Gadaffi

"Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi meanwhile blamed the uprising on al-Qaeda.

Speaking on state television, he repeated claims that hallucinogenic drugs had been given to young people to incite them to revolt." BBC News

Well at least you're going out with your dignity intact, eh Gaddafi?

Egypt's MUSLIM Brotherhood

I'm loving the news coverage of the situation in Egypt that recently ended with Mubarak's departure after thirty years in power. It seems as though the news services don't know which of two ways to play it.

On the one hand democratic power is alive and well. Army backed dictator is kicked out by pure, unadulterated people power. Wahey democracy!

But then what is this? One of the largest parties fighting for democracy is openly Islamic? Fuck! Doesn't that mean sharia law and planes flying into buildings? Better include a concluding paragraph hoping that those nutty zealots don't get into power.

Now one might think that the news services might be dissuaded from taking this stance by the fact that nobody has actually provided any evidence that the Islamists (whatever that coinage means nowadays) are threatening to seize power or impose anything that the Egyptian people don't want.

Irrelevant. The readership need to know about this deadly threat to stability in the Middle East. We'll settle for pro-democracy sentiments just as long as the Egyptians pick a government we approve of.

Conversations about the End of Time

Finished reading this book on the Millenium and the thoughts of Stephen Gould, Umberto Eco, Jean Delumeau and Jan-Claude Carriere on time and modernity today. (You can probably guess which two of these intellectuals I'd heard of before reading the book.)

Entertaining stuff with some imagery and thoughts that will stick with me. I especially liked Delumeau's apocalypse and millenarianism scholarship as I've never been sure what millenarianism actually meant yet it seems to come up a lot in Medieval and Chinese history. Also entertaining to detect the faint sense of unease about the Millenium bug, one of the biggest mass worry bloopers of, well, this millenium or the last one depending how you want to look at it.

However, the sense of despondence about modernity irritated me as usual. Is it mandatory to feel that the Internet is the beginning of the end for society if one is over 30 years old? Umberto Eco spent a long time talking about how it removes the ability of society to selectively forget, something he sees as key to collective memory. To paraphrase, having 14 million webpages is the same as having none since there is no filter through which this mass of information can be measured. However, modern society provides this filter just as previous societies did when one chose whether to read Jane Austen or Proust. Our education, parents, friendship groups and even traditions can direct us towards certain google searches and url entries. Nobody seriously sits down at the computer and tries to decide which of the 14 million websites they want to go on today.

Another crack in my rose-tinted view of Umberto Eco can hopefully be attributed to poor translation. In the same sentence he praises the 20th centuries increased sensitivity and tolerance of different races and uses 'Bongo-Bongoland' as a fictitious example of a third world UN country. Ugh, talk about missing the point. That wasn't socially acceptable in 1999 was it?

Ubik and Alternative History

Just finished reading Ubik which was even better than expected. Definitely one of Philip K Dick's best and I reckon they should get the 'Scanner Darkly' production team and the guys who made 'Inception' to collaborate on a film version.

It also got me thinking about the difference between alternate history and science fiction. Alternate history is obviously a branch of sci fi but people usually distinguish between it and speculative science fiction that imagines a plausible or possible future scenario.

This distinction would usually be fine but in the case of many works originally conceived as future science fiction the imagined future date has been reached and passed - 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1984 and Ubik (which was set in 1992).

So does the classification depend on the perspective of the reader or that of the writer? The perspective of Philip K Dick sets Ubik in the fairly distant future but from our perspective it could be seen as an alternative timeline where space travel and cryogenics advanced faster than in our real history.

It may seem an arbitrary and pedantic issue but I know that I have different expectations when reading alternate histories and speculative science fiction. Iain Bank's Culture is envisaged in the far future (or possibly in a different galaxy depending which books you read) so I don't really try to compare it on an equal footing with the democracies of today. On the other hand 1984 seems to openly invite the reader to compare it with the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century and the directions in which technology allows politics to develop. Maybe it would just be more sensible for writers to refrain from putting what seems like a 'futuristic' date on the front of their new novel since chances are we'll get there eventually and people may still be reading their books.

Entropy and Anthropocentrism

Short one today as I'm still in a bit of a manic state after my trip home for New Years. I'm reading 'The Science of Discworld' which is good fun (although the Discworld bits are more engaging than than the pop science).

This got me thinking - isn't it amazing that evolution has put together an organism so self centred and far sighted that it finds itself sharing a galaxy with naturally occurring fusion generators hundreds of kilometers across and yet still starts worrying about the fact that in an inconceivable amount of time the galaxy will be too cold for humans.

