Tag: sf

Posted on

Money Illiteracy, Apple Arcade

Issue 6 of my newsletter – subscribe here

Since buying a house a couple of years ago, I’ve noticed more and more people talking about overpaying their mortgages, and I find the whole idea mystifying.

The mechanics of mortgages were alien to me until recently, and they may well be to you as well. In the UK, most people opt for 25 year mortgages with a reasonably substantial deposit, usually around 5-10% of the value. For the first few years, the interest rate on the mortgage will be higher because your loan-to-value ratio will also be higher – that is, the amount you’ve borrowed vs. the value of your house. That means your monthly mortgage payments will also be relatively high.

But as time goes on and your mortgage payments add up, the amount you’ve borrowed will decrease. More importantly, the value of your house has probably gone up. In some areas, it might have gone up a lot. That means your loan-to-value ratio will be lower, so banks will trust you more and offer you a significantly lower rate of interest if you remortgage. Right now, you could get as low as 2% interest on your mortgage, vs. the 4+% at the start of your mortgage.

It doesn’t sound like a big difference, but when you’ve borrowed hundreds of thousands of pounds, it adds up to hundreds of pounds per month in increased mortgage payments. I was genuinely shocked by how much our mortgage payments decreased after just two years when we remortgaged for a lower rate, and I thought I was financially savvy.

Anyway – that’s all prologue to the fact that for many homeowners, when their mortgage payments decrease, they decide to overpay their mortgage, sometimes by a significant amount. If you overpay each month, you could clear your mortgage years earlier than its default 25 year term.

The act of overpaying a mortgage, I believe, confers such a strong feeling of security and responsibility and satisfaction that many very smart people will prioritise mortgage overpayments over every other form of investment. At least, that’s the only way I can explain such a mystifying decision.

Now, it is true that Money Saving Expert, the middle-class bible, tells you to overpay your mortgage, assuming you have no other higher-interest debts. Why? Their answer is that while the interest rate on mortgages can be very low, most savings rates are even lower. It’s possible to beat 2% on a few savings products like Cash ISAs and fixed-rate accounts where you lock your money away for a year or more, but I suspect most people are not using those.

So far, so sensible. It’s only until you get to the end of the long article that it explores alternatives to saving, like investing, with the stark warning:

But to generate the amount of investment returns equivalent to paying off your mortgage, you’d usually need relatively high-risk investments – overpaying the mortgage gives a surety of return.

This is a brilliant summation of British distrust in the stock market, and specifically index funds, which are the one of the more accessible alternatives to traditional savings and bonds. Index funds are the opposite of traditional wheeler-dealer stock traders – they’re composed of shares that mirror the biggest companies in a particular market, and those shares only get bought and sold as those companies gradually get bigger or smaller.

Still, index funds are volatile: their price can jump up and down in just a few days. In bad years, an index fund might lose as much as 40% of its value, as happened in 2008. On the face of it, it’s no surprise people distrust the stock market. And because it’s plainly risky to put your money in index funds in the short term, many people think it’s even riskier to do that for the long term.

The truth is completely different. Index funds are much less risky if you hold them for the long term. The average rate of return from the S&P 500 index (a bundle of major US companies) over last 60 years is 7%, after you’ve taken inflation into account.

In some years, the index has dropped a huge amount, but most years it’s increased. And the longer you hold an index fund for, the more those dips and spikes are evened out, such that you don’t need to worry about timing. Here’s an extreme example:

Imagine you were spectacularly unlucky and you invested in the S&P 500 on August 9th 2007, the day before it began its massive year-long crash. Two years later, you would have lost 47% of your money: a dire result. But if you held on to your money until 2017, you’d have realised a gain of 6% per year, after inflation – far higher than any interest rate you’d get from savings or bonds.

Most financial advisors agree that index funds are one of the best choices for investment, and they would undoubtedly favour them over overpaying a mortgage with a 2% interest rate. So why do people distrust them so much?

