Center For Inquiry fiction book club fall 2012-spring 2013 reading list

Update: we will have a meeting in November 2012 -- see below.

Here is the list of books we'll be discussing in the next few months in the CFI Austin fiction book club.

October 2012: Nancy Kress "Steal Across The Sky"

From amazon.com:

"The aliens appeared one day, built a base on the moon, and put an ad on the internet:

"We are an alien race you may call the Atoners. Ten thousand years ago we wronged humanity profoundly. We cannot undo what has been done, but we wish humanity to understand it. Therefore we request twenty-one volunteers to visit seven planets to Witness for us. We will convey each volunteer there and back in complete safety. Volunteers must speak English. Send requests for electronic applications to witness@Atoners.com."

At first, everyone thought it was a joke. But it wasn't.

This is the story of three of those volunteers, and what they found on Kular A and Kular B."

November 2012: Mark Twain "Mysterious Stranger". In this Mark Twain's last, unfinished novel, a young Satan comes to a remote Austrian village. He claims to be able to foresee the future and informs the group of unfortunate events that will soon befall those they care about. The boys don't believe Satan's claims until one of his predictions comes true.

December 2012: Octavia Butler "Parable of the Sower"

From amazon.com: "When unattended environmental and economic crises lead to social chaos, not even gated communities are safe. In a night of fire and death Lauren Olamina, a minister's young daughter, loses her family and home and ventures out into the unprotected American landscape. But what begins as a flight for survival soon leads to something much more: a startling vision of human destiny... and the birth of a new faith."

January 2012: Michael Bishop "Close Encounters with a Deity" - a story collection.

From amazon.com: "The book's unifying theme is man's concept of the Deity. Bishop's stories intermingle humor, horror, and awe in a manner similar to Vonnegut."

February 2012: Jonathan Strahan, editor, "Godlike Machines"

From goodreads.com: "In science fiction, nothing says sensawunda like a Big Dumb Object--a colossal, extremely powerful machine of unknown purpose and origin. It's that feeling that editor Jonathan Strahan was after when he asked six of today's finest authors to write for Godlike Machines. And they succeed brilliantly!"

March 2012: Greg Egan "Clockwork Rocket"

From amazon.com:

"Set in another universe where light does not travel at a constant speed but instead has a velocity that depends on its wavelength, Clockwork Rocket recounts the personal life journey of an inhabitant in this fictional universe."

"Alongside a taut and well imagined story set in a very alien world - complete with a sympathetic range of characters and a well imagined society - Greg Egan develops an entire alternative physics. This isn't just done in a hand waving way, it is properly worked out. The story of Yalda, the scientist who is the main protagonist, is also the story of the discovery of "rotational physics" in her universe, of the implications of that, good and bad, for her planet, and finally - in the construction of the rocket of the title - the story of the action she takes to safeguard that world."

Of programmatic thinking in low-tech situations

These days it's been fashionable to insist that everybody should learn to program. Some argue it's the next kind of literacy (a federal judge who learned how to code could correctly estimate how long it would take to implement a certain function), others say the importance of programming in an ordinary person's life is overblown. There is a vast difference between basic programming knowledge and being a professional software developer. The question is, can this basic literacy have applications in everyday life? Can it improve the life of a non-programmer? I liked this article that demonstrates how knowing how to program benefits even the people who are not programmers. When you have developed a mentality that lets you see many life problems from an engineering perspective, you see how software could help you improve even those life processes that you previously didn't think a computer could solve. It's a matter of thinking algorithmically, of seeing what could be automated. I have a similar problem as the one described in the article. I take lots of pictures of people at conventions and conferences, and there isn't a good way to "connect" photos of strangers with their names (which I forget instantly). However, unlike the casting directors in the article, I have neither assistants with spreadsheets, nor do people parade in front of me one by one like models. I also think that it would be awkward to ask them, after introducing myself, to write their names on a piece of paper, and to pose with it. :-) The best I can do is take pictures of their name tags, but sometimes those are missing, or flipped over to the blank side, or flash bounces off of them in a way that makes them illegible. On the other hand, my tablet allows me to add notes to any picture I take. (Well, I can't add notes to a picture directly, but I can save it to Evernote with a note attached.) So perhaps I'll just have to take two pictures of everyone -- one with the real camera, for quality, and the other with the tablet, for documentation. If a situation is not structured, there isn't much room for a programmatic solution to a problem.

