Cities in Flight

Written quite some while ago probably after an overdose of city fiction probably of the 'slipstream' variety. - Neal 2020

There seems a belief, ascribed to by many of those writing short science fiction today, that nothing of importance happens unless it is set in the ‘mean streets’ of some city. On the whole the works stemming from this will be based on some student or other urbanite living a squalid existence in a seedy flat, while experiencing either relationship problems, or angst about an inability to have a relationship at all. Often, the writers are displaying a lack of imagination by casting themselves in the lead role in the only setting they have experienced. From the other side, there are many writers of fantasy who cannot step away from the image of their characters questing through the wilderness or some agrarian idyll, though that usually stems only from the secondhand experience gained throught the books they have read. Getting back to the cities though: are the writers of much urban science fiction nowadays suffering from the same delusion as the fantasy writers?

Cities and the country bleed into each other. There are towns, villages, single houses and an infinite combination of everything inbetween; industrial sites in the country; city parks; wastelands being reclaimed by nature; connecting rivers and transport systems; and, fuckit, urban foxes. And of course in both directions there is a continuous exchange of people: wide varieties of commuters and ‘overspill’ and many so-called ‘country’ people moving into the cities to work. The dividing line, unfortunately, is near illusory, perceived mainly by resentful minds. Cities no longer have impenetrable walls around them with gates that are closed up at night and the countryside is no longer filled with Barny Hayseed clones chewing on straws and muttering about ‘tham thar towny buggers’. This perception displays the same blinkered vision as the present urban government, which legislates for cities and against the country – damaging those millions dwelling in between and polarising the attitude of many others – or of those dwellers in a time warp, the fox hunting lobby, who manage to piss off all camps.

Britons live in a huge and wonderful variety of environments. Along our coasts there are many people who have tried to opt out by living in their boats, others divide their lives between boats and often much neglected coastal houses, there are huge transitory populations on the sea on oil rigs and in container ships, many millions inhabit suburbs, large populations live in villages where their only real connection with the countryside is that they notice it from their car whilst caught behind a tractor on their weekly visit to Asda, there are inclusive island populations who don’t even think about any division between city and country, there are towns where the countryside is only a step away and in which the residents truly live their lives in both.

Of course, everything I’ve just written is also blinkered, for I’m describing Britain today. Maybe, an SF writer should be thinking of tomorrow’s Britain or an alternate one, or both. Also, Britain contains only a small fraction of the world’s population – there are actually other countries, and some very different ways of life. As for our urban environments? Even now the computer revolution is beginning to decentralise white collar professions, so what need to live in the city? Robotic manfacture is whittling down the required work force so what future need of industrialised towns? And the financial imperatives that originally made urban dwelling a necessity, will they last? Umph! Still today, still parochial!

What about undersea dwellings, orbital communities, nomadic populations, cave dwelling morlocks, people adapted to live under the sea, people loading their minds into VR, even nomadic minds leaping from artificial body to body? Ach, I could go on and on, but the point is made: urban SF writers, lift up your heads, take a look around and try to imagine yourself somewhere else. Oscar Wilde quipped about how he may be lying in the gutter, but he’s looking at the stars, some people, it would seem, are lying face-down in that same gutter.

Blade Runner 2049

Here's what I wrote the day after seeing this film:

"Okay, I watched Blade Runner 2049 last night. Well, you know when you go to a nightclub, and it's a bit crap, so they crank the volume up to try and make it exciting. That. The original Blade Runner was understated - the sounds meant something - here they were akin to the bangs and crashes in a cheap horror movie to make you jump out of your seat. Scenes dragged on for too long to try and impart atmosphere and meaning that wasn't there. I didn't care about anyone. Loose threads dangled. It was boring and it dragged. About an hour and a half in I felt I'd fallen into an episode of the Twilight Zone where I would be forced to watch a naff movie forever."

It is interesting to read reviews from others who feel that this is the best thing they have ever seen, or it is a great effort, or it is a suitable sequel. This is a salutary reminder that people's experience of art is mostly subjective. I then begin to wonder if my experience would have been different if the sound hadn't been so high that the crash bangs and music hurt my ears, but no, then I wouldn't have been able to hear what they were saying. Perhaps I wasn't in the right frame of mind? No - good films always grab me and in fact I use them to escape any bad state of mind. Perhaps I just didn't 'get' it? No. The last time I didn't 'get' an sfnal entertainment was when I was learning to walk.

In retrospect: The sound needed to be lower and unnecessary loud shit needed to go. Scenes needed to be much shorter because, hey, I get it now so move on. The attempts at arty mystery, seemingly tossed in at random, were a distraction. I mean, what were those bees about and who cares? What was the point of the 'unresolved' bad guy with the blank eyes? The next film? Why did I care nothing for any of the characters except, just a little bit, for Deckard? 

No, my opinion still hasn't changed.

STAN - Brian Aldiss

Sad loss, but the work lives on. Brian Aldiss 18 August 1925 – 19 August 2017. 

In the foreward of Space, time and Nathaniel (NEL 1971), Aldiss asks, ‘What happens to old science fiction? Is it as expendable as last year’s calender?’ to which the answer is, ‘Maybe.’ Nostalgia comes into play, and SF, though usually concerning the future, possesses a history worthy of study. In technical detail, science fiction stories do date quicker than bananas. Already with some of my own short stories I’m finding evidence of a lack of mobile phones, and when you look back to stories published more than thirty-five years ago you can but cringe when Captain Zorge calculates his next hyperspace jump on a slide rule. My edition of Stan (the acronym by which this book came to be known) can only be described as much loved and deeply in need of Sellotape. Just looking at the cover with its acorn-headed failed man gazing with its huge turquoise eyes into some immeasurable distance, sitting cobwebbed on a pile of bones, provides me with the thrill of remembered reading pleasure. Yet, Aldiss says of even this edition, ‘a whiff of period charm hangs over it’. However, Stan contains what for me are some of the classic short stories of the genre, and is well-worth a read for any of those who might think they are doing anything new. My favorite has to be The Failed Men. This excellent time travel story tells of a relief effort run by the fourth millennium Paulls to which twenty-fourth century humans have been recruited – both races brothers in comparison to the people, of millions of years in the future, that they are trying to help. And what is the plight of these last? They have buried themselves alive because they have ‘failed’. Put across in this story is the incredible frustration of the rescuers in trying to find out precisely what is meant by that failure – frustration in some cases leading to despair. No real explanation is offered and it is from this enigma that comes the appeal, that and the sheer story-telling ability. I don’t know whether or not this book is available now. It ought to be, not least for students studying the genre, but mostly because, slide rules aside, a good story is timeless. 

