Posted 5:47 pm by Ken

Looking Backward, on the year 2008

Last New Year, my resolutions were to write faster and to blog more. I seem to have accomplished the latter. Comments have been (mostly) all I could wish for - thanks to all, and special thanks to regular commenters.

As for writing: I had a delayed start on my next novel after The Night Sessions, partly because I made a false start on a sequel (which I may yet write). Then I took a long time over planning out the novel I'm actually writing, The Restoration Game. That was well worth doing, but my blithe assumption that it would make the actual writing a lot faster turned out to be mistaken. One side-effect of that blithe assumption was that commissioned stories and non-fiction pieces I'd blithely agreed to fell due in time I'd expected to be clear when I agreed to them. But the book's coming along fine, and is still on course for publication in 2009.

Next Monday, I'm starting a part-time job as one of two (hi, Pippa) Writers in Residence for the Genomics Forum, based at Edinburgh University. A large part of my work will consist of, ah, writing science fiction, and Darren Nash, my editor at Orbit, is very much on board for a science fiction novel with a genomics angle, so everything should fit together reasonably well (touch wood).

But I'm even more elated and enthusiastic about the prospect of doing other work - getting to know social scientists and biological scientists in their natural habitat, and taking part in outreach activities such as an event on Darwinian evolution and computer games sponsored by listings freesheet The Skinny, scheduled for 7 February.

My first project, I think, might be to circulate a list of SF short stories and novels relevant to (a) sociology and (b) genomics. I have a few in mind, but any suggestions will be gratefully recieved, even if I've thought of them already.

All the best for 2009 to all my readers (except the spammers, obviously).

Posted 1:16 pm by Ken

Gaza

Useful commentary on Operation Cast Lead at Lenin's Tomb, comprehensive coverage at Antiwar.com, and some stinging criticism in Israel.

Posted 9:38 pm by Ken

Season's greetings

Happy Christmas, Hannukah, Yuletide, or other solstice festival of your choice to you all!

Posted 4:00 pm by Ken

All Your Firewall Are Belong to Us

[Note: this is lightly edited version of a talk I gave on 30 September at this year's Gartner IT Security Summit, and later rewired as a GoH talk at Octocon. The talk depends a lot on topicality, so (a) the dates matter and (b) I can't squeeze any more talks out of it, so here it is. The picture above isn't actually of me giving that talk but it does fit what I was saying: the future isn't a straight line! It's wiggly!]

Good afternoon, and thank you for coming. I was a little perplexed when I was asked to speak about the future to a conference on IT security. Having worked ten years in IT is of course no guarantee that you know anything about security, in fact I suspect the average programmer gives people like you more sleepless nights than the average user does. As for writing science fiction, it's more or less a guarantee that you're going to get the future wrong. The science fiction writer Jack Vance gave due warning about predictions:

"What are your fees?" inquired Guyal cautiously. "I respond to three questions," stated the augur. "For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue." [1]

This may also be true of management consultants.

Today I'm going for clear and actionable language, on the basis that more than twenty years ago I saw this day coming. Some time around about 1986 the Reader in Mechanical Engineering at Brunel University told me that his best students weren't going into engineering, they were going to work for much higher salaries in the City, which had just undergone the famous Big Bang deregulation. And it did occur to me to think that a society whose best young engineers were going into finance was laying up some trouble for itself. I must admit I didn't actually foresee reading in New Scientist in September 2008 that the graduates most in demand by the City were literally rocket scientists.

There are two problems with thinking about the future, apart from that we can't see it. One is that we like stories, we're a story-telling species, and our heads are cluttered up with stories. But stories have a dramatic structure and usually a somehow satisfying ending. The future doesn't work like that. The other is that that we tend to think that things will continue along the same lines, like projecting a line on a graph. But the future doesn't work like that, either.
Shares, as the small print - well, today it's big black print - always reminds us, can go down as well as up. So can trends. This is why, for example, there isn't a US and a Soviet moon base, like in 2001: a Space Odyssey. It was a perfectly reasonable projection in 1969, because we'd had decades of big-scale state-led projects: the American freeway system, the welfare state, Keynesian economics, nuclear power, the space programme, and even the Soviet Union at that time was still looking pretty solid. There seemed no reason why that trend shouldn't continue. So nearly every writer of the sixties assumed we'd have marvellous mass transit systems in 2008 and lots of people would be living in domes on the Moon. And the whole world would have one big computer. The more imaginative had one big computer for each continent. Some time in the early 80s it became clear that this was yesterday's tomorrow.

Most of you, I'm sure, are familiar with the concept of legacy code. It has various definitions, but when I was working in IT back in the 80s we tended to use it for code inherited from someone else, which in the case of London Electricity usually meant someone who had retired or was otherwise no longer available for anything short of unfeasible amounts of money because they'd gone to work in the City to write the programs to implement the complex financial instruments being designed by all those engineers and rocket scientists from Brunel. In either case, that someone would have left an incredibly complex, system-critical, uncommented and undocumented tangle of code. A perhaps over-familiar example of legacy code from that time is the so-called Millennium Bug. Late in 1989 I was modifying a billing program for London Electricity so that the date-printing module could handle the change from 80s to 90s, and I pointed out that there was going to be another decade rollover 10 years later that would change the date from 19-something to 20-something, and that while we were at it we might as well fix that too. Most of the programmers there were science fiction readers, and unlike normal people we were pretty sure the 21st century was actually going to happen one of these days. We then had a discussion, took it to our line management, and they decided to fix the problem in all the other programs. So if you want to know who saved the world from the Millenium Bug, it was science fiction fans. Actually what I'm proudest of is the comment I put beside the fix: This will work for 2000 and 2100 but for subsequent century dates may require amendment. That's legacy code.

I used the term 'legacy code' in one of my novels, and Farah Mendlesohn, a science-fiction critic who read it thought it was a term I had made up, and she promptly adapted it for critical use as 'legacy text'. Legacy text is all the other science fiction stories that influence the story you're trying to write, and that generally clutter up your head even if you never read, let along write, the stuff. Most of us have default images of the future that come from Star Trek or 2001 or 1984 or Dr Who or disaster movies or computer games. These in turn interact with the tendency to project trends straightforwardly into the future. The great legacy text for the past twenty years or so is William Gibson's Neuromancer. Because Gibson was the guy who saw in the early 1980s that the next twenty years weren't going to be like the fifties and sixties in space. He famously foresaw something like the World Wide Web, but more importantly his novel projects a world where the US military is up there dominating the world from above, while down below the rest of us, from multinational corporations to lone hackers, sort of scrabble around in anarchy. I've written plenty of stories along the same lines, some of which may have become legacy texts themselves.

