Joe Haldeman's Accidental Time Machine

Just finished listening to Joe Haldeman's "The Accidental Time Machine" from Audible.

As a time travel story it was excellent, there was a time machine, multiple uses of that machine, time travel was a key element of the story, and there was even a time loop. The overall story dragged at many points, especially when he fell into the trap of anti-Christian ranting.  Then it rushed far too quickly through the climax.

Why is it that smart scifi writers can't imagine a world where Christians are heroes and live respectable lives? At least the anti-Christian stuff was relatively tame and the rest of the book was good enough to overcome it.  The narrator was well casted, he sounded about 23 and exactly like a physics graduate student.

Singularity, a free audiobook

I have started listening to a free audiobook, Singularity by Bill DeSmedt. So far it's great, it's about the real cause of the Tunguska explosion. I'll review the book when I'm done listening to it.

I listen to it as a podcast feed.  I had some trouble setting up the feed in iTunes, the response of the podiobooks website was VERY slow, but it did finally work.  You can choose to get one chapter per day, per week, or all at once.

Your own personal stereotype

This is slightly off topic for this blog, but I found this ZenHabits post to be deeply profound.  To sum it up, virtually everyone fits into a pidgeonhole:  the smart guy, the cold physician, the golf hack, the office gossip, the troubleshooter, the troublemaker.  It applies to scifi writers too.  How many pidgeonholed authors have an opportunity to break out into a different genre?  If Terry Brooks tried to write a hard scifi story about alien robot colonies invading Earth would you give him the benefit of the doubt?  Many people would not. Most famous people are pidgeonholed:  George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, Brittany Spears....the list is nearly endless.

The best advice is to make sure that your pidgeonhole is a good one.  You need a positive image associated with respect and dignity.  Because you probably will be stuck in that hole for the rest of your life.

Science Fiction for Smart People

Charlie Stross writes in Accelerando about a variety of topics which challenge even the most technically savvy readers. First he mentions a Matrioshka brain, a massive extension of the Dyson Sphere. Imagine a Dyson Sphere is built which consists almost entirely of computational nodes. Each node will radiate a little waste heat so the entire sphere could be as bright as the star it contains. Orient the radiators on the external surface of the sphere and build another Dyson Sphere around the first which again is composed of computational nodes. This sphere will radiate energy but probably less than the inner one, thus it will be cooler. A series of concentric shells extends further from the stellar core, each shell absorbing and emitting radiant energy. After 10-100 of these the outer shell will be so cool that there is no efficient way to gather the emitted radiation and convert it to computational power. What would a brain do with that much computational power ? It would be the equal of roughly 6 quadrillion human brains or 10^35 petaflops.  Would it think, would it create, would it warp the spacetime continuum?  Would it create time travel? How would we detect such an entity? The object could appear cooler than a brown dwarf, rendering it almost invisible. There could be a few of these within 100 light years of us and we might never find them.

Next Stross mentions the Kardashev civilizations. A Dyson sphere is a Type II Kardashev civilization. A Type I group will harness all the energy present on their planet (solar, nuclear, wind, and geothermal). But the most impressive idea of all is the Type III civilization which gathers and uses the sum total energy output of an entire galaxy, roughly 10^37 watts. I wonder if the final stages of absorbing all the galactic energy would produce a visible redshift? Older galaxies would have higher redshifts as their inhabitants have had more time to absorb all the energy. Wouldn't it be cool to see the Hubble recession theory discredited because most galactic redshifts result from sentient races using all the energy from their galaxies!!

And what about dark matter?  Could it be that most stars and most galaxies are dark Kardashev communities?  Perhaps the calculations on the baryon density of the universe are wrong, and dark matter can really be baryons.  Or perhaps even more interesting, could advanced technology convert unstable baryons to something which is not a baryon?  Is dark matter the end product of an advanced Type II Kardashev civilization?

