Archive for the 'Sci-Fi' Category
Footnotes to the Human Species (re)Begins with "City of Pillars"
January 31st, 2008
Footnotes to the Human Species has returned with an brand-new website and a brand-new story, “City of Pillars”!
For those of you who were enjoying “Trois Freres” on the previous, “beta-test” version of Footnotes–fear not: that story will return in a much-improved, edited, and greatly revised version shortly. The official launch of Footnotes to the Human Species begins with “City of Pillars”, however, simply because “City of Pillars” sets up characters, concepts, and major worldbuilding events that explain more about what is happening in “Trois Freres” and related tales. In other words, “City of Pillars” is the starting point from which all other tales in the milieu, whether they come before or after the events of “Pillars”, originate.
“City of Pillars” begins my re-telling of the history of the Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries from a Lovecraftian standpoint by supposing one simple thing: What if the terrorists who attacked New York City on 9/11/2001 were Cthulhu cultists armed with an authentic copy of the original Al-Azif of Abdul Alhazred? What if the attack on the World Trade Center was not a goal in itself, but merely a means toward achieving a goal–namely, opening a gateway to unhallowed dimensions of whirling chaos so that the Other Gods and their minions could begin again their colonization of our universe?
All of the stories in the Footnotes milieu are derived entirely from the works of H. P. Lovecraft himself. Readers don’t need to be familiar with Lovecraft’s works to enjoy them, but it sure does help! “City of Pillars”, for instance, features appearances by or mentions of the fungi from Yuggoth, the Great Race of Yith, and Yog-Sothoth, as well as Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos and, of course, Cthulhu itself. In some fashion, “Pillars” is a sort of “sequel” to Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”, “The Whisperer in Darkness”, “The Shadow Out of Time”, and “The Call of Cthulhu”–but you needn’t read all of these original tales to understand what’s going on in “City of Pillars”. Lovecraft fans will find hundreds of references to all things…well, Lovecraftian–but even readers completely unfamiliar with Grandpa Theobald’s works will be able to enjoy the stories!
So do have a look at the new tale and the new site. Subscribe to the RSS feed and have new material delivered right to your doorstep. And most of all, feel free to leave comments!
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Orion’s Arm
August 18th, 2005
Orion’s Arm is, quite simply, the most impressive, most well-developed, and most extensive collaborative “shared world” science fiction milieux I have ever encountered either on the Net or in oldskool static print.
Orion’s Arm sets itself a lofty goal - map out the next ten thousand years of terragenic civilization and sapience utilizing only hard sci-fi principles either already known to current physics/biology/cognitive-sci/etc. or logically extrapolated therefrom (no moronic psi powers, FTL maguffins, or treknobabble, thank you very much) - and actually achieves it through the collaborative imaginative superpowers of a number of hardcore sci-fi freaks n’ geeks from all over the world. I cannot stress the following point enough: this is not a piecemeal environment compiled higgledy-piggledy by various nerds obsessed with Farscape and other such ludicrous tropes - Orion’s Arm is self-consciously styled on fairly traditional Space Opera grounds in order for it to be engaging, fascinating, and dramatic to everyday readers…yet is founded in rock-solid scientific, sociological, and psychological principles. Orion’s Arm is as richly-textured as real life, with a consistent historical and technological model that give rise to a world that remains convincing and flat-out exciting even as it’s populated with such trans-trans-transapient beings as “AI Gods” with constellations of Jupiter-sized brains processing thoughts powerful enough affect the quantum vacuum itself!
The foundations of the Orion’s Arm universe are laid in the very near future, deriving primarily from three paradigm-shifting technological developments: artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and the interfacing of human neurologics with machine circuitry. These are three technologies virtually every transhumanist on the planet (like myself) are looking forward to and keeping tabs on, for they promise to lead to truly revolutionary changes in the basics of human life on Earth and, eventually, beyond it. From there, the next ten thousand years of terragenic history, involving the founding of interstellar empires, the development of godlike machine intelligences, the fragmenting of humanity and its robotic cognates into literally billions of separate species, clades, phyla, and so forth, and encounters with alien intelligences and the remnants of extinct civilizations, are mapped out in the most incredible detail. All of this background information is provided in a simple graduated timeline, a glossary, and a “galactography” illustrating the current distribution of civilizations through the 8000-lightyear volume of the “Civilized Galaxy,” as well as an amazing index of sophonts detailing the evolution and nature of the millions of different thinking things populating the galactic scene.