What if all the stories whose legacy text is Neuromancer have just turned into yesterday's tomorrow? What if right now, we're at a moment when trends that looked inexorable have reached a turning point? What if the common sense of the age is about to flip from free-market capitalism to state-regulated capitalism? Of course, turning that into actual policy won't happen overnight, or smoothly - too much political legacy code - but if it does happen then over the next ten years or so we'll be in an age of big government projects, some sort of new New Deal. We'd find ourselves back in the day before yesterday's tomorrow.

What that would mean is that every problem that has loomed large recently, from global warming to terrorism to Peak Oil to poverty to obesity, suddenly starts getting tackled in a quite different way, from the top down instead of from the bottom up. Or rather, macro-managed instead of micro-managed. People might actually feel freer, because instead of ubiquitous surveillance and endless nagging and hassling of individuals to change their behaviour and worry about their diet or carbon footprint or recyling or whatever, the governments would go straight to building non-carbon and hopefully nuclear power stations and installing reliable public transport and bike lanes, and instead of having us peering at small print on labels simply force the food manufacturers to stop putting fructose and transfats and god knows what other rubbish into the food in the first place. The problems do not go away but the whole attitude towards tackling them changes. Climate change starts looking very different if it begins to be seen in terms of building massive new power sources, transport systems, various schemes of geo-engineering - terraforming Earth, as we call it in the science-fiction biz - instead of cutting back on what we've already got and stopping Africa and Asia from getting it too.

What would such a big turning point mean for IT security? Well, the IT security problem of the past twenty years or so has come from the interaction of two processes: the proliferation and cheapening of computers, and the growth of insecurity and inequality. Some computers - in fact most computers - end up in the hands of people who are clueless about computers. Others end up in the hands, or at least under the fingers, of people who are unemployed or underemployed or criminally employed, and they've progressed from writing viruses to writing ever more sophisticated hacks, spam, scams and exploits. It has been a by-product of the processes that have also led to what Misha Gleeny in his book McMafia has called the globalisation of crime.

Now the problem of IT security will not go away, but the very nature of the problem changes if the education system has to adapt to preparing people for manufacture instead of McJobs (or finance), and if there are big technology-heavy projects to soak up the script kiddies and hackers and spammers and scammers into doing something more productive and useful and indeed profitable. And if the West is engaging in big development projects, it can hardly sic the IMF and World Bank on developing countries to let the market rip and shut down their public sectors and protected industries. So you might see again in the Middle East and Africa actual secular progressive regimes, which in the long run would soak up a lot of the swamp that terrorism comes from, not to mention Nigerian scams.

All this would take place against the background of one trend that's probably not going to reverse any time soon: Moore's Law, which very roughly means that next year's computer would do twice as much twice as fast for the same price if it weren't for Microsoft. There are similar trends in information storage and bandwidth. My friend Charles Stross, who knows far more about these things than I do, has written a brilliant analysis of the consequences of Moore's Law, in a talk you can find on his website, Charlie's Diary. I can't really better than that so I'm just going to say we can assume that over the next couple of decades the amount of computing power, the amount of information that that processing power has available to process, and the amount of bandwidth available to pass information around, are all going to increase to levels that very quickly take you into science fiction territory. Say they double every two years. In twenty years you get ten doublings: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. At that point you probably hit the buffers of fundamental physical limits. But along the way you have to envisage a world within your own professional lifetime and indeed business planning horizon where most people have something like a Cray supercomputer in their pocket and access it on their glasses or contact lenses.

Now if things were to continue the way they have been over the past twenty years, this is a huge problem for IT security, because you have vast quantities of personal information out there, very insecure, and vast processing resources to throw at it. This translates into immense opportunities for social engineering hacks. If you know the names and birthdays and maiden names and schools and for all I know Amazon picks of not just everyone but of everyone they know, security questions don't look like much of a barrier. The way Sarah Palin's Google mail got hacked is a very small example of how that can already be done. And to be honest it was because I was thinking along those lines and reading about the Russian Business Network and the Nigerian scam and the cyber attacks on Estonia and Georgia and so on that I came up with the title of this talk, 'All your firewall are belong to us.' But as I say, I think the nature of the problem is going to change. It changes from protecting people from their own cupidity and stupidity to protecting large infrastructure and manufacture from unintended security flaws and from very well-designed attacks, whether sabotage or espionage. Because the world I've just outlined is no more one of peace and harmony than the world of the postwar boom was. Instead of one Cold War there could be several going on simultaneously, in which all sides will be engaged in carrying out and in defending against cyber attacks.

It is, however, a world where IT is going to be even more important than it has been in the world of finance capital. And its focus is going to be different. Instead of going into the City or Wall Street, engineers are going to be working on engines, rocket scientists working on rockets. And instead of applying arcane probability calculations to designing improbable financial instruments, we could see a resurgence and elaboration of the sort of applications that in the sixties it was widely expected computers would mainly get used for: physical and economic planning. Applications like linear programming, critical path analysis, input-output tables, material requirement planning. In the early 90s when I was working for Feranti, I mean GEC, I mean BAE Systems, I worked on the edges of an MRP II manufacturing resource planning system and I was surprised that such a thing actually existed, while we were at the same time turning over the NHS to pseudo-market systems being developed at vast expense. Robust planning systems already exist but are often disrupted by economic turbulence arising out of the activities of all those Stock Exchange rocket scientists. Which is where we came in.

What I would like to wind up with in terms of thinking about the future is, as advertised, things that are unlikely to happen and things that look unlikely now but probably will happen and hit us all upside the head. As a science fiction writer I'm under a contractual obligation to mention aliens. I boldly say we will not encounter aliens. OK, so much for that. What about other unpredictable developments? There are plenty of catastrophic risks out there, as well as exciting possiblities. Leaving aside giant meteor impacts, local or global nuclear war, new diseases, Greenland's ice sliding into the North Atlantic in one go, or another Yellowstone supervolcano eruption - i.e. things about which the IT industry can do very little to prepare for, other than having very good off-site back-up and disaster recovery programmes in place, preferably in the middle of Australia - there are a few things we can think about that tie in rather neatly with my restrained and conservative suggestion that the developed world is about to take a massive lurch to the left.

