Archive for the ‘Science Fiction’ Category

TEACHING SF THROUGH PHYSICS…OR THE OTHER WAY AROUND

Published by Gregory Benford on January 16th, 2012

Getting Started

Mustering the fantastic in the cause of the real, or the reverse, can be useful teaching strategies. Illuminating physical law through science fictional thought experiments can awaken students’ inventive, playful side. Physics constrains action in ways that call up further study of the underlying physical laws.

Both David Theison (U. of Maryland) and Gibor Basri (U.C. Berkeley) and I have focused physics/astronomy seminars on science examined through SF. The reverse works just as well. I have found the best approach is to begin by trying to talk about physics as a life. Alas, it’s hard to find images of the scientist in fiction that hold up. Conventional” fiction has C. P. Snow’s novel The Search, and in SF, Fred Hoyle’s novel The Black Cloud is heavily laced with science and also gives a picture of the way scientists think and work — the way it’s really done, as opposed to the lab-smock image of commercial television.

You can even use non-SF to make this point, as with The Double Helix by James Watson, with his solve-it-at-whatever-cost approach. That kind of bath of cold water right at the beginning is very useful to show students that science is not a monolith as it’s lived, or as it’s often described.

You may have to justify such approaches, or indeed the scientific worldview, and curiosity itself. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in a Sherlock Holmes tale, touched on this. Dr. Watson is astonished to learn that his friend Holmes, who can infer so much from cat hairs or heel prints, does not know that the Earth moves around the sun. Holmes is ignorant of “the entire Copernican theory of the solar system.” Holmes counters that while cat hairs, heel prints, etc., affect his present life and livelihood, it makes absolutely no difference to him at all whether the Earth moves around the sun or the sun moves around the Earth. Therefore, he doesn’t have to know such facts, and what’s more, even though Dr. Watson has informed him of the truth of the matter, he intends to forget it as quickly as he can. This is utterly opposite from the hard SF culture Perhaps those not shocked by Holmes should not be in a physics class, or an SF one.

 

My own principal teaching difficulty lies in finding the right approach. A motley class — people who think it’s a gut course, engineers who want to argue with about Larry Niven, humanities majors who want to find out what LeGuin really meant, and so on—require special effort. Stories that focus on problems that sharpen intuition work best.

The Wrong Stuff

 

Jean Piaget’s ideas are useful here. Learn by doing, since people absorb much faster and better if they can manipulate, physically or mentally.
To approach scientific habits of mind, Tom Godwin’s endlessly controversial “The Cold Equations,” uses a set-piece problem story but with no solution. Instead, it displays society’s institutionalized delusions, set against the overwhelmingly, absolutely neutral point of the view of the universe. Scientists often assume this view unconsciously.

Students should begin with their natural impulse to propose answers, until the point dawns. Count on disagreement!

 

The next stage might be that of literary analysis, to see what makes the stories work. Engineering students particularly like discussing an author’s tricks and ingenuity and factual errors, and in a good discussion of this sort one part of the class can educate the other. Some notice that Larry Niven’s Ringworld, for example, is actually unstable, and won’t work the way it’s described.

That can kick off a discussion involving the basics of mechanics and of literary credibility. The same can be done with Poul Anderson stories about low-gravity planets; how does biology change? This shows how solved problems in a fictional matrix motivate students to learn physics a lot better than taking the canonical introductory textbook course. Integrating physics with biology stimulates the intuition. In Heinlein’s “The Menace from Earth,” people can fly in domes on the moon at ordinary atmospheric pressures, a startling application of straightforward mechanics.

Reading Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero, reveals some clear, clever cheats. Notably, if you run a spaceship into a star you cannot simply transform to another reference frame, à la Einstein, and show that it’s the star that gets gobbled up instead of the spaceship. Mass seems to increase as a body approaches the speed of light; Anderson knew this, but finessed it by supposing that the star’s rest frame is the right one to see the problem, and the starship’s mass trumps the star’s. Not so; consider the viewpoint of the ship, and the star is even more (relativistically) massive. Students can use this to understand that a relativistic reference frame doesn’t mean that you can wipe out real physical effects.

 

It also leads to a discussion of the important general aesthetic question of how much you can cheat on the facts in fiction. There are few cheat-free stories, including my own, and playing the game of finding the error in a story seems to motivate a lot of students to engage in physics, who otherwise sit there and stare. Some students take malicious glee by nailing big-name writers on details like this. It’s an introduction to criticism, and to physics, too.

