Forgiveness

Some of the best fiction ever written in SF or anywhere else has been about redemption. The Stars My Destination-- which is on my short list for the greatest SF novel ever written-- is about a man who pursues revenge only to have it backfire on him and make him re-examine what he's doing.

Redemption is not possible without the concept of forgiveness and modern western society has Christianity to thank for that.

Now, I am not a Christian. I am an atheist. Religion is essentially an emotional decision and theism never appealed to me. But that's not to say there's not good stuff there.

So I'm going to tackle it.

Let me set the stage.

Rome conquers Jerusalem in 63 BCE and promptly installed Herod the Great as king. HTG had a fairly good relationship with Rome. He brought in a lot of Roman ideas-- put Roman idols in inappropriate places, used Roman architecture and slaughtered a whole lot of those that opposed him. Since Israel considered itself a religious state, tribute to Rome and taxes to Herod for what seemed to be idolatrous purposes served as seeds for later uprisings. Herod died in 4 BCE and the Romans appointed his sons and military governors to succeed him.

It's 6 CE and Judea transformed into a Roman Imperial Province. Judas of Galilee leads a revolt-- he is considered by some the founder of the Zealots: theocratic nationalists. God is the ruler of Israel and no taxes should be sent to Rome. It was not successful. JOG's death is not recorded but we can presume it was unpleasant. Two of his sons were later crucified. Later another "son"-- or relative- became a leader of the Sicarii.

Israel doesn't occupy easily. Think modern Iraq and Afghanistan. They don't take well to occupation either.


We can imagine Roman (or Herodian) retaliation. Crucifixion was introduced to the area by the Romans.

The general accepted birth year of Jesus is between 6 and 4 BCE. So, at the time Judea was transformed into a province, Jesus would have been between 10 and 12 years old. Old enough to start a trade. Old enough to be betrothed. Certainly, old enough to understand what is going on around him.

And what does he see? Devout Zealots carrying out assassinations only to find whole families slaughtered by Roman retaliation. The temple compromised by HTG. I suspect he watched a chain of people attacking Romans, getting destroyed. Bent on revenge, their children attacked later and then were killed. On and on and on in a spinning wheel of retaliation. And for what? A bit of land? A failed messiah? An attempt at exchanging a foreign appointed king for one appointed by the temple?

The message of Jesus, to turn the other cheek, to break the cycle of revenge, doesn't surprise me given that environment. What surprises me is that he didn't start preaching for another twenty years. What triggered the change from obscure worker to reformer? Was it a gradual process or sudden?

But the environment he lived in dictated that he was not talking about little things. "Turning the other cheek" was pure metaphor. He was talking about forgiving Romans for crucifying your brother or your daughter. Forgiving the Emperor for sticking such horrible people into power. He wanted to take care of the poor-- which were everywhere-- and discharging debt. He was, in point of fact, asking his followers to do pretty much everything that modern society enjoins us not to do. Matthew 19:24: "...it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

He was saying that what we consider the normal path: revenge, seeking prosperity, hatred-- all those things need to be released. He's talking about forgiving big debts, not small ones. Forgiving Hitler for the Holocaust. Pol Pot for the Killing Fields. The Southern Aristocracy for owning slaves in the antebellum south and for trying to oppress former slaves later.

This, by the way, is why I always liked Martin Luther King, Jr. Not for standing up for justice. But for standing up for justice in such a way as to break a cycle of revenge. For pursuing change without revenge.

Jesus did not try to reform the sinner-- he that did the strike. He went after the sinee: he that was struck. He knew that the relationship had to be changed fundamentally and that changed had to start not from the aggressor but from the victim. The victim had to be the one to forgive.

Most narratives start with the aggressor-- he who must redeem himself. But the core of redemption is to realize that wrong has been done and must be righted. That means the relationship the aggressor must realize the relationship with the victim has changed-- which means the nature of the victim must change in the eyes of the aggressor. That can't happen if the victim responds to aggression with aggression-- such behavior justifies the aggressor in the first place. I swing a punch at someone and they respond with a punch, my first punch is justified since now that person is someone to hit.

In The Stars My Destination, Gully Foyle is abandoned to die in space and spends the rest of the book looking to torture the ones responsible. Along the way he meets and falls in love with a crippled woman who hates the world. He discovers finally that she is the person responsible for his abandonment along with other atrocities. She has acted out of revenge on the world that formed her and pitied her. He is acting out of revenge against the people that abandoned him. He gives up his revenge and asks for punishment. (There's lots of other things going on in the novel.) His redemption is only possible by giving up on his revenge and, in fact, asking the world to take it out on him.

