Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Heads-ups
My fellow Genomics Forum writer in residence, Pippa Goldschmidt, has had her short story 'The Competition for Immortality' accepted by LabLit, a website where actual scientists with white coats and everything write fiction (and fact). And, speaking of competitions and immortality, Pippa reminds me to remind you all that the 31 March deadline for her short story competition is fast approaching (aka Tuesday).
Lavie Tidhar writes:
I recently edited The Apex Book of World SF, an anthology of international speculative fiction published by Apex Books. It includes stories from World Fantasy Award winners S.P. Somtow and Zoran Živković, and stories from Malaysia, China, Israel, France, the Philippines and many others (some reprints, some original to this collection). The anthology is now available for pre-orders from Apex.So there you go: three worthwhile projects to check out this weekend. Don't let the missing hour on Saturday night slow you down.
I'm trying to get the word out! In addition to the anthology I recently started the World SF News Blog, dedicated to posting news and links about international science fiction, fantasy, horror and comics.
What I've been doing
Meanwhile, thanks to commitments recklessly undertaken when I thought this book would be well out of the way by now, I've written a story for the next issue of Subterranean Online edited by Gardner Dozois, and another for a forthcoming anthology of alternate-history stories, edited by Ian Whates and Ian Watson. That story contains a secret tribute to a literary pun by John Clute and a smoking break outside Newcon 2, last year, with Ian Watson and Storm Constantine.
In other news: local listings mag The Skinny has published a fine review of the Digital Evolution event which it and my fine employers the Genomics Forum sponsored last month, and I and Paul Cornell, Iain (M) Banks and Ian Watson are cited on the Beeb.
After all this, for my next novel it's back to long lives and strange deaths and spaceships on the cover, I can tell you.
Labels: genomics, self-promotion
The Voice of Moderation
So we should try to establish exactly what caused the crisis, who is responsible, and how. And that does require a certain amount of finger-pointing. Not because it is fun, although it is, but because we can’t afford to be magnanimous to the policy‐makers and opinion‐formers who steered us into this. If we do we’ll leave them in place to manage the crisis as confidently and ineptly as its prelude. They will seek to reconstruct a system on the same disastrous lines, they will fail, and they will, with every appearance of regret, resort to ever more desperate measures. You probably found this article online, so I shall say no more.Dan Hind presents (PDF) the most comprehensive and readable account of the origins of the current crisis, and of a feasible and potentially popular response from the left, that I've seen anywhere. (Via).
Instant update: the man also blogs.
Exactly sixty seconds' worth of distance run
Actually about the WoT, but ...
The bargain myopically forged by the US and Pakistan in training radicalized militias to fight as their proxies spawned a terrible monster that has effectively escaped from the laboratory, set it on fire and then evolved into a multi-headed hydra chasing its own creators.It's quite an apt metaphor, but I can't help but wait for the fascist octopus to sing its swan song.
Labels: WoT
Public understanding of science
Scientists themselves would be the first to agree that portrayals of them on TV and in films are always wildly unrealistic. But then so are most portrayals of musicians, journalists, violinmakers and others whose numbers are so low that most people never meet one. (From a very interesting and amusing (if long-winded) disillusioned account of the whole worthy enterprise of 'public understanding of science'.)
Labels: genomics
See into the quantum world!
Reunite Gondwanaland!
'I'm a geneticist. My job is to make sex boring.' That, said Steve Jones, is how he introduces his lecture course to his students. 'They look a bit puzzled, but after 25 lectures, they get it.'
I doubt that Steve Jones could make anything boring. His lecture 'Lost Worlds and Worlds to Come' was an hour well spent. Here are some scrappy notes.
The Lost World is placed, like More's Utopia, in an isolated New World setting - cue a slide of the actual plateau, Mount Roraima, which had inspired Doyle. (That's typical of how Jones used slides throughout - each one was unexpected and made a point stick.) The utopian genre (Jones said) changed in the 1890s, with biological change replacing social change. Slide of 1950s paperback cover of The Time Machine. Next instance: Star Trek, which Jones said showed a society almost identical to ours in terms of social institutions, but with great variation in human bodily form. (I suppose the absence of money is less visible than the presence of pointy ears.) Even more oddly, this point was illustrated with a slide of one of the Ferengi, which Jones seemed to think was supposed to be a future variant of the human species. But (returning to the serious science) such changes to the human species, Jones argued, are not going to happen. Evolution is 'descent with modification', or in a more modern formulation, 'genetics plus time'. Its drivers are mutation and selection.
Mutation was illustrated by a picture of Boris Johnson, 'British mutant'. The London Mayor's shock of yellow hair is the result of a mutation which has had a selective advantage in Northwest Europe. Light skin colour maps almost exactly to areas where Vitamin D deficiency, due to lack of sunlight, is a problem. (Point-sticking slide: graph showing significant difference in Vitamin D levels in the blood of European-Americans and African-Americans.) Blue-eyed blondes are a further twist in this tale: Northwest Europe, because of the Gulf Stream, is the only region where grain crops can be grown that far north. Grain crops are not only lacking in Vitamin D - eating their food products actually removes Vitamin D from the blood. This confers an advantage on skin types even more light-sensitive and melanin-deficient than the European norm. Natural blondes, sadly enough, are just people who can live on oats in the rain.
Both mutation and selection have dropped radically in the advanced countries. The main mutagen is not radiation but men, specifically older fathers. In developed, and increasingly in developing, countries, few men have children after the age of about 40. Slide of graph showing ages of fatherhood in West Africa, Pakistan, and France: the differences were striking. At the same time, the proportion of babies surviving to adulthood has gone from about half to almost all in a few centuries. Even the disparities in reproductive success between classes has dropped. Hence Jones's surprising claim that human evolution is over, at least for now. Isolation is another factor of evolution that has been drastically reduced. An easy way to track genes is to track surnames: in less than a century the Joneses have spread from being 'behind the electrified fence of the Welsh border' to adjacent areas of England, and can now even be found in London. In Australia, Professor Jones saw a T-shirt slogan that amused him: 'Reunite Gondwanaland'. That, he said, is exactly what we're doing: in terms of gene flow within the human population, we're living on one gigantic supercontinent. 'If you're worrying about what the lost world of the future will actually be like, you shouldn't, because you're already in it.'
In the Q&A afterwards I tried to think of a polite way to set the distinguished geneticist straight about the all-important Ferengi question, and it's just as well that I couldn't. The Ferengi may seem ridiculous as future humans, but it's even more ridiculous that they are aliens.