought out amongst the
best-selling
> : >Hugo-nominated "Hornblower in Space" drek. So I would say that for me
a
> : >more appropriate thread title would be "Why Vernor Vinge Has Saved SF
For
> : >Me".
>
> : This is rather typical about what I find irritating about this thread.
I
> : like Vinge and Stephenson and Gibson and the rest, but I also like
other
> : stuff as well. However, among the fans of this type of work, there
seems
> : to be prevelant a rather arrogant attitude about other types of work.
> : They seem to be saying: What _I_ like is serious, thoughtful,
> : cutting-edge, cool, hard-edged extrapolation, what other people like is
> : "'Hornblower in Space' drek."
The point is, if I want to read Hornblower or Hornblower-alikes, I can
wander away from the SF shelves in the bookstore to those with the
mainstream material on - and often do, to the point where historical novels
have probably edged out whodunnits as my major fallback genre (complicated
only by the counting of historical whodunnits). With the historical novel,
I can get the pomp and squalor, titled nobility, swordplay and what have
you, without worrying about strange gaps in the technology (or the quaint
and nauseating habits of most modern sword&magic fantasy).
And if I want to read SF in the grand old tradition of Asimov, Clarke and
Heinlein (who roughly defined SF when I first encountered the genre), well
I can always read the cream of their works. SF is a genre whose main
raison d'etre is that combination of novelty and 'gosh wow!' that forms a
sense of wonder. While acknowledging the verity of Sturgeon's Law, I would
rather see more laudable failures that attempted to be true to this ideal
instead of safe and formulaic books that fall under the "There are
spaceships in it, so it must be SF" heading.
So if someone wants to write a Hornblower-alike, then by all means let them
set it at the height of the Age of Sail, doing the modicum of research that
is required; rather than dollying it up with things like spaceships that
for some reason have to engage each other in broadsides (I forget which of
the recent military SF series had that particular feature in - I just
remember it from a conversation I had with a mil-SF buff in the last couple
of years), and foregoing the historical details.
> I think the guy was just expressing his opinion, nan. Chill out. I
> think - at the risk of putting words in his mouth - that what he and
> others - including myself - are saying is that if an author is going to
> claim that his/her story takes place in the future, and we don't see in
> that future things that in some cases already exist or are expected (not
> by SF speculators but by the heads of corporations who are in a
> position to bring them to us in the next five or ten years!) that it
> looks frankly stupid. If an author is going to pretend that technology is
Indeed I was expressing my opinion - and one of the purposes of this nym is
to give me a forum to express them in brusque terms.
And what you have written above is really at the heart of my
dissatisfaction with "Spaceship Formula" writing. I can forgive authors
not picking up what is in the issue of Scientific American current when I
pick up the paperback of the novel, or even what was in an issue two years
ago. But too many writers in the late 1990s don't even give their worlds
the cheap and easy bits for a starfaring civilization to deploy that would
give late 1980s - or even late 1960s - technology infrastructure (vide the
discussions about satellite applications elsewhere in this thread; or my
own rants here in r.a.sf.w about a year back concerning _The Reality
Dysfunction_ or in r.g.f.m last summer in the "Blue Planet" thread).
[stuff which I'm in general agreement with snipped]
> : One other thing. During the twentieth century, we've had a number of
> : important technologicial innovations: practical development of the
> : internal combustion engine, development of jet airplanes, computers,
etc.
> : Now, it is possible, that new technologies -- nanotechnology, AI,
direct
> : human/computer interfacing, somethign we can't even imagine -- will
> : further transform our lives. But it's also possible that the rate of
> : technological development will slow, and that there won't be new,
> : revolutionary developments in our future. We _could_ possibly be stuck
> : with incremental improvements of what we've got.
