Joe's Jottings

And so the new incarnation of Dr Who has his first adventure on BBC One, with 27 year old Matt Smith as the latest actor to portray the eponymous Time Lord.  The one thing about Doctors these days is that if you don’t like the current one, there’ll probably be another one along in a couple of years….

As well as teh Doctor, we have his new assistant, Amy Pond, played by Karen Gillan, who encounters the Doctor whilst dressed as a Kissogram Policewoman and agrees to travel with him.  She does, however, insist that she comes back before the following morning, as she has ‘stuff’ to do.  What we know, but what she doesn’t tell the Doctor, is that the stuff is her Wedding Day.

Hold on a minute…picking up a new assistant at the time of her Wedding…haven’t we been there before with the dreadful Donna Noble, who turns up in the TARDIS actually in her Wedding Dress on the day of her Wedding?  Come on folks – that is laziness of the highest order.  There are lots of ways in which assistants have been introduced to the Doctor, but to have two of them introduced in what has to be an unusual way like this is really lazy writing and serious imagination failure.

Or…could it be another piece of social engineering on behalf of the Dr Who / Torchwood writing ‘establishment’?  OK – I know that may seem a little extreme but I’ve muttered on numerous occasions in the past about the rather ‘heavy handed’ PC attitudes that have permeated some of the episodes of both Doctor Who and Torchwood – to the degree that some of the dialogue grates.  Several of the characters have frequently seemed to fit a set of PC stereotypes, and I’m afraid that this introduction of a second assistant at a point in which she is basically committing herself to a traditional lifestyle again grates. 

Just think about it – a Doctor who appears to be getting increasingly younger with each incarnation, in looks and behaviour.  An occasional character in the form of Jack Harkness who cannot die and is forever young.  A young woman running away from what some folks would label the ‘humdrum’ of normal life.  Just seems a little bit ‘Lost Boys’ here – reflecting a lifestyle and belief structure in which people are unwilling to grow up.

I am an enormous fan of the re-visioning of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ – good story and plot, good characters, nice combination of high tech and retro gadgets (loved the old style telephone handset that was used in the command centre).  Combine that with excellent soundtrack – just the best TV science fiction in recent years.  When I heard that a ‘prequel’ of BSG was in the works, I was a little bit concerned, but hopeful – same folks involved, should be worth watching.  And so I watched the pilot of Caprica with interest….

The following will help understand this post if you’ve not watched Caprica.  Daniel Graystons, father of Zoe, has a company involve din military robotics and AI.  They’ve made something called a Cylon, which needs an electronic brain called an MCP to work.  Joseph Adama, a top lawyer, has a daughter, Tamara, who was killed in a terrorist attack along with Zoe.  Both girls had ‘avatars’ in a VR game, and these avatars have retained form after their death.  Zoe ends up in the electronic brain of the prototype Cylon.  Tamara ends up left in the VR systems.

With me so far?  Where the frack did it all go wrong?

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all doom and gloom in Caprica, (list of episodes and plot here) and at one level that makes it worse – every now and again stuff starts happening and you’re at the stage of ‘Oh yeah, here we go, they’re gonna start turning out Cylons in a production facility, and Zoe - that teenage lass who’s consciousness is in the prototype – will….er…..do something…but hey, we’re looking at some serious tin men whupping Colonial Marine action!’  But then we cut back to a frackin’ boarding school or a VR representation of Dawson’s Creek.

And that’s the problem.  There is simply too much attention being paid to teenagers in this whole saga.  And that’s the flaw.  Last night we had Zoe going on a virtual reality date with the teenager who is helping her father work out why the ‘brain’ of the one working prototype works and others don’t.  The two teenagers end up with a suggestion that may point to the problem.  Back in the lab, old man Graystone is told this by his teenage assistant and it’s as if he’d never thought of it.  Hello?  This guy is the Stephen Hawking of robotics and AI.  His company make the holographic interfaces that people use to go in to immersive virtual realities in Caprica.  He’s not Homer J Simpson, for crying out loud!

Elsewhere, the head of the other family involved in the saga, Joseph Adama, is swanning around in a VR ‘game’ called ‘New Cap City’ trying to find the avatar of Tamara.  It works well, some shoot ‘em up and folks with the same tailor as Neo and Trinity from ‘The Matrix’ – I’m hopeful that this will go places.  The religious / spiritual angle – monotheism emerging in a polytheistic culture – is really interesting as well.