Diary of a Space Age Bureaucrat Pt 1

Captain Oliver of the space fighter Dragon was wishing he'd never left Earth. The loot had been good so far on his interstellar journey but now the pursuing Wraiths had caught up with him and their unworldly technology left him with no chance of escape. A spider craft scraped perilously close to his ship and bombarded the Dragon with another hail of burning, red bolts. A stray shot ricochetted into the Mnemonic sequencer, which had been ineffectually coordinating return fire, and it hissed and crackled before going offline. As the reboot system tried in vain to resurrect it, snatches of his log were played out in a crackling voice that echoed through his disintegrating ship. He tried to zone it out as he struggled into a primitive space suit and made for the escape pod at the rear of the ship.

Year 1 - Reached our first planet today and it looked pleasant and unthreatening. Acadia orbits the hot, orange sun of Merz. I shuttled down to the lushly vegetated planet and was received by a small group of three headed humanoids who called themselves the Threep. In exchange for some unimportant trade goods I'd stashed for just such an occasion one agreed to return to Earth with me as an indentured servant. Made him up a bedding space in the hull.

Year 2 - Cautiously approached a cold, blue sun named Viveka. One minute my scanners were empty but the next there was a crackle of electricity that registered as brief blips on all my sensors and a large ship blurred into the visible universe. I recognised it instantly as a Wraith phantom, notoriously hostile and unpredictable. It opened up with its weapons and ship alarms sounded angrily, reporting I had lost all connections to the chain gun mounted on the front of my fighter. Luckily I managed to outrun the interloper but as I outpaced it I saw tiny and fast Wraith spider craft deploy from its dock tubes to take up the chase. I resolved to lie low from here on.

Year 3 - Shaken by this experience I took refuge on the forest world of Bask. My spirits rose as I discovered some alien ruins that looked as if they had not yet been explored. After returning to my ship for a miniature digger I tunnelled into the nearest submerged chamber and recovered an exotic looking engine that seems to run on Nebular gases. I also removed a Mnemonic sequencer weapons computer that should come in useful. I'm uploading my logs to it now.

That was the last planet Oliver was ever likely to see. Four Wraith spiders had descended on him near the binary suns of Helios and Selene. While they were only weakly armed he lacked the armament to destroy all four ships before they could use their advanced circuitry to regenerate from solar energy. He had desperately turned his ship to flee but the deadly Wraith craft were too swift. Now his only hope lay in the camouflaged emergency pod, to which the servant Threep had already fled in fear, and the tender mercies of the next travellers to enter this isolated patch of space.

(This is a game report taking a certain level of artistic license from the free game 'Strange Adventures in Infinite Space', to which I have added the mod 'Even Stranger Adventures in Infinite Space'. Great game if you like space combat and complexity and don't mind basic graphics. Embarrassingly I was on the easiest settings for this mission. In my defence the mod enemies are tougher than those in the original and I was very unlucky to meet the Wraiths twice before I'd had time to upgrade my ship.)

My take on the Wiki Leaks controversy

I've been poring my grubby little fingers over the Wiki leaks cables just like all the other misanthropes on the Internet. I must admit I'm not too fussed about the political implications that are getting the correspondents with the Times letters page hot under the collar. The gentlemen states have been reading each other's mail since at least the Second World War and I doubt that global civilization is going to collapse because a 14 year old from Nigeria can read what the diplomats of the world's most powerful (or at least aggressively obnoxious) nation have to say.

The real gems are the snarky little wise cracks and in jokes of these officials. Most of the political content is dull and familiar. The US distrusts Russia? Israel thinks Hamas is a threat? Khazakstani anti-corruption drive was politically motivated and targeted those out of favour with the government? No shit.

What I enjoy is finding out that American diplomats are just as obsessed with gangster movies as the rest of the nation. It made my week to read a cable deciding whether President Aliyev of Azerbaijan is a Michael or a Sonny Corleone. I had not known until that moment that there was an academic paper (which sadly I can't find anywhere on the web) distinguishing these two fictional characters as paradigms of different types of political leadership.

Similarly it gives me a strangely voyeuristic thrill to read a blow by blow account of the visit to a night club of some central Asian (post-communist) apparatchiks. In what world could the information that there were 50 people on the dance floor that night or that the officials brought their middle aged wives with them be of political significance?

If the agents of the usually deathly serious government of the United States have the same eccentricities and peccadillos as the rest of us it gives me a little more hope for the future of mankind. How can you fear a state that collects information in such a gimmicky and human way. Especially one that can be made to blush in such a public manner by the creepy Assange and his mildly sociopathic, hacker friends.

Ps - If you want a more measured and complex analysis you should read this article by Bruce Sterling. He's a bit too cyberpunk to be surprised by what has happened and takes a very jaded view but also makes some interesting points. http://www.webstock.org.nz/blog/2010/the-blast-shack/