Haydon’s grasp of sf doesn’t seem to extend far beyond Star Trek and Star Wars and there’s a sneaking suspicion that the the whole blog piece has been written solely so he can make some jokes about David Tennant/Patrick Stewart’s forthcoming RSC appearance in a “sci fi Hamlet” – “Go on, RSC, put Hamlet on the Death Star”).

Before that, though, Haydon does manage to make at least one serious point about why theatre doesn’t have a significant science fiction presence. Describing a performance at the National Student Drama Festival of a piece called When You Cry in Space Your Tears Go Everywhere, made by a group of recent graduates of Dartington College called Tinned Fingers, Haydon says:

one of the performers reading out a list of thoughts and descriptions suddenly offers the gem: “space is a bit 70s”. It’s a great line, primarily because it is so accurate. It seamlessly pinpoints a whole feeling that can be summed up by the T-shirt slogan “This Was Supposed to Be the Future” – the idea that we have now passed all the major dates that, when we were growing up in the 70s and 80s, signified the future: Space 1999, 2000AD, 2001 A Space Odyssey. Rarely have I heard a collective penny drop so loudly in an audience.

And he suggests that this might be why sci-fi so rarely makes it ont the stage:

As well as being regarded with a certain warmth, there’s also a sense of mistrust around the genre. Writers fear that it’s somehow a bit uncool – a bit 70s – and so we get interminable plays about Urgent Contemporary Issues rather than coolly speculative projections. It’s a shame. After all, some of the 20th century’s greatest literature was set in the future – consider 1984, Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange.

Of course what this doesn’t explain is why, when science fiction had its firmest grip on people’s expectations of the future (from the 1950s to the mid 1980s?) there wasn’t a significant explosion of speculative theatre – and no Starlight Express doesn’t count. And nor do Lord of the Rings: The Musical or Wicked!

A number of comments below the blog make attempts to argue that sf theatre is more common that Haydon allows – but Return to the Forbidden Planet (a tongue in cheek adaptation of a film that was itself an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest) hardly amounts to contempory sf. Nor do the various adaptations (many done by amateur or semi-professional companies) of works by writers like Pratchett address the need for contemporary, original science fiction that uses the unique forms of theatre for speculation rather than simply adapting stories from other media. And, while setting Hamlet in space or The Women of Troy in the future might cast an interesting light on existing texts, it doesn’t make them, in any meaningful sense, science fiction. There’s a case for plays like Copenhagen (which takes the theme of uncertainty and weaves it into the construction of the play) and, less questionably, On Ego to be classed as speculative and there are clearly authors out there who want to use the theatre for speculative purposes – Sarah Kane gets a couple of mentions.

But perhaps the real reason why science fiction isn’t more common in theatre might also be found in the comments section below Haydon’s post – where science fiction is defined solely by its setting (i) in the future and (ii) in space or (iii) has robots in it. This typically conservative view of what makes science fiction (or more particularly) sci-fi is depressingly familiar and reflects the typical view of “sci-fi”.

And, of course, theatre – especially commercial theatre – is the most conservative of the arts. With huge fixed costs (buildings/casts/crew) relative to the amount it can make (from a fixed number of seats in one physical location at a time and at most two performances per day) the theatre is a hard place to break even, let alone make a profit. So commercial theatre tends to stick pretty firmly to the mainstream – the kind of stuff that respectable, bourgeois, slightly aged audiences expect on an expensive night out.

So sf theatre is always likely to be marginal – but it’s worth noting that it is out there for audiences willing to go looking for it – and that perhaps there’s an opportunity for fandom to look for ways to embrace it?

There’s been the gloomy blogging about whether there’s any point in short fiction (a primer on that discussion is here) that took place while I, failing to notice the form’s untimely demise, have just finished enjoying the shit out of Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (in Subterranean Press’s beautiful little hardback)was busy reading Nina Allan’s awesome first short story collection (buy it damn you, buy it) and the excellent Zencore!, (Nemonymous seven) and then picked up two great new compilations edited Ian Whates (disLocations and Time Pieces).

