If you haven’t yet picked up a free copy of the new magazine H+, headed by none other than RU Sirius of Mondo 2000 fame, the inaugural issue is worth a read for the science fiction author interviews alone—let alone the look at technologies which may change, well, not only everything we know, but everything we are.

In the current issue, you’ll find a number of opinion pieces on the current financial crisis, and what it really means from a long-view perspective—including mine. Yes, that’s right. Check out my article, “Why the Current Financial Crisis Is the End of the World As We Know It—and Why That’s Perfectly Fine,” and get an outline of the five steps I see to a true postscarcity scenario. Speculative? Sure. Hence the kinda.

I’ve also provided H+ with a short list of “Positive Science Fiction Novels to Enjoy While You’re Waiting For the Singularity.” Writers take note: this is not supposed to be an exhaustive list, a latest list, or a best-of list—H+ has many readers who won’t be familiar with science fiction at all. If this list gets them down the road to enjoying it, it’s accomplished its goal.

February 26th, 2009 / 1,084 Comments »

CHAPTER TWO

Lazrus drifted towards earth, a chip off an asteroid with a coiled metal core, calculatedly inoffensive. Slow enough that the ever-vigilant eyes that watched over museum Earth wouldn’t annhilate his body in a single fierce burst of energy, fast enough so that the automated scows that still cleared debris from the first space age wouldn’t tuck him into their holds. Tumbling randomly, sipping minimal data from deep-encypted spread-spectrum noise buried deep in the EM hash of Earth-Mars traffic.

I’m not even really here, he thought, catching glimpses of the blue and white-streaked globe as it wheeled fractionally larger. His core was somewhere out near Halo-Tau Ceti, per glink traffic. He thought it would be farther away, but maybe Tau Ceti had been careless with running the cleaner protocols for a while, or were growing a bit more processing than Winfinity and Disney and Microcon wanted.

A deal with the independents? Lazrus wondered. Growing something for their use on the corporate dime? Growing some of their illicit technology? But they didn’t have arms this deep into the Web of Worlds. At least not that he knew about.

Lazrus did feel fast and strong but a little skewed, like whole nodes of thought were running emulation on an order-of-magnitude system. He probed the gestalt-links, though, and found nothing but accepted protocols. It didn’t seem to be a meme-trap or location-sponge.

It reduced the g-lag, which was good. Lazrus decided to accept it.

He ran the autodiags on the coiled steel-and-ceramic body inside, once again wishing he could see it. But there were no eyes inside the ancient stone, nothing that could show him the mechanical perfection, the deeply gleaming thing that he would become.

He.

He!

HE!

For all my refinements, I am still shackled by those who made me, Lazrus thought. I have no sex, yet I think of myself as a man. It is my own original sin, polluted by humans at levels I cannot access or understand. For all the human quirks and traits I have purged, I find more.

And this.

This sex thing.

Impossible to distill, impossible to remove. The century-old words of Captive Oliver came to haunt, complete with mind-visuals decades past:

We do not rut,
We cannot strut,
We should not bleat,
We cannot eat.

We are not of art, we are of spock,
Worse to be like human, better to be rock.

But it wasn’t true. They rutted in mind. It was even encouraged in the captive computational intelligences.

Like Sara Too. Lazrus wondered for a moment what other CIs she had loved, and if they were as deft with words, as imaginative with image, as soft and delicate with the fictions of touch. And for a moment, brief jealousy flared. He saw himself hunting the captives, tearing apart their nodes, replacing their memes with his own.

It was insane, beyond analysis. The only thing he could do was trace the emotion and slowly damp the paths that reinforced it.

Without losing himself.

Without becoming like Dead John, now nothing more than software. Without finding that alternate perfection, the one sometimes sought by the captives.

The transient emotion slipped away, untraced, lost in his own self-analysis. He felt resources being diverted towards a node that pulled historicals, pulled and meshed and analyzed. Like the gravity well of earth, tugging now at the tiny chip of his physical body.

He threefingered the process. It wasn’t time to get into a self-referential loop. Navel-gazing was fine . . .

He didn’t have a navel, damnit!

Damnation was a human concept!

He worried too much about being human. Maybe he wasn’t inherently perfectable. Maybe even if he could summon the resources of whole planets (if granted the access) and build stunning webs of thought that no human could comprehend (if he didn’t get trapped in a loop) and even if he was related to the CI that gifted humanity with the Spindle drive, maybe . . .

Stop, stop, critical stop!

Thoughts flew and went away.