Even in the pessimistic scenario, you still have to deal with all the
currently in-prototype technology - smart environments, Personal Area
Networks, and indeed even neurone-silicon interfacing are all happening
(and that's just considering one very narrow field of endeavour). Closer
to the full roll-out are things like widespread, strongly encrypted,
untraceable anonymous electronic funds transfer (i.e. the whole economy
goes 'black'), a technology whose problems are more with the inertia of the
current installed base than anything else.
All of these have the potential to transform our lives, despite being
merely incremental improvements on what we already have. And there are
other such miracles and wonders lurking in the current news for anyone who
has eyes to see.
So even if we are in the Slow Zone, I still feel that a time as close as
the late 2010s will be very different from today : at least as different as
the late 70s are from today, and probably more so.
- --
_______ PGP fingerprint: BC 01 55 27 B4 93 7C 9B 3C 54 D1 B7 24 8C 08 BC
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Mr. Tines
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On Wed, 19 Feb 1997 05:49:39 GMT, in <erkyrathE...@netcom.com>
erky...@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin) wrote.....
> I've had a lingering sense of irony around this whole thread... stemming,
> I think, from the fact that AFUTD seems *dated* already. Not the overall
> vision, but the Usenet-parallel schtick.
>
> Because, of course, it's an imitation of *1990-1991* Usenet -- which has
> *already* changed immensely in tone and content. (Death of the Net
> predicted in hindsight! Retrospective at 11.)
Remember - the future is disposable.
At least AFUTD reflected some high-points of the real world technology at
the time of writing. This makes it more up to date of its time than almost
everything else, and still ahead of a lot of stuff written in the past five
years.
- --
_______ PGP fingerprint: BC 01 55 27 B4 93 7C 9B 3C 54 D1 B7 24 8C 08 BC
/_ __(_)__ ___ ___ (also mr_tines at geocities-dot-com) key on keyservers
/ / / / _ \/ -_|_-< http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/1394
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Graydon
PMccutc103 (pmccu...@aol.com) wrote:
: saun...@qlink.queensu.ca (Graydon) wrote:
: I'm not sure what this means in this context, Graydon, but I think we
: actually agree with each other on this matter. Ought we not savor the
: moment rather than ruining it with such commentary?
I was trying with excessive subtelty to point out that Bujold's
backgrounds are _much better_ tech extrapolation than Vinge's, lacking
Vinge's deification of exponential progress.
: >The difference, of course, is that Lois Bujold's backgrounds are inside
: >the ambit of the possible.
:
: I think it was in this post (it may have been another) where I defended
: Bujold against the charge that she was just mindlessly doing "feudalism in
: space." That is, Barrayar feels to me like a world with a history, a set
: of plausible _reasons_ for being the way it is. (And I agree with the
: other poster who said that Cetaganda was less fully realized.)
Well, yeah, one book versus six novels and three novellas. Not a
surprise. The Cetagandans aren't in any way _impossible_, though.
: One critique: her future society has both genetic engineering and at
: least some direct neural interface technology. I would have thought that
: those technologies would have had a broader impact on the societies
: pictured in her novels. Barrayar itself has an excuse, being a rather
: backward place, but (for example) Beta Colony would have had such
: technologies in full bloom for a long time, and it doesn't "feel" that way
: to me, despite the presence of hermaphrodites. But then, maybe it's just
: my aversion to successful social democracies talking.
To a first approximation, no one on Beta has any congenital defects.
There are no crazy, violent people there; more than half the population
was grown in a vat. They have a compltely bizarre economy - _how_ do you
have universal solvency and the hardest currency in the wormhole nexus and
any sort of representative democracy? (leading me to suspect that they
don't have a representative democracy :) - and no one from Beta eats meat
that came from an animal, it came from a vat, too.
Neural interface technology and genetic engineering are both _very_
expensive; significantly expensive even by Betan standards.
: And I personally think that Bujold is underestimated by her critics, both
: as a prose stylist and as a science fiction writer in the best sense of
: the term. She is, in my view, a worthy successor to Asimov and Heinlein
Eric Frank Russell, I think, but this is not a large matter.
