Arcfinity

We're visiting Frank Gehry's BIOMUSEO in Panama

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:00:00 +0100

Earlier this month, Panama’s highly-anticipated Biomuseo project completed Phase One. Jeff Campagna goes on a hard-hat tour of the construction site.

For isolationists and zombie-apocalypse fanboys, the future of architecture may mean buildings will resemble designer-fortresses, like The Safe House by Polish Architectural firm KWK Promes. Impenetrable blocks of concrete plug up the windows, steel shutters come slamming down over the glass front door and a drawbridge entrance is hoisted up — and all this with the push of a single button.

To conservationists and green-libertarians, structures yet to come may take engineering cues from nature, like the Green School complex in Bali, Indonesia. Bamboo chalkboards, compost toilets, cotton tents deployed to keep classrooms cool and water-vortexes that produce 8,000 watts of electricity, day and night, help to keep the complex off the grid.

Now, thanks to Canadian-born architect Frank Gehry, there is a new way of looking at the future of building design. Durable, industrial-strength engineering without the apocalyptic nuances of a concrete stronghold. Low-footprint construction that’s considerate of the surrounding eco-system without asking visitors to politely turn their shit into plant food. Originally sketched out by Gehry as a schoolhouse scribble in 2002, Panama’s new biodiversity museum is on track to becoming one of Latin America’s most sophisticated structures.

Photo: Kara Patrick

Fifteen million years ago, chains of volcanoes dotted the Central American Seaway where the Pacific and Atlantic waters mingled. About twelve million years later, the isthmus of Panama rose from the deep. The flow of water between the two oceans was severed by the new land bridge, creating the Gulf Stream. The Atlantic grew saltier. And ancestors of racoons, dogs, horses, llamas, porcupines and cats used the new link as a means of migration from one continent to the other.

Some scientists claim this tectonic event was one of the most important geologic happenings in the last 60 million years. Gehry agrees. The Pritzker Prize-winning architect made this transformation the cornerstone of his hundred-million dollar design.

Photo: Aaron Sosa

Passing over the Bridge of the Americas into Panama City, it’s impossible to miss Gehry’s jagged technicolor beast lazing on the banks of the Amador Causeway, at the mouth of the canal: a crumpled-up candy wrapper tossed away by gods.

Shallow pools of rainwater against the sides of the structure’s exposed concrete foundations give the casual bystander the impression that the building is emerging from the water right before their eyes.

In fact, the entire structure, from peak to footing, reflects the culture, the history, the geology and the biodiversity of its home country.

The steel roof panels that jut out harshly in every direction represent the angular formations of a rocky landmass as it ascends from the sea. The kaleidoscopic facades underscore the country’s tropical biodiversity. The two elements, steel and colour, come together to reflect the thousands of painted shipping containers that pass by the museum daily on the backs of ocean liners passing through the canal.

The roof is as sophisticated as it is symbolic. The many tangled panels work together to divert harsh tropical winds and, much like leaves in a dense jungle canopy, to transport rainwater to rocky filtration beds, to be stored for septic use. The panels also function as instruments for climate control, reflecting the sun’s heat so effectively that the difference in temperature between the the surface of a panel and its underside can vary by as much as 100 degrees. The museum has air conditioning, but hardly uses it.

Photo: Victoria Murillo

But the most future-facing detail of the structure is not architectural at all.

Fifteen years ago, the entire causeway was part of the American Canal Zone; it was against the law for Panamanians to enter the area. One of Gehry’s original stipulations when he took on this job was for a large public outdoor space to snake around and throughout the museum grounds, completely open and free for everyone - including skateboarders and buskers.

Gehry’s Biomuseo realises a conceptual symmetry between man and nature. It will be open to the public sometime in 2014 and completely finished by 2015. A beautiful equilibrium is forming: futurism without the doom and gloom, environmentalism without the nuts and berries.

We're talking to Tim Armstrong, author of AIR CUAN DUBH DRILSEACH

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:00:45 +0100

Debut science fiction novels are not uncommon, but there’s one thing that immediately sets Seattle-born Tim Armstrong’s On a Glittering Black Sea apart from all other science fiction published this year in the UK. It’s not necessarily the worlds his characters inhabit — an advanced autocratic and hyper-capitalist civilisation, linking several planets and space stations. Nor is it the feel of the novel, which Tim suggests “shifts between whimsy and menace, with elements of space-opera adventure, dark cyberpunk, romance, and rock-band road trip all mixed together.” No, it’s much simpler than that: it’s that the title on the cover reads Air Cuan Dubh Drilseach, and you won’t be able to read the novel unless you have a pretty good understanding of Scottish Gaelic. Paul Cockburn spoke to Tim before his book launch at the recent Aye Write! Book Festival in Glasgow.

Air Cuan Dubh Drilseach
Tim Armstrong
Clàr, PPB £9.99

Paul F Cockburn: The obvious question is, why write a science fiction novel in Gaelic?

Tim Armstrong: About ten years ago, I was in a Gaelic punk rock band. I didn’t go into that thinking: “Oh, I’m going to make a punk rock band in Gaelic.” I’d been listening and playing punk since I was a kid, I was learning Gaelic… it just seemed natural. With the novel, it’s kind of the same equation. Living and working on Skye I speak and use Gaelic every day, and I’ve written a lot of non-fiction in Gaelic. First and foremost I just wanted to write a science fiction novel, but it seemed right to do so in Gaelic.

What’s your interest in the genre?

I had problems with reading when I was younger, so I came to reading late. I was about twelve; in one year, I went from pre-kindergarten to Advanced High School level. They threw me in the advance reading class, and they were reading Frank Herbert’s Dune; that was the first adult book I ever read. I’ve been a science fiction reader ever since. Just now, my favourite author is Iain M Banks. I love the anarcho-socialist paradise he created in his Culture novels — it makes me so happy and hopeful to read about the Culture and its silly/wise ships, though actually my favourite novel by Banks is The Algebraist, which doesn’t feature the Culture at all. I am particularly interested in how technology alters the power equation in society and challenges our understanding of the human condition. That challenge is ever accelerating and, in that respect, I believe that science fiction is the most relevant genre of literature in the 21st century.

Is your novel set in a Gaelic future, or is it just a future being described in Gaelic?

One of the conceits in the novel is that everybody speaks Gaelic. I grew up with sci-fi movies in which everyone spoke with my dialect of English — they spoke West Coast urban American English, so for me it’s no less weird an idea to imagine Hans Solo at the controls of the Millennium Falcon speaking in Gaelic than in West Coast American English. That’s one of the fun things sci-fi has allowed me to do. When you write a realistic novel set in the present, you have to deal with the language question; will you write the dialogue as if everyone’s speaking Gaelic when, realistically, it would be mostly in English, and then just write the scaffolding language in Gaelic? In this novel, I was able to create world where Gaelic is the default language.

Did you face problems when it came to scientific terminology?

It wasn’t as big a challenge as I expected; because of the work being done in schools, teaching scientific subjects in Gaelic. The language is naturally acquiring a scientific vocabulary. I did a small amount of creation as well, specifically the sort of things you find in space opera. How do you say “Let’s go to Warp Speed!” in Gaelic? But it’s a judgement call. While it may seem more authentic to work from Gaelic roots, it’s actually better on occasion to borrow from the international vocabulary of science and technology, which is based on two “dead” languages, Greek and Latin. But it is tough for Gaelic speakers because we have the bad luck of our neighbour language being the giant international language of communication about science and technology. Even though you know these terms come from Greek and Latin, they feel like borrowings from English.

What would you say science fiction can bring to the Gaelic language? And, indeed, what can Gaelic offer science fiction?

I hope I’m not overstating my case, but I really believe that, in the post-modern, 21st century world, it’s very hard for a minority language to stay vital without a vital literary scene, and specifically without science fiction. In English, a lot of the most common terminology we use for science and technology often came into the language first through science fiction. It’s important to Gaelic for the same reason. I also think that, for a language that’s threatened as much as Gaelic, having a genre that’s explicitly talking about the future and taking Gaelic into that future is also really important. As for what Gaelic brings to science fiction, maybe I’ll answer that by broadening it out to what multilingualism brings to the world? I think it would be a very sad world if we were all reduced down to English language speakers. I think that it’s great that the world is multilingual. It would be great if science fiction became more multilingual; that’s got to be healthy and interesting, so I would hope that, just in general, there would be more science fiction appearing in minority languages. It’s a big ask, but it’s also a healthy thing.

We're reading THE MONSTER'S LAMENT by Robert Edric

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:00:52 +0100

What’s the difference between a magician and a crook? Liz Sourbut looks for answers in a novel of London’s underworld

The Monster’s Lament
Robert Edric
Doubleday, HB £17.99

In a London staggering towards the end of World War Two, a group of interconnected characters pursue a series of unrealistic dreams. Robert Edric’s novels often focus on the underbelly of life – gangsters, prostitutes, low-lifes of various kinds – and The Monster’s Lament is no exception. In this, the third of his ‘occult’ novels, the central character is an ageing and increasingly desperate Aleister Crowley, magician and self-proclaimed Antichrist, now ill and living in squalor, but still working towards one last shot at immortality. His magick requires knowing the exact time of a man’s death, and in condemned murderer Peter Tait, awaiting hanging in Pentonville Prison, he believes he has found exactly what he needs.