Accelerando is a good novel but it could do with a little more editing.  Many pages have sentences and paragraphs which spew jargon and techno-babble in a stream of conciousness mode that doesn't contribute to the essence of the story.  Here's an example:  "The whole ubicomp environment, dust-sized chips, and utility fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright optical processors in the soil and the air and her skin, which is growing blotchy andy sluggish, thrashing under load of whatever Amber....."

The story teases about uncovering what a group of really old Matrioshka brains are doing, but doesn't really answer the question.  Stross is probably fertilizing the soil for a sequel.

Time Travel Websites

There are a lot of other websites out there which offer a great sample of scifi. The most popular according to Google are SF Site, Scifi.com. An useful one is at www.magicdragon.com with the Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide. The interesting thing is that this site has not been updated in 4 years yet it's still #9 on a Google search for "science fiction". Gawker Media has the 800 pound gorilla with io9. The sheer quantity of searches and material on this site is overwhelming. Yet I must wonder why they won't let me post a comment.

For help with writing Science Fiction try Jeffrey Carver at www.starrigger.net or try his blog.

I'm most interested in time travel at sites like crystalinks, or time-travel.com, and there's even a site for time-travelling investors!

Are aliens watching us?

The Fermi Paradox allows for many explanations. One is that the human race encountered aliens in the past, we just don't know about it. This anti-anthropocentric view does not offer an answer to the question "are they still here?" If they came a long time ago then they probably went away bored. If they came recently they probably went away laughing. But perhaps they or their machines are still here, watching and waiting. Can we speculate for what are they waiting, and what would trigger a change in their posture?

They could be waiting for us to all kill each other so they can have the planet, or they could be waiting for us to dig up an artifact on the moon or Mars. They could be waiting for reinforcements, or for Sol to explode. They could be waiting for us to invent something they desperately need, or for us to answer an important question such as "What is the meaning of life?". Perhaps they are waiting for us to arrive at THE question for which they already know the answer (101010).

I believe the answer is much simpler, natural evolution produces one sentient species per galaxy once every 10 billion years. We are alone in the Milky Way and will be for a very long time. In fact we will probably colonize this galaxy so extensively that we prevent the evolution of the 2nd ones.

But it's fun to think aliens are listening to us and laughing at the method used in the USA for choosing leaders.

Free Science Fiction Pays for Itself

Gordon Van Gelder wrote a post describing F&SF's foray into free science fiction. He describes their policies then offers a survey to determine views towards online free science fiction. Most of the comments are from customers, not authors. So I'll offer my 2 cents. The reason I publish my time travel stories online is that I will end up making a lot more money here than I would ever see from print. Simple advertising such as Adsense, Amazon Associates, and Clickbank offer me more revenue than I will ever make from published work of science fiction short stories. Note that I am not referring to a novel. When my novel is complete I plan to aggressively market it to brick and mortar publishers because there is more money there (and possible movie rights !)

If I submit a short story to F&SF I might make $1000. That's it, that's the sum total of all money I'll ever make on that story. If however that story is available on my blog then advertising revenue can stream in for decades. The amount of money attributed to each story may be difficult to count, but that doesn't mean it's zero. Far from it.

Let's assume an author writes 10 stories per year. After 10 years that's 100 stories. It's highly unlikely that all or even most of those stories would be published. So let's assume that 10 of them would generate $1000 each. That's $10,000. The rest will never see ink on paper.

A well run blog with a reasonable amount of advertising could easily generate 2-5 times that amount. It's reasonable that over a period of 30 years those 100 stories might generate as much as $300,000.

Internet marketing has permanently changed the short story publishing industry. The change is irrevocable, dramatic, and liberating. More people will read my stories here than would ever read them on paper, as many as 1000 times more people. That audience has a monetary value to an author which cannot be matched by ink on paper. As a science fiction author I doubt I will ever submit a short story for publication. It's simple economics.

Why are scifi authors so pessimistic about the future?

A common theme in many of today's scifi stories is one of desolation, typically a planet ruined by human activity, or a population which cannot be properly fed or sustained. Where is the creative thinking which gave birth to our precious genre? Where are the hero scientists who learn to feed a million people per square meter of farmland ? Where are the solar power plants which operate at 100% efficiency, or the nanotech waste recyclers which generate a nearly lossless society?

