The Election of the Inhumanoids

                One of the most iconic images of late 20^th century science fiction movies is the scene in Independence Day where a huge alien mother ship that has been hovering over the White House obliterates the building, and presumably all that it stands for, in one shattering blast of pure energy.  One of the most beautiful features of this picture is that it is so unnecessary: the control of our world is already in the hands of a power that is divorced from, if not totally inimical to, humanity.  I don’t mean “humanity” simply as a DNA strand, but rather humanity as a system of ethical values that doesn’t stop at the boundaries of our skin. 

The approach of the season of horror (I’m speaking not of Halloween, but of the upcoming November election cycle) brings this topic to the forefront.  It is horrible because we are overwhelmed by the realization that our cherished idol of the elective process is generally hollow in a world where the candidates are pre-selected and, apart from the make-up called campaign promises, very much the same.  Choosing among them, almost always a matter of the least of many evils, reminds me of a wonderful episode of the Three Stooges where the boys find themselves in a medieval dungeon.  They are given the irrelevant choice of how their execution will take place: do they choose to have their heads chopped off or be burned at the stake?  Moe and Larry, like so many of us, try to apply micro-ethics in this situation and opt for decapitation as the quicker alternative.  However, Curly shows that choice is absurd in such a dilemma by selecting immolation because “a hot steak is better than a cold chop.”  We are all about to be asked, both next month and more importantly next November, whether we prefer to have our heads chopped off or be burned at the stake.

Of course, I exaggerate (as do the Stooges and all others who engage in satire as the only permitted form of anarchy).  We have an array of far more numerous equally disgusting paths to the same outcome.  On the ends of the political spectrum there are even two extreme candidates tolerated because the system finds it easier to let them deplete their bank accounts rather than simply suppressing them.  These are Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul.  The former advocates a new approach to government in which collective concerns would corral the unbridled forces of corporate capitalism and transnational financialization.  The latter advocates reaching the same ends through the resurrection of individual control of the economy in a discrete nation-state.  Neither will win the election, so bleak days lie ahead, but some of us can try, like Platon Karatayev in War and Peace, to try to find one decent potato in the bottom of the rotten sack to get us through to the next day of our forced march to oblivion.

One issue the Inhumanoids will stay away from is immigration reform. After all, it would only call attention to their own alien aspects.  Since they represent financial imperatives that are fundamentally non-human and non-humane, they cannot even appeal to a human ethnic voter base.  Oh, Trump can play his little jingoistic charade.  Everybody expects it now.  It resembles the guys in the second Battlestar Galactica that were always spouting off about the Cylon menace while they were trying to take over the ship themselves.  Can Trump be a closet Cylon?  Or Carson?  Or Hillary?  I don’t think Cruz is one – he’s more of a Cylon wannabe.  He has something of the Renfield in him, groveling around the Kochs and the Adelmans and asking when he will be allowed to feast on creatures with blood, instead of spiders and roaches.  Yes, his could be a truly Gothic presidency.

One of the Inhumanoids will control the country after 2016.  Whether that face sports the almost atomic shine of Ted Cruz’s cheeks, the surrealistically tyrannical hairdo of Donald Trump (reminds me oddly of the Harkonnens in Dune), the creepy mock-submissive expression of Ben Carson or the deceptively grandmotherly visage of Hillary (is Baba Yaga underneath it all?), it will simply provide a mask for the Big Money that will steer our Republic over the bounding economic seas.  Whoever it is will obediently sign the checks for all the cost-plus contracts the Pentagon can dream up, even if it involves installing an Iphone on every square foot of the ocean floor to monitor the fish in case they are communicating with ISIL.  Whoever it is will obediently look at all the photos of OMDs dished up by the CIA, DIA, DEA, or other alphabet soup entity and agree that we should invade somewhere.  (Invade?  No, that’s no good – liberate? Democratize? Pacify? Get Publicity to come up with a new brand!) Corporate financialized capitalism is content to give the orders and stay out of sight as much as possible.  It will not even provide an obvious clue to its influence, like Ahab’s leg stumping over the deck of the Pequod at night.  We, the motley crew of America, will not even have that much awareness of the maniacal obsessions that guide our destiny. 

