Geoff Ryman Interview
How did you get your start with science fiction and fantasy?
Hmm. By reading a Little Golden Book called ‘Mickey Goes to the Moon’ which I loved and lost during a hospital visit. Also Space Cat
What is it about the genre that appeals to you?
Cats. No, floating intelligent globes. Well, you know. At first SF was an extension of Oz, that extended into Edgar Rice Burroughs, and then a book with dinosaurs in it by Brian Aldiss… only it turns out in that book that human sensibility reverses cause and effect. From our point of view time ‘really’ flows backwards. Which means corpses are born out of the earth into human beings. At that point I realized that SF was fairy tales made plausible by science that could give readers a lot to think about as well as wonder at.
What’s your writing process like? Are you the type that comes up with an idea/agenda first or one that just writes and lets the story flow from there?
Sadly, I work by inspiration. Something just seems so good for its own sake. The trigger could be something very small, but I realize that this is an idea for something big, and if it really is going to work, the ideas just keep flowing, and I write them all down very quickly at least at first draft… then comes far too much work revising the ideas, changing the plot, and polishing the words. It can take years.
253, or Tube Theatre is hypertext fiction. What were some of the challenges in writing such a piece? Did you have all sorts of flowcharts and notes?
The main challenge was to come up with 253 characters, each of whom has enough of a story to be worth telling. By about car 4 I was getting a bit worried, but I just kept digging deeper and deeper into my memory. I started taking a lot of notes about the tube as I traveled… that provided some stories, like the guy whose watch gets caught in a woman’s hair. The structure of each person on the tube train was so clear that keeping track who linked to whom was pretty easy to keep straight. Just occasionally finding everyone who worked at a particular place might be tough. By car 5, the previous characters were generating characters a few cars on, so that was fine. I don’t need flowcharts or anything… I have all those navigation seat maps. The print version has a list of characters by what links them.
I just listened to your Adventures in Sci Fi Publlishing interview. How has Clarion affected you, either as a writer or as a teacher? How did mundane science fiction get its start there?
Clarion has given me confidence that writing is a skill that can be taught. It won’t turn someone of talent into someone of genius, but it will give them practice digging deep for stories, and insight into how prose works so that revision is faster and more effective. It taught me just how difficult giving a critique is, how much work it takes, especially if you have to have something to say after 16 really smart people have already given their critique. A good critique of a 5000 word story takes at the very least two hours… probably three hours if there a lot of nits in the prose. I am now at least in part a professional reader of other people’s fiction… which means I am just in the habit of reading very slowly and spotting problems. It can reduce your enjoyment if you’re re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness
This year’s Clarion were a particularly cohesive and very talented group. I saw a lot of stories that I think will be published and that’s very rewarding if you’re a teacher.
Clarion means you spot where the zeitgeist is going. I think this year I gained a fresh respect for how integrated information-seeking skills and imagination are getting as we all get used to the Internet. In 2002 Clarion I saw that a whole kind of SF writer, those whose work was based on science, were increasingly outside the SF and fantasy culture. I wanted to help get them published and I very suddenly found myself writing The Mundane Manifesto, based on some of the things the guys (and they were guys) had said. Both about old tropes driving out the new, and also an avoidance of the coming crunch in terms of oil, global warming, overpopulation, and development economics. Julian Todd and Trent Walters were particular inspirations. For example, I believe it was Julian that said that FTL gave the impression it would be easy to find and settle beautiful new Earths… which encouraged us to think we could burn through this planet and be immortal. So Mundanity partly came out of impatience with bad science, or with tropes that gave us the SF dream for free. Also it was impatience with the moral role SF was starting to play… as an irrelevant dream of a future that was unlikely to happen. The worry is that SF now sometimes actively prevents us imagining the future.
My idea was that we’d do something like Dogme film-making. Promise not to include certain tropes in our stories. The list keeps shifting, partly because we don’t agree. But included
• No FTL, no wormholes, warps etc as magic wands around that
• No Very Fast travel without time dilation
• No time travel
• No parallel universes based on quantum uncertainty
• No telepathy
• No aliens.
More discussion resulted in outright artificial intelligence being excluded.