Then Ridley Scott announced the end of sf cinema and a many nodded and rubbed their chins as though this had proven exactly what they always expected (and hoped, secretly, because those damned movies just weren’t as grown up as their books) ignoring the fact that the past twelve months had been a fantastically fecund year for intelligent, not to say provoking, sf cinema, as evidence by perhaps the highest quality Hugo “dramatic presentation” shortlist ever (perhaps 2000 – if we forgive the bizarre victory of the mediocre Galaxy Quest – and 1983 come close).

So, anyway, given that everyone else is notching up the death of various bits of science fiction it hardly came as a surprise to find, on page 64 of William Gibson’s Spook Country, that cyberspace wasn’t just dead, it had never been born.

“Someone told me that cyberspace was ‘everting.’ That was how she put it.”

“Sure. And once it everts, then there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction. With the grid, we’re here. This is the other side of the screen. Right here… We’re all doing VR every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles and the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right? … One day you will… have internalised the interface. It’ll have evolved to the point where we forget about it. Then you’ll just walk down the street…” He spread his arms, and grinned at her.” (64-65)

Having just finished Spook Country you can see this as marking a point where Gibson puts some very significant and deliberate distance between his past work and his current direction (although perhaps not as much as some commentators have claimed given the way that story unfolds – but I’ll try and come back to that in another post) but I did think that this passage cast an interesting light on another post-cyberpunk book I’d just finished.

As I noted here before, Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End was an enjoyable book that seemed to have something important missing from it. I think reading Gibson, I’ve worked out what it was – it was a sense that we shared in the “future shock” of his central character. It was that we’ve “internalised the interface” to the point that the tricks that Vinge hopes will amaze us just don’t seem to offer that big a hurdle.

It’s not for the want of Vinge trying. He projects into his future a Rip van Winkle-esque character, Robert Gu, who is old-fashioned even by current standards – a poet who is a literary snob so deeply entrenched in the ways “high art” and the academy that his computer experience halts around Windows 3.11. He is, effectively, forced to create a character who is already out-of-date to boost the sense of shock that his protagonist must overcome.

And that made me wonder whether Gibson is right. More than twenty-five years ago, when Gibson was imagining his form of cyberspace in “Johnny Mnemonic” and those other early stories, contact (for that minority for whom there was any meaningful contact) with the “information revolution” was by DOS and the command line. Even Apple were still living in the land of CP/M!

The last quarter of a century has seen the shift from the text-based to the visual interface – and much of our expectation of how that interface should work has been shaped by the speculations of sf writers and movie designers. So, even though we’re still not living in the world of all immersive cyberspace or the all connected info-sphere, we can see it from where we stand. We can imagine it, in films like Minority Report or I, Robot (average films, awesome design) we’ve seen it and we expect it to happen, we’re only waiting for the engineers and the business model to catch-up with our expectations.

In politics there is the idea of “discounted expectation” – if something is talked about often enough, far-enough in advance then the public have become so inured to the idea that, by the time the change actually happens – a tax rise, a hospital closure – they’ve already discounted its impact and hardly notice. Parties use it to try and reduce the adverse reaction to the unpopular policies they’re planning to introduce and to encourage people to discount the popular policies of their opponents. It’s why tax rises in the UK are now announced two years in advance.

Well, it seems to me, we’ve already discounted our expectations of the cyber-future. We might not live in Neuromancer’s fly-through digi-space or Rainbows End’s infinitely embedded info-sphere but our experience of the already existing media-environment means we have a pretty good idea of what it will look and feel like. Our 24 hour, always on, wireless, broadband, interactive and hyper-connected lives have us thumbing our Blackberries (or texting our mates), carrying our entertainment libraries (books, music and increasingly DVD collections) on our hips while shouting at people no one can see and only we can hear.

What this means is that we can find our own way to cyberpunk universes from here – and for most of us it won’t be cool trenchcoats and shotguns (“If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy.”), it’ll be consumer goods and passing the time on the commute home. And we don’t need gurus or prophets to guide us to that future anymore, we’re over the last hill, we can see it ourselves. Moses, sit down, you don’t get to come the last mile.

