Asimov, State, and Utopia

I’d like to start by apologizing for the title of this post. I just had to somehow cram the Nozick reference in, no matter the cost.

A while back, Alex Zalben, writing at SciFi Scanner, posted the following:

Find me a sci-fi movie where there is a Utopia, and I will point out the worm in the apple. Every single time we are presented with a Utopian society on film, there is also a corrupt diplomat that's running the show, or it's a dream world, or it's built on a city of good-hearted underground dwellers... You know what I'm saying because you've all seen such movies before.

So I'm going to make a broad statement and say: There is no such thing as Utopia in science fiction.

Zalben goes on to cite some examples from both film and books. He suggests that the lack of conflict inherent to a utopia makes drama effectively impossible.

You can include an actual utopia and still have conflict, either by having it threatened by outside forces, or by having characters from the utopian society venturing outside of it for some reason. In television, Star Trek: The Next Generation would be an example of both approaches, for instance. The portrayal of the Federation got “dirtied up” a bit by Deep Space Nine, and perhaps even a few of the later Next Generation episodes, but it was pretty explicitly utopian early on- all the talk about how humanity has evolved beyond this or that. Venturing into written science fiction, John C. Wright’s “Golden Age” trilogy is an example of the “outside threat” method, while several of Iain M. Banks’ Culture books use the latter method.

Zalben started out by talking about movies, though, and it’s possible that this method is poorly suited to feature films. It requires a lot of world-building, and that takes time: you need time to establish the utopia, and you need time to set up the non-utopian outside, and then you need time for the actual conflict, and if you want to actually explore the idea of the utopia in detail and still have a good conflict you end up with a movie that’s six hours long. The lack of actual utopias in cinema may be more a limitation of the medium than anything else.

It also depends on how strict your definition of “Utopia” is. If it requires absolute perfection and goodness, than conflict within the utopia is impossible. If it merely means a society that is vastly better than ours, you can still have internal conflict. There can still be bad people with bad intentions, they’re just not the ones running the show.

You can also have a utopian society where the conflict is not in the form of some sinister evil, but between good guys. For instance, much of the conflict in John C. Wright’s “Golden Age” Trilogy is not between heroes and villains, but between humane and well-intentioned people who disagree about cultural values and the future direction of their social evolution. An interesting wrinkle is that Wright’s utopia is libertarian, and both the protagonist and most of the antagonists firmly accept libertarian principles of justice, resulting in a conflict for the fate of their society where most of the combatants would never dream of using force, violence, or state coercion against each other. (Though some of the players don’t play quite so nicely…)

One problem is that if you actually portray the utopia in any detail, axe-grinding is all but impossible to avoid, which risks alienating potential readers. This can be overcome- I love Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, even though the Culture itself has a great deal of leftist wish fulfillment built into it- but it does have risks. If a society is portrayed as ideal or nearly so, everything makes a potential statement. Does religion still exist? What kind of government do they have, if any? How do they deal with criminals? (If they don’t have any, that too betrays certain assumptions.) What things are illegal, taboo, or disapproved of? How does the utopia remain in existence? Do they have a market economy and private ownership? What are their attitudes and practices regarding sex? Do they have marriage?

People differ on both what kind of society is desirable in theory (Most of the societies conceived by 19^th century utopians would be horrifying to me even if they worked as advertised) and on how societies work, and which ones are possible, in practice. Most portrayals of the future express ideological assumptions, whether or not they are explicit or even intentional, but utopia pushes the issue front and center by proclaiming what it portrays to be ideal. If you don’t think it’s ideal, or think it’s outright bad, than 1. you may enjoy the story less, and 2. you may like the author less, as a person. Different people have different limits in this regard. If John C. Wright had a radical political change of heart and decided to write about noble Communists colonizing the moon, building a perfect society there through the power of scientific socialism and mass terror, and then going to war against the plutocrats of Earth and heroically killing the entire reactionary population through man-made famine, my love of Wright’s previous work probably wouldn’t be enough to make me buy it.

One possible final problem is that so much science fiction is about change. Often the fictional changes took place between now and whenever the story happens, but quite often science fiction portrays societies in flux and transition. Most visions of utopia, on the other hand, are static- if you’ve attained the best possible society, change is degeneration. That can work fine for a story- a tale of a collapsing utopia could be very interesting- but that’s not really utopian fiction in the usual sense of the term. It’s ironic- science fiction is in one sense the only form of fiction that works for portraying a utopia, since no perfect societies exist circa 2008, and yet the idea of utopia clashes with one of science fiction’s principal themes and strong points.

I’d be curious to hear about you thoughts, or your favorite and least favorite utopian stories.

Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?

I was at a nearby Barnes and Noble a few days ago, and I noticed that they didn’t appear to be running the sort of extensive Mother’s Day promotions they had last year. Last year, to take advantage of fast-approaching Mother's Day they had a large display of books prominently labeled "Books for Mom." Not surprising.

What was surprising was that, prominently displayed under the softly colored flower-decorated "Books for Mom" sign was David Drake's The Way to Glory. Yes, that David Drake, he of Hammer's Slammers and the Reaches trilogy and the Lacey stories. Now, I love David Drake; he's a strong candidate for my favorite living author. And I would be thrilled to see science fiction gain popularity among new groups of fans. All that said, it’s difficult to conceive of a more bizarre choice. Yes, generalizations are seldom 100% accurate, and I’m sure there are mothers out there who would love to celebrate Mother’s Day with a dark, brutal military science fiction story about people crushed by the nightmarish horror of war and the burden of things they’ll never be able to forgive themselves for, but I suspect they comprise a somewhat slender share of the market.

Great endings

Warning: this post has what you might call a thematic spoiler for Jack Vance’s The Book of Dreams, though nothing that would be likely to diminish your enjoyment of that book.

A few days ago, SF Signal had a discussion on the best and worst endings of books. This got me thinking about the subject, because endings are often the aspect of fiction that I find the most interesting. They’re the biggest determinant of a story’s “aftertaste,” for lack of a better term. My own preferences are towards the grim or melancholy side of things, though not exclusively. Some of my own personal favorites:

Poul Anderson, The Night Face- Great buildup, and at the end… Anderson rips your heart out with a single sentence.

Glen Cook, Soldiers Live- Very poignant for me after spending so much time with the Black Company. Like Croaker, I’ll always have the memories.

David Drake, Rolling Hot- The first Drake novel I read, and the one that made me a devoted fan. I can’t recommend this one enough. (It’s included in the Drake collection The Tank Lords.) It was especially effective for me because, atypically for one of Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers stories, one of the principal viewpoint characters isn’t a soldier, but a civilian who gets dragooned into joining the conflict. The whole book is a series of savage muay thai kicks to the emotional groin, and the very end is just devastating.

Jack Vance, The Book of Dreams- The culmination of the five-novel Demon Princes series. Anticlimactic, but that’s the point, and it works wonderfully. You’ve won what you’ve dedicated your life to- leaving you with nothing.

Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man- The climax of the story sort of comes out of nowhere, but the very end manages to be blackly humorous and straightforwardly horrifying and disturbing at the same time.

John C. Wright, The Golden Transcendence- I’m not all death and gloom. This is the last book of the Golden Age trilogy, one of my favorite science fiction series ever. Like The Night Face, but with a very different set of emotions at the end, it has a truly perfect final sentence. With the conclusion of his trilogy, Wright leaves the reader feeling- as he should- exultant.

If novellas count, Neal Asher, The Engineer- Creepy. As. Hell.

While I’m at it, I’ll throw in a movie:

Colossus: The Forbin Project- Great science fiction movie that sees its own grim logic through to the bitter end. (It’s also quite fun, the second time you watch it, to imagine that the movie chronicles the birth of Neal Asher’s Human Polity.)

Those are the ones that first come to mind and have really stuck with me. Anyone else have a list of favorites?

Thoughts on Poul Anderson

Baen Books has done some fine work bringing older science fiction back into print, often for the first time in decades. This, however, is by the far coolest thing they’ve done- no, the coolest thing any human being who isn’t Poul Anderson has ever done. Baen Books will be releasing a collection of Poul Anderson’s Technic History stories this September. It’s apparently called The Van Rijn Method: The Technic Civilization Saga #1. Amazon.com also has a listing for David Falkayn: Star Trader: The Technic Civilization Saga #2, slated for release in January 2009. Both books are listed as around 600 pages, which is nice. Hopefully we’ll eventually get the complete Technic History stories.

Note that this post has some spoilers, if the widely known general themes of stories written decades ago count.

The dearth of Poul Anderson books in stores, and his relative obscurity compared to many other writers, is one of the greatest injustices of the science fiction genre. I was thrilled when Baen released their previous Anderson collections, Time Patrol and To Outlive Eternity, and I’m even more thrilled to see that they apparently sold well enough to bring this about. I compiled my collection of his books from my local used bookstores and various online sellers, but most people aren’t blessed with my obsessive nature and abundant spare time, and a young kid who’s curious about science fiction isn’t going to stumble on an old copy of Agent of the Terran Empire at the local Barnes and Noble. If there’s a young science fiction fan or potential science fiction fan in your life, you could do a lot worse than getting him this.

