Trillions
The name fitted perfectly. It had the right hard, bright sound to it - and Trillions were hard and bright. It suggests millions upon millions - and the Trillions were everywhere, sprinkling roads and gardens and roofs and even the firesides of people's homes with a glittery dusting of tiny jewels (but Trillions were not jewels).
And the name Trillions had a foreign sound to it - a suggestion of other worlds, star-studded skies, the cold emptiness of space. That was right, too. For wherever Trillions came from, it was not this world.
I finally read a book which haunted my childhood: Nicholas Fisk's 1971 young adult novel Trillions.
Whatever age I was when I first glanced at it (ten? twelve?), it scared the willies out of me, so much that I never plucked up the courage to read the whole thing. Reading the book now, it both amuses and startles me that I picked up entirely the wrong idea from the snippets of text I saw then. The Trillions of my imagination were extremely nasty space-Triffids; the ones in the book are the opposite. The story reads like a rather tame Doctor Who episode with an antiwar and ecological message: masses of tiny alien nanobot-creatures fall from the sky, a suspicious military attempt to use nuclear weapons to destroy them, a group of children make psychic contact with the tiny critters, discover that they are ecological repair robots and eventually use their newfound control to save them from the army. Somehow I both reversed the sense of it and created my own monsters (which still make me shiver today). That's kind of cool, actually.
The book does have several scary passages, but what I missed at that age is the context:
Scott suddenly saw a vision, like a photograph appearing in his mind, of the solitary figure in the space capsule. The figure was like a huge, elaborate, insect-like toy. It had a glinting, glassy, bulbous head. Its skin was of metallic silver material. Outside its body were veins - tubes and pipes and wires. But inside the glass-globe head there was a human face, in pain. And from one of the silvery arm-tubes there dangled a human hand with hairs on the back of it, nails on each finger tip and human warmth inside it. The hand moved uneasily and blood dripped from one finger.
The protagonist is talking to an astronaut about an Apollo-13 style space accident, and emphasising the loneliness and alienness of space; it is meant to be a little disturbing, but it's largely a fake-scare. What I picked up from this at age ten-something instead was a vision of alien Trillions somehow infecting and transforming humans into alien creatures. Where I got that, I'm not sure. But it sure freaked me out, and I could probably write a really scary ur-Trillion horror story if I wanted to.
(My Trillions were tiny virus-like diamondoids, each with a little 'sting', indestructible, with a hard cold alien intelligence which only wanted to consume, replicate, and possibly reconstruct the world into an alien ecosystem. They would eat the Terminator-1000 for breakfast, literally. It is difficult for me to convey the cold terror they conjured up in my brain - and I'm wondering now, where that came from.)
The Trillions are fascinating to me because they are an early nanobot story - long before Eric Drexler's 1986 'Engines of Creation', they have most of the pieces in place. They are little cogwork/lego type machines with a collective swarm intelligence, built like robots to serve long-departed 'Masters' and preserve their planet. Plausibly enough, they do not function as atomic assemblers but at a macro-scale: they can build mountains and large-scale structures, but not 'real' matter.
What I also missed was the flash of Christianity, in the dream-scene where Scott psychically contacts the ghosts of the aliens:
'We must serve the Master', said the Masters. 'The Master of everything. The Master of all planets, all lives, all of us, each single Trillion.'
'And the Trillions?'
'Through us, they serve the Master too.'
The mesh hummed gently. The Trillions that made the walls of the cavern shifted, twinkling and changing colour. Now the walls glowed purple, tinged with gold. The mesh vibrated, pleased. A veil of colour rose from it like a mist to thank them.
The ironic thing to me is that for a story which centres on the power of love and understanding of the alien versus fear, and the triumph of childlike trust versus adult incomprehension, it was the child me who was afraid, and the adult me who understands.
Big Dog
And here's another science-fiction image brought to life: Boston Dynamics' Big Dog. Watching this thing move is like the Imperial Probot from Empire Strikes Back mixed with a bit of The Fly.
What I fail to understand is why 100% of the world's residents *aren't* science fiction fans, given that we live in a science fiction world. Or is it that we simply make an artificial distinction between 'news' and 'fiction', between 'reporting', 'research', 'extrapolation', and 'speculation', between 'absolutely impossible' and 'not yet observed'? But they're all points on the same curve: we observe, we imagine, we predict, we experiment, we adjust our sense of reality. One blends into the other; if you try to artificially separate them, you lose sight of the terrifying intensity of the changes we're living through right now.
