tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-366616182024-03-12T18:17:06.775-07:00A dimly lit cloud of a shadow of doubtElzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.comBlogger368125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-21737064415218654282019-12-24T11:42:00.000-08:002019-12-24T11:42:02.848-08:00Book review: R. F. Kuang "The Poppy War"<p>I liked this book more than most other fantasy books I read this year. It drew me in from the beginning. The story is not exactly light-hearted, but -- at least at first -- it didn't lack in humor. The heroine Runin's (Rin for short) situation somewhat resembles Harry Potter's: she is an orphan with unusual talents growing up in an adopted family that mistreats and undervalues her. The family wants to get rid of her as soon as possible by marrying her off as a teen. But her talents, persistence, and cunning lets her escape her family and the looming marriage, and achieve a future that no one of her social class could dream of.</p>
<p>Hopefully this is not too much of a spoiler, because this happens relatively early in the book. Rin is admitted into the nation's top school, where, despite some teachers' attempts to derail her, she persists and gains exclusive, esoteric knowledge that's unattainable even for the elite students of that school. All throughout that, the book has a Harry Potter'esque "wizard school novel" feel, except that Rin is more like Hermione than Harry. Clever and doggedly stubborn, she outwits the stodgy adults that consider her unworthy of being there and thwart her at every step.</p>
<p>But the tone of the book completely changes in the second chapter, about a third into the novel. It changes so much that I wondered whether the first chapter and the rest of the book were initially separate novels featuring different protagonists, and only later for some reason were fused into one. The humor of the first chapter is gone, and the book takes a dark turn. The country is at war, and Rin is now a member of a small squad called the Cike, which is roughly a roving band of wizards. The Cike have supernatural powers. In this book, magic comes in a form of connecting to a god (in this nation's pantheon there are several) and asking them to do the dirty work for you. Often the practitioners of "lore", or magic, need to take consciousness-altering drugs to connect with gods. </p>
<p>Their magic powers, however, don't make the Cike superheroes. For all their formidable abilities, they still are unable to stand up against the vicious aggressor armies. This is part of what I liked about this book. It shows the limitations of magic very clearly. And it shows how the wizards' superpowers can lead them down a tragic path. They can't help but spiral into the ultimate arms race. Since the very beginning, Rin's old lore teacher -- the one who taught her to connect with the gods -- tells her that she should not under any circumstances try to "weaponize" them, i. e. call on their powers in a war. What the gods will unleash on Earth will be far more terrible than the damage done by war, he warns her. And, as you might expect, the Cike -- who are in their teens and early twenties, and have knowledge, but not much wisdom -- quickly get drawn into the cycle of aggression and revenge. They pull the gods into the war to exact worse and worse punishment, which, in turn, provokes more aggression from the invading army. </p>
<p>The dilemma is presented in the book very vividly. The aggressor is so horribly cruel that in the reader's mind there is not even a doubt that it's worth calling upon gods to destroy them -- until a wise man like Rin's teacher Jiang makes a case that maybe you really, really shouldn't. The reader gets to see the points both pro and con, and those are not strawmen arguments. They are weighty and well-balanced. True, the brutality of the enemy army can seem so excessive that it's at times ridiculous, but it's probably nothing that hasn't happened in some part of Earth at some point or another.</p>
<p>Being forced to choose between different evils, when it's hard to even tell which one is bigger, makes for a good tension source in a book. I liked that this book didn't have a happy ending. At most it had an ending that could be described as "not the worst possible".</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-52803276201002498602019-12-19T18:52:00.003-08:002019-12-19T18:52:58.582-08:00Book review: C. J. Cherryh "Foreigner"<p>It was a slow-paced book, and I was afraid I wasn't going to finish it -- I no longer force myself to finish books that don't sufficiently appeal to me -- but I finished it because, despite the slowness, it had some indescribable satisfactory quality. Perhaps because it was a book you could watch unfold before your eyes like a movie. Sometimes you read a book where every sentence falls apart into a pile of words as soon as you are finished with it, without adding up to an image in your head. This is the opposite. This book is highly immersive. Just for that quality you might like to continue reading it even when the plot is not very compelling. But those who like fast-moving narrative might not find it to their taste.</p>
<p>The main character, Bren is an ambassador of sorts to an alien race, called <i>atevi</i> that lives on a planet where humans are guests. Or perhaps he is more like a translator between humans and <i>atevi</i>. His official title in <i>atevi</i> language is <i>paidhi</i>, and that's how he is referred to throughout the book. He lives in the royal court of one of the planet's several kings, or <i>aiji</i>. Humans are permanent, though unwanted, guests on this world, because they ended up there by mistake and can't get off of it. Humans live in just one continent, maintain a truce with the <i>atevi</i>, and have been slowly trickling out their technologies to the <i>atevi</i>. At present they brought the local technology up to roughly the level of early 21st century Earth. The locals are civil to the humans, but (as behooves aliens) inscrutable.</p>
<p>One day someone attempts to assassinate <i>paidhi</i> Bren. In response to that, the king / <i>aiji</i> quickly orders him whisked away to a remote corner of the country. It's done under the guise of the <i>paidhi</i>'s protection, but it quickly becomes clear that it's more like imprisonment. He is exiled to a place where he is completely isolated and has no way to contact any humans.</p>
<p>This happens fairly early in the book, and then for the next 300-something pages neither he, nor we, the readers, know what was the true reason of his abduction, or where all this is going. The book slows down as Bren tries to figure out where he stands with his captor-protectors based on short, fragmented conversations he has with them. </p>
<p>He is not sure where their loyalty lies. Are they loyal to him? He strongly suspects not. Are they loyal to their employer(s), such as the <i>aiji</i>, or other organizations and alliances? Nor is he sure whether it is useful to them to keep him alive. He knows (but is not sure if the natives known) that the <i>atevi</i> can't use him as a pawn to extract something of value from the humans, because if his life is threatened, the human government will let him die. They said so from the start and he took the job with the full understanding of this. So, in this situation, he knows there is nothing protecting his life but his captors' whim.</p>
<p>He tries to probe their minds via short, fragmented conversations, but those conversations always skirt the essence of the topic. Yet they occupy the next 300-something pages of the book. Those talks are fraught with misunderstandings, some of them absurd, but not in a funny way. For example, the <i>atevi</i> can't fathom that the word "like" has many meanings, and that to like a food is very different than to like a person. This seemed rather unLIKEly to me. Bren even speculates that the locals don't have feelings. At the same time, it is obvious that they have feelings of dignity and pride, and that pride is rather easily wounded by a foreigner asking the wrong kinds of questions.</p>
<p>Those conversations don't go very far, and three quarters into the book we still don't have a clue who Bren can or cannot trust. So we are still waiting for the other shoe to drop, which is to say we are waiting for this low-grade suspense to lead to a huge revelation. There are so many minor shoes dropping throughout the book that you can never tell which of them is "the real thing" as opposed to random incident. Then, finally, around 3/4 into the book, his situation goes from merely uncomfortable to much worse. Only then the key point is revealed, and we find out the real reason he is kept captive. The pace of the book picks up after that. </p>
<p>I didn't understand what conclusion he reached at the ending either. Maybe I need to reread it. It seems like he was faced with a hard conclusion that humans were not welcome on this planet, but found a way to negotiate with <i>atevi</i> that could lead to permanent peace. But if there was an <i>a-ha!</i> moment in this book, it was rather subtle.</p>
<p>To summarize, this is a book for those who like science fiction with lots of psychological nuance. I personally like it too, but this wasn't the kind of nuance I could relate to. But then I'm known to be a robot. If you can tolerate the plot advancing very slowly, and if you are intrigued by characters trying to figure out what another character meant by their every utterance or gesture, with cultural differences thrown in, then it may be a book for you. I have to say, for me, the character's ruminations supplied just enough intrigue not to put the book aside, but ultimately did not add to something satisfying.</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-44272651648972044342019-02-01T15:16:00.001-08:002019-09-20T19:32:01.478-07:00Editing like a boss with Tex Thompson: ArmadilloCon 2018 panel<p>This was another of the wonderful panels / mini-workshops on various aspects of writing -- this time, on editing your own work -- by Arianne "Tex" Thompson. Like everything by Tex Thompson, her advice on editing was broken down into bullet points and sub-bullet points, each of which contained examples of how to accomplish it.</p>
<h2><a id="content">Five hot tips for content and developmental editing</a></h2>
<p>1. <a id="coincidences"><b>Eliminate happy coincidences</b></a>. The coincidences that make the protagonist's life harder are mostly OK. Turn "but fortunately" into "oh, shit".</p>
<p>Example: if you have characters who are willing to help the protagonist, turn them into characters that are not really able to help. Or into character that are able to help, but not willing. Why should I help you? You should earn it. Or characters that are able and willing to help, but their help comes with strings attached.</p>
<p>2. <b><a id="boring">Blow up the boring parts</a></b>. You are bored reading them, but you don't know how your story should get from part A to part B.</p>
<p>Here are some examples how to make boring parts more exciting.</p>
<p>Instead of having a breakup conversation in a private place like home, or a Starbucks or a restaurant, have it in an unusual setting: in the middle of a traffic jam in a car, when no one could escape, on a whaling ship, or at an 8-year-old's birthday party at a roller rink. Can we do it at a paintball match? This can help you to spice it up and put some interesting twist on it. The world is dropping from under our feet, but we still have to do the hokey pokey, since it's an 8-year-old's birthday party. Or at the roller rink somebody falls and breaks their leg.</p>
<div style="float:left;width:300px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2018/IMG_20180805_131304_Editing_DivideAndConquerSm.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-east-1.dream.io/elze-images/2018/20180803_05_ArmadilloCon/20180805/IMG_20180805_131304_Editing_DivideAndConquerSm.jpg" alt="Arianne 'Tex' Thompson 'Editing like a Boss' panel" title="Arianne 'Tex' Thompson 'Editing like a Boss' panel"></a>
<br/><code>Arianne 'Tex' Thompson 'Editing like a Boss' panel</code>
</div>
<p>In a novel "Matterhorn" (by Karl Marlantes? There are other novels by that title, but I assume that's the one Tex meant -- E.), there is a long infodump when a character goes around a military camp and is introduced to lots of people and is told their military ranks and names. That would be boring, but at the same time there is a medical drama brewing, where somebody has to be medevacuated, but helicopters can't land because of high winds. So there is a ticking clock. The infodumpy introductions are alternated with the medical drama.</p>
<p>A race against time can definitely spice up the boring parts.</p>
<p>Another way to introduce suspense is to let your readers know that something dangerous or terrible is about to befall the characters, but the characters don't know it. For example, the audience knows there is a monster under a child's bed, but the kid doesn't know it. So any time when the kid rolls over and his arm drops off the bed, the audience winces.</p>
<p>3. <b><a id="repetitions">Target accidental repetitions</a></b>
<p>Make them deliberate or delete them! A word or phrase repeated twice looks like accidental echo, but repeated three times sounds like you know what you are doing.</p>
<p>This applies not just to word usage, but to plot elements as well. For example: if the characters in your book take a road trip and are staying in motels, make the motels shabbier and shabbier as the characters run out of money. So when they are pulling up to the next motel, the reader will be cringing: what kind of bad things will be lurking at this place?</p>
<p>4. <b>Sharpen relevant contrasts</b></p>
<p>Conflict is not enough, says Tex Thompson. Contrast is everything.</p>
<p>5. <b>Multitask relentlessly</b></p>
<p>A great page should do at least two out of three: advance the story, develop the backstory or the setting, and build or reveal character.</p>
<h3>Other tips</h3>
<h4><a id="line_editing">Line editing</a></h4>
<p>Tex Thompson also gave tips on <b>line editing</b>, though I can't put them into nifty numbered-bullet-point format, because I didn't write all of them down. But here are some:</p>
<ul>
<li>Before every editing pass, change the format of the manuscript, such as the font or font size. The words line up differently. That way you'll see it more like a new reader. You'll see more what's actually there, not what you think is there. Have Stephen Hawking's robotic voice read it out to you. If your book sounds good while read in robotic monotone, it's good. </li>
<li>Read it backwards (a basic rule of proofreading). Microsoft Office has a read-it-backward option.</li>
<li>Delete distancing words: thought, said, saw, heard, felt, realized, wondered. They emphasize the distance between the character and the reader. We want the opposite -- immersion. Too much of that distance and you feel like you are watching someone playing a video game. You can google "filter words fiction" or "distancing words fiction" to find out which words you should consider deleting.</li>
<li>Tex Thompson mentioned some software that can help with various aspects of writing, and the audience threw in their own suggestions. For example, <b>Prowriting Aid</b> is a good program that shows you how many times you've used various words. <b>Hemingway</b> can tell you when your sentences are too complicated. Also it's a good idea to get a readability score for your text, and the grade level. In the early chapters, while the reader doesn't yet care about the story, it's good to keep it lower grade.</li>
<li>Do at least one "fast pass". Read the whole thing in a day, the way a reader who binges on your work would read it. That's the best way to find overused words / phrases. Also, you will catch inconsistencies.</li>
</ul>
<p>Tex Thompson also gave tips for <a id="feedback">gathering and interpreting feedback</a>.</p>
<ul>
<li>Try giving beta readers single chapters first. Don't give them the whole novel, because they most likely will get scared off, because they were not preprared to read this much material.</li>
<li>Look for points of convergence. What comments do you keep getting? Are there common themes among them? Also remember this: people who notice a problem in your writing are usually right. People who suggest a solution are usually wrong.</li>
<li>
<p>Strive to have a mix of both readers AND writers among your beta readers. Each kind will be valuable in their own way. People who are just readers but not writers haven't internalized the rules of writers, they haven't chopped up the Hero's Journey and snorted if off of a mirror. They care more about the story. Does it hold their attention?</p>
<p>Also ask readers-that-are-not-writers: what other books that you've read would you compare it to? Hopefully they won't say, it's like War and Peace: I didn't finish it.</p>
<p>It is important to write at least as well as Dan Brown. If you pass the Dan Brown test, you're good. This is a guy who writes "he picked up the phone with one of his two hands", but his stories get people hooked.</p>
</li>
</ul>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-45809106702311588602019-01-27T12:07:00.001-08:002019-01-28T06:20:21.876-08:00Writing dialogue: an ArmadilloCon 2018 panel<p>Authors Arianne "Tex" Thompson and Mark London Williams gave a panel on writing good dialogue. Here is some of their advice.</p>
<p><a id="indirect"><b>Mark London Williams</b></a>. In emotional situations, the characters will often be indirect.</p>
<p><b>Tex Thompson</b> <i>agrees</i>. When a horse approaches an object, it does not go straight to it, does not make a beeline. That's a predator move. A horse comes up at an angle to get a better view at an object. Similarly, good dialogue does not say something directly. It makes several approaches, several passes. It suggests (for smart readers to get), and then confirms, so that everyone could get on the wagon.</p>
<h3>Specific dialog problems</h3>
<p><a id="late"><b>Tex Thompson</b></a> <i>addresses the audience</i>. How many of you had in your own writing struggled with a scene where you had a dialogue bouncing back and forth for pages ans pages, but not getting to the point? </p>
<p><i>She then asks <b>Mark London Williams</b></i>: What advice would you have to overcome this?</p>
<p><b>Mark London Williams</b>. Start a scene as late as possible. Start with at teacup already smashed on the floor, and a woman says to a man: "I can't believe you did it! You always do this!" -- now the readers are forced to wonder: he did what? What does he always do? Smashes teacups? Hurts her feelings?</p>
<p><b>Tex Thompson</b> <i>gives another example</i>. Let's say the dialogue starts with a line: "So the school called again today". Now the readers want to read further, because they have a sense that someone is in trouble, and they are wondering who did what.</p>
<p><a id="action_tags"><b>Tex Thompson</b></a>. Instead of "he said, she said", put in a sentence describing action.