: and their ilk. The thing is, a lot of people don't _want_ a successor to
: Asimov and Heinlein; they want somebody cool and post-modern, which Bujold
: is not.
The problem with post-modernism is that you like it more if you're
innumerate or illiterate; both is best.
--
Uton we hycgan hwaer we ham agen, | saun...@qlink.queensu.ca
ond thonne gethencan hu we thider cumen.
Mister Skin
In article <5eknl7$q...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> Evan S Reese,
esr...@pitt.edu writes:
> I think that Microsoft has contributed greatly to the slowing of
>technological advance with their chronically late deliveries of new
>operating systems. Can you imagine how much further along we would be now
>if the first edition of Windows had shipped on schedule?
Actually, Apple is responsible for slowing down technological advance.
They invented an incredible operating system, then marketed it with such
incredible stupidity that they gave the market to DOS machines and the
cludgy Windows machines that are still based on DOS. They also kept
PageMaker off the Amiga, another machine with a promising platform and
good architecture, and when IT was badly marketed, it became a Video
Toaster accessory. Shame.
Graydon
: : >*only* sf writer who doesn't make me scream these days. If you start
: : >looking the science in the Vorkosigan books, you have to look pretty hard
: : >to find an outright bogousity, which is _not_ the case in Gibson or
: : Vinge.
:
: I won't argue with you about Gibson, but I would like an example from
: Vinge. Not that it really matters; it is irrevelant to the subject under
: discussion in this thread. (Bobbles have nothing to do with the concept
: of the singularity, just to head off posts on that subject.)
Bobbles are the one impossibility, sure. (They're screamingly bogus,
too.)
Lessee... ambient temperature imagining IR sensors the size of marbles;
brain function replacement computer chips in the current vernacular sense;
nanomachinery with no visible energy source; a working anarchistic
_industrial_ society with no common education system or other cohesive
social coercion mechanism to support/create it; use of large diamonds as
high speed cutters; someone getting half their ship chewed off by
antimatter and living (the gamma got there before any possible signalling
mechanism turned the bobble on); I'm fairly sure there are more, that's
going off n year old memories of :The Peace War: and :Marooned in Real
Time:.
: : and their ilk. The thing is, a lot of people don't _want_ a successor to
: : Asimov and Heinlein; they want somebody cool and post-modern, which Bujold
: : is not.
: I wonder how Heinlein would feel being lumped in with an author with
: royalty as a prominent feature of her future history?
:Double Star:; the function of the Chairman/vice-Chairman of the Howard
families; :Glory Road:.
Doubt it would fash him much.
Bill MacArthur
nan...@universe.digex.net (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
>In article <19970219205...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
>PMccutc103 <pmccu...@aol.com> wrote:
>>
>>One other thing. During the twentieth century, we've had a number of
>>important technologicial innovations: practical development of the
>>internal combustion engine, development of jet airplanes, computers, etc.
>>Now, it is possible, that new technologies -- nanotechnology, AI, direct
>>human/computer interfacing, somethign we can't even imagine -- will
>>further transform our lives. But it's also possible that the rate of
>>technological development will slow, and that there won't be new,
>>revolutionary developments in our future. We _could_ possibly be stuck
>>with incremental improvements of what we've got.
>
>what we have now a lot cheaper would have large effects.
Good point, Nancy. For example just look at what has happen with the PCs
we are all using. The basic chips are unchanged but they have become
smaller and cheaper over the last few years. We all have vastly more
computing power sitting on our desks than most corporate
mainframe computers had a couple of decades back.
IMO technological developments could slow because of two factors:
1) Inadequate education and funding thereof and/or
2) We asymptotically approach the limit of what's possible due to what
nature has to offer.
The first case scares me more than the second over the next decades or
centuries.
Bill MacArthur
D.Ke...@qub.ac.uk (David Kennedy) wrote:
>AFUTD was quite good, but let down in several ways. Most of it was
>either terribly pedestrian or almost getting to something exciting,
>lots of hints that were never fulfilled.