  1. Index funds don’t make investment firms a lot of money, so they prefer to advertise and promote actively-managed investment funds whose managers buy and sell shares much more faster. As famously demonstrated by a $1 million bet by Warren Buffet, these funds tend to underperform index funds over the long term, but due to survivorship bias you often just hear about the funds that succeeded rather than the ones that failed.
  2. At school, the only thing I learned about the stock market was the Great Depression. You just can’t underestimate the importance of education in all of this.
  3. Likewise, popular culture associates the stock market with risk-taking wheeler dealers. It’s basically gambling.

All of this is a great shame, because it makes people poorer. You might say, boo hoo, what a shame that people fortunate enough to own a house aren’t making more money. OK, fine, but until we get rid of capitalism, I think it’d be a good thing for more normal people to own part of large companies and benefit from their profits. Right now, those gains are disproportionately going to the wealthy.

I personally wouldn’t put all my savings into index funds due to their volatility. But while home prices aren’t as volatile, they are highly illiquid in that you can’t quickly turn a bit of your house into cash if you need it. And of course, the volatility of the stock market is lessened if you view it over the term of a 25 year mortgage.

It suits the financial industry that homeowners remain so risk-averse and financially ignorant that they harm themselves. I wish more people would consider index funds over mortgage overpayments. But it’s hard to change the stubborn British belief that housing is the best, and only, investment normal people can make.

—

Today, Microsoft launched the Xbox Games Pass (basically, Netflix for games) at $5/month on PCs, joining the existing console-only Games Pass for $10/month, and the “Ultimate” Games Pass that combines both and adds a few extras on top for $15/month.

This makes me think the Apple Arcade subscription price is going to be lower than most people expect. Apple has a reputation for being expensive, but their subscription products are comparable with competitors:

  • Music: Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play Music are all $10/month
  • Storage: iCloud Drive and Google One both offer 200GB for $3/month
  • Apple News+ is the same $10/month as Texture was before Apple acquired it

Apple Arcade is interesting because it extends across iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Macs – but it probably has fewer AAA titles and blockbuster IPs than Xbox Games Pass. So if I had to guess, I’d say it’ll land at $7/month – far less than the $15/month some commentators have floated.

Maybe an “Apple Prime” that includes games, news, music, storage, and AppleCare for $30-40/mo?

Playing

🎮 Kids on iPad. 30 minutes of weird, mesmerising, disturbing interactive animation about crowds, groupthink, and kids.

Watching

📺 When They See Us on Netflix about the Central Park Five. One of the best things I’ve seen this year; excellent acting and beautiful direction. I couldn’t get through the final episode without crying.

Reading

📖 The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. My book of the year so far; full thoughts next week.

📖 Saga, Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. Entertaining epic sci-fi/fantasy comic. Didn’t quite live up to the “better than Star Wars” hype, but hey, it was on Libby from my library so why not? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

📖 9 Lessons in Brexit by Ivan Rogers, the former UK ambassador to the EU. A very short book, more like an extended essay really, about misconceptions the British have about the EU and Brexit process. A tad overwritten, but that’s civil servants for you.

My main takeaway is that the government’s prioritisation of immigration and goods trade over services (which are worth far more to the UK economy) is going to majorly bite us on the arse.

📰 The Wild West Meets the Southern Border by Valeria Luiselli in the New Yorker, about the parallels between Wild West re-enactors in Tombstone and US attitudes towards the border with Mexico. Very enjoyable and insightful. Here’s a bit that, perhaps deliberately, reminded me of the modern Westworld:

The town, it seemed, existed not only in a loop of embodied repetitions of odd historical moments but also in a kind of cut-and-paste of the same people. It is entirely possible that, at any given moment in Tombstone, Wyatt Earp is having a beer with Wyatt Earp.

and on re-enactors’ fetish for details over the big picture:

An interesting paradox of the reënactment scene’s obsession with authenticity and historical accuracy, this “getting it right,” is that accuracy is measured in terms of the minute details of a particular event, which does not necessarily amount to historical accuracy in the broader sense. Old West history buffs may endlessly dispute whether Wyatt Earp was wearing a specific kind of bow tie during the O.K. Corral shoot-out in 1881, but may be oblivious of much of what was happening in the region during those years.