<blockquote>"You always do this." She picked up a broken piece.</blockquote>
<p>There is a rule: one paragraph for one actor.</p>
<blockquote>"You always do this." Her face was calm, but under the table she was picking at her 500 hundred dollar French manicure.</blockquote>
<h3><a id="languages">Dialects</a></h3>
<p>The discussion also covered dialects, accents, slang and vernacular. One of the general advices on that topic is: avoid writing out a dialect or an accent phonetically as it sounds (like "ze" instead of "the" in a stereotypical French character's speech), because that quickly becomes grating and annoying. In small amounts it can be OK, just don't write entire paragraphs like that. I don't remember most of other advice, but I remember these interesting observations:</p>
<p>Where more than one language is spoken, the lower-prestige language contributes the grammar, while the higher-prestige language, the vocabulary. This happened, for example, to English language after the Norman conquest of England, when French became the language of the court, while English remained the language of the peasantry.</p>
<p>Similarly, the names for raw foods come from the native / lower-prestige language (cow, pig), whereas the names for cooked food come from the higher-prestige language (beef, dessert).</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-51005792044896436672018-12-31T15:16:00.001-08:002018-12-31T15:18:01.496-08:00Book review: Jo Walton "Just City"<p>This was an easy and pleasant read. But it could have been so much better if it had actually tackled the premise that it promised. The premise seemed ambitious; ir promised speculative fiction with the capital S. But it didn't deliver.</p>
<p>The Just City in the title of the book is the city that Plato talked about in the Republic. The story describes the social experiment of the Republic implemented in real life. It's set on an island somewhere, presumably, in the Mediterranean sea, in an undefined time in the prehistory. The time it's set in is before the rise of the classical world. Even Illiad and Odyssey had not yet been written. It doesn't matter, because the inhabitants of the island are completely shut off from the surrounding world and have no interaction with it. Most of the inhabitants are 10-year-old children (10080 of them), that were bought from slave traders of different eras, and brought to this island, across time, to be raised according to the Platonic concepts of justice. They are expected to implement Plato's Just City in real life. They are schooled by a number of teachers from different eras of history, and all of them have one thing in common is that at some point they prayed to Athene. For it was Athene that set up this experiment, and transported people through time to bring them here.</p>
<p>The plot of the book is rather uneventful, but I was hoping for plot twists based on the moral dilemmas these people face, and how they have to adjust their experiment when it is not turning out as planned. Of course, the experiment does not turn out as Plato envisioned, because people are people and they bring their human natures with them here. They also bring their prejudices, perceptions, beliefs, and ways of doing things from their eras. So, not surprisingly, even in the Just City rape victims are still responsible for their rape.</p>
<p>What's odd is that the "masters" -- the teachers who are responsible for the upbringing of these 10080 children -- do not question the notion of justice beyond the Platonic ideal. This ideal was held by a person who lived 2000+ years ago, and much of it doesn't jibe with our modern notion of justice. And many of the masters were from eras historically close to ours, or even beyond ours.</p>
<p>So it's strange that none of the teachers entertain a more modern paradigm of justice, even in the matters of life and death. Such as availability of modern medicine. Athene "imported" something from technologically advanced era (I won't say what, because one of the plot developments hinges on that), so she could have imported advanced medicine as well. And yet they don't treat sick newborns, but "expose" them, i.e. leave them in the wilderness to die. They oddly think it's more humane than to kill them. They do it even to the babies with small birth defects like cleft lip or palate, which are entirely correctable in our times. What about treatment of injuries and illnesses that surely must have occurred among those 10080 children, because of sheer statistical likelihood? Was their medicine as barbaric as the medicine of the ancient times? To be fair, one of the teachers mentions "mold drugs", so apparently they did import the antibiotics from the future. But what about everything else? I would think that realistically this question would have popped up very early in the existence of the city, and I also think that those teachers who came from the more modern times would find it a gross violation of ethics to not provide lifesaving treatments when they could be brought in from the future. And if you are dedicating your whole life to put a vision of justice in reality, then surely you would assign the utmost importance to ethical questions?</p>
<p>In other words, I expect that realistically in such a city there would be never ending debates, serious arguments, maybe even fights over whose ethical system is considered the most just. Yet none of it happens. Everybody leads largely untroubled existences filled with philosophy, music, arts and sports, and nobody runs into ethically ambiguous situations, in which Plato's vision directly contradicts their own internal sense of justice.</p>
<p>To be fair, something similar does start to happen towards the end, but it was a bit too late to make me "buy" into the book. The whole book seemed like one big missed opportunity to get deeply into ambiguities and paradoxes of justice.</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-13420593694589891682018-12-25T07:31:00.000-08:002018-12-27T13:10:54.894-08:00Natural Language Processing hackathon, or don't judge the wine by the shape of the bottle<p>In April of 2018 I went to a Natural Language Processing hackathon. Organized by Women in Data Science Austin, it took place at Dell, where one of the organizers worked. This was not the kind of hackathon where you hack for the whole weekend straight, crashing on a beanbag to catch a few winks in the breakroom of some hipster startup. No, this was a hackathon with work-life balance. It lasted from 10 am to 3 pm on a Saturday, which is just enough time for you to get deeply enough immersed in a subject to fire up your appetite for it, but not get sick of it. There were no minimal viable products produced, and no prizes, but I got to sink my teeth into the basics of Natural Language Processing.</p>
<p>A data scientist named Becky, who does Natural Language Processing for an Austin company, introduced us to the three cornerstone approaches of NLP -- summarization, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. </p>
<a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2018/IMG_20180428_105147_NLPHackathon_TopicModeling_Becky_.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-east-1.dream.io/elze-images/2018/20180428_WomenInDataScience_NLPHackathon_Dell/IMG_20180428_105147_NLPHackathon_TopicModeling_Becky_Sm.jpg" alt="Data scientist Becky talks about topic modeling" title="Data scientist Becky talks about topic modeling"></a>
<br/><code>Data scientist Becky talks about topic modeling.</code>
<p><b>Sentiment analysis</b> quantifies the subjective emotion in a text, e. g. did the majority of reviewers like or didn't like a particular wine? Data scientists don't take into account just the words, but also such nonverbal information as capitalization (a word in all caps is likely to mean the author feels strongly about it), and emoji. <b>Topic modeling</b> finds abstract concepts that occur in a body of texts, a. k. a. corpus. For exaple, if it finds the words <i>milk</i>, <i>meow</i>, and <i>kitten</i>, it might decide one of the topic of this text is <i>cat</i>. If it finds the words <i>bone</i>, <i>bark</i>, and <i>puppy</i>, it might decide one of the topics is <i>dog</i>.</p>
<p><b>Summarization</b> reduces a text to several key phrases or a representative sentence. Summarization can be extractive or abstractive. Extractive summarization selects a few representative sentences from the text, while abstractive summarization creates a summary of the text.</p>
<p>As an example, Becky gave a phrase: "The Army Corps of Engineers, rushing to meet President Bush's promise to protect New Orleans by the start of the 2006 hurricane season, installed defective flood-control pumps last year despite warnings from its own expert that the equipment would fail during the storm, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press." </p>
<p>Extractive summarization would extract such phrases from it as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Army Corps of Engineers</li>
<li>President Bush</li>
<li>New Orleans</li>
<li>defective flood-control pumps</li>
</ul>
<p>In contrast, abstractive summarization would generate such phrases as:</p>
<ul>
<li>government agency</li>
<li>presidential orders</li>
<li>defective equipment</li>
<li>storm preparation</li>
<li>hurricane Katrina</li>
</ul>
<a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2018/IMG_20180428_102914_NaturalLanguageProcessingHackathon.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-east-1.dream.io/elze-images/2018/20180428_WomenInDataScience_NLPHackathon_Dell/IMG_20180428_102914_NaturalLanguageProcessingHackathonSm.jpg" alt="Natural Language Processing hackathon hosted by Women in Data Science Austin" title="Natural Language Processing hackathon hosted by Women in Data Science Austin"></a>
<br/><code>As many of the hackathon attendees as could fit in the picture.</code>
<p>I can't quite put my finger on it, but it seems that extractive summarization extracts names of specific entities, but not much information as to what happened to those entities or what did they do. But abstractive summarization seems to "understand" what those entities actually represent and what they do, and thereby extracts more "gist" from the paragraph. I could be wrong about it, of course.</p>
<p>According to Becky, extractive summarization is a mostly solved problem by now. <code>TextRank</code> algorithm takes care of it. But abstractive summarization is a very difficult, unsolved problem, though knowledge graphs help.</p>
<p>At the organizers' suggestion, the attendees arranged themselves into three teams, each focusing on one of those three pillars. The organizers brought with them the <i>corpora</i>, a. k. a. texts to be analyzed. Specifically, they brought wine reviews, lots and lots of them. I suppose that's the second best to bringing the actual wine.</p>
<p><a id="summarization_team">Summarizing wine reviews</a> means extracting an "essence" of what the bulk of the reviewers said about a particular wine. It means identifying certain qualities that most reviewers noticed in a given wine. Sentiment analysis meant identifying whether the reviewers thought mostly positively or mostly negatively about the wine. </p>
<p>I ended up in the summarization team. Lead by Randi, who is a data scientist at a big company, we analyzed the wine reviews. By that I mean <a id="python_packages">we called a bunch of functions</a> from <code>pandas</code>, <code>textacy</code>, <code>sumy</code> and other relevant Python packages. The results were mixed. For example, <code>sumy</code> summarized reviews of Moscato in two sentences, but we had no way to tell whether this summarization is good, i.e. whether those were the most representatives sentences from the reviews. It's funny how this is the kind of problem that one has no way of verifying -- at least none that I learned in my 5 hours of NLP bootcamp. Sure, you could read hundreds of reviews and try to get a "feel" whether those sentences were the most representative, but your "feel" would be subjective.</p>
<p><a id="mixed_results">It makes Natural Language Processing feel like black box</a>, and almost like magic -- until you notice that when you ask for 5-sentence summary, the summary includes duplicates for first two sentences. That looks odd, so you take a closer look at the texts and notice that there are duplicate sentences in the document itself. For all its magic, <code>sumy</code> can't figure that out.</p>
<p>Within <code>sumy</code>, you can choose which summarizer to use. First we used <code>LexRank</code>, and it turned out to be very slow. Then we tried another, <code>LuhnSummarizer</code>, and it was much faster, but the results not nearly as accurate. But how would you decide how accurate a summarization is, given that there are no exact criteria for accuracy that I know of? Well, the first summary described mouthfeel and acidity of Moscato. The second included things like the shape and color of the bottle. It left me with the same feeling one often gets interacting with artificial intelligence, that it's both very smart and very stupid at the same time.</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-43105886803978329572018-03-20T09:45:00.002-07:002018-04-05T18:30:02.677-07:00Introduction to Natural Language Processing with Women Who Code<p>In 2016 Women Who Code Austin hosted a series of five presentations on Natural Language Processing. The presenter was our member Diana, who has a Ph.D. in linguistics and has worked in the area of computational linguistics for many years. She did demos of some basic text analysis one can do with the Python Natural Language Toolkit, or in short, NLTK.</p>
<p>She presented all this as a Python notebook. A Python notebook is software that lets you combine text, code, and output of that code on one page. You can run a code snippet right there in the notebook, and the resuls will get updated automatically. So equipped, Diana introduced us to the basics of what computational linguists do. Or if that sounds too ambitious, let's just say she showed some simple things one can do with NLTK.</p>
<p>For example: </p>
<ul>
<li>read in the text,</li>
<li>tokenize, </li>
<li>tag,</li>
<li>remove punctuation, </li>
<li>remove stopwords...</li>
<li>build a frequency hash table from the rest of words.</li>
</ul>
<a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2016/2016_NatLangProc/IMG_20160316_193944_PythonNaturalLanguageProcessing.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2016/20160316_PythonNaturalLanguageProcessing/IMG_20160316_193944_PythonNaturalLanguageProcessingSm.jpg" alt="The first Austin Women Who Code meeting on natural language processing, with our instructor Diana standing in the center" title="The first Austin Women Who Code meeting on natural language processing, with our instructor Diana standing in the center"></a>
<br/><code>The first Austin Women Who Code meeting on natural language processing, with our instructor Diana standing in the center</code>
<p>She introduced such concepts as <b>collocations</b> and <b>bigrams</b>. Bigrams are pairs of words that are next to each other in a text. Collocations are pairs of words that naturally occur in the language together, i. e., a chance of them occuring together is greater than random. An example of a bigram that's not a collocation is Trump's usage of a phrase "Liar Ted" (this was the spring of 2016, the height of the Republican strife for a presidential nomination). If a bigram is not a collocation, but occurs more often than randomly in a text, that can help to identify who the author is / who the speaker is, and some such qualities. It can be a fingerpint of sorts.</p>
<p><a id="tagging">The aforementioned tagging</a> is something we do after tokenizing (roughly speakinng, breaking the text up into words). Tagging assigns a 2-letter tag to each word, marking it as a part of speech, such as noun, adverb, etc. "You can use a big list of tags, or a simplified one. Using a simplified list of tags can help with speed of analysis of your corpus," said Diana.</p>
<p>Here Diana noted that tagging words as parts of speech has inherent ambiguity in it -- exactly the kind of thing that makes language and its computational processing so interesting. Here is an example of parts-of-speech ambiguity in a sentence: "They refuse to permit us to obtain the refuse permit". Still, the Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit correctly tags the first "refuse" and "permit" as verb (VBP) and the second instance of each as noun (NN).</p>
<a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2016/2016_NatLangProc/IMG_20160518_193328_RefuseToPermitRefusePermit.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2016/20160518_PythonNaturalLanguageProcessing/IMG_20160518_193328_RefuseToPermitRefusePermitSm.jpg" alt="NLTK correctly identifies parts of speech in the sentence 'They refuse to permit us to obtain the refuse permit'" title="NLTK correctly identifies parts of speech in the sentence 'They refuse to permit us to obtain the refuse permit'"></a>
<br/><code>This slide shows how NLTK correctly identifies parts of speech in the sentence above. The first instances of "permit" and "refuse" are "VB" -- verbs, whereas the second ones are "NN" -- nouns.</code>
<p><a id="emails">At the second meeting</a> we did all those actions with a corpus of -- wait for it -- Hillary Clinton's emails. Her emails were available for download from the Kaggle site. This was still the spring of 2016, and we did not yet know how sad the implications of those emails will turn out to be, so the choice of the subject wasn't as... emotionally loaded as it would have been just half a year later. And to say "we" did this is an exaggeration, because it was actually Diana that did all the processing and presented the code and the results to us in a Python notebook.</p>
<p>Here was the complete agenda of the meeting:</p>
<ul>
<li>Getting data: Hillary Clinton's emails;</li>
<li>Reading files;</li>
<li>Using Pandas to create a Dataframe in Python;</li>
<li>Cleaning data: eliminating punctuation, eliminating stopwords, normalizing data: converting to lower case, tokenizing words</li>
<li>Visualizing data.</li>
</ul>
<p>All of this pre-processing of data was done in the Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit (NLTK).</p>
<p>I must say I would have preferred it if Diana had set up this mini-course as a series of exercises for us to do in class and write some code calling NLTK methods ourselves. But if we had done that, we would not have been able to cover even half as much in those four meetups. So I appreciate what Diana did. At least she showed us what kind of beast NLTK is and which fork to eat it with. In the process learned some basic NLP lingo, such as:</p>
<ul>
<li><b>corpus</b> -- a body of text, plural corpora; it's what you process to extract words and do computations with them; </li>
<li><b>lexicon</b> -- words and their meanings; example: English dictionary.</li>
<p>However, you need to consider that different fields will have different lexicons. For example: to a financial investor, the first meaning of the word "bull" is someone who is confident about the market, as compared with the common English lexicon, where the first meaning of the word "bull" is an animal. As such, there is a special lexicon for the financial investors, doctors, mechanics, and so on.</p>
<li><b>token</b> -- each "entity" that is a part of whatever was split up based on rules. For example, each word is a token when a sentence is "tokenized" into words. Each sentence can also be a token, if you tokenized the sentences out of a paragraph.</li>
<li><b>frequency distribution</b>. The frequency distribution method of NLTK counts the frequency of each vocabulary item in the text. It helps identify the most informative words in a corpus.</li>
</ul>
<p>So overall I got a little familiar with what are the very basics of what natural language scientists do. But somehow, during those four meetings I was still hoping that we'll get past collecting the statistics about words, and get to some mysterious insights about how language works, evolves, and transforms our thoughts, that only computer analysis of language can provide. Of course, my expectations were unrealistically inflated for a set of introductory lessons.</p>
<p>Going back to Hillary Clinton's emails, here is how you would analyze them. This is an "Exploratory Analysis: Getting and Cleaning Data" slide. Here you see the metadata fields that were extracted from the emails. There are quite a few of them.</p>
<a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2016/2016_NatLangProc/IMG_20160420_195130_EmailMetadataFields.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2016/20160420_PythonNaturalLanguageProcessing/IMG_20160420_195130_EmailMetadataFieldsSm.jpg" alt="Python dataframe with the metadata fields extracted from Hilary Clinton's emails" title="Python dataframe with the metadata fields extracted from Hilary Clinton's emails"></a>
<br/><code>Python dataframe with the metadata fields extracted from Hilary Clinton's emails.</code>
<a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2016/2016_NatLangProc/IMG_20160420_195206_MetadataExtractedFromEmails.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2016/20160420_PythonNaturalLanguageProcessing/IMG_20160420_195206_MetadataExtractedFromEmailsSm.jpg" alt="Python dataframe with the metadata extracted from Hilary Clinton's emails" title="Python dataframe with the metadata extracted from Hilary Clinton's emails"></a>
<br/><code>This slide, "Slicing dataframe to extract subject", shows Python method calls that you would use to extract the email subjects from the dataframe shown in the previous image. Presented in a Python notebook, it alternates code with results of that code. The results can be updated on the fly if you make changes to the code. The MetaDataSubject and MetaDataTo fields contain some familiar names and topics that made the news...</code>
<p>The next slide shows the use of the NLTK method "concordance". It produces a list of the words used in the text, with the passages where they are used. So if you want all occurrences of the word "surprise" in Jane Austen's "Emma", with snippets of context, you can call </p>
<p><code>emmaText.concordance("surprize")</code></p>
<p>(Here, <code>emmaText</code> is the variable that holds the text of the Jane Austen's novel "Emma".) From this example you can also see that NLTK has corpora of texts from the Gutenberg project, which is pretty handy.</p>
<a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2016/2016_NatLangProc/IMG_20160615_192106_Concordance.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2016/20160615_PythonNaturalLanguageProcessing/IMG_20160615_192106_ConcordanceSm.jpg" alt="Concordamce: all the places in Jane Austen 'Emma' where the word 'surprize' is used" title="Concordamce: all the places in Jane Austen 'Emma' where the word 'surprize' is used"></a>
<br/><code>Concordamce: all the places in Jane Austen 'Emma' where the word 'surprize' is used, obtained by calling a 'concordance' method of NLTK.</code>
<h3>Venturing ddeper into natural language processing</h3>
<p>The easiest texts to analyze are the news, Diana said. News have very good structure. Sentences tend to be short, and tend to have classical structure: subject, verb, object, etc. Medication instructions are also easy to analyze, since they are required to have readability scores high enough to be suitable for 9-12 year olds. But in literature the sentences are often not conventional and much harder to parse. </p>
<p>At the last meetup we talked a little bit about analyzing texts "for real". And by that I mean a little deeper analysis than just breaking up sentences into parts of speech and gathering statistics about it. </p>
<p>One example where computational linguistics is used is to grade student essays. If you have so many essays that hiring human graders would be cost-prohibitive, natural language processing can help. For example, if an essay is supposed to be on the US Declaration of Independence, the script would check to see if certain words are present in it in a certain way, and will conclude that that student might have a certain level understanding of the topic. (Yes, I know, this raises lots of questions about creativity versus cliche'd, cookie-cutter texts: the latter would be more likely to hit all the points that a grading program is looking for, whereas the former might be difficult for a program to discern. But we didn't cover such questions at the meeting, since it's an uncharted territory.) </p>
<p>We touched upon sentiment analysis, which helps determine how customers feel about an experience they had with a brand or a company. Companies like HomeAway use it to analyze customer reviews of their rental properties. And they discover unexpected things that way. For example, analysis of customer reviews of B&B-type places showed that the greatest predictor of customer satisfaction is whether a house has pots and pans.</p>
<p>Sentiment analysis also shows that, for example, if you try to infer customer satisfaction from the reviews by searching for wait times, you'll get inconsistent results. 15 minutes would be bad for a restaurant, but lightning-fast for an emergency room.</p>
<p>And this is where people try to determine degrees and ways of relatedness or similarity between concepts.</p>
<p>For that, they can use ontologies.</p>
<h4><a id="ontologies">What is Ontology?</a></h4>
<p>A consensus is now established about the definition and the role of an ontology in konwledge engineering: "An ontology is a formal, explicit, specification of a shared conceptualization".</p>
<p>It is used in cognitive modeling.</p>
<h4>More about Ontologies</h4>
<p>An ontology is a schema (model) describing the types (and possibly some individuals) in a domain, the relationships that may exist between types and individuals, and constraints on the way individuals and properties may be combined.</p>
<p>Here are some examples of ontologies</p>
<ul>
<li>Classes: <code>Project</code>, <code>Person</code>, <code>ProjectManager</code>. <code>ProjectManager</code> is a subclass of <code>Person</code>. <code>People</code> and <code>Projects</code> are disjoint.</li>
<li>Relationships: <code>worksOn</code>, <code>manages</code>. <code>Manages</code> is a sub-property of <code>worksOn</code>.</li>
<li>Constraints: <code>People</code> work on <code>Projects</code>, not the other way around. Only <code>ProjectManagers</code> can manage <code>Projects</code>.</li>
</ul>
<p>This simple example enables machine inferences, e.g. if X manages Y, then we can infer that Y is <code>Project</code>, and X is a <code>ProjectManager</code> and therefore a <code>Person</code>.</p>
<p>Onthologies allow people to create trees representing relationships between concepts, like this:</p>
<a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2016/2016_NatLangProc/IMG_20160720_195438_ConceptTree.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2016/20160720_PythonLNauralLanguageProcessing/IMG_20160720_195438_ConceptTreeSm.jpg" alt="A tree that expresses relationships between conecpts in the academia (Student, Employee, Faculty, etc)" title="tree that expresses relationships between conecpts in the academia (Student, Employee, Faculty, etc)"></a>
<br/><code>This is an example of a tree that expresses relationships between conecpts in the academia (Student, Employee, Faculty, etc.)</code>
<p>Some people propose ways to neasure the similarity of concepts by some graph metrics, such as the shortest path between two nodes.</p>
<a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2016/2016_NatLangProc/IMG_20160720_195528_SimilarityMeasure.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2016/20160720_PythonLNauralLanguageProcessing/IMG_20160720_195528_SimilarityMeasureSm.jpg" alt="Measure of similarity between two concepts in a graph, expressed in terms of a shortest path between two concepts." title="Measure of similarity between two concepts in a graph, expressed in terms of a shortest path between two concepts."></a>
<br/><code>Measure of similarity between two concepts in a graph, expressed in terms of a shortest path between two concepts.</code>
<p>More pictures from the Women Who Code Austin meetup series on Natural Language Processing are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2016/2016_NatLangProc/">in my photo gallery</a>.</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-29503085297482439672018-02-20T16:04:00.000-08:002018-02-20T16:07:01.766-08:00Margaret Atwood at the Texas Book Festival in 2015<p>Margaret Atwood was interviewed at the Texas Book Festival in October of 2015. I have only read one of her books, The Handmaid's Tale, and as we know, it's a depressing and scary book. Considering that, the interview was surprisingly (to me) light-hearted and revolvedheavily around popculture. I got an impression that Margaret Atwood is quite engaged with it. She participates in art / experimental projects that revolve around books and reading.</p>
<p>One of such projects was the <a href="http://www.futurelibrary.no">Future Library</a> in Oslo. It was started by an artist Katie Patterson. In May of 2014 she planted 1000 trees near a forest in Oslo. These trees will grow for a 100 years. Every year a different writer from around the world, invited by a committee, each writing in a different language and different genre, will contribute a manuscript in a sealed box to the future library. 100 years later all the boxes will opened. There will be enough wood from the trees that have grown to make paper to print the anthology of those stories.</p>
<p>As Margaret Atwood explained, the stories can be in any form: one word, a poem, a short story. No images. And you cannot tell anybody what is in the box, except for the title. But these boxes will be in the future library with the author's name and title visible. You can go into the library, see the names and titles and imagine what could be in them. "So in May (of 2016), I'm going to Norway with my box, tied with a nice blue ribbon," said Margaret Atwood. "I imagine there might be a moment at the immigration checkpoint where they're going to ask me what is in that box, and I'm going to have to tell them, I don't know," she said, adding that that might not go over well.</p>
<p>She also noted that the success of this project was based on a number of assumptions: that people will want to read and will be able to read, that Oslo will still be there. (Not to mention an even more questionable assumption that books in a hundred years will still be printed on paper -- E.)</p>
<p>Margaret Atwood seems to encourage all the ways in which people consume and produce the written word nowadays, including mashups and remakes. For example, she wrote her own version of Shakespeare's play "Tempest" for the Hogarth Shakespeare project, in which modern writers reimagined Shakespeare's works. She had a fan fiction contest for her latest book. (And no, she replied, she wasn't going to read all the thousands of entries herself. She had slush readers for that.) When asked if she was ready for other people to take over her characters, she indicated she had no problem with that. She said: "Fanfiction is very very old, except it wasn't called fanfiction. It started with the Greek mythology. When <i>Don Quixote</i> was published, there were a lot of other books published about Don Quixote by other authors. So Cervantes had to put out a notice that those other books aren't authentic."</p>
<p>She also contributed, even if in a small way, to the <i>Zombies, Run!</i> app. It's an interactive app for exercise, based on the premise that a zombie apocalypse is taking place, and you are running from the zombies. At one point the run takes you to Canada, but the entire Canadian government has been zombified, and the entire NHL hockey league are zombies on skates. However, you can establish contact with Margaret Atwood. Naomi Alderman, co-creator of the <i>Zombies, Run!</i> app, wrote her into the game. The way Margaret Atwood explained it, "I'm a pushover. You want to put me in a zombie game? Okay."</p>
<div style="float:right;width:300px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/IMG_4220_MargaretAtwood_Texas_Book_Festival.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2015/20151017_TexasBookFestMargaretAtwood/IMG_4220_MargaretAtwood_Texas_Book_FestivalSm.jpg" alt="Margaret Atwood at the Texas Book Festival in October of 2015, surrounded by the audience members" title="Margaret Atwood at the Texas Book Festival in October of 2015, surrounded by the audience members."></a>
<br/><code>Margaret Atwood (left) at the Texas Book Festival in October of 2015, surrounded by the audience members.</code>
</div>
<p>Despite the lighthearted tone of the conversation, the interviewer couldn't help but note that we were at the Texas Capitol, the place where Texas Legislature makes laws -- and some or many laws that they passed recently resonated strongly with the themes in Margaret Atwood's most famous dystopian novel "Handmaid's Tale". You could get an impression that Texas Legislature used "Handmaid's Tale", um, aspirationally. So, not surprisingly, the interviewer brought up political topics.</p>
<p>"Margaret, you do a lot of advocacy work. And we are in the Texas state capitol, so I want to ask you about how far we have come and how far we have to go," said the interviewer, Kelly. (I don't remember her last name -- E.)</p>
<p>Margaret Atwood quipped something about making a law from here. (The interview took place literally in the House Chamber of the Texas Legislature. All the audience were sitting at the lawmakers' desks.) Then she said:</p>
<p>"The people who passed it <i>(referring, I think, to a recent law severely restricting availability of abortion -- E.)</i> don't think about the effect there will be down the line. Real people will have to live with these things. The effects will turn out to be not what they thought to be. For example, California reversed its draconian prison legislation because they couldn't afford it. I don't think you can really sustain the society if you alienate a lot of young people, because they're going to move somewhere else, and then who's going to pay for your old age? If you are prohibiting abortions, you may think that there will be lots of babies born, lots of poof children, future serfs? That might not work out that way."</p>
<p>As usual, there was time for audience questions.</p>
<p><b>A question from the audience.</b> Oslo is building huge library, but a few hundred feet from here there is a huge library that's mostly empty, there's nobody there. (I think he might have been referring to the Austin Public Library central location. -- E.) So why do you think that the Oslo Future Library be successful?</p>
<p><b>Margaret Atwood</b> replied that some libraries were very heavily used, for example, the New York or Toronto public library systems. "So I don't think it's a question of library or no library, it's a question of what kind of library, how accessible it is, and what kind of interactivity do they do? I believe that access to books and reading is one of the cornerstones of the democracy," she said.