One of the things that recent SF, the Neuromancer-type SF of recent decades, got right was that even if humanity's power over big things seemed to have slipped from its grasp, its power over small things such as molecules was increasing very quickly indeed. This is in part a consequence of Moore's Law, in that researchers in genomics, proteomics, physiomics and all the other omics found they had more and more computer resources to throw at the problem. I don't think this is going to change or that it's anywhere near its limits, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of us here live long enough to find that biotechnology has come up with a cure for death. Well, for aging, cancer, and most kinds of crippling injury and disability, at least. It might even be a cosmetics company that does it. Immortality - because you're worth it. This would set the whole pension funds business in something of a new light, let's say. But it would also have consequences so profound that no SF writer to my knowledge has ever actually tackled in depth the possibility of a near-future world where the most annoying generation in history - mine - is still around in 2100 if not 3100. Perhaps the prospect just doesn't bear thinking about. Nevertheless, if you do want to imagine that kind of world, the world of the next couple of decades, I can recommend works like Bruce Sterling's Distraction and Holy Fire, Charles Stross's Accelerando, and Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End.

If people are going to live longer and healthier lives the next step might be to make people smarter. That seems a bit unlikely in the next ten years but it's not impossible. I understand that physicists are already notorious for popping pills to speed up their synapses.The only part of human intelligence enhancement that really impacts IT security is that people might then stop writing down their passwords on Post-It notes. With that however I suspect I may have strayed into the realms of fantasy. So we can expect ever more emphasis on biometric security, and you can be sure that by the time it's implemented it too will be hackable: not just in terms of hacking the IT systems that store the biometric data, but the live data itself - by tweaking bits of DNA to change the expression of particular genes, perhaps to change iris patterns or fingerprints. Eventually we will find ourselves in the world of the open source human.

Another area where ever-increasing computing power is expected to have radical consequences is of course Artificial Intelligence (AI). I've been saying for twenty years that human-equivalent AI has all my life been where it was when I was twenty years old myself - twenty years away. But ethereally-networked supercomputers in every pocket, with increasingly fine-grained interfaces with our own brains and bodies, may yet have some surprises in store. The biggest surprise might be that an AI that emerged out of that wouldn't notice us at all, any more than we notice our neurons. It wouldn't come to eat our brains because our brains are already eating for it. It would only be interested in talking to the aliens who we are likewise unaware of. That is in fact the end of that novel I mentioned earlier, Neuromancer, where the emergent AI tells a character about how an alien AI has already tried to make contact, but ''Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody to answer.'

Finally, we can be sure that if there is indeed a big turn away from neo-liberalism and towards regulation and large-scale projects, lots and lots of things will go horribly wrong, fortunes unimaginable today will be squandered on gigantic schemes that never pay off, and conflicts and contradictions will build up until that trend, too, is reversed or turns into something different in twenty years time or less. And, no doubt, there'll be science fiction writers and futurologists standing up in front of conferences like this and saying that everything they've been saying for the past twenty years is all out of date and we have to brace ourselves for a sharp turn to the free market. With or without life-extension and smart pills, I hope we are all there to see it.

[1] From "Guyal of Sfere", The Dying Earth.
Vance wikiquote consulted 29/9/08

Posted 11:03 am by Ken

Considerations on the description of Odontochelys semitestacea, Li C, Wu X-C, Rieppel O, Wang L-T, Zhao L-J (2008)

Two more gaps in the fossil record,
Two more beasts in Noah's Ark.
Science marches, ever upward.
Comment threads are rife with snark.

What'll they say at AiG?
What'll we hear from the ICR?
What'er it is, we know it will be
some fleer to show how miffed they are.

'An artifact of preservation.'
'Not on the "ancestral" line.'
'That's only your interpretation!'
'It's still the same created kind.'

To certain wonders of creation
an eye of certain faith is blind.
But we can raise a generation
that wonders at the shuttered mind.

Science marches, ever upward.
Comment threads are rife with snark.
Two more gaps in the fossil record.
Two more beasts in Noah's Ark.

[Last four verses added later.]

Posted 1:16 am by Ken

Why Do They Slander Airstrip One?

Oceania, and all its constituent republics including Airstrip One, are strong and free. This undeniable fact is admitted by all progressive and objectively-thinking mankind.

A recent work by the homosexual-linked, 'public'-schooled, former colonial-police-agent emigre Blair published in the provisional capital of Eastasia Eurasia grotesquely slanders the state and social system of Oceania, in evident covert sympathy with the long-established aggressive designs and absurd ideological contortions of Neo-Confucianism National Bolshevism.

In Mr. Blair's pornographic depiction, from the contamination of whose foul and depraved fantasies the Ministry of Truth has quite rightly protected the citizens of Oceania, the ludicrous impression is given that freedom of speech does not exist in our country! In Airstrip One - the land of Milton, of Shakespeare, of Paine, of Shaw! Our workers in the Prolefeed factories have unanimously repudiated this slander with indignation and disgust. They have, after wide-ranging discussion, refused to have any part in propagating such evident lies. Precisely because true freedom of speech exists and is proudly upheld in Oceania, the workers in the relevant industries - who are, obviously, those most directly concerned - have freely voted not to print or otherwise circulate the unhinged rantings of our 'liberal' and 'socialist' critic - who, it should be noted, chose to have his 'satire' published not in the land for whose liberty he supposedly sighs, but in that temporarily dominated by Eastasia its deadly opponent. Their refusal to connive in manifest treason is, of course, the Prolefeed workers' constitutional unquestionable right. Let the deranged or tragically suborned theoreticians of Neo-Confucianism National Bolshevism rant and rave - but let them demonstrate one instance of such freedom in their equivalent institutions so-called 'free' media!

Of particular depravity is 'our' 'free-thinking' author's insinuation that the Ministry of Truth endorses and even practices heinous forms of torture. This allegation, as is well known, directly echoes the propaganda of the Eastasian Eurasian Mandarinate of Popular Education Commissariat of Enlightenment, whose unspeakable perversions have outraged the entire civilised world - but not, apparently, Mr. Blair. Some 'humanism'!

Finally, the objective reader cannot fail to note the revolting racially divisive intent of 'our' author's naming of his dubious 'hero': Winston Smith. As is well known, people whose ancestry can be traced to the former slave populations of the former colonial territories of the now-liberated and fully-integrated 'West Indies' enjoy complete and unrestricted equality in rights and privileges with all other citizens of Airstrip One.