All People.

I’ve been really enjoying these ‘Who Reads my Books’ posts and I hope that you have too. It brings home to me some thoughts about the anonymity and disconnection from personal interaction on the internet. Very often people don’t use their names or their faces when they post, but that is almost irrelevant. Even when they have a photograph and a name they either are, or are perceived to be, their internet personae. It’s a little bit like Orlandine splitting off her sub-personae – subminds of herself – so assign to discrete tasks.

The internet persona is often a bit of a caricature in which anger, virtue, sarcasm, politics and many other traits predominate. It’s not a real person but a sketch, a presentation, a façade. So much of what is real about them is excluded. Therefore, it’s nice to read these ‘Who Reads my Books’ short autobiographies, with pictures, because I’m seeing more of the real person.

They are people who have lived and are living. They have their worries (or not) about money, health, their partners and children. Some like to stomp up mountains, practise Jiu Jitsu or sit and smoke a good cigar. One is laboring around his new house, another is studying marine biology. A retired school teacher is here and we have a couple who work or have worked in aerospace, while a third is teaching people how not to be fat! One designs gardens and runs marathons, while another races motorbikes and flies drones. Many, I have discovered, work in IT. They are all interesting because, in the end, once you get to know people, they generally are. Though, I’ll be conceited here and say that’s especially the case with my readers!

They are all people; not a name, picture and a line of text to be dismissed. So, if you want to join them, DM me through either my Facebook or Twitter account, and get your autobiography started.    

Corporatism and the TPD

Catching up with some blog posts. Here’s one I started some while ago and never posted:

Corporatism is defined as ‘the control of a state or organization by large interest groups’. Unfortunately it is one of those words whose meaning has been blurred by misuse (sometimes deliberate) and you can find lengthy articles about it. The best I’ve found, which simplifies and covers what I mean, can be found here.

 “Corporatism is the merger of state and corporate power with each side helping the other grow larger. Governments own, invest in, or heavily regulate every single company in this country and have enormous influence in business. Politicians and bureaucrats have their own friends and cronies in those firms as well. It’s the same for corporations as they have lobbyists in government to make sure that all those investments and regulations benefit them. Both are intertwined to form a government-corporate state that prevents capitalism from functioning efficiently.”

“That marriage has grown big government and big corporations at the expense of individuals, their small businesses, and the free market.” 

Corporatism is what we have now, not capitalism. Even Noam Chomsky, that darling of the Left, when asked what he thought about capitalism, replied, “I think it’s a great idea if we were to ever try it,” (Chomsky, 2002). 

The TPD (Tobacco Products Directive) out of the EU is a perfect demonstration of corporatism in action. In the development of ecigs there was massive innovation, numerous products from numerous small companies, and it's been a real game changer. Only the special interest groups - big pharma, big tobacco, those sucking on the teat of 'public health' - didn't like that. So, allied with an authoritarian regime seeing tax revenue disappearing, they pushed for regulation that kills innovation, kills those small companies that cannot afford to adhere to it (also by generally shoving up other costs), and, by reducing the nicotine strength of eliquids, kills the effectiveness of ecigs themselves.

It is still continuing with attempts to ban eliquid flavours because children might be attracted to those that have the flavours of sweets, despite the fact that children who use ecigs usually smoked before and that ecigs have consistently been shown to be a gateway OUT of smoking. The cry ‘think of the children’ is often an excuse for heavy-handed legislation.

And of course all this is working because now there are people out there who seriously believe it is better to continue smoking than use ecigs. I’ve met them and been baffled by such ignorance. I lot is being said about ‘fake news’ recently and the finger of blame points at the internet. In reality this is just a magnification of what has always been happening across all news media.  

Took a Walk

Last weekend I decided, rather than sit in the house and arse around on Facebook, that I should head off and walk somewhere pleasant, maybe have some lunch out too. I got in my car and drove to the village of Althorne, abandoned my car and headed down to the River Crouch estuary.

A stroll along the edge of here has been part of my walking routine but, from my house, that involves a lot of walking along the sides of the roads, which ain’t that great. Though I have to admit to some enjoyment since this is the first English Spring I’ve seen in 10 years.

So I headed down and along the edge of the estuary to Burnham-on-Crouch. It’s pleasant down there and I was reminded of the time when, at about age 20, I was training myself for a walking holiday in the Lake District. I had someone drive me out and dump me by Bradwell power station and walked back in, following the sea wall to where my parent’s house was located. This was about 20 miles.

I was of course writing stuff at the time and I made plenty of notes while tramping along and afterwards turned this into an article, which I sent to a walking magazine. I was young and naive then and unfamiliar with the ways of the writing world, so made the common mistake of becoming impatient and sending off a snotty letter when I hadn’t heard something for a while. The editor sent my article back telling me to shove it. Apparently he had been about to go and take pictures of the area to complement the article, which he was going to publish.

That would have been my first publication success had I not been a dick. I wonder now what course I would have taken if it had been published. Maybe now I would be a jobbing writer turning out articles for various magazines and newspapers while yearning to be a novelist.

Anyway, back to the walk… I arrived in Burnham after an hour and a half. My plan had been to have lunch there, but most of the pubs were still closed and, really, it takes a little while to cool down after a good walk and actually feel hungry. Instead I found a café and had a cream tea. All very English and, I admit, the first time in my life I had ever eaten a scone with clotted cream and jam.

After whiling away a pleasant time I then headed back. A search on the internet told me this walk was 5 miles so, with the return journey, 10 miles. Others told me it was 3 miles but I thought no. Average walking speed is 3.1 miles (though dependent on a lot of factors) and I was walking fast. I plumped for 8 or 9 miles. Now having traced the route on Google Earth I find it was a total of 11 miles.

Yesterday I decided to head the other direction along the Crouch to a place called Fambridge. Again the internet told me this was about 5 miles. It took me 2 hours to reach a pub called the Ferryboat where I intended to guzzle a pint of something, but when I got there it was closed for refurbishment. Following directions I headed to a nearby marina bar and there drank a pint of Thatcher’s cider before heading back. My estimate of 10 miles was again upgraded by Google Earth, this time to 14.8 miles. I thought I felt a bit knackered.

And here I am writing an article in a different way. No waxing lyrical about crab shells stuck to the sea grass, dry and papery and rising about me like confetti as I walked through them. Nothing about sun and salt bleached driftwood taking on the appearance of alien creatures that had hauled themselves from the depths. Aliens and things of a crabby nature are elsewhere now.   