<p><b>A woman from the audience</b> says she's getting her PhD in literature, and (if I understood correctly) is teaching literature to freshmen. Making them read feels like she's murdering them. She asks if Margaret Atwood sees it a general rule of thumb for this generation (unwillingness to read), and if so, does she have any advice?</p>
<p><b>Margaret Atwood</b>. Freshmen read all the time. You can't use internet without being able to read. There is a place where they can write anonymously, and post what they're really interested in, which may be vampire stories. Another way you can help them is audiobooks. But sometimes they just want to put in the studying time. When I was teaching grammar to engineering students, I started them on Kafka's parables, which are very short. So you can start your students on flash fiction. They're all 18, it's a difficult age. When I taught the same class to returning students, there was a huge difference. They wanted me to challenge them, they argued with me.</p>
<p>Make your students write a zombie or vampire story. Or an article of economics of vampires. Vampires are always rich. Why is that? They are immortal -- if they became a vampire in 1930, how much money you have accumulated? Have them do a business plan for being a vampire. There are two vampire movies where this accumulation of the riches is done explicitly. 1. An Iranian vampire western movie called "A girl walks home alone at night" - a feminist Iranian vampire, who was killing only bad people, but in the process she accumulated a lot of diamond watches. 2. "Let the right one in", with a 12 year old girl vampire. There is a classic line in it: a little boy says to her when he [starts suspecting something]: 'How old are you really?' She replies: 'I'm really 12. I've been a child for a very long time.'"</p>
<p><b>A woman from the audience.</b> What words of comfort you have for readers who know they'll never lay their eyes on your contribution to the future library?</p>
<p><b>Margaret Atwood</b>. There are many books you'll never lay your hands or eyes on, because you've never heard of them. As a tribute to that idea, find a book you never heard of, read it, and find other people who love it.</p> Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-41591471988437872682017-12-15T06:24:00.002-08:002019-01-27T12:10:07.467-08:00Arianne "Tex" Thompson's worldbuilding workshop at ArmadilloCon 2016<p>Subtitled "Escape From Clichea", Arianne "Tex" Thompson's worldbuilding workshop was the most remarkable event at the ArmadilloCon 2016, and was alone worth the price of admission. She gave a heap of good, practical, doable recommendations on how to improve your worldbuilding, storytelling, and characters. At a typical writing workshop you'll get vague advice like "show, don't tell", and "kill your darlings", but rarely will you hear specific recommendations what to do. But Tex Thompson's workshop was an avalanche of such implementable nuggets of goodness. She showed us how to look at your story material differently and tease the interrestingness out of it.</p>
<p>To be sure, this wasn't the kind of workshop where professional writers and editors critique your manuscript. This was 1.5 hours of Tex Thompson speaking. But I came out of it full of ideas of how to make my stories better. </p>
<p>I wrote them down to the extent I remembered them.</p>
<p>The workshop wasn't strictly just about worldbuilding, but also covered deeper aspects of writing, like how to find your identity as a writer, how to find what makes you unique, and use it to build your online presence.</p>
<h3><a id="useful_lists">On how to build your identity as a writer</a></h3>
<p>Write down 3 things you have been paid to do. Then 3 things you could write an article about. If the things on those lists have nothing to do with writing, that's completely fine. Those are things that make you unique. They help you stand out between other writers. If nothing else, they could give you ideas for your blog posts, and a blog is a big part of how a writer attracts and keeps an audience.</p>
<p>Here is another way to mine ideas for blog posts. </p>
<p>Write a list of 3 stories that you want your work to be compared to. Then write down common elements between them. For example, Tex Thompson said that for her, those elements are: (1) ensemble cast / team effort; (2) people with different abilities or powers; (3) big, wild, slightly-ruined world. Such elements are great for mining ideas for your blog or convention panel topics. For example, combining (1) and (2) could lead to Top 10 teams in comics.</p>
<h4>Other lists to tease out your identity</h4>
<p>Things you would you do with your life if you won a million dollars</p>
<p>What you tend to get into arguments about</p>
<h3>Worldbuilding exercises</h3>
<p><b>Association exercise</b>. What do the words "four kingdoms" remind you of, asks Tex Thompson.</p>
<p>Audience says: 4 elements, 4 directions, 4 seasons.</p>
<p><b>Tex Thompson</b>. Take your first idea and place it carefully in the garbage. Because it is also many people's first idea.</p>
<p>What could be a fresher take on the "four kingdoms" idea? The audience replied:</p>
<ul>
<li>Aliens come and the kingdoms have to unite to defeat them;</li>
<li>Economics arms race;</li>
<li>Each of the 4 lands has a princess and they are all supposed to be in a beauty pageant, but one of them has a prince and he wants to compete too.</li>
</ul>
<h3><a id="make_reader_want_to_know_more">Best practices for writers</a></h3>
<div style="float:right;width:410px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2016/IMG_20160729_170401_Armad2016WorldBuildingWorkshop.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2016/20160729_31_ArmadilloCon/20160729/IMG_20160729_171849_TexThompsonSm.jpg" alt="Arianne 'Tex' Thompson at the Escape from Clichea worldbuilding workshop at ArmadilloCon 2016" title="Arianne 'Tex' Thompson at the Escape from Clichea worldbuilding workshop at ArmadilloCon 2016"></a>
<br/><code>"Arianne 'Tex' Thompson leads the Escape from Clichea worldbuilding workshop at ArmadilloCon 2016. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2016 (39) are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2016/">in my photo gallery</a>. </code>
</div>
<ul>
<li>Use the Triforce!</li>
<p>Triforce consists of: Education - something you know about; Passion - something you care about; Inspiration - something you are excited about. At the intersection of those things is a story that only you can write, says "Tex" Thompson.</p>
<li>Ask yourself: "what is the easiest, laziest thing I could do here?" Then do something else.</li>
<li>Start with Episode IV, and leave space for more stories as you go.</li>
<p>What happened in Harry Potter world before the HP started? All the Voldemort stuff, the Marauders. Your idea for the front story might make an awesome back story.</p>
<li>Question your assumptions.</li>
<p>Have you read a story about space travel that's set in the 25th century, but all the gender norms are from the 20th century? Or they have all the same notions of nuclear family and property?</p>
<p>Everything that surprises you about another country / culture says something about your own. There is a book series <i>CultureShock!</i> that explains how to live in another country. In US it says, don't drop off at someone's house uninvited. It's OK to ask what people do, but not how old they are. You can call uninvited, but not after 9 pm. Never cut in line, that will not be good to you.</p>
<li>Give us something we expect and something we don't.</li>
<p>Many enormously successful TV and book series do that. Star Trek: a Western but in space. Game of Thrones: medieval fantasy, but gritty / realistic. Harry Potter: witches / wizards, but in high school. Another example. Chuck Wendig once asked: what would a vampire do in a zombie apocalypse? In "Double Dead", the vampire tries to make sure that the human race does not go extinct, because then he'll be out of food. So he herds human survivors through the apocalypse.</p>
<p>In any scenario, ask:</p>
<ul>
<li>Who benefits from the current state of affairs? Who tends to benefit in most zombie apocalypse stories? Zombies, warlords, gritty surrivors. Even in the worst of times somebody turns a profit. Doomsday preparers, escaping prisoners, drug companies? Gun manufacturer Colt?</li>
<li>Who loses out? Who is the first to go? The slow and the sick. The people on the front lines where the apocalypse started -- hospital workers who got blood sprayed on them. They are gone.</li>
<li>Who's trying to maintain the status quo? Usually people who are winning, or people who think they are getting a better deal than they would otherwise. How many of you stayed in a crappy job because its certainty was better than the uncertainty of the alternative?</li>
<li>Who is trying to change things? Someone who is losing, who has nothing left to lose.</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<h3>Explore the timeline</h3>
<p>While my memory of the workshop is already vague, I think this was a segue of the "vampires protect people from zombies" exercise. I assume this all means not that we, writers, need to explore all these time periods in our prose, it's just that perhaps the story could be built around not the event itself, but what happened <i>n</i> number of years later.</p>
<ul>
<li>3 months later: chaos, social collapse, ragtag survivors</li>
<li>10 years later: status quo; the world is relatively stable. But what are we doing now that we weren't doing 3 months after the event? Maybe we are enslaving zombies. We have started to adapt to this new world.</li>
<li>50 years later: the idea that there was something before this seems strange. You still have people who remember the old world, Kennedy's assasination, the days when presidents used to drive down the street in open convertibles. But also the current generation may not know or appreciate reasons for the current state of affairs. This leads to a possibility of a new conflict. They have no respoect for their vampires-elders. They don't understand why people submit to the vampire lords.</li>
<li>100 years later: nobody remembers the way it was. Nobody alive today remembers the flu pandemic of 1918. From the 50s to the 90s our big preoccupation was the cold war and the Bomb. Now everybody has a bomb. We don't worry about Russians launching nukes so much. We are worried about people sitting next to us in a movie theatter. The Great War doesn't come up so much as it does in the fantasy novel prologues.</li>
</ul>
<h3><a id="infodumps">How much info to dump?</a></h3>
<p>When Tex Thompson teaches at the DFW writers workshop, she tells writers: don't pack me a lunch, leave me breadcrumbs. If your mom packs you a lunch, you'll throw away the apple, trade the cookies, etc. You are more like T-Rex: you don't want to be fed, you want to hunt.</p>
<h4>Give readers just enough information about your world to build something of their own</h4>
<p>Consider how many bigger-than-big franchises -- Harry Potter, Star Wars, Marvel Universe, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Pokemon -- give you enough information so that you can create your own Jedi, superhero, wizard school, etc. And they make the world vast and intriguing enough that you would WANT to! Ask yourself: what am I giving my readers to do while they wait for my next book? Fan theories about what is Jon Snow's real heritage, Rey's from Star Wars real heritage, etc. Can they make a costume of a character? In how many ways can they participate in this world? In what ways can you make it exciting to participate?</p>
<p>Tex Thompson enjoyed Harry Potter, but like many fantasy novels, the main character was a dude. She wanted to make her own hero. For example, in the world of Sugar Rush racers, who are all named after candy, Tex's friend made his own Sugar Rush racer, Molten Milk Toast. Does your world accommodate other heroes? Do you establish your world well enough for your fans to actively participate in it? And is it interesting enough that they would want to? If your wizard school is in UK, would the readers wonder what it would be like in the Caribbean?</p>
<p><b>A guy in the audience</b>. Leave the rules a little open, that the people would wonder how much is possible.</p>
<p><b>Tex</b>. Right. We need some rules at the outset, but we don't need them all right away. And a lot of the secret sauce is what is the right order of revelations so that they would let people build upon one another, etc.</p>
<a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2016/IMG_20160729_172007_WorldbuildingTriforce.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2016/20160729_31_ArmadilloCon/20160729/IMG_20160729_172007_WorldbuildingTriforceSlideSm.jpg" alt="Use the Triforce, Luke" title="Use the Triforce, Luke"></a>
<p><code>"Use the Triforce, Luke! Triforce consists of Passion, Education, or Inspiration -- in other words, something you care about, something you know about, and something you are excited about. At the intersection of these three lies a story only you can write. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2016 (39) are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2016/">in my photo gallery</a>. </code></p>
<h4>Problem: infodumps are boring</h4>
<p><b>Solution</b>: do not let your story answer any questions the reader hasn't had time to ask! </p>
<p>Give out world details and exposition like treats. Instead of infodumping an explanation of how the star drive work, ask yourself, what question is that an answer to? The question probably comes up when the star drive is broken and needs to be fixed. "We need a new flux capacitor, or else the discombobulator won't work."</p>
<p>What excuse do they make for explaining magic in Avatar the Last Airbender? "Why is so-and-so special? Why can he control all 4 elements?"</p>
<p>Anything you are tempted to go on and one for 100 pages about, make it the focal point of your story. Make your story about how to survive on Mars, and hundreds of pages on growing potatoes will become relevant.</p>
<h4>Problem: making a fictional world as detailed as the real wone would take forever, and also be super boring. What should you do?</h4>
<p><b>Answer from the audience</b>. Use the same cliches as in the real world?</p>
<p><b>Tex</b>. Yes. Use the words "magic wand". Readers already know how it works. Or "hyperdrive". Everybody knows what it is.</p>
<p>You don't want to include things that are not relevant, things that have no emotion attached to it. But if I tell you what magic the blue crystal does, what will you automatically wonder about? What other crystals are there, and what magic they do.</p>
<p><b>Solution</b>: imply that your world contains more detail than is explicitly given in the book.</p>
<p>Conservation of detail: if something is explained in depth, it's because it's somehow important to the story. (The Malazan series by Steven Erikson stomp on this idea. He explains everything about everything.) Respect your readers' brain cells. If I ask the reader to spend a brain cell, there should be a reward for it.</p>
<h3>Using the real world responsibly</h3>
<h4>How to avoid stereotypes</h4>
<p>In real life we have stereotypes about entire nations, about some states or even some cities. In fantasy it is easy to fall into the same pattern. Elves have stereotypes about orcs and vice versa. Their races do not get along. But in reality, within any nation, people are quite different from one another. There is enough internal variation between elves and between orcs. In real world, your biggest beef is usually not with the person across the ocean, but with a person across the street. Your fantasy world will be more detailed if you tell us what elves fight among themselves about. Is it what type of wood is best for bow crafting? Is it something as silly as what end of an egg to open from breakfast?</p>
<h4>What kinds of people tend to get left out this kind of story? Can you find a way to include them?</h4>
<p>Going back to the vampires-in-a-zombie-apocalypse example, what kind of people don't make it through a zombie apocalypse? The elderly and the sick. One of Tex's friend had said: "Why would I want to read stories about apocalypse? If power goes out, my fridge goes out, I won't get my insulin and I'll die. So why would I want to read it?"</p>
<p>One of the plot threads in your book could be about how a guy with diabetes makes it through the apocalypse. Will the vampire take care of him personally? Will he the vampire hunt pigs to make insulin?</p>
<p>Make a story that includes a category of people who are not commonly included, and you might have a whole new big group of fandom for yourself.</jp>
<h3>Smash the Monoliths!</h3>
<p><b>Question</b>. What is the easiest, laziest, most obvious, least-realistic thing I could do with my fictional people? </p>
<p><b>Answer</b>. Create a monoculture.</p>
<p>You are probably wondering: but what if I mess up? What if I write a character outside of my own experience and get it wrong? Don't worry, says Tex: you WILL mess up. No matter what you write, someone will hate it. There is a famous quote: "If you're not pissing someone off, you probably aren't doing anything important." Use your fear of hurting people (from other cultures or marginalized groups) to motivate you to do your research. Listen to people, and solicit feedback -- even painful feedback.</p>
<hr/>
<p>The following year I had the fortune to attend another of Tex Thompson's workshops, <b>"Plate Tectonics Theory of Dialogue"</b>. It took place in Austin in July 2017, and focused on dialogue. Your characters are constantly in motion: they clash, collide, fold, buckle, shift. Good dialogue expresses all that. Here are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2017/20170730_DialogueWorkshop/">some of the slides from the dialogue workshop</a></p>.
Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-15876817491776652472017-10-29T15:04:00.002-07:002019-09-04T16:47:16.169-07:00Scott Aaronson at the Austin Quantum Computing meetup<p>We have heard that quantum computers are supposed to be much faster than classical ones. But what exactly does that mean, and why can't computers based on some other exotic physical models of computation be as fast? Scott Aaronson examined other models of computation and dispelled some popular myths about quantum computing at the Austin Quantum Computing meetup in May of 2017.</p>
<p>His talk might not have had a whole lot of new stuff for those who read his blog. It was a tour-de-fource of the topics he often addresses on his blog, and a synopsis of what a layperson needs to know about quantum computing. It was about what makes quantum computing so fascinating, but also how to keep your expectations of it realistic.</p>
<p>Scott started his talk with a look at some hypothetical alternative forms of computing. What physical models of computation would be alternative enough to violate the Extended Church-Turing thesis?</p>
<p>Church-Turing Thesis is closely related to the definition of computability: it says that all the computable functions are those and only those that could be computed by the Turing machine. Extended Church-Turing Thesis says that a Turing machine can simulate all other computers with at most a polynomial overhead. Are there forms of computing that challenge the extended Church-Turing thesis? On what kind of physics could a computer possibly be based to overturn it? Scott examined hypothetical computers based on exotic conditions where everyday laws of physics break down.</p>
<h4><a id="relativity_computer">Relativity Computer</a></h4>
<p>Scott's first example was a relativity computer. How come no one talks about relativity computer, he asks. The idea is simple: you start your computer working on some really hard problem, maybe NP-hard problem, and leave it on Earth, while you take off into space. From the computer's perspective, billions years have passed, the civilization has collapsed. But from your perspective, thanks to the relativistic time dilation, only ~ 20 years have passed. You come back and miraculously find your computer in the rubble, still connected to a power source, and you can read out an answer to your hard computational problem. So why hasn't anyone tried it? If you're worried that your friends will be dead in the distant future, just bring them on the spaceship with you.</p>
<p>Humor aside, the question is, would such a "relativity computer" (well, in this case the computer is ordinary, it's you travelling at a relativistic speed that makes the answer appear quickly) provide a fast solution to NP-complete problems? Would the problem be solved in polynomial time from your perspective? </p>
<p>The answer to that, Scott says, has to do with the amount of energy that would take to accelerate to relativistic speed. If you want to get an exponential speedup in only polynomial amount of time as experienced by you, you would have to accelerate so close to the speed of light that would take exponential amount of energy. So before your spaceship takes off, just fuelling it up would take exponential time.</p>
<p>It can sometimes seem like you could achieve exponential speedup for some problems by exploiting certain physical processes, but to really evaluate any such possibility you have to look at everything we know about physics, such as the energy involved in such a calculation.</p>
<h4><a id="zeno_computer">Zeno's computer</a></h4>
<p>Zeno's computer is a hypothetical computer in which each operation would take only half the time that it took for the previous operation. This scenario could occur at the so-called Omega Point. Omega Point is a theological notion, but according to some physicists, it could occur under some highly debatable conditions. (I don't think Scott mentioned Omega Point in his speech, I just remembered this trope because it seemed fitting.) For example, the founder of quantum computing, David Deutsch, envisions Omega Point happening near the time of the Big Crunch, as the universe oscilates faster and faster. By the time the universe collapses, the computations have achieved nearly infinite speed, and if you simulate the whole universe on the computational power of those oscillations, the world will never end for you. The closer the real thing comes towards the end, the faster the oscillations will go, the longer "subjective" time you'll be able to simulate. Here is <a href="http://theophysics.host56.com/deutsch-ends-of-the-universe.html">a quote from the David Deutsch book "Fabric of Reality" where he discusses Omega Point</a>. Scroll down to the paragraph "The key discovery in the omega-point theory...".</p>
<p>On the Omega Point computational substrate you would be able to solve NP-hard problems fast. But according to our best cosmological models, the universe is not going to end in the Big Crunch. Even aside from this particular scenario, Scott points out a fundamental problem with Zeno's computer. Zeno's computer relies on infinite amount of computational capacity, but any space-time region has only a finite number of information storage capacity. He says so <a href="http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2586#comment-972062;">in his own comment on his blog</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
"Rahul #50:
<p><b>Does Nature (or an existing proof) prevent undecidability in statements involving finite times / spaces / lattices & precision?</b></p>
<p>Mathematically, if we know that a problem only requires enumerating a finite list of possibilities, then essentially by definition that problem is computable. This is why, any time you see a new problem that's been proved at least as hard as the halting problem, that problem will always involve some element that goes to infinity (if the title and abstract aren't forthcoming about this, read the main text and see! ?? ).</p>
<p>Physically, it's conceivable that we could have lived in a universe where an infinite amount of stuff could get done in finite time (e.g., by what I call the "Zeno Computer," that does one step in 1 second, the next in 1/2 second, the next in 1/4 second, and so on). In such a universe, of course the halting problem could be solvable in finite time.</p>
<p>But the current conjecture in theoretical physics -- primarily because of the work of Jakob Bekenstein on black hole thermodynamics, which I blogged about before -- is that we don't live in such a universe. Rather, we seem to live in a universe that can be modeled as a quantum computer where each finite region of space stores at most ~10<sup>69</sup> qubits per square meter of enclosing surface area (with the bound saturated only by black holes), and where those qubits are operated on at most ~10<sup>43</sup> times per second. In such a universe, of course the halting problem would not be solvable."</p></blockquote>
<p>Also, he says in an excerpt of his talk <a href="https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3445">Big Numbers</a></p>:
<blockquote><p>While no one has tested this directly, it appears from current physics that there is a fundamental limit to speed, and that it's about 10<sup>43</sup> operations per second, or one operation per Planck time. Likewise, it appears that there's a fundamental limit to the density with which information can be stored, and that it's about 10<sup>69</sup> bits per square meter, or one bit per Planck area. (Surprisingly, the latter limit scales only with the surface area of a region, not with its volume.)</p>
<p>What would happen if you tried to build a faster computer than that, or a denser hard drive? The answer is: cycling through that many different states per second, or storing that many bits, would involve concentrating so much energy in so small a region, that the region would exceed what's called its Schwarzschild radius. If you don't know what that means, it's just a fancy way of saying that your computer would collapse to a black hole. I've always liked that as Nature's way of telling you not to do something!</p></blockquote>
<p>One of the few things about quantum gravity that everybody agrees on, says Scott Aaronson, is that it places fundamental limits on how much computation you place in a bounded region.</p>
<h4><a id="other_models_of_computation">Other models of computation based on physical world</a></h4>
<p>Sometimes people suggest that soap bubbles could solve NP-hard problems in polynomial time just by finding the minimum surface when they are connected. Finding the minimum surface for connected soap bubbles is an NP-hard problem, but humans have observed that soap bubbles form a minimum surface very quickly, thus prompting the idea that a polynomial-time algorithm for finding the minimum surface does exist. And if we could encode an NP-hard problem as a soap bubble problem -- in effect "feeding" it to a soap bubble computer -- then we could solve them in polynomial time. </p>
<div style="float:left;width:360px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2017/AustinQuantumComputingMeetup2017/IMG_20170524_203441_ScottAaronson_AustinQuantumComputingMeetup.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-east-1.dream.io/elze-images/2017/20170524_ScottAaronson/IMG_20170524_203441_ScottAaronson_AustinQuantumComputingMeetupSm.jpg" alt="Scott Aaaronson giving a presentation at the Austin Quantum Computing meetup" title="Scott Aaaronson giving a presentation at the Austin Quantum Computing meetup"></a>
<br/><code>Scott Aaaronson giving a presentation at the Austin Quantum Computing meetup</code>
</div>
<p>The problem with it is that bubbles do get stuck in local optima, says Scott. In other words, the surface they settle into is not guaranteed to be the absolute minimum but some kind of local minimum. Scott talks about it in more detail in his paper <a href="https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf">"NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality" (PDF)</a>.