Posted 3:48 pm by Ken

Hitler finds his name on BNP membership list, chews rug

Yet another Downfall mashup. 'Now people will think I am some kind of Nazi.' Priceless. The perpetrator of this outrage has his own thoughtful reflections on the Downfall mashup meme and links to others.

Posted 8:30 pm by Ken

Worlds of Yesterday's Tomorrow

Star Wars: A New Heap, or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Death Star is an intriguing web-essay on connections between SF film, modern architecture, and other odd angles.

Altogether elsewhere, but not unconnected: the architecture of occupied Kabul.

Posted 4:00 pm by Ken

Worlds of Tomorrow

I have a (commissioned and expert-advised) short story about what it might be like to be a space tourist in 2103 in the January 2009 issue of Focus, the BBC's glossy magazine of science, technology and the future. I've seen a PDF version of the pages with the colour pictures and sidebar boxes and everything and they look great. It's a big thrill to see the space cruise liner as envisaged by Duncan Steel (the expert) and described by me depicted in all its clunky glory - not to mention seeing the very same photo of Earth from low orbit that I had on my desktop and from which I described the view used as an illustration.

Some weeks ago Katherine Mangu-Ward, associate editor of Reason, the mainstream-user-friendly libertarian magazine, spoke to me on the phone about libertarianism in SF. She has quoted me and many others in her now-published article, which is about that great analytical engine of subversion, my US publisher Tor Books. In the Reason blog discussion someone refers to me as 'crazy old socialist Ken MacLeod'. It's an honour just to be nominated.

Labels: coming attractions, libertarian, self-promotion

Posted 7:37 pm by Ken

Friday cat blogging takes on a whole new meaning

Darpa funds cognitive computing project:

IBM will join five US universities in an ambitious effort to integrate what is known from real biological systems with the results of supercomputer simulations of neurons. The team will then aim to produce for the first time an electronic system that behaves as the simulations do.

The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain.

I for one welcome ... nah. We're doomed, I tell you. Doomed!

Posted 12:49 pm by Ken

A message from SFcrowsnest.com

Stephen Hunt, editor of SFcrowsnest.com, wants the world to know:

If you are a FaceBook user, please note, the SFcrowsnest.com Magazine FaceBook group has been hijacked. As of yesterday, any messages sent by it are NOT from SFcrowsnest.com staff or myself and should be treated as hostile – e.g. potentially containing or leading to scams, malware, compromised web pages and the like.

Please post news of this on your FaceBook profile and let all of your own FaceBook friends know as a matter of urgency.

Secondly, if you run a blog or zine, please spread news that the SFcrowsnest.com Magazine FaceBook group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21093694832 has been hijacked by hostiles and refer them to this warning which is now prominently linked from our own home page and can be found at http://www.SFcrowsnest.com/facebookhijack.php – I will keep this page updated with developments and any explanation/apology from FaceBook as and when (or if) I get it.

So far only the SFcrowsnest.com Magazine FaceBook group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21093694832 has been hijacked, but seeing it was myself that was singled out by FaceBook hackers, I would suggest also treating any messages from my Rule Jackelia FaceBook group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=34257537930 and my personal Stephen Hunt FaceBook account at http://www.facebook.com/people/Stephen_Hunt/1321736585 as being fatally compromised, as I’m certainly not in control of these two accounts either anymore.

Posted 12:41 am by Ken

Dot Communism

Cuba opts for Linux. (Via).

Posted 4:44 pm by Ken

Dawn, stars, and frost

Breathtaking animation. Play around with the control buttons at the foot of the page. This must be from one of the places where even today the night sky is so dark and clear that you can see the lines joining up the stars in constellations, just like the ancients did. Via.

Posted 4:17 pm by Ken

Coming attraction (local)

I'm giving a talk/reading at South Queensferry Library (on the 43 bus route - get off at Police Station stop then walk in the direction of travel to the next corner and cross the road at the foot of the hill carefully, children) tomorrow (Wednesday 12) at 7 p.m. The library is temptingly close to The Moorings, if anyone facies a drink afterwards.

Posted 4:15 pm by Ken

Traumatised, divided nation takes cautious step to the left

Well, that was one astonishing election victory. In other news: Edinburgh's City of Literature Trust has named a science fiction novel as next year's big read:

Thousands of free copies of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World will be distributed through libraries, schools and supporting partner organisations, together with a ‘quick read’ edition and a paperback comic biography on the life of Charles Darwin.

Meanwhile, Edinburgh publisher Canongate had already acquired the rights to two books by an American politician, and expects them to sell well.

Posted 9:33 pm by Ken

Obama

From over here it looks scarily close. I don't believe the polls for a second. There's the Bradley effect thing. There's the Nader-under-the-radar thing. There's the far-left anyone-but-Obama thing. (There must be some college students who are swayed by that.) There's the whole voter suppression and Diebold machines thing.

And then of course there's all the people who said they'd vote for Obama, see the polls showing him in the lead, and figure they don't need to vote. Young voters? I'd rely on young voters to hit the snooze button.

Most of all, though, there's the paradox that while nearly all the Americans I know personally are Obama supporters, and the sort of America Obama projects is very much the America I've seen when I've visited, I know that's only a fraction of America, and that the America I know from the outside is reflected perfectly in McCain-Palin. I can't help feeling it's out there, lurking. It's true that a reverse between opinion polls and actual votes on this scale would be unprecedented, but this is an unprecedented election.

Still, I'm not going to obsess about it. It's no skin off my nose. I don't live in the US, and I'm a science-fiction writer. If McCain-Palin win, I can look forward to a good decade or more of easy money from cheap gloom and cheap laughs. The rise of Nehemiah Scudder in a skirt and the devolution of the US into Gilead or some other dystopia would score me a fair few mainstream press pieces ('Can you do us 800 words on how you, as a science fiction writer, see ..?' Kaa-ching!) Sure, I have family in America, but by the same token they have family over here. We can put them up if necessary. Really, we can.

But if you live there and you want Obama to win, it might be a good idea to vote for him. That's all I'm saying.

Posted 11:54 am by Ken

I can see Russia from my house

Sarah Palin disparages fruit fly research:

You've heard about some of these pet projects they really don't make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

I knew I'd heard that one before.

Posted 9:01 pm by Ken

At last, someone puts it into words

Quote of the day: "Reading [Stanley] Fish as he reads public debate is a lot like watching a person try to jam a Betamax tape into a DVD player."

Posted 8:55 pm by Ken

Perspective

The height of up, the depth of down. (Nothing to do with the stock market, and all the better for that.)