The name Mundane came partly because I didn’t like the way fandom called non-fans mundanes. People who criticize you may have a point; maybe people didn’t like SF or fantasy for interesting reasons, that didn’t just mean they were dull and unimaginative. Partly it was the focus on Earth… mundane means of this world. The future for most of us is here on Earth. What’s so unwonderful about the revolutions in science and IT that are coming here?
Anyway, I wrote the Manifesto, and the guys liked it.
I’d been going to Landmark at the time, and one of their things is that you take responsibility, you get stuff going, but then you step back and let other people take over. That way you know that the project is valid and not an extension of your own ego. Julian, Trent, the guys really made it their movement, they set up the website, posted the scientific articles, and kept the discussion going. So it’s their project but I’m a sinful fellow and feel pride that I started it.
When did you know you wanted to write mundane science fiction?
It had always bothered me that there was bad science in SF. Way back when The Child Garden
I was hoping that Mundanity would be the meeting ground for hard SF and humanist SF. I now think I was the wrong guy to be identified with it. I’m not a science-based SF writer, which I think has foxed a few people. One blog actually did this whole number on us for being a bunch of literary Clarion types… completely the view of that particular blogger who didn’t know the people, and couldn’t have read much of the site, but assumed that Mundanity was like me.
What does it feel like to be one of the founders of a sub-genre? In your opinion, how is mundane SF different today compared to a few years ago? (Is it gaining more traction these days?)
Well we’ve just had the Mundane special issue of Interzone come out. Thank you, Interzone. Some triff stories from name writers, and two from Clarion West writers who got caught up in the mundane thing. In France, GalaxiesSF wants to do something around Mundane SF, with some of the stories from the Interzone issue. Charles Stross has declared one of his novels Mundane. I like that. A writer cannot be mundane. Only a story can. A writer should never surrender his or her autonomy to any movement. Only the author of a story knows if s/he played the mundane game when they wrote it. Only the author can call that story mundane.
I’m getting more and more worried about the creative and commercial health of science fiction. In the 2004 Clarion West not much SF was being written. Lots and lots of vampires and zombies in post-genre fiction –- fiction in which the weird happens but actually is not the whole focus of the story. We didn’t get many SF stories. This year’s Clarion even more so. Another strong year of fine writers entering their mature style. We got horror and supernatural; we got stories that were almost mimetic because the fantasy elements were so subtle; we got dark-future action stories. But in my two weeks we had say five SF stories. One was a very interesting story about how science can be financed in an energy conscious world. It’s harder for writers to believe in exciting futures. Good speculation has got harder and harder to do. You almost need the equations to work through what will happen in your world. Someone once said that you could write SF with the scientific knowledge of a smart twelve year old. I’m not sure that’s true any longer.
In the meantime so many of the things that used to be SF are mainstream, turning up in the work of mainstream writers: genetics, nanotech, cloning, IT, VR. Something has happened to both our reading and writing habits. Go the SF shelves in Barnes and Noble and you will find mostly fantasy or horror. No bad thing, nothing against either, in fact I intend to write horror and fantasy, but SF does something different that’s very valuable. In Britain, there has not been an SF (as opposed to fantasy) novel in the 100 fast sellers for the year in as long as I can remember.
Finally, our relationship to the future has been disrupted. The future is not a place we want to live in. We’ve got a bad few years ahead of us, and at the end of it our lives may involve less travel, less energy use, fewer toys, more work. Maybe we just can’t face, as Elisabeth Vonarburg once said, ‘writing over that pile of corpses.’ Maybe we just no longer believe the SF dream. I sometimes think steampunk may be anticipating our future—in a retro kind of way.
For you as a writer, which is more challenging: writing a mundane SF story or writing one that’s not?
Overwhelmingly, beyond what you’d first think, writing mundane SF is harder. To do it in good faith, you have multiple changes in your world, and they interact. You ideally have a good fresh idea in there growing out of real science. You always think if you’ve declared a story mundane, that people will be picking over the science so you check everything. My last mundane story, a novelette called Days of Wonder is due in F&SF soon. Its magic wand is inherited, coherent memory sticks in people’s heads. They’re born knowing about electricity. I couldn’t say how it was done. All I could do was say, OK, but it’s a relatively NEW magic wand that isn’t on the list of tropes to avoid.