Visiting

🎤 Cymera, “Scotland’s Festival of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Writing”.

Some choice (paraphrased) quotes from Ken MacLeod:

“Hard science fiction” is anything you can honestly sell with a spaceship on the cover. “Space opera” is anything you can honestly sell with an exploding spaceship on the cover.

… Space opera is justified because it’s the most optimistic form of science fiction. It shows we still have a future. And it gives us a vast arena for recreating mythological adventures.

Charlie Stross:

“Horror” is about loss of control. About the loss of bodily autonomy.

🏛️ I saw the Edinburgh (University) College of Art graduate show and the Edinburgh College HND show yesterday.

Lots of interesting art but my eyes were left bleeding from the blizzard of spelling mistakes and typos. Spelling errors in titles. Flagrant abuse of apostrophes. Grammatical errors every page. Barely any project was immune. It was painful to read.

I understand students might think they’re here to be artists, not writers – but unless you’re the best of the best, it’s really important to have a rounded set of skills.

Subscribe to my Newsletter

Posted on

A highly-upvoted Hacker News comment linked to a post I wrote twelve years ago on The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer:

a book from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age … that is powered by a computer so advanced it’s almost magical, and it teaches children everything. It does this through a fully interactive story. It teaches you how to read, how to do maths, it teaches you morals, ethics, even self-defence.

Looking back at the post, I’m shocked by just how little I remember writing it. I suppose when you’ve been blogging for almost twenty years, that’s to be expected. It’s also a reminder that while blogging is rarely as viral as Facebook and Twitter, its permanence and searchability can pay dividends over decades.

Posted on

When Surveillance Goes Private: A 2027 Retrospective

I’d like to begin with a story.

I was born in the UK — in Birmingham — although obviously I don’t have the accent! My parents came from Hong Kong, but we didn’t visit it until I was a few years old, since it’s quite the trip for any family.

The approach to the old Hong Kong airport in Kowloon Bay is hair-raising. You descend between skyscrapers, so close that you can practically see inside their windows. We were staying with relatives near the airport, which was fun, if noisy.

Me and my brother did the rounds of our aunts and uncles and grandparents, but eventually it was time for my parents to see their own friends. We were left with our cousins and the world’s greatest collection of pirated Famicom and Sega Megadrive videogames.

Now, these cousins. Their great aunt Agatha lived with them. As I was told it, she’d travelled the world, sailed the seas, fallen in love with all sorts of people, and made her fortune. Now in her eighties, she was still as sharp as a tack, with photographic memory and a wickedly funny tongue.

Agatha couldn’t easily walk any more, so more often than not, she’d sit in her armchair in the corner, situated just so she could see the whole living room and kitchen and hallway, and watch everyone coming and going. She wanted to know what was going on in the home, but more importantly, she wanted to be useful — and she was.

If you were on your way out but you’d forgotten to get pick up your keys, auntie Agatha would remind you (very loudly). If you were looking around for a letter or book you’d misplaced, she’d know precisely where you’d left it. She’d even watch you while you were doing your chores and tell you just which spots you’d forgotten to dust. Her job, as she saw it, was to help the household flourish, and keep them safe.

I’m sure some of you have figured out where I’m going with this. Almost forty years later, we all have auntie Agathas, watching over us in every room of our homes.

Today, in 2027

8 out of 10 households in the UK and US now have multiple home cameras. It’s one of the most astonishing success stories in the history of technology, with an adoption curve almost as impressive as smartphones in the previous decade. But unlike smartphones, we’ve bought many more than one per person.

Worldwide figures

What fuelled the rise of home cameras? Let’s start with the devices themselves.