<p>In his teens, Scott experimented with the surfaces soap bubbles form. That was the closest in his life that he had ever been to an experimentalist. And in his experimments the bubbles got stuck in local optima. "But I haven't tried every possible brand of soap," Scott quipped.</p>
<p>Same is true about using protein folding for solving NP-complete problems. Finding optimal configuration for a protein can be modelled as NP-complete problem, and yet every cell in our bodies does it every second. Despite having been under enormous selection pressure to not get trapped in local optima, proteins still sometimes do that, and that can lead to prion- and amyloid-related illnesses.</p>
<p>That's the basic problem with all physics-based computations: systems in nature do get stuck in local optima. "This may sound silly," says Scott, "but every few months I get calls from popular science writers and they ask me, what about this? This violates Church-Turing thesis! But the things they suggest usually have the problems I mentioned."</p>
<p>When Scott Aaronson first heard about quantum computing as a teenager, he was similarly skeptical. He thought some physicist didn't understand Church-Turing thesis. So he had to find out about quantum mechanics for himself.</p>
<h3><a id="qc_extended_church_turing">Does quantum computing bypass Extended Church-Turing thesis?</a> </h3>
<p>Does it? Skipping ahead, the smart people of the internet <a href="https://www.quora.com/Do-you-believe-quantum-computers-can-violate-the-Extended-Church-Turing-thesis">think it very likely does</a>.
<p>But back to Scott Aaronson's story. Setting out to learn quantum mechanics, Scott found out that quantum mechanics is not as hard to learn as it is commonly assumed. As he says, Quantum Mechanics turns out to be incredibly simple once you take the physics out of it. And no, he doesn't mean in a woo-woo New Agey sense. He adds: "The way I see it, it's a level below physics. It's an operating system that the rest of physics runs on as application. And what that OS is is probability theory with minus signs."</p>
<div style="float:right;width:360px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2017/IMG_20170524_191019_ProbabilityWithMinusSigns.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-east-1.dream.io/elze-images/2017/20170524_ScottAaronson/IMG_20170524_191019_ProbabilityWithMinusSignsSm.jpg" alt="Scott Aaaronson's slide on quantum mechanics as probability with minus signs" title="Scott Aaaronson's slide on quantum mechanics as probability with minus signs"></a>
<br/><code>Scott Aaaronson's slide on quantum mechanics as probability with minus signs. It shows the double slit experiment with a smiley-faced photon going through two slits and interfering with itself.</code>
</div>
<p>Probabilities with minus signs" is the concept of probability amplitude, which Scott has written about in more detail in this <a href="http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html"><i>Quantum Computing Since Democritus</i></a> series article. Here, Scott shows how the concept of probability amplitude (which is an entity that can be negative) explains the phenomenon of quantum interference. Interference is what causes some "paths" that lead to an observed outcome (e.g. photon going through either slit in the famous double-slit experiment) to cancel each other, because one has a plus sign, and the other has a minus sign.</p>
<p>"Probabilities as complex numbers come up in the double slit experiment," says Scott. "If I close off one of the slits, the photon appears in places where it doesn't want to appear before. By decreasing the number of choices, I can increase the likehood of an event. Physicists were eventually forced to say: the photon has some amplitude for going through the first slit, and some amplitude for going through the second slit. And amplitudes are complex numbers. You have to add the amplitudes of all the slots, and then take a square. That's a positive number."</p>
<p>This approach to quantum mechanics leads you to learning enough quantum mechanics from the "right angle" to understand quantum computing -- and you don't need differential equations and Schrodinger's wave equation to understand it. The latter is the traditional approach to teaching quantum mechanics, and, according to Scott, it scares people away from it. "Richard Feynman in his book "QED" doesn't even mention complex numbers. He says that each path has an arrow attached, and to compute how likely that path was, you stack those arrows together. So that's a perfect example how to boil it down to a bare minimum but not lower than that," says Scott. "I've given talks about this stuff at high schools. The smarter high school students can understand a lot of it without much difficulty, part of it because there is less they have to unlearn. To get into this field you don't have to take years and years of physics, you don't have to known how to do integrals or solve differential equations. But you have to understand vectors and matrices and complex numbers. So that's the bare minimum. But that bare minimum is accessible to a much larger population of people than the people that had been traditionally thought of as being able to understand quantum mechanics."</p>
<p>(To be fair, not all quantum physicists agree that quantum mechanics can be taught as "probability theory with minus signs" without first introducing the wave equation and such. <a href="https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-about-Scott-Aaronsons-claim-that-QM-should-be-taught-directly-from-its-conceptual-core-a-certain-generalization-of-probability-theory-to-allow-minus-signs-instead-of-retracing-its-historical-development">Here is a discussion on Quora</a> about what is lost when you approach it that way. -- E.)</p>
<p><a id="interference">Understanding interference</a> will also inoculate you against the biggest fallacy that's being thrown around in the popular press when explaining quantum computing. <b>A quantum computer does not "try every answer in parallel" to arrive at the right answer.</b> If there is one thing Scott would like you to take away from this or any of his quantum computing presentations, it is this. The quantum computer does not try every answer in parallel. It's not a massively parallel classical computer.</p>
<p>It is <b>interference</b> that lets you get the right answer out of a quantum computer. You rely on the fact that amplitudes behave not like probabilities because they can cancel each other. For every wrong answer, you hope that each path leading to the answer to have equal positive and negative amplitudes, so they could cancel each other. For the right answer we want all the paths leading to it to have either all positive or all negative amplitudes. We need to to do something to boost the probability of the right answer, and quantum interference does that. That's one new tool quantum mechanics puts in our toolbox.</p>
<p>This is also his bare minimum standard for popular science articles explaining quantum computing, also known as the minus sign test. The article needs to mention interference.</p>
<h3><a id="qc_applications">Applications of quantum computing</a></h3>
<p>Though we are used to thinking about quantum computers as something that would let us solve hard problems fast, the first application of quantum computing that its pioneers conceived wasn't that at all. Their initial reason for building quantum computers was to simulate quantum systems. "In the 1980s, Feynman, Deutsch, and others noticed that a system of n qubits seems to take ~ 2^n steps to simulate on a classical computer, because of the phenomenon of entanglement between the qubits. They had the amazing idea of building a quantum computer to overcome that problem," Scott says. And now, decades after Deutsch proposed that idea, Scott Aaronson still thinks that quantum simulation is a major, perhaps the biggest and most promising, application for quantum computing. It could have huge applications for energy. </p>
<p>For Scott personally, the number one application is to disprove people who come to his blog and argue that quantum computing is impossible.</p>
<h4><a id="cryptography">What about cryptography?</a></h4>
<p>When people say "quantum cryptography", they typically mean one of two things: (1) Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) -- a process that lets two parties exchange cryptographic keys while guaranteeing that the keys won't be intercepted by an attacker in transit, or (2) quantum-safe cryptography, that is to say, classical encryption algorithms that can't be broken by quantum computers any faster than they could be broken by classical computers. I'm not sure which one Scott meant when he said that quantum cryptography already exists today, but there is almost no market for it, because it's a problem that's already solved by private key encryption.</p>
<p>As far as public-private key encryption, it relies on computational difficulty of factoring large numbers, and that is actually vulnerable to Shor's factorization algorithm, but there are many symmetric encryption algorithms (that use the same key for encryption and decryption) that don't rely on factorization and thus can't be cracked by quantum computers.</p>
<p>(Here is a more detailed <a href="https://labs.mwrinfosecurity.com/blog/the-current-state-of-quantum-cryptography-qkd-and-the-future-of-information-security/">overview of quantum-safe encryption algorithms and QKD</a>.)</p>
<p>But when it comes to using quantum computing to solve any kind of problems faster, as anyone who reads Scott's blog already knows, he is very doubtful that there will be real, practical applications for quantum computing in that respect. At least not soon.</p>
<h3><a id="qc_speedup">Can quantum computers actually achieve exponential speedup? What about any other kind of significant speedup?</a></h3>
<p>"If we were physicists, we would have declared P != NP to be a law of nature," Scott says. "But we use different terminology. Where physics have laws, we have conjectures."</p>
<p>Popular press sometimes states that quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, but anyone who reads Scott's blog knows that's not true. The integer factorization problem that Shor's algorithm solves is not known to be NP-complete, and is suspected not to be. But can quantum computers do it at some point?</p>
<div style="float:left;width:360px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2017/IMG_20170524_193312_BQP.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-east-1.dream.io/elze-images/2017/20170524_ScottAaronson/IMG_20170524_193312_BQPSm.jpg" alt="Scott Aaaronson's slide of the BQP problem class" title="Scott Aaaronson's slide of the BQP problem class"></a>
<br/><code>Scott Aaaronson's slide of the BQP problem class</code>
</div>
<p>There is a complexity class called BQP, or bounded-error quantum polynomial time. Those are problems for which exists a bounded-error polynomial time algorithm for quantum computers. "Bounded error" means that the algorithm will give a wrong answer no more than a certain percentage of times -- that percentage probably being sufficiently low, or can be brought down to be sufficiently low for practical purposes. This class of problems is bigger than P, the class of polynomially-solvable problems, but it definitely does not include the NP-complete problems -- at least nobody at present thinks that it does, and there is a lot of evidence that it doesn't. So most likely polynomial-time algorithms for NP-complete problems, even on quantum computers, don't exist.</p>
<p>But it's not known yet where the boundaries of BQP lie. While it includes some problems in the intermediate zone of NP problems that are not known to be P, but not known to be NP-complete either, some of these problems are very special problems. We don't even know if BQP is contained in NP. So there may be problems that quantum computer can efficiently solve, but a classical computer might not even be able to verify the answer. For that you would need another quantum computer.</p>
<h3><a id="dwave">What about D-Wave's claims of exponential speedup?</a></h3>
<p>D-Wave is a company that builds adiabatic quantum computers and that has claimed to achieve quantum supremacy, that is, made a quantum computer that achieves significant speedup over a classical computer for some type of problem. Scott has long been skeptical of their claims. Even if you were able to build a perfect adiabatics quantum computer, we don't know how well it would do. The quantum adiabatic algorithm was described in a <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0001106">2000 paper by Farhi and other authors</a>, and the general idea is shown in this slide by Scott. Farhi suggested that maybe it solves NP-complete problems in polynomial time, which would put NP in BQP. The iffy part is that the amount of time you need to run adiabatic algorithm depends on something called eigenvalue gap. As you vary the Hamiltonian, what is is the smallest gap between its first and second eigenvalues? If that gap becomes exponentially small, you need to run it for an exponential time. "And some people were able to construct problems for which this gap becomes exponentially small," says Scott.</p>
<p>"After you've seen problems with NP-completeness, you are tempted to elevated [computational] hardness as a fundamental physics problem. You would ask, what implication it would have for physics? And now we know some examples: for example, in condensed matter systems spectral gaps would have to become exponentially small," says Scott Aaraonson.</p>
<p>For the last some number of years D-Wave has been trying to find problems for which adiabatic algorithm would be exponentially faster than a classical algorithm. Scott is quite skeptical that they have found any. In the previous quantum computing meetup, though, Brian La Cour from UT Austin said he thought <a href="http://sfragments.blogspot.com/2017/05/advances-in-quantum-computing.html#dwave">it wasn't so clear-cut</a>, because the recent D-Wave advancements make it less apparent that there is a classical algorithm that would do just as well. But it's not that Scott is skeptical about adiabatic algorithms altogether. "We may not understand the potential of adiabatic algorithm until we have a real quantum computer," he says.</p>
<h3>Scott Aaronson's areas of research</h3>
<p>Scott's own research area is <i>quantum supremacy</i>, that is, finding quantum algorithms that for some types of problems provide a definite speedup over any classical algorithm. And by the way, he got a lot of comedic mileage out of that phrase during the Trump campaign year.</p>
<p>A year ago Scott wrote this paper connecting quantum computation to the black hole firewall problem. He briefly mentioned it and said that there wasn't enough time to discuss it at this presentation. This left me and some other people in the audience with a cliffhanger feeling. Just when we got to hearing something we had not heard about before, the lecture was over! Some of us asked Scott about that paper later after the talk, and he pointed us to more information about the paper <a href="https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2852">on his blog</a>.</p>
<h3>Questions from the audience</h3>
<p>Unfortunately, the questions were nearly impossible to hear, because the audience members didn't have a microphone. So I could only guess the general topic they asked about.</p>
<p>Q1. <b>About quantum entanglement</b>.</p>
<p><b>Scott Aaronson</b>. I didn't say much about entanglement in this talk. In quantum mechanics entanglement is not a separate rule you have to postulate. It's just something that's there for a ride. It's just that entanglement means that in QM you can't write a state of a qubits as a product state. </p>
<p>If qubits are not entangled, you don't have a quantum computer. You can simulate it easily with a classical computer. Entanglement is a necessary but insufficient condition for QM.</p>
<p>Q2. <b>About decoherence</b>, the problem that makes quantum computing so hard to implement in practical terms.</p>
<p><b>Scott Aaronson</b>. A crucial discovery from the nineties was that you don't have to get your decoherence rate down to 0. You just need to get it down to very very low rate. So even if some small number of qubits will leak out into environment, the quantum information that you care about is still there.</p>
<p>Q3. <b>About machine learning and quantum computing.</b></p>
<p>Scott acknowledged that quantum computing might seem like a natural fit for quantum computing. "In a way, machine learning is all about linear algebra in high-dimensional spaces, and so is quantum computing. But you always have to ask, if someone can simulate a quantum machine learning algorithm with a classical approach, would they really a get a speedup from the quantum computing algorithm?"</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-44251333938043499612017-05-25T12:57:00.003-07:002017-05-25T13:13:10.002-07:00Advances in quantum computing: presentation by Dr. Brian La Cour<p>Dr. Brian La Cour from University of Texas at Austin gave a presentation on the latest state of quantum computing to Austin's Quantum Computing meetup in March of 2017. Here are some prominent points from it.</p>
<p>Several big companies are getting into quantum computing now: <a id="google">Google, Microsoft, IBM</a>. There are significant differences between their approaches.</p>
<p>Google plans to solve a problem with 49 qubits, a problem that would demonstrate quantum supremacy (getting a clear speedup with a quantum algorithm over a classical algorithm), but is completely useless in real life. The problem with that is that when you progress to the quantum supremacy frontier, you can no longer check the answer with a regular device. Or it would take a very long time. So Google's argument will probably be based on asymptotic trend, with how they are doing with more qubits. But overall this problem of how to check the results will be more difficult in the future.</p>
<div style="float:right;width:410px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2017/IMG_20170321_184122_GoogleRaceQuantumSupremacy.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2017/20170321_QuantumComputing/IMG_20170321_184122_GoogleRaceQuantumSupremacySm.jpg" alt="Brian La Cour talks at the Austin Quantum Computing meetup" title="Brian La Cour talks at the Austin Quantum Computing meetup"></a>
<br/><code>Brian La Cour talks about Google's race to quantum supremacy at the Austin Quantum Computing meetup</code>
</div>
<p>We are a long way from solving Shor's algorithm and breaking internet's encryption. But quantum simulation is a near term application. It goes back to Richard Feynman's discussions of quantum computing. We can simulate things on a digital computer, but it's not very efficient. When you want to add another spin, another atom, you have to double the memory. What better thing to simulate a quantum system than a quantum system?</p>
<p>There is a difference between gate-based quantum computing (like what IBM and partially Google does) and <a id="dwave">quantum annealing</a>, like what D-Wave does, and partially Google.</p>
<p>Gate-based device (that operates on gates, similar to classical gates) is a universal quantum computer. D-Wave's computer is specialized, it is only useful for certain optimization problems. And so far those problems have been pretty contrived, not necessarily corresponding to anything in real life. Even so there is no definitive evidence that the D-Wave's computer is advantageous for solving specific practical problems, as compared to classical solvers. There is a professor somewhere who, every time when D-Wave claimed that their quantum computer was solving some problems more efficiently, took it as a challenge to find a classical algorithm that would beat it. And so far he has been successful. But lately this has become less clear, because he has been, in Brian's words "exploiting what he knows about the problem". (Mathematicians and computer scientists can make it sound like it's a bad thing. But perhaps he means that while the professor is exploiting special knowledge about a problem, the quantum annealing computer can't make use of that knowledge, thus he is not comparing apples to apples? -- E.)</p>
<p>IARPA -- funding agency for intelligence community, analogy of DARPA -- is focused on developing next-generation quantum annealing, a universal quantum annealer. Their goal is, can you take benchmark projects and scale them to the thousands of qubits that D-Wave has?</p>
<p>Microsoft is looking at high-level languages for quantum computing. They are designing high-level languages that optimize what low-level languages do. They also do their own research into topological quantum computing, which is a very different approach than the qubit-based QC, but Brian thinks that's technologically so far away it's probably never going to happen.</p>
<p><a id="developers">This brings us to another Brian La Cour point</a>, which is that now is a good time even for ordinary software developers to get involved in quantum computing, and you don't have to be a researcher to do it. There are people who are building interfaces in conventional programming languages to QASM, IBM's Quantum assembly language. This is where you as an individual can make a contribution: figure out how to do things in QASM and implement an interface to it in your favorite language. Also, individuals can play around with the IBM's Quantum Experience, a web interface to the IBM's quantum computer, and familiarity with it could put you in a position to get a job at some company that does quantum computing (not that there are many of those currently -- E.).</p>
<p>According to Brian, <a id="games">quantum gamification</a> is also a trend. However, he used the word "gamification" not the way it is typically used (to incentivize certain user behaviors by making them seem like a game). He meant it more literally in the sense of games that teach you something about quantum mechanics. In some of those games people perform actions that help quantum researchers. Here are some examples:</p>
<ul>
<li>www.scienceathome.org</li>
<li>qCraft -- a "mod" to the popular Minecraft game. It uses "quantum blocks" to teach superposition, observation, and entanglement.</li>
<li>There are even games that have been programmed on IBM Quantum Experience, such as Quantum Battleship.</li>
<li>Decodoku was developed to help researchers with quantum error correction. You are protecting researchers from errors.</li>
<li>cat-paper-scissors game (I could not find it by googling -- E.)</li>
<li>Quantum Cats from University of Waterloo, Canada. It's like angry birds, except cats can be in superpositions.</li>
</ul>
<p>Brian La Cour noted that not only quantum computing research is strong in Canada, Canadian QC scientists also do a lot of educational outreach. US scientists don't do nearly as much, but they should.</p>
<p>As always, the least predictable part of any presentation is the <a id="questions">audience's questions</a>, and Brian got a few of those.</p>
<p><b>Audience member</b>. Have you heard of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromorphic_engineering">neuromorphic computing</a>?</p>
<p><b>Brian</b> replied that he has heard about it, but that there wasn't any connection there to quantum computing. It was just another unconventional way to compute. Apropos of unconventional computing, quantum computing in a way is a throwback to analog computing: encoding information in continuous variables, except what comes out is still digital.</p>
<p><b>Audience member.</b> Can quantum computing be used to mine bitcoins?</p>
<p>Aside from currently existing quantum computers being nowhere near powerful enough to mine bitcoins, Brian also noted that the value of bitcoin is based on the fact that bitcoins are computationally difficult to find. So if you find an algorithm to mine them fast and reliably, it will devalue them.</p>
<p><b>Audience member.</b> How big a leap is it to go from classical programming to quantum programming? Is it a totally different beast?</p>
<p><b>Brian</b>. It is a totally different beast. If you try to do things like conditionals and loops, you are doing it wrong. Instead of conditionals you have control gates, where value of one qubit controls what happens to another qubit. Which is sort of like conditional, but linear. A qubit in a superposition of 0/1 controls another qubit which is also in superposition.</p>
<p>The way you think about quantum computing is taking your entire data space, or state space, and think about it all at once.</p>
