Mundane time travel

Time travel will be used for the most mundane purposes imaginable. Corporations will hire multiple copies of the CEO for all management positions. Employees will be forced to go back in time so as to never have any time off - sick days will be a thing of the past, because you'll just come back when you're well. On the plus side of that scheme, you can have whatever preferred schedule you like. Two days on, five days off? No problem, as long as you're in the office Monday to Friday. Three months of leave per year? Go for it, just come back to the beginning of your holiday when you're done. It would get tricky to track, and some employees would, as a result, burn out a lot faster than others. Some, who take a lot of time off, would age a lot faster than others, who don't. That would be weird.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Time travel, used this way, would lead quickly to the tech singularity.
PPS - Because corporations will want whole research eras to be done, literally, yesterday.

The redundant beverage dispenser

Did it bother anyone else that the Heart of Gold ship in the most recent Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie contained a weirdly imperfect beverage dispenser (as per the joke in the books) but also a perfect food replicator hooked up to a mind-reading device designed to detect cravings? I mean, if Arthur craved a cup of tea, why go to the machine that produces something that merely resembles tea instead of the much better machine that would do a perfect job? Why have the beverage dispenser on the ship at all?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's assuming the craving-machine does work any better than the beverage dispenser.
PPS - The craving-detector would be a very useful thing in our house, even without the food replicator part.

Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov

I borrowed a collection of Isaac Asimov short stories from a friend ("Robot Dreams") and found some of the stories surprisingly dark. I thought I knew Asimov. He's like the grandfather of science fiction, and his early stories are really quite bright and hopeful. There's one I recently heard on Escape Pod ("Rescue Party")of aliens responding to an apparent distress call on Earth. The host noted that it was quite positive because the aliens find no corpses. The whole of Earth had to evacuate, and humanity did so, without destroying each other just for the hell of it. Asimov wrote that when he was 19.

Fast forward to the stories in this collection, and among the first few we already find a human deliberately killing the robot equivalent of Moses and some robot cars that actually murder a man. On purpose. When his previous robot stories were basically all about how the famous Three Laws of Robotics interacted and could cause unusual effects, the later ones seem to hold a lot more unease about robot slavery and a potential uprising. It's just not the Asimov I thought I knew.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I believe there was only one story in the collection I'd read before.
PPS - It was "Little Lost Robot".

My favourite podcasts

Podcasts I love. I listen to four audio podcasts regularly that I thought I should let you know about. The first two are Escape Pod and PodCastle, both from the same "group". They're weekly science fiction and fantasy stories, respectively, and usually run about the length of my daily commute, 40 minutes, though PodCastle very frequently goes over an hour and occasionally lets loose with "giant" episodes over 90 minutes. In balance with that time sink is Toasted Cake by Tina Connolly running at about 10 minutes per week, featuring fantasy flash fiction. I use them as filler when Escape Pod or PodCastle runs under 30 minutes. Finally, there's I Should Be Writing, an irregular advice podcast for "wannabe fiction writers" like me. Genuine, down-to-earth advice on how to keep writing and what to do with it when you're done, published by Mur Lafferty. She records when she's good and ready, and the lengths can vary a lot, so sometimes I have to pad this out with Toasted Cake too.

Also worth mentioning is TED, a video lecture series on a wide range of topics from science to charity and politics, under the broad heading of "Ideas Worth Sharing". I only watch some of them, if the topic grabs me, because I have a lot of other things to watch too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Escape Pod and PodCastle have a third "sister" called Pseudopod, too.
PPS - I don't listen to that one, though, because horror isn't really my thing, and also I only have so many minutes in my day.

Keeping science out of science fiction

I'd like to be a science fiction author, but the reader community is starting to turn me off the idea. It seems any time you touch on something real enough, someone with a relevant tertiary degree steps in and says the wrong science in the story was too jarring for them. I mean, in what way is it okay to tell a story about body swapping aliens, but not okay if your story includes relativistic space travel? I would like to be able to write fiction, but I don't want to study theoretical physics, biology, maths, chemistry, neurobiology and linguistics to a university level before I'm allowed to do so. It's good to have the science right, but it's not that bad to have the science a bit wrong if it's consistent and the story suits it.