I highly recommend this and the other methods I’ve mentioned as ways of students to respond with the proper spirit to physics, and to science in general. SF story creation, bending things a little bit to make your story hold together, is the same way scientists create a new theory. The act of creating a new axiom in science, says Jacob Bronowski, is the same as creating a poem or a novel or a painting. The product may be different, but the act of creation is the same. (It even feels the same, to me.) SF can be used to get across this idea, which is startling to most literature students, and to most science students, too.

 

An example clarifies. As commonplace as tides are, for example, few understand them. They become deadly when considering flight near a compact mass, the key idea in Larry Niven’s “Neutron Star. “ Such stars pack a stellar mass into ten kilometers, and Niven’s entrepreneur hero zooms by within a few hundred kilometers. The steeper gravitational potential well of a compact star means that tidal stresses can be large over distances of meters. The hapless human must then understand nature in a new way to survive. The stress is proportional to the different distances his head and his feet are from the star. This may be the only case in fiction where the right answer to a plot problem is to curl up into the fetal position, lessening the tug at head and feet.

Niven knew this (I asked) and finessed his ending. When I taught this story at UC Irvine, I checked his work and found the fetus effect wasn’t big enough; the character gets shredded anyway. But the ideas animate the story and can educate. And some students may make the same calculation, giving them a sense of participation in a story quite unusual in the classroom.

 

Generating a plot problem through applying physics takes the reader out of a human-centered narrative and into the realm of imagination, where nature provides a worthy opponent—maybe the only one worth our time, as Hal Clement once remarked. (Indeed, in most of our species’ history nature was the obstacle, a view sf can recapture.) Such strategies can both teach science and reflect on the nature of narrative itself. Science fiction abounds in such examples, one of its charms.

The science doesn’t have to be right to be useful. In Jerome Bixby’s “The Holes Around Mars” (1954), explorers keep hearing odd whizzing noises and notice that the mountains have holes in them. Then a near-disaster reveals the awful truth—Mars has several moons at very low altitude, so they keep plowing through mountains. This is so implausible even the most benighted humanities major will begin to have doubts. What happens to the moon’s kinetic energy, after all? How come it keeps boring holes and never crashes into the planet? Asking questions like these leads to some highly motivated learning of physics. Any student who can’t see the hole in this thrilling idea hasn’t learned to think with a hint of a scientific attitude.

Similarly, in “The Big Bounce” by Walter Tevis, a ball rises higher on each bounce, a clear violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Such stories encourage students to use common sense first, then to see that careful scientific argument can illuminate the underlying logic, and to learn something about science’s style and content as well.

A far better classic story, with a more subtle, illuminating scientific error, is “The Light Of Other Days” by Bob Shaw. Suppose the speed of light through different media could be made very slow, leading to windows made of “slow glass.” This 1966 short story explores the human implications of a seemingly minor physical fact. A special glass slows light so much that it takes months to move a centimeter, that is, reducing its speed by at least 17 orders of magnitude. Then a viewer outside a house can see his wife and child, inside the house, happy in the days before they died. The story skillfully builds to an emotional conclusion, using this implication of the physics.

But slow glass would also be a very dangerous explosive. Sunlight deposits about a kilowatt of power per square meter at high noon, so light slowed down in glass would carry that power, accumulated over months or years and stacked into a thin pane. Simple calculations a student can do (energy stored=sunlight power multiplied by time duration) show that a window has far more energy stored in it than is in a hand grenade. Drop the windowpane, or break it with a rock…

Bob Shaw hadn’t thought of this (I asked him) but for me his image of a captured past, with it artfully played implication, trumps such technical cards—a good example of the play between scientific fact and literary utility.

 

Looking Large
Beyond small-scale science lie grand visions the genre uniquely makes possible.

 

Hal Clement’s landmark Mission of Gravity began this with its detailed descriptions of a high-gravity planet and its insectlike natives, meticulous and well argued. Rich in physics and chemistry, with a Clement essay (“Whirligig World”) on how he built up his ideas, this novel may mark the true beginning of hard SF as a recognized subgenre, though the term itself doesn’t seem to have come into use until the middle 1960s, perhaps in reaction to the New Wave literary movement. (Though the New Wave was important in opening the field to wider influences, its greatest effect may have been to make hard SF into a recognized opposite.) Clement’s bizarre but scientifically plausible world is a raw setting in which the protagonists struggle upward against great weight, a reflection of the sometimes grim but usually hopeful tone of hard SF.

 

Much of the charm of Frank Herbert’s hugely successful Dune, written a dozen years after Mission of Gravity, lies in its working out of the implications of life on a desert planet. Herbert used massive research to buttress his imagination, and the book compels us because the consequences of the rigorous environment, as the plot unveils them, seem logical and right.