Of course there are still people who are going to get left behind by the technology. Eventually, I suppose, we all will. But then that’s the job of one generation – it’s supposed to leave the last one behind. This weekend my daughter (four) beat me at tennis on the Wii (and I was trying) and it would never have happened if we’d been playing the game with a joystick and d-pad – because she can’t get her head around those yet but the Wii interface she can thoroughly internalise. I can already sense the obsolescence creeping up on me. I don’t get social networking – though that may not be technological, it might just be because I’m a grumpy bastard and functional hermit – and for the first time I recently sat down and tried to learn some new computer stuff (PHP and MySQL) and decided that it might be more effort than I have left in me.

But, at least for the moment, the technological plateau before us doesn’t seem to offer the kind of precipice of incomprehensible future shock that it did 25 years ago. But of course Gibson got here before me, didn’t he, when he noted way back then, that the “future is already here, its just not equally distributed”.

Which brings me back to Vernor Vinge and Rainbow’s End, by a too convoluted a route. You see the thing I think the thing I found missing from this novel was the sense that Robert Gu was somehow an empathetic character – he’s obviously stuffy and hard to like but at a more crucial level, Vinge needed us to be able to empathise with his predicament, his technologically enforced isolation and that he was the party injured by time. But Vinge has had to make his character such an extreme case to emphasise the drama that he seems either utterly incredible or the deserved victim of his own bloody-mindedness. In either case his journey from Nobel-winning poet to minor tech-guru doesn’t ring true.

Of course the future has its way of surprising us. Perhaps the event horizon of a singularity is steaming, invisible and unstoppable towards us even as I speak and in a decade or two we’ll all be left like Vinge’s Gu (is it me, or does that sound like a nasty medical condition) lost in a world we don’t comprehend. But I wonder if the majority of us haven’t already “internalised the interface” (or at least the fundamental parts of it) to the point that the machines are going to have to work like we want, not vice versa.

I’ve always thought that Steven Pinker pretty much nailed it when he said in an essay in Prospect in 2000: “The future, I suggest, will not be unrecognisably exotic, because across all the dizzying changes which shaped the present and will shape the future, one element remains constant: human nature… We can also predict that our mind will shape, rather than be reshaped by, the information technology of the future. Why have computers recently infiltrated our lives? Because they have been painstakingly crafted to mesh better with the primitive workings of our minds.”

A bit like space travel, cyberspace is going to turn out to be a bit humdrum, a bit unspectacular, a bit “what’s the big deal” – it will have to be, because that’s the only way it’ll be accepted, because that’s the only way “the primitive workings of our mind” will be able to internalise it. That’s why Gibson is right – we’re already living in cyberspace – and Vinge’s vision of generations left-behind because of a communications revolutions does not ring true like it once did.

We’ve already discounted the revolution. Now we just want to be let play with the toys.

1. My daughter’s new class photograph. Okay no one else is interested in this but it is funny – thirty-odd four year olds caught trying to smile precisely at the moment it started to rain on them. You can see the confusion of their faces – the mix of “we’re four, we’re looking cute cos that’s what four year olds are best at” and the barely constrained fury of a smallish mob of wild things forced to get wet while some idiot points a camera at them. It’s a bit like someone’s opened Schrodinger’s box and captured the point where the wave between angel and anti-christ finally collapses. If looks could kill…

2. Postscripts issue 10. I’m late getting this because I accidentally let my subscription lapse, but Peter Crowther has definitely stretched the definition of a “magazine” to breaking point. This is a 350+ page hardback that just happens to feature fiction by Joe Hill, Connie Willis, Graham Joyce and some bloke called Stephen King, amongst others. Most excitingly, for me, is a big section devoted to Michael Marshall Smith, whose novels I enjoy, even when he drops the “Marshall” (err “Smith”, obviously) and writes “mainstream” detective stories (with vast global conspiracies and psychic bigfoots!). I’m going on holiday later in the month, and Postscripts 10 will be in my bag. I’m hoping to get to MMS’s The Intruders soon too.

3. Triquorum 2, is a plainly covered collection of three novellas. I really enjoyed issue one, so this will be coming with me on holiday too. Not least because it features Jason Andrew’s fantastically titled Fear and Loathing in Bat County: Hunter S Thompson vs Dracula.