Posted 9:47 am by Ken

Annals of uneven and combined development

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is computer-modelling the US economy on a Dell workstation. Chinese premier Wen Jiabao upholds Adam Smith's other book. The Taliban has its own ringtones. Who knew? Iceland says goodbye, and thanks for all the fish: 'When everyone was extremely rich in Iceland - you know, last month [...]'

Walk on two legs, dig trenches deep, and don't seek hegemony.

Posted 12:44 pm by Ken

Intervention from without

The Cedar Lounge has a wide-ranging and interesting post on current issues as reflected in science fiction. If any editors of critical magazines or fanzines have a space to fill ...

Posted 1:14 pm by Ken

Now, here's the plan ...

The US Government takes on
one trillion dollars of toxic debt, which it will finance by borrowing from
the People's Bank of China which will in turn take it out of the hide of an increasingly militant working class whose formative political experience was
the Cultural Revolution.



Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Posted 6:06 pm by Ken

Stimulus and response

Pic: today's FTSE, from the BBC.

Well, that shot in the arm seems to have worn off real fast. Every day or two, the governments or the banks do something unprecedented to calm the nerves, and the traders are all relieved until they think, 'Hang on, that means things are worse than we thought!' and suddenly they're singing 'My Heart Will Go On' again. And then the next fix comes along.

A couple more of weeks of this and Alasdair Darling will announce that everybody now has a land grant on the Moon, and there'll be maybe five hours of lunatic speculation before shares dip again. The week after that, Henry Paulson will announce that from now on all currencies will be based on the Higgs boson and traded at the Large Hadron Collider, and all will go swimmingly until somebody thinks, 'Wait a minute, does that mean there's something weak about the quark?' and from then on it's just dark matter all the way down.

Posted 7:40 pm by Ken

More reviews

Two more good reviews of The Night Sessions: by Lisa Tuttle in The Times and Daniel Coysh in the Morning Star.

Posted 12:21 pm by Ken

Nerd Plug

Those nice people at Soft Skull Press have sent me a copy of the War Nerd's book. It's good, even if (like me) you've read most of the content in his compassionate columns online.

Posted 8:14 am by Ken

Sunday morning sermon

I recently attended a talk on evolution and creationism by Edinburgh student humanist Stuart Ritchie. It was good.

I'm pleased to report that Stuart didn't make use of any dubious anticreationist debate tactics, such as those deprecated here:

Anticreationists are frequently uncivil and even hostile. Many of them often come into a forum lying from the very beginning, are easily angered, and complain if they are not heard. They are experts at guilt trips. Some are swift to use cuss words and are also swift to call other people names. And always have to have the last word. Engaging in a discussion with such a person requires diplomacy that is not natural to the human condition, and may only be available to someone truly able to demonstrate Christ-like love.

I know the feeling.

From the same source, we learn some fascinating physics, and even more fascinating biology:

All elements in the universe (periodic table) get their properties based on their combinations of 3 specific sub-atomic components (a trinity). Protons, Neutrons, & Electrons. No element has the same combination, in other words Gold has 79 protons, 118 neutrons, 79 electrons while [17] Carbon (man) has 6 protons, 6 neutrons, 6 electrons or 666. This will be the number in which the Antichrist will be identified by. And because a clone does not have working sexual organs, this explains why a cloned Antichrist will not have need for a woman.

And there are some misguided people who will tell you that creationists have no scientific discoveries of their own to contribute!

Posted 8:21 pm by Ken

The future, hitting me upside the head again

Cosmonaut Keep has a blog.

Posted 3:06 pm by Ken

Comrade Bush

Picture credit: The White House.

President George H. W. Bush carried out what was then biggest single nationalization in history with the Savings and Loan rescue. President George W. Bush has now effectively nationalised even more property than his illustrious father.

This was not, of course, the result of any excess of leftist zeal:

“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so large and so interwoven in our financial system that a failure of either of them would cause great turmoil in our financial markets here at home and around the globe,” said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr., at a Washington press conference. “A failure would be harmful to economic growth and job creation. That is why we have taken these actions today.”

This explanation irresistibly reminds me of the words of Frederick Engels:

The period of industrial high pressure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not less than the crash itself, by the collapse of great capitalist establishments, tends to bring about that form of the socialization of great masses of the means of production which we meet with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of these means of production and of distribution are, from the outset, so colossal that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalistic expansion. At a further stage of evolution, this form also becomes insufficient. [...]

In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its very opposite — into monopoly; and the production without any definite plan of capitalistic society capitulates to the production upon a definite plan of the invading socialistic society. Certainly, this is so far still to the benefit and advantage of the capitalists. But, in this case, the exploitation is so palpable, that it must break down. No nation will put up with production conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend-mongers.

In any case, with trusts or without, the official representative of capitalist society — the state — will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production. [...]

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.

Posted 8:54 pm by Ken

Seeds of Change

This morning I received my two contributor copies of this fine anthology. As physical objects they are just beautiful: small-format hardbacks with clean, clear print. The book has its own website with lots of goodies and extras, including sample stories and its very own magnificently scientifictional YouTube trailer.

Already argued about on BoingBoing and noted on io9! Several of the authors have recently taken part in a Mind Meld!

Get hip to the 21st Century! Buy this book!

Posted 11:10 am by Ken

Where are all the women of genius?

Right here, with us now, and been here all along, says Richard Carrier.

Posted 1:13 pm by Ken

Geek bleg

So, I've just had a Windows Vista Service Pack take an hour to install and another hour to revert changes, having failed to install. I'm reduced to teeth-grinding fury. (Especially as the latest Norton update for Windows Vista also just failed to install.)

So, I'm willing to consider Linux. I'm not interested in any version that requires endless faffing about under the hood. I just want software that actually fucking works.

Some of my readers must know what to recommend. What do you recommend?

Posted 1:19 pm by Ken

War with Russian characteristics

The Exiled continues to be, as its strapline boasts, Mankind's Only Alternative. There's the usual sensitive, caring analysis by the War Nerd, an interesting backgrounder by Mark Ames, and a stunning photo-essay on (or from) the Russian Army in action. (Nothing too shocking, but there are images of dead and injured people.)

Update, Thursday 21 August: Feh. You can see the originals (and then some, including grimmer images) in higher resolution here. (Via a comment on this post at the Tomb.)

Posted 4:28 pm by Ken

The Guns of August

Just how many ironies of history are concentrated in the above BBC picture of Georgian reservists in Gori, near a statue of Gori's most famous son, the author of Marxism and the National Question?