This was the first major ecological work in the field. His world has no obvious source of the oxygen his characters breathe (most of Earth’s comes from sea plankton), but this does not damage the story.

 

Except for some super-strong materials to wire it all together, Larry Niven’s Ringworld mostly conforms to physics as we know it now. It follows a band of explorers who trek across an immense ring which circles a star, spinning to create centrifugal “gravity”. The ring is so immense it can harbor life across a surface many times larger than the area of the Earth. Making this all work is great fun, with ideas unveiled by plot turns at a smooth pace. The sheer size of everything overwhelms the reader, but the game is played straight and true, no cards up the sleeve. Fred Pohl’s Gateway, for example — a New Wave-influenced novel with futuristic psychotherapy and angst as a frame — uses stellar astronomy, scrupulously rendered.
Getting the voice right is essential. Fred Pohl’s “Day Million” is a frustrated rant, expressing the author’s despair at ever conveying to his reader how wondrously different the far future will be–yet it tries anyway, with compact expository lumps like grumpy professorial lectures. This is one of the voices of hard SF itself, trying to punch through humanist complacency about the supposed centrality of human perspectives and comforts. Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” also hammers relentlessly and melodramatically, invoking the constraints of gravity, orbital mechanics, and fuel levels—the conservation laws of physics.

These two stories talk across the rapid social evolution between Godwin’s era (1954) and Pohl’s (1966). Godwin uses the indifference of the universe to frame a morality tale in which a woman dies because her innocence does not matter to an indifferent universe. Pohl, though, doesn’t personify human insularity in a woman, but in the reader –and ends by directly addressing that reader, assumed to be a callow young man (first published in Rogue).

Perhaps the best SF short story ever written, it is a virtuoso performance, a story set in a future so distant and different that we can only glimpse it in mysterious reflections and intriguing images. It’s also an exercise in the application of an unconventional style to the solution of a science fiction problem. What’s so hard about it? The attitude is right, giving it the texture and feel of hard SF.
Both Arthur Clarke’s “Transit of Earth” and Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” profit from not attempting a pleasant finish, remorselessly sticking with the assumptions of the story. The impersonality of the universe ultimately stands for its authority. Then match the Godwin against James Patrick Kelly’s 1996 Hugo winner, “Think Like A Dinosaur.”

Smart Speculation
Students enjoy stretching their intellectual muscles, especially with speculations. Some ideas open wide windows.
The Singularity envisioned by Vernor Vinge can be a useful classroom device to fuel discussion and reading. Many recent stories deal with various human augmentations, from the angelic to the horrible. The Singularity describes the black hole in history, created when human intelligence can be digitized and integrated with technologies, taking some of us beyond the comprehensible envelope of current concepts. It challenges the very idea of progress this way, a how much can you take? dare.

When the speed and scope of our cognition gets wedded to the price-performance curve of microprocessors, our progress will double every eighteen months, and then every twelve months, and then every ten, and eventually, every five seconds.
No wonder that the Singularity occupies so much of the SF narrative now. Using Vinge’s novels can well illustrate this. Whether students respond best to science or to spirituality, you could hardly ask for a subject better tailored to technological speculation and drama.

 

Centering science raises questions about conventional literary methods, as well. Of course, more literary SF works have plenty of space for pretty sentences and deep character, especially since they don’t do much thinking about anything else. Science-centered SF has to contend with many demands in the same story.

There’s a larger reason to foreground science: our culture has uplifted much of humanity with technology, but needs to think about the ever-faster pace of change. One of SF’s aims is to bring along into the culture those who may well react against change, even if it proves beneficial though unsettling. Genomics, climate change, biotechs that bring techno-augmented bodies and electronically assisted brains, etc –all need realistic treatment in what-if? scenarios.

Just depicting today’s science won’t do that. Thinking forward is far tougher, compared with realistic present day stories.

Sources
Subject Index of Science Fiction Stories with Good Astronomy, quite extensive, with comments: http://www.astrosociety.org/education/resources/scifi.html

Gibor Basri’s Seminar at Berkeley: http://astron.berkeley.edu/~basri/astro39/

“The Light Of Other Days” by Bob Shaw is available:

http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/shaw/

NO LIMITS: Developing Scientific Literacy Using Science Fiction, by Julie H. Czerneda, published by Trifolium Press
(http://www.czerneda.com Biologist and textbook author, she published a manual called No Limits which gives many hints about using science fiction in the classroom

http://itsf.spaceart.net/resources/itsf-biblio.html -
Innovative Technologies In Science Fiction A list of publications about the science in speculative fiction. Comprehensive.

http:/ /web.calstatela.edu/academic/builders/index.html Documents a course at California State University teaching science through the process of World Building. Includes a guide to world-building and student responses to that challenge.