Edric has brought the streets of wartime London expertly to life. The milieu is entirely convincing and the characters are solid, vulnerable flesh and blood as they trudge around the rubble-heaps, scanning the skies for rockets and trying to figure out how to stay one step ahead, or at least not to fall too far behind in their struggle with the forces shaping their lives.

Crowley has used his influence over gangland boss Tommy Fowler to send Tait a small bible, imprinted with invisible incantations, as part of his immortality ritual. The boy himself, only 19 years old, isn’t sure if he fired the fatal bullet or not because he was knocked unconscious during the crime, but he thinks he’s innocent. He seems the least tortured person in the whole book as he sits in his cell, reading this bible, and waiting calmly for death.

As Tait sits and reads, infuriating his sympathetic gaoler with his passivity, everyone else in the book twists and turns: minor hoodlums try to free themselves from Tommy Fowler; Detective Pye tries to link Tait and the shooting with Fowler; Crowley himself clings to life as he awaits the apparently inevitable moment of Tait’s hanging. And everybody hopes they can dodge the last few bombs still falling on London as the war draws to its close. The thought of dying now, so close to the end, haunts everyone. Perhaps, amidst all this chaos, it’s reassuring for Tait to know the exact manner and moment of his death. It’s this certainty that Crowley needs for his ritual. He has pointed out how rare it is for anyone to have such knowledge; and in the course of the novel, death comes very unexpectedly to some.

Is Crowley the monster of the title? Many of the other characters could vie with him: Tommy Fowler the gangster, ruling the lives of his employees through fear and killing those who cross him; Frankie Doll, his messenger boy, who cares for no-one but himself; not to mention Hitler, hiding in a bunker somewhere in Germany and still sending over the bombers to kill civilians at random.

The occult is certainly a theme, though not perhaps the dominant one. The mystic Veronica makes her living pretending to channel messages from dead loved ones for the multitude of bereaved Londoners, while Crowley can only bore those around him with endless tales of the ritualistic debaucheries he used to enjoy in his prime. Now there’s not much he can do, although he tries his best with working girl Ruby Nolan, who wants the notoriety of having been associated with him.

It is much more a book about death. In a world where millions of innocents have been slaughtered, Peter Tait has been caught, tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang for the murder of one man. It seems to be less important that the right man has been sentenced than that justice is seen to be done. Sometimes, amidst the rubble-strewn streets of this dark and dingy London, it seems as though the devil has consumed us all. Not a book to read before bedtime.

We're reading WHO OWNS THE FUTURE? by Jaron Lanier

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:00:50 +0100

Queensberry rules be damned: Paul Graham Raven reckons it’s high time the tech pundit and critic Jaron Lanier took his gloves off.

Who Owns the Future?
Jaron Lanier
Allen Lane, HB £20.00 / Simon & Schuster, HB $28.00

So, you wanna know who owns the future? That’s an easy one: the Siren Servers own the future, at least for now.

Named for their ability to seduce us onto the rocks with false promises, rather than for any intrinsic lethality, Siren Servers have some similarities to Bruce Sterling’s “Stacks”: Big Data ecosystems that have eviscerated whole market sectors like saprophytes hollowing out a sequoia. Siren Servers include any business model that hoovers up “free” data and monetises it without sharing the profits with the data creators; any business model that radiates away all risk (e.g. through highway-length EULAs and other T&C click-wrap crapola) while it centralises and leverages as much data (and profit) as it can. These aren’t just your Gorgles and your Farceborks, but also your Craigslists and Wikipedias (being a non-profit doesn’t get you off this hook). Slso your Enrons and your HFT agencies.

The problem, you see, is rooted in the free-wheelin’, free-sharin’ culture of our increasingly information-centred economy; hoodwinked by our own misplaced network idealism, we’ve cheerfully strewn a billion billion tiny nuggets of data around the net, thinking they’re worthless – and with some justification, as we don’t yet have an information economics able to (or willing to) add the value of those intangible data-crumbs into the ledgers. But we do have businesses – the Siren Servers – capable of monetising that data, and they do, getting richer off stuff that they’re keen for us to keep thinking is worthless, promising us the opportunity to be “found” by “our audience” if we’ll just surrender the crumbtrail to their almighty indexes.

The result is the colonisation and shrinkage of market sectors (which is what that euphemistic SilVal buzzword “disruption” really means) by monopolies. Not monopolies of the strict sock-‘em-with-an-Antitrust-suit sort, but monopolies based on first-comer’s advantage – monopolies that are not just too big to beat, but increasingly too big to fail, too. (How many web services would be fucked to a fare-thee-well if they suddenly couldn’t use Facebook as a log-in authorisation proxy, for instance?) Informational monopolies, siloing away all the advantage in black holes of economic value, sucking everything into their insatiable maws and spewing out beams of planet-sterilising risk.

As far as the diagnosis goes, Lanier is measured, lucid and logical – even if he takes a rather rigid approach to the Siren Server thing that doesn’t take into account the social good that comes out of a site like, say, Wikipedia, where the contributions of work and/or data may be free, but are made in fairly thorough knowledge of where the contributor stands economically. I found Lanier’s unpacking of information economics enlightening, as he strips it of quant shibboleths and recouches it in the sort of comp-sci/engineering models and metaphors I’m more familiar with. And he links it up with recent technological history and a little bit of sociopolitics. Good work, and long overdue.

After so good a diagnosis, it’s hard not to be disappointed by the prescription, which verges on the homeopathic. Basically, if Lanier can just convince his fellow technologists of the wrongness of an early wrong-turn in the principles of networking (namely the copy function, which on a true network would be redundant, because the whole point of a network is you can all access that one original file from any machine on said network), then they’ll leap to work and get everything fixed up nicely.

What we need, says Lanier, is a “humanistic information economics”; on this point, I certainly agree. Such a set-up requires a few basic planks: duplex attributional linking (to replace the copy function; you can remix, mash up or cite what you like, but there is always a link back to the original work); a universal and frictionless micropayments system (no small order in and of itself, but long overdue; this ensures that the person whose stuff you remixed automagically gets a cut of any profits you make); and a universal single identity system that ties each person to their online activity, and hence to their payments and earnings as they create and consume data in the digital world.

It all makes a great deal of sense, even coming from a guy whose employment history makes him look deeply complicit in the status quo. Lanier is bothered enough by this to feel the need to defend himself in the text. (Lanier currently works for Microsoft, who – while perhaps not “evil” in the sense that FOSS nerds use the term – have had a hand in projects like the NYPD’s infamous and still-expanding ubiquitous surveillance system; that’s about as far from humanistic as it gets.)

That said, I’ve not read a book out of the Valley like this one in a long, long time, if ever. How many folk from the SilVal/Techcrunch/VenCap circlejerk would dare publish a book which showed support – even qualified and cautious support, as here – for unions, universal healthcare, a state-provided safety net and a sort of “cyberKeynsian” form of economic intervention? Furthermore, how many would dare waggle a politely disapproving finger at the Jobsian Cult of I, at the venal immortalists and brainfreezers of the Singularitarian Church of Kurzweil? Oh, it’s very polite – more a head-shaking “gee, you crazy guys!” than pitchforks and torches outside Castle Frankenstein – but it’s there, almost as if he knew none of them would be paying much attention.

And therein lies the problem.

The central riff of the book is “How can we shore up and revive the squeezed middle classes with humanistic information economics?” It’s also the central riff of contemporary Western politics, even if in many cases it’s a mask for the question “How little can we get away with conceding to the squeezed middle classes before they start getting angry enough to vote for someone else?” After all, everyone knows the working classes don’t read books or vote (or count; delete as appropriate). Lanier waves away the fate of the underclass in his supposedly humanistic utopia with a half-page “they’ll always be with us” schtuck which suggests that the lazy buggers will be able to get subsidised access to the fruits of the new pay-to-play information superhighway through charities and churches and so forth. He spends at least as many words (if not more) on tilting at the windmill of commandeconomysocialismOMFG!!! On both sides of the pond, this has become such a standard dogwhistle that you’d think there’d be at least one major political force actually advocating in favour of such a thing, while back in reality the soi-disant Left is so scared of getting its fingers slammed in the Overton window that it’s selling the same neoliberalism under a hasty chop-shop spray job. (Even the Red’n’Yellow Peril is rocking a Cantopop remix of capitalism these days…)

The point is, Lanier – again, possibly as a way of avoiding the social-safety-net bugbear, possibly as a genuine oversight – elides the very obvious fact that the best way to protect and shore up the squeezed middle class is to make sure that they don’t drop into street-sleeping poverty when they get downsized out of their job by a Siren Server. The safety-net of a universal welfare’n’healthcare system that looks after the very poorest is the only solid foundation on which a secure middle class can ever be built - which is why watching the middle classes baying for the blood of welfare recipients is one of the saddest ironies of our times.

The rest of the book makes it abundantly clear that, absent one of those nasty populist-socialist revolutions that no one wants to happen (myself included, to be absolutely clear), the power to change things lies in the hands of government lobbyists, technologists and the CEOs and majority shareholders of big multinational corporations… which is to say, in the hands of those already benefitting the most from the rent-seeking business models Lanier so decries.

Lanier is quite open in describing his humanistic future as utopian in character, and argues that perhaps we’re a little hard on utopian thinking; after all, is it so wrong to aspire toward a better, fairer world? He has a bit of a dig at science fiction here, too, arguing that basically everything’s been rubbish since Star Trek TOS<.em> because writers are too busy celebrating the dark mass of dystopia, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Lanier’s mistake (which, to be fair, is an error that a certain sort of science fiction writer does little to assuage, and that a lot of readers make as well) is to assume that science fiction is a blueprint for the future rather than a mirror held up to the present, but that’s an argument for another day. The point is that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with aspiring to a better, fairer future – but if you’re doing so without a realistic roadmap for getting from here to there, then it really is οὐτόπος: no place.