And that's just from a materialist perspective, before you even start to factor in the 'impossible' things which have been happening for millenia in the realms of the psychic, spiritual, or religious, and which our science for the most part has yet to digest.
(Both this and the Audeo via this article in the Boston Phoenix.)
Audeo
As a science fiction fan, one of the reasons I get deeply frustrated with people asking 'why do you care about that weird stuff?' is that the line between fiction and reality gets thinner each day.
Take the Audeo, for instance. According to this New Scientist article, and video, it's the first functioning piece of subliminal voice recognition hardware.
That is, if this tech isn't just vaporware, a computer can now scan your nerves, detect a signal for words you want to say without actually saying them, translate it into sound, and speak it for you.
It's not qualitatively a huge jump - we've had nerve-induction technology for decades, we've had voice recognition for almost as long, we've had voice-synthesis boxes for the disabled like Stephen Hawking's device, and they've been slowly getting better - and who knows what experimental stuff the US military has had access to - but seeing this happening in real-time in what could be a high-end consumer device... that's impressive, to me.
Of course, science fiction isn't about answering the question 'what will the future be like', because the future is made by human choice and we're too complicated to predict. What SF is good for is asking the question 'what do we WANT the future to be like?' Because often, until we can imagine that a technology like this MIGHT exist, and what its implications might suggest, we don't even understand how to go about deciding whether or not we like it.
Watch the Skies
A local UFO flap, or just dots?
2005:
January 2
2008:
April 10
April 10
April 26
Can't say I've ever seen anything interesting in the sky here.
Rynemonn
Not shatterwrack. Not breaklight.
Just broken glass at sunset.
Those words end the first magazine-published science fiction short story I think I ever read: Terry Dowling's haunting cyberpunkish Shatterwrack at Breaklight in Omni, 1985. The story (a sand-ship sailor encounters the holographic projection of a woman grieving a long-ago car accident in a future Australian city) got under my skin and left me dazzled and confused in a bewilderingly changed world, struggling to find my breath. It was a long time before I forgave Dowling for what he pulled on me.
(There are a few other SF writers who have had a similar effect: William Gibson's Burning Chrome from the same era stamped cyberspace and the BAMA Sprawl on my brain, but much later; Greg Egan, another Australian, with his infinitely bleak Transition Dreams; Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. But Dowling for me was the first.)
What I didn't realise at the time is that Shatterwrack was to be just the first of a long cycle of short stories all centering around Tom Tyson, the Blue Captain of the sandship Rynosseros, in Dowling's far-future romanticised post-spiritual-apocalypse Australia where Aboriginal Tribes rule the planet with laser satellites, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and psionic powers, while white-skinned Nationals are exiled to the crumbling coastal cities. The stories - collected in three books in the early 1990s (Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, and Twilight Beach) - are a love song to the Australian outback and the Aboriginal Dreamtime, filtered through a cocktail of 1980s high-tech cyberpunk and a sort of space-opera-steampunk retro-escapism, dashed with tense and elliptical political intrigue. William Gibson meets Cordwainer Smith by way of Frank Herbert. And they remain probably my favourite science fiction works of all time.
But the stories never ended, they just stopped; they never resolved the mystery of just who Tom Tyson was, why he spent years in the Madhouse, what his three dream-signs (a ship, a star, a woman's face) meant, why ID-5982-J, the old rogue Iseult-Darrian belltree AI, had given Colours to the Seven National Captains in defiance of the Haldanian Order themselves...
Well, that's over now, because the fourth and final Tom Tyson volume, Rynemonn, is out. And it's everything I had hoped for. Eleven short, mostly standalone, stories linked by a framing narrative, and resolving in a glorious, bittersweet, ambiguous battle royale that answers the basic questions of Tom's existence but leaves so much - everything, really - open to the reader's imagination.
If you've never read these stories (and the books are hard to come by, printed by a small press and possibly out of print, I had to get most of mine second-hand), but you love thoughtful, swashbuckling sci-fi (robots! aerostats! kite-powered sandships! mindwar! deathlamps! politics! genetic assassins! laser strikes from orbit for breaking tribal law!) - do your best to get hold of these.
Yes, there's probably also a lot wrong with the Rynosseros universe too, starting with a sort of reverse Western orientalism that both glamourises and fears native people's 'inherent spirituality', and a view of religion as little more than a form of mental warfare, so I'm not sure I could write these myself - but there's also a poetry and warmth that is missing from a lot of fiction today, speculative or otherwise.
