"My father's car was science fiction."

Yesterday I attended an entertaining and illuminating evening with science fiction author William Gibson, arranged by the Vancouver Public Library as part of Gibson's promotional tour for his new collection of non-fiction work, Distrust That Particular Flavor.  Gibson's articles and commentaries are a fascinating present-day application of the same brilliant methodology and unique style that he more often uses to create the future.

The event was standing room only, or would have been if the organizers hadn't started setting up more chairs.  I had the good fortune to be Number 24 through the door*, which continues to support my philosophy that if you show up early, you get good seats.

The demographic was an interesting mix that ranged from twenty-year-olds to people who looked to have a decade or two over and above my fifty, suggesting that Gibson's popularity as a writer has maintained itself well over the intervening years since the 1984 publication of his landmark cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. 

Gibson is a little more lined, a little more lean, and what used to be almost trademark unruly mid-length hair has changed to a receding crewcut, but the round wire-framed glasses remain the same as in the pictures of Gibson from the 80s.  He retains a kind of laconic southern drawl from his youth in Virginia which combines well with his flat delivery, although that deadpan sense of humour can make it hard to realize that he's made a joke.

Over the course of the evening, Gibson covered a wide range of topics.  He discussed his early interest in science fiction as almost a given for someone growing up in the United States in the 50s, when everything had a sort of post-war futurism in its design. To illustrate, he pointed out that:

My father's car was science fiction. It was far-out science fiction, it had rocket fins and chrome plates on it.

He went on to discuss the question of science fiction as a predictive medium as he approaches it in his work:

People can and do attempt to predict the future in works of science fiction. Someone like Arthur C. Clarke does today look rather prescient - unusually so by the standards of science fiction. When I began to write science fiction, I convinced myself through my own reading of science fiction and whatever cursory study of comparative  literary critical methodology I was able to apply, it seemed to me that the science fiction fiction of the past could most meaningfully be read as a product of the moment in which it was created. 

When I was a kid, there was a lot of 1940s science fiction around, which I was reading in the late 50's and early 60's, and I actually had to reverse engineer the history of the world as i read it in order to figure out why some things were so wrong.  Because when you finish writing a piece of fiction imagining the future, when you dot the last "i" and put the last period on it, it begins to obsolesce - it begins to acquire a patina of quaintness which ultimately will probably be its greatest charm for readers of the future, in the way that when we read 19th century science fiction today, what we find charming is what they got wrong.  So that always happens.  Nothing dates more quickly than an imagined future.

I tried...knowing that I did my best, when I was starting to write, to try to produce work that would resist that and have some longevity, simply because that was more of a challenge. So I was careful never to have year dates in my early work. 

In fact what happens is that even though people do read it, it's all still in print, people do read that stuff, when they read it now, they think, okay, I know that the central mystery of this book is going to be what happened to all the cell phones.  You may be able to anticipate or at least name cyberspace, but it doesn't mean you can anticipate the advent of ubiquitous cellular telephony, and indeed if anyone had been able to anticipate that in a SF novel of the early 1980s,  what a weird book that would have been!  Imagine a world in which no one is ever truly alone. 

Gibson is resigned to the inevitability of piracy in the digital age.  When asked about his position regarding this problem during the question and answer period, he replied with the following philosophical position:

Everything I've ever written is available as a single BitTorrent download that you can find on hundreds of sites around the world...if that weren't true, you'd have to consider me a failure.

All in all, a good evening.  And it was free, which is an awfully good recommendation for something like this.  

I declined the opportunity to stand in line and obtain Gibson's signature on a newly purchased copy of Distrust That Particular Flavor, although, when you think about it, that's going to be one of the most difficult things to adapt to e-books - and a pretty good justification for not downloading the pirate version of Gibson's collected works. 

- Sid

*  No, my OCD hasn't reached the point where I've started counting people in front of me in event lineups, the organizers were good enough to provide me with a non-winning door prize ticket.

Form Follows Function.

"No flames, no fins, no rockets."

Instructions from Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry
to U.S.S. Enterprise designer Matt Jefferies

It's funny how fast a science fiction movie can lose me.  The Space Channel is showing Pandorum right now (a movie which lost a lot of people) which opens with a travelling shot down the length of a spaceship.  My first thought upon seeing this majestic craft travelling through the void was "What the hell are those three spikes for?  And why wouldn't those rings be continuous?  What possible reason would they have for not finishing the arc?  What is all this crap on the outside of the hull?"