>
I won't comment about the pedestrian assessment but IMO the hints that
were never fulfilled were what made AFUTD classic. Novels that wrap
everything up neatly with all the mysteries solved strike me as rather
juvenile. Great artists often give you the impression that they are
holding something back; they aren't giving you everything they've got.
Vinge gives this impression in AFUTD.
>> Banks' Culture and the universe of Delany's _Stars in My Pocket Like
>> Grains of Sand_, now, those get me excited.
>
>Agreed, especially Banks. Even when I think parts of his books
>are contived, trite or plain silly they still stir me up nicely
>and have me excited. Hard to explain why though.
>
I've come to like Banks since being introduced to him but I can't
understand the reference to Delany in the earlier post. I wanted to like
his stuff and gave it a decent try but it has struck me as artsy and
boring. Delany's off my list.
Bill MacArthur
>
>: Have we really escaped royalty? Maybe so if we only look at government.
>: But I think the rich-and famous, i.e. the "royalty", wields great
>: influence in our society. We're still fascinated by the Kennedys, OJ
>: Simpson, Madonna, etc. Their influence is through the mas media rather
>: than through public policy. I believe the bottom line is that people just
>: are fascinated by other people's lives, especially if those people are
>: perceived to have more important lives than their own. In addition, I
>: really don't think people like comlete freedom. They don't want infinite
>: choices, nor do they want to make too many decisions (who will they blame
>: if things go wrong?). In this sense, I don't really see any Great Leap
>: for humanity anytime soon nor do I think we've already made this Great
>: Leap. But it sure if fun to think about it!
>
> If I'm reading your message correctly, that is, you think there is
>some equivalence between media stars and the divine right of kings or the
>mandate of heaven, then I see no point in further discussion.
>
The divine right of kings et al has been absent from at least the British
Monarchy since 1688, (The Glorious Revolution, I believe). Since then
Monarchs have ruled based on the will of the people. All European
monarchies are now constitutional.
I think equating media stars with royalty is an indication of a class
structure which keeps reinventing itself. The 80s and 90s have shown us
that the two class structures are compatible. Eg. Princess Diana and
Sarah Ferguson are both media stars. Prior to that media star Grace
Kelly became a Princess. I think Benjamin had some good points.
Nancy Lebovitz
In article <E6066...@news.uwindsor.ca>,
Bill MacArthur <bil...@uwindsor.ca> wrote:
>nan...@universe.digex.net (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
>
>IMO technological developments could slow because of two factors:
>1) Inadequate education and funding thereof and/or
>2) We asymptotically approach the limit of what's possible due to what
>nature has to offer.
>
>The first case scares me more than the second over the next decades or
>centuries.
>
two--things get so complicated that it's impossible to identify the
useful tweaks or changes. What if the year 2000 problem is merely
the first and easiest roadblock?
--
Nancy Lebovitz (nan...@universe.digex.net)
October '96 calligraphic button catalogue available by email!
Del Cotter
On Fri, 21 Feb 1997, in rec.arts.sf.written
"Michael S. Schiffer" <ms...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote
>>to dawn among the ruled that the rulers aren't really any smarter, or more
>>moral than they are; and they begin to wonder why they should let these
>>people tell them what to do - particularly when their form of government
>>results in their impoverishment compared to said neighbors.
>
> I really don't think that that realization was that long in
>coming. There was never much pretence that medieval nobles, say, were
>highly intelligent, nor was that the basis of their legal status.
Not legal, no, but the assumption has always been that the wealthy are
better people than the poor. Consider the original and present meaning
of the words gentle, noble, villainous and churlish.
--
Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk
The US Tour Sat 23rd August - Sun 14th September 1997
Houston Austin SanAntonio Phoenix Flagstaff GrandCanyon LakeMead LasVegas
DeathValley Yosemite NapaValley SanFrancisco TouristTipsGratefullyReceived