Technology

Why did the home camera revolution only begin in 2018 and not earlier? Fast and cheap internet was an essential condition, allowing owners to monitor their homes on the move and abroad. Another boost came from the ‘smartphone dividend’, which reduced the price of camera components.

But beyond 2018, two technological revolutions fuelled the rise of home cameras: charging and sensors.

Early Home Cameras

Nowadays, it’s hard to believe that almost all home cameras in the mid-teens were wired. These cameras had no batteries and had to be tethered to a power outlet at all times, constraining their placement within homes and generally causing an unsightly mess.

From 2018 to 2023, home cameras adopted batteries lasting one week to one month — a massive improvement over tethering, as they could be mounted anywhere, including outdoors and in bathrooms — but arguably more irritating than wires, as their “low-power” chirping became a frequent sound in many homes.

It wasn’t until the full rollout of resonance charging, or more broadly speaking, ‘charging at a distance’, that cameras truly permeated every room and corner of our homes. Freed from the need to be wired or retrieved every month, and completely weatherproofed, they were stuck in the corners of ceilings, thrown onto roofs, hung on walls, mounted on gates, and balanced precariously on shelves. Providing they remained within range of a resonance station, they could be placed and forgotten for years.

The improvement in the sensor capabilities of home cameras has been even more extraordinary. In 2018, most cameras had a laughably-named ‘high-definition’ resolution of 1920 x 1080 — barely enough to distinguish small objects across a room. Matters were soon improved with the introduction of ‘High Speed 4K’ sensors that could examine minute changes in skin bloodflow to monitor people’s heartrate and emotional state. Soon after, cameras reached beyond the visible spectrum to infrared and ultraviolet, essential for home security and health applications.

It wasn’t until the introduction of multipath LIDAR in 2024 that the supremacy of cameras in our hearts and homes was assured. Various primitive forms of LIDAR had been present in earlier cameras, as an aid to home VR and augmented reality through precision depth mapping and 3D positioning. Multipath LIDAR, however, multiplied the reach of our cameras by using reflections to see around corners into other rooms; to interpolate new camera angles; and to even see inside objects. It finally provided total awareness of all objects within a home, without the need for excessive numbers of cameras.

In fact, the most advanced multipath systems now pose a threat to the business model of the camera manufacturers who’ve emphasised quantity over quality. Now that a single camera can take the place of many, it’s likely that overall camera shipments could begin falling.

Enough about technology — why did people invite cameras into their homes, and what did they use them for? I’ve identified five broad applications, in rough chronological order: Continue reading “When Surveillance Goes Private: A 2027 Retrospective”

Posted on

Artificial Intelligence: Another Inspection

Film critics were not kind when A.I. Artificial Intelligence was released in 2001. A.I. was directed by Steven Spielberg but originated from, and was made with, Stanley Kubrick, up until his death in 1999. A lot of reviewers accordinly blamed Spielberg for pretty much everything they disliked about the film, notably its final 30 minutes which appeared to be overly sentimental.

I enjoyed the movie when it was released. Admittedly, a lot of that was because I’d played the associated ARG, which also provided more context for the final 30 minutes. But it was hard to convince my friends that it was a good movie, especially in the face of critics.

In the past five years, prominent critics have begun reappraising A.I., to its benefit. A better understanding of the ending, and the relationship between Spielberg and Kubrick, sheds much light on the intention and message of the movie. In short, Spielberg didn’t write the ending, Kubrick put the teddy bear in, the aliens are actually machines, and the ending isn’t happy:

Roger Ebert: Great Movie: A.I. Artificial Intelligence Movie Review (published 2011). See his original review for comparison.

Watching the film again, I asked myself why I wrote that the final scenes are “problematical,” go over the top, and raise questions they aren’t prepared to answer. This time they worked for me, and had a greater impact. I began with the assumption that the skeletal silver figures are indeed androids, of a much advanced generation from David’s. They too must be programmed to know, love, and serve Man. Let’s assume such instructions would be embedded in their programming DNA. They now find themselves in a position analogous to David in his search for his Mommy. They are missing an element crucial to their function.