In your opinion, why do you think some people oppose the concept of mundane SF?
Because it denies aspects of the SF dream such as immortality among the stars. Mundanity is about self-discipline; we’re not about stopping anybody writing anything, but that’s how it lands for some people. People charge us with not liking HG Wells or M John Harrison’s Light
Any particular reason as to the (Fantasy) appendage to “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”?
Yeah. Saloth Sith is a real person. She’s (I’m told) nice, sophisticated, and not an emblem for Cambodian youth, as she was in my story. So the Fantasy was there to keep reminding the readers that it wasn’t true, that this is not the real Saloth Sith. The one thing that was carried over from reality is the difficulty of being the child of such a figure of hatred. I think people are smart and forgive the children, particularly if the inheritors show remorse. I’m reminded of the forgiveness accorded to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. One blogger got upset and asked what Simon Wiesenthal would have made of Hilter’s daughter. Personally I think he’d probably wait to see who Hitler’s daughter was and what she said. All it takes to blame children for their parents’ misdeeds is a lack of imagination.
What was the inspiration for the novelette?
Visiting Soriya market on the day after high school exams and picking up on the incredible desire for modernity, luxury, freedom from the past and a space of their own that is part of being young in Cambodia.
Your short story “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)” and your novel are influenced by events in Cambodia.
They’re not influenced by them, they are about them. My first Cambodia-ish novelette, now that WAS only influenced by Cambodia… Unconquered Country
Pol Pot’s Daughter came about because of all the stuff I’d done for The King’s Last Song
Cambodia for me has had to stand in for all the small countries of the world that we bomb, manipulate, exploit, forget, don’t translate, or assume will be assimilated into us. I can’t cover all of them or know more than one of them to any extent, but that one country I can get to know. I’ve got one more longish story coming out about Cambodia called Blocked also mundane, also from F&SF, and we’ll see if there’s more there. The country is peaceful, getting more prosperous, perhaps we’ll get more of their own stories in translation. Anyway, I’ve been advised by one intelligent, hard-headed, practical publisher to stop writing about Asia and write about Americans. And I’m sure that’s very good advice.
Could you talk more about cultural diversity (or lack of it) in fiction?
People always like to hear about themselves and be told their culture is special. America and the West are no different from anybody else in that regard. We all want to see ourselves in the future. There have been Indian SF novels for ages; there’s a tradition of Brazilian SF, and the Turks made their own version of Star Trek with different actors. I suppose they boldly go promulgating the Turkish hegemony through space and meeting aliens who speak Turkish. The trouble with cultural diversity in a lot of SF, is that it ends up with 1940s bomber crew of isolated examples of different peoples, all cut off from their own culture. One black person there; one Arab there, over there an Asian with little cultural difference between them. That’s diversity at the EXPENSE of culture.
A much preferable solution would be if we had translations of literature from those countries. Maybe the literary equivalent of the BBC news site, fiction from all the regions and countries, covered in a system that sets in context, tracks publications, archives fiction, encourages discussion – and hopefully gets some money to the writers. Maybe in the near future we will. In the future, Westerners maybe will have read Tum Teav, the great Cambodian verse novel. Right now most of us don’t read the English-language Cambodian memoirs of the Pol Pot era.
Can you tell us more about your upcoming anthology?
Yeah thanks. I’m editing an anthology for a British publisher due out next year. The mundane gets rid of stuff you want to avoid. This anthology turns that around. You want good science in fiction? OK, you commission fiction writers and marry them up with a scientist of their choosing. We’ve commissioned the 14 writers and they’ve almost all been introduced to their scientist to work with. There have been some predictable problems in getting the scientists and writers to understand each other. We lost our biggest name author to a scientist who just didn’t respond to questions. The anthology is called When it Changed (yes in honor of the Joanna Russ story) and the scientists all come from the University of Manchester and its research institutes like Jodrell Bank. Stories are due this November… We’re hoping it will be out spring next year.
Any other projects you’re working on?