<p>You initialize all to 0 and apply Hadamard gates all at once. It puts them in superposition of all possible states, and then you do operation on them. You are looking at the whole haystack and apply operations to the whole haystack until you find a needle. You don't examine each value and look whether it's a needle.</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-14641553183738904562017-02-15T18:40:00.000-08:002017-05-11T13:13:31.727-07:00Stumbling into BodyHackingCon on the last day<p>You walk into the BodyHackingCon on an early Sunday afternoon, and you are not sure if it's really still going on. You expect it to have a bigger, or at least flashier presence: shouldn't there be people with highly visible body modifications milling about? Instead, you see people in business casual whose name tags say "superintendent", and the hallways are plastered with signs for Texas School Boards convention. But you persist and walk around a corner, and then down a city-block-long corridor around another corner (that's Austin Convention Center for you), and you are finally rewarded by a hand-scrawled sign pointing towards an open door of a huge, warehouse-style expo room. But this is the last day of a 3-day convention, so naturally most of the vendors are gone.</p>
<div style="float:left;width:310px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2017/IMG_20170129_135121_NeosensoryVest.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2017/20170129_KMFA_BodyHackingCon/IMG_20170129_135121_NeosensoryVestSm.jpg" alt="Neosensory vest that is supposed to let you perceive words as vibrations on your skin, seen at BodyHackingCon 2017 in Austin" title="Neosensory vest that is supposed to let you perceive words as vibrations on your skin, seen at BodyHackingCon 2017 in Austin"></a>
<br/><code>Neosensory vest that is supposed to let you perceive words as vibrations on your skin</code>
</div>
<p>There is still a thing or two happening; at one of the booths a visitor is trying to pull together the edges of a peculiar-looking vest around his torso; it clearly is not going to happen, since the vest is 3-4 sizes too small. "I'm sorry. We are planning to have larger sizes in the future," says a vendor at the booth, even though the guy is merely average size. But apparently the vest does not need to close to work. It is studded with small metal circles that make up some kind of haptic language interface. That's only my guess based on what I could glean from the snippets of conversation. Because who needs to ask how it works when you can speculate?</p>
<p>"Whip. Angle," says the booth guy. "Whip. Angle." Then he turns a phone screen to the guy who's trying out the vest. There are two circles on it, and he asks the guy to pick one to tap on. Apparently the booth guy made the dots convey some kind of haptic stimulation (e.g. buzzing?) -- and asked the wearer to recognize the word encoded in it. He praises the wearer for answering correctly. "So you see, it's not just the length of the word," he says. I guess he was saying that the vest made it possible, with some minimal training, to distinguish the actual word pattern, not just a longer word from a shorter word?</p>
<div style="float:right;width:160px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2017/IMG_20170129_135450_YellowRibcageOnHead.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2017/20170129_KMFA_BodyHackingCon/IMG_20170129_135450_YellowRibcageOnHeadSm.jpg" alt="A jacket with a ribcage headpiece (?) from BodyHackingCon" title="A jacket with a ribcage headpiece (?) from BodyHackingCon"></a>
<br/><code>A jacket with a ribcage headpiece? This would make a splash at a science fiction convention. </code>
</div>
<p>Then you look around some more, and even with most vendors gone and large patches of the expo hall square footage reverting to its post-convention beige bleakness, you still see something unusual. At another exhibitor's booth, flanking it on both sides, two women are lying on the tables, looking for all the world like wax statues. Their eyes are covered with something that could be a sleep mask or a VR headset. You glance at the vendor's name -- <i>bio</i>- or <i>healing</i>-something -- and think it's more likely to be a mask. By the way, the name matches a definite pattern: half of the exhibitors' names here have "bio", or "quantum", or something vaguely medical in a New Agey way. Which is fitting, given that half of them sell nothing more than nutrition drinks and supplements.</p>
<p>You stumble upon exhibits of clothes that wouldn't be out of place a goth or punk store, except they have patches with wires sticking out, like something that's placed on you right before a surgery. Some also light up. Many would make a stunning costume at a science fiction convention, if you could spawn off a third or fourth alter ego to explore your mild interest in costuming. Overall, this is the bodyhacking you could get behind -- the kind that stays entirely outside the body.</p>
<p>Most of those clothes are art projects. One dress claims to simulate dark matter: "Dark Matter inflates and deflates against your body to simulate the universe expanding against you, and the buzzing sculptural universal necklace, "Dark Energy", buzzes against your skin to simulate movement through the universe in time in accordance with events happening in VR". But you have read enough science fiction and imagined the vast cosmic space enough times that you know if you put on that dress (not that it's an option) the experience would fall very short of feeling at the center of the expanding universe.</p>
<div style="float:right;width:250px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2017/IMG_20170129_135317_CyberkniticsCape.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2017/20170129_KMFA_BodyHackingCon/IMG_20170129_135317_CyberkniticsCapeSm.jpg" alt="A cape that goes over some sensor with wires that's placed on your chest, seen at BodyHackingCon 2017 in Austin" title="A cape that goes over some sensor with wires that's placed on your chest, seen at BodyHackingCon 2017 in Austin"></a>
<br/><code>A cape that goes over some sensor with wires that's placed on your chest, resembling uncannily of surgical preparations. </code>
</div>
<p>Some of the clothes have VR content associated with it accessible through your phone; and perhaps you could spend some interesting minutes with it, but just downloading the app would take some time, and the WiFi connection in this building is iffy, and the event is winding down and you are sure vendors are anxious to pack up and leave.</p>
<p>Finally on the way out you get a glimpse of a more radical kind of bodyhacking: a guy you pass in the hallway has small, but prominent devil's horns under the skin of his bald forehead.</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-33079729724195678772016-09-14T11:27:00.001-07:002016-09-14T11:27:34.637-07:00Book review: Lauren Beukes "The Shining Girls"<p>This is a book about a time-travelling serial killer and a woman who survives her own murder attempt and sets out to catch him. The most interesting part is that she doesn't even consider time travel as a possibility (the book is set in the conventional reality), but gradually comes to accept it, based on evidence.</p>
<p>The weakest chapters of the book were the ones written from the killer's point of view. Those parts have a detached, distancing quality. I didn't get any clue as to the killer's motivation. At some point he feels forced by the House itself (a house where he lives that serves as a portal to different eras) to go murder all those women. But he does not respond like an ordinary person would if they felt compelled to murder someone. At the very least s/he would be upset and conflicted about it. Even more so if the urge was planted directly in their mind by a mysterious force. That should make anyone question their own sanity, but the murderer does not seem disturbed. He is very nonchalant about all that.</p>
<p>If the killer had been portrayed in a way that readers could connect with him (and yes, to enjoy a book you have to connect with the villains too; you need to get into their mind and understand why they do what they do, even if you don't find it justifiable), I would have added another star to the review.</p>
<p>It is in the victims' plotlines that the storytelling really picks up. Each of the eight murdered women were interesting, different, and vivid. They made the book worth reading. It quickly became clear why they were called the Shining Girls. Each of them was ahead of her time in some way, breaking the mold of what was expected from women of their time. In that way perhaps the House could be viewed as embodiment of evil reactionary forces of the world. But if so, that metaphor isn't developed in the book very well.</p>
<p>The story really takes off when one of the women survives the attempted murder and gets on the killer's trail; as level-headed as she is, she is eventually forced to accept the evidence that the killer might have traveled in time to commit murders. I really liked that she applies every ounce of skepticism to examine all the other possible explanations, and only after exhausting them settles on the seemingly impossible. </p>
<p>I will not reveal the ending, except to say that it was a quite confusing. Perhaps that was deliberate: time travel stories are very difficult to resolve in a satisfactory and logical manner. Once you start dealing with time paradoxes, there is no good way out. So even though the ending felt handwavingly dismissive and intentionally obscure, it doesn't detract from the story that much; its essence was about the journey, not the destination.</p>
<p>Rating: approximately 3.5 or 4 stars out of 5</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-36793989719199401072016-01-24T15:46:00.001-08:002017-05-11T13:18:03.617-07:00ArmadilloCon 2015: New Feminist Science Fiction<p>Beside book and story recommendations, this panel on the best recent feminist science fiction and fantasy involved a discussion on what the panelists would like to see more in the feminist SF/F.</p>
<h3><a name="recommendations">Feminist speculative fiction writers, recommended by our panelists</a></h3>
<p><b>Stina Leicht</b> recommends:</p>
<blockquote>Kameron Hurley, Elizabeth Bear, Ann Leckie, Nisi Shawl, N. K. Jemison, G. Willow Wilson.</blockquote>
<p><b>Katherine Sanger</b> mentioned science fiction written by men that has awesome female characters, but it went by too fast for me to write down the names (-- E.)</p>
<p><b>Nancy Jane Moore</b> recommends: </p>
<blockquote>
<p><b>Andrea Hairston</b> -- her work "Mindscape" really plays with gender stuff. <b>Jennifer Marie Brissett</b> "Elysium". Also, Aqueduct books. If you need a reading list of feminist SF, just go to the Aqueduct books page. And anything on the Tiptree awards page.</p>
<p><b>Kelley Eskridge</b>'s collection <i>Dangerous Space</i>. It has a character named Mars, and I defy you to tell me whether Mars is male or female.</p>
<p>Going into fantasy world -- <b>Laurie J. Marks</b>, whose <i>Elemental Logic</i> series starts with <i>Fire Logic</i>. Gender politics, war and peace, you name it, it is covered in the <i>Elemental Logic</i>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><b>Caroline Yoahim</b> recommends:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><b>Nicola Griffith</b> <i>Hild</i> -- historical fantasy. She is a really intelligent female character. There is a freedom for her to explore sexuality in the way that was not available to women. </p>
<p><b>Tina Connoly</b>: <i>IronSkin</i>, <i>Copperhead</i>, and <i>Silverblind</i>: steampunk Jane Eyre with fairies.</p>
<p><b>Nnedi Okorafor</b> <i>Who Fears Death</i></p>
<p><b>Nalo Hopkinson</b> writes fantastic feminist stuff, such as <i>Brown Girl in the Ring</i>.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3>Short fiction</h3>
<p><b>Caroline Yoachim</b> recommends the <i>Crossed Genres</i> magazine. Of the notable stories there she recommends these: </p>
<blockquote>
<p><b>Sylvia Spruck Wrigley</b> <a href="http://crossedgenres.com/magazine/019-space-travel-loses-its-allure/">"Space travel loses its allure when you've lost your moon cup"</a>.</p>
<p><b>Rachael K. Jones</b> <a href="http://crossedgenres.com/magazine/020-makeisha-in-time/">"Makeisha in Time"</a> -- story of a black woman who lapses backward in time.</p>
<p><b>Alyssa Wong</b> <a href="http://fu-gen.org/crash/fisherqueen-wong.htm">"The Fisher Queen"</a> is up for a Nebula this year. It is a mermaid story, and some themes in it require trigger wanings. Cost of not speaking up against injustice.</p>
<p><b>Sofia Samatar</b> <a href="http://www.strangehorizons.com/2013/20130107/selkie-f.shtml">"Selkie Stories are for Losers"</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><b>Amanda Downum</b> recommends:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><b>Kij Jonhson</b> short story <a href="http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/johnson_10_09/">"Spar"</a>;</p>
<p><b>Catherine Valente's</b> Fairyland series for children that starts with "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making".</p>
</blockquote>
<h3><a name="more">What they would like to see more in the feminist science fiction</a></h3>
<p><b>Amanda Downum</b>. I am a fan of playing with subtle things, instead of bringing a hammer. I like Trojan horses. I like books with an array of women doing an array of interesting things. Not just having one special woman, because then it becomes a token.</p>
<p><b>Stina Leicht</b>. I'm like you. I don't like having one special, kickass token female character to who nothing bad can happen. (She refers to Arya from Game of Thrones as an example of a female character that's singled out for special treatment.) Arya is great! She's never going to be raped!</p>
<p><b>Amanda Downum</b>. I like the normalization of women doing things.</p>
<p><b>Caroline Yoachim</b>. I like a wider range of cultures represented in SF.</p>
<p><b>Amanda Downum</b>. I also have hard time pulling feminist out of broader range of cultures. (Perhaps she meant that it is impossible to dissociate diversity of cultures from feminism. -- E.)</p>
<p><b>Caroline Yoachim</b>. The broadening of feminism in science fiction is a good thing.</p>
<p><b>Nancy Jane Moore</b>. [I like that] We finally moved away for the reality where white male is the default, and anyone else's existence needs to be justified.</p>
<p><b>Stina Leicht</b>. Minorities and women are historically not permitted anger. You're supposed to have a sense of humor, laugh it off.</p>
<p><b>Nancy Jane Moore</b>. The same issue as with Sandra Bland dying in a jail cell. She was not permitted to get angry when she got pulled over.</p>
<p><b>Stina Leicht</b>. When the Hunger Games movie was made, a lot of people got upset, because they were convinced that Rue was white. They thought it was not OK for her to be a person of color.</p>
<p><b>Amanda Downum</b>. You can describe your character very clearly, and some readers will still sail past what you're trying to do. (I think she means that some readers will visualize your character as white even if you described him or her as a person of color, simply because white is the default to them. -- E.)</p>
<p><b>Caroline Yoachim</b>. It's tricky. I'm half Japanese, and I write a lot of Asian characters. But you don't want to bludgeon people with the character's race. When you're writing a modern Japense American character, they don't have to have a traditional Japanese name. And people will automatically whitewash it.</p>
<p><b>Stina Leicht</b>. It happened to Ursula LeGuin, the Earthsea wizard -- people assumed he was white.</p>
<div style="margin: auto; width:460px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2015/IMG_7077_NewFeministSF.jpg"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2015/20150723_26ArmadilloCon/20150726/IMG_7078_NewFeministSFSm.jpg" alt="Left to right: Caroline Yoachim, Nancy Jane Moore, Katherine Sanger, Amanda Downum, Stina Leicht." title="Left to right: Caroline Yoachim, Nancy Jane Moore, Katherine Sanger, Amanda Downum, Stina Leicht."></a>
<br/><code>Left to right: Caroline Yoachim, Nancy Jane Moore, Katherine Sanger, Amanda Downum, Stina Leicht. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2015/">in my photo gallery</a>.</code>
</div>
<p><b>Amanda Downum</b>. One of the things that frustrated me in science fiction is that people stop questioning. They have their speculative idea, their fantasy world, but then they don't question and push -- they just stop. They found one thing they wanted to write about, and they don't think that anything else can be different. You have a world you are creating from scratch, so why don't you push yourself to imagine more? Why your gender relationships are like from the 1950s America?</p>
<p><b>Nancy Jane Moore</b>. Academic book "Brain Storm" by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young -- most of research that find brain differences between men and women are bad science. When you look at differences among people, they don't break down along gender lines.</p>
<p><b>Amanda Downum</b>. When you're a shallow writer, you're a shallow writer. It manifests in more than just not being able to write female characters.</p>
<h3>More book recommendations</h3>
<p><b>Caroline Yoachim</b> recommends: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Collections of short stories: "Women destroy SF", "Women destroy fantasy", "Women destroy horror".</p>
<p><b>Nisi Shawl</b> "Filter House" -- another Tiptree winner.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><b>Amanda Downum</b> recommends:</p>
<blockquote> <b>Jacqueline Koyanagi</b> <i>Tangled Axon</i> books. The first book is "Ascencion".</blockquote>
<p><b>Caroline Yoachim</b> recommends: </p>
<blockquote><b>Maureen McHugh</b>: short story collections "After the Apocalypse", "Mothers and Other Monsters".</blockquote>
<p><b>Nancy Jane Moore</b> recommends:</p>
<blockquote>"Necessary Ill" by <b>Deb Taber</b>. Her main character is a neuter. The neutter people go by "it". They are neither male nor female. They don't have genitals. They do very disturbing things. It is a disturbing book , and that's the greatest recommendation I can give for a book.</blockquote>
<p><b>Amanda Downum</b>. Talking about characters doing unpleasant things: I would like to have a discussion about female characters doing unpleasant things, and how audiences respond to them.</p>
<p><b>Stina Leicht</b>. Women are people, and part of being people is making terrible mistakes. It happens, and it needs to be OK in the books. </p>
<h3>Questions from the audience</h3>
<p><b>Q1</b>. How do you like the treatment of those issues in film? </p>
<p><b>Nancy Jane Moore</b>. 10 minutes of Fury Road was a great movie. Overall I think film is way behind fiction.</p>
<p>All the panelists agree.</p>
<p><b>Amanda Downum</b>. Marketing constraints, etc.</p>
<p><b>Stina Leicht</b>. And there are very limited roles for women once they hit 35. </p>
<p><b>Caroline Yoachim</b>. Also, other contraints like race, sexuality. When we celebrate the broad range of female characters in the books, that's totally not true for film.</p>
<p><b>Nancy Jane Moore</b>. The only SF movie I liked last year was "Her". It is not feminist, but it is going someplace really interesting science fictionally. And the best feminist film of the last years is "Obvious Child", which is not science fiction.</p>
<p><b>Q2.</b>Do you have high hopes for Ghostbusters?</p>
<p><b>Stina Leicht</b>. I really don't, sorry to say. What does it say that our best feminist movei hope is a movie that's completely lacks in plot? It is just explosions. A woman driving a monster truck. I don't like what Hollywood is doing where we rehash everything. Hollywood caters to the established audiences, and they don't take chances.</p>
<p>They mention Geena Davis institute for women in film, and it is doing good work.</p>
<p><b>Q3</b> (not really a question, but a remark). A movie that was very interesting from feminist perspective was "The Age of Avalon" -- about a woman who doesn't age, and the difficulties she's going to have. She comes across one of her former lovers, who is 65, but she still looks 29. And she's dating his son.</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-31406547886958012602015-11-26T05:42:00.000-08:002017-05-13T13:25:39.305-07:00Heina Dadabhoy speaks at the Atheist Community of Austin<p>At her pre-atheist-bat-cruise lecture, an ex-Muslim and atheist activist Heina Dadabhoy was rather critical of westerners stereotyping Muslim women. Her tone was gentle and playful, but the message was sharp.</p>
<p>Heina gave many examples of how Westerners like to fetishize Muslim women's presumed powerlessness and oppression. That doesn't really help the women, just like the memes that compare burqa-covered women with garbage bags don't either. It's not just conservatives: progressives do it too. And they should know better.</p>
<p>Western people like to not acknowledge that Muslim women have agency. It comes across in patronizing comments, such as when little old ladies would come up to Heina back when she wore a headscarf, and say "Dear, you know you don't have to wear that here." Heina was tempted to answer, "Here? Where else would I wear it? I haven't lived in any other country than US."</p>
<p>When she first got on the internet as an adolescent, and some men online found out that she was a Muslim, with a headscarf, trapped at home (I don't know if she meant that last part sarcastically or genuinely), they objectified her as an oppressed princess that needs to be saved. And there was an undercurrent of "you better be grateful and keep your bitch mouth shut". Heina pointed out that it happens in the atheist movement to, cough cough (I guess she meant Richard Dawkins, though he is not alone in that). She had people say to her: it's so great you left Islam! Are you still pure? Do you still have your headscarves? Can you wear one for me? The weirdos just keep coming out of the woodwork.</p>
<p>But Muslim women are not without agency, and Heina bristled against being portrayed as a helpless, isolated girl in need of rescue and liberation. Even as a teenager, growing up in a very strict fundamentalist environment, Heina and her friends found ways to have fun. For example, they used religious phrases to rate boys by hotness, e.g. "Look what the God has created!"</p>
<div style="float:left;width:204px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/aca/2015ACABatCruise/IMG_4038_HeinaDadabhoyLecture.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/ACA/20150926BatCruise/IMG_4038_HeinaDadabhoyLectureSm.jpg" alt="Heina Dadabhoy gives a lecture before the Atheist Community Austin bat cruise in September of 2015" title="Heina Dadabhoy gives a lecture before the Atheist Community Austin bat cruise in September of 2015."></a>
<br/><code>Heina Dadabhoy gives a lecture before the Atheist Community Austin bat cruise in September of 2015. More pictures from the 2015 Atheist Community of Austin bat cruise are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/aca/2015ACABatCruise/">in my photo gallery</a>.</code>
</div>
<p>Heina pointed out that all societies have patriarchal structures oppressing women. While there is no "law" in the West that women should shave their legs, the societal pressure is there nevertheless; the fact that no one is going to throw you in jail for refusing can make this norm even harder to get rid of. Whether you think that the less clothing a woman is wearing the more immoral the country is, or the freer it is, it's the same thing: you define women's sexuality as only in relation to men.</p>
<p>Later in her speech she gave a bunch of trivia about Islamic rules that govern dating, sex, relationships, and marriage. Not surprisingly, most of them don't take women's wishes into account. Oh, and she assured us that the myth that "virgins" (as in 72 virgins that await a man in heaven) is mistranslated "raisins" is completely wrong. The guy who said that just didn't understand language. Speaking of which, what do women get when <i>they</i> get to heaven? Apparently, in some corner of Islamic mythology it is written that women will be reclining on couches, eating, and they will be served by beautiful clear-eyed servant boys. There is a lot of discussion between Muslim women to what extent those boys are used. "So there is kind of some forward thinking there," says Heina.</p>
<p>(I already forgot if all women were supposed to get these boy servants in heaven, or only particularly virtuous ones, or maybe just the ones who died as martyrs.)</p>
<p>Some people from the audience asked her how, with all the gender segregation, are you supposed to meet a person you're going to marry? She replied that it could be someone you met at a mosque, or it might be someone your parents knew all his or her life. There is also a lot of halal flirting going on in the hallways of Islamic association gatherings: "Can I have your dad's email?" Oh, and Islamic men and women who are unmarried are called boy and girl, even if they are in their 40s.</p>
<p>As a takeaway message, she said we should champion an attitude of female agency. We should not buy into Islam's erasure. We should not agree when Westerners say, oh, Islam women are oppressed and have no agency. The most important thing, the most pragmatic thing is harm reduction. We should not try to deconvert them all, its not going to happen. A person from the audience asked her for ideas on how to support progressive Islam. Heina replied: "For one thing, western people should not be smartass and condescending: 'ha ha, you are a Muslim feminist? How do you do that?' Progressive Muslims are eager to get involved, but nobody even notices that they exist." When Heina points out to someone that she is an ex-Muslim, someone inevitably tells her that all ex-Muslims are dead.</p>