Maybe I should just start my stories with a disclaimer about how it might look and sound and smell like your universe, but physics works different here.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess, in a certain sense, I am a sci-fi author.
PPS - Just not a published one.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Next Machine

I entered a couple of stories in a flash fiction contest at the ever-excellent Escape Pod. Voting is currently in progress on their forums, but some stories have already been knocked out of their preliminary rounds. Below is a very slightly updated version of my story that was eliminated.

The Machine rolled over the dusty plains, as tall as a hundred men. Those huddled in the caves recognised its shape from the stories, but it was bigger this time. Whoever kept sending them was determined. Relentless.

Sheriff Deerborne tried to keep the people calm as they shivered in the dark. He always projected an impression of patient competence, in charge of every situation. But the entire town had been hiding for nine days now, and his resolve was getting close to cracking point.

"Sheriff, when is it going to stop? When can we go home and live our lives in peace?"

"Miss Dorothy, I'll tell you again, this Machine will die, just like the others. I don't know when, but as soon as it does, you and your children can go home."

"It's just not good enough, Sheriff!" said Miss Dorothy, re-settling her youngest boy up on her hip. "We have to find out what it wants and stop it!"

The Sheriff raised his voice and hitched up his gun belt the way he did when he meant business. Everyone in the cave could hear him easily. "We will all go home once the Machine has run its course. Not before. It's not safe. And we can't know what it wants if it won't communicate."

"So go out there and try, why don't you?" asked one of the young men.

Deerborne couldn't see which, but he glared in that general direction.

"Alright. I'm going outside."

The people looked somewhat mollified by this, but they were clearly uneasy. He picked up his rifle and crept out of the cave, telling everyone to stay down, keep quiet. He crept over a ridge to get a good look at the multi-wheeled monstrosity. They were right. It looked like the stories said. He took a closer look through the scope of his rifle, just in time to see the head of the Machine turn, ponderous and slow, and spit a ferocious ray of fire. It burned through rocks like they were nothing, and they wafted away in the thin breeze, utterly destroyed. The machine turned and rumbled over in that direction to investigate its handiwork.

When his blood stopped running cold and his legs would support his weight again, Deerborne shuffled quietly and carefully back to the cave. Immediately he was mobbed.

"What did you see, Sheriff?"

"What does it want?"

"When can we go home? I want to go home!"

All Deerborne could do was shake his head. The monstrous Machine outside was here to find them and destroy them. No question about it. It would be a long time before the Martians could go back out of their tiny caves again.

Outside, the Machine rolled on, oblivious, inexorable, and emotionless except, of course, for its Curiosity.

The main criticism I gathered from the voting comments was that the science wasn't quite right. I try not to let science get in the way of a good story, but there are plenty of sci-fi fans who need to have both. I get that. When someone gets computers wrong on TV or film, it's pretty jarring to me, and for a while that's all I can see. Hardness in sci-fi is a good thing, and I could have made this one more accurate with a little research.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't think I could have made it good enough to win in the short contest time.
PPS - I do still have one horse in the race, though.

Space travel fear

Though I am a bit of a science fiction buff, occasionally the thought of space travel scares me. To some people, sailing the stars is not only a wistful notion, but a lifelong dream. To me, when I really think about it, I get a definite claustrophobic feeling. To be sealed inside a tin can literally millions of kilometres from anything resembling "help" or "rescue" should terrify anyone.

Taking a holiday in some hypothetical moon or Mars colony is slightly less panic-inducing, but it feels like human beings were meant to stay on Earth. It's made for us. If there's not enough air or water or food where you are, you go somewhere else. In space, all you can do is shrug your shoulders and die.