Yes. A cookbook in honour of Tom Disch. My own short story for the anthology. A new course in SF that I start teaching this fall at UC San Diego, I’m very excited about that. While I’m at UCSD, I’ll be a small part of the Speculative Communities initiative at the UCSD Calit Centre that’s the brainchild of Sheldon Brown. There will be a gathering with people like Bruce Sterling, David Brin and others on the heuristics of speculation and the building of speculative communities. That will just be great. Anyway thanks for the opportunity to talk… over and out.
Geoff Ryman is a Canadian citizen living in the UK. He divides his time between writing and teaching at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester. His colleagues include Martin Amis and Patricia Duncker. His books and stories have won 14 awards. He first came to attention with the publication in 1985 of the novelette The Unconquered Country
The gender bending sword and sorcery novel The Warrior Who Carried Life
In 1991, the mainstream novel Was
253 started life in 1996 as a hypertext novel online followed by a print version in 1998. It won the Philip K Dick Memorial Award. Air in 2004 won the Arthur C Clarke Award, the James Tiptree Jr Award, the Sunburst Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel. This year sees the US publication of The King’s Last Song
His ambition when he grows up is to be Iain Banks or Jonathan Lethem.
CHARLES TAN is a speculative fiction fan from the Philippines. He has lots of online doppelgangers, including a Singaporean politician and a Filipino basketball player, but people should be warned that the “real” Charles Tan is a bibliophile who stalks his favorite authors. His blog, Bibliophile Stalker is updated with daily content including book reviews, interviews, and essays. He is also a contributor for SFF Audio.
6 comments so far.
The claim that “FTL, time travel, telepathy are all against the laws of nature as we understand them” is just plain flat-out wrong. It’s not slightly wrong… It’s not mildly incorrect… That statement systematically contradict the entire edifice of modern general relativity and the available knowledge of human cognitive neuroscience.
Frank Tipler’s 1974 paper “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation”. Physical Review D 9: 2203–2206, explains clearly and specifically how to create a structure along the axis of which a geodesic forms which provides a closed timelike loop. The axis of a Tipler cylinder gives access to any point in space-time after the construction of the cylinder. If you posit a very old race that constructed a Tipler cylinder (or cylinders) time travel to any arbitrary point in the past becomes not just possible, but necessary according to the Einstein field equation of general relativity.
Let’s be clear here: this is not just a “theoretical possibility.” The solution along the axis of a Tipler cylinder is mandated by Einstein’s general relativity tensors. this is not “optional.” It’s not a “special case.” It’s how the equations work.
So both FTl travel and time travel are well known to be among the thoroughly established solutions of the Einstein field equations for general relativity. What’s more, these well-known and exhaustively vetted mathematical solutions to the GR tensors have been known for many many years. This is not some exotic piece of news that broke just yesterday. Anyone who has studied general relatively even slightly is well aware of the large number of causality-violating solutions to the GR field equations.
To save time and effort, the usual rejoinder to this citation of the scientific literature involving the GR field equations involves the claim that “we don’t yet have a fully consistent physical theory of the universe.” This is entirely true. When we try to marry quantum theory with GR, the equations blow up, and the boondoggle called “string theory” (or M-theory, if you prefer, depending on your level of faith in Ed Witten and company) has not helped matters.
However, this objection, valid as it remains, fails to deal with the documented fact that both quantum field theory and general relativity remain accurate to the utmost degree to which we can test them. The Standard Model, which summarizes our knowledge of quantum theory, is not only accurate, but the more closely we subject it to minute and detailed testing, the more accurate we find its results. With the trivial exception of solar neutrinos (which requires only a minor adjustment in an ancillary part of the Standard Model, affecting nothing else) and dark energy (a big question mark still), we are at present unable to perform any high energy physics experiments which give results not accurately predicted by the Standard Model. It is simply astonishingly accurate, and, so far, astoundingly complete.
As far as general relativity goes, the more exhaustively we test it, the more accurate we find its predictions.
Clearly we do not at present have an overarching theory which combines both quantum effects and GR. Consequently, we do not have a complete picture of the physical universe in mathematical form. However, this should not obscure the fact that the available mathematical theories we do have, to wit, quantum theory and GR, provide an astounding comprehensive and extraordinarily accurate picture of the universe. And one of those theories, general relatively, mandates time travel and FTL as possible solutions to the field equations. If you don’t like that fact you can avoid mentioning it, or you can ignore it, but it remains a fact. Time travel and FTL are built into general relativity. That’s the reality behind the science.