ArmadilloCon 2012: a summary

Misunderstandings about writers was the topic of the toastmaster's speech at the opening ceremony. Even in these days of decline of published word the general public continues to perceive writers' lives as glamorous. Since the toastmaster shared a personal anecdote, I will refer to him only as T (to keep Google's prying eyes away). One time he told a stranger he played XBox with that he was a writer. The stranger immediately found this suspicious, and started asking T his name, address, and what books he has published. T answered his questions, all the while surprised that his XBox pal didn't think T could just have borrowed someone else's name and biographical facts. And though the XBox pal had never heard of this writer, he said: "Wow! I've never played XBox with anyone famous!" T replied: "You still haven't".

First row: Jeremy Lassen, Martin Wagner (speaking); second row: Liz Gorinsky, Robert Jackson Bennett, Joe McKinney; third row: Mark Finn, Matthew Bey, Nicole Duson -- teachers at the writers' workshop. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

Writers' workshop. There are many ways to express how a writers' critique group can help you, and many of them involve self-deprecatory humor, which is apropos in anticipation of your "brilliant" story being trounced. For example, they might tell you when there's a toilet in your kitchen -- metaphorically speaking.

The writing game required us to smell, taste, and touch various items while blindfolded, and list 5 positive and 5 negative adjectives about each smell, taste, or texture. It was a mostly futile occupation for someone like me with only a rudimentary sense of smell or taste.

Nancy Jane Moore, Kevin Jewell, Marshall Maresca, Jessica Reisman, and Madeleine Dimond on the 'Workshopping to Success' panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

Workshops are multifaceted things, and the advice given in them is not always helpful, as noted in the "Workshopping To Success" panel. Sometimes a critique group that points out a toilet in your kitchen simply doesn't understand the architecture of your home. For example, it may be a group of fantasy writers all into dragons and elves, but you don't write that kind of fantasy, and they'll be bored with your work. Perhaps you shouldn't bring your work into a critique group that thinks your whole genre is one big toilet? Or perhaps you should! Show your drafts to people who don't read your genre to see if you can keep them entertained. That's what Mary Doria Russell did. She showed the first draft of "The Sparrow" to her aunts, who only read mysteries, but no science fiction. And they kept reading it.

Another thing to note is that you need a different critique group for a novel than for short stories. You need first readers who are in it for a long run. If you bring new chapters of your novel to an open-to-all critique group, you'll see new people at every meeting. Those people will read the chapter and say: "I have no idea what's going on, but let me tell you what I think".

Kenneth Mark Hoover, Bill Frank, and Bob Mahoney on the panel on writing hard science fiction. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

Writing hard science fiction. Why base a story on science fact? If you do so, you disarm people who say that "it" will never happen, "it" being the subject of your speculation -- for example, a total surveillance society. How much scientific or technical detail to put in a SF story? A good rule of thumb is this: you can mention how a headset works, but don't elaborate on the wiring, unless it plays part in electrocuting your character's brain.

Another thing reading and writing hard science fiction can teach you, is to think through what-if scenarios. It's a great life skill, says Bill Frank -- both at work and in personal life. Before you start a project, you can learn to identify potential points of failure, and come up with alternative plans.

Robert Jackson Bennett, Elizabeth Moon, Chris N. Brown, and Madeleine Dimond on a "Social Impacts of New Technology" panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

Social Impacts of New Technology. Madeleine knows a professor who gives his students every 15 minutes a connect-break in class, when everybody is allowed to use their gadgets to check their email, etc., otherwise they'll get too anxious and distracted. Audience is shaking their heads in disbelief.

3-D printing has been on everyone's lips lately, and just a week before ArmadilloCon came an announcement that 3-D technology now makes it possible to print guns. Most people in the audience found this development chilling. Elizabeth Moon thinks that since such printing requires lots of energy, law enforcement officers might look at who is consuming lots of energy, to get clues as to who is printing guns. Robert Jackson Bennett is not sure how viable 3D printing is, given that power is going to get much more expensive in the near future. (My Twitter friends responded that you should be able to run such a printer off of solar energy.)

Chris N. Brown is hopeful about a future where technologies could be brought down to "garage level", and anyone could build surveillance drones in their garages. That way we should able to monitor what the police is doing as much as it monitors us. A woman in the audience noted that abundance of garage-level technologies might renew interest in science among American school children, 70% of which currently say science is too hard.