There is no clear route to a humanistic information economics. Meanwhile the road to dystopia becomes clearer every day. It’s certainly clearer after reading Lanier’s book, which I’m only ragging on so hard because it comes so frustratingly close to being something vital and important. It doesn’t take a science fiction writer to realise that a few more decades of business-as-usual will leave no middle class left to save. This will leave us with either a global-corporate feudalist drone-boot stamping on a human face for ever, or a bunch of messy, doomed-to-fail populist-socialist uprisings that never work and no one wants. Lanier reckons that things should have sorted themselves out by the last third of the century, once the Boomers and most of the Xers have died off, and maybe the Millennials too.

Call me a pessimist, but I don’t think we have that long.

Right now, I’m not sure we have even a decade. There are few (if any) historical precedents for powerful oligarchies going gracefully into that good night. If we’re hanging our hopes on a change of heart in SilVal boardrooms and other technologist enclaves, it won’t be ushering in the cuddly techno-hippie wootopia of Star Trek, but rather the Dickensian techno-neoliberalism of David Marusek’s Counting Heads.

Lanier has at least described an Eldorado we can start orienteering towards. So grab your compass and hiking pole; there’s some nasty big mountains ahead, and the residents aren’t keen on uninvited visitors.

We're visiting the UMK at London's Design Museum

Mon, 13 May 2013 21:29:38 +0100

Arc’s editor Simon Ings went along to London’s Design Museum to catch the opening of United Micro Kingdoms (UMK): A Design Fiction. The exhibition, conceived and curated by design studio Dunne & Raby, uses elements of industrial design, architecture, politics and science to explore the future of design. Anthony Dunne talked to us about his four fictional kingdoms, his love of science fiction, and the value of dystopic thinking.

United Micro Kingdoms runs until 26 August 2013 at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 2YD.

We’re reading STRANGE BODIES by Marcel Theroux

Thu, 02 May 2013 10:00:34 +0100

Martin McGrath goes out of his mind

Strange Bodies
Marcel Theroux
Faber, HC £14.99, ebook £12.99

Nicholas Slopen, the protagonist of Marcel Theroux’s fourth novel, Strange Bodies, is a middle-aged academic whose once-promising career specialising in the work of Samuel Johnson has stalled, his wife is cheating on him and he has difficulty connecting with his children. But these are not his biggest problems. Slopen’s real difficulty is that he is dead, horribly mangled beneath the wheels of a truck. The man who is walking around with his memories, emotions and personality is encased in the body of a Russian thug and has recently escaped from a high security psychiatric hospital.

The plot, told through Slopen’s recovered memoir, begins as he receives an invitation to review some previously unpublished letters by Samuel Johnson. Although the documents are obvious fakes, they uncannily capture the voice of the great dictionary compiler (for the non-expert this can be verified by the fact that they unerringly evoke the voice of Robbie Coltrane from Blackadder the Third). This leads Slopen to the strangely troubled Jack, the author of the letters, his keeper Vera and a conspiracy of the powerful that is determined to live forever through the application of some Soviet-era weird science.

There’s lots of interesting material in Strange Bodies. I liked Slopen, even though he, and everyone who knows him, tells us he’s a bit of a self-obsessed prig. Through the course of the novel he is instinctively drawn to do the decent thing – even when the risks are obvious – without, at any point, coming across as heroic and he develops along a subtle but satisfying arc. Theroux’s writing is neatly evocative throughout, locations, people and emotions take shape on the page with a pleasing precision. Theroux is also good at working in his background material – there is exposition, but it is interesting exposition.

Using doubles and replicas as a means of exploring what defines us as human is hardly a new idea. Doppelgangers are a staple of myth and folklore and they thread through literature and popular culture from Borges to Star Trek, where evil doubles are usually helpfully identified by a surplus of facial hair. Theroux’s take is interesting, however. He builds on the ideas of the soviet scientist and mystic Nikolai Federov – John Gray’s non-fiction study, The Immortalization Commission, is referenced throughout the novel – who genuinely believed that science could, indeed was duty-bound to, reanimate all those who had died. As befits an English graduate and novelist, Theroux invests words and language with the power to capture the core of human personality – the soul, for want of a better word. These ideas are cleverly wound through the novel, using texts and books as the key to the mysteries that face his characters.

Not everything works perfectly. Most notably, the great conspiracy at the heart of the plot is a little James Bondish and feels uncomfortable in this book – as though Theroux had tried to jam something slightly too large between the covers.

Any missteps are small, however, and do not detract from what is generally an excellent novel. Theroux’s previous work, Far North, was nominated for the Arthur C Clarke Award, amongst others, in 2009 and Strange Bodies is a significantly more successful work that deserves at least as much attention and praise. It is an impressive achievement.

The Empathy Farm

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:00:26 +0100

Last Saturday the ReConstitutional Convention - a global experiment in political system design - brought together diverse groups of social inventors all over the world to imagine and prototype original and alternative architectures for governing.

By pure coincidence, this was also the week I started researching for the 70th anniversary of the discovery of LSD.

Here’s my bit. (There are lots of others)

Around 6’20” I start channeling Timothy Leary; watch Lydia Nicholas’s face as it begins to dawn on her that this to-camera is going up on YouTube FOR EVER…

I’d like to thank Tobias Revell and Justin Pickard for inviting me along to this creative, playful, exasperating and very rewarding day.

The revolution begins here. (Maybe.)

We're reading SELF-REFERENCE ENGINE by Toh EnJoe

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:00:23 +0100

Terry Edge enters a cloud of unknowing:

Self-Reference Engine
Toh EnJoe (translated by Terry Gallagher)
Haikasoru, PPB £9.99

Nearside review:

Somewhere between thinking Self-Reference Engine is the worst book ever written and believing it’s the best, I experienced an event - possibly, an Event. I’m not a physicist, which is perhaps why everything changed for me while watching an episode of Bones in a break from reading. Now, Bones, an American crime comedy-drama, is constructed according to pre-Quantum storytelling theory. The plot is always the same; only the characters’ sub-plotted lives change (but not very much). Anyway, suddenly, I couldn’t follow the plot of Bones. I genuinely didn’t know what was going to happen next, even though what did eventually happen next is what always happens next. Self-Reference Engine did this to me, I have no doubt.

Which got me thinking about how conventional story-telling turns us all into followers. Jeffrey Archer knows this only too well, of course, which is why his concretely plotted books brainwash us into following him all the way to his bank account.

So I decided that “worst” or “best” are irrelevant terms for Self-Reference Engine. It affects your mind, is what it does. And let’s face it, very few novels do that.

Farside review:

“What’s Self-Reference Engine about?” is probably also an irrelevant question. It features “giant corpora of knowledge” triggering (I think) an Event. At one point, their knowledge of everything is challenged and they decide to “fight back with comedy”. I thought that perhaps at last we were going to have some real emotion to deal with. Because one thing Self-Reference Engine does not do is emotion, pretty much of any kind. And of all the emotions, humour is probably the most difficult for an author to elicit.

Well, no laughs ensued, although there were one or two wry chuckles, usually followed by a thumping headache. Which left me with the overall conundrum of this book: how much is the author deliberately eschewing standard story-telling virtues, and how much is he just not able to produce them when needed? I don’t know. My mind went around in circles about this. Finally I decided, I think, that at its core, this book is about ideas, not human realities.

All the same, the odd laugh would have been nice. There is a talking bobby sock but I found that embarrassing, because I wasn’t sure if it was just a weak idea or in fact a subtle reference to Planck’s lost Y-fronts which we non-physicists are shamefully ignorant of.

There is a chapter towards the end of aching but not-quite-painful-enough beauty. There aren’t really any characters; at least not ones that develop according to the exigencies of the plot. Most of the time, I couldn’t even tell who the “I” was telling us the story (Richard, I think, but probably not Feynman - some of whose jokes I can actually understand).

A lot of people will love this novel. Others will be baffled. The only thing I can say for certain - and I think this is a compliment: no way will Stephen Spielberg be making a movie out of it.

Read Terry Edge’s prize-winning story “Big Dave’s in Love” in Post human conditions (Arc 1.2), out now for tablets, screens and phones and in a collector’s print edition.

We’re staring hard into the mirror at London’s BFI

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:00:47 +0100

Join Arc for a free event on Sunday 5 May at London’s BFI as we explore the emerging fairyland that is augmented reality, in an afternoon dedicated to new media.

Arc’s editor Simon Ings and Imperica’s Paul Squires are hosting Mirror Mirror as part of the Sci-Fi-London film festival.

The event begins at noon in the BFI’s Blue Room and features the first public UK screening of Tim Maughan’s film Paintwork, based on his short story.

Other attractions include novelist Christopher Priest on smoke, mirrors and the magical prehistory of AR; artist and filmmaker Rebecca E Marshall on media attempts to ape human vision; and Tamara Roukaerts demonstrating the AR gear that put her company Aurasma ahead of the race to develop AR platforms that people actually want.

Imperica are threatening to bring along some fascinating items and speakers — we’ll tweet these as they’re announced — and there’ll be a microsite up in a very little while. In the meantime, while it’s a free event, please register your interest here, as it’ll help us keep track of numbers. Thanks!