Useful analysis and links to more analyis and news are provided by veteran reporter Chris Floyd here and here. Another useful summary here. The same blogger has more. (Via.) Yet more, with background.

If this dispute escalates, well ... it's been nice knowing you, and in case you're wondering what hit me, it was probably the naval dockyard at Rosyth.

Back to the bloke on the plinth.

His above-mentioned pamphlet argues for 'the right of nations to self-determination' and against 'cultural-national autonomy'. In practice its author (a former Georgian nationalist poet who became a Bolshevik) implemented a policy that looked for the most part awfully like 'cultural-national autonomy' under the guise of 'self-determination': all the nations and nationalities and ethnicities of the Russian Empire were given the trappings of actual or embryonic statehood (including, for the Union Republics, the formal right to secession), but in practice what they (mostly) had was the right to local use of their own language, customs, colourful costumes, etc, while actual political control remained firmly in Moscow. The government of a republic could at any time exercise its right to secede from the USSR, but the CPSU and the KGB made sure that no government at all likely to do so would ever be elected.

When the CPSU and KGB lost their grip, all the large and small components of the Soviet Union had a national or ethnic state apparatus already in place (this matters, because otherwise the various nationalists would have had to construct new states from scratch) and most of them quickly self-determined themselves out of the union. But quite a few of them had, like Georgia, smaller ethnic proto-states inside them and/or straddling their borders. For interested outside powers near and far, the question of just which unit counted for 'self-determination' and which for 'territorial integrity' became purely and simply a question of whose ox is gored. This whole dynamic played itself out in Yugoslavia too.

Future multi-national republics might do well to avoid the mistake made by the author of Marxism and the National Question. Languages, customs, costumes, dances and cookery, yes. But for the rest, the component nations and nationalities of multinational states should be left not so much as a line on a map.

Posted 10:39 am by Ken

'Science fiction,' said the robot, 'has become science fact!'

That's the opening line of The Night Sessions. The robot in question is an airliner cabin 'trolley-dolly', described thus:

The trolley locked, the trolley-dolly halted. It had an oval head with two lenticular eyes and a smile-shaped speaker grille, and a torso of more or less feminine proportions, joined at a black flexible concertina waist to an inverted cone resembling a long skirt.

Behold.

P.S. Two reviews of the book are now online, both good.

Posted 9:11 pm by Ken

It's Friday. Here's your effin' cat.

It's our neighbour's cat, for whom hedges are just more stuff to explore.

A reprint of the paperback of The Execution Channel dropped through the letterbox this morning. The first printing came out in April, so that's encouraging.

Also this morning, in the early hours of a better nation (when I, like most of it, was asleep), came the news that the Scottish National Party won Glasgow East. I must admit, I'd have been a little disappointed if it hadn't. This is one of those issues where I'm as undecided as Schrodinger's cat in a hedge. Not independence - the Labour Party. On the one hand, New Labour deserves every bloody-nose defeat it gets. On the other hand, the prospect of a Tory government in Westminster and the SNP winning its independence referendum ...

Posted 10:30 pm by Ken

Go Jo!

Saw Nick Carr's article Is Google Making Us Stupid? reprinted in the Indie at the weekend. Gave it a quick skim - claims using the Internet is reducing our attention span, or something. Whatever. But seriously - whenever I see arguments like this, I think of Jo Walton.

Jo Walton is a writer who made using the Internet a part of life, and of literature, before most people knew it existed. I think she was the first person to be nominated for a fanwriting award entirely for writing posted to Usenet. She has gone on to write some quite extraordinary SF and fantasy novels.

She has just won the Prometheus Award for her novel Ha'penny, jointly with Harry Turtledove for The Gladiator.

As she says, 'Yay!'

Posted 11:26 pm by Ken

Skiffy updates

The Execution Channel came third in the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, after In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan and The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon.

John C. Snider has an interview with me up at The SciFiDimensions Podcast, at which you can also find interviews with James Morrow, Cory Doctorow, John C. Wright, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lisa Yaszek, and lots more.

A couple of weeks ago I had to proof-read The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal for the omnibus edition Fractions, forthcoming from Tor (who've just brought out a trade paperback of The Execution Channel, and very good it looks too). Re-reading The Star Fraction in particular was an odd experience: I still like the book, and it stands up well (though not, obviously, as prediction - that world ain't gonna happen), but it takes so much for granted and it still has a little infodump to explain what memes are.

Posted 9:45 am by Ken

Economic indicator

You won't find this one on the business pages, but the rate of exchange of heroin for Kalashnikovs is probably a significant indicator of something. The current rate is one kilogram of heroin for 10 AK-74s or 15 AK-47s.

Posted 7:46 pm by Ken

The series bible of reality

In Richard Carrier's brilliant, brash Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism he makes this helpful observation:

[I]f you want to know what we [naturalists] believe on almost any subject, you need merely read authoritative works on science and history - which means, first, college-level textbooks of good quality and, second, all the other literature on which their contents are based. The vast bulk of what you find there we believe in.

This is a good tip, quite independently of metaphysical naturalism. Reading the series bible of reality can spare you a lot of continuity glitches, science errors and non-canonical plot developments.

Posted 9:22 am by Ken

Trailers

An exclusive chapter excerpt from my forthcoming novel The Night Sessions is up at FantasyBookSpot.com.



Free PDF copies of the fine forthcoming anthology Seeds of Change (in which I have a very short story, 'A Dance Called Armageddon') are available to reviewers and bloggers here.

Posted 11:58 am by Ken

How to win friends and influence people

The surprise decision of Tory MP David Davis to resign his seat and force a by-election over his opposition to 42-day detention has been more popular in the blogosphere than in the commentariat, and continues to make waves.

Over at Liberal Conspiracy, the typical liberal hand-wringing gets almost out of hand:

If we get involved, we may also end up looking silly.

Sean Gabb, for whom the phrase 'made of sterner stuff' might have been coined, swings the massed ranks and vast funds of the Libertarian Alliance (Official) behind Davis. Tory qualms about damaging the Conservative Party are firmly stomped:

It may be that the Conservatives are less evil than Labour. But so are the BNP and al-Qa’eda.

The Yorkshire Ranter likewise lays to rest liberal mutterings about Davis's sometimes less than liberal views:

In terms of classical conservatism, it makes perfect sense to think that the State should have the power to cut your head off, and that its power must be constrained by law as much as humanly possible.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Glenn Greenwald riffs off the Davis candidacy to take the Democrats to task, and is himself taken to task for failing to mention the most conspicuous current example of a Democrat with a backbone.