Anderson is an interesting choice for Baen, whose editors have explicitly said they want to bring adventurous, upbeat stories to the forefront of science fiction. Anderson’s Technic History stories certainly have plenty of adventure and excitement; no can say they’re boring. On the other hand, while Anderson doesn’t wallow in despair or nihilism, there’s a deep sense of melancholy that pervades much of his work, and the Technic History is a prime example of that- most obviously in the Dominic Flandry and Long Night-era stories, but in some of the van Rijn-era stories too, though the latter are usually cheerier since most of them take place in Technic Civilization’s vigorous youth, before the rot takes hold. There’s action and adventure and excitement, but there’s also the deep sorrow of a universe where human civilizations rise, fall, and shatter to pieces in a cruel cycle that Anderson’s heroes, for all their courage and ingenuity, cannot stop. You can fight as hard as you can- indeed, you should fight as hard as you can- but human civilization will continue to fall towards Ragnarok, and whatever hope you can have is not for yourself but for whatever manages to grow from the ashes.

Now, this is one of the many things I like about Anderson. If you had to describe my personality, “gloomy Germanic fatalism” is a pretty good start. It is by no means necessary to have that sort of temperament to enjoy Poul Anderson, but it doesn’t hurt. However, I am a bit surprised by Baen’s choice of material here, in light of Baen’s stated goal of bringing more optimism back to science fiction. Then again, they publish David Drake, not the jolliest of authors, so perhaps it’s not so odd. It should be said that while life in Anderson’s universe is often sad and tragic, it is not pointless.

I should stress that if I’ve made Anderson sound relentlessly dreary, that wasn’t my intent. He’s not- he’ a huge amount of fun as well. If you like science fiction and you haven’t read Anderson, do yourself a favor and check him out. You’ll probably want to use Amazon.com or the like, because he’s terribly underrepresented in stores. And if there’s a budding young geek you know who would benefit from exposure to the classics, get him one of the collections when it comes out. He’ll thank you for it. Or possibly just laugh at you behind your back for being an out-of-it old weirdo. Either way, the kid will be entertained.

Fun with cloning

Biology in Science Fiction has a post on the depiction of cloning in movies. Sadly, they left out The Sixth Day (spoilers upcoming), arguably the best Arnold Schwarzenegger movie about evil clones Robert Duvall has ever had a supporting role in. Okay, the science is absolutely ridiculous, with full-grown human clones whipped up in minutes and a doohickey that record the complete contents of your brain in seconds by blinking into your eyes. Still, there were parts I liked, silly or no.

The villainous henchmen of CloneCo. (A Division of EvilCorp) all get killed repeatedly by the Arnolds, only to be brought back, since their DNA and memory records are both on file back at CloneCo. It becomes darkly humorous after a while, especially as the henchman start to find the prospect of another violent death at Arnold’s hands more annoying than terrifying. The main villain, Amoral Corporate Prick, ends up being killed by his own clone- after all, the clone is an Amoral Corporate Prick, too.

My favorite part is the way the Arnolds were handled. I’m disobeying all those PLEASE DO NOT REVEAL THE INCREDIBLE SECRET OF THE SIXTH DAY signs that were in the lobby, but here goes anyway. In the story, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character is cloned without his knowledge- including his memories and personality, thanks to the aforementioned doohickey. So you’ve got two Arnolds, Arnold Classic and Arnold II, running around fighting the bad guys together.

As the movie approached its climax with both Arnolds still in action, I suddenly became certain of what was going to happen. Arnold Classic has a wife and son. Arnold II has exactly the same memories, personality, and emotions as Arnold Classic, but they can’t both be married to Mrs. Arnold. Therefore, I assumed that Arnold II would die heroically in the final confrontation with the bad guy, allowing the movie to milk the pathos of Arnold II’s death while still having a happy ending as Arnold Classic returns to his family.

They didn’t do that. Instead, both Arnolds survive. Arnold Classic returns to his family, of course. Without a place of his own in the world, Arnold II decides to travel the globe on his own for a while, so that he can have experiences Arnold Classic has never had and thus grow into a unique individual. I really liked that, and it was especially nice since it was such a surprise.

Ironically, Laplace's demon foresaw that I would post this

First caught wind of this at Roderick Long’s blog.

There’s been some discussion here and there about a recent study announced by the Max Planck Society on human consciousness. To quote from the press release I’ve linked:

In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind. The aim of the experiment was to find out what happens in the brain in the period just before the person felt the decision was made. The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take already seven seconds before they consciously made their decision. Normally researchers look at what happens when the decision is made, but not at what happens several seconds before. The fact that decisions can be predicted so long before they are made is a astonishing finding.