Fast Words

Well that’s good. I tried out this fasting and did four, then two then three days, with the days in between eating my usual amount. I’ve lost 10lb+ in that time, but hard to judge precisely since when you eat again that’s a pound of so of food plus the fluid you retain while digesting it. Doesn’t take a lot – a cup of tea weighs half a pound. If I were to measure it from a month ago, when my weight hit 192.8, then I’ve lost 20lbs. I do feel a lot lighter! Anyway, fasting is a damned sight easier than trying to diet. Near analogy would be the difference between feathering the clutch while in traffic on a hill or putting on the handbrake. But I’ve gone on enough about this already so … writing.

I finished up the first book of the Jain trilogy a week ago then turned to a file marked Jain2. Here I’d dumped sections I’d excised from the first book. I had a few little hiccups when starting the new book – lot of checking and reiterating – but soon things were running strong. This week I’ve been clearing my 2,000 words a day. Today I looked at one of those previously dumped sections where I introduced a new character. I then realised it would be better to make this new character an old character, this being a (sort of) renegade prador from the previous book. It made it more interesting and allowed for better continuity. However, I then had to go back to the first book and make some alteration there. Glad I didn’t prematurely hand it in to Macmillan.

So what else can I tell you without giving too much away? There’s a Polity assassin drone nailed to an anti-gravity disc. There’s a very dangerous alien with its … manipulators on some serious weaponry. Orlandine is having an existential crisis, and a lethal war drone called Knobbler has a crucial mission. And then there’s the Clade, ooh let me tell you all about the Clade. Maybe I should start with how it –   

What was I saying?

One Week Fast

When I came back from Crete in August, still suffering from anxiety and panic attacks, I was pretty slim from kayaking, swimming and walking and weighed about 175lb. However I wouldn’t have styled myself as fit and healthy. A year and a half plus of anxiety and cortisol overload hadn’t left much in the way of reserves and I was frequently exhausted. After I settled back in here I decided I needed some other exercise of interest besides walking so I joined a gym. Since unaccustomed muscle groups were involved and I was still exhausted I found this hard at first. I had to give up my long morning walks and just go to the gym.

Over a number of months I put on weight and it mostly seemed to be muscle. I had to go up a shirt size because of restriction about my shoulders and even a bangle I wear on one wrist started to get tight when before it hung loose. However, in the last month or so I could not deny that I was running out of holes on my belt, had developed a male muffin top and that the 192lb I reached at one point wasn’t due to my brawny arms.

I started dieting. Potatoes, bread and pasta ceased to go into my shopping trolley, while the pork scratchings were definitely out. On stir-fries I dropped about 5lb. Not so exhausted now I started walking again (in the last couple of weeks), doing 7 miles every morning. I then considered something else I had done in the past, which was take a day off every now and again and eat nothing at all. But I didn’t do anything about that.

On the day before my birthday I went out for a meal with someone. I ate a scallop starter, spaghetti carbonara followed by a sweet of profiteroles, washed down with a couple of gin and tonics. But even as I was eating I felt unhappy with the way my midriff was pushing against my shirt.

The next morning my weight was 184lb and I kinda fell into not eating that day. Because, obviously, I’m an avid reader of what interests me, I started reading up on fasting. My last post here tells you much of what I got from that. But I’ll reiterate:

Your body has evolved to store fat in times of plenty then burn it when there is no food about. We live constantly in times of plenty and that’s why so many of us are fat. The mechanism is this: over a few days of fasting your body burns through its glycogen reserves in your liver and elsewhere. It then starts burning fat (ketosis). The idea that you burn muscle and store fat is, in my opinion, apocryphal. Autophagy and apopsis accelerate during this time cleaning out cell detritus and breaking up those cells that are redundant and yes, some of those are muscle cells – useless, damaged inefficient cells. However the meme has been promulgated by people who have fasted seeing their biceps or whatever shrink and think, ‘Oh my god it’s true I’m burning muscle!’ Wake up. One of the closest animals to us physiologically is the pig and, bearing in mind that pigs are less well-fed than us, how much fat do you see in pork? Your muscles are getting smaller because they’re losing the fat in them. This story is also promulgated by those who stop exercising when they fast. Yes, you’re losing muscle BECAUSE ITS REDUNDANT IF YOU DON’T USE IT – autophagy and apopsis taking out what is surplus to requirements. Also, consider this: if your body is carrying 10lb of extra fat – the equivalent of five bags of sugar – then logically it requires muscle for that, which becomes redundant as you lose it. That is my opinion anyway.

The next day my weight was down 4lb, almost certainly all of it was the stuff in my liver, in my gut and fluid. Because I had not quite understood the above and feared ill effects I ate a banana and two satsumas in the morning then spent the rest of the day without food. The following morning I was down 1.6lb and the day after a further 1.4lb. The day after I was out for dinner again. I ate something at about 5pm to prepare my stomach for that (and the gin and tonics) and the following day my weight had gone up 2.6lb. And no I was not rapidly putting the fat back on because that was almost certainly the weight of the food and the fluid retained to digest it – no food again for a day and I dropped 3lb.

Throughout this I have continued exercising, walking 7 miles each morning and going to the gym for an hour and a quarter every afternoon. I had a couple of small dizzy spells at one point but mostly I’ve felt sharper mentally and had no problem exercising, quite the reverse in fact. Over four days my ‘love handles’ reduced by about half while my belly shrank about the same amount. My arms also shrank, but to give better muscle definition. Hunger was an issue but, three or four days in, it was no different from how it was on day one. It wasn’t constant either – I didn’t wake up hungry and I certainly wasn’t hungry while exercising. It was patchy throughout the day. And it wasn’t so severe I wanted to eat a raw buffalo liver or eat a fish while it was still wriggling (from the film The Revenant). I guess that kind of hunger occurs when ketosis is over – no fat left – and you do start eating your own muscle – protein starvation.

To sum up: Over a period of a week I lost 10lb. An awful lot of that has been around my waist. I have lost from shoulders, arms, chest, bum and legs but I like that there’s less to pinch under the skin and my musculature is more defined. I’m now going another day without food but not exercising. It’s snowy outside and cold and grey, but I also want to take the opportunity to see if there is any change in the hunger pangs and whether I’ll keep up the constant loss average of 1.5lbs a day.        

Article 18: Who Threw That?

Here's an article I wrote quite some years ago. I probably did it at around about the time films like Armageddon were doing the rounds since it seem likely the reporter or the news story concerned was looking for something 'topical'.

WHO THREW THAT?