<p>(People from the other side tell her she's been bought and paid for, but she is still waiting for that check.)</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-5932844032983917022015-10-10T11:36:00.001-07:002017-05-13T13:28:42.797-07:00Short Fiction You Should Have Read Last Year: ArmadilloCon 2015 panel<p>For starters, panelists K. B. Rylander (moderator), Eugene Fischer, and Rebecca Schwarz list their favorite short stories of the year.</p>
<p><b>Rebecca Schwarz</b>. Ken Liu <a href="http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liu_03_15/">"Cassandra"</a>.</p>
<p><b>K. B. Rylander</b>. Eugie Foster <a href="http://dailysciencefiction.com/fantasy/fairy-tales/eugie-foster/when-it-ends-he-catches-her">"In the end, he catches her"</a>. It was published the day she died, just by coincidence. </p>
<h3>Best sources of short stories</h3>
<p><b>Rebecca Schwarz</b>. I listen to a lot of stories. There are lots of great ways to listen to them, such as the podcasts by <i>Clarkesworld</i>, <i>Cast of Wonders</i> (Young Adult fiction), <i>Beneath the Ceaseless Skies</i>, <i>Strange Horizons</i>. <i>Tor</i> is on and off with their podcasting, but sometimes you can discover great stories there, like Kij Johnson. <i>Escape Pod</i> -- they do a lot of reprints. (It also exists in the print form.) <i>Starship Sofa</i> also does a lot of reprints. <i>Bourbon Penn.</i> </p>
<p><b>Eugene Fischer</b>. <i>Lightspeed</i>, <i>Strange Horizons</i>. Oddly, the best publication for finding new authors these days is Twitter. Follow authors, they will recommend a lot of stories. This year majority of the stories I found is not because I read <i>Asimov</i>'s cover to cover, but because I follow authors, and when they have a story out, they'll tweet a link. You can harness social network effects to curate your reading for you.</p>
<div style="float:right;width:360px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2015/IMG_3553_ShortStoriesPanel.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2015/20150723_26ArmadilloCon/20150726/IMG_3553_ShortStoriesPanelSm.jpg" alt="Short Stories You Should Have Read This Year panel, left to right: K. B. Rylander (moderator), Eugene Fischer, Rebecca Schwarz." title="Short Stories You Should Have Read This Year panel, left to right: K. B. Rylander (moderator), Eugene Fischer, Rebecca Schwarz."></a>
<br/><code>Short Stories You Should Have Read This Year panel, left to right: K. B. Rylander (moderator), Eugene Fischer, Rebecca Schwarz. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2015/">in my photo gallery</a>.</code>
</div>
<p><b>K. B. Rylander</b>. When you think about stories you loved, what makes a great story? What makes them stand out?</p>
<p><b>Eugene Fischer</b> quotes <b>Kevin Brockmeier</b>, who said that every great fiction owes its greatness to fidelity to one of 3 things: fidelity to language, fidelity to lived human experience, or fidelity to authorial obsession. An example of fidelity to language would be Ursula le Guin. An example of fidelity to authorial obsession -- J. G. Ballard. His writing is off the wall, but the images were strongly felt to the author. If a story doesn't bring at least one of those things to the table, says Kevin Brockmeier, then it won't work.</p>
<p><b>Rebecca Schwarz</b>. I like stories that play with form, such as <a href="http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/yoachim_08_14/">"Five Stages of Grief After The Alien Invasion"</a> by Caroline Yoachim, who hangs the story on the traditional five stages of grief. Another example would be <a ref="http://www.strangehorizons.com/2015/20150406/noisepollution-f.shtml">"Noise Pollution"</a> by Allison Wilgus in Strange Horizons. It's punk as in cyberpunk. It's a young rebellious kid narrator telling a story.</p>
<p><b>K. B. Rylander</b>. The way I approach story, the story needs to elicit emotion from the reader. Even in hard science fiction there needs to be emotional interest for that reader.</p>
<p><b>Eugene Fischer</b>. <a href="http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/cimmeria-journal-imaginary-anthropology/">"Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology"</a> by Theodora Goss, published in <i>Lightspeed</i>, resembles Borghes: it's about how reality actually works. Lorrie Moore, in an introduction to "Best American Short Stories", said that a novel comes to us already half-ruined by its length, but in short story we can experience something pristine: a single moment. It is not necessarily in time, but a single esthetic moment. In "Cimmeria", students go to a field study in a country that exists only because they made it up. One of them falls in love with the daughter of a king. In this country there are strange cultural differences that they invented when they designed this country. One of them is, twins are actually the same person. The esthetic moment is, a shift from viewing cultural experience as an outsider, to viewing it as an insider. It's not a moment in time, but a moment in cognition.</p>
<p><b>K. B. Rylander</b>. A lot of time in a story there is a very visceral emotion that people can relate to: loss, love, revenge. Those strong emotion stories are often ones that become the big stories for the year.</p>
<p><b>Rebecca Schwarz</b>. Annie Bellet <a href="http://www.johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-triptych/free-reads/goodnight-stars-annie-bellet/"> "Goodnight Stars"</a>: it was nominated for Hugos, but she withdrew.</p>
<p><b>Eugene Fischer</b> Sam J. Miller <a href="http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/cloud/">"We are the cloud"</a>.</p>
<p>The panelists mention that they've found many notable stories that draw from global mythology, such as Chinese or Pakistani. An example would be Carmen Maria Machado <a href="granta.com/the-husband-stitch/">"The Husband Stitch"</a>, nominated for the Nebula Award.</p>
<h3>Humor stories</h3>
<p><b>Rebecca Schwarz</b>. <i>Daily SF</i> publishes a lot of humor. Also, Alex Shvartsman publishes humor anthologies, <i>Unidentified Funny Objects</i>.</p>
<p><b>K. B. Rylander</b>. Two flash pieces: <a href="http://flashfictiononline.com/main/article/i-am-graalnak-of-the-vroon-empire-destroyer-of-galaxies-supreme-overlord-of-the-planet-earth-ask-me-anything/">"I am Graalnak of the Vroon Empire, Destroyer of Galexies, Supreme Overlord of the Planet Earth. Ask Me Anything."</a> by Laura Pearlman. It's a Reddit with an alien who has came to earth. Oliver Buckram <a href="http://www.drabblecast.org/2014/04/08/drabblecast-320-half-conversation-overheard-inside-enormous-sentient-slug/">"Half a Conversation, Overheard While Inside An Enormous Sentient Slug"</a>. </p>
<p><b>Eugene Fischer</b>. Alice Sola Kim "Mothers, lock up your daughters because they are terrifying" -- a ghost story of Korean adoptees loking for the biological parents with the help of Cthulhu.</p>
<p><b>K. B. Rylander</b>. Kris Dikeman <a href="http://dailysciencefiction.com/hither-and-yon/humor/kris-dikeman/madhouse-on-aisle-12">"Madhouse on Aisle 12"</a> -- a woman goes to a grocery store, and the food talks to her. It's hilarious.</p>
<h3>Great stories that didn't get much attention</h3>
<p><b>K. B. Rylander</b>. What stories were great, but didn't get a lot of attention?</p>
<p><b>Eugene Fischer</b>. <i>Guernica</i> magazine published a story by Anna Noyes, <a href="https://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/becoming/">"Becoming"</a>, from a point of view of chimpanzee who grew up in an 1950s experiment of raising a chimp in a human family to see if it grows up like human. It's not going to get attention in genre fiction awards, and there's no such thing as realist fiction awards.</p>
<p><b>K. B. Rylander</b>. Story by William Ledbetter, <a href="http://escapepod.org/2014/01/31/ep433-sea/">"That Other Sea"</a>, publsihed on <i>Escape Pod</i> (available in both podcast and text versions). It takes place on Europa, on the theory that there is life under ice on Europa. It's a first contact story from the point of view of the aliens. What drew me into the story is that the alien has overwhelming curiosity about the world, the yearning for what's out there.</p>
<p><b>Rebecca Schwarz</b>. A story in <i>Strange Horizons</i>, Kate Heartfield, <a href="http://www.strangehorizons.com/2015/20150216/limestone-f.shtml">"Limestone, Lye and the Buzzing of Flies"</a>. It leans a little literary, it's a little interior. It's a fantastic coming-of-age story with magic elements.</p>
<h3>Must-read short story writers</h3>
<p><b>K. B. Rylander</b>. Do you have any must-read writers? </p>
<p><b>Eugene Fischer</b>. Carmen Maria Machado, Ted Chiang, Alice Sola Kim, Kelly Link, Meghan McCarron.</p>
<p><b>Rebecca Schwarz</b>. Karen Russell, M. Bernardo (she recommends his story in <i>Beneath the Ceaseless Skies</i>, possibly <a href="http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-penitent/">"The Penitent"</a> or <a href="http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/after-compline-silence-falls/">"After Compline, Silence Falls"</a>), Kevin Brockmeier.</p>
<p><b>K. B. Rylander</b>. Sarah Pinsker, Caroline Yoachim. </p>
<h3>Controversial, influential, wave-making stories</h3>
<p><b>K. B. Rylander</b>. What stories do you think were very important to the industry as a whole, that really made waves, that were controversial? </p>
<p><b>Rebecca Schwarz</b>. Cruel stories well done are just perfect. Chuck Palahniuk wrote a story "Loser" in Neil Gaiman anthology, it's aboujt a guy on The Price is Right, he's tripping on acid, and he gets called on the stage. </p>
<p><b>Eugene Fischer</b>. Kij Johnson <a href="http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/johnson_10_09/">"Spar"</a>. Kij Johnson experimented with stripping as much as possible from the story. It produced incredible winners, including "26 Monkeys". Rachel Swirsky <a href="http://www.apex-magazine.com/if-you-were-a-dinosaur-my-love/">"If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love"</a>.</p>
<p><b>Rebecca Schwarz</b>. "Dinosaur" became politicized in the Hugos, and that had nothing to do with the story.</p>
<p><b>Eugene Fischer</b>. "Dinosaur" became a token, a symbol for people for who stories with emotional load is not sufficient. People who think they have ownership over what the speculative fiction genre should be.</p>
<h3>Trends in short fiction</h3>
<p><b>K. B. Rylander</b>. Do you want to talk about any trends in short fiction? Do you see it evolving recently? </p>
<p><b>Eugene Fischer</b>. Last year it shifted to digital publication. Print is fully an afterthought. Charlie Finley's new regime in <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i> produces very good stuff. Print venues are continuing to do good job, but the critical mass of attention has shifted online.</p>
<p><b>Rebecca Schwarz</b>. I'm seeing more diversity. Ken Liu has now translated several short stories from Chinese. </p>
<p><b>Eugene Fischer</b>. Chris Brown two years ago co-edited an anthology "3 messages and a warning" of Mexican science fiction stories translated into English.</p>
<p>Then <b>Eugene Fischer</b> asks the other two panelists: What's out there that people should read of yours? </p>
<p><b>Rebecca Schwarz</b>. <a href="http://devilfishreview.com/issue-fifteen/black-friday-by-rebecca-schwarz/">"Black Friday"</a>. It is a story of a future dystopic Thanksgiving that has become codified, football game to the death, in a big box store, that everybody watches. It is in <i>Devilfish Review</i>. </p>
<p><b>K. B. Rylander</b>. <a href="http://www.baen.com/WeFly.asp">"We Fly"</a>, about trying to find life in Alpha Centauri system. It's based on real science. The story opens when an uploaded human mind, a woman, wakes up in a spaceship. She wakes up, and something is completely wrong, but there is no external damage. It's her trying to work through these things. </p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-40779975037874792632015-08-05T19:32:00.000-07:002017-05-13T13:35:40.016-07:00The Hugo Award's Struggle for Relevance: an ArmadilloCon 2015 panel<p>It's not too much overstatement that blood was expected to flow on "The Hugo Award's Struggle for Relevance", a.k.a. the Sad Puppies debacle, panel at the ArmadilloCon. But the discussion was instead polite and even funny at times. Here are the main points of the discussion. (Pretty much everything is paraphrased.)</p>
<p>The panelists were Lou Antonelli, Justin Landon, Michelle Muenzler (moderator), Marguerite Reed, and Jacob Weisman.</p>
<p>The discussion opened with moderator <b>Michelle Muenzler</b> asking who exactly the Hugo Awards represent. A lot of fandom claims they don't represent them.</p>
<p>On one hand, Hugo Awards are the only science-fiction and fantasy genre awards that the general public (at least the portion that reads those genres) has at least heard about. But upon closer look, <b>Justin Landon</b> said, only a very small part of the SF/F-reading population has heard of Hugos, cares about Hugos, or lets Hugo Awards influence what authors they read. At the end of the day, it only represents the Worldcon voters. <b>Marguerite Reed</b> agreed that people who vote on Hugos are a small percentage of SF/F readers. <b>Jacob Weisman</b> too agreed with everyone else that this award represents mainly, or only, the fans who bought memberships to Worldcon. </p>
<div><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2015/IMG_7074_HugoRelevance.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2015/20150723_26ArmadilloCon/20150725/IMG_7074_HugoRelevance_450.jpg" alt="The Hugo Award's Struggle for Relevance: an ArmadilloCon 2015 panel: left to right: Michelle Muenzler, Jacob Weisman, Lou Antonelli, Marguerite Reed, Justin Landon." title="The Hugo Award's Struggle for Relevance: an ArmadilloCon 2015 panel: left to right: Michelle Muenzler, Jacob Weisman, Lou Antonelli, Marguerite Reed, Justin Landon."></a>
<br/><code>Left to right: Michelle Muenzler, Jacob Weisman, Lou Antonelli, Marguerite Reed, Justin Landon. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2015/">in my photo gallery</a>.</code>
</div>
<p>If that's really the case, why are we worried about what the future of Hugo Awards means for the future of the speculative fiction genre? </p>
<p>I could say that there was a brief argument as to whether the fans who bought WorldCon supporting memberships were "true fans". But in reality, none of the panelists were presumptuous enough to divide the fans into "true" and "false", so it was more like a meta-argument, a survey of popular arguments. For example, one could say that the "true fan" would be considered someone who buys Worldcon memberships and votes for Hugos year after year. But the panelists agreed that the definition of a fan can't be as restrictive as that. <b>Marguerite Reed</b> said that she didn't believe that everyone who bought supporting membership was a true fan, and that no doubt some people bought it for questionable reasons, such as to put Sad Puppy nominated authors on the Hugo ballot; but she is willing to welcome all those people into the science fiction community. She hopes that they will like it enough to stay. <b>Jacob Weisman</b> said that, on the contrary, it might bring such a deep divide that people will opt out, as happened to the Nebula Awards a few years ago.</p>
<p><b>Justin Landon</b> had very harsh words to anyone who likes to divide fans (even the politically-motivated Hugo voters) into true geeks and not true geeks. He, too, has been accused at conventions of being a fake geek. "When we see someone to come into our community, how screwed up it is to say, you're not one of us, get out, just because you're a conservative?" he said.</p>
<div style="float:left;width:310px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2015/IMG_3534_HugosMuenzlerWeismanAntonelli.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2015/20150723_26ArmadilloCon/20150725/IMG_3534_HugosMuenzlerWeismanAntonelli_300.jpg" alt="The Hugo Award's Struggle for Relevance: an ArmadilloCon 2015 panel: left to right: Michelle Muenzler, Jacob Weisman, Lou Antonelli." title="The Hugo Award's Struggle for Relevance: an ArmadilloCon 2015 panel: left to right: Michelle Muenzler, Jacob Weisman, Lou Antonelli."></a>
<br/><code>Left to right: Michelle Muenzler, Jacob Weisman, Lou Antonelli. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2015/">in my photo gallery</a>.</code>
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<p>All this discussion or meta-discussion about true vs. fake fans/geeks seemed a bit pointless to me. The notion of being a science fiction fan or geek is so subjective, it's not like there could ever be a test administered who is and isn't a true fan or geek.</p>
<p><b>Lou Antonelli</b>, who was nominated for Hugos by the Sad Puppies, said that he regretted how it turned out, and that he didn't want the Hugo ballot to be full of authors nominated purely based on political agenda.</p>
<blockquote><b>Lou Antonelli</b>. Whenever you have a system with laws, you chug along until someone finds a loophole, and then you rectify it. So maybe this year we will introduce some provisions. I think people should have fewer nominations than there are places on the ballot, to assure that there won't be a slate. It is ridiculous when someone is nominated more than once in the same category. I hope some reforms will come out of it. I got nominations, but I'm not happy with the way it turned out.</blockquote>
<p>Naturally, other panelists asked Lou why he is not happy with the way it turned out (especially since, according to <b>Marguerite Reed</b>, Lou in his blog called current science fiction "dystopian slipstream pornography", or something like that); and more importantly, why he didn't recuse himself from the Hugo ballot, like so many people had. He said that he stood on it as a matter of principle, to not give in to the abuse that people heaped on the nominated authors.</p>
<blockquote><b>Lou Antonelli</b>. I think <i>Letters from Gardner</i> was good enough for Hugo nomination, good enough to make it on the ballot otherwise. But I said, I didn't need two nominations. And then ... I refused to be bullied and insulted. So I stayed the course. The first short story was withdrawn by the nominee, Annie Bellet, because she couldn't take the heat. When she went down, I decided I wasn't going to let that happen to me.</blockquote>
<p><b>Justin Landon</b> pointed out that while some nominees indeed withdrew because of the bullying they got from "people we would identify as social justice warriors", other nominated writers withdrew themselves without being bullied.</p>
<blockquote><b>Lou Antonelli</b>. I would rather make a decision that turned out to be wrong, but not bow down just to be popular.</blockquote>
<blockquote><b>Justin Landon</b>. I have a lot of empathy for people like Lou, who worked in science fiction for many years, and one year they get a chance to get nominated for a Hugo, and I can't imaging being in their position and having to say "no". I don't want to beat up Lou. I don't envy position you are in.</blockquote>
<div style="float:right;width:310px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2015/IMG_3533_HugosAntonelliReedLandon.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2015/20150723_26ArmadilloCon/20150725/IMG_3533_HugosAntonelliReedLandon_300.jpg" alt="The Hugo Award's Struggle for Relevance: an ArmadilloCon 2015 panel: left to right: Lou Antonelli, Marguerite Reed, and Justin Landon with a glass house in front of him, ready for people to throw stones." title="The Hugo Award's Struggle for Relevance: an ArmadilloCon 2015 panel: left to right: Lou Antonelli, Marguerite Reed, and Justin Landon with a glass house in front of him, ready for people to throw stones."></a>
<br/><code>Left to right: Lou Antonelli, Marguerite Reed, and Justin Landon with a glass house in front of him, ready for people to throw stones. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2015/">in my photo gallery</a>.</code>
</div>
<p>If, as everybody on the panel agreed, conventions and organizations can run their awards however they see fit, it begs a question, voiced by <b>Marguerite Reed</b>: Why didn't Sad Puppies have their own award? <b>Justin Landon</b> thinks it is because Sad Puppies are intent on destroying the Hugos. So then the question is, what are we going to do about it? <b>Justin Landon</b> thinks we should still vote. Not voting would be worse for Hugo Awards.</p>
<blockquote><b>Justin Landon</b>. If you want to vote No Award in some category, go ahead. But if you vote that way in all categories, you are making a statement. But statement-making is what Sad Puppies do. {I think he says, don't do it.} If you don't want to read sad puppies, don't read them. How many people before voting for Hugos, read everything on the ballot? <i>(Nobody in the room raised their hands.)</i> If we vote No Award in every category this year, what will it mean for Hugos next year?</blockquote>
<p>But does it matter if Hugo Awards are destroyed or made irrelevant (which is likely to happen if many people vote for No Award)? Panelists and audience think it does.</p>
<blockquote><b>Jacob Weisman</b>. Science fiction and fantasy genres are more fragile than realized. More books are published but fewer numbers per title are being sold. Too much acrimony will shrink fandom because of the culture war.</blockquote>
<p>A fan from the audience echoed that concern. "In the past, the science fiction community always healed itself, because there was a sense that it was important to maintain the community. This time, there are many who do not feel the preservation of the community is more important than getting their agenda met. This makes this a far more problematic and "dangerous" time in fandom."</p>
<p>The TL;DR version: the panelists would like you to go and vote for the Hugos no matter what. Find something you like, or at least are not opposed to, in as many categories as you can, and vote, and let the Hugo Awards continue.</p>
Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-12476645252062139262015-08-03T13:54:00.000-07:002017-05-14T12:54:50.973-07:00ArmadilloCon 2015: What You Should Have Read in 2014-2015<p>A bunch of authors, editors, critics and booksellers discuss their science fiction, fantasy and horror picks of the year. </p>
<p>Some books got a nod from more than one panelist. This year those were Emily St. John Mandel <i>Station Eleven</i>, Ken Liu <i>Grace of Kings</i>, Kim Stanley Robinson <i>Aurora</i>, and Neal Stephenson <i>Seveneves</i>.</p>
<p>Below are each panelist's recommended books, and his or her comments about why they are worth reading.</p>
<h3><b>John DeNardo</b> recommends</h3>
<p><i>Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection</i>, edited by Gardner Dozois. If you don't read short fiction, here are 3 reasons why you should read this collection. 1. "The Regular" by Ken Liu. I made a mistake of starting it late at night. it pulls you in, and you can't wait to find out what happens next. The way he does it, alternating viewpoints. The way he reveals these plot twists. 2. Rachel Swirsky "Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)". A pinocchi'esque story about father and inventor whose daughter has cancer, so he transfers her memories into a lookalike automaton. It is heartbreaking, but not for a reason you think. It is very moody and emotional. 3. Nancy Kress "Yesterday's Kin", also sold as a short novel by Tachyon. A story of first contact -- a ship landed in New York, and has been there for several weeks, and nobody is able to make contact, because the ship is surrounded by a force field. A geneticist is called to make contact. She also has family issues. The aliens affect her family and relationships.</p>
<p>Emily St. John Mandel <i>Station Eleven</i>. It is is a great character study of people. For our muggle friends, who don't like science fiction, this is a very accessible book -- it is something we could share with our friends mainstream readers. (Also recommended by Justin Landon.)</p>
<p><i>Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany</i>, edited by Nisi Shawl & Bill Campbell.</p>
<p>Neal Stephenson <i>Seveneves</i>.</p>
<blockquote><b>John DeNardo.</b> One of the things I like about science fiction is worldbuidling, and <i>Seveneves</i> is stuffed with it. I even thought there was too much worldbuilding. I never thought I would say it about any SF. But you'll learn about orbital mechanics in a way that you'll never think you are learning about orbital mechanics.</blockquote>
<blockquote><b>Willie Siros.</b> It is Stephenson's best work since Baroque Cycle. It is Moonfall done right. Bad stuff happens, and mankind doesn't step up to the plate well. It's not really apocalyptic, and it ends with a more hopeful ending than you would think halfway through the book. It is amazingly well-written, very tight, more accessible than his other books.</blockquote>
<p>Andy Weir <i>The Martian</i>. It's all about problem-solving. John DeNardo could especially relate to it because he's an engineer by day, and engineering is all about solving problems. In "The Martian" you don't feel like you're getting a science lesson. And it is very positive, at least for someone who is stuck alone on Mars. The most the character would say is "I'm not feeling up to it today", so you know what he is going through, but it's not in your face.</p>