Robbie Collin at The Telegraph: AI revisited: a misunderstood classic (published 2014)

When the epilogue begins, it’s Kingsley’s voice that explains the ice age and the passage of time. Does that mean David’s story – ie AI – is itself a creation myth, told by these futuristic mechas about the making of their kind, as an attempt to understand the elder beings that made them?

“Human beings must be the key to the meaning of existence,” the Kingsley mecha tells David, and the line sounds odd until you realise these creatures hold humans in the same awed regard as humanity holds its gods. Dr Hobby’s son died so that David might live, and these new mecha are descended from David’s line.

In that light, AI’s ending isn’t twee, but wrenchingly sad. The love we’re seeing, between a mecha and a clone, is a simulacrum, as manufactured as a movie. But if it feels like the real thing to us, what does that tell us about the real thing? In that moment, Spielberg shows us real fear and real wonder, knotted together so tightly it becomes impossible to tell the two apart.

Jesse Hassenger at the AV Club: Contrary to popular opinion, Spielberg found the perfect ending for A.I.

Unpredictability, though, is not necessarily what audiences want, which brings us to the focal point of controversy over A.I., and a major reason the movie is more of a cult item than a confirmed modern classic: the film’s ending. Initially, David’s drive leads him to the bottom of the ocean, staring at a statue of the Blue Fairy, convinced that if he waits long enough, she will work her magic. You may have heard, or even subscribed to, the belief that this moment, with David waiting underwater indefinitely, is the “correct” end to the film. But the movie presses on past this neatness, jumping forward thousands of years. The Earth has frozen over, and an advanced race of mecha-beings (not aliens!) uncovers David. Through a process that is, admittedly, a little drawn out with explanations (including, essentially, two different types of narration), the mecha-beings, eager to learn from a robot who knew humans, agree to revive Monica for David. In this form, though, she’s more of a ghost; she can only stay revived for a single day. She and David spend a perfect day together before she drifts off to sleep, accompanied by her mecha son, essentially a dying ember of human life.

It’s understandable, then, that so many backseat directors would dutifully follow that program. This is not, however, Spielberg’s obligation. The film frequently adopts a robot’s point of view, but was not made by one. By sticking with David after thousands of years’ worth of waiting, Spielberg stays true to a robot perspective while also deepening David’s sadly close connection to human experience, a far trickier balancing act than having David dead-end at the bottom of the ocean. The actual and vastly superior ending of A.I. is more than a bleak kiss-off; it imagines humanity’s final moments of existence (if not literally, certainly metaphorically) as a dreamy day of wish fulfillment. David wants to be a “real boy,” and the scenes with the ghostly Monica turn his desperation and sadness from an imitation-human abstraction to a desire with an endpoint, which in this case coincides with, more or less, the end of humanity as we know it. As such, the sequence also turns the comforting idea of dying happily into something pretty fucking sad. Spielberg hasn’t grafted a happy ending onto a dark movie; he’s teased the darkness out of what his main character wants. David’s artificial intelligence has given him the very human ability to obsess, and then to take solace in his own happiness above anything else.

Mark Kermode at the BBC: AI Apology (published 2013)

And finally, Steven Spielberg in conversation with Joe Leydon:

In 2002, Spielberg told film critic Joe Leydon that “People pretend to think they know Stanley Kubrick, and think they know me, when most of them don’t know either of us”. “And what’s really funny about that is, all the parts of A.I. that people assume were Stanley’s were mine. And all the parts of A.I. that people accuse me of sweetening and softening and sentimentalizing were all Stanley’s. The teddy bear was Stanley’s. The whole last 20 minutes of the movie was completely Stanley’s. The whole first 35, 40 minutes of the film – all the stuff in the house – was word for word, from Stanley’s screenplay. This was Stanley’s vision.” “Eighty percent of the critics got it all mixed up. But I could see why. Because, obviously, I’ve done a lot of movies where people have cried and have been sentimental. And I’ve been accused of sentimentalizing hard-core material. But in fact it was Stanley who did the sweetest parts of A.I., not me. I’m the guy who did the dark center of the movie, with the Flesh Fair and everything else. That’s why he wanted me to make the movie in the first place. He said, ‘This is much closer to your sensibilities than my own.'”