So, on February the 1^st 2019 there is a chance, cosmically speaking, of a large lump of rock slamming into Earth. According to ‘expert opinion’, so the media told us on the morning of this announcement, this thing is a mile and half wide and will impact with enough force to wipe out a country the size of Britain. This was then upgraded, within an hour, to be one capable of wiping out the USA – a change I put down to both media hype and a dearth of information. Of course experts will vie with each other to predict greater and greater disasters to get themselves on television, so you can expect by the time you read this that the asteroid will destroy all life on Earth. But then maybe it could. What happens if it hits the oilfields, what changes might it make to the weather, might it perturb Earth’s orbit enough to sling us into an ice age or turn everything to desert? I’m not an expert, so I can’t really say.

At present, measurements are not yet accurate enough to tell us precisely what will happen. The asteroid will probably miss us completely and go round for another try in ex-thousand years time. What is certain is that measurements will become more and more accurate as the asteroid draws closer. Personally, I hope that they show, in the near future, that the asteroid is certain to impact. This is not because I am a nihilist, but because such a state of affairs would impel the kind of hard technological advances not seen since the World Wars. We have the time and ability to stop this thing, but we would have to get off our arses to do so. Such a threat could pump huge amounts of cash, heretofore blown on military spending and idiot bureaucracy, into giving us a firmer foothold in space. Resultant developments would be hugely beneficial and solid – we would not be able to afford the dipstick mistakes that have wasted the last few Mars’ missions – and I can see that how once the rock is blown off course there’ll be no turning back. Suddenly we’ll be dwellers in a huge and hostile universe, not post-Copernican Earthlings. And even those grandads saying, “Well, we didn’t have those new-fangled asteroid thingies in my day,” will have to sit up and take notice.

For the SF writer there are other situations to extrapolate. Taking the phrase ‘capable of wiping-out the USA’ it is almost inevitable that the Bin Ladens of this world will say that it has been sent to do just that. Let me predict that they’ll name the asteroid ‘The Fist of God’, and that fundamentalist terrorists will do everything they can to sabotage any project to change its course. Because there will be no guarantee that the project will be successful, a more careless attitude to life and liberty might prevail. Maybe the Western World would take this opportunity, in the purported interests of humanity, to flatten the Middle East and take control of the oil. Don’t doubt this possibility. It’s worth being reminded that the firepower of a couple of nuclear submarines could do the job. Have people already forgotten what atomic bombs can do, and more specifically, neutron bombs? Perhaps Pakistan and India will take this opportunity to settle their differences – end-of-the-world scenarios being an excuse for all sorts of mayhem. Will China just sit back and watch all this? And, there is always the most unlikely possibility: this could be a unifying influence on the entire planet.

Taking an even larger and more tongue-in-cheek view, one might even wonder about the timing. Consider how fortunate we were to have a moon that strips away atmosphere thus preventing this planet going catastrophically greenhouse and ending up like Venus – a moon that also gives tides so that life developing in the water will certainly also end up on land. Previous impacts wiped out life forms that would not have led to us. The asteroid that drove the dinosaurs extinct ended the 160 million-year reign of creatures that showed no signs of growing brains larger than peanuts. Aptly-timed ice ages then led to the survival of creatures with an interest in banging rocks together. A hundred years ago we would have been unable to do anything about the approaching cataclysm, moreover, probably would not even have detected it.

This is all obviously the determinist 20/20 hindsight of the bible-thumping trench survivor: “God loves me, that’s why the shrapnel took the top off of Harry’s head and not mine.” But it’s just as obvious that the aliens sent this rock, and that we have seventeen years in which to prove ourselves fit to join the galactic community.

Writing Update.

Righto, I’ve finished the initial editing of Orbus and now await its return from the copy editor. Next, I’ve written an article for the BSFA, The British Science Fiction Association, which is

…currently producing a series of special pamphlets for its members. Previous pamphlets include a small press sampler.’ Martin Lewis would like to produce one consisting of brief articles of SF writers on SF films. The idea is that each contributor writes an 750 word piece on a SF film which means something special to them. It might be your favourite film, it might be a guilty pleasure, it might be a film that was your gateway into the world of science fiction. I would be happy for contributors to use the broadest possible definition of science fiction and to be as popularist or obscure as they wished.

Bearing this in mind I chose Aliens, which is certainly one of my favourite films and which I might have described as a ‘guilty pleasure’ where it not for the fact I’m not pretentious enough to feel guilty about anything I enjoy. You certainly won’t get one of those film lists from me including something French with subtitles, or utterly obscure, or both, and the words ‘noir’ or ‘surreal’ will not be in evidence.

Next on the agenda is getting back to writing the ‘Owner’ story which still doesn’t really have a title. Presently I’m approaching 90,000 words, but I’ve been knocking the hell out of the story changing it from 1^st person to 3^rd, expanding the scale of the scenery and the scale of the problems faced by the somewhat nasty hero.

Back to work now.

Article 17: Super Trooper

Just before reading through this I wondered if my opinion might have changed any, finishing the article, I found it hadn't. We're still on the liberal shit-slide, it's just that the shit is getting deeper...

SUPER TROOPER.

I've just re-read Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers – a book I originally read when a teenager. What little I remembered of reading the book then, had since been swamped by the lurid images from Paul Verhoeven’s silly but enjoyable film. I probably would not have read it again but for two circumstances: firstly my mother happened to bring home a copy from the charity shop in which she works, and secondly, the strident claims that Heinlein is fascist/right-wing/libertarian from members of the British SF establishment, piqued my interest, for it is often the books recommended by the same critics and self-styled academics that bore me into a coma.

My second reading of this book gave me what I’ll describe as the Dad’s Army effect. When I watched that series as a child, I laughed along with the slapstick and enjoyed it on that level. Watching it later as an adult, I began to appreciate the adult humour. Starship Troopers can appeal to the SF-with-boy’s-toys oriented adolescent just as much as to an adult with the same orientation. But reading ideas of how human rights and privileges should be earned and should be equally balanced by responsibilities, I began to see why Heinlein is disliked by so many, then I hit chapter eight.

There are those who consider his work ironic – satire – when he is describing his future society, but that’s wishful thinking on the part of people who cannot accept that someone who produces such lucid enjoyable work does not buy into their political beliefs. His satire is in fact directed against the society of his time, and of our time, of which he is unstinting in his scorn. Not accepting the cop-out that he didn’t really mean it, it would seem then that Heinlein advocates corporal and capital punishment “…they (wrongly) assumed Man has a moral instinct.” his narrator tells us, this, after detailing how the delinquents of the twentieth century were never really deterred from going on to become full-time criminals. How they never, in the puppy-training analogy he uses, had their noses rubbed in it.