<h3><b>Justin Landon</b> recommends</h3>
<p>Joe Abercrombie <i>Half a King</i>, <i>Half the World</i> and <i>Half a War</i> (forthcoming). Justin Landon is a sworn fanboi of Joe Abercrombie. 'Nuff said.</p>
<p>Bradley P. Beaulieu <i>Twelve Kings in Sharakhai</i> -- Middle Eastern-flavored world; protagonist is 18-year-old woman who is a gladiator and a smuggler.</p>
<p>Becky Chambers <i>The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet</i>. It was self-published before it was published traditionally. It's like Firefly, but better. Cleverer, more charming, more real. It is social science fiction about a family living on a spaceship, and how they deal with relationships and xenophobia.</p>
<p>(Forthcoming) Kate Elliott <i>Black Wolves</i>, coming out this fall. It is phenomenal. The protagonist is 70-year-old beaten up woman, well past her prime, and has to figure out a way to protect her father's legacy, king's legacy, her grandson's legacy. Show me another fantasy that shows a capable old woman!</p>
<p>Robin Hobb <i>Fool's Assassin</i></p>
<p>Rebecca Levene <i>Smiler's Fair</i>. Rebecca Levene used to be a Dr Who writer. It is Night Circus if G. R. R. Martin wrote it.</p>
<p>Sara Lotz <i>The Three</i>. The story is a thriller that may or may not be supernatural -- it is up to you. Four airplanes crash around the world simultaneously. Everybody dies. But on 3 of them, a young child survives. On the fourth there is apparently no such child, but there are rumors that a child might have survived. And so the rumors start that those children are the 4 horsemen of apocalypse. The book is written as a memoir of a woman reporter.</p>
<p>Alex Marshall <i>A Crown for Cold Silver</i>. Epic fantasy but without all the stuff that we hate about epic fantasy: progressive, not sexist, without all the baggage. Very aware of the tropes in the genre, and tries to do something unique.</p>
<h3><b>Michelle Muenzler</b> recommends</h3>
<p>Darin Bradley <i>Chimpanzee</i>. In an economic downturn, a professor is in danger of having his education repossessed. So he tries to give it out for free, teaching people in public parks, so he could give it away before it's taken from him. But it's not legal, so he gets caught in a revolution.</p>
<p>Kameron Hurley <i>The Mirror Empire</i> -- great worldbuilding.</p>
<p>John Hornor Jacobs <i>The Incorruptibles</i> is set on an Earth a few dimensions way over there. It has one of the most frightening descriptions of Elves. They take the place of native Americans in this weird version of a western. Is it a terrifying and wonderful story. (<b>Justin Landon</b> added: "And it is not available for purchase in the US, except here in the dealers' room.")</p>
<p>Nicole Kornher-Stace <i>Archivist Wasp</i> is about a girl whose job is to kill ghosts, to make them stop bugging people. But instead she decides to help one of them. She gets pulled into a weird underground world, and learns the real reasons of apocalypse.</p>
<p>Mary Rickert <i>Memory Garden</i> is about old women who may or may not be witches.</p>
<p>Kazuki Sakuraba <i>Red Girls</i> -- three generations of a family, three very engrossing narratives. It spans the time from 1970s to the 2000s.</p>
<h3><b>Willie Siros</b> recommends</h3>
<p>Ben Aaronovitch <i>The Hanging Tree</i></p>
<p>Paolo Bacigalupi <i>Water Knife</i>. Published as a trilogy, but it is not. It has a discussion of the future water wars that are coming to the US as the drought continues. An asssassin arranges for water to go from one place to another, regardless of what the people who think it's their water, think. Texas is such a wasteland that refugees who are trying to get in to Colorado and Oregon, are dismissed as Perry's ramblers.</p>
<div style="float:left;width:310px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2015/"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2015/20150723_26ArmadilloCon/20150725/IMG_3503_MichelleMuenzlerCookiesJohnDeNardo_300.jpg" alt="Author Michelle Muenzler gave out cookies to everyone as a way to combat the midday crash. Next to her, fan guest John DeNardo looks on." title="Author Michelle Muenzler gave out cookies to everyone as a way to combat the midday crash. Next to her, fan guest John DeNardo looks on."></a>
<br/><code>Author Michelle Muenzler gave out cookies to everyone as a way to combat the midday crash. Next to her, fan guest John DeNardo looks on. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2015/">in my photo gallery</a>.</code>
</div>
<p>James S. A. Corey <i>Nemesis Games</i><p>
<p>(Forthcoming) Julie Czerneda <i>This Gulf of Time and Stars</i>. In this book, Czerneda returns to her main species universe, which was the setting of the books she wrote many years ago.</p>
<p>William Gibson <i>The Peripheral</i>. Willie said that after thinking that Gibson's best work was in the past, he was very pleasantly surprised by <i>The Peripheral</i>.</p>
<p>Peter F. Hamilton <i>The Abyss Beyond Dreams</i><p>
<p>Robin Hobb <i>Fool's Quest</i></p>
<p>Stina Leicht <i>Cold Iron</i></p>
<p>Jack McDevitt <i>Coming Home</i> and <i>Thunderbird</i> (forthcoming)</p>
<p>(Forthcoming) David Mitchell <i>Slade House</i> - a much looked-forward-to novel from the author of <i>Cloud Atlas</i></p>
<p>Michael Moorcock <i>The Whispering Swarm</i></p>
<p>Alastair Reynolds <i>Poseidon's Wake</i> is part of Alistair Reynolds series that began with <i>Blue Remembered Earth</i>. It is set in near future and examines how society deals with space travel in various ways. A family is raising elephants to intelligence, and by the end of the third novel it seems like elephants will have surprises for us. It is somewhere between popcorn fiction and serious fiction (the same applies to James S. A. Corey <i>Nemesis Games</i> too).</p>
<p>Kim Stanley Robinson <i>Aurora</i>. It asks: if man in 2000 years only managed to keep things made of stone, that could last 2000 years, how are we going to keep a generation ship going? It is really well done and fabulous. <b>Justin Landon</b> adds: "Aurora is tols form a perspective of a developmentally-challenged person, and Kim Stanley Robinson does a very good job of putting us in this person's head."</p>
<p>Several forthcoming books:</p>
<p>John Scalzi <i>The End of All Things</i></p>
<p>Charles Stross <i>The Annihilation Score</i></p>
<p>Michael Swanwick <i>Chasing the Phoenix</i></p>
<p>Robert Charles Wilson <i>The Affinities</i></p>
<p>Gene Wolfe <i>A Borrowed Man</i></p>
<h3><b>Skyler White</b> recommends</h3>
<p>Max Barry <i>Lexicon</i> has system of magic that's based on language. If you're a word person, or a magic person, it is so delicious.</p>
<p>Elizabeth Bear <i>Karen Memory</i>. Steampunk-inflected western with a very interesting protagonist. It's set in a bordello. It is Elizabeth Bear's strongest novel yet. It is as conceptually interesting as her other stuff, and also has interesting relationships between people. </p>
<p>Karen Joy Fowler <i>We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves</i>.</p>
<p>(To tell the truth, the panelists were not completely clear if they were talking about this book -- which came out more than a year ago, so technically it does not qualify for this year's What You Should Have Read -- or about <i>We Are All Completely Fine</i> by Daryl Gregory. No one could remember the exact title and author of the book they were thinking of. Then a brief argument broke out whether in Karen Joy Fowler's book there was mention of aliens arriving to Earth's orbit: some of us in the audience who have read it swore up and down that there were no aliens, but one of the panelists claimed that there were maybe a total of 5 lines in the book mentioning the aliens. This made it further confusing which panelists had which book in mind. -- E.)</p>
<p>Max Gladstone <i>Three Parts Dead</i> -- magic is legal-based. There is nothing boring about legal contracts.</p>
<p>Ann Leckie <i>Ancillary Justice</i>, <i>Ancillary Sword</i>, and <i>Ancillary Mercy</i> (forthcoming)</p>
<p>Ken Liu <i>Grace of Kings</i>. Incredibly bold, incredibly global, has amazing ability to introduce you to a huge cast of characters, and they are each unique. According to several panelists -- Skyler White, Justin Landon, and Willie Siros -- it has an incredibly unique storytelling structure, a non-traditional, non-western narrative. If you read traditional Chinese novels, it fits into that structure. And if you haven't, it feels completely unique.</p>
<p>Christopher Priest <i>The Adjacent</i>. There is some kind of hop between times, that we don't really understand, but it has powerful applications. It's not hard SF, it is a character study of people who are wrapped up in this event. It is the impending feeling, that things will be terrible, but you don't know why.</p>
<p>Jeff VanderMeer <i>Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy</i> also has creeping dread. It is set in a postapocalyptic future of the American South. This book explores not just conceivable ways in which everything can go terribly wrong, but also impact on survivors, and the ruthlessness of the quarantine. Willingness to sacrifice a few for the good of the many.</p>
<p>Jo Walton <i>The Just City</i>. Jo Walton writes dialogue for Socrates. Just City is a utopian city created by the goddess Athene. They buy enslaved 10-year-olds, who will be become the citizens of that city.</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-37782374288873206332015-05-06T18:31:00.001-07:002017-05-19T13:17:03.926-07:00Discussion of software apprenticeships at All Girl Hack Night<p>At the March meeting of All Girl Hack Night, a startup founder Diana Griffin and two women developers -- Tricia and Autumn -- talked about software development apprenticeships they did at Diana's startup, GirlsGuild.</p>
<h3>A startup's decision to take apprentices</h3>
<p>GirlsGuild is a startup that matches women makers (they didn't want to call them "masters", as that might sound too intimidating) with apprentices who want to learn a skill or a craft: leatherworking, chocolate making, graphic design, or many more. So it is only natural that its founders wondered how the notion of apprenticeship would extend to software development. In the software world it is also known as eating your own dog food. Having only recently learned programming, GirlsGuild founders Diana and Cheyenne built GirlsGuild web app themselves, with the help of more experienced Ruby on Rails developers. So they also wanted to give back and teach other women what they knew of programming.</p>
<p>Thus they announced apprenticeship positions. They view them as different from internship. They expected that apprentices were completely new to programming, and that they might not know much at all.</p>
<p>In Tricia's case, it turned out to be true. She went into apprenticeship to gain experience she couldn't gain otherwise.</p>
<h3><a name="reasons">Reasons to become an apprentice</a></h3>
<p>A beginner developer who wants to get a job in the industry must demonstrate some kind of credentials or programming ability to potential employers; if you don't have computer science education, that can be tricky. It is a chicken-and-egg problem, getting experience without already having experience. That's where unpaid work, such as an internship, can give a foot in the door to a beginner programmer.</p>
<p>And that's why when Tricia heard about an apprenticeship opportunity with GirlsGuild, she applied. It helped that she knew Autumn, who was already working there as an apprentice. Up until that point, she had taken some Java courses at the Austin Community College, but had no programming experience in the industry. Without it, or a degree in computer science, she didn't see how she could ever get a job as a software developer.</p>
<p>At first she worried that GirlsGuild won't accept her, but she was determined to come back again and again, and become impossible to get rid of. </p>
<div style="float:left;width:400px;margin:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2015/2015AllGirlHackNight/IMG_2796TriciaDianaAutumn.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2015/20150311AllGirlHackNightApprenticeships/IMG_2796TriciaDianaAutumnSm.jpg" alt="Left to right: Tricia, Diana Griffin, and Autumn" title="Left to right: Tricia, Diana Griffin, and Autumn"></a>
<br/><code>Left to right: Tricia, Diana Griffin (cofounder of GirlsGuild), and Autumn at the All Girl Hack Night discussion of software apprenticeships. More pictures from All Girl Hack Night events are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2015/2015AllGirlHackNight">in my photo gallery</a>.</code>
</div>
<p>Autumn admitted that she worried about that too, even though she is an experienced software engineer, and her reasons for going through an apprenticeship were different. She was working in a well-established organization with a large team of developers; as typical for a large institution, it had complex processes and procedures in place for everything, such as testing, doing code reviews, and deploying to production. Autumn, however, wanted to experience working in a startup, where processes are minimal, red tape almost nonexistent, developers have very close interaction with business owners, and large influence in the product.</p>
<p>Neither of them needed to worry about not being admitted to an apprenticeship, because GirlsGuild was happy for every helping hand they could get.</p>
<h3><a name="structure">Structure of an apprenticeship</a></h3>
<p>GirlsGuild founders Cheyenne and Diana got together with Tricia and Autumn for 3-4 hours a week. At first they walked them through the code, examining various use cases, <i>a la</i> "When a user clicks this button, here is what code gets executed in the background". They gave Tricia and Autumn full freedom of bugs and issues to work on. They were happy to have anyone to work on them, even beginners. (I didn't ask if they were ever concerned that a beginner would inadvertently make the product worse, e.g. by fixing a bug's symptoms rather than the underlying cause, and making it more difficult to fix the cause afterwards.)</p>
<p>Meetings with Diana and Cheyenne was just a small part of the time both apprentices invested in their work. The meetings took only 3-4 hours a week, but Tricia and Autumn spent much more time than that studying the code on their own. To every meeting they came prepared to implement what they learned. And after a while they didn't need constant hand-holding from Diana. They would work independently and only come to her if they got stuck.</p>
<h3><a name="conditions">Making it easier for a startup to foster apprentices</a></h3>
<p>It helped that ever since its beginning, GirlsGuild kept a detailed list of code issues in Github. It also helped that they didn't have any other deadlines to meet except self-imposed ones; there weren't any investors breathing down their neck to implement features faster. GirlsGuild, as I understood, is funded entirely by the owners, both of who have full-time jobs outside of GirlsGuild. This gives them a lot of freedom to implement features at their own pace.</p>
<p>Another thing that helped was that their users were so forgiving. There weren't too many users to begin with, and they didn't tend to get upset by errors. Plus, error messages were quite funny, said Tricia, so that went a long way to give the users enjoyable experience even when the application didn't work right. They had a simple, direct process of fixing user-reported bugs: the user would call them, and they would get on fixing the bug right away.</p>
<h3><a name="other_ways">Comparing apprenticeships to other ways of gaining programming experience</a></h3>
<p>The audience wanted to know how apprenticeships compared with other ways to learn programming. Was it a better or worse way than, say, taking self-paced courses at Codecademy? College courses? What about intense development bootcamps, such as MakerSquare?</p>
<p>According to Tricia, who had previously taken some programming courses at Austin Community College, an apprenticeship teaches you very different skills than an academic course. Most programming classes, in her view, might teach you concepts of programming, but not how to write an application from scratch. What's more, they won't teach you other crucial aspects of being a software engineer, such as how to collaborate with other engineers, or use tools (e.g. Github) effectively. So, for a taste of real-life software engineering, apprenticeships are invaluable.</p>
<p>It so happened that towards the end of her apprenticeship, Tricia entered the full-time Makersquare development bootcamp, and Autumn took Makersquare part time courses in the middle of her apprenticeship. So they could not really compare the experience they gained from it to the experience gained from the apprenticeship, but they both thought they would have been much more valuable to GirlsGuild if they had come to it after Makersquare. Diana assured that they were very useful anyway, and that if they had come to GirlsGuild <i>after</i> MakerSquare, they would have been <i>leading</i> the apprenticeships!</p>
<p>Tricia says most prospective employers valued her apprenticeship almost as much as an experience at a paid job, because it showed that she could take a project, persevere, and complete it.</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-63916160812433016412015-04-30T15:30:00.000-07:002015-04-30T15:30:18.264-07:00Book review: Helene Wecker, "The Golem And The Jinni"<p>This was one enjoyable urban fantasy book. It was different from other novels I've read in this genre, though admittedly I haven't read that many, because I got disappointed with the genre soon. There is no Mary Sue heroine here that every werewolf falls in love with; this one has truly interesting, unique characters, rather than the usual assortment of werevolves and vampires.</p>
<p>The title character, a golem, was made by a European Jewish wizard for a man who wanted a custom-made wife; the man took her on a trip to the US, but died along the way. She disembarked in New York not knowing a single soul there, but was befriended by a kind, old rabbi, who quickly guessed who she is. Luckily he is the only human she ever encounters who can see that she is made of clay. Outwardly she is indistinguishable from a human woman.</p>
<p>The jinni, on the other hand, escaped from an ancient flask, accidentally opened by a metalworker in the Little Syria neighborhood of New York. He was trapped in a human form by a sorcerer many centuries ago in a Bedouin desert. While the Golem, who is made of Earth, is an excellent baker, the Jinni, who embodies the fire element, is talented at metalworking. They make their lives in the new country, their paths eventually cross, and they find an unlikely (or maybe likely?) friend in one another, as the only other supernatural creature each has ever met. They are the only ones who can understand what it's like to live in a human shape with all its restrictions, and to have to pass for a human every day. This involves not letting anyone catch on that you don't eat, sleep, breathe, or have a heartbeat.</p>
<p>As much as they try to blend into the society, they naturally create messes in their wake, simply because they are not human beings, and some things they do have unexpected consequences to humans. The Golem cares about it much more than Jinni does, who, at least at first, doesn't give a thought to the broken human lives he leaves in his wake (mostly women, for the handsome Jinni is like catnip for them). The Golem is the opposite: since she was created to serve, she can't help but sense the humans' needs, and feels irresistible urge to help them. The Golem's concern for others rubs off on the Jinni, who, after spending time with her, starts viewing his carefree actions in a different light.</p>
<p>But both of them are bound to the powerful forces who made them what they were, and the past comes looking for them. When that happens, ancient wizardry starts to play out in 19th century New York. To avoid spoilers, some tensions get resolved, and some don't, but it seems that the stage gets set for a sequel.</p>
<p>This book alternates between exotic/mystical and cozily mundane settings: the Golem works at a bakery, and the book has a good number of delightful scenes involving challah, strudel, fresh-baked bread, and so on. They are interspersed with scenes of Middle-Eastern and cabalistic magic. The threads of present and past are woven together beautifully, and suspense arises on two levels -- past and present; while the reader suspects that they must be related, you can't easily predict how it will all come together.</p>
<p>Secondary and tertiary characters truly come to life. Each of them is distinct. The characters that seem at first spoiled or airheaded, turn out to have depth. Sometimes the book teeters too far into the realm of "characters who didn't believe in the existence of paranormal suddenly become believers", but there is only a little of that. The scenes set in the ancient Bedouin desert centuries or millennia ago don't seem as strong as the scenes set in the 19th century New York; I'm not sure why, but maybe because they rely too much on clicheed Middle-Eastern setting, whereas the New York setting is detailed and authentic? Then again, this book is <i>based</i> on Middle-Eastern fairytale tropes, so that would be hard to avoid.</p>
<p>In any case, the result is quite original.</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-73658044980140397072015-03-31T10:43:00.003-07:002015-03-31T10:44:59.786-07:00Book review: Karen Joy Fowler "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves"<p>This was one of the most enjoyable books I read recently. This is definitely character-driven fiction, and not just primary, but secondary and tertiary characters too were developed with unparalleled depth and nuance.</p>
<p>The plot revolves around a young woman named Rosemary, who is trying to figure out what happened to her "sister", a chimpanzee named Fern. In their early childhood Rosemary and Fern (who were born just months apart) were raised as siblings; Rosemary's parents treated the chimpanzee as their own child, encouraging her to do everything Rosemary did. Then, when Rosemary was five years old, Fern suddenly disappeared from the household, and Rosemary never fully recovered from the loss of her sister. </p>
<p>On one hand, it wasn't hard to figure out the mystery of what happened to Fern; it was clear that Rosemary's parents gave Fern away because they just couldn't keep a chimpanzee at home anymore as Fern grew bigger and stronger. Historically, cases of raising a chimp as a human never ended well, because humans were never able to control the chimp's aggressive tendencies; this novel leaves no illusions that this attempt could have been anything else but doomed, and the adult Rosemary understand it very well.</p>
<p>However, there is a twist at the end that makes it particularly ironic -- but by the time it is delivered, we readers are quite skeptical whether we should believe it. That's what makes this book so captivating. As Rosemary tries to piece her past into a coherent narrative, it becomes increasingly clear that none of the characters' versions of events can ever be trusted. Rosemary herself doesn't trust her memory, believing that many of her vividly remembered childhood episodes never could have happened. But we also find out that throughout Rosemary's childhood her parents and older brother Lowell manipulated her, feeding her various lies, fictions, and non-answers to avoid accept responsibility for their actions. So later in the book, when Lowell delivers a key "revelation" to the now-adult Rosemary, there is no reason to think that he isn't manipulating her even then.</p>
<p>This book reveals, in an understated way (because Rosemary is never bitter or angry towards her family) how even highly functional, seemingly caring parents can be subtly cruel towards their children. They raised Fern among humans, knowing that she won't be able to live with them indefinitely, yet making it very hard for her to adapt to a life among chimpanzees. It was just as bad that Rosemary's father, a psychologist, treated not just Fern but Rosemary too as an experiment. While she and Fern were together, they were both studied by graduate students in her father's lab. Everything Rosemary said was interesting to them, but only because she was part of the human-chimp speech acquisition experiment. With Fern was gone, nothing Rosemary said interested them anymore, and her endless chatter became a nuisance.</p>
<p>What I liked best about this book was endless observations about the nature and unreliability of memory, about theory of mind, about animal rights, and the way those meditations were wrapped into suspenseful plot arc.</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-49395943227759386772015-03-03T17:20:00.000-08:002017-06-26T09:21:30.456-07:00Build Something Awesome… but what?<p>"Build Something Awesome with OpenStack and the Open Cloud" hackathon could have lived up to its name, if only someone knew what <i>kind</i>of awesome things one could build with OpenStack. Or could explain it to developers. But I'm getting ahead of myself.</p>