Mirror Mirror
BFI Southbank, London
1pm-6pm, Sunday 5/5/13
(free)

Read Tim Maughan’s story “Limited Edition” in Afterparty Overdrive (Arc 1.3), out now for tablets, screens and phones and in a collector’s print edition.

And look out for Tim and Christopher Priest in future issues of Arc, coming soon.

We'll be WRITING THE FUTURE on May 1 at the Royal Society

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:00:47 +0100

If you’ve £50 to spare (and in these days of plenty, who hasn’t?) come join Joanna Kavenna, Jane Rogers, Paul Graham Raven and the editors of Arc at WRITE THE FUTURE, a micro-conference organised and curated by the Arthur Clarke Award and the Royal Society, London.

A series of creative short presentations and panels will explore the transformative power of science, technology, communication and the human imagination, “condensing the best bits of a typical two-day conference into a single afternoon of compelling content.”

So there.

Other attractions include the author Lauren Beukes, futurist and design scientist Melissa Sterry, and Matt Webb, CEO of design consultancy BERG.

We’re gathering at

The Royal Society
6-9 Carlton House Terrace
SW1Y 5AG London

on Wednesday, May 1, 2013 from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM

Click here for further details and look out for Kavenna and Rogers in future editions of Arc, coming soon.

We're going to DARK SOCIETIES in London's Piccadilly

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:00:19 +0100

Dystopian fiction is booming. What makes it so appealing? In association with Waterstones Piccadilly and the Post-Apocalyptic Book Club, Dark Societies returns to figure out the importance of collapse.

With:

Tom Hunter, Director of the Clarke Award (who will do his damnedest to turn this into a discussion about awards - “Burn him! burn him!”)
Robert Grant, literary editor of Sci-Fi London
Anne C Perry, co-founder of The Kitschies.
Adam Roberts, author of (among much else) Jack Glass
Frances Hardinge, author of Fly By Night.

The event takes place at Waterstones Piccadilly on Thursday 2 May at 7pm. Tickets cost £5/£3 for Waterstones Card Holders and Post-Apocalyptic Book Club Members.

Email events@piccadilly.Waterstones.co.uk or call 020 7851 2400.

Apocalypse No

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:52:00 +0100

Competition finalist Andrew Gray says we should throw off our sackloth-and-ashes approach to the future

Photo: Ruhrfisch.

I’m sick of the Apocalypse. It’s a tired, worn-out trope and an excuse for lazy writing and I wish it would go away.

I’m currently writing a novel set 200 years from now and you know what? It’s hard. It occurs to me that someone writing a novel when the first steam locomotives were just appearing couldn’t possibly have imagined the chain of events that would lead to something like the Facebook phone — not even close. So how the hell can I create something convincing that far in our future? Wouldn’t it be easier to just drop an asteroid/global warming/zombie invasion/plague on everything and then write a novel about people struggling in a world gone to hell?

Sure, it would be easier. Just wreck the world, throw in a few mutated monkeys, and stir. But it’s intellectually lazy. We’ve been down that road a million times and we know what it’s like: dazed survivors wandering the ruins, gnawing the thigh bones of their former neighbours. A plucky few trying to rebuild civilization again in between shooting zombies and building Thunderdomes. Enough already!

Two of my favourite SF books of last year, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 and Alastair Reynold’s Blue Remembered Earth both convincingly and artfully escape the apocalypse trap. They don’t shy away from the challenges in our future, but they also don’t balk from conceiving a radically different, yet still convincingly human future for us.

In 2312, which has rapidly been gathering award nominations this season, Kim Stanley Robinson doesn’t portray a utopia – the Earth is still suffering the lingering effects of climate change and overpopulation, and he cleverly (and accurately) refers to our current era as “the Dithering”, which was followed by a crisis that killed scores of people. But we survive to fill the solar system with our cities and our art and he shows a way forward for us, while not pretending we’ll escape the eternal struggle between our best and our worst impulses.

Blue Remembered Earth is set a little closer to now – less than two hundred years, but paints a similarly compelling picture of a humanity who have expanded beyond Earth, dealt with many of the solvable issues of our time (climate, violence and poverty), and who have changed in remarkable ways. It shouldn’t seem daring that Reynolds chooses Africa as the future seat of much of the world’s energy and power, but it’s something rare in SF, and I found it refreshing.

Both books show wonders like augmented realities and radical body modifications, new social structures, an industrialized solar system - but are no blind techno-utopias. People are still people, which I think is the most important thing about both books: they don’t just spark the imagination; they humanize the future. They make it seem like a place worth living in.

Will they get it right? Of course not; that’s not really the point. But I can imagine a writer in a couple of hundred years looking back at books like these and seeing something. Something compelling. Our attempt to build a bridge to our descendants, to imagine how we’ll solve the problems that beset us.

What are they going to get out of our host of zombie apocalypses? Fear. Fear of the future, fear of ourselves and not much else. That’s not what I love about science fiction, and that’s certainly not what I want to write.

Read Andrew Gray’s story “A Node in the Network”, a runner-up in our short story competition.

Read Alastair Reynolds’s story “The Water Thief” in Arc 1.1: The future always wins.

Kim Stanley Robinson answers the call of the wild in “Shedding Skins”. Read it in Arc 1.4: Forever alone drone.

We’re reading THE BLOODLINE FEUD by Charles Stross

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:00:00 +0100

Adrian Ellis climbs into a fast car full of soup.

The Bloodline Feud
Charles Stross
Tor, PPB £9.99

SF and fantasy novels are big now: physically big. Five hundred pages is just warming up for a modern escapist story in this genre. A lot of people put this trend down to The Lord of the Rings, a tome that used to be printed in text small enough to make your eyes water, just to keep the publisher’s printing bills down. Have you read The Lord of the Rings lately? Once, it felt like you needed a sabbatical year just to get through the blessed thing. Now the story zips along like an express train full of dwarves. It is not a long any more; its length pales in comparison to Neil Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle or Peter F. Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction. We’ve entered an age of Behemoths.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Stephenson is a master of the long story. Cryptonomicon, a story that runs to 928 pages, never feels padded and is full of ideas and events. Buying that novel, a reader gets many hours of enjoyment for the price of a lunch. Still, there is a danger that to meet such huge page-count expectations, a writer will simply churn out chapters rather than hone them until every line is important. Every paragraph, even every sentence in Douglas Adams’s The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy andCormac McCarthy’s The Road can be savoured. Each one is needed, has meaning, has been boiled down to its bare essence, like a really good curry. If you don’t boil off that excess, you get soup.

The Bloodline Feud is the first of three omnibus editions of Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes series, which ran from 2004 to 2010 and is about to be extended thanks to a rather tidy publishing deal with Tor. What were once six normal books are now three big books.

It was always thus, though you used to have to wait till you were dead for this sort of thing. (These days, if you can find them at all, Henry Green’s novels turn up in threes.) What is rather more surprising is the publisher’s assertion that “Stross has worked through the text to polish and update the text so it’s even better than the original.”

Really? Because The Family Trade, the first of the series and the first of the two books concatenated here, is soup. The ingredients are great; Stross writes with skill and assurance, summoning up believable characters and peppering his descriptions with phrases that stick in the mind, memorable lines like “black space-age Aeron chairs everywhere, all wire and plastic, electric chairs for a fully-wired future’”; but there is no sign that he wants to boil off the excess. Adverbs begin to pop up like weeds; “She wanted to hug her mother, but she looked increasingly frail. She was only in her mid-fifties, but her hair was increasingly grey.” It is as though Stross doesn’t have time to go back and cut back. He powers on, knocking out the dialogue and everyday descriptions with a skilled, experienced eye but with the cruise-control button firmly engaged.

The Secret Family begins with the heroine being kidnapped, SWAT-style, and taken to the story’s alternate world. Here, Stross moves up a gear, producing tight, fast, engaging prose. He’s clearly in his element and knows the territory well. He still leaves behind ragged lines - ‘his face was set in a faintly wistful expression’ - but the events gather pace and the characters are running. Stross uses the contrast between the alternative world - feudal, medieval - and the modern real world to good effect, while keeping up the intrigue and tension.

This is where the story will win over the reader, with Stross’s worldly-wise, contemporary heroine, skilled but human, trying to stay alive in a world both feudal and corporate. Dungeons and boardrooms, if you like: D&B. When Stross is on home ground, he rattles along like a V8, LIDAR equipped, chainmail Lexus. You won’t be disappointed.

Look out for Adrian Ellis’s competition-winning short story The Lost Emotion in the next issue of Arc, coming soon.

We're reading VURT by Jeff Noon

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:00:00 +0100

Nan Craig reports from the other side of a twenty-year-old looking glass:

Vurt
Jeff Noon
Tor, HB £16.99

Vurt appeared in the spring of 1993, won the Clarke Award, and promptly changed the lives of a number of many people (especially, it seems, writers), who read it in the formative years of their lives and immediately recognised that it was not only linguistically and imaginatively original, but that it spoke intimately to their own experience of the world. I wasn’t one of these lucky people. (In my defence, in the spring of 1993 I was ten).