He comments on a death sentence carried out on someone who kidnapped and murdered a little girl: Well, if there was no way to keep it from happening once, there was only one sure way to keep it from happening twice. Which we used. The old liberal platitude has it that the death penalty is no deterrent to murder, which is like saying that hitting a paving slab at 125 miles an hour is no deterrent to jumping off the Eiffel Tower. Well, you’ll only do it once. Of course such arguments are too simplistic for the politically correct and ‘socially aware’, but he has a pop at them as well on the subject of corporal punishment: “…the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves 'social workers' or sometimes 'child psychologists'. It was too simple for them, apparently, since anyone could do it using the patience and firmness needed in training a puppy. I have sometimes wondered if they cherished a vested interest in disorder..."

Such simplicity is not relished by those who studied psychology, sociology et al at the universities where they also received their political indoctrination. (It’s sad that so many enter the SF world via the same route and consider themselves radical, when really they’re only joining the establishment.) Such people have not so much a vested interest in disorder, but in over-complication, because that way they can wrest control from poor normal plebs. “You must not smack your child, bring him to the child psychologist and if that doesn’t work, we’ll dose him up with Ritalin, then during his ensuing life this severely screwed-up human being can keep any number of counsellors, psychologists, social workers & sociologists in employment.”

Reading about Heinlein’s work I discover that he did not write 'literature' and that his later works were weighed down with didactic right-wing/libertarian tracts. Of course, had those tracts been left-wing/liberal, he would have been on a higher pedestal in Britain than the one he presently occupies – his work branded as serious literature containing much important social commentary. You gotta laugh.

Starship Troopers was first published forty-six years ago. Read chapter eight if you cannot be bothered with the whole book. In the political zeitgeist of today’s Britain Heinlein is not accepted as a visionary, but that will come after the lunatics presently in control of our society have finished shovelling their excrement at the fan, in the time when we have to clean up the mess.

ENDS.

Article 16: SF Archaeology.

Wow, things date really quickly in SF if its not set some centuries in the future, and in this article you can see how things date even quicker when you're writing about SF. The X Prize as been taken and not so long ago I put a post here about a tank-mounted laser weapon.

SF ARCHAEOLOGY.

The idea that old is bad and new is good is one that permeates some quarters of our culture and sees its expression in the New Labour verses the ‘forces of conservatism’ in the political world. The former seems intent on destroying anything old even when having nothing better to replace it, the latter wants to hang onto the outmoded even when something better is available. But before anyone switches off, I’m not going to get into a rant about all that – this magazine isn’t big enough – I’m going to look at it as applied to science fiction.

For many, SF has to be primarily new and innovative. Now, while I agree that SF should open our eyes to possibilities never seen before (though that is by no means all it should do), I also feel it should never close our eyes to the eminently likely.

Some while back I produced a story in which I named an android manufacturing company ‘Cybercorp’, and was told the name was nothing new. But being much used in fiction, is that name less or more likely to be used in fact? Already we are coming out the other side of rebranding for the sake of it. Consignia is now once again the Post Office and most people know that Corus really means British Steel. Of course I could have named my company Epsilion Floogle Bugler Ltd or Rumbatious Pumpwhistle, but I came up with the Cybercorp in the same way as many company names are formed (when advertising executives are not becoming ‘creative’ and disappearing up their own fundaments): Microsoft, Vodaphone, Telecom, Railtrack – simple basic and descriptive. But my real contention here is that though something may be old hat, that doesn’t make it bad, wrong or unlikely. I know it’s a distasteful prospect for some, but it is quite possible that sometime a company will be formed and it’ll be called Robotics Inc. Though, going off at tangent here, the most likely name, for a future manufacturer of androids, is Honda.

Zap guns and rocket ships (or squids in space) are what SF is all about, apparently. I can take issue with that straight away. 1984 certainly isn’t and, despite what Jo Brandt might think, it’s classic SF. Other books in the genre that don’t fall under that supposedly derogatory description: The Time Machine, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Frankenstein, Half-Past Human (T J Bass), Hawksbill Station (Silverberg) … I’m probably preaching to the converted here. However, what’s wrong with zap guns and rocket ships? Certainly the terms themselves are cliches, but what about the ideas and the reality behind them? Must they be abandoned because they are no longer new?

Many years ago the American military asked Congress if they could test a ground-based laser for knocking out satellites (refused). Microwave beam weapons were employed during the Gulf War to screw Iraqi communications. The taser has been in use for a ages and now, in the process of being developed, is a taser that uses no wires – the utterly cliched SF stun gun. Even my nieghbour, working years ago for Marconi, was developing specialist transformers for powering military lasers. All zap guns, all real. As for the rocket ships … well erm, there’s this thing called the space shuttle, a couple of years ago the first ion drive was tested in space, there are plenty of contenders for the $10 million prize for putting a privately-funded craft up into space (twice in a limited period to prove it’s viable proposition), there’s the prospect of many more missions into the solar system, rocket ships have put two robots on Mars. I won’t go on.

Only writers of utterly dystopian futures of technological collapse think zap guns and rocket ships won’t figure in them. To ignore these supposed old cliches of SF makes about as much sense as ignoring trees because they have too often been used in fiction. It is plain wrong to discount something because it is old and well-used. Things, in general, become that way because they work, because they are right, and because no one has thought of a plausible alternative. New doesn’t mean good or right and old doesn’t mean bad or wrong, they just are what they are.

Heavy Metal.

Well, since it's now out there on the Internet, there's not much point in me keeping quiet about it. Hopefully Hollywood Insider won't mind me pinching this:

David Fincher's Remake of Heavy Metal a No-Go at Paramount.

An article on Jul 9, 2008, 03:44 PM by Nicole Sperling

Not even a bigshot like David Fincher could keep Heavy Metal at Paramount. The Zodiac director, who is currently putting the finishing touches on his highly-anticipated Brad Pitt movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, has been spearheading an edgy remake of the 1981 R-rated animated flick inspired by the 1970s fantasy magazine of the same name. But Tim Miller, whose Blur Studio is handling the animation, says he and Fincher, along with current Heavy Metal publisher Kevin Eastman, are now shopping the film to other studios because Paramount's new production execs felt the movie was too risque for mainstream audiences. The project is an amalgam of erotic and violent storylines penned by well-known sci-fi scribes like Steve Niles (30 Days of Night), Joe Haldeman (The Forever War), and Neal Asher (Gridlinked). The concept is to use eight to 10 of these shorts in a single movie with each segment helmed by a different director (Fincher is on deck to direct one). Though things are on hold until another studio picks it up, Miller is confident the film will eventually see the light of day. "David really believes in the project. It's just a matter of time," Miller says.

