S. C. Butler will read from his new novel The Magicians’ Daughter this Wednesday, May 6th, at Book Court in Cobble Hill (163 Court Street, Brooklyn).
Archives for April 2009
Saladin Ahmed, Robert J. Howe, Andrea Kail at NYRSF Readings
The New York Review of Science Fiction Readings
and the
South Street Seaport Museum present
Writers from Tabula Rasa, Episode 2
Saladin Ahmed
Andrea Kail
Robert J. Howe
Guest Curator
Rick Bowes
Tuesday, May 5th — Doors open 6:30 PM
South Street Seaport Museum
12 Fulton Street — 4th Floor
New York City
$5 suggested donation
Neil Gaiman, Mariken Jongman, Shaun Tan at Scholastic Auditorium
Just heard about this, and am contemplating going:
Torture
In one of my undergraduate political theory seminars (this would be in about 1999), the professor posed this problem to the class: “A group of terrorists have planted a bomb in a major American city. The bomb is set to go off in one hour. If it goes off, it will kill hundreds of people. You’ve captured a member of the terrorist organization, and he knows where the bomb is. If you torture him, you can get the information and possibly defuse the bomb before it goes off. Who thinks you should torture him?”
There were about nine students in the class. Everyone raised their hands.
The professor was taken aback. “So we’re all in favor of torture? Wow.”
Nobody said anything.
The professor said, “Does anyone want to try to argue the other side?”
I said halfheartedly, “I mean, I could.”
The professor said, “Does anyone think it’s just wrong to torture? If you torture him, he may lie, and actually lead you away from the bomb. Maybe he doesn’t know where the bomb is. Maybe you’ve picked up the wrong guy, and he’s completely innocent, and you’re going to torture him.”
“But wait,” I said. “When you introduced the scenario, you stipulated that this guy knows where the bomb is, and that torturing him would get the information. Now you’re just introducing hypothetical counterfactuals. If torturing doesn’t work, or if you’ve got the wrong guy, then obviously you shouldn’t torture him. But if we’re serious about the ethical implications here, we should be discussing the hard case. Stipulate that you’ve got the right guy, and that torture works, and that you can save hundreds of lives by torturing, should you do it then?”
The professor said, “But that’s not real life. In real life you can never be that certain of the facts on the ground.”
This is a problem with a lot of debates in political science. If you don’t stipulate certain facts, you spend all your time arguing practicalities rather than ethics. But in real life there are seldom clearly stipulated facts.
Anyway, in the years since then I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that discussion. I mean, did I support torture? The best answer I could ever come up with, assuming that torture does work to saves lives, was that there should be harsh punishments against torture, and in the rare circumstances where torture was necessary, the individuals who engaged in torture should subsequently turn themselves over to the authorities and face the prescribed punishment, be it incarceration, execution, whatever. But still the issue bugged me. It didn’t seem right to punish people for doing what was necessary under the circumstances, but on the other hand, if people were permitted to torture without repercussion, torture would quickly become standard operating procedure, and there would be no question that it would be used gratuitously and on completely innocent people.
(Though apparently everyone in the intelligence community these days agrees that torture doesn’t actually work. If this is true, then of course the debate is over right there.)
One of the disturbing things about studying political science is that you realize when you’re about twenty-two that you know more about these issues than the people who are actually making the decisions, and that’s really, really scary. An example of this would be Condoleeza Rice, in the wake of the September 11th attacks, making the jaw-dropping declaration that no one could have anticipated that terrorists would use hijacked planes as weapons. Say what? That was something I’d been worried about since I was about fifteen, when I saw a step-by-step infographic in TIME magazine laying out exactly that scenario. And the freaking National Security Advisor was completely unaware of the possibility?
It’s the same thing with torture. I feel like I spent more time worrying about it than the people who were actually torturing people. I spent so much time pondering what sort of punishment or restitution a person who had tortured (as a desperate, last resort) should volunteer for, and it apparently never even occurred to any of these assholes that they should have to sacrifice anything.