The plot is impossible to describe succinctly. Trying to explain it to my dad over a dodgy Skype connection was interesting: “There’s this boy, and there are these feathers, and they’re like drugs, and they’re different colours, and they take you to another world, and there are aliens, and the boy has lost this girl he loves and he’s trying to get her back…” All the time, my pixelated dad mouthing “Just tell me the back cover blurb!” That didn’t really help, either. Noon has said that he’s heavily influenced by Lewis Carroll, and trying to describe the plot of Vurt is like trying to describe the plot of Alice Through The Looking Glass (“Oh, there’s this little girl, and she’s lost, and there are queens and knights and twins and a talking sheep…”) For all the slightly cyberpunky atmosphere, and all its talk of aliens and hybrids and virtual worlds, structurally and in sensibility it’s more closely related to the Alice books than it is to, say, Neuromancer. It is itself a dream, and its logic is dream-logic. Giant violet-and-green dreamsnakes, dangerous yellow feathers, loved-up hippies conjoined by their dreads, dog-men, droid-people: surprisingly little of this is “virtual”: reality here is more dream-like than the dream.

At the same time, people who read the book when it first came out say how important it was to them that it was set in a world they recognised, and this is still true. The daily details still work: when they’re not trying to reach altered states of consciousness, the characters sit at jam-smeary kitchen tables, drive around in vans with dodgy suspension, hang out in messy high-rise flats. You don’t need to have grown up in the Nineties for this to work for you (although if you did, there’s a pleasant, nostalgic feel to be got from seeing teenagers in plaid dresses and crop-tops). You don’t even need to be from Manchester.

The twentieth anniversary edition, published last week, is an attractive hardback. It comes with Beukes’s introduction as well as three extra short stories set in the same world. The stories are nice to have if you’re looking for an extra hit, but the novel itself is the point. It’s still fresh and original; however much it has inspired later works, it doesn’t feel like it’s been outdated or overtaken by them. A whole new generation of readers are about to have their minds twisted.

Lucky us.

Read Nan Craig’s story “Scapmetal” in Afterparty Overdrive (Arc 1.3), out now for tablets, phones and screens and in a collector’s print edition.

And look out for Jeff Noon’s story “Vapours” in the new edition of Arc, out soon.

We’re reading THE CURVE OF THE EARTH by Simon Morden

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:00:00 +0100

Martin McGrath wonders why Samuil Petrovich took his foot off the gas.

The Curve of the Earth
Simon Morden
Orbit, PPB £8.99

Simon Morden’s Samuil Petrovich series arrived with a bang in 2011. The first three novels were published between April and June, came arrayed in striking geometrically-patterned covers, and won the author the 2012 Philip K Dick Award for the best science fiction novel first published as a paperback. Almost two years later the fourth novel in the sequence, The Curve of the Earth, has arrived and, from the murky brown cover onward, it’s a bit of a disappointment.

The first three novels placed Morden’s improbable protagonist in a post-apocalyptic London, rechristened the Metrozone, facing a variety of threats. Petrovich saved the city from a rogue AI, a barbarian invasion, Japanese, Russian and native gangs and the depredations of an aggressive American government, all while getting various bits of his body hacked off. He also found time to discover a unified theory of everything, invent an anti-gravity device, black hole bombs and build a perpetual motion machine. The great pleasure of these books was the way in which they propelled their readers with a shocking velocity through the plot. There was no time admire the view, there was only one path: forward, full-speed ahead.

This only makes it odder that so much of The Curve of the Earth is so plodding. Opening ten years after the action in the previous novels, this story starts with the disappearance of Petrovich’s adopted daughter, Lucy, while on a scientific expedition in Alaska. There’s much talk of urgency in response to this event, but the opening two-thirds of the novel are full of prevarication and meandering as Morden takes the opportunity of shifting the action to America to indulge in some rather obvious political point-scoring.

Morden sets up a future America that is fundamentalist, secretive, corrupt and morally bankrupt and, using Petrovich as his mouthpiece, proceeds to dismantle it in a string of rants that have even his own characters begging him to stop. Nor is it just that his America is an obviously evil Aunt Sally, it’s that his alternative – the near-utopian Freezone created by Petrovich – is so contradictory. Here is a state that values personal privacy but in which everything is monitored by an almost omniscient AI; a state that reifies personal freedom but in which decisions are made on behalf of all by tiny committees of appointed, unaccountable, experts; and a state where all are supposed to be equal but where Petrovich and his entourage are clearly primus inter pares.

This is a scientist’s state: homogeneous, rational, meritocratic and entirely improbable.

The real problem, though, is not the actual politics, it’s that Morden dwells on it for so long that he gives the reader time to reflect. And, on reflection, it becomes harder to ignore the fact that his Americans are as crudely stereotypical as the Russians and Japanese were in his earlier novels. You notice that his cast of supposedly strong female characters spend all their time mooning about Samuil Petrovich or waiting for him to rescue them. And you notice that Petrovich, despite his supposedly vast intellect and cyborg enhancements, doesn’t actually solve any of the puzzles in this novel but just blusters around until the answers are handed to him.

Morden clearly has big plans for Samuil Petrovich, and I still want to find out where the character is going (a very long way, from the suggestions in this novel), so I hope that in subsequent books the author will return to his strengths and put his foot back on the accelerator.

Read Lavie Tidhar, Tim Maughan and the best new writers in Arc 1.3 Afterparty Overdrive, out now.

We’re watching Paul Prudence....

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:13:12 +0100

We’re watching Paul Prudence. Visit http://www.transphormetic.com/ for more.

We’re reading THE EXPLORER by James Smythe

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:30:36 +0100

Leigh Alexander drifts free of her comfort zone:

The Explorer
James Smythe
Harper Voyager, HB £12.99

Among the most interesting things about James Smythe’s The Explorer, a novel that on the grand scale is about the naivety of the human love affair with space exploration, is that it reveals its ending in its very jacket summary: its crew will not survive.

The lone survivor, journalist Cormac Easton (the name transparently a nod to other existential road-trippers), is the sole documentarian of the ill-fated grand adventure. Even though his decision to undertake the long journey came at the expense of his marriage, he’s ultimately one of just six crew members plucked from a rigorous selection program to journey outside the solar system aboard the Ishiguro - the first trip of its kind.

Its purpose is familiar to any space-program romantic: a lavish tribute to the pioneering bravery of humankind, an act done in worship of our fascination with the black unknown. The Ishiguro’s job is simply to go further out into space than any manned exploration has ever travelled, then turn around.

The Ishiguro never does turn back. Easton is the only one left, alone with a diminishing fuel gauge, an inexplicable, anomalous error message, and the bodies of his fellow travellers, running out the end of his life as hope slips further and further away. He whittles down his time reflecting, remembering, and engaging in the bleak ritual of survival in a confined space.

Smythe renders bleakness and claustrophobia brilliantly, and communicates with delicate restraint the tragedy of man confronting the impossible, law-defying and mind-bending expanse of outer space. The unknowns of the universe are so terrifying that many people turn to earthly religion to deal with the fear; The Explorer is glutted with that quiet terror as its protagonist has nothing to do but think about it.

We do more with the novel than to wait for Easton to die, though. No spoiling here, but the mysteries of the universe do come to enact a slow, terrible revenge on the Ishiguro. Reading the novel is a slow and often unpleasant slog through the dread of the inevitable and the futility of hope, but it’s also an interesting reflection on human nature and our relationship to the unknown. Ultimately it’s tedious to read, but in a way that may be intentional, and is certainly thought-provoking.

Buy Arc 1.1: The Future Always Wins to read Leigh Alexander’s essay on platform-agnostic gaming, “Three Ways to Play the “Future””.

And look out for James Smythe’s essay “Rise of the Engines” in the new edition of Arc, coming soon.

Judgement Day: the concluding part of Arc's interview

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:00:40 +0100

The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day
Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

Ebury Press, £18.99

Jack Cohen: I think the headline story in this book is mine, he says a little immodestly. It’s the argument that biology isn’t just physics and chemistry with knobs on. An atom that flies in a bird does so because the bird can fly, not because the atom can fly. We like to chunter on about “working from first principles” but the honest fact of the matter is there are countless first principles. There are first principles wherever you look. My favourite analogy is the space elevator. If you can build an elevator wire stretching from the surface of the earth to a geosynchronous satellite, then the only energy cost of going into orbit is friction. This makes perfect sense once you’ve built the elevator. Before then, the idea is completely nuts, because you’re having to think about gravity and orbits and Newton’s inverse square law and all the rest of it. If you’re constantly working from first principles, you’re going to miss all the opporutunities that come along from starting at a higher level of complexity. A mitochondrion works with a sort of surreal efficiency, If generates waste heat, we can’t really detect it. It took evolutionary processes 30,000 million years to accomplish that, and if you started with the basic chemistry, you’d never get there. Lower levels of complexity may underlie higher levels of complexity, but they don’t imply them. If you wanted to be flippant about this, you’d say that biological systems transcend the laws of nature.

Simon Ings: You’re saying they’re magical?

Terry Pratchett: Uh-oh.

Jack: Well, loose talk costs lives, but I’d certainly use that word about the space elevator, or technology in general come to that. When I reach up and press a switch and the light comes on – there’s nothing about that moment that isn’t magical. When I went to America in 1963-64, to Harvard, I needed a car. I bought a cheap thing - nothing flash. And it had this button. At home I had a Rover 10, and it needed the choke pulling out and a heater putting under it in the winter to start it. Wheras this car had a magic button that said, “Cold start”. You pressed it, and a minute later, the engine started. What made it a magic button? The fact that I could work it without knowing how it worked. That’s all it takes to do magic. That’s all magic is.