In the meantime, we suckers are treated to the Punch and Judy Show, the campaign debates.  It is true that the Democratic Party seems to have canceled its act in the show, but the Republicans have more than made up for it by multiplying the candidates to such a degree that they won’t even all fit on the same stage. Psychologists have recently determined that an overabundance of selections actually makes it more difficult for an individual to achieve a desirable  solution, and this campaign season certainly proves their point.  This is a show that is guaranteed to make the audience take notice, though the choreography and props allow only for limited permutations: Punch can grab the bat and hit Judy or Judy can grab the bat and hit Punch.  Who will score the most points this time? – Rubio? Mario? Carly Fiorino?  Princess Daisy?  Ironically, the most foolish puppet is the public, who dutifully assemble every so often (and even pay money) to have their intelligence insulted in this manner.

Denouement: there will be a “winner” because there has to be a winner and the winner will take all and deliver it like a rolled-up newspaper to the feet of its plutocratic master.   On that bloody morning after the 2016 elections, the best an individual human, a Mensch, can hope for is to be the one tin soldier that walks away.  Not like the movies.  They offer hope, albeit in the form of myth.  Villains, kaiju, those Mysterians with their funny noses, are always defeated.  In Independence Day, there was Bill Pullman to pull us up by our bootstraps and declare that humans had won because they had made a smoking mess out of… pretty much everything.  Hey, wait a minute, didn’t he start out as Lone Starr in Spaceballs?  Let’s see… he saves the galaxy by exploding a vacuum cleaner, marrying a Druish princess and blowing Rick Moranis to the Planet of the Apes, which is really the Dead Zone on Earth of the Future.  It’s all abundantly clear. Why can’t the campaign debates provide something as coherent or as entertaining?  We’re supposed to get bread and circuses, promised to us two millennia ago, and this isn’t much of a circus.  And what about the bread?  Oh, it’s called Soylent Green?  Available at bargain prices like Obamacare.  And come January 2017, it will come in a brand new wrapper named…?????

Exoplanets: Why There May Be a Lot More Than We Currently Know

                The relatively recent discovery of exoplanets in other star systems has been one of the most exciting developments in early 21st century science that has strengthened the traditional sci fi interest in the possible existence of non-human intelligent life.  So far, the majority of exoplanets identified have belonged to a class of celestial bodies that includes “gas giants” such as Jupiter and Saturn.  Only a few years ago were the first planets found that could have structures similar to Earth, thus presumably more likely to harbor the conditions for life resembling our own.  However, based on our local observations on this planet, such bodies would have to occupy a habitable zone, neither too close nor too far from their stars, so as to sustain liquid water and temperatures conducive to Earth-based life.  Given these restrictions, astronomers have not yet found an ideal candidate, a “Goldilocks Planet”or twin to Earth that would give a very high probability of life, much less intelligent life.  A good summary of the current state of the search is Dr. Sten Ostenwald’s article in the Huffington Post, “Exoplanets: The New Age in Planetary Science” (3/10/14).

                Results in our so-far-limited scrutiny of the Milky Way Galaxy’s planets therefore lead us back to the nagging question of the Fermi Paradox: if intelligent life is out there, why haven’t we seen any of it?

                A positive answer to this conundrum may be closer than we realize if we look at our own prejudices in analyzing distant star systems.  We humans have been lucky, but also unlucky perhaps, in that our own solar system is so neatly arranged.  The arrangement is a disk.  Around our sun, the planets fall into a neat, nearly circular array, all lined up in roughly the same plane.  Only about six degrees of variance exist between the orbits of Earth and its neighbors, a serendipitous fact that helped humans discover some facts about near space long before we could begin to go there.  The existence of such an ecliptic of planets is something we more or less take for granted. 

