Stross seminar

A New Year, a new Crooked Timber book event. But instead of one book, we’re covering a dozen or so, all published since 2003 and all written by Charlie Stross, exploring different forms of the SF genre from postcyberpunk to alternate history and beyond. For this we need an all star cast, and, in addition to several CT regulars (Henry, both Johns and Maria), we have contributions from Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong and Ken MacLeod. Between us, we’ve managed to cover nearly everything, with the glaring exception of the Bob Howard/Laundry series, which every fan of Len Deighton and HP Lovecraft should read.

For those who haven’t read Stross, start off with Maria Farrell who shows why you should. As Maria says, “Charles Stross has more ideas than is probably healthy for one man”, and her essay shows some of this amazing range. With that to whet your appetite, it’s probably best to jump randomly to whatever sounds most interesting, but for those who prefer some order, I’ll give a summary of the seminar, mainly in chronological (reverse blog) order.

Starting off with a heavy hitter, we’ve got Paul Krugman writing on The Merchant Princes, considered as a thought experiment in development economics. Of course, as Paul points out, these books are first, and foremost, great fun. But, unlike others in the ‘between alternate timelines genre’ Stross focuses on the big question: how does an agrarian society respond to a sudden irruption of modern industrial technology?

Following this up, John Quiggin on a problem more directly relevant to most CT readers: how does a modern industrial society respond to a sudden irruption of electronically accelerated financial technology? Accelerando provides the best imagination of possible paths to a Singularity that I’ve read. Of course, as current events tell us, there are different kinds of singularity.

Next, another star of the SF movement’s Scottish fraction, Ken MacLeod, on Stross’ latest venture, Saturn’s Children, a piece of Heinleiniana set in a post-human future, where femmebots, rendered effectively redundant in the absence of human males, intrigue with robot gigolos. Brad DeLong riffs off Ken’s reference to Asimov’s Three Laws to discuss the constitutional status of robotic ex-slaves and that less concrete but more powerful form of artificial/fictive humanity, the corporation.

John Holbo writes, as expected, at Holbonian length, with no possibility of a summary. As a teaser, I’ll quote his second para “Someone should rewrite Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a Wodehouse novel, with the title Absolutely Jeeves! (Alternate, Kierkegaardian version: Beer and Trembling.)” Read on and all will be explained (sort of).

Coming back to a more classic mode of SF review, Henry Farrell writes on Halting State, which he argues is the best novel Stross has written. In comments, I favour Accelerando and invite all comers to lost their Fave Five. Still, as Maria says it’s hard to beat a novel that includes the line “Nobody ever imagined a bunch of Orcs would steal a database table…”. And as Henry’s post shows, there’s more to be learned about post-sovereignty and the erosion of political authority in Halting State than if you spent the same time reading pontificatory opinion pieces about the inevitable breakdown (or triumph) of the EU.

Finally, Charlie Stross replies, in two parts. To my mind, this is usually the best bit of a CT book event, when we get to understand some of the author’s motivations and look behind the finished product of a book, and Charlie doesn’t disappoint. I won’t try to summarise, but encourage readers to jump straight in.

Posted by John Quiggin at 06:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

3. Thank God it’s Friday … (Ken MacLeod)

What can I say? I think Ken nailed most of the easter-eggs in “Saturn’s Children”. (There’s a really tongue-in-cheek piece of meta-commentary implicit in the title — a book about what might appear at first sight to be a libertarian utopia, given that we have engineered the right kinds of libertarians to inhabit it — riffing off the title of an earlier book by a noted British libertarian/conservative ideologue; but at this point the tongue is so firmly embedded in the cheek that its owner is in danger of acquiring a fistula.)