Posted 2:07 pm by Ken

In other news ...

I see (via - no one's told me) that The Execution Channel has been been shortlisted for the 2008 John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Given the strength of the shortlist, 'It's an honour just to be nominated' is the sensible reaction. Still, fingers crossed ...

Posted 7:03 pm by Ken

Horseman of the Apocrypha

The Protestant translations of the Bible are not known as 'the Vulgate'. Christianity does not teach that Jesus had 'a human body but a nonhuman nature'. The title of William Paley's book on the design argument is not Natural Philosophy. The opposite of 'synoptic' is not 'apocryphal'. 'Q' is not the lost source of all four gospels. That the long ending of the Gospel of Mark is a later addition was not one of the 'more astonishing findings' of Bart Ehrman. Alpha Centauri is not the 'preferred origin' of supposed alien spacecraft. Marx, not Engels, wrote that human anatomy is the key to the anatomy of the ape. Not all Christian churches approved of slavery. Lysenko's theories did not lead to the deaths of millions. If you want to argue that Martin Luther King wasn't really a Christian, you don't clinch it by citing his refusal to hate his enemies.

That last is a lapse of understanding. The rest are matters of fact. None of these errors and misconceptions is important to Hitchens' argument in God is not Great. Getting the facts straight would have been easy - not just for a man of Hitchens' parts and learning, but for anyone with access to the Internet or a library and half an hour to spare.

Posted 4:11 pm by Ken

Reasons to be Cheerful

The privatisation of the Labour Party, mooted here and discussed in the post below, may or may not be a joke. What is well past a joke is the need for creative market-based solutions to the problems of the farther left. The way forward has long since been pioneered by two groups at opposite poles of the British Marxist spectrum: the ultra-left RCP became the contrarian, libertarian think-tank spiked, while the right wing of the old CP morphed smoothly into the left-of-centre think-tank Demos. Both are more influential than they ever were as parties: a strong indication that a wealth of untapped talent and assets await the enterprising venture socialist within the crumbling edifices of democratic centralism. A thousand weeds are ready to bloom, just as soon as the walls are knocked down and the roof blown off.

So how could the rest go?

Let's start from the top. The diverse, diminished, but still millions-strong international Communist movement has global brand recognition, and could very well be run as a franchise. Who better placed to do that than the mighty CPC? This is less outlandish than it sounds. In the 1970s, squabbling sects of US Maoists contended for what they quite openly referred to as 'the China franchise' (the losers had to make do with Albania). Meanwhile, China's official Foreign Languages Publishing House even-handedly flooded the market with cheap, excellent translations of the Marxist classics, whose font and print were so easy on the eye as to make reading even Stalin's duller pages tolerable. With China's more general turn to the market, FLPH disposed of its surplus Marxist stock by shipping bales of the stuff to any Communist party that would take the books and pamphlets off its hands for nothing. Local stocks around the world are now dangerously low, and the Chinese Communists could earn some much-needed goodwill on the left by cranking up the presses again, in whatever slack time the FLPH has between production runs of business manuals. As for the supply of baseball caps, flags, T-shirts, ball-point pens and other agitational ephemera, it would merely be a matter of changing the stencils in the sweatshops. If 'Free Tibet' flags can turn out to be Made in China, why not Red ones? With its decades of diplomatic experience and ingrained sympathy for national prickliness, the CPC would be well placed - and could well afford - to take an above-the-battle view of the minor differences among its clients.

Trotskyism presents a knottier problem. The only answer here is in radical restructuring. Trotsky himself was notably better at producing interesting descriptions of reality than at devising practical policies to change it, and the flaw has replicated down the entire clade of his successors. However, the whole point of this exercise is to turn setbacks into opportunities, and here the answer just drops out of a clear statement of the problem: separate the analysis from the actions! The Socialist Workers Party is the obvious case in point. If only the intellectuals who produce International Socialism would concentrate on what they're good at, and the rank-and-filers who sell Socialist Worker and who hand out placards and leaflets did likewise, everything would be fine. It's when the intellectuals try to formulate a policy that they tend to come to grief. Policy formation should therefore be taken out of the hands of the Central Committee and hived off to a think-tank (details below). Having no say in the policy of the paper they sell shouldn't embarrass the sellers, who have no such say at the moment in any case.

OK, so we have our Marxist intellectual book publishers, and our socialist street newspaper sellers. That leaves the little matter of the policy that will inform the papers they sell. How is that to be decided, if not by the intellectuals? Why not the rank and file? We search the blogs of the far left with a sinking feeling. How is it that so many bright, well-informed, intelligent people can bear to either carry the cross of their party's line, or drift into inactivity (disguised, often enough, as left-wing blogging)? Again, a clear statement of the problem provides the answer: turn the army of lefty bloggers into a prediction market! The clearing-house of that market would then determine policy from week to week; and a small automated system, from day to day.

Speaking of predictions and markets, the rigour of Marxist economics spokespeople would be greatly stiffened if they had to put their money where their mouths are. If their salaries were to be linked to the performance of shares bought and sold on the basis of their predictions, many economic crises that have never happened would never have been predicted. Again, there's a real-world precedent for this: in 1987, while more excitable Marxists (and others) were predicting the final crisis, the Communist Party's pension fund did very well by buying shares hand over fist at the bottom of the crash.

To take this further with more detailed suggestions for the smaller groups - to consider, for example, the Scottish Socialist Party's potential as a relationship counselling service - would take us too far into the realms of speculation.

Posted 6:46 am by Ken

Labour Party to be privatised

The People's ink is deepest red. Blood and Treasure draws our attention to a possible market solution to the crisis of the Labour Party's finances:

The party's impending insolvency is beginning to concentrate minds, not least those of a group of previously Labour-friendly businessmen, who can spot a bargain when they see one. The New Statesman has learned that the unnamed, secretive group - whose members have track records in helping turn round left-leaning institutions in the past - is considering approaching hedge funds with a view to buying out the Labour Party, or rather the remaining individual members, who would be offered shares instead. "Turning the members into shareholders could offer the same opportunities as the demutualisation of the building societies," says one who is involved.

[...]

Quite how those who are courting this rapidly declining asset stand to benefit is unclear. Another businessman who is part of the "Syndicate", as he puts it, is less guarded. If new Labour became a "limited liability party", it might be possible, he says - not entirely jokingly - to "sell non-core policies, from a customer perspective, as three-to five-year options on implementation in office". These could include policy sales to the nuclear industry or to the green lobby. "This," he points out, "could help ensure that national policies achieve the highest returns. And that could only benefit the shareholders - or, as they used to be known, the party members."