4. Jupiter no. 17 (named after the moon Callirrhoe, which, as my wife succinctly and accurately points out, sounds like a venereal disease) I always say this, but Ian Redman’s little A5 photocopied jobby is one of my favourite arrivals through the letterbox, and not just because the nice man published two of my stories. Jupiter delivers “core sf” – stories will often feature spaceships and aliens and plots – and while some of the writers who appear in Jupiter (and I include myself in this category) aren’t quite ready for prime time, the magazine frequently prints very strong stories. Fantastically regular, for a small press magazine, and ludicrously low-priced, how can you not subscribe?

5. I picked up a copy of Schismatrix Plus, the collection of all (It’s an old book, is that still true?) of Bruce Sterling’s Shaper/Mechanist stories – I’ll happily reread the novel and the only one of the short stories I’ve read is “Twenty Evocations”, which was in Interzone, so there are four new ones in the volume. More holiday reading.

6. This blog post has been brought to you by Simian Mobile Disco, who as well as having one of the best band names ever, have also been cheering me up with their new album Attack Decay Sustain Release (sad, though, that I’m old enough (and wasn’t wasted enough at the time) to remember rave the first time around). It’s tiding me over until the new Chemical Brothers album arrives – bring me big beats. Bigger, damn you, bigger!

7. High interest rates might be threatening to bankrupt me due to the spiralling cost of our mortgage, but on the bright side it does mean it’s cheaper to buy cool shit/tat from America. I could resist this no longer. The tin box is a thing of beauty as is the little Robbie the Robot figure. I’m looking forward to sitting down with the film and watching this sparkling new print (which looks fantastic on a quick inspection).

I’m currently reading Brasyl - which I’ll probably review more fully later – on the train and my “bedtime book” is Helix by Eric Brown, which has been great fun so far (about half way through). Next up probably David Marusek’s Counting Heads (at last) and Alistair Reynolds’ The Prefect.

But, the reason for this post is that I’ve just finished reviewng David Gunn’s first novel, Death’s Head (to appear at some future date in Vector). Six hundred words, I had, to explain why I didn’t like it.

Charles Stross managed to sum it all up in two: “carnographic war-porn”.

Perfect.

And the clever bugger didn’t even have to read the damn book.

Of course being too sick to move far enough from the toilet for long enough to go to work but not so sick that you can’t sit up in bed with an endless supply of weak lemon drink does have advantages – like the chance to read, uninterrupted.

Which is how I came to be the last “fan” in Christendom to read Peter Watt’s novel Blindsight. Now I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting from the book, but whatever it was, Blindsight wasn’t it.That’s not to say there weren’t bits of the book I really liked – but there were also big bits of it that didn’t work at all for me. Like vampires. And perfunctory plotting. And evaporating alien threats.

But I don’t want to concentrate on the things I didn’t like – I want to talk about the stuff that interested me and that clearly interested Peter Watts more than the rest of the book. Particularly his discussion of consciousness, what it means and what it might be for.

I’ve been doing some of my own reading on consciousness and intelligence because I’m thinking about writing a story (that might be my first serious punt at a novel for over fifteen years) that deals with AI and identity and what a thinking machine might really be like.

Blindsight gives a run out to one of the most venerable (if that’s the right world in a field as young as artificial intelligence research) paradoxes in the theory of machine thinking – the Chinese Room.

The Chinese Room problem places a man in an almost completely sealed room. The man has a stack of tiles and a rulebook. The only opening into the room sees tiles with markings come into the room. The man opens his rulebook and, depending on what the book says about each set of markings, he selects tiles from his own stock and passes them through another slot to the outside world.

The man doesn’t know that the markings on the tiles that he is receiving are one side of a conversation conducted in Chinese or that the markings on the tiles he is sending out are responses, also in Chinese.

Effectively the man in the room has been having a conversation in Chinese even though he speaks no Chinese. Indeed for the person passing the tiles into the room, not only is the “system” conducting a conversation but it is doing it so well that it meets the criteria for intelligence as set down by the Turing Test.