Best of all, Orion’s Arm is NOT just an exercise in transhumanist futurology–were it such, it would still be amazing and Mad Fun to read…but all of this worldbuilding has not been done just for its own sake! Orion’s Arm is fundamentally a collaborative world which anyone can contribute to and use for his/her/its own creative development. “Cafe OA” showcases various forms of short fiction inhabiting the OA universe. The Orion’s Arm universe is also uniquely suited to gaming possibilities, as well, and there are a number of RPGs based in various eras of the OA universe are currently in the works. The site also includes a large gallery of graphic works, a HUGE collection of links to various scientific whitepapers and other resources designed to help out potential OA-builders, and all manner of other supplementary materials.
In fact, the site is so thoroughly developed, expect to spend a few days wading through it all.
The OA community is particularly vibrant and friendly, as well. Expect to find me contributing to the site a great deal in coming times–and while you’re at it, if you find yourself as inspired by the construction as I have been, then feel free to contribute! Best of all, the entire project is licensed under Creative Commons!
On a personal note…I’ve been working on a novel lately whose core concepts have turned out to be dramatically similar to many of the ideas developed in the OA universe. It won’t take much work at all to tweak it in order to fit into the OA world. So expect to see something of that emerging in the near future as well!
In the meantime, lose yourself in one of the most perfectly realized future histories ever developed. I’m sure you’ll find me kicking around in there someplace, careening from wormhole to wormhole in my Archailect-powered starship The Inevitable Middle Finger, with my Muuh astrogator riding shotgun and a Greater Archive stuffed in the hold, headed for the Periphery where I heard I might be able to jack into some ancient transcension network and upgrade myself to AI God….
Hammerjack(off): or, Cyberpunk is as Dead as Industrial
June 23rd, 2005
Waaaaaaaaaaaay back when in the Year 1990, while I was still in highschool learning how to kludge together a simple databasing program in BASIC on one of my school’s ancient Apple ][e’s, I discovered - through the auspices of a friend of mine much more in touch with the audiovisual underground than I was thanks to his involvement in our school district’s “gifted” program–two artistic milieuxs which would come to define my own personal aesthetic for the next decade: cyberpunk fiction and industrial music. More specifically, William Gibson’s seminal Neuromancer, and Ministry’s The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste.
At the time, that book and that album were like microscopic bombs smuggled into my brain and detonated, shaking loose a lot of ideals and concepts that had been drifting formlessly in my head for a while, and literally opening up another world for my imagination to explore…one saturated with the chromeplated, circuit-ridden fascination of The Future that I’d come to adore by my exposure to lots of sci-fi and Gary Numan’s music, but at the same time filthied over with the everpresent shadow of human greed, apocalyptic disaster, and eternal nastiness that even then I recognized to be a constant Sword of Damocles dangling over this planet. Cyberpunk fiction melded the gritty grime of 1940s Film Noir and 1980s post-apocalyptic survivalism with ultrahightech visions of a transhuman world in which the line between Man and Machine had all but vanished, and life was lived hard, fast, and brutal along that razorblade-edged interface. Ministry’s music the same thing in a different medium: it brought together the rusty, crunching growl of metal guitars together with futuristic samples, voices, and a metric ton of Very Bad Attitude to create an album that…well, it wasn’t metal, exactly, but it wasn’t synthpop: it was street music for the world of Neuromancer - screeching sounds and voices sliding hard, fast, and brutal along the razorblade-edge of what was, in 1990, just beginning to be called “alternative music.”
Cyberpunk and industrial were perfectly complementary visions of one another, one ingested by the eyes, the other by the ears. In the heady glory of discovery, when both forms of art were completely new to me and unbelievably exciting for being so amazingly different than everything else I was reading/listening to, I went nuts and sought out Gibson’s other novels, the collection Mirrorshades, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling, Walter John Williams - and everything else I could find from Ministry, Front Line Assembly, Skinny Puppy, Tool…anything and everything that could be considered either “cyberpunk” or “industrial.” Even then, I was discovering that amid the beautiful shards of heat-ruined mirrorplastic and the scrapyard of sampled beats and distortion, there was Good Stuff and Lame Stuff: Good Stuff was original, crafty, and shared certain genre elements with its fellow stories or albums, sure, but always did something new and interesting with those basic core concepts; Lame Stuff, obviously, just ripped off the basic core concepts of cyberpunk/industrial and just churned out generic xeroxes of much better works. For example, if I could say, “Wow, this is like Count Zero only cooler!“…well, Good Stuff. On the other hand, if I came away from a book or an album thinking, “OK, this was just like Count Zero,” Lame Stuff.
