I’m Not Advocating Putting Them Against the Wall and Shooting Them, Although It Is Tempting…

April 17th, 2012 Posted in Writing
No Comments

Okay, who here uses Windows?

Huh, not as many as I thought. Cool beans.

Okay, so the reason I ask is two-fold: one, the latest version of Ubuntu is out at the end of this month; and two, I’ve been doing a lot of reading over the last day to try and work out what exactly a Chief Director, a Non-Executive Director and an Executive Director actually do.

The thing Microsoft doesn’t tell you about computer operating systems is that they require very careful and dedicated management. Windows XP made this comparatively easy. Keep your registry clean, purge the temp files regularly, check every week or so for adware and spyware, make sure there are as few programs in the boot directory as possible, install the latest updates, and wipe the entire drive and reinstall the OS every year or so. Windows Vista seemed to go out of its way to make every single one of those simple tasks as difficult as possible, and that’s why I switched to Ubuntu.

Importantly, Ubuntu doesn’t keep lots of esoteric directories and the programs made for it don’t insinuate themselves into them. If you want a Ubuntu program to do something other than run when you click on it, you need to go into the command line and edit the code. And that’s good, because I don’t want any programs on my computer to do anything other than run when I click on them. Still, though, it’s good practice to reinstall the OS every year or so.

Why this obsession with reinstalling? Well, the operating system–regardless of who it’s designed by–is designed to run optimally on the systems and conditions present at its launch. As no one can predict the future, no one can really do anything better. However, computers, expectations, capabilities and operating environments change after the OSs release. In order to maintain their performance, updates are released that allow the OS to adapt.

Sounds fine. However, the system the update is designed to run on is not the system running on your computer. You’ve installed programs, uninstalled them, saved files, changed drivers, imported files, deleted them… Every change bringing you another small step away from the system the updates are designed for. As the updates are being forced on an ill-fitting system, the differences yours and the factory-perfect system are compounded. You install, uninstall, delete, save again and again, install updates that are an increasingly bad fit… Until the system you’re running is only fifty or sixty percent of the system it should be. It’s slow, errors are increasingly frequent, crashes start to happen. The continual updates by both you and the OSs erode efficiency and effectiveness as processes get lost in increasingly piecemeal code. So, you wipe it all, install the factory-fresh OS, install the updates designed for the factory-fresh OS, and it’s all good.

To use an analogy, you burn away all the tangled, uncontrolled growth that’s strangling the forest and the forest can breathe and thrive again.

So what’s this got do to with the Board of Directors?

Well, systems of corporate governance were established in the seventeen century (when the first chartered companies emerged). Since then, society, expectations and demands have continually changed and governance structures have changed with them. Each change incremental, designed to accommodate a specific set of circumstances. Change has been built on change which has turned into tradition and accepted practice which is then adapted to a new circumstance… Until we get to me, staring at my screen, unable to work out exactly what these people do other than wear suits and play golf. Partly because I’m a bit dumb, partly due to a lack of concrete information, but partly because the whole system is so self-referential and incestuous that there’s no easy way in, no way without understanding one term or role without understanding another equally opaque jumble of words.

It’s time for a wipe-and-reinstall. Boards of Directors, Executives, stock options, Hedge Funds, asset management companies, securities, portfolios, futures, the lot. Everyone and everything from the CEO to the investment broker to the minimum wage front-line employee. Wipe it all. Then, we sit down and ask, ‘what is it that we want companies to do? What is their primary function? What is the best way to achieve that?’ And then we make it happen.

Every long-standing system needs to be wiped and reinstalled periodically, from those that run our computers to those that run our society. Every incremental change makes it a little less fit for purpose.

Oh, politicians? Don’t get me started. I talked about companies in this post because I could fit it into one post without too much vitriol. The only OS worse than politics is law. Man. Burn the lot–lawyers, judges, books of law, court records, precedent–and start again, please!

(Of course, a note of caution needs to be added: wiping-and-reinstalling too frequently means your system is never going to get the momentum needed to achieve efficiency. Just look at the NHS–it’s redesigned every ten years and more money is spent on explaining what everyone’s new job title means and changing the stationary than is every spent on patient care. In computer OS terms, the NHS never gets out past the Alpha release.)

,
Read More

The Future is in the Past

June 25th, 2011 Posted in Writing
No Comments

I’m putting together a new setting and new characters. For those of you who know Duke (about a dozen slush readers who weren’t fond enough of her first outing, at least), she’s back! Hell, I like her.

Anyway, I’m going for a kind of noir feel. I’ve failed enough times to try and write like Chandler, but I’m going to try anyway (while being rather more culturally, racially, and sexually aware, of course).

It’s not going to be set in 1940′s America, though. It’s going to be set in Britain, an unspecified number of hundred years in the future. The city is going to be an aging metropolis, huge sky-scrapers linked by tunnels and sky trains and all that good stuff. Vegetation and rust have a firm grip on the buildings and streets.