But then we get the bloody teenagers again and I weep in to my tea.

Come on guys – I can see that you want to reach the teen demographic, but don’t forget the rest of us.

One of my professional interests is in Artificial Intelligence – AI.  I think I’ve had an interest in the simulation of human personality by software for as long as I’ve been interested in programming, and have also heard most of the jokes around the subject – particularly those to do with ’making friends’.   In fiction, most artificial intelligences that are portrayed have something of an attitude problem; we’ve had HAL in 2001 – insane.  The Terminator designed to be homicidal.  The Cylons in the new version of Battlestar Galactica and the ‘prequel’ series, Caprica – originally designed as mechanical soldiers and then evolving in to something more human with an initial contempt for their creators.  The moral of the story – and it goes all the way back to Frankenstein – is that there are indeed certain areas of computer science and technology where man is not meant to meddle. 

Of course, we’re a long way away form creating truly artificial intelligences; those capable of original thought that transcends their programming.  I recently joked that we might be on our way to having a true AI when the program tells us a joke that it has made up that is genuinely funny!  I think the best we’ll manage is to come up with a clever software conjuring trick; something that by deft programming and a slight suspension of disbelief of people interacting with the software will give the appearance of an intelligence.  This in itself will be quite something, and will probably serve many of the functions that we might want from an artificial intelligence – it’s certainly something I find of interest in my involvement in the field.

But the problem with technology is that there is always the possibility of something coming at us unexpectedly that catches us out; it’s often been said that the human race’s technical ability to innovate outstrips our ethical ability to come up with the moral and philosophical tools we need to help our culture deal with the technical innovations by anywhere from a decade to 50 years; in other words, we’re constantly trying to play catch up with the social, legal and ethical implications of our technological advances.

One area where I hope we can at least do a little forward thinking on the ethical front is in the field of AI; would a truly ‘intelligent’ artificial mind be granted the same rights and privileges as a human being or at the very least an animal?  How would we know when we have achieved such a system, when we can’t even agree on definitions of intelligence or whether animals themselves are intelligent? 

Some years ago I remember hearing a BT ‘futurist’ suggesting that it might not be more than a decade or so before it would be possible to transfer the memory of a human being in to a computer memory, and have that memory available for access.  This isn’t the same as transferring the consciousness; as we have no idea what ‘conciousness’ is, it’s hard to contemplate a tool that would do such a thing.   But I would accept that transferring of memories in to storage might be possible and might even have some advantages, even if there are ethical and the ultimate in privacy implications to deal with.  Well, it’s certainly more than a decade ago that I heard this suggestion, and I don’t believe we’re much closer to developing such a technology, so maybe it’s harder than was thought.

But what if….

In the TV series ‘Caprica’, the artificial intelligence that controls the Cylons is provided by an online personality created by a teenage girl for use as an avatar in cyberspace that is downloaded in to a robot body.  In Alexander Jablokov’s short story ‘Living Will’   a computer scientist works with a computer to develop a ‘personality’ in the computer to be a mirror image of his own, but that won’t suffer from the dementia that is starting to affect him.  In each case a sentient program emerges that in all visible respects  is identical to the personality of the original creator.  The  ’sentient’ program thus created is a copy of the original.  In both Caprica and ‘Living Will’ the software outlives it’s creator.

But what if it were possible to transfer the consciousness of a living human mind over to such a sentient program?  Imagine the possibilities of creating and ‘educating’ such a piece of software to the point at which your consciousness could wear it like a glove.  From being in a situation where the original mind looks on his or her copy and appreciates the difference, will it ever be possible for that conscious mind to be moved in to that copy, endowing the sentient software with the self awareness of the original mind, so that the mind is aware of it’s existence as a human mind when it is in the software?

Such electronic immortality is (I hope) likely to be science fiction for a very long time.  The ethical, eschatological and moral questions of shifting consciousnesses around are legion.  Multiple copies of minds?  Would such a mind be aware of any loss between human brain and computer software? What happens to the soul?

It’s an interesting view of a possible future  for mankind, to live forever in an electronic computer at the cost of becoming less than human?  And for those of us with spiritual beliefs, it might be the last temptation of mankind, to live forever and turn one’s back on God and one’s soul.

One of the useful spin-offs from the recent (and ongoing purge and tidy) at Pritchard Towers is that every now and again something floats up that makes you think “Whoa, yes, relevant with a capital ‘R’”.  The most recent relevant thing to catch my attention was a copy of Bernard Crick’s excellent biography of George Orwell.    I’m not planning on reviewing the book here, or entering in to a biography George Orwell – that’s what Wikipaedia is for, after all! 

No, finding that book set off a set of thoughts and conversations with my wife that resulted in me looking at the Britain that we’ve ended up with in 2009 – and I guess by extension the rest of the world – and wondering ‘What would George say?’

I encountered George Orwell in my teens, through the usual route of ’1984′ and ‘Animal Farm’,  I can’t honestly remember which I read first, although ‘Animal Farm’ was brought to my attention by my English teacher, a delightful Tory woman who had us read it after we’d finsihed the English Literature sylabus for our year.  We took it in turns to read from the book out loud, then discuss the book; my main memory is of one girl mis-reading ‘the hens capitulated’ as ‘the hens copulated’, which generated a fair amount of sub-Beavis and Butthead guffaws.

One thing led to another and I eventually read all of his novels, essays, non-fictions and a fair number of his letters.  My admiration for Orwell grew – I regard us both as being members of ‘God’s Awkward Squad’.   As a semi-professional writer, his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’  gave me the basic rules of English prose that I have tried to adhere to to this day.

It’s a great shame Orwell died before the specious nonsense that is ‘Political Correctness’ came to pass – I could see him giving the PC brigade a thorough drubbing.  He saw it coming; the essay above and the explanatory notes to ‘Newspeak’  that he placed in 1984 showed his perfect understanding of how manipulating the language manipulates the ability of people to use that language to debate politics.

By one of those weird coincidences that shouts to a writer ‘You’re on to something here, keep typing!’ I came across this item today.  Put briefly, a High Court judgement states that in some cases the online archives of a newspaper must be modified after a libel judgement, even if the original item in the article is not libellous.  Read the link for details – it’s a strange world we inhabit today.  Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth would be a heck of a lot easier today than it was in ’1984′.  Earlier this year we saw the bizarre episode of Amazon’s e-book service removing a copy of 1984 from the e-book readers of Amazon customers,  and New Labour’s penchant for Ministry of Love style surveillance and ID cards is pretty well known.   I’ve also been reading a scary book called ‘Fantasy Island’ about the first 10 years of New Labour which details the half truthes and downright lies that NuLab have foisted on us in true Ministry of Truth fashion about the way our country has been run.  (Worry not…I’ll review that book when I’ve finished it and it’s sunk in a little) 

So, George would have a truckload of things to talk about today.  Would he stick to newsprint?  Would he blog? Tweet? Facebook? Engage with us on Internet discussion forums (where, no doubt, some of his less politically correct views might disappear within seconds of him writing them!)

I like to think of him blogging – his ‘As I please’ column for the Tribune newspaper, and many other shorter pieces (and longer ones!!) that he wrote were perfect Blog material.  Just take a look at the lists of articles in the above link – it’s what you might see in anyone’s Blog today.   Imagine him bashing away at his laptop, producing weekly blogs, drinking his famously stewed tea and smoking away.  Although the latter might cause problems with some people these days…  I could imagine various trendy web sites getting nastygrams from him after they ‘lose’ his cigarette in photos,  courtesy of Photoshop.

There would be two sides to his blogs; the Orwellian political analysis and the Orwell-like commentary about anything and everything.  An article decrying a Government injustics would share blog-space with a short piece on whether it’s right or wrong to shoot grey-squirrels, and with what gun.   I think we could rely on him to be totally non-doctrinaire and frequently politically incorrect; Orwell had an intellectual honsetly that was often brutal, and it’s a shame we don’t get more of that today from commentators and writers.  I could see him being on the occasional receiving end of ‘Twitterstorms’ after a piece of his upset some group or another by his inability to go with what the current trendy viewpoint was.

What would he have to say about our current media?  Would our repeated diet of talent shows, soaps and reality TV remind him of the fiction machines of the Ministry of Truth?  Would he regard our ’underclass’ as the proles – in whom all hope rested in ’1984′?  PR people full of ‘duckspeak’?  I particularly like the latter – there ARE people you see on TV who you don’t need to listen to to know EXACTLY what they’ve said about an issue.  You encounter them on Internet forums as well…

We’ll never know – but what any of us can do is to start thinking a little more like Orwell – questioning, debating, standing out for our beliefs (at the risk of upsetting those around us), being political without necessarily being doctrinaire, being able, for example, to state in the same breath that ‘X is a great artist but a dreadful human being’ (as he intimated about Dali). 

‘What would George say?’ to me means to exhibit a freedom of thought and expression, a freedom from fear of other people’s opinions and the opinions of the mass media.  It means having an intellectual honesty about the world and myself.  It means noticing the big political ideas of the day and the small nuances of daily life, and regarding them both with the same importance in my writing.  It means being on the look out for the activities of our modern day Ministries of Truth, Love, Peace and Plenty.  It also means finding hope out there – and not succumbing to teh despair that modern life can easily induce.

In his diary, Winston Smith writes “From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of double think – greetings!“.  Whilst we have a way to go yet before things get that bad, it’s time for us all to spend a little time each day pondering ‘What would George say?’

I read this short story again recently; it’s by Ursula Le Guin and is one of the most haunting short stories that I’ve ever read.  The only short story that sticks with me more than this one is Parke Godwin’s ‘Stroke of Mercy’, which is stunning.

I’d suggest you go and read ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ before you hit the link below, but, if you can’t, to save the plot summary, here we go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_From_Omelas

I guess the question for me is whether I would choose to be one who walked away; I suppose that in our heart of hearts we all like to think that we have in ourselves the courage and self-knowledge to ‘do the right thing’.  For several years after I first read this story - which must have been in the mid 1980s – I guess at one level such thinking was hypothetical and rhetorical; it wasn’t the sort of world we lived in, after all.  But today I’m not so sure that it is rhetorical anymore, and also I’m not sure I’ve got the guts to walk away.

We in the ‘developed world’ live a materialistic and consumer driven lifestyle, which has had an increasing amount of impact on the state of the world.  For us to have many of our goodies, it could be argued that somewhere else in the world someone else’s lifestyle takes a kicking.  We have an oil-driven economy; if you’re cursed enough to live above rich oil fields then start running now.

We want high-technology equipment; if you’re a young, female, circuit board assembler in a sweat shop then be aware that some of the processes that are involved may expose you to fertility affecting chemicals.  In order to provide us with cheap electronics, some of the safeguards that we adopt in the developed world are ignored.

Have a think about it, please.

I guess my hiking boots and rucksack are still in the store cupboard right now, and I sincerely doubt that I’ll be walking away real soon.  But I do wonder whether I should at least dust the rucksack down and polish the boots, figuratively speaking, for the day when I too start looking to the distant hills of a less consumption oriented lifestyle and choose to walk away from Omelas.

Over the last couple of days I’ve taken a break from Don DeLillo’s ‘Libra’ and have returned to one of my all time favourite horror / science fiction writers, H P Lovecraft.  In particular, I’m re-reading his novella ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ - an everyday tale of international grave robbing, ghoulish possession and dealings with dark forces, spread over the centuries.

HPL is a definitely un-PC writer to admit to enjoying.  Even as a fan there are some phrases used that today slap you in the face as being patronising or racist, but given the attitudes prevalent in much fiction in the first 25 years of the 20th Century, I’m willing to cut some slack.  His ‘purple prose’ is well known – just mention the words eldritch, un-nameable and squamous as adjectives to anyone with a passing knowldge of his books, and you’ll immediately elicit his name.

I recently bought replacement volums of his stories – my existing ones had fallen apart after 20 years of reading.  The first time I read any Lovecraft at all was in a Corgi edition in my teens – I remember the book as having a purple cover – very apt, I thought – and it was part of a ‘Science Fiction Classics’ series.  The first stories of his I remember are not, oddly enough, from the C’thulhu Mythos - they were ‘The Colour out of Space’ and ‘The Shadow out of Time’ – pretty much straight science fiction in most respect.  His Venus set ‘In the Walls of Eryx’ was pure 1930s science fiction, with the ilmage of Venus as an overgrown jungle world.  Once I got hooked in to the C’thulhu mythos, it was downhill all the way.  I also have a neat collection of ‘Mythos Stories’ from other authors which are great fun, and wrote my own Necronomicon related short story set in Victorian England.  Great fun!

As for the Mythos, it’s struck me recently that many of the Mythos stories I actually like best are not by Lovecraft himself!  I think one of the amazing things about the Mythos structure is how it’s been used (and occasionally abused) by an incredibly wide range of writers; just as most writers will do a Holmes Homage, most science fiction authors will end up doing a Mythos related tale somewhere along the way.  My favourite Mythos tales probably include those of Stephen King (‘Crouch End’) and Colin Wilson – particularly his ‘Return of the Lloigor.

I remember some years ago killing time in London one evening (during my film making days) in a Cybercafe on Tottenham Court Road writing a Mythos tale based around a creature that could inhabit electronic networks.  Oddly enough, the email in which I sent the story to myself mysteriously disappeared in transit.  It did make me wonder…

Back to Charles Dexter Ward – true Gothic Horror.  There is a section of the book where even now I have to sit back and think hard, following the disguises and double identities of the characters in the novel – but it’s a great story.

If you’ve never read any Lovecraft, and you don’t mind a bit of prose that is slightly purple, I suggest you start with ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ to kick you off on the Mythos stories.  ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ is an interestingly understated short story that always reminds me of H G Wells’ ‘The Platner Story’.  ‘The Mountains of Madness’ is a good read as well – set in the Antarctic and deals with the discovery of ancient alien life on Earth (part of the Mythos).

In the words of an old newspaper review…go forth to HP Lovecraft and shudder!

Bugger.

Like a lot of things, I guess that in my heart of hearts I knew that eventually all the venerable old writers of science fiction, the folks who I grew up with, would all pass away.  When it starts happening it’s a strange experience.  The world has enough obituaries for ACC – here I just wanted to say something about what he means to me.

When ’2001 – A Space Odyssey’ - came out I was a boy of 7 years old and although it played the local fleapit I didn’t see it.  I don’t remember whether I was too young to go, but I remember my mum wanting to see it.  I never found out whether she eventually got to see the movie or not; I only myself caught up with it after watching 2010, which is pretty arse-about-face.   In other words, I came to ACC not via his most famous work, but in my own way.

A British ‘boys weekly’ of the 1970s was called, I seem to remember, ‘Speed and Power’, and featured all sorts of machines, vehicles, etc. each week…aong with a short story from ACC.  And that’s where I encountered him first.  I still have a box of these magazines somewhere in the dark recesses of my attic, complete with the short stories which occupied many an evening, and encouraged me to go and find his other books.

The first ACC novel I read was ‘A Fall of Moondust’ - a disaster story about a ‘moon bus’ full of tourists that gets swamped in dust whilst traversing a lunar ‘sea’, and the efforts of rescuers to get them out.  The novel of his that made the biggest impact on me was ‘Rendezvous with Rama’ - I still remember the first time I read it, and even now it holds up.  Lovely, wonderful, story telling that I never get bored with.  I have to say that I’m very excited about the prospects of a film being made of the novel – possibly for release in 2009.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

But the short stories made the biggest impression on me.  As the years passed I just grabbed copeis of his collections of short stories from second hand shops, charity shops, wherever.  And of all of them, the ones that made the biggest and longest lasting impression were his ‘Tales from the White Hart’.   Quite why I have no idea – I guess that I just love ‘tallish tales’ that are just, maybe, plausible.  These stories, and those of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, have probably been the major influences of my short story writing.  So much so that I’ve written a collection of similar stories – an ‘homage’, I guess – called ‘Tales from the Oakham Arms’.

I’m not even going to start on the technical innovations that ACC suggested, starting with his now famous Wireless World item on Geostationary Communication Satellites, that have now appeared in our lives.

Like someone else said recently, I really hope that as ACC passed away he was able to look deep into the cosmos and utter those final words of Dave Bowman’s…”My God, it’s full of stars”.

Thanks Sir Arthur.  My life would have been significantly poorer without your imagination.