And this is where the controversy starts. The Chinese Room problem was first set down in 1980 by John Searle who sought to use it to demonstrate the weakness of the position of advocates of so called “Strong AI” who argue that if a system works in a way that is functionally equivalent to an “understanding” being then it must be considered to “understand”. But, no matter where you look in the Chinese Room system, Searle argued, there is no evidence of understanding.

Proponents of Strong AI argue that, far from disproving their case, Searle’s Chinese Room demonstrates that (as with the human brain) understanding, consciousness even, can emerge from in a system where the constituent parts are dumb. Neurons don’t “understand” the world but the mind does.

This, broadly speaking, is the line that Watts has his characters accept in Blindsight.

Watts’s narrator, Siri Keeton, was the subject of radical brain surgery as a child, which has left him somewhere just this side of autistic with his ability to relate to those around him severely impaired. With a half a hemisphere full of technology, Kiri’s “disability” has helped create the perfect impartial observer – he watches the world, he applies rules, he responds. Siri is, as one of the characters notes, a walking Chinese Room.

But for me, Searle was right. The Chinese Room is not conscious. Nor does it display understanding. The Chinese Room displays only syntax – the operation of rules – not semantics or meaning.

A conscious mind does more than apply rules to inputs received from the outside and respond with appropriate outputs. For understanding to have any real meaning, it must demonstrate an appreciation of context, the capability to recognise patterns and make predictions from limited knowledge and some degree of empathy (to understand the likely positions of other actors – human or otherwise – in the system). The “mind” (whatever that is) is not just sorting rules – understanding implies anticipation, adaptation and reshaping the environment – not just reacting to it. All of these elements are missing in the Chinese Room, no matter how far up the system we look.

This is not the fuzzy, warm argument about man being divided from the machine by his ability to write a sonnet or appreciate Wagner – I’d be excluded from higher-thinking for a start – but it is to say that I don’t think understanding or consciousness can be divided from the physical sack of mostly water our brains find themselves sloshing around in. The emphasis on the brain as the source of “intelligence” ignores the fact that a great deal of the bodies processing power is distributed around the nervous system and that the feedback from that system, the demands it makes the perceptions it provides and the context it sets must play as important a part in human “consciousness” and “understanding” as the sparking neurons in our frontal lobe.

The stimulation of the senses, the context provided by the body, the environment in which the body exists, these are as much part of the human consciousness machine as the brain. And the differences in the physicality of an octopus, a parrot and a human go some way to explaining why these three problem-solving creatures exhibit their intelligence and their “understanding” in very different ways. Think how much more complex understanding between an alien or an AI will be.

Actually the acceptance of some Strong AI advocates of a Chinese Room as a real thinking device is a symptom of the malaise that gripped AI research for decades. Another is the concentration on gimmicky talking programmes designed to meet the very narrow (human-centric) view of language as evidence of intelligence. A considerable proportion of AI researchers have spent decades bogged down with coming up with ways to trick an observer that the box they’re talking is just as stilted and unenlightening in conversation as the average geeky AI researcher. The Turing test has warped AI research and taken it down some unhelpful dead-ends.

Intelligence, understanding, consciousness are words we’re barely able to define as they might relate to non-human creatures and by far the most exciting idea in Blindsight is the idea that “consciousness” is an evolutionary dead end. Watts presents us with the superhuman vampire – a highly intelligent predator without any of our “drawbacks” – and with military officer Susan Bates’s robot arsenal – crippled by being slaved to her conscious decision-making – and, of course, the starfish like aliens, who, freed from consciousness, aren’t just cleverer than humans but display intelligence of a different order of magnitude and are terrifyingly capable of the most minute manipulation of our brains.Watts’s cold, clinically realised conclusion in Blindsight is that consciousness will condemn us to the fate of the dodo.

It’s not a conclusion I agree with, nor from Blindsight’s appendices (I love hard sf, where else does a novel come with appendices…) I suspect does Watts, but it is fantastically well argued and cleverly woven into the fabric of the novel – though there’s a fair degree of infodumping as well. Still, Blindsight is one of those novels that restore my sometimes battered faith in hard sf. It takes really BIG ideas and wrestles with them and tries with honest endeavour to make them fit into a rational world, whether they want to fit or not.