Posted on

Railhead = YA Hyperion + Culture

I’ve been a fan of Philip Reeve after reading his thrilling Mortal Engines quartet. Strictly speaking, Philip Reeve is a young adult SF/fantasy author, but I found this series to be more imaginative and darker than many other ‘adult’ novels. A lot of his other books have been for younger children, but when I heard that he’d written an out-and-out SF novel called Railhead, I had to check it out.

Railhead is an exciting amalgam of two of my favourite SF series: Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos (well, the first two books, anyway), and Iain M. Banks’ Culture series. The Hyperion part stems from Railhead’s network of wormholes, connected by – of course – railways; plus the presence of godlike AIs with their own cryptic plans. The Culture part is represented by the slightly-smarter-than-human AI trains, with appropriately Banksian names, plus the well-written action, explosions, drones, and AI avatars. There’s also a dash of Dune and Hunger Games in there, as well.

Perhaps the most Banksian thing – and the most surprising to see in a young adult SF novel – is Railhead’s refreshingly modern treatment of gender norms and sexuality. Some characters are gay, and some characters regularly switch sexes, leading to offhanded passages like this:

She was gendered female, with a long, wise face, a blue dress, silver hair in a neat chignon.

and

Malik got a promotion. He got himself a husband, a house on Grand Central, a cat.

and

And, to cut the story short, it fell in love with him. And he fell in love with it. In the years that followed, Anais came to him again and again. Sometimes its interface was female, sometimes male. Sometimes it was neither. Different bodies, different faces, but he always knew it.

An unexpected but pleasant surprise!

Posted on

Initial Thoughts on KSR's Aurora

Spoilers abound for the entire plot of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora

I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy changed my life. I was 14 and reading plenty of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov when I idly flipped through our monthly book club brochure. They usually didn’t have any science fiction, so I was surprised to see an entire page devoted to a book called Red Mars. It was by some author I’d never heard of and therefore of questionable quality, but Arthur C. Clarke himself urged readers to give it their time. “The ultimate in science fiction,” or something similarly unambiguous.

We bought the book – we had to, that’s how book clubs worked – and I fell in love with the idea of colonising Mars. I felt as if Kim Stanley Robinson had demonstrated that not only was it possible, not only was it sublime, but it was absolutely necessary for the project of humanity becoming a fairer, more enlightened people. At an impressionable age, this book made the biggest impression, and was enough to spark my ambition to write an essay, win a competition, travel to a Mars conference in the US on my own, organise youth groups, speak at TED, and so on.

I am not active in the Mars exploration movement, or even the space exploration movement any more. I remain deeply interested, but it became clear to me that the road to Mars would be much longer and much harder than anyone had expected. Even now, even with SpaceX, it feels as if the decades keep ticking up. What once might have happened in 2020 will now happen in 2030, or 2040, or later. And when we get there, what then? Creating a world from scratch is hard, slow work.

Kim Stanley Robinson regrets the effect the Mars trilogy had on people like me. At least, that’s the impression I got from Aurora, a tale of the near-impossibility, and hence near-pointlessness, of creating an Earth-like environment outside of Earth. It’s not his fault; the science has changed since the 90s. We now know that Mars has much less nitrogen than we need for growing plants, and the vast amounts of perchlorates on the surface are a serious hazard to humans. These, and other new obstacles, could lengthen the time to terraform Mars from centuries to millennia, or tens of millennia. Perhaps our technology will advance to meet the challenge, but there’s no question the challenge is herculean.