http://www.davidbrin.com/teachingSF.html David Brin’s Science Fiction That Teaches site

Writer-authored curricula by Greg Egan, using his own stories:
http://w ww.netspace.net.au/~gregegan/index.html

http://www2.kenyon.edu/depts/biology/slonc/bio3/bio03syl.htm – Documents Dr. Joan Slonczewski’s “Biology in Science Fiction”(Biology 103) course at Kenyon College. This page contains a list of recommended books, and the results of student projects. This can be a model for how to use physics similarly.

http://www.guysread.com addresses the needs of boys. Many reading lists, such as those of Accelerated Reader and California Reads, show an unmistakable and profound bias toward the interests and inclinations of girls. This web site tries to counter that, stressing physics.

“Close Encounters? Science and Science Fiction”, Robert Lambourne et.al. Volume 59, Issue 9, pp. 861-862 1991

Stanley Schmidt American Journal of Physics Vol. 41 (1973): 1052ff

“Teaching modern physics through science fiction”, Roger A. Freedman, W.A. Little. American Association of Physics Teachers (http://www.aapt.org/ ) and American Journal of Physics: Vol. 48, Issue 7, pp. 548-551 1980

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OUR MEANING-STUFFED DREAMS

Published by Gregory Benford on January 5th, 2012

 

I recently reread THE DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF  by my old friend Thomas Disch (Free Press, 1998, $25). Tom is now gone, but his ideas seem fresh as ever about science fiction and where it’s gone.

Here are some thoughts on the book, which still bears consideration. This sadly sardonic survey of science fiction worries its subject from many angles: historical, literary, sociological. Science fiction (sf) is perhaps the defining genre of the twentieth century, its conquering armies still camped outside the Rome of the literary citadels.

It’s an old story. Throughout this century, conventional literature persistently avoided thinking about conceptually altered tomorrows, and retreated into a realist posture of fiction of ever-smaller compass. By foregrounding personal relations, the novel of character came–especially in a classic debate around World War I between Henry James and H.G. Wells–to claim the pinnacle of orthodox fiction. James won that argument, surrendering the future to the genre that would later increasingly set the terms of social debate.

Disch underlies his wryly witty observations with poet Delmore Schwartz’s resonant title from 1938, *In Dreams Begin Responsibilities*. This “pregnant truth” is his clarion call to the genre that once fascinated him but plainly calls to him less since the mid-1980s. Sf takes up Big Ideas, but does not always treat them well. This unfulfilled promise vexes Disch, and he rummages among the cranks, fakes and crazies that often camped near the Legions of the Future. He treats us to tours of mesmerism from the time of Poe, to UFOs and their exploiters (Whitley Strieber, a flagrant example), to the huge religion invented in an sf magazine, Scientology. These unseemly neighbors of the genre betray America’s great historical trouble: high dreams, ready gullibility. Some skepticism is quite in order, particularly in the New Age.

The persistence of cranks and fools in the ranks of sf is sobering. We’ll scarcely be invited to tea if we keep such companions. This blends with Disch’s class analysis of literature.

Still, “The difference between highbrow and low — between Eliot and Poe, between mainstream and scifi–is not one that can be mapped by the conventional criteria of criticism.” He supports this by showing that Poe is more a formalist than Eliot, and less given to overt lecturing and preachiness. Instead, “The essential difference is not one of aesthetics or of some subtler metaphysical nature, but of the two writers’ antithetical social and economic positions.” Poe was a popular, market-driven writer, a “magazinist,” while Eliot was supported by a high culture with subtle patronage.

Sf is best seen as the voice of a rising class that sprang from the burgeoning American masses, hopeful middle class technological types. Their very earnestness carried their arguments and visions into the souls of the one country most responsible for our visions of the future; sf is notably an American creation, since the great era of Wells.

Predictably, its grandiose dreams lead to its worse faults. Sf’s greatest vice is lecturing. In the face of such large ideas, many authors became the “School Teacher Absolute, a fate that would befall so many later sf writers–Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Le Guin, Delany–that it must be considered an occupational hazard.” It can carry a writer away. Disch sees the later work of Philip K. Dick, particularly the important Valis, as “madness recollected in a state of borderline lucidity.”

Such faults go with the territory, but they do not dominate. The true strength of the genre lies in its power to convince by imagining. “A theory can be controverted; a myth persuades at gut level.”

We sf writers were often great makers of myth, some lifted from written sf and tarted up for media consumption  *Star Trek* is notorious for looting the more thoughtful work of writers for their striking effects, leaving behind most of the thought and subtlety. Of the show’s huge global audience, he observes, “few audiences like to be challenged,” for after all, “it is traditionally the prelude to a duel, not to a half-hour of light entertainment. Any artist’s first order of business is not to challenge but to entice.”