Ian Stewart: Arthur Clarke said sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And then Gregory Benford turned it round and said, technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced; which creates a kind of imperative: we should develop technology to make it transparent to the user. We want our technology to be magic. It’s supposed to be magic. That’s what it’s for: to sit on your kitchen worktop, sit in your house, and make your life more interesting, or more pleasant, or more fun. And it’s fascinating and often quite amusing to realise that, in a sense, we are trying to turn Roundworld into Discworld, where things work because people want them to work. And you know, we’re getting pretty good at it.

Terry: All of us these days are looking askance at our politicians. The way things are going in the world, we say to ourselves, No one’s really in charge. No one knows what to do. Everyone’s caught up in events, everyone is beholden to lawyers and bankers. So science comes as a comfort. We’re seeing a lot more popular science these days. You can’t move for it on television. And I look on it as a sort of very decent, well-meant pornography. You can tell it’s pornography because you know the plot backwards but you keep watching anyway for the sheer pleasure of the repetition. “I know this one! I know this one really well!”

Ian:: It used to be easier. When Michael Faraday started his popular lectures, raising money for the Royal Institution, he was also performing crucial science in electricity and magnetism which led, through James Clerk Maxwell, to radio, television, and modern communications. Nowadays, you can’t drag the Large Hadron Collider in and show people how it works. The trouble is that, however accessibly you write, the people who really ought to understand this stuff, and get some ideas about it, are precisely the people who are never going to even bother to look at it. Which is where the TV programmes that look beautiful and inspire people without actually explaining very much are actually very valuable, especially in terms of reaching younger people.

Simon: Where does the Science of Discworld project sit? Are you addressing a new audience, or playing to the fans?

Jack: What we say is, we’re serious but we’re not solemn.

Ian: Working with Terry, I think Jack and I get sensitive to the value of wearing our learning lightly. When we write some pompous looking sentence, we think, Wait. Don’t take this so seriously. And one of us puts in some self-deprecating sarcastic comment, which gives people the impression that we have a more balanced view of things.

Simon: Quite often the fulsome line, the pompous line, is an expression of anxiety.

Ian: Puncture your balloons! I’ve always found that the more firmly I state my position on something, the shakier my view is. After all, the things we argue about are the ones for which there’s the least amount of evidence either way. If there’s strong evidence, we can all look at the evidence and say, well, we better stop arguing about this.

Terry: Or so you’d think. We do now have this rather awkward situation where a lot of people are saying, this evidence is wrong because it doesn’t agree with my beliefs. Climate change denial is completely absurd. I can understand why the companies that are going to suffer if we cut back on our energy use are a bit unhappy about it and are spreading propaganda, but I can’t understand why perfectly sensible people fall for it and ignore completely what the world’s scientists have been saying for the last 20 or 30 years. You can’t have a worldwide conspiracy of scientists. It’s completely absurd.

Simon: The words “cats” and the “bag” spring to mind.

Ian:: You can find an area of science which is locked into a paradigm which turns out to be complete nonsense. There are lots of examples of that. But these involve a few dozen or a few hundred scientists. They don’t involve thousands across every country in the world. It’s just silly.

Terry: In my early teens, I worked Saturdays in my local library. If certain things in my life had been different, I would probably have ended up as a librarian, and that wouldn’t have been a bad thing. While I was working on this book I was thinking about the irrational, how the irrational actually works, and I phoned up two ladies who are fans of my work and also librarians, and I asked, Do you still get the Left Ear People? It’s what we used to call them. People who come into the library looking for books, for some official sanction even if it’s just an out-of-print paperback, about beliefs which turn out to be absolutely bloody ridiculous. How the US faked the moon landings and such.

Simon: And the weirdest part is they’re inventing Illuminati and wot-not to make their lives duller. Who wants to live in a world in which people didn’t land on the moon? In what way is that better than a world in which people did?

Terry: There must have been about a billion people involved in the thing: did they all lie? I’m proud that men got to the moon. At least once, this planet threw up something big enough to shove something up there. Mankind made an effort, got to the moon, found it, was there, walked about.

Jack:: Human folly is one thing. It’s when it achieves some sort of authority that it becomes frightening. I’m terrified of Islam, the way the authoritarians have got a stranglehold on its teachings. A third of humanity is being given a narrower and narrower definition of what the world is and what they are. It’s desperate.

Simon: Well, that’s what you get with a deteriorationist religion.

Terry:: I’m sorry?

Simon: It’s deteriorationist. The jame towhidi, the society of believers, has been and gone, and all we can do is try to preserve the remains. The Americans and their constitution are the same. Long ago the Constitution made perfect sense, and now it’s getting harder and harder to interpret. It’s a similar sort of mindset.

Terry: I hadn’t thought of that.

Simon: I think it’s Christopher Hitchens.

Terry: I like it very much. The Constitution used to be this beautiful thing and time is tearing it to pieces. I like the idea that you can pursue happiness. No guarantee that you’ll catch it, of course. You might know, of course, that I’m a fan of assisted dying. The reason we don’t have it in this country is that the religious right get up against it, despite the fact that it’s taking place now in many democracies similar to our own, quite happily, without any of the terrible consequences and disasters we’re told are bound to follow from this thing. It really pisses me off. I didn’t vote for the Pope, and I genuinely do not see any reason why he should have this privileged voice in the debate.

Simon: I’m a big Dawkins fan. I think Dawkins is irate for all the right reasons. But when you three approach the same issues with humour, it does feel refreshing.

Terry: I think we need a few Richard Dawkinses just to counteract the massive propaganda machine that is organised religion. I do find it extraordinarily hypocritical when people say, “This man’s insulting our religion.” Look at what your preachers are saying to perfectly decent people who happen not to agree with you about an afterlife, a virgin birth, a whole pile of silly miracles that you seem to think are important. And as soon as you’re pressed on that, what do you do? You rush off and say, “Oh, we’re nothing to do with that. What’s important is morality.” As if people who disagree with your virgin birth story have no morals! And on the other hand one prominent Roman Catholic protested about being persecuted because there was one advert on the side of bus saying God probably doesn’t exist. I mean, how ridiculous can you get?

Jack: We’re promoting rationality as a way of understanding things. Whether you can understand everything with rationality is a different question.

Terry: For instance, I do sometimes wonder if spending billions and billions of pounds on the latest fancy collider is really a sensible use of money. Of course it’s in the nature of these things that, now I’ve said that, tomorrow somebody will find some fantastic medical treatment based on Higgs bosons or something.

Ian: The cost is a real worry, you’re right. There are all sorts of really important projects which are cheaper and are not getting funded. What is so “fundamental” about this physics, that it’s worth billions? I work in mathematics, which is criticised as having nothing to do with reality, which is complete nonsense. It has a lot more to do with reality, in terms of direct dollars-and-cents payoff, than the Higgs boson does.

Simon: Expensive projects are quite often easier to fund than less expensive ones.

Ian:: But can we can go on playing this game forever? I don’t think so. Already particle physicists are starting to say that they’re not finding anything much beyond the Higgs boson with the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is telling us that the physics we’ve already written down seems to be correct, but we know already that there are problems with it, because it still doesn’t square properly with relativity, and it’s still not telling us what gravity is. There’s more to be discovered, and this machine is not finding it. I do wonder if the particle physics community, faced with a moratorium on big projects, might not start thinking about alternative ways to do these things. We have a precedent in the Human Genome Project, this enormously expensive multi-billion dollar project that was supposed to take years and years. Now you can sequence a complete genome in a desktop box in 48 hours for a thousand dollars.

Jack: The thing is, the biologists wanted a big-money prestigious project. Quite explicitly. They wanted their equivalent of the moon landings. They said so.

Simon: So we’re back to human folly, then. People’s short sightsightedness. Their selfishness.

Terry: Not selfishness. That’s wrong. The world is not going to hell in a handcart because we’re selfish. That’s too easy, to say that we don’t care. We do care. The problem is we can’t take what we know on board for more than the length of time it takes to worry about it. It’s almost as if we live in a fantasy…

Paul Graham Raven scours the ruins of Western civilisation for the last baked potato in “Breaking the fall”, Arc 1.1: The future always wins, out now.

Judgement Day (2/3): Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen talk to Simon Ings

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:00:38 +0100

The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day
Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen
Ebury Press, £18.99

Simon Ings: How are the Science of Discworld books assembled?

Ian Stewart: We think of the Discworld story first, because without that, the books just don’t work. There has to be something Terry can get his teeth into. And then we start looking for good science topics to fit into that story. And over the years we’ve got fairly good at this. It’s not completely foolproof. From time to time we’ve written entire chapters and thrown them away again.

Simon: How did the idea get started?

Jack Cohen: I knew Terry from science fiction conventions, but only casually. And then there was a meeting in the Hague, a big European science fiction convention. And three rich science fiction authors were giving talks to an audience of around 300 people. Bob Silverberg spoke first. He said he sold his first story at fourteen, and that by the time he was twenty-five he didn’t know how much money he had in the bank: ten thousand dollars more or less wouldn’t have touched his radar. But money isn’t important. And the place got a bit restive at that. Then Larry Niven stood up and explained his grandfather gifted him 21 million dollars when he was twenty-one, but he still had to go through all the rites of passage of growing up, and he finished by saying, “Look, although I have all this money, I have to tell you, money is not important.” At which point the audience started throwing things. Terry Pratchett came on next – you could see he was on the edge – and someone threw food and it hit him, and he lost it. And he said, “What the fuck do you think we’re doing? We’re rich science fiction authors. We don’t have to come and talk to you here, you could at least be polite. And the money isn’t important.” And I stood up – I was standing at the back of this big theatre – and I said, you’re both right. Money is like air and love. If you’ve got it, it doesn’t matter. The absence of it is desperate. Afterwards Terry took me aside and said, Let me buy you a drink. We got talking and I explained I was writing a book with Ian and we were finding it really difficult to get the chapters to gel. He said, let’s have a proper meeting. Which ended up taking place – I can’t remember why – in a Mongolian restaurant in Berlin. Ian and I took along our plan of Figments of Reality and Terry said, Give it to me and give me a month. Two weeks later we met in the same restaurant and Terry said, This is the way you do it. And the structure he’d cooked up worked beautifully.