Gives a whole new meaning to 'market socialism', not to mention anarcho-capitalism.

Posted 2:17 pm by Ken

Cognitive dissonance

Pic: Traces of primitive man in South Queensferry

Yesterday I came across this fascinating documentation of the heresy trial of Dr. Terry M. Gray, all the way from the initial offence to the recantation.

What I found most interesting was this elaboration of the charges (Dr Gray himself firmly denies that he holds the view attributed here):

Dr. Gray repeatedly speaks as though we ought to interpret Scripture subject to the findings of science. He seeks to conform the teaching of Scripture to a current evolutionary view.[..] His hermeneutical method is more dangerous even than his specific view of human origin. Clearly, the application of this hermeneutical method cannot be limited just to the teaching of Scripture regarding the origin of Adam's body. It may be that Dr. Gray is content not to extend the application of his hermeneutic to other areas, but the method itself consistently applied undermines the authority of Scripture in any area of scientific inquiry.

The following, from Dr Gray's recantation, is also remarkable:

The study of evidence in God's creation using scientific methods in keeping with a Biblical worldview leads to the apparent conclusion that the human body originated via evolutionary mechanisms from animal ancestors. While there are some who deny that this is a valid inference from the data, I am unable to find fault with this conclusion held by the majority of the scientific community.

6. The simplest reading of Genesis 2 makes no suggestion that Adam's body had animal ancestors. [...]

7. Thus, my response is simply that I do not know how bring these two ideas together and that I am willing to remain in a state of agnosticism and cognitive dissonance on this issue. Perhaps future findings of science or future refinements of our understanding of the Genesis text will allow for resolution.

What can you say?

Posted 12:07 pm by Ken

Reading

Marshal Zeringue blogs on books, and he has two separate posts up on what I'm reading at the moment.

From blog posts that snagged on my fur this week:

God after Newton: In fact, though it is rarely discussed in history books, the influence of the conservation of momentum on theological practice is fairly evident.

War and love, man: One thing that stands out is how many of these people were enjoying themselves - the transition from ordinary routine, Catholic morality or Protestant propriety, to intrigue, violence, and nervous hedonism was clearly a liberation for a lot of people. In many ways, it was yet another version of the 1968 generation; just conditioned by history to be a peculiarly horrible one.


Telling it like it is: Any ostensibly “political” text that makes reference to “the ‘zine I used to publish” or “my old punk rock band” is almost guaranteed to parade the author’s stupidity and ignorance, and indeed, this text does not disappoint.

Where the 'protest babes' of Beirut went. (Via.)

Posted 9:07 pm by Ken

Coming Attractions

Last week I checked the proof pages of The Night Sessions, discovering towards the end a misplaced subordinate clause that - rather like an HTML tag left hanging - turned the climax into gibberish. Now that's fixed, the book is on course for UK publication in August.

A few years ago, I got a commission to write a short story for an anthology called The Cthulhuian Singularity. The idea for the anthology was sparked by Charles Stross's story 'A Colder War', which mashed Singularity memes with Lovecraftian horror. That story was to be included in the anthology - the rest were to be original explorations of a similar theme. So I went ahead and wrote 'The Vorkuta Event', a story quite unlike anything I'd written before or have written since. I found it remarkable how adopting a voice - in this case a mannered, lettered, slightly archaic voice - and a technique (the story within a story, both narrators being less than reliable) made the story flow easily, almost inevitably, as if some strange force had taken possession of my fingers.

For various unspeakable reasons that man was not meant to know, the publication of this anthology has dragged like a shoggoth's tail. I'm delighted to report that the shoggoth now has a firecracker under its ass, and the eldritch volume is expected to burst on an uncomprehending world late this year or early next, when the stars are right. You can reserve your copy by buying it here.

I also have (fairly short) short stories in Seeds of Change (forthcoming August 2008) and The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three (forthcoming 2009).

Posted 9:13 pm by Ken

The rifles of Rome

I live where Rome stopped: on the south bank of the Firth of Forth. It's strange to think that there was once nothing but Roman empire all the way from here to the Sahara. Richard Carrier has recently blogged about, inter alia, a detailed history of one weapon that helped them do it: the catapult.

In her study of this machine there are two things Rihll accomplishes of particular note (apart from producing a fully up-to-date synthesis of the whole of catapult history that reflects all the new developments in the field that few careful observers may already have known about from otherwise scattered reading). First, she establishes beyond doubt that catapult technology advanced considerably and importantly during the early Roman Empire (something that had often been denied), including the best case yet that they developed the metal-framed inswinger catapult, greatly magnifying power output (and leaving many modern reconstructions obsolete). Secondly, she also establishes beyond doubt the widespread use of small hand-held torsion catapults. In other words, the ancient equivalent of rifles (examples with three-foot stocks, for example, being commonplace), and even handguns (with models as small as nine or ten inches in total length).

The latter is perhaps the most astonishing. Expert observers will already have heard of growing evidence of Roman advances, but might have missed entirely the evidence of small catapults--yet as Rihll reveals, the evidence is surprisingly vast, if you know where to look for it, and what to look for. These weapons were apparently abundantly supplied in the Roman legions, and were so powerful that a typical stone-throwing smallarm could penetrate a human body with a lead bullet at a hundred yards [...]

And yes, the Romans did use lead bullets.

Posted 2:08 pm by Ken

Wonders of the market

Donald MacKenzie muses on end-of-the-world trades:

Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St James’s office trying to understand the credit crisis that had erupted over the previous four months. I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm – around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt – for the insurance to be paid out.

I asked one investment banker what might cause half of North America’s top corporations to default. No ordinary economic recession or natural disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it: no hurricane, for example, and not even ‘the big one’, a catastrophic earthquake devastating California. All he could think of was ‘a revolutionary Marxist government in Washington’. That’s not a likely scenario, yet the cost of insuring against it had shot up ten-fold. Normally one can buy $10 million of end-of-the-world insurance for between two and three thousand dollars a year. By early last November, the prices quoted were between twenty and thirty thousand, and even then it was difficult to buy in quantity – at least, said the banker, ‘not from anyone you trusted’.

You can insure against the revolution? Who knew? The rest of the article is less intriguing, though if you've always wanted to know what a ‘single-factor Gaussian copula’ is, here's your chance.