Five of my stories up for inclusion -- about half the film.

SFX December 2008

Nice profile piece on me in the December 2008 issue of SFX, with a full page picture too (inside, not that scary-eyed depilatephobe on the front cover). I can’t say it was much fun posing in the pissing rain on the Mayland mud flats, but the result seems pretty good. I’d just love to know how the other more ambitious photos of me posing against a wall of scrap turned out. That picture could have had the tagline: here is Neal Asher superimposed over a view inside his head.

Article 15: Re-Write

This is an old one, with some bits I no longer agree with, but I'll give it to you as it was:

RE-WRITE.

When do you cease to re-write work? Simple answer: when you are no longer improving as a writer, when you feel you have nothing more to learn, when you have achieved perfection. It is an unfortunate fact that some writers do believe this of themselves. They are normally the ones who have achieved success, and are drunk on the adulation of those who think a past participle is something you'll find in a linear accelerator.

For me revision of a story partially ceases when I feel I have achieved a required effect, might well attain publication, and have more interest in the next project. But while it remains in my processor it is still subject to a critical eye. I don't believe there is such a thing as too much re-writing. You just reach the stage where you can't go any further with a piece and move on to the next. In the process you jettison the bad and keep the good. You decide, and you base your decision on what you are after. Publication? Re-write for the market acting on feedback from editors and readers. Personal satisfaction? Don't kid yourself. For my novella for Club 199 I took a thirty thousand word story and extended it by ten thousand words to fit it within their parameters, and felt perfectly justified in doing so. As far as I am concerned good writers are successful writers (though successful writers often degenerate into bad writers).

There is no quick-fix formula. It is obvious such a formula is profoundly wished for, as the sales of the 'How To' books attest. When the questions are posed as to the extent and method of re-writing the real question being asked is: how do I write well? The first step on the road for ninety percent of would-be-famous novelists is to learn how to use the English language. Get hold of books like 'Fowlers Modern English Usage', 'Roget's Thesaurus', and perhaps a plain old 'Mastering The English Language -S.H. Burton'. For many people the re-write required is the one to turn their masterpiece into something intelligible. It was not until I joined some postal workshops that I found out just how bad it was possible for some writing to be. I also learnt that those writers who really try to get a handle on the language are also the ones who tell the best stories. Understanding the structure is all. You're not going to build a suspension bridge if you don't know how nuts and bolts go together. The rest is badly written soap-opera.

So now you know how the English language works, have put a story together, and are looking at doing a re-write. You have looked at the story objectively and made sure that the bunch of flowers is beautiful rather than are beautiful and your hero still has the same colour hair all the way through. How does it look subjectively? Where, for example, can you break the rules to the greatest effect? The best of writers are the ones who know how to do this. Steven Donaldson once managed a one word sentence that had the skin on my back crawling (Of course I'm aware that it is not pc to like Donaldson; he's too successful). The word was 'Kevin'. No, not the spotty dickhead down the road. Kevin Landwaster who performed the Ritual of Desecration and whose spectre has just stepped through a door from the underworld. I'm afraid no English book is going to tell you how to achieve the same (though 'The Critical Sense' by James Reeves comes mighty close). The only way to learn is through hard work, reading, and listening to criticism, though for the latter you must judge what is relevant. There are no substitutes for these, just as there is no substitute for talent. When you re-write you must see the images and feel the effects of every word. You have to decide what to discard and what to keep. There are many sources you can tap to help you make these decisions. But in the end they are your own.

Article 14: Rebrand the Brand.

Rebrand the Brand

The boundaries between the very ill-defined genres of fiction have always been blurred and always will be. This is a good thing as the ground in those grey areas can be very fertile. It has brought us the hardboiled detective Brother Cadfael, Robert Graves’ wonderful family saga, that war/historical/romance Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and many more besides. But why oh why this continual need to search for new labels?

In the genres of science fiction and fantasy this is especially noticeable, and often maddening. I was dumbfounded to discover that Jurassic Park was labelled in a fast-seller list as the genre ‘dinosaur’, and on principle it is highly unlikely I’ll ever read Oryx & Crake. SF&F have an image problem for some, and this is why they try to label parts of it differently. Forever in search of respectability they grope for new names for the fiction they write, read, criticise or publish. But where are they looking for this change in attitude? Who are they actually hoping will look upon them in a different light?

Many in the mainstream literati intelligensia sneer at these genres. This is in spite of the fact that they take up about twenty percent of the fiction market, have resulted in many of the most successful films in recent years, and, science fiction specifically, is hugely relevant to today’s culture with its rapid technological change. Where will anyone have first come across videophones, genetic manipulation, satellite lasers, and missiles that think for themselves? In SF, of course. And it is to those who sneer, that those in search of new labels are going cap in hand pleading, “Please, take me seriously. I’m not really involved in that awful science fiction or fantasy stuff!” This is not only insulting to some great past authors, it is bloody annoying for those who are writing SF&F right now. How dare these people grovel for acceptance from those who don’t have the imaginative capacity to grasp science fiction or fantasy? And how gutless they are to not claim these genres as their own.

But why seek the approval of the mainstream literati establishment, especially when those seeking that approval often style themselves as ‘radical’? More blurred lines. It is because SF&F have their own literati intelligensia who stand astride the line between SF&F and the mainstream: one group standing with their feet in both worlds. They enjoy the creativity and ideas of the first but loath its status. They like the status of the other but do not enjoy its pedestrian limitations.

Some would also have us believe that what they are labelling is something new. What conceit, what arrogance, or what pretension and ignorance. One can only suppose that they have not read widely enough. There’s also some misapprehension of how the English language works in this age when if you’re bad, man, you’re good, and if you’re cool you’re hot. Like the PC lobby they hope that changing labels changes attitude, when in fact current labels change in people’s perception. And the delusion that this rebranding (for that is what it is) will work, is misguided. It will not cause what has been rebranded to perform better. Perhaps they should call the new thing Consignia Fiction, or Corus Fiction – that should do as much good.