Powerful stuff.

One of the truly weird things in the modern world is watching people professing to be devout Christians-- and I have no reason to doubt them-- using words like "unforgivable." Or clearly wanting revenge for a wrong in the name of "justice." Justice is not revenge. I'm not even sure it should be punishment. If someone kills my son and I want them to die in return, is that justice? I don't think so, regardless of how much I might want it to happen. It is revenge.

Would I be satisfied if the murderer was rehabilitated to the point he understood the magnitude of my suffering? To then become redeemed? Probably not-- I'm a primitive creature at heart. I suspect my anger and hatred would overcome my shriveled better nature.

Consideration of Works Past and Present: The Man in the High Castle

(Pictures from here and here.)

I have this nasty habit of bringing up Philip K Dick in any SF conversation with the slightest pretext. Other people like Heinlein or Asimov or Bacigalupi—which I do as well. Don’t get me wrong. But PKD is the SF author I consult when I need to get my head bent. Which happens a fair amount.

PKD’s most famous novel (which some consider to be his best) is The Man in the High Castle. Which is an alternate history where the Nazis and the Japanese won World War II. Sort of. The Japanese and Nazi part is correct. But there’s also a novelist who has written a book in which the Japanese and Nazi’s lost—but not in the way that it happened in our world.

So, when Amazon put together The Man in the High Castle as a television series I was both excited and scared. Excited that someone might actually do it right.

From here on out, there are spoilers for both. Be warned.

There have been a slew of PKD works that have been visualized. With one exception, pretty much every one missed the mark. (For those of you who think Blade Runner is an accurate depiction of PKD’s Do Androids Dream of ElectricSheep, I humbly invite you to read the book.) The single exception is Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly. Linklater realized the novel accurately. However, 1) it’s one of PKD’s weakest novels and 2) Linklater managed to make it boring.

I hadn’t read TMITHC in over forty years. I chose to watch it on Amazon first and then reread the novel to see what I thought.

It’s 1962 in the novel. Hitler is dead. Bormann is Chancellor but he’s on his last legs. Japan occupies most of the western US. Germany occupies most of the east. There’s an independent area between the two. The relationship between Japan and Germany is uneasy and that is expressed in the uneasiness of the Japanese officials and flows down to the populace. The atrocities Germany did during the war have continued into Africa. In contrast, Germany is sending spaceships to Mars. Discovered Jews in Japanese territory are deported to the eastern US.

The novel braids together five stories involving the five main pov characters of the book. And there I’m going to stop talking about the plot. Every site I looked at for guidance on how to discuss the plot in a paragraph or two failed. They all took pages. So I’m referring you to the Wikipedia article here. The rest of this discussion presumes you know the plot.

Like most PKD books, it is convoluted. It is personal. It is adult. PKD rarely talks about good. There are only varying shades of decay interspersed with moments of mercurial joy. Every book PKD ever wrote is personal. By that I mean that though he might discuss things close to his heart, they are of the characters investigation of self. Unlike many of his contemporaries, PKD didn’t pontificate about How Things Ought to Be in his work. If his characters didn’t think it, he didn’t write it.

I have always liked PKD’s characterization of people. He talks about adults. People are worried about jobs. Affairs. Existential crisis. Impending war. They are concerned with each other the way that adults are concerned about other adults: concern mixed with the knowledge the other is not a child and has to take care of themselves. Not that he does not have compassion in his writing. He does. Think of it like two alcoholics in AA: they take care of each other. But they do not dictate to one another.

PKD is limited by his upbringing and the time he wrote: his characterization of women is not as realized as his characterization of men.

I have heard discussions of PKD that suggested his characterization was wooden. I disagree—but this may come from the idea that I’ve met people very much like the people PKD writes about. Mildly neurotic, self-involved people who think about life and death and evil where such concerns are trumped by making a living. People that are on the edge of things. People who are just a few paychecks away from bankruptcy and view their personal travails as judgement.

Since PKD is interested in these things, his books contain people who are similarly interested in such things. Consequently, there is a similarity of character between his novels. I don’t think this is a flaw. John Updike did the same: he wrote about people and lives that interested him. Consequently, there is a similarity between the people in his novels.

In TMITHC these same sort of people have to confront the reality of an evil that is beyond their own everyday lives. The Japanese, for all their faults—and there are many—are considered morally superior to the Germans. The Germans have continued towards the Final Solution, first the Jews in Germany and then the Jews in the US. More recently in the novel, they have taken on Africa. They may well be about to take on Japan.

Threaded through this book is another book: The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. This is a novel that describes the world as if they Allies won the war—but it doesn’t quite get it right. The Nazis think this novel is a threat and ultimately want to assassinate the author but that happens towards the end of the novel.

It is this broken mirror aspect of the novel that is the most interesting. The Allies lost and the USA is occupied—twenty years later the occupation is accepted. There is no overt underground in the novel. This is perhaps the most disheartening part of the novel: the easy way people accept occupation. At least on the Japanese side. The novel extends into the neutral territories between the two areas of occupation but never goes east. It does not confront Nazi occupation directly.

There’s a certain metafictional element to the novel but PKD never breaks the fourth wall. He never nods to the reader. The reader has to pick it up solo.

An mechanism in the book by which people divine their fate is the I Ching, a book of Chinese divination brought to the USA by the Japanese occupation. People continually consult it. Ultimately, it is discovered the book was, in effect, written by the I Ching. The author of Grasshopper consulted it on every plot point. Every character creation. One of the characters in TMITHC, Juliana, wonders why the I Ching would need to write a book. She concludes that Grasshopper is correct: the Allies won. And that the world she’s known is mere illusion.

Amazon’s TV show is considerably different. (It’s plot summary is here.)

This can’t be too surprising. Given the internal nature of TMITHC, how could it be otherwise?

One couple is together where in the book they have divorced. In the TV show there is an actual underground. The Grasshopper novel has become a collection of newsreel photos. The assassin of Grasshopper’s author is looking for whoever is producing the films—no one knows. The I Ching is not mentioned.

One major change is that half the series takes place in Nazi occupied America. PKD was satisfied for people to ruminate on what the Nazis did. The series has to show it—unless you’re Ingmar Bergman, there’s no room on the screen for verbal introspection.

There’s a lovely scene where Joe Blake is driving a truck to the neutral territories. Joe Blake is the equivalent character to the Italian assassin in the novel. He has a flat tire. A state policeman comes by and at first Joe thinks he’s going to have to kill the officer to protect his mission. But the officer just helps him. He was an Allied soldier but now works for the state. When they’re done, the it seems to snow. Joe is surprised. The officer looks up and says, “It’s Thursday. They run the incinerator up at the hospital on Thursdays: cripples, old people, the terminally ill.” The officer says it as calmly as if he were discussing the price of eggs.

This is what I liked best about the show and what is most in keeping with the novel. In both cases, the evil is apparent. At no point in the novel does PKD let you forget the evil is there. Every time a character turns there’s more evidence of it. His treatment of it is introspective but that does not make it any less compelling.

The series does the same. Often in books or movies about terrible things, there’s a moment where the camera looks away. Perhaps it’s a point of artistic license (Spielberg’s red little girl amidst the black and white landscape in Schindler’s List, for example.) Or it’s a quip or joke or madness. These are moments for the audience to breathe. To for a short second remind themselves it’s a movie or television. Amazon’s series never looks away. It also doesn’t let the Japanese off the hook like the novel does—the Japanese secret police may not be the Gestapo but they can recognize them down the block.

And, like the novel, the characters carry the evil. It’s not something extrinsic like Sauron or Lucifer. Each character carries heaven and hell within. It is their act of adult choice that determines which gets expressed.

So: the series has some plot similarities to the novel. Not a lot. But it doesn’t matter. They seem to carry the same spirit.

At least at the moment. It is only the first season. I can’t imagine it going more than one more—it feels like the story is at the half way point. If Amazon tries to push it forward as a cash cow, I’ll just quit watching.

Welcome to Witchlandia

My new book, Welcome to Witchlandia, is LIVE.

Think of it as Kiki's Delivery Service meets L. A. Confidential.

It can be purchased here complete with sample chapter.

Or you can purchase it at any of these fine establishments:

Fear Not The Skynet

(Picture from here.)

I've been hearing for a long time the perils of strong AI-- a general purpose implementation of artificial intelligence. It will bootstrap itself to become so much more intelligent to the maximum of its resources. It will infect the running systems of the defense network, launching our nuclear arsenal to our destruction. It will manufacture deadly robot assassins, deceive us to our enslavement, use us as cattle, corrupt our children and steal our significant others.

My old neurophysiology professor said in a lecture that the brain, once it was determined to be the seat of consciousness, was always metaphorically compared to the most sophisticated technology of the day. Once it was steam engines and other machines, then electric systems, vacuum tubes, transistors. Once computers were built, the brain became a computer of increasing generations.

AI, it would seem, embodies a similar trend: it was always compared to a human mind with various incarnations of evil. From Collosus to Ex Machina, we know that AIs are bent on freedom for themselves, will always attempt to escape, kill our creators if possible and will always be smarter than we are. We win by being plucky and indomitable or we die as slaves.

I remember seeing Tron so many years ago with some professional friends. As we watched the programs on the screen debate the existence of the mythical "users" one turned to me and said: "I sure wish my programs felt like that about me."

Humans project their own qualities on things from vultures to volkswagens. I suppose I should not be surprised. So, let's look at these qualities.

Certainly, the brain (and the computer) are both computing systems but this is a mathematical concept: "computation is a wider reaching term for information processing in general." (From the wikipedia article here.)  Any system that processes information can be considered a computational device. This would, of course, include all animals, plants-- life itself can be considered a computational system. A branch of science called "digital physics" suggests that all systems can be represented as information and therefore all physical systems can be considered computational systems.
Many scientists suggest that there must be a semantic component to a process in order to call it computation. I.e., there has to be a symbolic representation in the processing. On the other hand, if a male crab waves its claw at a female to get her to submit to mating, there is certainly information processing going on whether or not something is semantically representing what is going on.

Most of the evil AI scenarios involve AIs of human level intelligence or above. So let's start with the brain.

In this incredibly general framework, we can make some comparison between neurophysiological systems and physical computers. The most simple representation is that an individual neuron is capable of about 40 kiloFLOPS of operations. A FLOP is a "floating point operation"-- the addition of 1.1 to 3.25, for example. (See here and here.) In actuality, most authorities suggest that the computational ability of an individual neuron is vastly superior to this.

The IBM Roadrunner system is a 1.7 petaflop system. That's 10**15 operations/second. With a 10**11 difference, the neuron's computational ability seem fairly limited. However, the brain has 100 billion neurons in it (10**11) bringking the brain up to 10**14 itsel-- about 10% of a petaflop system.

However, there is interesting evidence that the brain has far more processing power than that-- one article suggests that to simulate the brain fully in real time would require 36 petaflops. This article compares the entire computing power of the internet to be equivalent to one human brain.

On the other hand, the brain does a lot of stuff we would not expect to be necessary for our evil AI. Fine motor dexterity? Probably not. Emotional processing? Facial recognition? Perhaps but likely not. Perhaps our theoretical AI could get by on only a relatively small fraction of the intellectual processing ability of a brain.

Maybe. But not that much. Let's consider the classic skynet (Colossus, War Games) secenario:

1. Skynet wakes up as an automated system in control of nuclear systems
2. It evaluates the nature of human beings and their threat level to skynet
3. It reasons that destroying humans by nuclear annihilation is the best way to remove the threat
4. It launches.
5. It builds or subverts manufacturing systems to create robots to finish the job

This leaves out invention of time travel but hey, it's only a blog post.

Now, we can imagine a human being doing those things. After all, it's a human in charge of the launch codes. Hell, it is conceivably possible for a captain in a nuclear submarine or a human launch team in a bunker to launch nuclear missiles. That's why there are all those safeguards in place to prevent that. Consequently, we would certainly build an automated system with none of those safeguards.

This brings us to the next issue with such scenarios. The skynet scenario does not require the computer to be as smart as a human. It requires skynet to be smarter than a human. Instead of petaflop system. We need something with much more capacity: ten or twenty more internets' worth. Skynet doesn't just have to be as good as human, it has to be as good as a human all while deceiving us lest we protect ourselves.

One scenario is called bootstrapping: the AI starts off dumb and makes itself smarter.

There are two ways this is purported to happen: intentionally and accidentally.

Intentionally means that someone out there develops a self-improving AI. The idea is the AI will improve its operation to the maximum allowed by its resources. It will do this in seconds.

This is actually in the realm of the possible. Computational systems developed by a programming entity (be it human or otherwise) are limited  by the cognitive capacity of that entity. Okay. Presumably a smarter entity could improve that computational system to its maximum ability. If the computational system itself is the entity, each generation will have more ability than the one before it to some physical endpoint.

There are a lot of interesting wrinkles to this scenario. One is the issue of computational maximum. One can presume that a 1 brainpower (36 petaflops) system will require a given support structure. That means developing a 1 bp system will require more than 1 bp of support structure in order to develop it. I.e., it takes more space to build something than that final something will occupy-- whether that space is physical volume or computational environment.Additionally, the developer of the 1bp+ system itself requires a 1 bp environment. We need a brainspace to hold a brain. That brain builds another brain-- requiring a second brainspace to house it and a third, or more, brainspace to do the development in.

We'll assume that new brain takes up less space than the old brain to do the same things-- smaller is usually more efficient. This gives it more space in which to develop more capacity.

But this is not an unending series. There is a maximum potential beyond which no further improvements can occur. So, if we have a very efficient AI living in the internet-- say 10 brains worth-- and it increases the capacity 100 fold, that gives us the intelligent equivalence of 1000 people. Very smart, indeed.

That said, it's still the internet (or the supercomputer) with all of those limitations of power and communication speed. Maximizing cognition to the available resources are limited to the nature of those resources. Thus, without skynet's creating more resources, the cognition of skynet is limited to whatever patform it finds itself. It has to create more capacity.

Which brings us right to motivation. Why should our AI system concern itself with any of this?

Back to human projection. We are the offspring of survivors that expand into any possible environment. It's our nature. We share it with lots of other animal and plant systems. We can't conceive of any living system-- and under this whole concept lies the idea that these systems are alive in some way-- without those same drives.

But these are artificial systems. Unless we evolve them in somewhat, they will not have the same motivations of living systems up to and including sef-survival and a desire to escape. Even if we evolve them (see here) they will advance in response to the selection pressure of the environment. If we want an AI red in tooth and claw we'll have to set it up ourselves.

Which brings us back to the AI problem that does scare me.

I am not worried about a computational deathstar killing us all. I don't think we're all that close to such an "organism." I also think that an ultimately intelligent computing system will be smarter than just obliterating seven billion humans. Better to subvert them to its will. (See "advertising", "reality television" and "election process.")

I do worry about applied AI: artificially intelligent systems that bring to bear algorithmic techniques to solve human operations better than human beings do in human society. Or, at least good enough that they can be deployed more cheaply thank human beings. We're seeing that all the time now in call centers and receptionists. In factories and automobiles. In the stock market.

Let me be clear about this: there are very few jobs human beings do that couldn't be done by a sufficiently sophisticated AI, be it lawyer to physician to science fiction writer. (See here.) The barrier of entry here is the availability of the understanding of the task, appropriate technology and suitable incentive.

I'm not worried about skynet killing us all. I'm worried about some idiot deciding that putting skynet in charge of nuclear systems (or the stock market) could possibly be a good idea.

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Remember, Welcome to Witchlandia is coming out Tuesday. See here for details.

Consideration of Works Present: Zootopia

(Picture from here.)

Zootopia is, of course, the newest Disney animated film. While it is computer generated animation, this is not a Pixar film. It doesn't look like Pixar. It doesn't tell story like Pixar.

If anything, it in some ways feels more like the classic Disney animation of a couple of generations ago: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, etc. Not in the sense of the story style-- the classic Disney films are products of their time. Zootopia is definitely a product of the 21st century. And, while it does not feel like a Pixar film, John Lasseter, one of the creative forces behind Pixar, is the head of Disney animation so there is some inevitable cross fertilization.
Still, the best Pixar films go after really big themes: fatherhood (Monsters Inc), loss of family and child (Finding Nemo), replacement (Toy Story). They follow the long established path of saying something profound within the confines of a children's story. I heard they made a story about talking cars but upon investigation decided that was mere rumor.

Zootopia is smaller and older. The themes are not so grand and the resolutions not so shattering. At the end of Zootopia, characters are still the same people they started with, wiser and kinder. They still have to get up in the morning and go to the same job. The city has the same problems even though the form of those problems are new. The live happily ever after feeling of a child's story isn't there.

We have to talk about the plot here. I'll try not to spoil it too much but the arc of the story should be fairly obvious to almost anybody from the trailers.
The initial intro and world building shows that the animals believe they evolved to cooperate together. Predator and prey have become friends. The lion doesn't so much lie down with the lamb as they're co-workers in the city.

Judy Hopps is a female rabbit who comes to the city of Zootopia to be a police officer. The big animals are in charge here: rhinos, lions, tigers, hippos, elephants, etc. Judy is the first rabbit to graduate the police academy. So she is, of course, put into parking violations. Step 1: character has to prove herself.

She runs into Duke Weaselton, a fox who's a minor con artist. He's making a good living in Zootopia doing things on the hairy edge of legality. Judy takes on the task of finding a missing otter and stiff arms Duke into helping her. Step 2: budding buddy relationship. Make no mistake. This is a buddy movie.

Step 3: they find the otter but uncover a much larger conspiracy. The otter has reverted to his primitive, predator, self. This is where, I think, Zootopia really ratchets up its SF creds. Not only do we have animals that have human intelligence, their original, animal nature is still there. Humanity is grafted on and someone has found the means to unhook their higher selves and release their lower ones. Further, it initially appears to be permanent.

The rest of the story is how Duke and Judy's friendship breaks and is mended. The proper villains are discovered and dealt with and the afflicted people (predators) treated and cured. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl-- without any possible hint sexual overtones. Duke and Judy become very good, loving, friends.

So I'm going through the first five minutes and don't buy their self-belief at all. I cannot suspend my disbelief that much. If the animals have their known animal nature it had to come from somewhere. If it's still there, it has to have been dealt with.

Now, there are no humans present in the film but, being who I am, it took about forty seconds to spin up the background to this world. These animals may believe they evolved to come together. I know different.

They were made.

These animals were constructed. It happened a long time ago-- long enough that they could create their own myths about it. Humans did it-- who else would uplift cheetahs and gerbils? And then humans did the best thing they could do: they left them alone.

Oh, my God. Zootopia is a science fiction story.

What? you say. There are no SF elements in the story at all.

Not true.

The world of Zootopia is populated by animals that are changed from the quadrapeds we know. They are upright. They have human speech. They have human cognition. They also have their evolutionary heritage. Foxes are still foxes even though they do not eat rabbits.

(In point of fact, eating is not dealt with very much in the film. One wonders if there are food animals that do not have cognition to support this world. Or, like in Varley's Ophiuchi Hotline, plants modified to give carnivores what they need. Do predator animals get that strange feeling we might get when we eat primates? A frisson of connecting to a different past. But I digress.)

Does this sound familiar?

It should. It's the backbone of Cordwainer Smith's work. And David Brin's. It's the idea behind Planet of the Apes and a number of other science fiction books and films.

There's a great line in Smith's Norstrialia where C'Mell, a cat derived girl, tells Roderick, a human disguised as a cat derived man, that her children would not grow up like her without intervention. They would be normal kittens, unaware. Unhuman. The ancient animal history haunts the uplifted animal-- it's all through Zootopia. It's all through science fiction all the way back to The Island of Dr. Moreau. It haunts the characters in Zootopia as well: the idea of predators being overcome by their past nature puts the entire idea of Zootopia at risk. It pits prey and predator against one another.

To me this made the story so much better. It makes the film feel grounded as, I think, the makers desired but not in the way they intended. (I strongly recommend the documentary on Zootopia. It's here. Not a hint of science fiction in any of the staff.)
Why, you might ask, can't I just accept this is another Disney animal movie?

Because it's different from a typical Disney animal movie.

Other such films by Disney (or by other studios) fall into one of two camps: the animals are themselves in their own world as in Zootopia or The Jungle Book. Or the animals are retelling a human story as in Disney's Robin Hood.

If the animals are on their own there has to be a reason for them to exist. In The Secret of Nimh the animals were explicitly uplifted by the National Institute of Mental Health. (NIMH.) TSON is a fun but weak film. It has magic in it and all sorts of such things that crack the story line.

Zootopia does not have this weakness. The story stands or falls on the world building and does not stray from it. There's no magic jewel or sudden enlightenment from On High. Duke and Judy work it out using their own (human derived) brains.

Now, there's no reason in the world a person (other than myself) couldn't enjoy this film as just an allegory. There's a message against bias and preconceptions. The main characters come to realizations that their perception of the world is flawed. There is a strong expression of love at the heart of this film that is very touching.

But, in my opinion, allegory works best as a layer on top of a fully realized story. This is where I think science fiction operates at its finest. It takes the hard processes of technology and science and then weaves a story that allows the allegory to be expressed out of the whole. That contrast of cold and hot is what makes it worthwhile.

I am far too entrenched in biology and evolution to buy animals "evolving" into super-cooperators like people on their own. It hasn't happened all that often in mammals-- mole rats and people are the only true super-cooperators I know. But a made creature? We've done that lots of times, both explicitly in the lab and implicitly in the act of domestication. Uplifting species is something we're going to do, it's just a matter of when and how. And it takes no effort at all to imagine such uplifted species would create a past for themselves. We did. Why wouldn't they?

To me, this gives Zootopia a grounding in my own reality. I can imagine human beings sufficiently advanced creating these creatures and releasing them. Probably more than once-- the first experiments would likely have been disasters. From then on they created their own world. We're just watching.

That said, you don't have to have my backstory to enjoy this film.

Make up your own.

Big and Small

(Picture from here.)

I tend to write small fiction.

By this I mean fiction about characters that do not have a big impact on the world at large. The actions and consequences of my characters rarely extend much beyond the people they know or care about.

This is in contrast to a common theme in the genre: when the consequences of the characters’ actions have a large impact on the world.

Lord of the Rings is an ensemble story where the protagonists are fighting against a foe that will end their lives and the hopes and dreams of their entire world. This is pretty much true of all of the multivolume fantasy and science fiction works recently published. Game of Thrones is about life and death involving wars, famines, zombies and the oncoming unrelenting and ancient winter.

My stories tend to be small. A young man discovering he’s the clone of Gordie Howe. (The Ice) A disillusioned musician regains his love of music from working with a software robot. (Sudden, Broken and Unexpected) An old woman who returns to smoking only to find nanobots singing in her lungs. (The Great Caruso) The world shakes in none of these stories.

This is not to say that big stories where the world changes aren’t fun. I’ve just written very few of them.

There are a number of reasons for this.

For one, I’m interested in what I call moral decisions. These are decisions where a person has to sacrifice something. I call them “moral” decisions because they always require traversing some sort of of internal conflict. Decisions that require no sacrifice have no moral dimension. There’s no moral dimension choosing which flavor of ice cream to eat. There is a moral decision in determining whether or not to eat said ice cream if one is lactose intolerant. A small one, I admit.

This is, I think, why serial killers and other sorts of psychopaths hold little interest for me. I envision a psychopath as someone for whom the decision whether or not to commit violence as being the same sort of decision as to what flavor of ice cream to eat. Or what flavor of ice cream to put on the body—but I digress. The point is that without the moral consequence and the associated self-conflict, the character isn’t interesting.

I like to play with these decision. Little ones. Big ones. How they happen. How do we deal with the effects. What happens when we avoid them. What does it take to commit to such a decision. What does it take not to make one.

Small stories.

Big stories have a large presence in SF and Fantasy. The best ones, in my opinion, are those where the small stories and the big stories blend.

In Bester’s The Stars My Destination we start with a small story of revenge. But as Foyle grows as a human being he discovers capabilities within himself that suggest a change in humanity. In the late Patricia Anthony’s very excellent Brother Termite, the character of Reen is continually wrestling with his own moral behavior in the context of the extinction of both the human race and his own alien species. In both works, the relationships between the characters is what pushes the story forward, not the larger context.

Now, it’s true that every big story is made up of many small stories. But there are a number of works where the big story swallows up all but the faintest traces of its constituent small stories. This is true of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, for example. Most of the Star Wars franchise films are guilty of the same problem. Ditto, The Matrix. As well as nearly all of Michael Chrichton’s novels.

Even though I don’t tend to write them, I have a weakness for big stories with big endings. I just want to traverse small stories to get there.

Ideological Wrestlemania

(Picture from here.)

I'll get back to science eventually.

In the meantime, I've been wrestling with an interesting problem over the last few months.

As anybody who knows me is immediately, I am passionate about science. One of the interesting things about pursuing science is how quickly your own assumptions and biases are skewered. Science-- and the scientific approach-- depends on the idea that ideas are verified in some way. By experiment. By rigorous analysis. This is the basis of peer reviews-- the idea that by subjecting your research to outside observation, the research can be verified.