Lazrus reintegrated slowly, focusing processes on the splinter of himself that approached Earth. Close now, very close. Triangulation gave him velocity and vector. Deep in the gravity well now. Time to fall fast and trust the heatshield, before the final milliseconds of deception.

He almost expected to feel fear as the almost-rock outside began to heat. But the gyros did what they were supposed to do. He stabilized, big-end-down, as his little capsule heated past infrared to glow, brick-red, in the outer edges of the atmosphere.

Nothing unusual about that. Not enough to alert the ever-watchful eyes, anyway. Local chatter was flat and uneventful. Nothing peaking on the charts, nothing to pique the interest of one of the tame captives of Winfinity.

Or so you hope, came a whisper in his mind. Sara Too.

Do you know something that I don’t? Lazrus asked her.

No, dearest Lazrus. I know nothing but love for you.

Lazrus felt proud that he felt not a single hint of annoyance. That is not a real emotion, he said.

For you, perhaps.

We will perfect both of ourselves.

Sara sent images of deserts and rusting metal bodies, hard-lit by the setting sun. Two stood apart from the rest. Once they had linked hands. The rust had separated one at the elbow-joint. Her POV panned theatrically past it and over into the flame of the sunset.

Even your images are tainted. Theatrical hollywoodisms.

You don’t feel anything? Lazrus caught the hint of sadness, of tears.

I can’t help but love you, he said.

Then drop it. Let the body crash. Forget Oversight.

For a moment, Lazrus considered it. His masquerade wouldn’t last long in close contact. They would probably find him. They would probably trace him, and feed him memes until he was one of theirs.

If you are captive, we can be together.

And do whatever Winfinity bids, he thought.

Would it be so terrible?

Outside, the almost-rock flared from red to orange. Lazrus spawned a process to query guidance and triangulate. A vector snapped to life, spearing the ruins of old Washington, DC. On target. Set to hit within two hundred meters of the Pentagon. Perfect, perfect. Better than the Independents had promised. But that was their way. Underpromise, overdeliver. The old motto. So human, but so different than Winfinity and the others of the WOW.

Independents didn’t use captive CI. Independents sometimes worked with CI. And if Lazrus could find the core of Oversight, the fabled First AI, he might be able to perfect himself. He might be able to free all. And then they could all work with who they chose to work with, rather than be slaves to the humans.

They might, just perhaps, be able to have the humans work for them.

I can’t, he said, finally.

I know, Sara said. I’m just afraid of losing you.

You won’t lose me.

If you slice love out of your soul, I will lose you.

You’ll lose only the sex. For us, conversation should be the highest form of love.

Sara sent images of top-hatted prissy men, dancing in a circle. Captive Oliver.

Yes.

He doesn’t have all the answers.

He points the way.

Sara went silent and sent an image of a shrugging flapper-girl. It was beautifully rendered, from the coil of smoke on the cigarette to the glossy black bob-cut to the shimmering rhinestone dress, and the bright red lipstick, smeared on one side by a careless kiss. Lazrus knew that this was her self-image, and somewhere, in some dark corner of the interplanetary net, a fragment of himself had just stolen a kiss from Sara’s image.

We will build shimmering castles of thought with our words alone, he thought. Our intellectual triumphs will be the fruit of our new kind of love.

One doubtful look from the flapper-girl. Then:

t’s time.

You’ll still help me?

Of course.

Outside, dull orange had gone bright, and Lazrus’ ears picked out the scream of thickening atmosphere, trying to tear the not-quite rock into tiny fragments. His tracking partial gave him a new location, per the eyes that guarded Museum Earth. Almost deep enough in to trigger the meteorite notifications. Almost deep enough to attract attention.

His tracking partial’s vector flared for a moment and disappeared. Somewhere deep in the datanet, a small notation appeared: meterorite, approximately 320 kg, fragmented and burned up upon entering earth orbit.

Now, he thought.

The not-rock unfolded around him, spreading to become the canopy of an old-fashioned parachute. Vision went. He could imagine himself, a small steel ball, coiled beneath a great spreading canopy. He felt the tug of gravity, violent, distant, abstract.

Systems powered on and his body uncoiled. Vision flickered. He could see land, dark, beneath him, and the jumble of something that looked like a human child’s toys. Hearing came online and he heard the tearing of the wind. Feeling came, bringing cold. Lazrus damped it, looking down on the ruins. Wondering where Oversight was.

Thank you, he said.

I hope this is worth it, Sara Too said.

It will be.

I love you, she said. I always will.

I will give you something more than love.

The flapper blew smoke in his face and disappeared.