The thing I just can’t stop thinking about, and just can’t get over, is that someone like George W. Bush, from one of the wealthiest families in the country, who attended some of the top schools, and who had an army of highly-paid lawyers and advisors (who also attended some of the top schools), made the call that we should start torturing prisoners. And when the first hints of that decision started coming out, he lied about it, and was willing to sit back in his comfy chair in the White House, where he was the most powerful person on the planet, and let a 23-year-old girl from a trailer park in Alabama, who had volunteered for military service to this country, take the fall for him — for a decision he made. What kind of person does something like that?
Hardcore History Show 27 – Ghosts of the Ostfront I
At long last there’s a new episode out of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast: Show 27 – Ghosts of the Ostfront I.
Here’s a really striking section from near the beginning of the show:
But the most haunting part of Donovan Webster’s book is when he takes several planes and a bunch of cars to get to this spot in the middle of nowhere, on the steppes of southern Russia, to see something that very few people know is there, especially outside of Russia, and he says he had a guide with him and they pulled the car up to this spot, and it was in the middle of a very flat plain, and he could see way off into the distance, all the way to the horizon, miles away, and he says that he and the guide got out of the car, their boots crunching on the snow-filled field, and the guide told him to look down, and Webster says when his eyes adjusted to the blinding white of the snow and the plains, he could make out strange shapes in the snow, and the guide picked up one of these shapes and showed it to Webster, and it was a bone — a human bone — and he and Webster begin walking around this field, picking up clavicles, and thigh bones, and jaw bones, and pieces of skulls, and they are everywhere. He says there are also jackboots that you come across, and all sorts of leather gear, all the refuse and debris of human existence that you might imagine still sitting around this field. And he says you can look off into the horizon and these bones are sticking up out of the snow as far as you can see, for miles. The guide tells him that this is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of how far this bone field, he calls it, stretches. This bone field is a monument, an inadvertent commemoration of an important event, with many, many, many lessons to teach modern people today, and it’s out in the middle of nowhere. The nearest major city is a place called Volgagrad, which may not ring a bell in your memory. But Volgagrad used to have another name. It used to be called Stalingrad.
ETA: I interviewed Dan Carlin for Episode 15 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
Military Robots and the Future of War – P. W. Singer
Here’s a lecture that’s worth watching: Military Robots and the Future of War, presented by P. W. Singer. (Check out my interview with Singer on the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.) A key excerpt:
Mankind’s five thousand year old monopoly on the fighting of war is breaking down in our very lifetime. I spent the last several years going around meeting with all the players in this field, from the robot scientists to the science fiction authors who inspired them to the 19-year-old drone pilots who are fighting from Nevada … The kinds of things that we used to only talk about at science fiction conventions like Comic Con have to be talked about in the halls of power, and places like the Pentagon. A robots revolution is upon us.
Hey, you know what would be awesome? How about if people in the halls of power and in places like the Pentagon started thinking about the implications of new technology as seriously as people at Comic Con before those technologies actually got built. Maybe even decades before. Is that so hard? I guess maybe it is, considering the willful ignorance of so many people in our halls of power, who are still trying to wrap their heads around 19th-century science (say, evolution) or 20th-century science (say, global warming) let alone 21st-century science.
Anyway, here are two of the many new technologies touched on in this lecture:
The PHASR. Downside: Likely to Mostly Be Used on People Complaining About Their Rights Being Taken Away. Upside: Looks Really Freaking Rad |
Virtual Reality Ball: Because Why Should Gerbils Get to Have All the Fun? |
Report on Center for Inquiry Panel on Evolutionary Origins of Religious Belief
I had a request to report on the CFI panel on the evolutionary origins of religious belief. I didn’t take notes, but I’ll try to recall some of the highlights. These are not my views, I’m just passing along what was discussed.