This may suggest that general relativity offers an incomplete picture of the physical universe, and that a better theory will eliminate closed timelike loops and causality violation and FTL from the possible physically meaningful solutions of the Einstein field equations. In fact, I suspect that this may be case. Until someone provides hard evidence in the form of a testable mathematical theory published in a peer-reviewed physics journal, however, that’s just an idle speculation. We do know that the Einstein tensors offer a completely classical geometric model of the universe, which clashes violently with the mathematical model offered by quantum theory, which is probabilistic and based on collapsing wave functions and expectation values. The Einstein tensors depict a space-time which is non-discrete and discontinuous only at pathological topologies like the singularity in a black hole, requires no observer, has no collapsing wave functions, and does not involve probabilities. Quantum theory offers a picture of the universe which is fundamentally discontinuous and in which we can only estimate expectation values as a result of observer collapsing wave functions. The two pictures of the universe are simply not compatible.
So we know that the picture of the universe we get through physics is not complete. We have two radically different mathematical and conceptual models, quantum theory and GR. But this does not change the fact that if we want to stick with the science as we understand it today, we must accept the reality of physically meaningful solutions to the Einstein field equations which permit time travel and FTL. That’s just the fact. If you want to try to argue with that reality, you must first come up with a better theory of gravity than GR, and get it published. I’ll wait while you collect your Nobel Prize.
I’ve not even broached the subject of quantum entanglement. That permits the transmission of information via FTL in ways that are well known for many years. Since information and mass-energy are related by the well-known equation involving Rydberg’s Constant (look it up if you want to know, it’s trivial and universally known), any physics which allows us to transmit information faster than light also by implication necessarily lets us transmit mass-energy faster than the speed of light. Quod erat demonstrandum.
So both quantum theory and general relativity permit FLT, which GR explicitly permits time travel. Or, to be more technical, travel along a geodesic which forms a closed timelike loop.
As for telepathy, a brain implant that allowed instant communication with other people who have a similar brain implant is not far-fetched, given current knowledge of cognitive neuroscience. Such technology represents a step beyond chips currently implanted in blind people to let ‘em see, or cochlear implants that let deaf folks hear, or implants in monkeys’ brains that let ‘em control remote-control arms, but it’s not that far beyond these kinds of techniques. The exact nature of the communication permitted by such a brain implant remains a matter of conjecture. Is there a universal human neutral code? Probably not. Can a sufficiently sophisticated implant decode individual human neutral codes and transmit them on the fly in a mathematical pidgin which enabled other people to see what you see, hear what you hear, taste what you taste? That’s still a matter of conjecture. However, at present, we can say with certainty that there is no known law of nature which makes it impossible. It appears to be a matter of computing power and neurophysiological knowledge.
Let me say, by the way, that I’m strongly in accord with the general trend toward “mundane” science fiction. My criticisms of the claims made above in no way imply any negative stance toward mundanity in science fiction.
AI, aside from giving every appearance of being a classic degenerating research program like alchemy or phlogiston that’s doomed to futile failure because of a fundamentally faulty paradigm, tends to poison anys cience fiction story in which it appears. A superhuman AI acts like a wrecking ball toward all plots and characters, since it by definition works as a deus ex machina. All stories involving superhuman AIs inevitability degenerate into “Appointment in Samara"-style triviality because, after all, the superhuman AI foresaw everything all along, and whatever happens was just part of its diabolically clever plan. Not good for suspense or character development or plot twists.
However, if people want to make sweeping statements about the putative scientific viability of FTL or time travel of technologically assisted telepathy, they really ought to know their science. Otherwise they’re just going to get cut off at the knees by someone who does, because this stuff is entirely within the realm of scientific feasibility, going by the science as we know it, today, in late 2008.
The problem with exotic solutions to classical general relativity like the Tipler cylinder (time travel) and the Alcubierre warp drive (FTL) is that they all require regions of negative energy density, and classically there’s no such thing. So perhaps I should have said they contradict “the laws of nature and the nature of matter as we know them”. There is a debate about whether quantum fluctuations can make a difference (as positivity of energy density only holds on average there), but I think the theoretical evidence is against it.