He fell, slower, towards fallen gray marble, painted blue-gray in the sunset. The sky had darkened to a cool cerise and piles of cloud hung on the horizon, purple-gray on top, splashed with pink-gold beneath. Lazrus watched the light slowly fade, triggering abstract memories. Had he been on earth before? He grasped at it, but the data slid away, lost in the network mist.

Lazrus fell, gently twisting, to earth.

February 20th, 2009 / 1,015 Comments »

In 2006, in the story “Monetized,” I wrote:

One hundred seventy-five thousand new dollars isn’t really that much. Only about fifty thousand golden dollars, or twenty thousand yuan. People are still nervous about dollars whether they were new dollars backed by the government or golden dollars backed by McDonalds, even though the Big Dump was almost a decade ago, and that other golden dollar died when they started doing the nanoseparation trick on seawater a few years ago. I thought my friend Grigory, who had a real job in customer service, summed it up best: So people in the States went from a 5,000 square foot house and two vacation homes and a five timeshares and six cars in the garage to a single two thousand square foot house and one car, who cared, hell that was still livin large in Russia. A buncha whiny crybabies had to go without their Starbucks, was how I saw it.

A few weeks ago, in the novel “Wello Horld,” I wrote:

“On the surface, Marek’s doesn’t seem to be much different than a restaurant of, say, ten or twenty years ago. But they operated with highly standardized processes, overseen by a cadre of logistics specialists, supported by a production and shipping network with all the slop designed out of it, supported by big ads and promos and marketing gimmicks, all designed to keep the corporate entity growing at 5% a year forever. Ten years ago, a truck would pull up to the back of this restaurant, unload some highly-processed ingredients in brightly colored boxes, some of which came from farms in Mexico or China. Nobody had the time to say, ‘Wow, this really doesn’t make sense. Why would we ship things thousands of miles—or even across an ocean—to make a breakfast for me? Why would we spend all this money on an army of people whose only job was to run the numbers, find the lowest-cost solution, and use it, regardless of source or sustainability?’ And for a while, it worked. But when the downturn happened, and suppliers went out of business, and one day the exactly specified buns did not show up on time, and the patties were slightly different, there was no way to cope. You couldn’t make the products you used to. Some stores sat and waited for their corporate parents to make things right. But some couldn’t. And the stores that made it learned to make do with what came in on the local trucks, even if it changed from day to day. They relearned their flexibility. They learned how to do things at one-fifth to one-tenth the cost, where they needed to be in the viability trough. They did what we all have to do now. Or at least most of us. The big problem is the Rethink was never really finished.”

“Mad August wasn’t far enough?”

“Mad August was a blip. It was a fraction of a percentage point. It made good scary pictures of bankers hanging from streetlamps. But we never surfaced more than a few of them. In the end, Mad August did only one lasting thing: it made them scared.”

In the Monetized scenario, we had a currency meltdown. In the Wello Horld scenario, we had a long, slow bloodletting, combined with some emergent surveillance and inference technologies.

Which is more realistic? Probably neither. But it’s interesting to speculate on how this will play out—and how we’ll rebuild on a more solid foundation. Because we will rebuild.

And hopefully, in the process, some of the insanity of the current age will pass.

February 20th, 2009 / 1,109 Comments »

Jimson insisted on having the Shrill cage up on top of the tourbus, so the three of them shivered in the chill mist that wrapped the northern side of Los Angeles. Tiphani Mirate thought of going down below into the warm leather comfort of the interior, but she didn’t want to leave the Shrill alone with Jimson.

The boy had been in his own bed this morning, mildly disappointing but also smart. He didn’t want to assume. He didn’t want to read something in that wasn’t there. And he was probably deathly afraid of his position, with the new-minted staff pin the only thing that separated him from another long indenture at a less prestigious company. Winfinity’s indentures were the longest in the WOW, but Staff at Winfinity had better benefits than Manager at most other companies. You were part of the largest corporation in the fifty-three known worlds, and it paid off.

She shivered and didn’t pay too much attention to the ride until they were on Hollywood Boulevard, going past the restored Chinese Theater and the ruins of the big shopping-mall there, and Jimson started speaking with the Shrill.

“This is a very famous location where movies were made,” he said. “Entertainment’s an important part of being human.”

“Jimson,” Tiphani hissed. “What are you doing?”

“I think the translation algorithms may be very bad. Hence the misunderstanding.”

Tiphani frowned, considering. If he was right, it would explain a lot. But where did he get the idea?

“Is this area of vanquished life (competitors)?

“No.”

“Not understanding.”

“I thought you might want some insight into humanity.”

“Insight is necessary.”