Randy Thornhill, Professor of Biology at the University of New Mexico, presented his “parasite-stress theory,” which essentially argues that people’s political and religious temperament is largely shaped by subconscious biological processes in response to their perceived risk of infection. In our evolutionary past, disease was a massive factor, maybe the primary factor, driving our evolution. In tribal societies, you’ve probably already been exposed to all the germs of everyone in your tribe, so the real risk of deadly contagion comes from outsiders. In this environment, hostility to outsiders can be a strong survival trait, but too much hostility to outsiders can also hinder your survival, as it cuts you off from trade, possible mates, etc. So hostility to outsiders has to be carefully calibrated according to the risk of infection. Religion, in his view, is a powerful force for strengthening in-group solidarity while increasing out-group hostility, and would therefore be expected to evolve in tandem with high levels of parasite-stress. The theory goes that the more stressed you are about possible infection, the more your biology responds to elevate your hostility to outsiders. Thornhill presented graph after graph demonstrating this correlation (though of course establishing causation from correlation is extremely problematic). Conservatism is generally characterized by higher antipathy toward outsiders. The more disease there is in any given country, the more Conservative that country is likely to be. The more disease there is in a given U.S. state, the more Conservative that state is likely to be. Individuals who are more concerned about disease are more likely to be Conservative. Most striking of all, pregnant women in their first trimester (when the immune system is suppressed so as not to reject the fetus) are markedly more Conservative on issues such as immigration than they are either before pregnancy or after the first trimester. Thornhill also concludes that the Liberal movements of the 1960s in Western countries — civil rights, the women’s movement, the sexual revolution — were the result of decreased parasite-stress, which was brought about by innovations such as chlorinated/fluoridated water several decades prior. (In countries without such technological innovations, no comparable social revolutions occurred.)
David Sloan Wilson, Professor of Biology at SUNY Binghamton, began with a sort of survey of the various evolutionary models to explain religion. These fall into adaptive and non-adaptive categories. Non-adaptive explanations are ones such as that metaphysical belief systems really have no impact on an organism’s survivability, so religion spreads and changes more or less arbitrarily, similar to genetic drift. It might also be the case that religion is a non-adaptive necessary byproduct of a linked adaptive trait — for example, we evolved to be really smart, which helped us survive, but one consequence of being really smart was that we could worry about our own mortality, which created the impetus for not-terribly-constructive religious rituals. Another non-adaptive explanation would be that religion was once adaptive, given the drastically different environment in which we evolved (tribal societies on the African savannah) but is no longer so. (Wilson compared this to our eating habits. We’re biologically programmed to stuff ourselves with as much fat and sugar as we can lay our hands on, which is a perfectly rational survival strategy when you’re at constant risk of starvation, but which becomes extremely maladaptive when you continually have more food available than you need.) There are also the adaptive explanations, which he favors, i.e. that religion makes an organism more likely to survive, either at the group level (religious communities have more solidarity) or at the level of the individual (religious people are less stressed). This is in marked contrast to the adaptive explanation put forth by Dawkins and Dennett, which states that religion operates like a virus, spreading itself through populations, constantly mutating into ever more powerful and seductive narratives, aiding the survival of nobody but the ideas themselves. (For example, the Greek/early Jewish concept of the afterlife — a dismal place of perpetual boredom and emptiness — mutated into the more attractive notion of eternal bliss for you and your friends along with eternal torment for your enemies, and that second narrative therefore thrived while the first largely died out.) Wilson talked about the importance for human beings of having meaningful narratives for their lives — which religion provides. (Though there are equally potent non-religious sources of meaningful narratives.) He described an experiment in which one group of students was regularly assigned to write essays about the things that mattered most to them while another was tasked to write about abstract or trivial topics. At the end of the semester, the first group was actually measurably healthier than the second. Wilson also does research in which college students are asked to wear a device that beeps at them eight times a day. Each time the device beeps, the students are supposed to fill out a quick questionnaire about what they’re doing and how they’re feeling. Wilson was looking specifically at the differences between adherents of notably Liberal religions (Unitarian) versus notably Conservative religions (Seventh Day Adventist). One of the findings was that students belonging to Liberal religions were more stressed generally, perhaps because they experience more worry and anxiety around making decisions, whereas members of Conservative religions were more likely to apply a simple set of black-and-white rules, obviating the need to stress about making tough calls. Conversely, the study also found that Liberals spend about twice as much time alone, and are comfortable doing so, whereas Conservatives experience sharply rising levels of anxiety when separated from their social group.
