Idea stories, a baker's dozen

 kw: continuing reviews, story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, world science fiction, utopias, dystopias, robots

Here I limn another thirteen of the stories in The Best of World SF, Volume 2, edited by Lavie Tidhar. It's something more than a third of the volume. As before, I skipped none, and enjoyed nearly all equally.

"To Set at Twilight in a Land of Reeds" by Natalia Theodoridou (Greece). Maintenance robots need maintenance also. I wonder why SF robots are so frequently emotional? 

"The Beast Has Died" by Bef (Mexico), translated by Brian Price. An alternate history, with TV and other technologies in the 1800's, and also a technology for scanning a brain to produce a simulation of a person.

"Twenty About Robots" by Alberto Chimal (Mexico), translated by Fionn Petch. This story is dedicated to the prior author. Each vignette is preceded by a binary number from 0 to 19 (00000 to 10011), but not in any order I could discern. The author stretches the limits of the robot genre. It's becoming clear that the editor loves robot stories.

"The Regression Test" by Wole Talabi (Nigeria). An advanced version of a Turing Test. An uploaded human mind, as it interacts with others, will naturally learn and evolve (in the non-biological sense). The test, by someone intimately familiar with the original person, is to detect a divergence into delusion. As I expected, there is a betrayal awaiting.

"Kakak" by William Tham Wai Liang (Malaysia). "Kakak" means "sister" in Malay. Another story rooted in emotional robots, but here the levels of emotionality vary more.

"Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love" by Usman T. Malik (Pakistan). Caring for an ailing and increasingly demented mother… It's unclear how the protagonist thinks going on a starship (a NAFAL accelerator), with increasing time dilation as the trip proceeds, can help him care for his mother, even though a quantum-entanglement link has been set up between him and a robotic caregiver.

"A Flaw in the Works" by Julie Nováková (Czech Republic), translated by the author. Another story of emotion-laden robots, written for the centennial of R.U.R. by Karel Čapek; those robots had an emotional element also. These robots, in political exile, get the opportunity to make first contact.

"When We Die on Mars" by Cassandra Khaw (Malaysia). The gradual weeding out of more than 100 volunteers for a one-way trip to Mars, to a final twelve (see Note 1 below). This initial crew will establish a basis for others to follow. This seems a lot like Elon Musk's plan.

"The Mighty Slinger" by Tobias S. Buckell (Barbados) and Karen Lord (Grenada). Early in the story, the thought emerged, "Music as a political force". By the end: "Music as a weapon". Concepts that were obvious to the protest singers of the 60's, my musical mentors. If you've never heard "There, but for Fortune" sung by Joan Baez, go right now and do so! Oh, and the title...think David.

"Corialis" by T.L. Huchu (Zimbabwe). If you've seen The Andromeda Strain, or read the book, you may recall the extensive decontamination of the people before they can enter the super-clean laboratory. Preparing to adapt to the microbes of a new planet goes far beyond that (see Note 2 below). The protagonist realizes something more is needed for the humans and the life-forms of Corialis to become fully compatible.

"The Substance of Ideas" by Clelia Farris (Italy), translated by Rachel Cordasco. A different kind of alien world. Here, it seems that certain life-forms store ideas and memories in proteins, so that eating them… well, that's the "substance" the author is talking about. As usual, Murphy's Law intervenes.

"Sleeping Beauties" by Agnieszka Hałas (Poland). Suspended animation, we used to call it. Here it's used to exile an increasing range of "undesirables" to a prison planet. You gotta wonder, is it worth the expense? I could have done without the ending, a scene more sadistic than any I've encountered. This makes other dystopias seem tame.

"Waking Nydra" by Samit Basu (India). Another take on the phrase "sleeping beauty". The elaborate defenses of Nydra's "castle" make the story longer than it needed to be. The mindset of the caste system (the protagonist is clearly considered beneath contempt by the "heroine") underlies it all. A not-so-surprising betrayal rounds it out.

There are but four stories to go. Stay tuned.

Note 1: My first two years of college I was a chemistry major. My sophomore year I took Organic Chemistry, a three-quarter series of classes; the school year was in quarters, rather than semesters. The first day of class the professor (a rather recent PhD from Harvard) said the following:

This class will decide which of you will actually major in chemistry. The testing and work in each quarter will reduce your number by half. At the moment there are 150 of you…149…148 (as two students walked out). About fifteen will pass the final exam at the end of the third quarter.

He was right. I was one of those fifteen, finishing with an A-. I loved those courses.

Note 2: You may know the Central Dogma of Genetics, that DNA is copied to RNA, and the RNA is used to construct proteins, according to a standard coding table. There are 20 amino acids that make up all proteins (on Earth), and there are 64 3-unit codes (the units are A, C, G, and T in DNA, and instead of T, RNA has U), called codons. This allows for some redundancy in the translation, and protects against certain kinds of single-nucleotide mutations.

You probably don't know that there are (so far), 24 variations on the "standard" translation table. They can be considered minor variations; all the variations occur in one or more of 18 of the 64 "positions", leaving 46 untouched.

Some bacteria, most mitochondria, a few protozoa, and even a few small metazoans (multicellular animals) have variant coding schemes. That means the ribosomes, the protein-building "machines" that couple the RNA codons to their corresponding amino acids, are tailored to the appropriate table for the creature in question. It also means that the mitochondria in every cell of your body have the "vertebrate mitochondria" coding table, and some of the bacteria and archaea in your intestines have specific variations.

Now, consider, if we find life on another planet, will it be DNA/RNA/Protein based? Perhaps that is inevitable, but it's not certain. Even if so, will that planet's "standard" code translation table be the same as any of the Earthly ones? That is much less certain! Mathematically crossing 64 with 20, we find about 10⁷⁰ possible tables! If multiples are kept together, the number reduces to about 10⁴⁰. These numbers might be much higher; I may not have thought of everything when I did my bonehead permutation math.

The bottom line: I suspect it's impossible for aliens to eat us, or for us to eat them...or their food animals/plants/whatever. If we want to migrate people to an exoplanet, we'd probably do best to find a totally barren one and terraform it.

Ideas in abundance

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, world science fiction, utopias, dystopias, robots, zombies

By page count I am a bit more than a third of the way through The Best of World SF, Volume 2, edited by Lavie Tidhar. I reviewed stories in the first volume in six posts, beginning with SF from everywhere, almost a year ago. As with that volume, I'll review story by story, 12 in this post, focusing on new ideas.

"The Bahrain Underground Bazaar" by Nadia Afifi (Bahrain). It takes an aging woman a very long time to come to terms with the death wish within. A technological ability to experience a dying person's last moments don't seem to make her journey any easier than ours.

"The Ten-Percent Thief" by Lavanya Lashminarayan (India). With most of the world a slum of poisoned air and water, devoid of nature, a woman risks her life to plant a single flower bulb outside the protected enclave of a city of the rich.

"At Desk 9501" by Frances Ogamba (Nigeria). A technology permits those with the constitution to live extra-long lives to confer some of their lifetime to extend the lives of others who are dying untimely, for a fee of course. The life-givers experience side consequences.

"Milagroso" by Isabel Yap (Philippines). One translation of "milagroso" is "miracle". A producer of technological miracles is confronted with the real thing. Magical reality, in a controlled, subdued way.

"Bring Your Own Spoon" by Saad Z. Hossain (Bangladesh). In a dystopia that is not too different from much of life in Bangladesh, a poor man who is a superb cook is helped by a Djinn to open a restaurant for the dirt-poor, who can pay only with bartered goods. Of course it is illegal, and doesn't last, even with the power of the Djinn. Magical reality with a slightly hopeful ending.

"Blue Grey Blue" by Yukimi Ogawa (Japan). It's ambiguous whether the colors seen are in the world around or the eyes themselves. In this fantasy, eye colors and the colors of the people change with mood and the fortunes of life.

"Your Multicolored Life" by Xing He (China), translated by Andy Dudak. This seems peripherally related to The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain, without the happy ending. I would retitle it "The Slave and the Scholar". Two men do indeed change places, and though the circumstance of each is actually improved, it doesn't last.

"The Easthound" by Nalo Hopkinson (Jamaica). A kind of zombie story, where all adults became monsters that destroyed and devoured first each other, and then attempted to do so to their children. Some children survived by killing the remaining "sprouted ones". Then they learned that puberty results not in adulthood, but in "sprouting" as a monster. It's the most dystopian story I have ever read; the extinction of humanity is at most a dozen years in the future.

"Dead Man Awake, Sing to the Sun!" by Pan Haitian (China), translated by Joel Martinsen. Not all who die are fully dead. Some are undead, and the undeadness is spreading, transmitted by a bite. Perhaps the human race is being transformed into a new kind of creature that cannot die all the way dead. Zombie or vampire, or both?

"Salvaging Gods" by Jacques Barcia (Brazil). AI to the max. Manufactured gods, and at least the one limned in this story can perform miracles of the sort that genies (or Djinn) perform in Arabian folk tales. But nothing lasts, for God is flawless, while these gods are flawed.

"The Next Move" by Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia), translated by Jessica Sequeira. An occupying soldier has gone rogue, "saico" (psycho) in the parlance of the story, which has a number of phonetic spellings of colloquialisms. Of course he is eventually "eliminated". Much of the story is his own stream of consciousness.

"The Child of Clay" by Dilman Dila (Uganda). A robot world, in which the strongest motivation is reproduction, by a technology full of mystery. One robot is childless, and in seeking a solution, returns biological life to a barren land. It took a page or two to realize that "rit" and "rits" are pronouns, the pronouns "it" and "its" preceded by an "r" for "robot". I suppose the making of new pronouns arose from the recent "choose your own pronouns" fashion. That's the closest to anything positive to arise from recent "woke" fashions.

By comparison with the best stories I've read in recent anthologies of both science fiction and mainstream fiction published in the US, nearly all of the stories in Best of World SF are better.

Multiple utopias

kw: book reviews, science fiction, near-future, dystopias, utopias

Has Western society already become a plutocracy? A passel of disappointed Democrats, decrying the country's first billionaire President, and further decrying the number of billionaires and near-billionaires he has installed in his cabinet and other executive posts, seem to think so. Of course, they conveniently ignore that their own plutocrat, who has managed to avoid "personally" amassing too many millions, has instead created a pay-for-play foundation with, to date, close to a half a billion dollars that "everyone knows" is to be used for political purposes, a "charitable" foundation that spends three or four times as much on said plutocrat's travel and hotel expenses as on the foundation's purposes as stated in its charter. At least the plutocrat who made it into office is honest about his great wealth and doesn't play poor-face.

In a true plutocracy, only the plutocrats own anything. How close is America to that?

• The "one percent" of Americans own 38% of all wealth in the U.S.
• The richest 10% own just over 75% (or, you could say, "the next 9%" own "the next 37%).
• The poorest 50% own 1%.
• The "middle class", the remaining 40%, own just under 24% of all wealth.

Thought that is not quite full-on plutocracy, it is pretty dramatic inequality. This "wealth inequality" is greater than "income inequality", because below the median income (around $50,000 per household in recent times), it is hard to accumulate wealth, while for "upper middle class and above" (about $200,000), most income can be socked away and add to accumulated wealth, and for a genuine plutocrat, tremendous luxury can be enjoyed while spending only a few percent of income as great wealth continues to multiply.

Let's look at that $200k threshold. For someone working a 40-hour week, it would be nearly $100 per hour. Someone with a modicum of prudence can live quite well on less than half of that, and save the rest, which after taxes exceeds $60,000 yearly. About every 16.7 years, even if investment income is nil, another million dollars accumulates. If investment income is instead in the 4% range, then during the second 16.7-year period, another million will accumulate from the compounding alone. Now, there are numerous "professionals" out there who demand fees of several hundred dollars an hour, and probably earn half a million to a million yearly. Then there are CEO's of top corporations who are routinely paid a million per month. I consider that excessive.

My own take on earnings that exceed one or two dollars (2017 dollars) per minute: The only guy to whom I will pay as much as $400 per hour (an average lawyer's fee in this area), without feeling resentful, is the dude who can go in with a screwdriver and side cutters and defuse a bomb. (Before you cry "sexism", I'd pay it to a similarly skilled gal with screwdriver and side cutters. Doesn't matter to me.)

I conclude that we are well on the way to plutocracy replacing democracy in America. Don't think the current President will make that go any faster, he won't. But had the Democrat won, she'd have pushed it in that direction much, much faster! America would have become "Godfather country" in pretty short order.

OK, so what will things be like in a full-blown plutocracy? Cory Doctorow thinks he knows, and it forms a society universally called "default" in Walkaway, a Sci-Fi novel of the sorta-near future. The hyper-rich who run everything are called "zottas" (I guess that is a combination of "zetta" and "yotta", the two largest prefixes in the metric number system. "Yotta" means a trillion-trillion, or 10²⁴, and "zetta" is 1/1,000 the size , or 10²¹.) Either way, I suppose a zotta is rich enough to treat the odd billion dollars as pocket change.

In the face of zotta-controlled wage-slavery for those few who are ambitious enough to work, and a grinding welfare state for the rest, increasing numbers of people have been walking away, going to unoccupied areas and learning to live without "default society". They are not as badly off as things may seem. Technology has kept pace with the times, and nearly all human needs can be "fabbed" (an advanced form of 3D printing) from suitable feedstock. That goes not only for vehicles and houses and furniture but even more so for many foods and medicines, and also recreational drugs. Walkaway society is a society of abundance. No more zero-sum. If you take my sandwich, and I can throw leaves in a hopper and fab another in five minutes, why should I care? If I do feel a bit put out, I can make ten sandwiches and throw them at you…or ten darts, if I want to do something more than just shame you.

The political discourses that the author uses to point up the differences among default and walkaway philosophy make this a rather dialog-heavy book, sort of like the Foundation books by Asimov. Abundance philosophy has the potential to create genuine utopia, but human nature is not used to it, and there'll be tremendous growing pains. Part of the dramatic thrust of Walkaway is about such growing pains. Another big part is what we might call "World War W", as "default" tries to regain control of "walkaway".

This is intensified because the walkaways possess sufficient technology to be winning the race to produce effective scanning and simulation of a person, so that they can be reincarnated in software after dying. A lot gets glossed over about this, and that's OK, because there are significant questions to address, such as, "How will a person who wakes up in silico react to the knowledge of being dead?", and "Can the scan of a person become enslaved?". Two questions that I wondered about, that are barely touched upon: "How will the simulated person communicate; is there a need to emulate the signaling systems of the Occipital and Temporal lobes of the brain, and translate machine video and audio signals to and from appropriate optic and auditory nerve signals?", and "What will replace the endocrine signaling of the body with which the brain/mind was accustomed to relate?".

Such a book raises many questions and answers few. This one had the obligatory happy ending, but it didn't have to. The downfall of a plutocratic culture takes longer than a generation. They tend to leave little but scorched earth behind. The end of Walkaway has a continued coexistence, at arms' length, of the two cultures, with default becoming the secondary, left-behind one. I found that puzzling.

Those who know me may well wonder why I subjected myself to a book containing explicitly erotic scenes. There are but a handful, and I know how to skim past what I don't want to read. Whether you roll your eyes at this and say, "Yeah, sure," or not, you're entitled to believe what you wish.

What price Utopia?

kw: book reviews, science fiction, utopias, dystopias

Should you inherit a half billion, or win it in a State lottery, what would you do with it? The two folks I know who won millions in the lottery say they are heartily sorry they every bought the Lotto ticket...but I don't notice them giving it back. The one near-billionaire I know, who happens to have earned it, building a huge fortune from a merely large family fortune, is a modest fellow, having no utopian pretensions.

In his 1879 classic Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum Jules Verne contrives to endow two men, both scientists but one French, the other German, with equal shares in a half-billion-franc fortune. Each decides to build a city. So far, so good.