There is a theorem, Eberhard’s theorem, which rules out the transmission of information by entanglement alone. The correlations cannot be controlled, they only show up after the fact, when you compare the distant events via a classical, slower-than-light communication. There *is* something called superdense coding, in which quantum information can be used to *augment* the information capacity of a classical channel (basically, you do something to the distant part of an entangled pair on the basis of measurements made on the near part), and this is the basis of quantum teleportation. However, such “teleportation” only involves the transfer or alteration of physical state, and in particular it definitely does not involve transfer of *energy* at a distance.
It’s rather a stretch to dub communication via neural prosthesis as “telepathy”. I took the word to mean a natural faculty of transfer of thoughts which bypasses the known senses and the external physical world in general.
Science-fiction is obviously, inevitably bound to go further into the “mundane,” because science and technology are inextricable from everything we do anymore; inextricable from any story, to the point where plotting how any two characters interact on anything in any circumstance is subject to communication technology and scientific test without being totally drained of their humanity. Every human ambivalance is subject to some kind of Darwinistic understanding, if not the second law of thermodynamics, without ever having to get clinical about it. “Sally texted Ted to break up with him because somehow a few wayward memes collided.”
On that basis, even the most radical technological change is actually also moot.
I never would have entertained the science-fiction genre at all, if I hadn’t noticed William Gibson, and Kurt Vonnegut before him, kicking a mundane can. My contexts for enjoying all classic science-fiction are mundane, because the science is stained while the emotions linger.
But the science-fiction-further-into-the-mundane I really want to see has to do with the social reality for writers themselves. Given the ramping ubiquetousness of communication technology, why can’t there be a full life for fiction writers (among other creative-types) that isn’t market-driven? I think there’s an alternative to the stress inherent in the vagueries of recognition/obscurity that having to make a product induces. It would be to recognize that the core of experiencing creativity is the pleasure of being “lost” in the moment and sharing it.
Better that everybody could be happy on their day-job, rather than having most writers moodily window-shopping the literary salons, yet conveniently carrying e-book readers tucked under their arms.
If the big tropes in science-fiction are all ultimately futurismic, an art-world/lit-world market-driven social pyramid of writers is, like, so yesterday — along with much of the literature under that lens.
Mitchell Porter remarked:
The problem with exotic solutions to classical general relativity like the Tipler cylinder (time travel) and the Alcubierre warp drive (FTL) is that they all require regions of negative energy density, and classically there’s no such thing.
It’s not obvious that’s correct. ("During inflation, while the energy of matter increases by a factor of 10 exp 75 or more, the energy of the gravitational field becomes more and more negative to compensate” See this page by Guth at caltech.edu.
In any case, even if we grant your claim that purely classical solutions of the Einstein tensors cannot lead to negative energy states (which as mentioned above I believe to be incorrect c.f. the Guth reference), that still illustrates the essential problem. Classically there’s no such thing as negative energy states, but P.A.M. Dirac theorized negative energy states in the 1920s and in the 1930s positrons were experimentally discovered, confirming the existence of negative energy states.
Alan Guth’s inflation hypothesis depends on negative energy states and COBE has confirmed cosmic inflation. Dark energy also appears to be accelerating the expansion of the universe and may have some connection to negative energy states. Nobody is yet sure what dark energy is or how it works.
None of these phenomena are predicted by the classical GR theory, unless you judge the fudge factor “cosmological constant” Einstein inserted into his equations as an explanation. (Most of us remain unimpressed by fudge factors, especially since this one was inserted to create a steady-state universe prior to Hubble’s discovery of the red shift.)
This reinforces my original point. We don’t yet have an adequate mathematical picture of the universe. Such a mathematical framework would combine GR and QM. At present, GR prohibits some things that QM predicts and vice versa. Clearly some negative energy states, viz., positrons, exist which are not predicted or explained by classical theories like GR.
Without a fully adequate mathematical picture of the universe, we can’t rule out FTL travel or communication.