He views this most persistent of any TV show from a fashion angle: actors in pajamas. Their starship looks much like an office from the inside, with lookalike uniforms: “the same parables of success-through-team effort that can be found on such later workplace-centered sitcoms as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Designing Women.”

Trek was thus the prophet of the  politically correct multicultural future just ahead of us, with workplace equality conspicuously displayed. Disch wrings much humor from this insight, yet surely the crucial nature of both Star Trek and Star Wars lies in their invocation of family. The strangeness of outer space futures had before been so daunting  for audiences that typically it is the backdrop of horror (the Alien series, etc.).

Star Trek’s insight lay in the promise of going to the stars together, with well defined stereotypes who could supply the emotional frame for the potentially jarring truths of these distant places.  That is why the cultures they meet proved so boring: “Blandness and repetition can be comforting, and comfort is a major deseratum in bedtime stories.” Alas, the genre set out to do more than rock us to sleep.

The market now mirrors his withering analysis. Despite his assertion that “three or four slots on the best-seller lists are occupied by SF titles” in fact their occupants are fantasy tomes and Michael Crichton clones, not actual sf at all. Only one true sf novel I can recall from the 1990s made the lists for long, Arthur Clarke’s 3001, a media-driven sequel to a sequel to a sequel. Instead, fantasy reigns supreme.

Indeed, Disch believes that once space travel, sf’s grand metaphor, proved to mean long voyages to inhospitable places, the genre reverted to fantasy-like motifs.  There is truth in this, both in the rise of genre fantasy in books (now plagued with a numbing sameness and endless trilogies) and in the Joseph Campbell (savant of the mythic archetype theory of storytelling, as used by George Lucas in Star Wars) over John W. Campbell (tough-minded editor of Astounding magazine, the font of sf’s Golden Age, yet also the crucible of Scientology and crank ideas like the infamous Dean Drive).

This retreat from the observable fact–that the moon in indeed a harsh mistress–to Disch signals the end of sf’s best days. Though he scorns the Heinlein-Pournelle wing of hard sf (“Space is like Texas, only larger.”) he confesses a fondness for that seminal work of physical exploration, Hal Clement’s Heavy Planet.

Certainly, “hardness” in the sense of scrupulous concern for the facts and methods of science remains for many the core of the field, and its always hopeful promise. Hardness has been appropriated by some for political hard-nosed analysis, often with a libertarian bias, sometimes even for a conservative one — a seeming contradiction, for a “literature of change.”

Clement’s seminal world-building took us to far exotica, to meet the strange face to face. Indeed, aliens are the most pointed sf motif.     “If God can’t be coerced into breaking his silence, at least he can send emissaries,” a neat compression of science’s failure to reveal the holy, and sf’s literary attempt to find it metaphorically in the alien. Aliens are only passingly interesting to see; what one wants to do is talk to them, sense the strangeness of another mind.

Yet this is not the focus of the movies and TV, which have turned sf’s aliens into horror shows or neat parables. “Screenwriters do not have the luxury that novelists enjoy of taking the time to explain things, to pose riddles and work them out, to think. Such bemusements can be the glory of sf (as of the deductive mystery, another genre poorly served by film)” and we see it seldom in the torrent of special effects circuses pouring from our screens.

In the late 1990s we have entered an era when special effects can show us just about anything, sometimes at surprisingly little cost. This could liberate sf in the arena by which it is increasingly judged, the visual.

I believe this to be the great challenge to the genre: to use its insights and methods to reach the great potential audience with more than simple spectacle. The western made such a transition in the 1950s, producing its highest works (High Noon, The Searchers, Shane) before running out of conceptual gas.

Written sf may have lesser prospects. Media tie-in work fills a (thankfully) separate section of the sf division in the larger book stores. In the rising tide of media spinoff novels and “sharecropping” of imaginative territories pioneered by early greats, Disch seen the genre’s probable fate: “more of the same and more of the sameness.”

Need this be so? I find the quantity of fine written sf has never been higher, counter-balancing the media tie-in clones. This goes little noticed in the windy passageways of the literary castles, for the division of that Wells-James debate persists. There is a curious mismatch between the reviewing media and the reading public. One would expect an efficient market to shape book reviewing to the great strengths of contemporary America: genres, from the hardboiled detective to cutting-edge sf to wispy, traditional fantasy.