This attitude is probably the way people felt in the early days of human flight, saying that solid ground is the place for us and that's that. I can understand that my feelings may be paranoid like that, but you'll have to do a lot to get me to jump in a rocket and leave orbit.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I realise feeling claustrophobic in outer space is a bit contradictory.
PPS - But the amount of space you can use is as big as your space ship.

Vocabulary of the future

Science fiction writers often seem to use new words or terms for the inevitable next generation of technology, like '3D So-Vi' for television or 'time teller' for clock. The problem is that words have momentum that's hard to overcome. People were referring to "ice boxes" long after they required no ice. I frequently say I'm going to rent a video when I mean a DVD. I've even heard a television referred to as a "picture wireless". If those terms persisted, then "television" and "clock" will, too, and, English being English, the simplest word is likely to win.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - But how will you know it's the future unless they have weird words for things?
PPS - I think the jet packs will give it away.

Stargate Universe cancelled in Australia?

After showing just 3 episodes here in Australia, Channel ten seems to have decided not to show any more of Stargate Universe. It's a bit disappointing that SGU was not rating as well as, say, "Accidentally on Purpose" or "The Cleveland Show", but surely 3 episodes is too small a sample to say for sure.

Whatever the reason, what are our options as Stargate fans in Australia now? Well, we could subscribe to Foxtel at $70+ per month, wait for the DVDs (that is if region 4 is deemed worthy of publishing them here), or download them legitimately or otherwise. The siffy SyFy channel website has the first five episodes, but you can't watch them from Australia. The iTunes Music Store reportedly has the show, but that too is often region-restricted.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - So it looks like our legitimate options are to wish for DVDs.
PPS - Which doesn't always turn out well.

Stargate: Universe

It's hard to sum up my feelings towards the Stargate: Universe premiere the other night. A co-worker pointed out that the premise is quite similar to Stargate: Atlantis, at least at the start. They are lost a long way from home in a place that's not theirs and is barely functional, but with access to a stargate.

I found it difficult to get involved in either the story or the characters. The story was fairly standard, and was just there to establish how the crew got lost, so no big surprises there. As for the characters, most of them got so little screen time it was hard to get a handle on them. Doctor Rush, the lead scientist, is cold, analytical and secretly very excited to be on an ancient spaceship many galaxies away from home, which all add up to everyone else hating him or at least distrusting of him. Eli, the kid genius, hardly knows what's going on and spent all his time playing with a remote-controlled flying camera.

Being the first Stargate show for a while, and following 15 seasons of the original plus the spinoff, it's got a lot to live up to. I think they can probably do it, but there's got to be more to it than in the pilot.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The further they get from home, the more power they'd need to dial Earth.
PPS - And an exploding planet was what it took to get there in the first place.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Star Wars Zombie Art

Star Wars zombie art. These illustrations were contributed by "several well-known artists in the Star Wars community".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, the Star Wars Galaxies online game is set to release an update called Death Troopers.
PPS - I believe it is also related to the release of Joe Schreiber's novel of the same title.

Brain downloads for job handover

It occurred to me yesterday, as I tried to get up to speed with my new job, that if we had plugs in our heads and the ability to download information quickly and easily directly into our brains, then even very specialised people could be replaced in jobs at a moment's notice. As long as you have the job-specific knowledge ready to download, you can step into any position and pick up where the last guy left off. It would still be important to find someone who worked well with the rest of the team (if applicable), but finding someone with the right skills becomes meaningless.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It would certainly help productivity of new employees.
PPS - And interviews would become much more about personality than skills.

Trans-reflective force fields

Often in science fiction you see a force field protecting something. The heroes shoot at it just to establish that it's really there, and the energy blasts or bullets seem to be absorbed or disintegrated. So I started wondering what would happen if the force field reflected anything you propelled at it right back where it came from. Throwing a rock would be a bit of a bad idea, but shooting such a force field would be like shooting directly at yourself. Makes for a much more effective defence, in my opinion.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The good guys should be in control of such a force field first.
PPS - Otherwise good guys die just finding out that the force field is there.