Article 13: Organic

INORGANIC ORGANICS

I have to wonder how many people actually carry out the quite simple exercise of checking the meaning of words in a dictionary. Doing so, they might learn just how much gobbledegook is being flung at them every day. And just how much advertizers and those with more political motives, are perpetually playing on their fears and ignorance. Hypo-allergenic shampoo, for example, is not one that prevents allergic reaction, just one that contains lower levels of the proteins that do cause an allergic reaction. The compound word means ‘less allergens’ – one of those utterly meaningless statements of which advertizers are fond because there’s less chance of Trading Standards jumping on them. The question you have to ask is: less allergens than what? A patch of stinging nettles? A wasp’s nest? Obviously the intention of putting these buzz-words on bottles is not to inform, but to blind with science. Perhaps realising this people could then ask themselves why fruit additives are good or why washing with herbs will give you an orgasm? At its root, all this obfuscation is playing on the simplistic idea that natural is good and chemical is bad (This ignores everyday facts of life e.g. because we drink chemically-treated water we are utterly free of natural cholera and amoebic dysentry), which brings me, by a roundabout route, to the incredible ignorance surrounding the word ‘organic’.

While driving around in rural Essex it’s quite common to see signs up advertising all sort of items for sale – knackered lawn mowers, ancient cars, flowers, honey – and some of the signs display literacy ranging from the poetic to the abysmal. But just lately I’ve been noticing a trend set by ‘greenies’, adopted by supermarkets, and promulgated by stupidity. Now you can buy organic manure, organic cheese, organic eggs… Do the people who started this strange craze have any idea what ‘organic’ means? Could they please explain to me what inorganic cheese, manure or eggs might be?

If you are green then you’ll probably think it means items produced without any of those nasty chemical thingies. What utter drivel. Everything is made of chemicals or their constituent elements. They are not something recently created by evil science but something derived from what is already here. Monosodium glutamate (flavour enhancer) … yuk, we don’t want any of that – far too many syllables. Ever wondered why tomatoes enhance a dish? Because they’re packed with MSG. An essential chemical we must ingest every day is sodium chloride: the product of a metal that if held in the hand would result in you being hospitalized shortly after, and the basic constituent of mustard gas. It is also a chemical three oxygen atoms away from being a powerful bleach and weedkiller. How about these terrible sounding compounds: diallyl disulphide, diallyl trisulphide, S-2-propenylcysteine sulphoxide … The list is a long one, but can be contracted to one word: garlic.

That which is organic is something relating to or derived from plants or animals, or it is any of a class of compounds based on carbon. Interestingly, a final definition in the dictionary I’m presently studying, is: any substance such as a pesticide or fertilizer derived from animal or vegetable matter. So, organic food that you buy in the supermarket can have been sprayed with a nicotine insecticide or the organic chemical DDT. In fact few insecticides and fertilizers are not the product or organic chemistry, so they are organic. In fact, some of the most poisonous substances on this planet are products of organic chemistry, whether performed in a laboratory or in the more potent chemical laboratories inside living things. Oh my goodness, chemicals, I hear you cry. Sigh. Get with reality. Curare is organic, so why not spread some of that on your wholegrain bread and see how you get on? And next time you buy your organic potatoes, remember they could have been sprayed with the organic compound agent orange and that would make them no less ORGANIC!!

Ends

Article 12: Not Immortal.

And another old rant and rave:

NOT IMMORTAL.

We live in a society obsessed with the idea of youth, and frightened of the plain facts of aging and death. To avoid facing up to them people will lie, behave as if those facts don’t exist, refuse to wear hearing aids or glasses, dress young, have Botox injected and wrinkles cut away. But worse than all this are those who offer up the obviously untruthful promise of eternal youth.

One look at the advertising thrown in our faces every day will illustrate this. An evening of TV adverts will give you such gems as a model who has only just managed to clear up her acne in time to sing the praises of a hypo-allergenic-polyfiller-in-wrinkle-cream. Another cream will reduce the seven signs of aging, so we can all be glad that such a simple product will protect us against incontinence, arthritis, dementia, heart failure, blindness, hearing loss and a tendency to harp on about the good old days. You can boogy down on the beach sipping a drink containing enough sugar to rot the tusks off an elephant, and somehow this will transform you into a white-toothed youth. There’s the deodorant that keeps you perpetually available to your latest boyfriend, which is probably useful if you live the active skateboarding life promoted by your latest brand of tampon.

Magazines and catalogues are as bad if not worse. See the girdle clinging to the curves of that model who has just returned from shooting an advert about a shampoo that apparently gives you an orgasm. Observe young Adonis modelling the latest truss. And read all those articles promoting foods, New Age treatments, lifestyles and internal décor that’ll keep you perpetually this side of the Styx and apparently on the underside of thirty.

The horror of all this is that it works – many people believe it. It is doubly unfortunate, therefore, that this lying ‘in spirit and in fact’ extends well beyond the mercenary and cut-throat worlds of advertising and glossy magazines.

Consider government health warnings on cigarette packets. If you smoke you can get painful, humiliating, or disfiguring diseases that can be fatal. This is all very frightening until you ask, “How many of us don’t?” We all die. Few of us are lucky enough to die in our sleep. Most of us die from some kind of lingering malady. If you drink, don’t imbibe more than twenty-one units in a week. Heavy drinking can lead to liver failure and death (unless you’re a famous footballer of course). Both of these aberrant behaviours can lead to all sorts of terrible illnesses ranging from impotence to heart failure. Again, such warnings ignore the fact that avoiding such habits does not result in endless perfect health. You are going to get sick and die anyway, and not at the age of ninety-two with your nurse bouncing up and down on your willy. But ignoring this fact is carried on through to our health service with horrible results.

This seeming inability accept the inevitability of death (which admittedly has always been a human trait) has resulted in a health service that refuses to give us an easy way out and, with increasingly poisonous treatments, prolongs the horrible process. Get yourself a painful lingering terminal illness, and you can guarantee that the NHS will extend your suffering for as long as possible. Your only way out would be to suck on the exhaust of your car but, unable to drive that you sold it years ago, or perhaps cut your wrists, if your hands didn’t shake so much. But neither are really viable while you are trapped in a hospital bed. Your dignity is irrelevant, of course. How dare you, by your very presence, prove that none of us lives forever? How dare you be old or ill? How dare you die?

Article 11: Music Please

Here's another one of my old articles. You can see it's old because I was still having to do other work to support myself. As I recollect this caused much annoyance in certain circles...

Music Please.

I have a friend who is in the music business just as I am in the writing business i.e. we’re contenders, but we both have to work for a living. In the winter we work together and much of our time is spent discussing our respective arts while sipping coffee and staring out of a truck window at the rain. When we each manage an ego bybass we agree that our pursuits and our attitudes are similar in many respects. Perhaps it is that Essex boy approach to the art world in that when you can bank it, it’s worth something.