Yet no-one seems dissuaded by this. In fact, I had never even heard of the nitrogen and perchlorates problem until reading Aurora. It’s as if merely asserting that colonising Mars is an imperative for the survival of humanity suddenly makes it possible. What must happen, will happen.

And why is colonising Mars an imperative? Because, in part, of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.

So Aurora is a corrective. We follow an attempt to colonisation a planet orbiting Tau Ceti, light years from Earth. In short, it fails. Everything fails. Not the just colonisation of Tau Ceti, but the very starship that took the colonists there as well. All the beautifully designed miniature Earth-like biomes on the starship fail, because that’s what happens to enclosed ecosystems with a wide variety of flora and fauna, all evolving at different rates.

Our colonists do try, though. A engineer/biologist is positively heroic in her efforts to keep the starship running, a rather unusual note in a science fiction novel (although not, to be fair, The Martian); and some colonists are so determined to press on with the project in Tau Ceti that they choose to take the one in ten thousand chance of creating a new world. Those are, of course, terrible odds. Only in a certain kind of story do you win that gamble, and this is not that kind of story.

What kind of story is it, then? An anti-space exploration story? Not really. Robinson describes a solar system full of thriving outposts and colonies, all trading with one and another, and most crucially, with Earth. He talks about the eventual colonisation of Mars – in a few thousand years time. This is not the imagination of someone who wants to smash rockets. In his world, Space exploration is exciting, it’s laudable, it’s inevitable, but it’s not a solution to preserving the future of humanity. And while volunteers will line up to take the riskiest of gambles, it’s not so clear that their children and grandchildren, left on a fragile miniature ecosystem too far from Earth, should have to risk their lives as well. No, the future of humanity is best assured by preserving the future of Earth’s ecosystem.

This kind of talk used to sound like sedition to me, spread by shortsighted fools who’d say, “Why explore space when we have problems on Earth?” It still does, sort of. It may not seem like it, but humanity is wealthier than ever, and I still think we can well afford to explore and travel in space, and to Mars.

The problem is, it’s not just on Mars that the facts have changed, with its nitrogen and perchlorates – it’s Earth as well, with its warming air and rising seas and fraying ecosystem. So I don’t feel unjustified in changing my mind as well about our priorities and how we think about the future of humanity, not after reading Aurora.

It’s been almost twenty years since I first opened Red Mars, but I’m still impressionable – at least, by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Posted on

Interstellar: Two Movies in One

I was fortunate enough to catch a screening of Interstellar tonight, courtesy of BAFTA. Christopher Nolan surprised the audience by introducing the movie with a few words, comparing-but-not-comparing it with 2001.

It’s not as good as 2001 – but you could say that about almost any movie. Is it a great movie, though? No. Is it a good movie? Maybe. If you like Nolan’s other movies and you like science fiction and incredible visuals, it’s certainly worth watching Interstellar; there are many moments and entire sections of the movie which are absolutely stunning. Unfortunately, they’re marred by an often plodding and predictable story, flat characterisation, and confusing cinematography.

There is an excellent 90 minute movie hiding in Interstellar, and probably another very decent 30 minute short film. Unfortunately, you’ll have to see the whole 170 minutes to get to them.

Posted on

2001 and Master and Commander

Next month, the BFI is releasing a new digital transfer of 2001. I will be there.

Quite apart from the fact that even a big TV can’t replicate the ultra-widescreen experience required to properly appreciate 2001, I think that most normal people – myself included – are incapable of paying sufficient attention to the movie unless forced to do so in a dark cinema. It’s not just that I’d want to check my phone during some of the slower bits (which, to be fair, is most of the movie); it’s that it’d be near-impossible to avoid interruptions like noise from outside, or phones ringing, or people coming and going, and so on. So, see it at the cinema. Also, live in the UK, because if you don’t, you’re out of luck.

2001 is one of the two movies that I rewatch every year or two. Specifically, the flight to the space-station, and then to the Moon:

(didn’t I tell you not to watch this at home?)