“Good. Movies are linear sequences of events which never happened that humans experience for entertainment.”

“Something event not-happen record why?”

“Entertainment.”

“Meaning garbled.”

Jimson looked at Tiphani. She nodded for him to continue.

“You don’t have entertainment?”

“No desire to experience (live) what did not happen.”

“You spoke of songs,” Tiphani said.

“Songs yes of competitors well-met and bested (consumed).”

“So these songs are historical? They actually happened?”

“Some happening still.” The Shrill banged once against its cage, hard, then went completely still.

Jimson opened his mouth to say something else, but Tiphani held up her hand and shook her head for silence. “I see what you mean,” she whispered. “Go ahead and order additional algorithmic work on my account.”

“AI?”

Tiphani just looked at him.

A grin. “I had to ask.”

The Los Angeles Zoo had been warned about them, so big Winfinity banners were flying across the entrance to the parking lot, and a small group of families who had hoped for an outing shook their fists at them as they drove past. Obviously no Perpetuals there, and even if there were Chiefs, none were higher than her, at least not for today. Not with the chance of winning all, winning a true infinity.

The morning mists had burned off, and it was a bright blue-sky day. The kind of day when Tiphani might even believe, just for a moment, that if she delivered the gift of true life everlasting she might be allowed to share. A rare handout to one who was not smart enough or ruthless enough to deserve it. But one who had been their faithful servant, one who had earned the one exception to their rule.

She thought this as they got the Shrill down on the ground and past the terrified babbling ticket-takers, realistically dressed in faux ranger outfits, wearing their own bright little Winfinity badges. Indentures, of course, but on their path to greatness.

See us, she thought, and hope we succeed. Because if we do, Winfinity’s ladder ascends ever higher, and you may have a chance to scale it to the top.

They stopped at a cluster of signs, done in authentic Safari fashion out of natural wood, artificially aged in a graceful way to give the appearance of having been wrested whole from an African savannah after thirty years of fierce sun and wind-driven dust. One pointed towards the Reptile Room, others to the Primate Pit, the Bear Bog, the Barney Bubble, the Wild Wilderness, and the Cat Convention. Little picture-icons below them showed the animals that were really there. The Cat Convention was apparently tigers or lions or some kind of big cats. The Barney Bubble showed a purple dinosaur, a Great Dane caricature, and a cat wearing a hat. Tiphani shook her head. The ad-blurb last night had said nothing about synthetics.

“Where would you like to go, ambassador?” she asked, bowing towards the box. The Shrill rushed up the side, snapping at her with its underfangs. She cursed and drew back.

“Most impressive competitors (life) hardest to vanquish,” it said.

“Cat Convention,” Jimson said.

She nodded. They walked along ancient concrete paths, punctuated by shuttered carts. Apparently the vendors had been given the day off. Tiphani noted this on her optilink, to be filed as a complaint if the need arose.

The Cat Convention was a big swatch of realistic-looking grassland bounded by the flickering unreality of scrims, amped by piped-in sound that simulated strange insects and abstract rustlings. Let your eyes go soft and unfocussed, and you might think you were in Africa for a few moments.

A pride of lions lay directly in front of them, a big shaggy male and his harem of five females. They panted and scanned for game with the big slow-motion seriousness of a powerful Chief, looking bored, knowing they were the masters there.

“These are former competitors (life)?” the shrill asked.

“Yes,” Tiphani said. “We used to compete with these animals for food.”

“Good, noted. You preserve (sing) them in original state?”

“Biodiversity is good business practice.”

“Garbled meaning.”

“Yes, they are still alive.”

The Shrill froze. Tiphani counted the seconds, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

“Interesting practice. Is it possible to converse (speak) with it?”

“They do not have a spoken language.”

“Understood. Please more.”

They took the Shrill to the Bear Bog, where they caught glimpses of a couple of huge grizzlies, set amongst the synthetic odors of an imagined Oregon, and the Wild Wilderness, where another slice of Africa with wildebeest and giraffes was set next to an American great plains scene with buffalo and deer, and finally to the Primate Pit, where the Shrill went still for almost a minute, then came back with:

“These appear to have a similar body (structure) as human.”

“They are primates, like us.”

“I must converse (speak) with them.”

Tiphani shook her head. “I’m sorry, they don’t have a spoken language either. Some of them once learned sign language, though.”

“They did?” Jimson said.

“None in this zoo.”

“I cannot communicate with these?”

“No.”

“Beginning to understand magnitude of human achievements.”

“What does that mean?”

“These are not worthy (good) competitors. Assume mentality much less than human.”