The Babel Fish additional uses and limitations

I had a thought about the Babel Fish from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the other day. My understanding (which doesn't quite match the Wikipedia description) is that it feeds off brainwaves of others and translates them for you. It would, therefore, allow you to understand inarticulate people as well as foreign languages. Someone who is unable to get their thoughts out into words would still be understood. However, I don't think it would work for television the way it is mentioned in passing in one of the books. It would need real people, not just sounds.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's possible that Wikipedia has it right and I'm wrong, though.
PPS - Wouldn't be the first time.

Star Wars: Retold

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) is hilarious. I linked to it in my "news" section a while ago, but since then I've been showing it to just about everyone, so I thought I might as well make a feature of it here.

I'd love to see someone do a whole series of these for cult movies. I guess it would be hard to give someone just enough information to get the story right enough to recognise but wrong enough to be funny.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For extra fun, here's a Star Wars-related LEGO animation.
PPS - It is not related to the LEGO Star Wars video games.

Hive mind resistance

If presented with the idea of fusing their minds into one global entity, I expect most people would pass. The loss of identity is enough, but on the whole, each individual tends to believe themselves to be of above average intelligence. If the worldwide pool of intelligence was divided evenly between everyone, then, most people expect they would be worse off. It's possible nobody else is thinking of it that way.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And if we're all part of one mind, "my IQ" is a totally meaningless phrase.
PPS - Unless you mean it corporately.

The Awesome Future

I've had that phrase rolling around in my head for a few days now, since it appeared on Boing Boing. It suggests to me that there are a few different futures that we are aware of, and the Awesome one is where boom boxes have cartoonishly-large speakers. There would be a few other stand-out aspects of that future, probably relating to a lot of Men In Black-style gadgets.

I imagine there is also The Mad Max Future, where most of the world is desert, everyone wears metal or leather and we ride around in dune buggies fighting each other for scarce resources.

There's The Really Clean Future, where everything is white and nothing seems to have any sharp edges. Most of the people in this future are self-medicated into a soft, fluffy haze.

There's The Class Struggle Future, where 10% of the world dresses nicely (in a futuristic version of Victorian fashion) and controls everything that the grubby, homeless 90% of people have and do.

Of course there is The Star Trek Future, where one government spans many star systems and the galaxy is teeming with alien life that looks suspiciously like humans in rubber masks.

Then there's The Space Cowboy Future, similar to the Star Trek future, except there's no aliens, smaller ships, less government and more crime, but in a sexy way.

There's the Post-Global Plague Future, where almost everyone was wiped out by some global pandemic and now we live in isolated forts for our own safety. Nose plugs or surgical masks are common.

Finally, I think we have to consider The Robots Are Our Masters Future, where our would-be robot slaves rise up and ironically enslave us.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess I left out the Digital Brain Upload Future, where we all live in a simulation.
PPS - And I'm sure there are more.

Bars of Gold-Pressed Latinum

In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, they often deal in the hard currency of "bars of gold-pressed latinum". The main problem I have with this is that it's a lot to say. If people of the future are anything like people today, they'll create a shorter name for them, or at least say only "bars" when the context makes it clear.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - "Latinum" is completely fictional.
PPS - It's a currency only because it can't be replicated.

Lifeline Bookfest

I've already missed one Lifeline Bookfest this year, but apparently now they have two. I only happened to catch the ads on television by accident because I usually don't watch TV with ads. Deb and I went yesterday, but I would have preferred to go on Saturday before all the Star Wars books had been picked out of the sci-fi table. Still, I picked up a few items that I hope will provide me with some entertainment on bus rides for the rest of the year.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd be especially grateful if the books gave me ideas.
PPS - I tend to value ideas over entertainment.

Star Trek Montage

I saw a montage of original Star Trek moments involving the phrase "he's dead" which was slightly amusing. I'd like to see someone do the same thing with The Next Generation and the phrase "energy field". There's plenty of material to work with.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - A few other phrases would show up repeatedly too.
PPS - "Make it so" and "engage" are pretty frequent.