Terry Pratchett: Then I said, Look, I’ve had a play in your field, why don’t you have a play in mine? The idea for this one goes back five or six years. We were planning to do it much earlier, but because of my posterior cortical atrophy the project was put on the back burner until we were all confident it would be possible to go ahead and do it. Our overall storyline here is a debate between scientific thinking and belief.

Ian: We try to take a fairly moderate view on that, because there are a lot of longstanding human beliefs which are rational within a historically sanctioned framework, and a lot of people people find them to their taste. If somebody invented these things tomorrow, these same people, I’m sure, would look at them in a rather different way. But religious beliefs, in particular, have thousands of years of history at their back. If I say to you, a religious person, “You are irrational,” that’s certainly presumptuous and probably stupid. Chances are you’re not in the least bit irrational. Some of your premises might be irrational and, in some circumstances, I would argue that they’ll trip you up quite badly. But they don’t make you an irrational person.

Jack:: I grew up to be a rabbi. My father had expressed a wish to become a rabbi, but he died shortly after the war and the mantle fell on my shoulders. From fourteen to seventeen, I went to yeshivas. I eventually came to the conclusion there was no God. But I still went to synagogue, because so much of what I’d learned there made sense to me. The absence of God didn’t suddenly make that place worthless.

Terry: Anyway, I got it into my head that the Omnian religion on Discworld is trying to get its hands on Roundworld, because its shape is so significant for them. For the longest time, you see, the Omnians believed Flatland was really a sphere – quite preposterous! And this story suggested to Jack and Ian that we should explore the social side of science. How does science really work?

Ian: Science isn’t just observation, you see. It’s inference. You think about things. You produce theories. You test things. And you use indirect reasoning. You have to, because science tries to understand things you can’t look at directly. If we could look at them directly, we’d have understood them much longer ago. It’s a bit like an ant on the surface of the earth wondering what shape its planet is. The ant can’t go very far, or see very far, so there’s a limit to what it can apprehend. But let it infer things about the world, and there’s quite a bit the ant can learn about its world. Stand on a low island somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean, with sea all around you, and look at the horizon. If you entertain the idea that the earth is a sphere, you can work out how big the sphere is, because the size of sphere determines how far away the horizon is. Once you ask yourself the question, “What if this thing was a sphere?” you don’t actually need a lot of apparatus to come up with a reasonable estimate for the size of the earth. The trouble is, you don’t know for absolute certain, until you circumnavigate the thing, that the world is a sphere. We’re in that kind of position when we try to imagine the shape of the universe. There are hints of structure, and if we make some sweeping, reasonable-sounding assumptions, then we can start to make informed guesses about the shape of the universe. But we’re never going to be able to circumnavigate the universe, any more than an ant is going to book a round-the-world cruise, so it’s hard to see how we’ll ever know for sure that our oh-so-reasonable assumptions are actually correct.

Simon: This comes up when you and Jack debate the usefulness of studying very small particles at very high energies.

Ian:: We don’t agree, which ought to be a problem. But as they say in show business, if you’ve got a wooden leg, wave it. Being a mathematician, I think that quantum field theory is extraordinarily interesting. Jack, being a biologist, looks at the things he’s been working on like frogs and mice, and thinks, the link from Ian’s sort of mathematics to my frogs and mice is extraordinarily tenuous. There’s a kind of story here, and each bit in the story makes sense. But there are gaps – big ones.

Jack: When you’re probing scales of measurement so tiny that, even to infer something about them, you need a machine five miles across and a supercomputer to actually detect anything, can you really be sure that your picture is accurate? Or have you wandered off into some realm of deduction where you’re simply plugging the gaps in logic left by the previous stage of your argument?

Ian: And Jack and I differ on this. I would be inclined to say, the quarks and the Higgs boson do really exist. We’re not quite sure what a particle is anymore, but we have pretty good evidence that we’re not just making these things up.

Jack: And I say, even if that’s right, actually very little science rests on it. We know how a mouse will behave when you change its genes in certain ways. The existence or otherwise of the Higgs boson doesn’t impact the solid knowledge we have of the mouse genome in any way. People say the Higgs boson is a fundamental particle. Yes, it’s fundamental in the sense that its a required component of the universe. But it’s not fundamental in the sense that you need it to work out everything else about what’s around us.

Simon: So from your point of view, Jack, it’s almost as if big physics is falling through the hole that it’s just kicked in its own floor.

Jack: Well, I’m inclined to think that if we’d started our atomic physics with some phenomenon other than electricity, we’d have a different view of what particles are, and it would work equally well. And physicists mostly don’t think that way. They think that protons are real, that electrons are real, and even the more exotic particles are all real. It depends what you mean by real, but you know what I mean.

Simon: This reminds me of M John Harrison’s novel Light, in which advanced civilisations have over time cooked up six perfectly workable, mutually contradictory theories of everything. They can’t all be right, but every one of them gives you the tools you need to build a hyperspace drive that can take you from one side of the galaxy to the other.

Jack:: I like the idea because, let’s be fair, the scientific theories that underpin most of our technology have turned out to be incomplete, if not plain wrong.

Simon: There is a tremendous passage in Judgement Day in which a bunch of learned and ingenious pianologists are trying to work out how a piano works. They can’t see the piano, or touch the piano, but they can throw small stones at it and by listening to the sounds that come out of the piano when the stones hit the keyboard, they‘ve developed a fairly good understanding of how the piano works. Then one of them says, “We need to take this further. Why don’t we take this thing to the top of the hotel and push it off the roof?” And suddenly their theory is full of complex, conjectural particles called thudons and twangons and such-like, and they think they’re coming to a more profound understanding of the piano when all they’ve done is make it behave in extraordinary and uncharacteristic ways.

Jack: Ian loves that sort of thing. He had great fun.

Ian: Jack has the feeling at the back of his mind that some of the laws of physics aren’t really there until the universe is pushed into some very extreme situation: that the universe makes things up as it goes along. So how do we distinguish between understanding laws that always operated, whether we knew about them or not, and laws that maybe weren’t really there until we started poking sticks in the right places? Until you create a star with nuclear reactions going on in its core, is there actually a set of laws governing nuclear reactions? My feeling is, there has to be, otherwise the star wouldn’t know what to do. The alternative is a bit Rupert Sheldrake for my taste; he voiced a similar idea a while ago that the universe adapts to the experiments you do on it.

Terry: Of course the magicians of Discworld would be very, very comfortable with this idea. It would seem obvious to them that when you start asking questions of the universe, you actually change it.

Ian: Certainly, when you stress the natural world in new ways, you reveal new behaviours that nobody knew existed before. And there seems to be this unlimited richness to the way the world can behave. There really doesn’t seem to be an end to this. If there’s an end to scientific knowledge, we’re nowhere near it right now.

SI It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Like natural selection: no matter the number of turnings you didn’t take that maybe you should have taken, no matter the catalogue of blind alleys you get stuck in, there always turn out to be more design possibilities after each generation than there were before it.

Terry: Depending on your point of view, this is either something that’s terribly, terribly obvious or deeply perplexing and mysterious. I’m inclined to say it’s deeply mysterious.

Ian: If you don’t think it’s mysterious, you haven’t understood the problem. Certainly, as a research mathematician – and I’ve been in the business for forty-odd years now – I’ve seen problem after problem being solved. The great problems – Fermat’s last theorem, the four colour theorem – have all been polished off. And my subject, far from shrinking, is getting bigger. As your territory gets bigger, the frontier gets longer. Yes?

Simon: Sure.

Ian: Of course, that’s not actually true on a sphere like the surface of the earth. If you push the frontiers far enough you go past the equator and everything starts to get smaller again. So, if the world of mathematical knowledge was finite, there would come a point at which you start saying, “We’re running out of ideas here.” But mathematics doesn’t seem to be like that. And the frontiers of the sciences are even bigger, of course, because they’re about the real universe in all its richness.

TOMORROW: the final part of Arc’s Judgement Day interview, in which Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen explore magic, human folly, and science porn.

Read Jeff VanderMeer’s “Komodo” in Arc 1.2: Post human conditions, out now.

Judgement Day: Simon Ings talks to Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:00:46 +0100

The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day
Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

Ebury Press, £18.99

Judgement Day is the fourth in a series of popular science books written by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. The Science of Discworld books are about as far as it is possible to get from The Science of Star Trek because The Science of Star Trek is, according to one of the writers, “absolutely fucking useless. So we got talking about how to make this kind of format work properly, and do some work while being entertaining and appealing to fans.”