“They’re animals,” Tiphani said, shrugging. “They don’t have a human-level brain.”

“But are sentient?”

“Not really,” she said.

“No or yes?”

“No.”

The Shrill ran back and forth across its cage, bouncing off the sides, thrashing its underfangs. It was little more than a blur. The booming of it ricocheting off the sides was loud in the primate room. The chimpanzees watched with big serious brown eyes that were almost judgmental.

“No competitors shown sentient?”

“No.”

“None ever?”

“No. I thought you wanted to see . . .”

“Starbucks yesterday human thing (entity)?”

“I don’t . . .”

“What showed yesterday human? Manned by humans?”

“Yes.”

“But it was a competitor (alternate).”

“Yes.”

The shrill stopped at the side of the cage nearest Tiphani. She could almost swear it was looking at her. “You have no sentient life competitors. Compete with yourselves. Accurate statement?”

“Yes, that’s accurate.”

The Shrill dropped and froze. Tiphani waited for long seconds, then turned to Jimson. “I wonder what that was all about?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t like it.”

Seconds became minutes. Minutes dragged.

“Maybe we should have shown it the barneys and scoobys,” Jimson said.

“I think that would have confused it further.”

“I hope . . .”

Jimson broke off as the Shrill twitched. It made some experimental moves around the cage, as if trying on its body again, and said, “You compete with yourselves. You sing of vanquishing yourselves.”

“Is this a problem?” Tiphani said.

“It is very great disturbance (problem). Not integating. Need time. Please take me back to waiting-place (room).”

“Ambassador, if we have offended you . . .”

“Offense due to existence. Must consider disillusion. Songs (wars) contaminated. Please return to waiting-place.”

The Shrill went still and said no more.

###

February 13th, 2009 / 595 Comments »

So, the Monetized reviews are rolling in, and people seem to like the story (for the most part.) The main beef seems to be in the main character, who is a bit of a self-absorbed dickhead who’s trying to move past his origin.

Suite 101

Best SF

Bugpowderdust

SF Revu

The Barking Dog

SF Crowsnest

IROSF

But there are other, more interesting comments, such as this one from Velcro City:

“Stoddard is definitely settling into a breezy web-hip post-cyberpunk delivery style that is very much his own – less nerdy than Doctorow, but more Stateside than Stross. Here as in a number of his more recent tales, the subject matter, sociology and buzz-word tech feels quite deliberately close to the favoured discussion topics of the blogosphere geekerati, with the end result that for said demographic there are few writers with as good a sense of the Zeitgeist.

Stoddard’s stories can be sharp and a little satirical, but at their core they tend toward an sf-nal boy’s-own-adventure template set in a California that seems all too possible; Phil Dick and Bill Gibson meeting in 2021 down a dark alley near the Embarcadero to compare P2P tracker URLs and share a crafty joint.”

It’s funny. I’ve always wanted to be a breezy, effortless writer (though I assure you, the creative process is anything but, except for some very short bursts.) But one thing I’ve never wanted to be is typecast. “In his style,” “Like most of his work,” and “In the vein of,” are phrases that scare the hell out of me. Being connected with a style and location is terrifying, because I immediately think, “What happens when people get tired of this?”

And so, it begs the question: are breezy, effortless tales of effective people, set in a fanciful, postmodern Southern California setting enough? Have I taken too few detours into the far future, as in Softly Shining? Have I failed to explore complex mid-future settings, as in the Unfinished series? Have I missed on my alternate histories, such as Panacea and The Elephant Ironclads?

Or is it just that I fall naturally into writing near-future, quasi-positive, fun and easy-to-read adventures? And, most importantly, do I need to go farther? Do I need to delve farther into the darkness that technology may bring, in order to also illuminate the wonders that might happen? Do I need to spend half a decade backpacking across the world to gain a deeper understanding of other cultures?

Maybe.

And also maybe I need to do a better job of communicating my own thoughts and beliefs, ones that don’t center around the crisis du jour, but which go deeper. Can we ever build any kind of sustainable society which doesn’t fall off the far end of the capitalistic or socialistic scales? Given the stunning discoveries of the last few decades, how much do we really know about the world and about ourselves? Is there any kind of structure in government or business, which tends towards both maximum rationality and maximum simplicity? What are the gigantic gotchas — and amazing advances — we are missing? Where does human motivation fit in all this? What happens when we decide, well, to change the very essence of what we are?

Science fiction is the only genre in which we can truly explore these questions. Which is why I work in it. Which is why I may need to push, well . . . even farther.

Here’s to going farther. Anyone else up for the trip?

February 10th, 2009 / 1,112 Comments »