What’s the other movie? Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Here’s the opening sequence:

It’s beautiful, and slow. The movie features few battles other than those against the weather. Like 2001, there is much “competence porn” wherein smart and experienced people concoct clever plans. Like 2001, it is a journey into the unknown, on board a state-of-the-art vessel with serious technical problems.

They’re both – mostly – contemplative movies punctuated by moments of sheer terror, providing an enjoyable mix of ASMR-like relaxation with adrenaline that keeps me awake. And once I’ve finished, I feel like I’ve grappled with weighty questions that concern the future of humanity. What more could you want?

Posted on

The Many Meanings of The Islanders

After reading Christopher Priest’s The Islanders, I was immediately compelled to figure out exactly what was going on in the story (similar to what I tried with Iain Banks’ Transition). Of course, The Islanders is even more deliberately ambiguous and dreamlike than Transition, and so I’m acutely aware that trying to unknot the plot is perhaps not the most sensible exercise; especially when I haven’t yet read Priest’s other stories set in the same world, i.e. The Dream Archipelago and The Affirmation.

That said, I really enjoy doing it, so: please look away, SPOILERS AHEAD!

islanders
Click to enlarge

In no particular order, here are some of the questions I had, with accompanying speculations:

So, what exactly happened with Commis?

The most straightforward answer is that Kerith Sington, after having been beaten up by Commis (in non-mime garb), really did drop the pane of glass on him; and that this was made possible by Chas Kammeston loosening its bindings and leaving the door open (not to mention putting it up there in the first place, although that wasn’t entirely his fault). Continue reading “The Many Meanings of The Islanders”

Posted on

On Reamde, Neal Stephenson, and The Mongoliad

I was disappointed.

When I heard about Reamde‘s premise of hackers, spies, and gold mining in a massive multiplayer online game called T’Rain, I had the same worried feeling that I had when I heard about Anathem’s monasteries – that Neal Stephenson was venturing away from the sort of adventure/SF capers I enjoyed best. However, I was pleasantly surprised at Anathem and I held out the same hope for Reamde.

reamde

The problem with Reamde is not that it’s trying to be more ‘accessible’, if by ‘accessible’ we mean it’s set during the present day and has no obviously futuristic elements that might put the ‘mainstream’ off. No, it’s problem is that it’s frequently boring and it doesn’t add up to much at all.

Sure, there are flashes of the classic Stephenson brilliance – the insightful observations of how technology is changing the world, the clever ideas about business and gaming, the tangents into the finer points of grammar and MMO economies. But these are buried in literally thousands of words describing stuff that I frankly couldn’t give a shit about. Every fight, every journey, every thought is explained in excruciating detail, often from multiple points of view, and a lot of the time, none of it is particularly relevant to the plot.

Even worse, the usual and excusable Stephenson vices seem to be on particular show in Reamde: the tendency of almost all the smart characters to speak in the same over-specific way, the cliched over-weaponed and sprawling family of hard-bitten survivalists, the revisiting of Manila and Trinity College in Cambridge, the baffling hookups. I accept these things as being integral to Stephenson’s soul and writing, just as Iain M Banks frequently lapses into forced-jokiness and gratuitously violent torture scenes in his novels, but usually there are more than enough good moments to balance them out. But not this time.

It’s upsetting because there are some fantastic moments in the book where Stephenson was clearly having a lot of fun. I was impressed by the man-hunt in Xiamen, and later on, a massive battle in T’Rain occurred simultaneously with real world shenanigans. Many reviews (such as the WSJ’s*) suggest that these moments, and others like them, are the meat of the book; in fact, they’re far outweighed by tiresome detailing of gun battles and people travelling from A to B. Perhaps if it was a mere 500 pages instead of 1000, I’d have enjoyed it more. Unfortunately, as it stands, I can’t see myself recommending this book to anyone.

Stephenson is still clearly capable of writing awesomely interesting and entertaining fiction. The question is, what happened with Reamde? I can see three possibilities: Continue reading “On Reamde, Neal Stephenson, and The Mongoliad”