Science fiction television and cinema is full of interesting and intriguing spaceships designed to fit into a specific milieu, such as the dictatorial wedges of Imperial Star Destroyers, the blunt military practicality of the battlestar Galactica, or the sensuous curves of Farscape's sentient organic starship Moya.

But out of all the spaceships and starships out there, I have a particular affection for the various iterations of the U.S.S. Enterprise from the Star Trek franchise, simply because of the logic behind the unique perspective that Matt Jefferies, the original designer, brought to the question of starship design.

Jefferies' Enterprise was based on his long experience as a designer and flight test engineer:

I decided that whatever we came up with had to be instantly recognisable, and to sell the speed it would probably have to start in the distance as a tiny speck of light, and enlarge and come right by your head or go the other way. In that couple of seconds you had to be able to recognise it.

The habitat part I felt ideally should be a ball, but it got too awkward to play with. It just didn’t look like it would get out of first gear, much less the speeds he (Roddenberry) was talking about. So it gradually got flattened. I was trying to stay away from a saucer because the UFOs or flying saucer were old hat but it did gradually turn it into a saucer.

I felt that if he was going to get this sort of fantastic performance out of the thing, there would have to be very powerful engines of some kind or other, even to the point they might be dangerous to be around. I said, "Well, we better get ’em away from the main hull." The other thing is what we called during war a Quick Change Unit. By having the engines out there, if anything is wrong, you can just quickly unhook it and put another in its place.

Similarly, the smooth outside finish of the ship was also based on logic and experience:

Basically I wanted to keep it as plain as I could. To be able to play light on it. I didn’t want to load the exterior up with what looked like equipment of some kind. We used to talk about Murphy’s Law, that whatever man makes will break at the most inopportune time. So why have equipment on the outside in the worst possible environment to put a crewman out to work on it, if you can keep it on the inside?

For myself, I've always assumed that the designs of the various Starfleet ships represented a response to the physics behind faster-than-light travel, as with the distinctive hulls of sailing ships and the carefully crafted curves of airplane wings.  I can't make any sort of similar connection for Pandorum's Elysium, which to my experienced eye just looks like a long stack of what the Star Wars set designers used to call "greebly dressing" rather than a reasoned design for a NAFAL* colony ship.  In fact, I have to wonder if the script said:  CAMERA PANS DOWN SHIP FOR 30 SECONDS, and they just kept adding bits to the model until it was long enough to fill that half-minute of the movie.

- Sid

* Not As Fast As Light - this useful but underused acronym comes to us courtesy of science fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin.

Actually not the kind of apogee manager that my spaceship needs.

Did anyone else notice recently that Google™ is willing to install Google Apps™ on your spaceship?  Intrigued by the idea of watching someone fire up Gmail™ on the main viewscreen of the Enterprise, I obtained the following information from a Google™ representative:

Provided your spaceship has Internet access and a current browser, we can install and configure Google Apps for you.  Most new craft are equipped with space broadband wireless access (SiFi).  Please make sure your salesperson knows that you want 4G and not "4g", as the latter will make it more difficult to reach orbit.

As you represent a new market segment for us, we will also be launching (pun intended) Google Apps for Space Travelers (GAST).  GAST is a bundled package, centered on Google Apps, that includes additional services and features important to space travelers.  GAST includes: Message Archive & Discovery services so that you can maintain an auditable copy of your email communications; Backupify to ensure that documents are protected should sun spots interfere with your link; and Appogee Domain Managment Studio for sharing contacts and managing security.    We will also include OffiSync and Syncdocs, so that you have offline access to all of your Google Docs.

And, of course, we offer a full range of deployment and support services.  Our support is available by email, web, sat phone, and HAM radio (coming soon).

Please let me know if you are interested in pricing and financing options.

Regards,
Allen

Well, as much as I'd like to consider this a forward-looking initiative on the part of Google™, frankly I'm willing to bet that if my refrigerator had a current browser and Internet access, they would be just as eager to slap Google Apps™ onto it.

- Sid