                Certainly, the ecliptical view of things has influenced our observations of exoplanets so far.  This is because we can determine their existence not by sight, but by recording variances in the radiation reaching us from their stars as the planets pass in front of them relative to Earth, creating in effect a mini-eclipse at a tremendous range, detectable by only the finest instruments.

                Another question imposes itself: what if there are exoplanets out there that are not orbiting their stars in such a way as to come between the star and Earth?  After all, we have no way of proving that all stars have ecliptics similar to our sun.  There may conceivably be stars where planetary orbits do not form a flat plane at all.  And even if they do, as some theories about the formation of solar systems suggest, why would an exo-ecliptic necessarily have to be co-planar to the direction of Earth?  It is true that our galaxy’s spiral structure might tend toward a “universal” coplanar coincidence, but so far there is nothing to suggest that it would be as uniform as that of our own solar system.  In addition, many stars exist in clusters or other environments that might exert gravitational influences that would override coplanarity. 

                The bottom line is that any given star might have perfectly well-developed planets similar to Earth that have not been discovered, and may not be for a long time, simply because their orbital angles do not allow us to observe their existence.  How many undetected Earth-like planets may lie out there?  It is a problem to be considered no doubt by the mathematics of symmetry until we can refine our methods of observation.  Several sci fi films have jumped ahead to posit the existence of an Earth twin within our solar system, orbiting the sun exactly opposite Earth so as to be undetectable.  Given the fluctuations in Earth’s own orbit, this kind of extreme symmetry would be most unlikely.  The films that have featured it, such as “Gamera versus Guiron,” have been filled with so many more facetious elements that the possibility was not seriously considered. 

                This should not stop us from investigating the likelihood of actual “hidden Earths” in other star systems, since they may only be hidden by our own angle of vision.  We can never exclude the existence of the strange, the unheimlich, until we are a bit more positive about the exact nature of our current planetary Heimat.

     Soyez les bienvenus, amis francais!  Etant un ancien habitant de Dijon, ou j'ai pour la premiere fois rencontre Stanislas Lem, je suis d'autant plus heureux de vous accueillir a notre blog.  N'hesitez pas a partager les derniers developpements dans la science fiction francophone.

Welcome to our new viewers in China and Germany!

Both countries are making great contributions to the future of space exploration, the former through the exploits of their taikonauts and the latter through massive participation in the European Space Agency and its numerous projects.  This reminds me of the favorite sci fi movie, First Spaceship on Venus.  A Germano-Polish production (Der schweigende Stern, Milczaka Gwiazda) based on Stanislau Lem's novel Astronauci, the film portays an international expedition including the German pilot Brinkmann and the Chinese linguist Tchen-Yu, who along with their colleagues try to solve the riddle of a message from Venus that eventually reveals sinister intentions.  Though the Venusians turn out to have disappeared long ago in an atomic holocaust that they were preparing to unleash on Earth, both Brinkmann and Tchen-yu (along with their African friend Talua) bravely sacrifice their lives so that the rest of the explorers can return to the home planet.  The scenes on Venus are often characterized by surreal effects far ahead of their time.  The film also features a precocious robot named Omega who adds to the interplay between the humans.  

                                          Building Robot Characters

                                          By John Gaines

                One of the greatest challenges of writing a science fiction novel is designing robots and technology.  Many robots of early science fiction were simple automatons, capable only of silently fulfilling their master’s commands.  From the Mechanical Men Superman once fought in a Max Fleischer cartoon to the imposing Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still, early robots served primarily as tools, instruments whose defining characteristics were their physical forms rather than their personalities.  One of the early innovators of robotic characterization was Isaac Asimov, whose Robot series created the first concept of encoded robot behavior (the Three Laws of Robotics) and robots who possessed well developed personalities, dialogue, and characterization.  Asimov’s robotic characters such as R. Daneel Olivaw went on to inspire popular androids such as Data of “Star Trek: the Next Generation” and created a demand in the science fiction fandom for compelling, memorable robots.  Life Sentence and its sequel offer a unique perspective on how sentient robots could interact with humanity in the future, continuing the speculative fiction tradition of questioning the place of robotics and artificial intelligence in the years ahead.

                As we began writing Life Sentence, there were no sentient machines.  The early chapters I worked on took place on the planet of Domremy and had very minimal interaction with robots, as the frontier planet did not have access to high-tech manufacturing.  The few robotic characters I created for the Domremy scenes were service automatons with no free will, simple tools to aid the colonists in various tasks they didn’t have the training to do themselves.  Towards the end of the process of writing Life Sentence, we decided that we finally needed to create a sentient robot for a pivotal sequence.  We created Doctor Torghh, a robotic physician.

                Torghh was intelligent, thoughtful, and unique among the characters we devised for Life Sentence.  He was the only thinking robot we created for the first novel, and we created him as a modular robot who could plug instruments and needed equipment into himself to utilize him—the ideal doctor of the future!  Although Torghh’s appearance in Life Sentence was quite brief, we enjoyed creating the character so much that we decided to give him an expanded role in the sequel, as well as a companion robot named Rack.

                 Incorporating these new characters into the world of Life Sentence has proved a particularly interesting challenge for me.  For the longest time, I had perceived the world of Life Sentence as being one where only humans and other organic characters truly “mattered”; most of my effort went into Klein, Ayan’we and the other organic characters.  After we agreed to utilize Torghh and Rack extensively in the sequel, I faced the difficulty of having to change my own beliefs about the universe we created in order to make Torghh and Rack true central characters.  How would a robot fear for its own mortality? How would it perceive and interact with other automatons?  And how would they perceive the world of living beings around them?  All these things cycle through my mind as I create the sequel of Life Sentence, the possibilities of a world in which robots could be the equals of humankind…or surpass us.

Creating Creatures

Jim and John Gaines

              We thought you might be interested to know that we will be conducting a presentation on August First at the Virginia Writers Club annual symposium at the Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottersville, Virginia.  The subject will be "Creating Creatures," and it will draw on classic science fiction creatures of the past, as well as some of our own creatures from the novels Life Sentence and Spy Station.  Here are the descriptions from the symposium program and a set of questions we will be distributing for discussion.

                We will discuss approaches to creating non-human characters in science fiction and other literature.  This will involve both From-Evolution-Out and From-Environment-In techniques, with examples from our Entara & Klein Cycle of novels and other sources.  Participants will be invited to sketch out their own non-human characters based in the FEO and FEI methods.  We will also consider the possibility of non-human-model robotic creatures.

Some Essential Questions

1.       1.  Much modern sci fi assumes that extraterrestrial creatures would be humanoid and largely anthropomorphic in both body and thought.  This was not the case in the earliest sci fi and there is no reason it should be now.  After all, Earth is currently undergoing its sixth extinction period.  Humans were not around for the first five and may not be after this one.  Given the almost infinite possibilities for planetary environments and the extreme unlikelihood that any which developed intelligent life would follow the chance-filled history of Earth, shouldn’t we look at other possible evolutionary scenarios?

2.      2,   Is there any good reason why another intelligent race should have similar values, associations, patterns of thought, and social organization as humans, given the fact that these are not shared by other Earth-bases species?

3.       3.  How would other environments, other evolutions, other histories, affect extraterrestrials and the  way they communicate (or fail to) with humans?

4.     4.  What simple biological facts could influence other intelligent races differently from us?

5.     5.  What possible sources of cooperation and conflict could arise between various different life forms?

6.     6.  What are the possibilities and limitations of comparison with human behavior?

7.     7.  How could other creatures adapt to the exigencies of factors like space travel?

8.     8.  Assuming that some forms of extraterrestrial intelligence may be generally “robotic,” what might the consequences be if they were not created by humans?

Hello New International Friends

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