On studying Eberhard’s paper (abstract [url="http://www.springerlink.com/content/g7w8441j75831k4x/
“ ]here[/url]) and papers like [url="http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0008036
“ ]this one[/url], I now agree that QM prohibits FTL travel or information transmission. Thanks for pointing out my error. It slightly lessens my enjoyment of stories by Stephen Baxter ("More Than Time Or Distance") and Charles Stross (Singularity Sky)which now appear to have been debunked, but that’s life.
The mundane manifesto deals more with the overall tone of science fiction than with its putative factual accuracy. Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles remains valid even though we know you can’t breathe the Martian atmosphere. As a general call for a move away from high fantasy in science fiction drag, with Arthurian sword & sorcery playing out in orbital habitats instead of castles and ray guns instead of magic wands, the mundane manifesto makes a valuable point. Personally, I’ve had about all the H. Beam Piper and Star Wars spinoffs I can take. Time to give that stuff a rest.
That said, I must admit that the science fiction I’ve enjoyed most in recent years, Karl Schoeder’s Ventus, essentially combines high fantasy and science fiction. So as with all manifestos, we must take the mundane manifesto with a pinch of salt.
Actually, the discovery of positrons marked the end of the negative-energy interpretation of the mysterious new states in the Dirac equation. See Dirac sea. Instead, they were interpreted as positive-energy states of a new, complementary particle, the antiparticle. When you combine an electron and positron, you don’t get nothingness, as you might expect if they carried positive and negative energy respectively; instead you get high-energy photons, with a total energy you’d expect if you treated the positron’s energy as positive. Antimatter carries positive energy; the idea that it carries negative energy was just one of those confused transitional views.
My understanding of inflation is deficient, but I note that the energy of the phi field itself is always nonnegative (see figure 1). The “negative energy” is in the gravitational field, and how to quantify the purely gravitational component of energy is a debated topic even in classical general relativity; at least, if there is some expert consensus on how to think about it, I haven’t come across it. It is a commonplace of high-school physics that it’s only change in potential energy that matters, and there, gravitational energy is always potential energy, energy latent in a configuration; e.g. the potential gain in the kinetic energy of a mass suspended in a gravitational well, if it is allowed to fall. So it’s unclear (from the textual evidence) whether even the gravitational energy, in the inflationary scenario, ever becomes negative in an absolute sense, or whether it’s merely negative with respect to a certain convention. I will look into it.
1. mitchell porter on 06th November 2008 at 3:31 am
One of these things is not like the others:
“• No FTL, no wormholes, warps etc as magic wands around that
• No Very Fast travel without time dilation
• No time travel
• No parallel universes based on quantum uncertainty
• No telepathy
• No aliens.
More discussion resulted in outright artificial intelligence being excluded.”
Yes, a specter is still haunting 21st-century science fiction, the specter of the Singularity. FTL, time travel, telepathy are all against the laws of nature as we know them. Quantum many worlds are just one of several quantum metaphysics. The nearest aliens may be very far away. But… “outright artificial intelligence being excluded”? Why not exclude germline genetic engineering as well? Or, I don’t know, human beings ever getting beyond the orbit of the moon?
Just because people write badly about AI doesn’t mean it’s an inappropriate topic for realist science fiction. If the “star-spangled robot hooplah”, as Bruce Sterling dubs it, is distracting people from understanding the present, that’s just another contingent fact about present culture, not a confirmation that AI is entirely and for all time a phantasm comparable to those other excluded items. We know natural intelligence exists and is possible; you’re using it right now. To bet against artificial intelligence is to bet that natural intelligence will never be understood, and that’s a losing bet.
To put it another way: Stanislaw Lem wrote, quite correctly, that there is a type of science fiction which is just a contemporary fairy tale. Its standard tropes have been determined by their agreeableness rather than by their relationship to reality. Space opera is the most common example, with its FTL travel and anthropomorphic aliens, and one can see a big chunk of the Mundane checklist of things to avoid as an allergic reaction to this formulaic unrealism. Matrix mysticism is another, newer, but still recognizably common formula.
But Mundane SF risks erring in the other direction, by ruling out things which are quite possible but just aren’t here yet. By all means let’s have people engaging with the novel, unanticipated specificities of the present. But let’s also not turn our backs on that which is foreseeably real, just because it brings out an irrational ecstasy in some people. That’s a situation which calls for engagement and redoubled intellectual effort, not a retreat into comfortable naturalism.