My friend likes music that is clean, distinct, and not amenable to obfuscation. I listened to him play A Whiter Shade of Pale on the alto sax and understood what he meant. He does not like bad jazz. Many musicians claim to play jazz because it gives them ‘freedom of expression, man’. The truth is that they play it because it gives them freedom from discipline; from the necessity of getting it right. And thus, by a round about route, we come to the plotless writing that you often find under the slipstream label.

This writing is easy to spot. The protagonist usually spends most of his time wandering round an urban landscape pursuing a dysfunctional sex life while some vaguely weird things happen, just, happen. The piece you will read – I shall not call it a story – starts, runs for a few pages, then stops. There is no real beginning, middle, or end. It is authorial masturbation that leaves the reader thinking, ‘Well, what about me?’. Raymond Chandler said that when he felt a story was flagging he’d walk in a man with a gun. In slipstream the man remains on the other side of the door, nothing is resolved, and the reader wonders if there ever was anything to resolve. I get a lump of frustration developing in my stomach when I find myself reading one of these pieces and it slowly dawning on me that it is not going to have an ending, that the characters will not have changed and their squalid existence will just ... continue. Why, then, is this stuff published?

If you listen to a piece of badly played modern jazz you will, if you have any sensibilities, wonder where the melody is. You’ll wonder why you’re listening to this disjointed annoying racket when the guy on the stool next to you will say, “Wow, ... scale!” and you’ll nod your head knowingly and reply, “Yeah ... man.” We all hate to appear ignorant. It is this hatred of ignorance that allows such idiocies as a soiled bed in the Tate gallery. It is the very same that allows the above described rubbish to appear under the slipstream label. People will remain silent about it because they are frightened of admitting that they haven’t got the point. There is no point. And those guilty of perpetrating it, writers and publishers, are very often those who get a bit too arty for their own good, and are cringing at the prospect of being accused of something so demeaning as science fiction. My goodness.

You are a story teller are you? If such you are then put yourself in front of an audience and tell your story. If, when you have finished, your story requires justification then it was not a story. A story completes. What you read was very likely slipstream. I am not saying you should not write this stuff. It is one of the better methods of beating the block and freeing up the creative faculties. Sometimes you’ll end up with a sentence or two, maybe a paragraph, that you can use in a real story.

Ends.

Article 10: Into The Machine.

Here's another old one.

INTO THE MACHINE

The image that sticks in my mind, from the covers of early Science Fiction paperbacks, is of a robot, like the bastard offspring of a dustbin and a food processor, chasing a half-naked woman across some lunatic professor’s laboratory. Of course, as was the case with many SF pulps of the time, the stories inside were intelligent, and bore no relation to the cover picture. For this the writers should have fed the publisher feet-first into his own printing press. Ever since early SF writers cast the robot in the role of Frankenstein’s monster, the image of a sentient machine murdering its makers and taking over, has endured – examples of the type being Terminator, HAL, and numerous Dr Who baddies (I’m sure any of you reading this can think of many more). However, for machines to take over bespeaks a certain superiority that does not yet seem likely. First, we must make them better than ourselves.

Although we are even now developing computers that can out-think us in many specific respects, the science of cybernetics, and straightforward material technologies have a long way to go. A computer can beat a man at chess – great – but can it actually pick up the pieces and move them, recognise certain members in the audience, converse with its opponent, then walk away from the table afterwards? We can make a mechanical hand that has a more powerful grip than our own and it can move with eerie similarity, but will it function for eighty years without falling apart? We are an awfully long way from being able to create something that can outperform a human being.

All this is moot, though, for the development of human technology that has taken us from the flint arrowhead to the PC, follows an undeviating course. All our machines are merely tools – extensions of ourselves. Just as binoculars are an extension of human sight, books are an extension of human memory and communication, and just as pair of pliers is an extension of the human hand, the computer is an extension of the human mind. These are, in the main, indirect extensions. But we try to make them more direct all the time: soft shaped grips for the pliers; Windows, mouse, the virtual glove and voice recognition for the computers. We are moving closer all the time – getting into the machine.

Most direct extensions are at present the province of the medical world. Prosthetics have been around since before Captain Hook and in the last century most of us have seen moveable plastic limbs. Prosthetics are, like the rest of our tools, extensions of us. Now consider where they are going.

This technology is developing at an increasing rate: from such devices to assist the body, as do pacemakers and the Jarvik heart pump, we are leaping ahead to those that actually restore function, such as chips surgically implanted to restore sight to the blind. Already being tested are prosthetic limbs that can be surgically attached and wired into the nervous system (the most interesting advance being feedback i.e. making fingertips that can actually feel). Through people like Kevin Warwick, who is actively experimenting with implants to link him to a computer, and through advances in medical prosthetics, we will eventually reach a stage where the replacement is better than the part replaced, or will provide additional abilities. People are going to want these – needed or otherwise.

It could be argued that at this point it would be possible for the superior computer/AI mind to acquire its required physical interface with the world, strangle the mad professor, then march off to exterminate the rest of the human race. However, by then it would be too late for the machines to take over, for we will be as much, if not more than them. By the time we can build a machine that could destroy us, we’ll be able to upgrade ourselves to equivalent or greater efficacy.

Pursuing Warwick’s experiments to one conclusion, it will be possible for the computer to truly become an extension of the human mind – directly linked, not via a nerve impulse to open doors. This may come about as a medical technique for restoring/curing the brain damaged, or it might be developed as the next quickest way to get onto the Internet. Whatever. There will come a time when someone will be able to go into a shop to buy extended memory or larger processing power, and it won’t be for their PC, or rather, the lines will be so blurred that PC and person will be indistinguishable. Your future girlfriend won’t be staying in because she’s washing her hair, but because she’s running a virus check and defrag on what lies underneath it.

Often in SF, the humans are little different from us, and the machines vastly superior. The truth of the matter I feel is that in the next few centuries definitions of what is human will become rather hazy, and the individual of that future unrecognisable to us. In the end humans will be able to upload/download their minds into machines, extend their memory, leave part of their minds in machines, load machine minds and programming into their own. Their bodies might be more synthetics than flesh while biotechnology would have by then given us living computers. Pointing to different items and classifying one as a machine and one as a human being will be as difficult as distinguishing egg white and sugar in a meringue.

Of course, all the above refutes many of the plot elements of Gridlinked with its omnipotent AIs, psychotic android and indefatigable Golem, which goes to prove that truth may well be stranger than fiction, and that writers are not to be trusted.

ENDS