One day I'd like to write something as good as these. It's just one of the unattainable goals I have that make me cry.
Looking for the Mouse
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."
Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.
-- Clay Shirky, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
Why the future belongs to those who can figure out how to radically decentralise, democratise, and empower the world to cooperate on projects they believe in, rather than try to centrally control it and enforce policy from above.
And that includes the Christian church.
The good news is that Christianity didn't actually start out as a top-down central control trip, so stepping into this terrifying new world of massive democracy actually means getting *back* to orthodox belief, not destroying it.
Squid, Boundary, Saucer, Ploughshares
Te Papa's Colossal Squid is now defrosted and pickling in formalin. I've been watching the webcast intermittently, but the photos on their blog are probably more interesting.
(Edit: Video clip from National Geographic.)
Via the TT Brown forum, the Boundary Institute has a very interesting collection of papers on logic- and computer-science approaches to a view of physics which would include psi.
Also via TT Brown, Wilbert Smith is a key figure in the Canadian UFO scene who deserves more attention, particularly on the intersection of the 'contactee' phenomenon and psychic phenomena.
And finally: yay to the Ploughshares team who deflated one of the Waihopai domes.
Pop!
The Christchurch Tram makes the FAIL Blog
Christchurch has officially arrived on the world scene this week: our local tram's little accident with a doorway has made the prestigious FAIL Blog.
Failure, the pinnacle of success.
Defying Gravity: The Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown
A new biography of Thomas Townsend Brown (that patron saint of antigravity and weird science), finished in 2005 and which I came across while it was being written, but which I have not yet read now that it's done.
It's a fun story, and looks like an intriguing read for fans like me of the UFO and antigravity mythos.
At the very least the man invented air ionisers. And maybe impossible things - or maybe not.
Edit: It's now Wednesday, and I've finished reading the book, and um, wow. It wasn't finished in 2005, it was finished a month ago, and the conversation's still ongoing. And those last two dreams seem pretty much predictive in retrospect.
The Semiotics of the Cross, pt3
watch the sun, as it crawls across a final time
and it feels like, like it was a friend
it is watching us, and the world we set on fire
do you wonder if it feels the same?and the sky is filled with light, can you see it?
all the black is really white, if you believe it
as your time is running out, let me take away your doubt
you can find a better place in this twilight
-- Trent Reznor (In This Twilight, Year Zero, 2007)
He has not left us comfortless. He has come to us, humbling Himself and making known His love to us through the love of man. Therefore the next step of our prayer, the step by which we translate the divine love into human terms, is for those of us who know Him to think of that most loving Son of Man, our Friend. He stands before us when we think of Him, forever receiving the eternal life of God and forever transmitting that life to us through love. He has given us His name to use, as a human friend might give us his name to use when we approach a man more great than he. Let us then comfort our hearts by thinking of His human tenderness and love. Uniting our hearts with His heart (by loving Him), let us ask in His name that the life of God may be increased in us.
-- Agnes Sanford (The Healing Light, 1947)
And lo, the voices of the Earth
Cried out and sounded discord
'Mid the heaven-song of Him.
And He a-walked Him from the sea's calm shore
And through the vale, the bittered cup to sup.Methinks that there within the garden place
I see me of His holied self a-stripped.
No brother of the flesh might know of Him,
For God be God and man doth fear to know.
And Earth doth stand it, still a-crying out
Against this song of love.
And yet, I do to see Him sit,
Calm eyes unto the sea
And wisdomed past the tell.
-- Patience Worth (quoted by Mrs John H Curran, The Sorry Tale, 1917)
What does the Cross mean?
The Cross is a terrifying thing to me: the symbol of everything that is broken, twisted, and wrong in the human heart, human society, and the universe in which we live. It is a human thing, the product of one specific culture, but the message it sends is universal. It is a made thing, a social construction, but it relies for its power on built-in weaknesses in the human body: our mortality, thrown up in our own face. This is the way the world is. It breaks you.
The Cross is the symbol of violent death. There is no way to make this pretty or attractive or healthy or life-giving. It would be like dressing a swastika up in roses. Crucifixion is a thing people used to do to one another in order to bring the roughest kind of 'justice' to the earth, and we still do much the same thing only with different methods.