In the end, Disch seems saddened because the promise of the New Wave, just breaking when he entered the field in the 1960s, hissed away into the sands of time. But the legacy of his generation is deeper, raising the net in the genre’s perpetual tennis match between conventional literature’s subtle, stylish stamina versus sf’s blunt, intellectual energies. True, Disch’s fellow marchers have largely fallen silent, but the advance of hard sf after them used weaponry they had devised. From Clement’s beginning, hard sf has fashioned a whole armament of methods, some of which mainstream mavens like Tom Clancy, and savvy insiders like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, have built rich provinces of their own. Neal Stephenson’s cultural insights and technoriffs too have found a huge audience.

Genres are best seen as constrained conversations, and sf is the leader and innovator in this. Constraint is essential, defining the rules and assumptions open to an author.  If hard sf occupies the center of science fiction, that is probably because hardness gives the firmest boundary.

Genres are also like immense discussions, with ideas developed, traded, and variations spun down through time. Players ring changes on each other–a steppin’-out jazz band, not a solo concert in a plush auditorium. Contrast “serious” fiction–more accurately described, I believe, as merely self-consciously solemn–which proceeds from canonical classics that supposedly stand outside of time, deserving awe, looming great and intact by themselves.

Disch seems to sense the central draw of sf, but because he has been so isolated from it for so long, his expedition never reaches the core. Genre pleasures are many, but the quality of shared values within an on-going discussion may be the most powerful, enlisting lifelong devotion in its fans. In contrast to the Grand Canon view, genre reading satisfactions are a striking facet of modern democratic (“pop”) culture.

Disch does deplore the recent razoring of literature by critics–the tribes of structuralists, post-modernists, deconstructionists. To many sf writers, “post-modern” is simply a signature of exhaustion. Its typical apparatus–self-reference, heavy dollops of obligatory irony, self-conscious use of older genre devices, pastiche and parody–betrays lack of invention, of the crucial coin of sf, imagination. Some deconstructionists have attacked science itself as mere rhetoric, not an ordering of nature, seeking to reduce it to the status of the ultimately arbitrary humanities. Most sf types find this attack on empiricism a worn old song with new lyrics, quite retro.

At the core of sf lies the experience of science. This makes the genre finally hostile to such fashions in criticism, for it values its empirical ground. Deconstructionism’s stress on a contradictory or self-contained internal differences in texts, rather than their link to reality, often merely leads to literature seen as empty word games.

Sf novels give us worlds which are not to be taken as metaphors, but as real. We are asked to participate in wrenchingly strange events, not merely watch them for clues to what they’re really talking about. Sf pursues a “realism of the future” and so does not take its surrealism neat, unlike much avant-garde work which is easily confused with it. Thes followers of James have yet to fathom this. The Mars and stars and digital deserts of our best novels are, finally, to be taken as real, as if to say: life isn’t like this, it is this.

The best journeys can go to fresh places, not merely return us to ourselves.  Despite Disch’s sad eulogy for the genre’s past, which he considers its high point, I suspect there are great trips yet to be taken.

 

 

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THE FIRST HARD SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION

Published by Gregory Benford on October 5th, 2011

The 100 Year Starship Symposium was much like a science fiction convention, with solid content and a zest seldom seen. Held Sept. 30-Oct 2 in Orlando, it struck a strong note among the hundreds of attendees. I found it to be enormous fun.

DARPA’s intention in sponsoring this was to spur research and select an organization that will sustain and develop interstellar ideas over the next century. More important, it strove to create a culture centered on human expansion into the solar system, and onward to the stars. A science fictional staple, yes—so it needed sf writers.

Brother Jim and I had invited Steven Baxter, Elizabeth Bear, Geoffrey Landis, Robert Sawyer, Allen Steele, George Zebrowski, Joe Haldeman, Gerald Nordley, Charlie Stross and Vernor Vinge.  We writers gave two panels moderated by Gay Haldeman before the ~1000 person crowd. Jim ran the biggest part of the tech program, propulsion. It was fun to see tech types recapitulate sf ideas – worldships, spacewarps, long lived societies, wormholes, intricacies of biology and aliens. They’re putting numbers on ideas we embodied in stories. One talk titled “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?” called our assumptions onto the galactic stage, quite wittily.

DARPA will give out one grant to an entity with the ‘Communication of the Vision’ goal of furthering ideas that lead to interplanetary travel and a society that will support going to the stars within 100 years. Paul Gilster of Centauri Dreams   said to me this was like an endorsement from on high, and the symposium may be remembered as the Woodstock of interstellar. John Cramer, who ran the warp drive session, said the same.