It appears most science fiction writers have been brainwashed by the "common wisdom" of today's society, they are no longer capable of imagining a greater good. Will there be any more big thinkers writing scifi for us all?

Perhaps I'm one of the last real science fiction writers, someone who imagines that today's "terrible" problems will be so easily solved that one day we will laugh at how serious we were. I can hear my grandchildren's voices echoing down from a distant future where they ask me in all seriousness "Grandpa, did people once really believe that Earth would get so warm the ice caps would melt? Didn't you have any scientists back then?"

The truth is that soon we will be able to feed 100 billion people without any significant change in the amount of farmland, we will have clean drinking water for them all from desalination and nanotech recycling, global warming will be a distant joke even if the sunspots do return. Resistant bacteria will be easily killed with phages, avian flu will be erased by targeted anti-viral agents, and cancer will be in the same category as today's tooth decay (which will have been eradicated). I see a day where rain forests can be created in a few years using ultra-fast growing bioengineered plants. Old growth forests will be established in time capsules orbiting the moon, then transplanted where ever we want to see one. Abortion will become transplant surgery where a 1-day old fetus can be safely transplanted into the womb of a woman who will love and care for her.

Are any big thinkers out there? Please contact me and we'll try to move science fiction to a more optimistic footing.

Free Science Fiction

I found a couple of blogs which discuss free science fiction. One of the reasons I plan to write science fiction short stories here on my blog is that I see little value in trying to get them published. The financial incentive is not worth the wait, and would not enough to allow me to quit my day job. Basically my goal is to build a fan base, people who are familiar with my work and might buy my novel when it is ready later this year. The first blog I found is BestScienceFictionStories. Their post on The 10 Best Web Sites for Free Online Science Fiction Short Stories is very useful. Hopefully my site will be on the list soon.

The other is Auxiliary Memory where I found a post on Free Science Fiction. Free audio scifi books is a great idea.

Free Science Fiction from Tor

Tor Books offers free science fiction downloads every week just for signing up. Not sure if they ever have science fiction short stories. This week's book is In the Midnight Hour by Patti O'Shea. The next book will be Battlestar Galactica by Jeffrey Carver.

They don't appear to have a science fiction blog.

Fermis Paradox

Fermi's Paradox can be resolved in many ways. My preference is the following: Natural evolution of advanced species is much rarer than most Darwinists would have you believe. It is in fact so rare that the probability of at least one species evolving in any given galaxy is below 1 (perhaps well below 1). Many galaxies never host intelligent life. The number of galaxies which evolve 2 or more is a very small number.

No aliens have contacted us yet because there are no others. We are the first (in the Milky Way). This is not anthropomorphic, rather it is an honest assessement of the probability that random chance will produce intelligence.

The Best Time Travel Movies

A recent post on TopTenz offered the Top 10 time travel movies. With all due respect it's not clear that "time travel" was an important concept in this list. For example, in the Terminator movies there is a single time travel event at the very beginning of the movie and then nothing more. While the characters attempt to change the future there is no evidence they succeed. There is no foreknowledge or time loop or time machine. I would not call this a time travel movie because time travel is not possible for anyone after the beginning of the movie. As for Star Trek movies, they just aren't serious enough. The time machine is their spaceship, and apparently they can travel in time whenever they like. I think a time travel movie should have

1 A time machine or time travel mechanism right there in full view

2 Multiple instances of time travel

3 A time loop or paradox

4 Tension associated with the time-travel, a chance of temporal disaster.

So here is my own list of the Top 10 Time Travel Movies (free of Amazon links)

===================================

1 Primer

2 12 Monkeys

3 Back to the Future I, II, and III

4 Timecop

5 The Time Machine (new and old versions)

6 Time Bandits

7 Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

8 Frequency

9 Timeline

10 Butterfly Effect I ( II was not good enough for this list)

Unfortunately there is a dramatic difference in quality towards the end of the list. I think Hollywood should look at this an opportunity.