Christ's command to 'take up your cross and follow me' also terrifies me. How can I face what I fear most? How can someone who is supposed to be love incarnate ask me to do this? Where is the healing? Where is the grace? Where is my escape? I ask for salvation, and I get... this?
And I face this symbol, this event, this... thing... every week at the Eucharist. And at Easter it comes home to me even more forcefully. I cannot escape the Cross, even in my mind. It is everywhere.
I look at the world and I see a Cross writ large. I see a storm everywhere on the horizon. I see war rising again. I see religion tearing communities apart. I see economic globalisation sweeping like a manic machine out of control, enforcing random discipline on markets long since decoupled from reality. I see a roll call of species brought to extinction by human activity. I see melting icebergs. I see the spectre of new plagues and old plagues returning. I see resource wars over water, oil, food.
What is there left to hope for? I could hope that none of this happens, that climate change, peak oil, water scarcity, financial crash do not touch us. That the Four Horsemen stay safely locked up. And perhaps a great global crash can still be avoided. But for many millions today, either urban poor or in warzones, it seems that the Horsemen are already riding, as they have been for centuries. If the smallest part of the worst has already happened, and we were too late to avert it, can we escape the greater part?
The Cross gives me nothing but fear. The shadow of the future is dark. I do not know how to see beyond disaster, or somehow beside disaster to another brighter option.
Worst of all, I have no assurance that a huge global disaster would not somehow be the best possible outcome at this point. Have we gone so far down a dark path that we need something of that magnitude to wake us up?
I do not want to wake up to a world in mass starvation, constant war, and screaming chaos. Even if half of the world seems already to be there. Is it selfish of me to want the First World not to fall? The Anglo-American Empire not to crumble, as other empires have?
And yet.
Somehow, when I participate in the Eucharist, that fear is gone (and I am not making this up; this happened today). There is a literal presence, somehow real, that gives me at least a temporary solace. How? Where? What is going on?
How can the Cross, a thing of death, bring salvation?
I think the only way I can start to come to understand this is to think this: Christ is not the Cross. In fact He is the Cross's polar opposite. He is the enemy and devourer of all that destroys. He is the life that is untouched by pain and the love that is unbroken by death. He is pictured for us on the Cross only because that is where we need to find Him, because that is where we are.
There is something that looks from the outside like a paradox here, but it is not really a contradiction. When the Apostles looked back (after the Resurrection) at Christ on the Cross, they saw something entirely different from what they saw on that Friday which was not at the time Good.
There is a great truth, I think, in the old saying: 'by His stripes we are healed'. It is even literally true, I suspect. I think what it means is something like this: we can only touch others with the experiences we have. And our spirits seek their own level, like water. Even God, the source of all good, cannot reach us if we choose at some deep inner level not to be reached; though He can send intermediaries, and use all the other channels available to Him. (And if God has infinite resources and infinite patience, then I have no doubt that He will ultimately succeed, even 'has succeeded' from His point of view, even if from ours it is 'not everywhere, not yet').
To be a 'saint', I think, is to somehow be a sort of channel for God; a way for the Light to reach out across universes to connect to others. If some of the strange stories of the psychics and contemplatives is true, then saints continue in this mission even after death, channelling grace to the world. But if we can only reach those with whom we have some resonance, or sympathy (in the physical sense), some set of shared experiences, then in order to channel grace, those chosen (or who choose) to be saints must suffer: they must take on somehow some of the darkness in order to have it transmuted into light.
What Jesus is, I think, is the 'saint of saints' - the 'capstone of the arch' - the one channel who can be always available. And to fill that role, He had to suffer.
I think the point is that Jesus did not necessarily want to suffer (that would make him sado-masochistic), but that accepting that suffering was in the world, He wanted to be present in the world in order to be present in our lives as a counterforce to that suffering. Which is a role He continues in today.
And somehow thinking of this - which is to say, thinking of us - was an antidote to the fear.
It is not the Cross that I want to embrace. It is the opposite of the Cross.
I am afraid to say yes, and I am afraid to say no (to what? I am glad I do not even know what the question is), but somehow in the middle of it all I have to do is breathe.
I was crying over you
I am smiling I think of you
Where your garden have no walls
Breathe in the air if you care, you compare, don't say farewell
Nothing can compare
To when you roll the dice and swear your love's for me
Nothing can compare
To when you roll the dice and swear your love's for me
-- Finlay Quaye (Dice, Much More Than Much Love, 2004)