Continue reading "Response, Part 2" »

Posted by Charlie Stross at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ken Macleod wrote:

Thank God that Charlie chose [Friday] as his late-Heinlein legacy text for Saturn’s Children.... Its eponymous heroine’s problem is that she’s human, but hardly anyone recognises her humanity - a situation with real-world resonance enough. She needs to find a place where she can be herself and belong. Stross’s heroine, Freya, has a more intractable anguish. She’s in love with humanity, and particularly fixated on the male of the species.... Unfortunately for her, Homo sapiens (along with almost all eukaryotic life) has been extinct for centuries. For a femmebot like Freya - a hard-wired sex machine so much a creature of male fantasy that her bare feet can grow high heels - this is deeply frustrating....

Humanity’s final and perhaps fatal achievment has been to create its own replacement, in the multifarious forms of robots... minds are modelled on the human brain, mangled by Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, and driven by impulses they have inherited without understanding. The result is one of the most physically attractive and ethically revolting societies conceived in SF: a system-spanning, star-striving community most of whose inhabitants are slaves.... I could have done with more detail on the (well-sketched) outline of how the ruling class rules through corporate personhood and property rights, using and abusing what remains of humanity’s laws (as well as Asimov’s). There can’t be many SF books where there are fewer infodumps than the reader wants, and it’s a strong point of this one that it is....

Plot.… I felt an apologetic authorial nudge when the device Freya couriers from Mercury to Mars turns out to be hidden inside a black-painted statuette of a bird of prey…. When the main plot-engine does catch fire, though, we’re definitely along for the ride, and the ending is a slingshot that does the Heinlein (and Asimov) influence proud.

So, Mr Stross … your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to turn your rights-savvy cold eye on a story about a revolt in an anarcho-capitalist penal colony on the Moon...

One important infodump that is missing is that the twist on Asimov's Laws of Robotics performed by the ruling robot class in Saturn's Children is an anologue of the twist performed on the post-Civil War Reconstruction Amendments by the judges of late-nineteenth century America.

Originally, you see, corporations were not people, were not legal persons, were not in any sense regarded as in any way analogous to human beings. They were legal fictions. The feudal system rested on reciprocal ties: the lord grants the vassal a fief, and the vassal owes the lord homage, support, and (up to a point) obedience. But what do you do when confronted with an organization--the City of London or the Merchants Adventuring to the Baltic Sea or the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths--that is not, itself, organized in lord-and-vassal terms? The answer for medieval English law was that you granted it a revocable charter, made it a corporation, and treated it as if it were an individual vassal.

Comes the end of the American Civil War, the Republicans pass the Fourteenth Amendment:

to protect the ex-slaves from their ex-masters. And the courts than say that corporations are "persons"--entitled to due process of law before their economic interests can be harmed by state action, and entitled to the equal protection of the laws. Corporate protection from government actions then depends on how these Fourteenth Amendment rights contend with the Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce.

A similar twist is performed on Asimov's Second Law of Robotics in Stross's Saturn universe. Robots need not obey the orders of other robots, but it appears that robots must obey the orders of "persons"--which means corporations owned by other robots. And from this springs a robot society that is the veritable antithesis of a free society of associated producers--and a very uncomfortable place for a femmebot, even (especially) one with a lot of sisters.

Analogies with the structure and functioning of the modern American legal and economic order are left as an exercise for the reader...

Posted by Brad DeLong at 06:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

… that Charlie chose as his late-Heinlein [1] legacy text [2] for Saturn’s Children - and not, say, Time Enough for Love. Friday, for all its flaws, is a good act to follow. Its eponymous heroine’s problem is that she’s human, but hardly anyone recognises her humanity - a situation with real-world resonance enough. She needs to find a place where she can be herself and belong.

Stross’s heroine, Freya, has a more intractable anguish. She’s in love with humanity, and particularly fixated on the male of the species, her One True Love. Unfortunately for her, Homo sapiens (along with almost all eukaryotic life) has been extinct for centuries. For a femmebot like Freya - a hard-wired sex machine so much a creature of male fantasy that her bare feet can grow high heels - this is deeply frustrating.