I tried to deal with the many talks running on six parallel programs, scurrying among the rooms—an impossible task. For example, Jim and I think the most likely first unmanned “ship” will be a beam driven sail that makes a sundiver fall to get a boost from maybe 1/100th of our orbital radius, then gets pushed by beamed laser or microwave beams to very high speeds. The physics of that we now understand; Jim and I worked on the basics in the early 2000s—stability, steering, high acceleration. We even lifted a carbon fiber sail against gravity at JPL. With the basic physics done, it’s merely engineering… but what fascinating prospects! The sail papers were all promising.

What about larger payloads? We’ve hit the engineering wall, going as far as we can with chemical propulsion systems. If we’re going to make it to Mars in any sort of reasonable timeframe or with healthy transit durations, nuclear is the obvious next step.

Indeed, if NASA doesn’t show the world it has a goal—which should be Mars, certainly–and will develop the means to go there, it will be deeply cut in the budget battles soon to come. The Webb space telescope, now projected to cost $9 billion (ten times the initial supposed cost), is the only good project they have on hand. If we put it into the L2 point at Earth’s shadow as planned, we’d better be able to service it, to get long term performance from such a huge expense. That’s hard and expensive to do with chemical rockets.

Nuclear thermal rockets are the sole economical way we have to reach such places, four times further away than the moon. The outlines of an emerging interplanetary transport system are clear. At the Symposium  Geoff Landis reported on the NASA Glenn nuclear thermal rocket program, the third generation of development (after the NERVA program of the 1960s-70s and Timberwind, a still classified program of the 1980s-90s). Stan Borowski of NASA Glenn projects a manned Mars expedition by 2033! That goal could inspire a new generation.

So NASA has a choice, I think—swing for the bleachers, or die. We may know within a year or two which the bureaucrats – who have over thirty years with the Station and Shuttle turned an exploratory agency into something like a postal route—will choose. I’d like to be optimistic.

Several NASA execs remarked to me that the big opportunity now, nuclear thermal rockets, has a lot of opposition from those in the agency who fear public outcry. We’re in the third generation of nuclear thermal rocket development, which already has lift/pound ratings four times that of a Saturn V. But fears of failure dominate Agency thinking. Indeed, the NASA figures I talked to automatically assumed that nuclear thermal rockets were off the table because of “public outcry.” So I said, “Ever done a study to back that up?” Well, no.

I believe the public isn’t so concerned. The 1990s protest against the Cassini mission, which carried a nuclear “battery” source of small power, was the most recent such dustup. But it was funded by a publicity-seeking self promoter, Michio Kaku, who made preposterous claims about the dangers. There was no general public opposition at all. The future has many enemies.

As Joe Haldeman put it, the symposium was “A good and strange time. All those seemingly normal people doing what we do.“ Yes. And we all had a grand time doing it.

 

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HOW TO LOSE A BILLION DOLLARS IN YOUR SPARE TIME

Published by Gregory Benford on September 18th, 2011

I envisioned computer viruses and wrote the first one, in 1969—but failed to see that they would become widespread.  Then, decades later, came Stuxnet.

 

Technologies don’t always evolve as we’d like. I learned this in 1969, and failed to catch the train I’d predicted would soon leave.

Further, I failed to see the levels of distrust that would arise in computer culture from malware generally. Certainly I did not think that seeds of mistrust could be blown by the winds of national rivalry through an internet that infiltrated every aspect of our lives. But then, it was 1968… ages ago.

At the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory I used ARPANet (Advanced Research Projects Administration) to send brief messages to colleagues in other labs, running over the big, central computers we all worshipped then. ARPANet’s emails had a pernicious problem: “bad code” that arose when researchers included (maybe accidentally) pieces of programming that threw things awry. Mostly I sent technical discussions to those at other labs. I worked on theoretical physics: solid state theory, plasma confinement for the fusion program, and some weapons work.

One day as I worked on a computation using the main computer, an idea struck: I could do so intentionally, making a program that deliberately copied itself. The biological analogy was obvious; evolution would favor such code, especially if it was designed to use clever methods of hiding itself and using others’ energy (computing time) to further its own genetic ends.

So… I wrote some simple code and sent it along in my next transmission on ARPANet. Just a few lines in Fortran told the computer to attach these lines to programs being transmitted to a certain terminal. Soon the code popped up in other programs, and started propagating. By the next day it was in a lot of otherwise unrelated code, and I called a halt to matters by sending a message alerting people to the offending lines.

Then I wrote a memo and made a point with the mavens of the Main Computer: this could be done with considerably more malevolent motivations. Viruses could move. Their reply: “Why would anyone do it, though?”

I recalled the Dylan song: The pump don’t work, ‘cause the vandals took the handles…

I thought it inevitable that such ideas work themselves out in the larger world. I wrote a story, “The Scarred Man” to trace this out, choosing to think commercially: could someone make a buck out of this? I devised a “virus” that could be cured with a program called VACCINE. The story appeared in the May, 1970 issue of Venture magazine and mercifully dropped from sight.