This unprecedented prediction of a free decision was made possible by sophisticated computer programs that were trained to recognize typical brain activity patterns preceding each of the two choices. Micropatterns of activity in the frontopolar cortex were predictive of the choices even before participants knew which option they were going to choose. The decision could not be predicted perfectly, but prediction was clearly above chance. This suggests that the decision is unconsciously prepared ahead of time but the final decision might still be reversible.

This is being heralded as a confirmation of the results of the famous experiments on people’s subjective experience of choice done by Benjamin Libet, which were widely claimed (though not by Libet) as proof that free will was illusory, due to the fact that electrical activity in the motor cortex of the brain (the “readiness potential”) appeared before the subject was conscious of choosing to act. I want to talk about Libet a little, because this study appears to have the same limitations, in terms of what conclusions we can draw about its implications.

First, however, there’s an elementary point of logic that needs to pointed out, which is this: Even accepting for the sake of argument that this research shows all actions are actually decided at the unconscious level and merely rationalized by the conscious mind afterwards, which I’m going to question in a minute, that would not prove determinism. As commenter Laura J. points out in the comments of Long’s post, the claim that this would prove determinism hinges on the unstated assumption that the unconscious processes running in the background of my conscious mind are not really “me,” that the self is only the fully conscious mind, and that unconscious influence on or control of it is an enslaving outside force, rather than an equally true part of my self. If you reject this assumption, the determinist would also need to prove that the unconscious mind is fully determined by something before he could claim to have shown that I- that is, the complete “I”- have no free will.

It should also be noted that, at best, this would refute only incompatiblist free will, and has nothing to say about compatibilism versus incompatibilist determinism. I don’t consider that distinction very meaningful, frankly- I’ve never heard an explanation of compatibilism that didn’t boil down to determinism with some of the terminology of free will thrown in- but many people would consider it important.

So, Libet. The first problem with a determinist interpretation of Libet’s work was, as Benjamin Libet pointed out, that his subjects would occasionally show the usual electrical activity in the motor center, the “readiness potential,” and then choose not to act. So it's a jump to assume that the electrical buildup demonstrates that the act is truly predetermined, and not merely an indication of a strong disposition to act. The press release for the new Planck study says that the accuracy of their predictions was imperfect but “clearly above chance,” with the precise percentage unspecified. The fact that modern scientists can make predictions of people’s movements seven seconds in advance with above-chance accuracy in this situation is extremely cool, but it’s pretty poor as a knockdown argument for determinism. A skilled bookie can predict the winner of a sporting event at a rate well above chance, but that hardly demonstrates that the competition is rigged. (Unless it’s boxing, of course.) It merely shows that the outcome of the game was affected by conditions in place before the game began. Unless, as some people do, you redefine “free will” to mean that choices are just random and completely unaffected by conditions in the physical world, such as electrical activity in the agent’s own brain, this doesn’t demonstrate much philosophically, however intriguing it might be as science.

There are some other problems, which wouldn’t go away even if the prediction in the experiment was never wrong. The actions taken by Libet's subjects were consciously preplanned. In Libet’s work, the subjects watched a timer, and were instructed to choose a random moment to hit a button, then report the time they perceived themselves willing to hit the button. The problem there is that the intention "hit the button" was, in an important sense, already consciously formed and chosen before the clock had even started. The subject had already decided to hit the button, already knew they were going to hit the button, and the only intention not yet consciously formed was the exact moment. In that sort of case, it's hardly surprising that the motor center was lighting up before the actual final decision, regardless of whether the subject actually had free will or not.

Another issue is that the action being taken- hitting the button- is completely random and meaningless, and the decision of what moment to hit the button is thus completely arbitrary. Thus, it is precisely the sort of thing that I would expect to be decided at an unconscious level, since there’s absolutely no reason for the conscious mind to care about the particular moment the button is hit, and thus no reason to deliberate about it at the conscious level, except perhaps to ratify a conclusion already reached unconsciously. We simply don’t know if the results are applicable to all experiences of choice, including those we have more reason to consciously deliberate on, and we have been given no reason to think that they are.

Based on the way the experiment is described, both problems seem to be present here as well. The press release says, “In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind.” So, again, the subject had already decided to hit the button, and he knew that, barring some sudden freak occurrence that forced him to flee the room, he would carry out that decision. So, once again, the brain gearing itself up to act before the final moment of decision is to be expected with or without free will. The only new wrinkle appears to be having a choice of two buttons. The fact that they could predict which would be chosen is neat, but not terribly decisive, since it's not at all hard to imagine a free-willed person starting with a strong predisposition for one button over another without consciously realizing it. As in the choice of timing, the choice of buttons is completely meaningless and thus gives the conscious mind no reason to bother to make the decision itself, though it might will the actual execution of the decision.