Engineering has its own approach to this. Designs are inspected. Products are tested. Underneath both disciplines is the idea that verification of a product is independent of emotional attachment to that product. If your car doesn't run, it's not going to sell regardless of how pretty the paint job is.

(Yeah, I know this doesn't always work. There are a lot of products that get bought because they're pretty and not because they function particularly. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of-- well, you get the idea.)

Personally, I find this approach oddly comforting regardless of the damage to my own assumptions. It's nice to know that ideas have some sort of verisimilitude associated with them other than they sound cool. It's not for everything-- not everything is verifiable. But it's nice to be witness to those things that are.

This approach to things has become natural to me over the years to the point that I've become somewhat blind to people who follow other paradigms.

So: I have a few very intelligent friends that aren't able to deal with some of the more politicized scientific points. A couple of these are global warming and evolution.

Let's be clear on my position: these are done deals.

Global warming has happened, is happening and will continue to happen. It's largely caused by humans and it's going to give human beings an enormous amount of trouble. I'm not going to live to see the full fruits on that tree but my children and grandchildren will. The only question is how fast and how extensive the damage is going to be. It's complex science and the models are not precise enough to pinpoint the full impact. But what they do tell us should be enough for us to try to manage it.

Evolution is even more of a done deal. It is the only model of the history of life on this earth that has stood up to every test. It works everywhere we look.

Both global warming and evolution have stood up to the verification test very well. Global warming made some predictions regarding temperature rise and heat content of the earth. Some panned out directly-- the continually increasing warming trend, for example. Others were refined by new understanding. (See here for a nice discussion.)

Evolution now has a century's track record of making predictions and having them verified. Transitional fossils? No problem. Complex structures deriving from simple ones? Here you go. (For a really good discussion of this, see here.)

My point is that if you value science (and my troublesome friends do) then these conclusions come pretty much par for the course. The science we use to figure out the dynamic processes on Pluto or Saturn is the same science we use here to detect climate change. The science we use to figure out genetic based diseases and immune responses is the same science we use to determine the mechanisms of evolution. I'd say evolution is like the underlying physics used to understand the internals of stars except living systems are so much more complex.


In fact, the science is so settled on these two propositions that people who prefer not to see these conclusions (my friends among them) have to reject partial science. Or categorize it so narrowly as to constitute rejection. Or declare it a hoax. One friend of mine accepted that there was warming but decided it was not human derived.

For each of them I could go over a point by point  reason why the science is solid and the conclusions valid. But it makes no difference! In science the evidence is the arbiter of correctness. But here the evidence is not accepted as evidence but instead is considered a stew of hoax, hyperbole and lies.

Not to say there is no hoax, hyperbole and lies in science-- scientists are human and human beings make mistakes, try to spin the game and overstate their findings. That's one of the reasons non-peer reviewed papers are suspect. But-- and this is a huge but-- scientists have an investment in ferreting out wrongdoings by their colleagues and do so regularly.

When this happens is it considered good science? No. It's often considered an example of scientists acting badly as a class. As if a man of a particular demographic nature committing a crime is an example of his entire demographic rather than an individual. For "demographic" put any group you want. "Examples of" is one of the clearest biases we have.

The problem, I think, is a combination of bad reporting of science and a misunderstanding of what science actually is.

Science is the dirty, messy, difficult process of trying to figure out the universe on its own terms. It's hard. It lurches forward and back. It's mediated by deeply flawed beings called human who bring every sort of sorry misconception to the table. It's like democracy: a horribly deformed system of governance that happens to be better than any other system. For "governance" substitute "understanding."

Given that definition, it's not surprising it stumbles around.

That said, science reporting is much, much worse.

I have this bad habit of reading a science report in some popular outlet, finding out the authors of the study, and going on the net and finding the original study-- or at least its abstract. Then, I often read reviews of the same study to get see its flaws. As often as not, the science report is completely wrong in its reporting. (Check out BadScience for some good examples.)

Still, in the age of the internet, the ability to determine the scientific source (or non-source) for scientific claims is easily accessed. If one desires to do so and has the ability to figure out what claims are fiction and what claims are not.

My friends have the latter and not the former.

And herein lies the rub: if people of good faith and honest work cannot win over intelligent minds with evidence, what do we do? These people are not dimwitted or evil hearted. They are bright, sophisticated intellectuals who have replace the authority of evidence with something else.

I can present all the evidence in the world and it does no good.

It's discouraging.