I avoided “credit” for this idea for a long time, but gradually realized that it was inevitable, in fact fairly obvious. In the early 1970s it surfaced again at Livermore when a self-replicating program named Creeper infected ARPANET. It just printed on a user’s video screen, “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” Users quickly wrote the first antivirus program, Reaper, to erase Creeper. Various people reinvented this idea  into the 1980s,  when a virus named Elk Cloner infected early Apple computers. That got fixed quickly, but Microsoft software proved more vulnerable, and in 1986 a virus named Brain started booting up with the disk operating system, spread through floppy disks and stimulated the antivirus industry I had anticipated in 1970.

It is some solace, I suppose, that last year’s #2 seller software in virus protection was a neat little program named Vaccine. The basic idea came into different currency at the hands of the renowned British biologist Richard Dawkins, who invented the term “memes” to describe cultural notions that catch on and propagate through human cultural mechanisms. Ranging from pop songs you can’t get out of your head all the way up to the Catholic Church, memes express how cultural evolution can occur so quickly, as old memes give way to voracious new ones.

There was some money to be made from this virus idea, if remorselessly pursued, even back in the early 1970s. I thought about these, though my heart was not in it. Computer viruses are antisocial behavior I did not want to encourage.

Nowadays there are nasty scrub-everything viruses of robust ability and myriad malware variations: Trojan horses, chameleons (acts friendly, turns nasty), software bombs (self-detonating agents, destroying without cloning themselves), logic bombs (go off given specific cues), time bombs (keyed by clock time), replicators (“rabbits” clone until they fill all memory), worms (traveling through network computer systems, laying eggs). Some companies in the anti-viral business claim over 100 million dollars lost each year in the just USA due to viruses.

Viruses were not a legacy I wanted to claim. Inevitably somebody was going to invent computer viruses; the idea requires only a simple biological analogy. Once it escaped into the general culture, there was no way back. I didn’t want to make my life about that. The manufacturers of spray-paint cans probably feel the same way…

For example, our cities will get smart. They will be able to track us with cameras or with microwaves that read chips in our phones, computers or even embedded beneath our skin. The first commercial use of this will be to feed advertising to us. We’ll inevitably live in an arms race against intrusive eyes, much as we guard against computer viruses now.

Stuxnet, the software virus that invaded Iran’s nuclear facilities, apparently is the first virus that disrupts industrial processes. It mutates on a schedule to avoid erasure, interrogates computers it invades, and sends back data to its inventors. Stuxnet can reprogram the PLCs and hide its changes. This smart cyber-weapon has a worm’s ability to reprogram external programmable logic controllers, making it a refined malware, aimed at critical infrastructure. Commands in Stuxnet code increase the frequency of rotors in centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant so they fly apart. Yet much Stuxnet code is unremarkable, standard stuff without advanced cloaking techniques.

Still, this is a wholly new thing—smart viruses with a grudge. These are evolving, self-aware, self-educating, craftily doing their mission. Expect more to come. Countries hostile to the United States may launch malware attacks against U.S. facilities, using Stuxnet-like code to take down national power grids or other critical infrastructure.

Though seldom remarked upon, USA policy traditionally has been to lead in technology, while selling the last generation tech to others. Thus we can defeat our prior inventions, and sometimes we even deliberately installed defects we could exploit later.

Stuxnet looks like a kluge with inventive parts. It does not hide its payload well or cover its tracks. It will not take great effort to greatly improve such methods (say, with virtual machine-based obfuscation, novel techniques for anti-debugging, etc), whatever their targets. Once major players use such techniques in nation-state rivalries, surely these will leak into commerce, where the stakes are immense for all of us. If Stux-type, untraceable malware becomes a weapon of commerce, our increasingly global commerce will take on a nasty edge.

If living in space becomes common, such systems will demand levels of maintenance and control seldom used on Earth. The International Space Station, for example, spends most crew time keeping the place running. These can be corrupted with malware.

So can many systems to come, as our environment becomes “smart” and interacts with us. Increasing interconnections of all systems will make smart sabotage a compelling temptation. So will malware that elicits data from your life, or corrupts systems you already have, in hopes you’ll replace them.

Now think beyond these first stages. What secondary changes emerge from those? Seeds of mistrust and suspicion can travel far.

That’s the world we’ll live in, with fresh problems we can attack if we’ve thought them through.

How  should you prepare and respond? You can’t possibly anticipate all outcomes. The time to think about this is now, before the future arrives like an angry freight train.

 

 

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