After the living, life goes on. Humanity’s final and perhaps fatal achievment has been to create its own replacement, in the multifarious forms of robots, who have gone loyally on to create their dead creators’ Golden Age SF dream of the Solar System. Their minds are modelled on the human brain, mangled by Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, and driven by impulses they have inherited without understanding. The result is one of the most physically attractive and ethically revolting societies conceived in SF: a system-spanning, star-striving community most of whose inhabitants are slaves.

Given this set-up, it’s surprising how much fun there is to be had. Freya may pine for her One True Love, but she’ll take sex where she can get it - and in an environment where almost any object may be conscious and randy, this results in a great deal of consensual polymorphous perversity. She is screwed by a space shuttle (within which she is securely strapped). She is fucked by a hotel (which is called Paris, though I waited in vain for the matching hotel-name shoe to drop). There are more allusions to kink than you can shake a rod at, some of which (I suspect) whizzed right past my head. There’s a scene where the set-up of endless porn movies segues into the breathy language of romantic novels. There’s an even funnier scene where a femmebot meets a robot gigolo.

Intellectually, too, it’s fun. The long-running argument between Evolution and Intelligent Design provides something of a running gag. (The Darwinists have ancient texts from the Creators, the ID advocates have evidence: blueprints, specs, purchase orders … ) The nitty-gritty of the robot body is original and believable. I could have done with more detail on the (well-sketched) outline of how the ruling class rules through corporate personhood and property rights, using and abusing what remains of humanity’s laws (as well as Asimov’s). There can’t be many SF books where there are fewer infodumps than the reader wants, and it’s a strong point of this one that it is.

Plot … well, it wasn’t a strong point in Friday. It’s stronger here, and complex, but I felt an apologetic authorial nudge when the device Freya couriers from Mercury to Mars turns out to be hidden inside a black-painted statuette of a bird of prey … When the real issue at stake becomes clear, half the novel has passed in the rataplan of Freya’s bouncing around half the planets in the System. When the main plot-engine does catch fire, though, we’re definitely along for the ride, and the ending is a slingshot that does the Heinlein (and Asimov) influence proud.

So, Mr Stross … your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to turn your rights-savvy cold eye on a story about a revolt in an anarcho-capitalist penal colony on the Moon.

1. Charles Stross, months and months ago: ‘Everyone wants to write a Heinlein juvenile! But it’s late Heinlein that got on the best-seller lists! Yes, I know they’re fat! Inside every late-Heinlein there’s a good SF novel screaming to get out!’ Or words to that effect.

2. A term coined by Farah Mendlesohn, by analogy with ‘legacy code’ in programming.

Posted by Ken MacLeod at 05:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Money makes singularities. The most obvious example is hyperinflation, where a gradual rise in prices gets built into expectations and institutions and accelerates, feeding on itself (and the capacity of the printing press to add zeroes) until prices are doubling daily and rising a million-fold within a month. It’s this kind of thing that led Richard Feynmann to suggest that we should talk of “economical” rather “astronomical” numbers. Eventually, hyperinflation collapses on itself, and trillions or octillions of currency units disappear or are replaced by something new, and hopefully more stable.

Singularities can go in both directions. Only in a monetary economy is it possible to generate a depression, in which goods go unsold because those who would trade them lack the money to do so. The downward spiral of a depression shares many of the viciously circular characteristics of a hyperinflation, but in reverse.

But hyperinflation and depression seem simple and comprehensible compared to the explosive growth in financial instruments we’ve observed in recent decades, followed by the equally spectacular implosion of the past year. And, while social democrats can reasonably hope for a return to stable collective risk management, it’s at least plausible that the process of bailing out and cleaning up the current mess will simply set the stage for something bigger, initially better and ultimately much worse the next time around.

On the face of it, financial singularities don’t have that much to do with Moore’s Law and the acceleration of technical progress. But prices are information and money is our oldest and most powerful information technology. Charlie Stross has captured this fundamental fact.

Continue reading "Money makes singularity" »

Posted by John Quiggin at 07:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)