The architecture of the first book has stuck for the series: – an original Discworld story is interleaved with chapters exploring the scientific issues it throws up. Jack Cohen: “The first Science of Discworld is very much about hands-on science; we thought it would be the only one, so we threw everything we could into it. Then, when we saw we had a series on our hands, we calmed down and concentrated on the topics that interested us at the time. Number two is about anthropology, mostly, and number three picked up on the Darwin centenary.”

When Arc’s editor Simon Ings met the authors, he began by asking them about this book – that is, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch; the one that came out eight years ago, in 2005; the one before Judgement Day, the book they were all supposed to be talking about. In this way, he endeared himself forever to the trio’s long-suffering publicist Sally Wray, to whom we extend our grateful thanks.

Simon: Jack, you can start us off, since we’re talking about Darwin. For the tape: Jack Cohen is a reproductive biologist whose theory of sperm redundancy has been important in the treatment of infertility. He’s also responsible for some of television’s more plausible aliens. Gerald Durrell once said Jack had had contact with more creatures than anyone he’d ever known—

Jack: And that was a long time ago. Do you know, mantis shrimps have seven different visual pigments?

Simon: They have proper colour vision, don’t they?

Jack: I love mantis shrimps. I’ve had three. The last one learned to lift up scrabble letters when it wanted food. I wanted to see if it would lift up different scrabble letters for different foods, but it died.

Simon: I see.

Jack: But you should ask Terry about Darwin.

(Sir Terry Pratchett has sold over 70 million books worldwide in 37 languages. Now and again he makes people laugh, usually with tales set in his invented universe, Discworld, a flat disc balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle.)

Terry: When I was in my early teens, one of our science teachers loaned me The Origin of Species and I went down with the flu. So I read Charles Darwin with the world spinning round and about – I was hallucinating, you see. To modern eyes the book’s a hard read, but I went through it like a bulldozer because I was tripping.

Simon: A while ago I read Simon Conway Morris’ book on – what is it, confluence evolution… congruent… Oh, God. If you live in the sea, you look like a fish…

Ian: Convergent evolution. Why do dolphins and sharks look the same when one’s a fish and one’s a mammal?

(Ian Stewart is a professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick, and the author of many popular books on mathematics, science and epistemology. In 1995 Stewart received the Michael Faraday Medal and in 1997 he gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on “The Magical Maze”. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001.)

Simon: Yes. And Conway-Morris ends that book with an image of Earth being the only place where there is intelligent life. And suddenly we’re in some sort of polite English drawing-room of a world, unable to imagine any other way of being, and I am sitting there thinking: I’ve been played. I’m not clever enough to know how I’ve been played, but I’ve definitely been played. In Judgement Day, though, you three take the anthropic priniciple apart. You show that this idea – that we’re balanced on a cosmological knife-edge – is actually not true.

Ian: Well, there’s a whole lot of difficult and different issues here, but they boil down to the distinction we make in Judgement Day about the difference between human-centered thinking and universe-centered thinking. Human-centered thinking says, we’re the most important thing around and everything that’s worth knowing about is there for us. What we have to work out is, what we can do with it?

Terry: It’s the kind of thinking the wizards of Discworld enjoy. The wizards are smart on the whole, but they have a rather direct view of things, because their worldview includes magic. If they want something to happen, they can make it happen.

Ian: And that’s also the kind of thinking a child enjoys, when it says the rain comes down so the crops can grow. Universe-centered thinking says, “No, no, rain’s been around for eons, crops are a human invention that only goes back 10,000 years. Rain’s not there for the benefit of the crops.”

Terry: The thing is, human-centered thinking is natural, it’s intuitive. The people of Discworld don’t regard Discworld as magical. They don’t go around saying, “Isn’t this amazing? We’re on the back of a turtle!” They know there’s a turtle, but they don’t bother about it much. In that, they’re like most of us here in Roundworld. We don’t actually interrogate what’s going on all the time. Why would we? Why should we?

Ian: Right: you have to actually work to acquire in this other, more imaginative, universe-centered way of thinking. Is life on Earth the only possible kind? Are we living in the only possible universe? Is this universe extraordinarily finely tuned so that life can exist? You get radically different answers depending on which mode of thinking you apply. It’s not about evidence, or scholarship, or rigour. Simon Conway Morris is a fantastic scientist and writer. But the way he thinks means that everything in the world converges on the same solution. The idea that that there may be different problems doesn’t interest him. If you watch the evolution of life on a planet that is very similar to Earth, I would not be at all surprised to find that you would get living things that look Earth-like. If you have oceans, you’ll have things like fish. Then Conway-Morris points out, correctly, that the chances of there being another markedly Earth-like world out there are vanishingly small – and draws what to me is a really strange conclusion: that complex, thought-bearing life is therefore probably unique to Earth. Really? Why?

Jack: Ian and I are science fiction fans. We’d love it if the aliens were out there, taking very bizarre forms, the sort created in good, properly worked-out science-fiction stories. So we’re a bit prejudiced. But it seems to me that the most interesting possibilities for alien life are the ones that are not very similar to us. How radically strange can life be? Are there wildly different kinds of life out there? That’s an important question, because if the answer’s yes, suddenly the range of possibilities and the number of alien civilisations that might be out there becomes much greater.

Ian: If you look at this planet, we haven’t all converged onto one creature. We’ve converged onto an enormous range of different creatures suited to particular habitats. There are precious few habitats where there isn’t something living. Even under the ice in the Antarctic, even deep in the earth, there are bacteria. That, I feel, is sending us a message.

Simon: Terry, your Discworld books convey their learning lightly, but, beyond the jokes, they also convey an essentially comic view of the universe.

Terry: Of course. The world is an amusing place. Shakespeare wrote tragedies and he wrote comedies, and both give insights into the human condition. But while the tragedies make you sit there thinking, Oh my God, how dreadful all this is, the comedies make you think, Well, we are a ridiculous creature, aren’t we? Look at the mess we get ourselves into! Wouldn’t it be sensible to try and avoid some of this?

Simon: But the books in The Science of Discworld series do a pretty comprehensive job of convincing us that the mess is unavoidable, the the world is bloody unreasonable on just about every scale, and from end to beginning. Assuming it has one. In Judgement Day, you have some fun pulling apart the Big Bang.

Terry: People tend to assume that the Big Bang is established science, that it’s proved, and this is how science works. But it’s much more interesting than that. To talk blithely of the Big Bang is rather like talking blithely about the world sitting on turtles.

Ian: Because we’re not cosmologists, we tend to sit back and look at things like the Big Bang with a certain ironical distance. This is the current favourite theory. There’s a lot of evidence that seems to fit it. You can’t dismiss it. You certainly can’t dismiss it because it seems crazy, because it’s no more crazy than anything else. But there is a growing belief among cosmologists that as they understand the theory of the Big Bang better and ask more subtle questions about it, parts of the idea don’t make as much sense as they used to.

Terry: It wouldn’t surprise me if, twenty years from now, everyone is saying, “Oh, they used to believe in the Big Bang. How foolish.”

Ian: The thing is, the deeper we go in uncovering the laws of nature, the further removed they seem from anything human. The things we see when we look out of the window make sense to us, but science doesn’t really understand how those things link back to the really deep, underlying laws. I look out of the window at the moment and it’s raining. And I know what rain is. It’s water condensing from clouds, and so forth. But if I go further, until I hit the quantum mechanics of the water molecule, I’ll discover that there’s no really good theoretical link between the water molecule and the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics. According to them, there’s no such thing as the water molecule, just this incredibly complicated seething mass of hydrogen and oxygen atoms that keep linking together in very strange ways. The more scientists look at water, the less they understand it.

Terry: This is the joke that runs throughout the entire Science of Discworld series, of course: Discworld actually makes far more sense than our world. Things happen because people want them to and the world’s flat so you don’t fall off. What could be more reasonable than that?

Simon: The virtual unknowability of the real world feeds your comedy. I think for a lot of people it’s a source of despair.

Terry: Despair? Really?

Simon: Well, our model of the physical world is certainly more accurate than the one the ancient Greeks had. But it seems to me that getting progressively more decentered hasn’t done much for our morale. In fact our moral and ethical thinking has hardly progressed at all.

Terry: Ah, I see. Well the problem is, we know more and more, but we can only ever engage fully with a tiny fraction of what we know. We know things, but we don’t take them on board. Right now, for example. we know we’re using up the resources of the planet, but we don’t really do very much about it. And sometimes, when I mention this, people say, “Well, science will find a way.” And I have to say, “Look, there’s only so much stuff around here. So unless you know where there’s a good rocket and a nice planet to go to, I don’t see how we can ever get any more of it.” The moment’s not very far off when we’ll be fighting for resources and using up those resources in fighting for them. This is hardly science fiction. Science fiction is the chap who came up to me saying, “Well, we’ll probably find all the stuff we need in Antarctica.” Once we start messing about with that place — once that seems like a good, sensible idea — I think we’re done.

Simon: There’s a lot of stuff on Mars that’s useful.

Terry: I don’t actually think we’ve enough money or time to go and do anything about it. What would you say?

Simon: I’m wondering in that case whether you think intelligence really has much of chance. Maybe it uses resources too fast to actually sustain itself. The stars are remarkably quiet.

Terry: Well, that’s a way of looking at it and it may be true.

Simon: So are you optimistic or…?

Terry: This is one of those situations where optimistic or pessimistic doesn’t really matter. Something’s going to happen, one way or the other, and we know it’s out of our hands.

TOMORROW: Part 2 of Arc’s Judgement Day interview, in which we explore The Science of Discworld and throw a piano off a hotel roof.