The French doctor Sarrasin, a student of hygiene, obtains a large tract of land in Oregon and establishes France-Ville as a healthful, industrious place, and example to the world. The German chemist Schultze, seemingly in a piece of me-too-ism, obtains a similar plot ten leagues (about 30 English miles) distant, where he establishes Stahlstadt (Steel City), where his workers make superior cannons; he jump-starts the international weapons trade, mid-Victorian style. His passion is to first show up the French city, then to destroy it, with an enormous new weapon of his invention. To give away a portion of the ending: a laboratory accident results in Dr. Schultze being flash-frozen, bringing Stahlstadt to a halt. I guess Verne found this a simpler solution than having the French rapidly invent a counter-weapon.

The English title is The Begum's Millions. This 2005 re-translation by Stanford L. Luce is published by Wesleyan University Press, in their "early classics of science fiction" series. Reading the apparatus (Arthur B. Evans, ed.), the value of a more accurate translation is clear. The earlier English edition by Kingston is more of an overly-colloquial paraphrase.

The editor makes much of the actual oppressiveness of both cities. Though France-Ville is intended as a happy, healthful place, the hygienic environment is attained at the expense of numerous rules most folks would find intrusive. However, this aspect doesn't really come out in the text. There is but one chapter that describes France-Ville, in the form of a newspaper article told from a German viewpoint. Most of the book is taken up with the story of a young Frenchman (an Alsatian) who infiltrates Stahlstadt to learn of the secret weapons and plans. He poses as a Swiss engineer (to explain his accent), and gains Schultze's confidence. As Verne states in his correspondence, Schulteze's city is "more interesting" than Sarrasin's.

With this novel, Jules Verne began to express his political fears. His first, unpublished novel Paris in the Twentieth Century was very negative, and he had to publish a number of more cheerful books to attain the stature that allowed him to present cautionary material later in his career. From his correspondence, he also grew more pessimistic with age. I find his career similar to Mark Twain's, in the growing pessimism and black humor of his later days (and I find even the relatively early work "A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" quite appalling, in the "hero's" annihilation of some 30,000 armored knights).

Verne was as prescient in his fears as he was in his science. The German-French antipathy filled the world with war for fifty years. Though a side effect was to effectively force the U.S. to become a superpower, it also did so for the Russia of Lenin and Stalin. I find the juxtaposition of the US and USSR too uncomfortably close to that of France-Ville with Stahlstadt! And the end of the "Cold War" and destruction of the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall came about as a denouement nearly as fanciful as the sudden freezing of Schultze.

I have to say it: the Berlin Wall came down on my birthday...I was on my way to work, driving alone instead of in the pool van. When the announcement came over the radio, I pulled off the road and cried a long time. I could still taste the sense of immense betrayal I'd felt at age 14 when the Wall was built. The tremendous relief I felt that day still makes me teary.

Makes me wonder if Verne got hold of Wells's time machine...

My Heaven could be Your Hell

kw: utopias, dystopias

I happened to read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, because my son had to read it to prepare for Junior English. Allow me to grump a bit, that this book really ought to be rated PG-21. I don't think it is suitable input to the formative teenage years, and not just for its sexual content. That is such a blatant caricature of the "free love" advocated by some 1920s Suffagettes, most teens can see through it. But some can't, and they'll be influenced; positive influence being unlikely.

I think I might be getting mature, as I approach 60, so I could tell that everything is a caricature. Huxley was presenting an admittedly false dichotomy (as his 1946 foreword notes) between the statist control and libertarianism. His "Savage" concludes in despair and suicide, a conclusion foregone in the existentialist tenor of the times, and explored further by Camus. Huxley did not succumb to the despair of existentialism, but surmounted it in a quest for spirituality and transcendence in his later writing.

As great writing does, this book can help us learn ourselves better. It also reveals the writer, as he uses the writing to work through difficult aspects of his own relationship with the world and where it might be going.

It is largely due to writers such as Huxley, Camus, Orwell, and other trend-extrapolators that society is able to avoid following risky trends to their logical extreme. Even more, looking back over history, every trend has buried within it a counter-trend; things tend to gravitate back to a middle-of-the-road situation over time.

Whatever the mighty of the world may want for us, most of us just want to be left alone.