Theses sorts of experiments are limited by the limitations of human focus. Since the subject has to concentrate on precisely monitoring and reporting his own mental state, he can’t really engage in any acts that aren’t tainted by a lengthy gap between resolving to act and actually acting, since a situation where he had to make a quick decision in response to something unexpected would occupy too much of his attention. Likewise, he can’t make any decisions that he actually has a reason to care about and consciously think through, while simultaneously closely monitoring and reporting the precise moment he became aware of his choice. If genetic engineering really takes off, we should see if we can crank out some posthumans with huge heads and extra brain lobes who can maintain multiple trains of thought at once. Short of that, the philosophical implications of this are limited.

For maximum effect, you should now reread this post, but this time do so aloud by shrieking out the entire thing in your best Geddy Lee impression. Actually, henceforth, I want everybody to read everything I write that way.

Essential concepts

John C. Wright offers an invaluable lexicon of science fictional terms for the uninitiated. My personal favorite:

Rishathra is sexual congress, without the benefit of marriage, between two mutually sterile intelligent hominids, usually for the purpose of solemnizing a treaty or somesuch. So if your girlfriend has left you for a Neanderthal or a Slan, this is the word for it.

Ah,The Ringworld Throne. How on Earth did the Ringworld series go from “thrilling adventure and mind-blowing concepts” to “nonstop interspecies ape sex?” I still wonder what got into the usually reliable Niven when he wrote that one. (I almost wrote that as “I’d really like to know what…,” but then it occurred to me I really, really don’t.)

He also provides what is simultaneously the most succinct and the most accurate summary of the Star Trek film franchise I have ever heard, with his reference to, “[O]ne of those lame STAR TREK movies that was not WRATH OF KHAN.” Well-said. Talking whale-alien spaceship, my ass. Okay, Undiscovered Country was pretty good.

An intermittently updated science fiction blog by any other name…

The blog is reborn! Or, more accurately, the name of the blog is reborn. The name only just occurred to me recently, and I was never intensely attached to the old one. It’s not as if I’m losing a huge amount of accumulated name recognition here. When I’m seventy, I don’t want to look back wistfully and wonder what might have been, if only my blog had a cooler name.

And they said I was mad to build a robot out of bacon!

Peter Watts has an interesting post about some of the work being done in robot design which suggests the possibility that machines of the future may have more “lifelike” attributes than people usually think. For instance, mucous is apparently an important aid in the acuity of human smell, and mechanical olfactory sensors can be made much more effective by covering them with a polymer snot substitute. Watts has more, including artificial sweat. (Watt’s post has stuff about artificial sweat, I mean; Watts himself does not. Presumably.)

It’s interesting to speculate on how people’s attitudes towards technology will be affected if some machines really do start to do more to imitate the attributes of living beings. I suspect that a lot of people who are otherwise comfortable with new technology would find the idea of a machine with characteristics of a living thing- and especially the “earthier” attributes of life, like body fluids- somewhat disturbing, even if a lot of them couldn’t articulate why.

I was looking at his blog because I actually just read Watts’ work for the first time, thanks to the inclusion of his story “The Eyes of God” in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 2. If you haven’t grabbed that one yet, get it. “The Eyes of God” was one of the most exciting introductions to an author I’ve had in years. It’s got speculative technologies for the manipulation of the human nervous system, crushing religious guilt, and the best sense of unease and creepiness a story has given me in some time. It’s as if he wrote it by consulting a focus group of John Markley clones. I usually fail to keep up with the newest book releases because I’m so mired in my huge pile of old out-of-print books that I’ve accumulated, but I’ve bumped Watts up in the queue and expect to have read Blindsight by no later than 2017.

Curse you, Gregory XIII!

I hate April Fool’s Day. I'm absent-minded and often have only a vague idea of the current date, and so the same pattern repeats every year. I’ll be wandering the internet, and come across some sort of wonderful news. “Square-Enix announces Final Fantasy VII remake for Playsation 3," “Entire staff of The New Republic devoured by timber wolves,” “Mayo Clinic study proves 87% of foxy brunettes secretly long for introverted, bearded science fiction geeks; Degree of insatiable lust directly correlated with number of Poul Anderson books owned, researchers say,” or whatever. I’ll feel a moment of exhilaration, then confusion as I realize something’s not right here, and then realization dawns and I come crashing back to earth. You’d think I would have learned by now, but no.