Temple Library Reviews reviews The Living Dead Anthology
Temple Library Reviews is reviewing every story in the anthology The Living Dead, which contains my piece “The Skull-Faced Boy.” My story’s in the latter half of the book, and the reviews have been going up since December, so for a long time this review has been approaching … slowly … slowly but inexorably … like a hungry zombie. I was thinking what a drag it would be if after all that suspense they totally slagged the story, but fortunately the review is quite positive:
“The Skull-Faced Boy” by David Barr Kirtley: Another interesting story, which is emotional as well as a pure joy to read due to the world-building decisions. According to Kirtley, those newly deceased of natural causes and incidents come back as zombies who are intelligent but also with no hunger. This however is not the case with those dead for a longer period of time or already munched on. The main protagonists are Jack and Dustin, who die in a car crash on the night zombies decide to rise, and while Jack has an intact humanity and moral compass, Dustin raises an army of the dead and decides to conquer the living in America. Fun, huh? But not for Jack, who has to be an outsider and treated with hate by the living and feel out of place with the other intelligent dead. I can really connect with this story since it is largely about those people, the minorities, the misfits, who are usually looked down on and mistreated for being different.
New York City Events Blog
I created a new NYC Events tag on my blog, so if you want to find out about fun stuff going on in New York City (and if you want to meet up with and/or stalk me) without having to wade through all my other blather, this is the link for you.
In God We Rust: Final Thoughts on Battlestar Galactica
My friend Rob has a post up at Tor.com entitled In God We Rust: Final Thoughts on Battlestar Galactica. When Rob mentioned that he’d written this, I was like, “Wait, you wrote more about how bad the Battlestar Galactica finale was? Geez, man, you’re like that character in Office Space, when they beat the crap out of the printer by stomping on it and hitting it with a baseball bat, and then the printer’s lying there in pieces and they’re walking away, but one of them is so overcome with rage that he runs back and starts pummeling it with his bare fists, and his friends have to drag him away. You’re that guy.”
So I just read the post, and it really is sharply observed, but now it’s got me all angry about the finale again. Man, that thing really was like a hundred-car pileup in the middle of Route Stupid, between the Dumbassville and Fuckwittown exits. And this whole time they’ve been teasing us with that whole “And they have a plan” crap. What plan? Plan 9 From Outer Space? There was no plan. Argh.
Anyway, go check out the post.
Isaac Asimov on Technology and Inspiration
Several of Asimov’s robot books included a foreward called “The Story Behind the Robot Novels.” This is an essay I’ve read and reread countless times. For me the key section is this:
It became very common, in the 1920s and 1930s, to picture robots as dangerous devices that invariably destroyed their creators. The moral was pointed out over and over again that “there are some things Man was not meant to know.” Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. To me, it always seemed that the solution had to be wisdom. You did not refuse to look at danger, rather you learned how to handle it safely. After all, this has been the human challenge since a certain group of primates became human in the first place. Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech — and both are still dangerous to this day — but human beings would not be human without them.
This pro-science, pro-technology sentiment is at the heart of Asimov’s philosophical outlook, which is why it’s such a horrific travesty that Hollywood turned his brilliant short story collection I, Robot into exactly the sort of moronic robots-run-amok hysteria-fest that Asimov was responding to by writing a more intelligent and nuanced treatment of the subject in the first place. (It’s also pretty pathetic that Hollywood is still churning out material — such as the Battlestar Galactica series finale — built around the sort of notions that would strike a bright teenager living a century ago as worn-out and intellectually contemptible.)
Anyway, the other Asimov foreword I used to reread regularly was “The Story Behind Foundation,” from his book Foundation. The part that struck me as romantic and memorable was this:
I had an appointment to meet [magazine editor] Mr. Campbell to tell him the plot of a new story I was planning to write, and the catch was that I had no plot in mind, not the trace of one. I therefore tried a device I sometimes use. I opened a book at random and set up a free association, beginning with whatever I first saw. The book I had with me was a collection of the Gilbert and Sullivan plays. I happened to open it to the picture of the Fairy Queen of Iolanthe throwing herself at the feet of Private Willis. I thought of soldiers, of military empires, of the Roman Empire — of a Galactic Empire — aha! Why shouldn’t I write of the fall of the Galactic Empire and of the return of feudalism, written from the viewpoint of someone in the secure days of the Second Galactic Empire?