I never imagined that, a mere fifteen years later, both genres–once so fecund and promising–would be so exhausted, so saturated with The Lame, as to have become parodies of themselves. But one need look no further than the latest Big Promotion Savior-of-Cyberpunk novel, Hammerjack, by Marc D. Giller, and just about every contemporary “industrial” band’s work to realize that both genres are dead…and that anything being put out these days under the monikers “cyberpunk” or “industrial” is little more than a wretched, zombified revenant of past glories recycled one time too many.
Numanity!
June 1st, 2005
Where the hell are we all going? What’s to become of this goofball species known to themselves as “humans” in the near and far future? It’s certainly possible we’ll render ourselves extinct, or at least destroy civilization, through the usual combination of environmental damage, war, resource depletion, and so forth…but despite my oftimes dismal view of humanity as a whole, I don’t see the possibility of us extincting ourselves to be that great. Sure, the future will no doubt see a drastic change in human numbers and human biological forms, but I believe that intelligent life on earth has reached the point where total extinction is possible but highly unlikely: even if an oldskool nuclear war were to break out and eliminate most human civilizations overnight, there’d still be survivors scrabbling amid the ruins, and tons of left-behind technology to analyse, re-engineer, and use to start over at some time in the future. Intelligent life on earth will around for a while, yet, but “humanity” will not. Why? Because we’re already in the process of becoming something else. Evolution teaches us that there are no such things as ultimately stable species–every species can, at the drop of a gene, begin to morph into a wholly new species better suited to its situation. To think that our species will remain the same forever is moronic. To wonder what we’ll become in the future is fun.
MSNBC.com recently ran an intriguing feature entitled “Human Evolution at the Crossroads” detailing five possible avenues of development open to our species in the future. All of these speculative avenues were dreamed up by credible evolutionary biologists or, in some cases, health professionals…but all are not created equal. Briefly, these five possible avenues are:
- “Unihumans”: a monlithic species in which all racial differences have been eliminated thanks to bioengineering and interbreeding of people from all continents.
- “Suvivalistians”: rugged, hardcore, tough-as-nails humans (practically a rebirth of Neanderthals) produced via the species’ transition through a major catastrophe (asteroid strike, war, etc.).
- “NUMANS!”: genetically-designed, physically “perfect” superhumans immune to virtually all disease and biological difficulties.
- “Cyborgs”: the familiar cyberpunk melding of human and technology.
- “Astrans”: humans engineered for interplanetary and interstellar travel/colonization/exploitation.
So, Pegritz, you ask. You’re virtually obsessed with human evolution (particularly technological), and you’re a total sci-fi geek as well…plus, you’ve read just about every decent sci-fi novel ever written concerning human evolution–so which of those MSNBC scenarios do you think the most likely to come about?”
Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
May 15th, 2005
I am, by no definition of the word, a “Trekkie”–I’ve never sat through an entire episode of either Voyager or Enterprise, and I lost interest in Deep Space Nine after its first season. I’ve often found the original Star Trek with Captain Kirk and Mister Spock to be completely ludicrous most of the time, and often an insult to a true sci-fi fan’s intelligence. But Star Trek: The Next Generation has always had a very dear place in my heart, because ST:TNG was so often beautifully written, highly intelligent, and comprised an ensemble cast featuring some of my favorite actors of all time: Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Whoopie Goldberg, Brent Spiner, and so forth. Of all the Trek series, The Next Generation is the only one that consistently delivered great stories that dealt with serious topics such as, for instance, communication difficulties between human and nonhuman cultures, in a very intelligent and often enlightening fashion.
The greatest example of this is one of the bestknown TNG episodes ever: “Darmok.” Never before and never since has televised sci-fi ever dealt with communication difficulties better. To read my analysis of the episode, scoot on over to Page Numba 2….