Ari Marmell, Bev Hale, Madeleine Dimond, and Matthew Bey on the "Story ideas I don't want to see again" panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

"Story ideas I don't want to see again" panel quickly got bogged down in trivial stuff, as the panelists started complaining how they never wanted to see skimpily dressed women on book covers again.

-- Why can't healthy, loving relationships ever be discussed in genre fiction? Quick answer: healthy relationships are too "boring" for fiction, because most fiction is fueled by conflict. Bev Hale then said that there are some science fiction works that portray loving relationships -- for example, Lois Bujold Miles Vorkosigan series or Firefly.

-- Some of the relationships tropes that the panelists DON'T want to see again are "The fate of the whole world depends on these two people getting together, and their relationship is more important than the whole world", as well as "I'm so special that there is no mere man who is worthy to be my mate. He has to be a werewolf or vampire."

-- We also don't want to see rape universally used as "something bad that happened in the heroine's past that made her come back stronger", says Ari Marmell. Too often it's used as a lazy character-building shortcut, as if there was no other adversity that a woman protagonist could possibly experience and overcome.

-- Another trope we don't want to see: white people go to another planet and save the natives.

Al Jackson, John Gibbons, Alan Porter and Paige Roberts / Ewing on the "Is Interstellar Space Travel Possible?" panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

"Is Interstellar Space Travel Possible?" John Gibbons pointed out that there is a perception that the problem with interstellar travel is the speed of light, but in reality getting close to the speed of light is not even a question. A fusion bomb-powered spaceship would take an amount of fuel the size of a small planet to reach even a 10th of the speed of light. There's no way to do it on a planetary energy budget. The only way to do it is to colonize the solar system first, and to gain a solar system-sized energy budget.

A common science fiction scenario, generation ship, was also discussed on the panel. Paige Roberts doesn't think a generation ship would have much chance of arriving to the destination and colonizing a distant planet, because over many generations the people in the ship might evolve or progress to the point where they don't remember where or why they are going; or don't care. Or that they wouldn't overuse their resources. It's unlikely that they'll stay the same and faithful to their purpose. Alan Porter also thinks it's implausible.

So, sad to say, we did not brainstorm new and promising ways to get out to interstellar space.

Jaime Lee Moyer, Patrice Sarath, Rhiannon Frater, Chloe Neill, Michael Bracken and Katherine Eliska Kimbriel at the "Writing Strong Female Characters" panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

"Writing Strong Female Characters" panel was thoughtfully moderated by Patrice, who asked good questions.

-- Rhiannon Frater says: mothers in fiction are typically portrayed as weak characters, though in reality mothers defending their children can be fierce and heroic.

-- Can male writers write believable female characters? Michael Bracken says he's pretty sure he can, as he had plenty of strong women in his family.

-- Kick-ass women protagonists as lone wolves with no female friends is a damaging cliche.

We don't get many costumes (read: almost none) at ArmadilloCon, but here is Raven as Elizabeth Shaw from Prometheus. Who, one could say, IS a strong female character. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

-- What does a strong character mean anyway, even when speaking about males? Rhiannon Frater said that some guys who read her fiction said her male characters sound like normal guys one would like a barbecue with, but the men in her critique group criticized her male characters for not being a Rambo. It seems too many people think that in genre fiction a strong character has to be a cliche.

What sciences haven't been used yet in science fiction?. I didn't even take a picture of the panelists, because this panel reached an all-time intellectual low in my memory of ArmadilloCon. It happened when a certain poet (I don't know why he was on the panel, because he didn't seem to have a clue about science) said that a new "scientific" idea that still hasn't been used was a spaceship powered by "emissions" from eating Mexican food. Moderator Madeleine Dimond tried hard to keep it on track, and in fact the panel later recovered from the poet's verbal emissions. We had a brief, but interesting discussion whether cyberpunk fell in the realm of computer science, or not -- Madeleine agreed with me that it didn't, and that real computer science is one of those very underutilized sciences in SF. Another guy in the audience suggested cyberpunk takes a transhumanist approach, without being necessarily scientific.

In the style of the "Gorilla of the Gasbags" challenge, Madeleine issued her own challenge to the audience -- to write a SF story based on an underused science. She let everyone who wanted to draw a slip of paper with a science on it. I drew alien psychology. That shouldn't be too hard -- I'll just base the story on my own psychology. And the best thing, we have two years to submit our stories for the challenge, because there won't be an Armadillocon next year.