<div style="float:right;width:300px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2013/20130914OpenStackHackathon/IMG_4636MaddyAndAnna.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2013/20130914RackspaceHackathon/IMG_4636MaddyAndAnnaSm.jpg" alt="Maddy (left), our unofficial team lead and Python expert, and Anna" title="Maddy (left), our unofficial team lead and Python expert, and Anna"></a>
<br/><code>Maddy (left), our unofficial team lead and Python expert, and Anna. More pictures from the 2013 OpenStack Hackathon are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2013/20130914OpenStackHackathon">in my photo gallery</a>.</code>
</div>
<p>The September 14th, 2013 OpenStack hackathon was the first hackathon I ever attended. It was organized and sponsored by Rackspace, creator of the OpenStack project. I didn't know much about it, so I assumed that it was just yet another API that lets you build applications. The hackathon event page did not hint at what kinds of applications you could build with it. So I was surprised when it turned out that for the kind of application my team wanted to build, OpenStack kind of… got in the way.</p>
<p>The hackathon started with a 2-hour presentation by Rackspace's developer advocate. He guided us through a tutorial on how to create a DevStack server on Rackspace. DevStack, by the way, he said, is not the same as OpenStack, but the distinction was lost on me. This was by far not the most subtle point that was lost on me. </p>
<div style="float:left;width:360px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2013/20130914OpenStackHackathon/IMG_4618PaigeJessMaddyChristine.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2013/20130914RackspaceHackathon/IMG_4618PaigeJessMaddyChristineSm.jpg" alt="Left to right: Paige, Jess, Maddy (our unofficial team lead and Python expert), and Christine" title=”Left to right: Paige, Jess, Maddy (our unofficial team lead and Python expert), and Christine"></a>
<br/><code>Left to right: Paige, Jess, Maddy (our unofficial team lead and Python expert), and Christine. More pictures from the 2013 OpenStack Hackathon are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/life/2013/20130914OpenStackHackathon">in my photo gallery</a>.</code>
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<p>After the presentation our team of five, all female developers, rolled up our sleeves to start building the application proposed by one of our members. I investigated the server created during the walkthrough, looking for the directory where Apache keeps HTML files and web scripts. That's where I thought I would place a web application (at the beginning, just a Python script) that we were writing. I saw there was an <code>index.html</code> in the <code>/var/www</code> directory, but its contents were not the one that were displayed when you pointed your browser to this server's root URL. So I went to the presenter and asked why that was. He said, better don't try to use Apache on that devstack server; it's configured in a special way, and if you want to run an ordinary Apache web server, you'd be fighting it all the way. You should create a basic Linux server on Rackspace, not a Devstack server, and install Apache on it. I tried asking him what could we do with this Devstack server, if not write web applications. He said it was mostly for learning. Learning OpenStack. Well, that still didn't answer my question what I could do with OpenStack, but oh well, maybe I should have found out beforehand? It's not like it was any secret that this hackathon was for building things with OpenStack: it was in the name of the hackathon. But I wasn't the only person who went there with assumptions that I could build web applications with it.</p>
<p>Other lessons from this hackathon were more interesting, and came from my attempt to find out what can be accomplished during a hackathon. More about it in the next blog post.</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-79850072409226590762014-11-30T21:47:00.004-08:002017-07-03T12:52:53.699-07:00Ted Chiang speech on lifelogging
<p>Lifelogging is an emerging trend of recording every, or nearly every moment of your life. A simple example of lifelogging would be wearing a video recorder that records continuous video and audio of everything you see and do. Ted Chiang used this example to speculate about how lifelogging would change our society. He made carefully balanced points both for external-recording-as-memory, and against. In the end, I think, he is <i>for</i> it. Here are the highlights of his speech.</p>
<p>Even as we might think that a video of our life would never be used as a memory substitute but only as aid, it won't be so. We have been outsourcing our memory for millennia in every way we could. Ancient Greek philosophers complained that writing has corrupted people by weakening their memories; no one could recite thousands and thousands of lines of Iliad or Odyssey anymore. Since then, outsourcing of memory has only picked up pace. We don't remember phone numbers, because we rely on having them stored in our phones; we are less inclined to commit facts to memory, because we can always Google them. So if we have a continuous video of our life, we will come to rely on it instead of our internal memory; it will become, in fact, our memory.</p>
<p>But our memory is not a documentary; it is a web of narratives that get edited every time we remember something. Recalling past events adds layer after layer to our memories, and also distorts them. Most of our memories contain a version of events that pleases us, or lets us see our lives as having a narrative arch. Maybe it lets us to hold on to a thought that our life is getting better in one way or another -- for example, that our love for our spouse grows deeper over time; and that can be useful, because without this illusion we might not have the strength to go on. For example, in a certain study the female participants said they shared as many interests and spent as much time with their husbands as 10 years ago; but the researchers, who had asked the same question of these same women 10 years ago, noted that it wasn't true: the number of shared interests and the amount of closeness had declined.</p>
<div style="float:left;width:370px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2014/IMG_1482TedChiangLifeLoggingSpeech.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2014/20140725_27ArmadilloCon/20140727/IMG_1482TedChiangLifeLoggingSpeech.jpg" alt="Ted Chiang gives a speech on lifelogging" title="Ted Chiang gives a speech on lifelogging"/></a>
<p><code>Ted Chiang gives a speech on lifelogging. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2014 are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2014/">in my photo gallery</a>.</code></p></div>
<p>As we edit our memories, we are also eliminating those memories that are inconsistent with the way we see ourselves. Ted Chiang gave two examples of famous science fiction writers who had been on the giving or receiving end of it. One of them had misremembered the year of his father's death by 2 years, until fact checkers found an old obituary for his father in the newspapers, and pointed out the inconsistency. The writer provided a hypothesis for that: since his father died just a few months before he started college, and the freshman year of college was a very exciting time for him, his memory simply refused to put those two events in one year. The emotional "tone" of those events was much too dissimilar for them to have happened just months apart.</p>
<p>The other writer in Ted Chiang's example found out, as an adult, that his mother didn't remember beating him with a rope as a child. She denied ever doing that. Again, the way this could be explained is that back in the early 20th century (the time of this writer's childhood) it was acceptable to beat children, but a few decades later it was far less so. So his mother, thinking of herself as a good mother, unconsciously edited out of her memory the episodes of beating her child.</p>
<p>But if we edit out our memories in which we have hurt others, then we are not doing justice to those people; we are denying them their experiences. Similarly, the ruling elite of a nation might be denying the acknowledgement of suffering to the groups in the nation that they had oppressed. The notion of justice -- both interpersonal and on world scale -- requires that we remember our wrongdoings. This was Ted Chiang's conclusion, and this is why he thinks, after all, that lifelogging would be a step in the right direction.</p>
<h3>Questions and discussion with the audience</h3>
<p><b>Audience member 1.</b> Forgetting can be very helpful in getting over a trauma; especially forgetting violent events. If we can't forget anything, if our video is there, we might be tempted to go back to those traumatic moments and never make progress in healing. </p>
<p><b>Ted Chiang</b> responded that these days researchers are working on medicines that help us selectively forget, allowing one to heal from PTSD. <i>(This doesn't quite address the question that selective forgetting won't do you much good if you'll be tempted to go back and revisit the record of violent events. -- E.)</i></p>
<p><b>Audience member 2.</b> A certain amount of forgetting goes a very long way in maintaining good relationships with your relatives. When you meet and talk with them only a few times a year, it helps if you had forgotten things they did that made you very angry, or hurt you.</p>
<p><b>Ted Chiang</b> responded that it would be even better if that person remembered how they wronged you, and be motivated not to do it again.</p>
<p><b>Audience member 3</b>. What if having a video of all moments of our life would prompt us to live our life as if we are creating a story? When I was in college I deliberately went and did things, had experiences, to have something to write home about. Friday afternoon would come and I would think, oh, I haven't done "anything" this week yet (out of the ordinary) -- I should go be interesting for a couple of hours now! </p>
<p><b>Ted Chiang</b> responded that this wouldn't be the same as how people these curate their Facebook profiles, posting only those activities that form an image they like. If we don't have to worry about anyone seeing our video, we won't be motivated to appear a good person on the tape.</p>
<p>That last statement hinged on a pretty big assumption, which Ted Chiang stated upfront at the beginning of his talk: that privacy and security issues had been solved, and we don't have to worry about our life record being viewed by the eyes it wasn't intended for. I think Ted Chiang made this assumption only to keep the scope of discussion manageable, not because he thought it would be easy. Still, it was near impossible to discuss lifelogging-as-memory without getting tangled in the issues of privacy, as is evident from the audience's questions.</p>
<p><b>Audience member 4.</b> What happens when a hacker hacks into the record of your memories? Surely it will happen, because any and every technology that has ever existed has been hacked into.</p>
<p><b>Ted Chiang</b>. Even if hackers modify your own memories, that wouldn't be the end of the world for you, because any kind of public event would be recorded by at least some other people. So you could compare your memories with theirs, and restore the truth. <i>(This doesn't address the cases when the event is private and nobody else has a record of it; or what if a hacker makes your most private moments public? Or what if you don't even <i>know</i> your memories were tampered with, and thus have no reason to compare them with others' memories? -- E.)</i></p>
<p><b>Audience member 5.</b> If everything you do is recorded in the continuous video of your life, then any movie you've seen will also be in it. So who will own that part of the video -- you or the movie studio? If you want to rewatch a movie, would you need to pay to get access to your own memories? If you don't pay, is it piracy?</p>
<p><b>Ted Chiang</b> pointed out that movie studios are already dealing with similar issues even today, because you can download a movie from the torrents as soon as it comes out on the screen. This won't be that different.</p>
<p>Other audience members asked more questions without good answers. For example, 5th amendment. Police <i>can</i> confiscate your computer records, video records, or any kind of records if they are needed in an investigation of a crime; but if the recording is literally considered to be your memory, they might not have a right to confiscate it, as that would be the same as forcing you to speak. How would the laws, or constitution need to be rewritten in such a case?</p>
Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-77244666967038920072014-11-06T14:57:00.000-08:002014-11-06T14:57:31.774-08:00Book Review: James Cambias "A Darkling Sea"<p>This book was praised by more than one of my acquaintances who are not writers. It is an important distinction. I have been increasingly disappointed by new books recommended by science fiction or fantasy writers, and have come to suspect that those books are hyped because of something other than good storytelling. But I know that if my nonwriter friends enjoy a book, it must have an engaging plot and characters; and if they are techies, it probably has well thought-out, science-based (or at least systematic, even if magic-based) worldbuilding.</p>
<p>"A Darkling Sea" has a lot of that. The worldbuilding is superb, and it has plenty of intrigue, as its human protagonists deal with not just one, but two very different alien races. Yet I was ambivalent about this book. It left me with a strange feeling that the majority of the plot was just the setup for something that didn't quite happen. But it is not true, of course: the plot arch arched satisfactorily, and was properly resolved in the last couple of chapters. So it must be that my expectations were different. </p>
<p>While this book shows a clash between two technologically advanced races, it is positively NOT a space opera. The action is carried out guerilla-style at the bottom of the sea on a distant planet. There, a group of human researchers observe Ilmatarans -- underwater, bottom-dwelling intelligent beings -- until another alien race, Sholen, tells them to quit or else. It is really about a conflict between human and alien psychology. But it rather lacks intensity and sharpness of psychological conflicts that such a claustrophobic setting could -- or should -- provide. Then again, my measuring stick for similar themes -- humans living in close quarters, isolated from civilization, facing the unknown -- is Peter Watts' "Blindsight". Few novels live up to the intensity of "Blindsight", so perhaps it's not fair to measure "A Darkling Sea" against it. </p>
<p>Still, when the driving force of the plot is a conflict between human and alien mentality, the book needs better characterization. As it is, the characters in it (the humans at least) are likeable, but bland. There aren't any strong, quirky characters through which such a conflict could manifest.</p>
<p>The worldbuilding in this novel, however, is excellent. It's not an easy feat to create two credible, different, nonhumanoid races, but this novel did just that. Between the Ilmatarans and the Sholen, Ilmatarans are definitely a more completely fleshed-out civilization. The name Ilmatarans is the only thing incongruous about it, because this name brings to mind J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. That's unfortunate, because the lobster-like, underwater-dwelling Ilmatarans couldn't be more unlike Tolkien's elves. Other than that, their culture, mentality, customs, even speech idioms follow from the physical conditions of their world. Living at the bottom of the ocean, they don't have eyes (which would be of no use in the perpetual darkness), and instead perceive the world and communicate via echolocation and taste. As with every alien species, a writer has to straddle a careful line between making them boringly human-like, and making them too alien for us to understand. With Ilmatarans, the author fell back on a tried-and-true method of making them a pre-industrial race, akin to a medieval, feudal society on Earth; they were starting to engage with the world scientifically, but their societal structures were quite primitive. That way, as alien as they are, they are still simple enough for us to understand.</p>
<p>What especially intrigued me about Ilmatarans was their number-speech. They assigned non-obvious semantics to numbers, and considered not just factorization of a number, but also its decomposition into a sum of integers; from that they inferred something about a person's character. Too bad it didn't play a big part in the book; I would have liked to know more about that. Even though there is no scientific basis for such a cabbalistic approach, it could tell us a lot about a culture.</p>
<p>But an even more interesting race was Sholen, the spacefaring civilization that clashed with humans over the sphere of influence. They were a spaghetti ball of intriguing contradictions. They had a self-proclaimed "hands-off-the-universe" attitude, which meant they wanted uncontacted alien races to remain so, and especially to stay free of influence of humans -- yet they enforced their peace philosophy rather aggressively. Their social structures and modes of interaction were a bit like bonobos', but they were nothing like the friendly, frolicky apes. My impression of them was more like hulking, menacing, six-limbed monsters. Despite all that, Sholen did not seem to be a poorly thought-out heap of inconsistencies, but a complex race with its own internal logic. </p>
<p>While the novel was enjoyable, it wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and that's why I will only give it 4 stars. I like to reserve 5 stars for books that do something innovative, such as develop an original scientific or philosophical idea. (Yes, like Peter Watts "Blindsight"). The setup, storytelling, mood, and characters of "A Darkling Sea" strongly resemble classical science fiction. An comparison that comes to mind is "Dragon's Egg", which also has primitive but smart creatures living in an extreme environment (super-high gravity of a neutron star). It is classical in the sense that science and technological resourcefulness takes precedence over character depth; the human characters in the book are not especially interesting. But the book is at least modern in the sense that female and male characters are equal in skill and courage. </p>
<p>I also have one minor beef with this book. The ending reveals a surprise whose impact can only be fully understood if you kept track of tiny, insignificant pieces of information scattered throughout the book. At least that's my guess. When I read the last sentence, I thought "huh"? What's that have to do with anything? Is the object mentioned in there referenced anywhere earlier in the book? If it was, I quickly forgot it (it was no more than a minor detail), and I don't even know how far back I would have to go in the book to find earlier references. Or is there an implication that this object could only have been left behind by yet another, ancient, long-lost civilization? If so, it must be a setup for a sequel, because this object played no role in the book that I could tell. Luckily, the plot had already been wrapped up at that point, so the ending was just a bonus "huh".</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36661618.post-3041590863683688062014-09-23T11:12:00.002-07:002017-07-03T12:57:15.536-07:00ArmadilloCon 2014 interview with Ted Chiang<p><b>Jayme Lynn Blaschke</b> interviewed <b>Ted Chiang</b>, one of the two ArmadilloCon 2014 writer Guests of Honor. They talked about linguistics and time travel, story length and starting from the end, and obsolete scientific theories as story material. Here is a condensed version of the interview.</p>
<h4>Why, despite the plans to make "The Story Of Your Life" into a movie, <b>Ted Chiang</b> does not consider himself a Hollywood bigshot.</h4>
<p>Until the cameras start rolling, there is no guarantee that the movie will get made: many movies had been canceled at the last minute.</p>
<h4>About the process of writing "The Story of Your Life"</h4>
<p>Originally <b>Ted Chiang</b> wanted to write a story about someone who knew the future, but was unable to change it. What sort of emotions that person might experience, knowing that both good things and bad things were going to happen, and not able to do anything about it? Linguistics came into the story later, as Ted Chiang tried to figure out how to grant this protagonist ability to know the future. Meditation or mind-altering drugs didn't seem very interesting possibilities. Then he remembered Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language determines our perception of the world. The notion of being able to know the future by learning an alien language seemed very interesting, and only then the story became about linguistics.</p>
<p>At that time he didn't know a lot about linguistics, so he spend the next several years reading books about it and working on his writing, so as to become a good enough writer to tackle this story.</p>
<h4>More about his writing process</h4>
<p>He first comes up with the ending for a story, and works backward from there to determine what needs to happen. That way the stories don't "get away" from him like they do for many other writers who work without a plan.</p>
<h4>About story length, and the [un]likelihood of writing a novel</h4>
<p>Though he turned down a Hugo award for the story "Liking What You See" because it was too rushed (under the publisher's deadline he could not expand that story into the length he originally wanted it to be), Ted Chiang is content with how it turned out, and has no plans to rewrite it. He doesn't write novels, because each of his stories takes up only as much length as is required to develop the idea of the story. That's not to say he wouldn't write a novel if he ever got a novel-length idea; it just hasn't happened.</p>
<p>And while some audience members thanked Ted Chiang for "resurrecting" short story, he doesn't think short story is on the way to become a commercially viable art form. Though e-readers enable people to read in short bursts, they haven't lead to short story renaissance.</p>
<div style="float:left;width:350px;padding:10px"><a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2014/IMG_1448TedChiangJaymeBlaschke.jpg.html"><img src="https://objects-us-west-1.dream.io/elze_images/2014/20140725_27ArmadilloCon/20140726/IMG_1448TedChiangJaymeBlaschkeSm.jpg" alt="Ted Chiang (left) and Jayme Lynn Blaschke" title="Ted Chiang (left) and Jayme Lynn Blaschke"/></a>
<p><code>Ted Chiang (left) and Jayme Lynn Blaschke. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2014 are <a href="http://pic.geekitude.com/v/sf/armadillocon2014/">in my photo gallery</a>.</code></p></div>
<h4>About <b>Ted Chiang</b>'s early writing days</h4>
<p>His first story, written at the age 15, was an disaster-in-space story about an attempted rescue of astronauts in a spaceship. Even so, the adventure stories he wrote were science-based. One of them involved research the wavelength of gamma ray emitted when electrons collided with positrons. In other words, as <b>Jayme Lynn Blaschke</b> pointed out, he was writing for Analog.</p>
<h4>What influences helped his transition from adventure stories to more philosophical ones?</h4>
<p>John Crowley, Gene Wolf, and Ed Bryant. <b>Ted Chiang</b> highly praised Ed Bryant as a currently forgotten author who won a couple of Nebula awards in the 80s for his science fiction short stories. He especially recommended Bryant's story collection "Particle Theory". Ted Chiang credits him for opening his eyes to the ways you could use science as a metaphor for human experience. </p>
<h4><b>Ted Chiang</b>'s story "72 Letters" where the concept of preformation, meaning that all living beings contain microscopic, but fully-formed versions of their future children, happens to be true. What appeal do obsolete, discredited scientific theories hold for Ted Chiang, at least as story potential?</h4>
<p>People believed in those ideas because they were not self-evidently false: it required some experimental results for them to be discredited. So you could imagine a universe where they were true. As far as preformation goes, a human being or any organism is incredibly complicated, so it's not obvious that it could come from a single cell like an ovum. We still don't completely understand the details of how a fertilized egg becomes a human being. So a theory that we are fully formed on a scale too small to see is not unreasonable; though if you take it to its logical conclusion, that Adam and Eve's sperm and ova contained the entire human race in them, it starts to seem less plausible. In any case, you have to perform the right kinds of experiments to determine that it's wrong.</p>
<p><b>Ted Chiang</b> is also interested in what are the things we take for granted now, not knowing that they are based on an incorrect scientific theory.</p>Elzehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15771169726523518297noreply@blogger.com0