It occurs me now that, as much time as I spent reading and re-reading this anecdote, and as much time as I’ve spent remembering it since, I can’t say that I’ve ever actually used the technique described. I can’t say why. It certainly sounds like it should work, and obviously it worked for Asimov. Maybe I’ll try it sometime.
Center for Inquiry Panel on Evolutionary Origins of Religious Belief
I’m going to try to make it to this:
Voices of Reason: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Belief Starts: Wednesday, April 22nd 2009 at 6:30 pm Ends: Wednesday, April 22nd 2009 at 8:00 pm Location: All Souls Unitarian Church, 1157 Lexington Ave. (and 80th St.) The Center for Inquiry-New York City and the All Souls Unitarian Church are co-sponsoring a panel discussion on the evolutionary origins of religion. Why does religious belief persist? Is there a so-called ”God gene?” What is the relationship between biological and cultural evolution in the development of human religion? How does unselfish behavior fit into the evolutionary mix? Is there really such a thing as “free will,” a basic tenet of many religions? These are a few of the questions to be explored by a panel that includes Randy Thornhill, Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of New Mexico, and David Sloan Wilson, Distinguished Professor of Biology at SUNY Binghamton. The panel will be moderated by Austin Dacey, a philosopher and author of The Secular Conscience. Admission is free and open to the public. |
Larry Niven on Science Fiction Mysteries
Here’s another of my favorite bits of commentary on writing. This is Larry Niven discussing the problem of writing a science fiction mystery, from the afterword to The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton:
How can the reader anticipate the author if all the rules are strange? If science fiction recognizes no limits, then … perhaps the victim was death-wished from outside a locked room, or the walls may be permeable to X-ray laser. Perhaps the alien’s motivation really is beyond human comprehension. Can the reader really rule out time travel? Invisible killers? Some new device tinkered together by a homicidal genius?
More to the point, how can I give you a fair puzzle? With great difficulty, that’s how. There’s nothing impossible about it. In a locked room mystery you can trust John Dickson Carr not to ring in a secret passageway. You can trust me too. If there’s an X-ray laser involved, I’ll tell you so. If I haven’t mentioned an invisible man, there isn’t one. If the ethics of Belt society are important, I will have gone into detail on the subject.
Orson Scott Card on Writing Child Characters
Here’s another one of my favorite paragraphs on writing. This is Orson Scott Card on writing child characters, from his introduction to Ender’s Game:
Never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along — the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing Ender’s Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives on these children from that perspective — the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as important as any adult’s.
My Blog Gets Tagged
I did some tagging on my WordPress Blog to make things easier to find, so you can now browse by categories such as “How to Write,” “My Fiction,” “Art & Animation,” and “Photos.” Look under “Entries Tagged.”
Elmore Leonard on Leaving Out the Parts that Readers Tend to Skip
Here’s another paragraph on writing that really influenced me. This is from Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Writers. Some of these rules I agree with more than others, but this is the one that’s really stuck with me:
Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip … Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.
Davebarrkirtley on Twitter
So I’m now davebarrkirtley on Twitter.
Pinchbottom Burlesque Presents Pinch U
I seem to have somehow agreed to go to this (er … very mildly NSFW?) tomorrow night. I don’t even know. The poster kind of says it all. Though it is about college, so maybe it’ll be educational?
KGB Fantastic Fiction Reading Series April 2009
Here’s a photo from this month’s KGB reading, which featured Marie Rutkoski and Cassandra Clare.
“Oh no, you guys! We forgot to wash our hands!” |
Stephen King on How Aspiring Writers Have to Read Constantly
Next up in my continuing series of paragraphs about writing that really had a big impact on me, here’s Stephen King from On Writing. Many of you I’m sure are familiar with this quote, but it definitely bears repeating:
You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it’s true. If I had a nickel for every person who ever told me he/she wanted to become a writer but “didn’t have time to read,” I could buy myself a pretty good steak dinner. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in … Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway.