Tag: scifi

Children of Arkadia

I read Children of Arkadia, by Darusha Wehm, over the weekend. This was a fascinating book. The setting is a classic of science fiction: a bunch of idealistic settlers embark on creating an idealized society in a space station colony. There are 2 unique twists: the artificial general intelligences that accompany them have, in theory, equal rights and free will as the humans. There are no antagonists: no one is out to sabotage society, there’s no evil villain. Just circumstances.

Darusha does an excellent job exploring some of the obvious and not-so-obvious conflicts that emerge. Can an all-knowing, super intelligence AI ever really be on equal footing with humans? How does work get done in a post-scarcity economy? Can even the best-intentioned people armed with powerful and helpful technology ever create a true utopia?

Children of Arkadia manages to explore all this and give us interesting and diverse characters in a compact, fun to read story. Recommended.

Nitpicking Aurora

First, where I absolutely agree with Kim Stanley Robinson is over the biggest of all Big Lies in hard-SF tales about humans conquering the galaxy… the notion that it will be easy for ortho-humanity to colonize other earthlike worlds. A mere cloning of the European experience settling the Americas, stepping off the boat, inhaling the fresh air, chopping some trees and pushing back natives, building prosperous farms, then cities… this re-figuring of the American West in space is a standard motif, from Poul Anderson to Lois Bujold and a 1000 other authors, and although it is so alluring a dream, it ain’t necessarily so.

I don’t think his composite pressurized structures are very realistic. Flat floored “tents” are very hard to do. I think it would be far lighter, stronger, and safer to have a cylindrical pressure shell, with a lightweight raised flat floor inside, and space under the floor panels for storage. . I also think that 60 seconds from resin mix to strong cure may be reasonable for a patch material, but it makes a lot of what he did nearly impossible. But if he let it get cooler than intended, he could stretch the cure time.

The perils of worldbuilding

It’s not difficult to understand the appeal of expansive, intricate artificial worlds in works of fiction. They safely transport us from our everyday lives to new lands and galaxies far, far away. They don’t just give us a new narrative to digest, but an entirely new universe with its own logic, laws and rules, and we – the audience – are invited to become participants, seeking to fill in the cracks and gaps. But should great works of fiction demand more from readers and viewers than merely assisting in worldbuilding? Should they make us contemplate and challenge the built worlds that advertisers, governments and corporations have already created around us? Incisively written by the US blogger Evan Puschak (also known as The Nerdwriter), working from some ideas from the English author and critic M John Harrison, The Perils of Worldbuilding is a shrewd take on the appeal of imagined worlds, and their potential pitfalls.

2015 Nebula Award Winners

Novel:
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (Winner)
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
Trial by Fire, Charles E. Gannon
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu
Coming Home, Jack McDevitt

Novella:
Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress (Winner)
We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory
“The Regular,” Ken Liu
“The Mothers of Voorhisville,” Mary Rickert
Calendrical Regression, Lawrence Schoen
“Grand Jeté (The Great Leap),” Rachel Swirsky

Earth, population 500M

There are only ~500M of us left, after the convulsive transformations caused by climate change severely diminished the planet’s carrying capacity. Most of us now live in ‘lifeboats’, in places that were once Canada, China, Russia and the Scandinavian countries, shoehorned into cities created virtually overnight to accommodate the millions of desperate refugees where the climate remains marginally tolerable.

Before the seismic shocks of the great upheavals, people’s movements were unfettered, and they could breathe unfiltered air, roam in the woods or simply watch their kids play soccer outdoors. Today, the unprotected strips of land exposed to the elements are forbidden zones, plagued by drenching rains with howling 160-km-an-hour winds, alternating with fierce dust storms, the deadly soil tsunamis that rumble up from the deserts that blanket what used to be the United States. When there is a break in the wild weather, the scorching sun relentlessly cooks the atmosphere to temperatures of 82 celsius or more by midday, making it impossible to step outside without body armor and oxygen tanks.