So, if I have a crumbling future dystopia, shouldn’t people be driving flying cars and meeting on the ‘net? I mean, that’s how the future is going to be, right?

Of course it’s not. Any fiction, any fiction, is set in the present. It doesn’t matter where the scenery of the story comes from, the story is about present-day ideas, beliefs, worries, hopes, fears. The characters come from our time, are shaped by it as much as we are. No matter what fantastical society we might build, it’s inescapably rooted in our society. It’s a reflection of what we see, what we want to see, what fear we’ll see when we walk out the door in the morning.

In fifty years time, people are going to be regarding our best projections of the future the same way we regard those of fifty years ago. Talking robots doing our washing up? Personal airplanes for everyone? Asimov’s Foundation is set hundreds of thousands of years in the future, and the ultimate pinnacle of human science is nuclear power. Aw, bless you, nineteen-fifties people. You so cute.

By the middle of this century, our kids are going to be looking back at the achingly constructed future worlds we’re building and say, “Aw… you thought the future would be ruled by microchips? You so cute!”

So, when you look at that, it doesn’t really matter where you get your scenery decoration from. So long as you’re borrowing and not appropriating, go for it. You want to mix forties America with eighties Britain, add in a touch of Judge Dredd and tell us it’s set in the future? Why the hell not?

And now, the cars I’ve found so far for my new people:

Duke’s car:

A 1949 Jaguar XK120 Roadster, in white and without the roof. It's sleek, with a small front windscreen, the real wheel arches covering the wheels.

1949 Jaguar XK120 Roadster

 

Unnamed male protagonist’s car:

A 1947 Lincoln Continental in blood red with black soft top. If you've ever seen a noir movie, if the idea of a noir movie puts into your head a car, it's this one.

1947 Lincoln Continental

 

Man, they knew how to make a car look good back then, eh?

,
Read More

Apply to Attend the 2011 Launch Pad Lectures

March 2nd, 2011 Posted in Links, Writing
3 Comments »

For the month of March, you can apply to attend this year’s Launch Pad lectures.

Last year, Rachel Swirsky was good enough to blog each of the lectures, and I got a bit excited by the whole thing.  For those who don’t know,

Launch Pad is a free, NASA-funded workshop for established writers held in beautiful high-altitude Laramie, Wyoming. Launch Pad aims to provide a “crash course” for the attendees in modern astronomy science through guest lectures, and observation through the University of Wyoming’s professional telescopes.

…

Our primary goal is to teach writers of all types about modern science, specifically astronomy, and in turn reach their audiences.

There’s twelve spots open for attendees, which are going to be handed out to those who can reach the largest audience with their writing.  As it’s being held in Laramie, Wyoming, there’s no chance that I can attend even if I had enough of an audience for them to consider me.  So, I’m going to need go there and relay it all to me via the medium of Internet.

Go forth and apply!

, ,
Read More

HiStory, TheirStory, MyStory and OurStory

January 25th, 2011 Posted in Writing
8 Comments »

I’m currently writing a story sent in 1828, in which a well-bred lady discovers a way to isolate the particle responsible for life.  The particle is also responsible for divine inspiration, visions of God and the universe, divination, prognostication… all that good stuff.

Astute readers will have noticed by now that I’m taking a few liberties with history.  Although the search for the secret of life–Vitalism–was a hotbed of chemical, physiological and anatomical research in 1828, no vital element was found.

I’ve also written stories in which the French Empire of the 1860s extends into Bavaria, is ruled by the daughter of Louis XVIIIth and is in the process of constructing their first orbital space colony, and another in which a small flotilla of British ships makes their way through the East China Sea in 1847 with the intent of making China a colony of the British Empire, carrying with them a weapon of awesome destructive powers.

Taking liberties with history, it seems, is increasingly becoming a ‘thing’ of mine.

None of these changes is ill-considered.  I went to a lot trouble to re-write the social and political history of nineteenth century Europe to put Charlotte de Bourbon in her father’s throne.  Every thread was carefully measured, teased out and followed.  Of course, the vast majority of my work didn’t make its way into the story.  I mean, people want to read a story, not an infodump.

Allegra’s opinion is that I’m already screwing with history, so am I still giving all the parts to white Europeans?  And why are my nineteenth century women still second-class?

It’s a fair point, on the surface.  But my initial reaction was to growl, tail fully-fluffed and hackles raised, recoiling slowly in horror.  ‘You can’t just mess around with history like that!’ I cried.

The difference, I think, is that to change social history like that would require huge social and political changes which would have vast and unseeable consequences on my world-building.  I mean, an English Lord in 1828 who was black and treated like an equal?  That would be a significant divergence from our own timeline.

(Not to say, of course, that the history and population of Europe was entirely composed of white people until a few years ago.  Unfortunately, their contribution has been largely ignored by mainstream history and cultural narratives.  Maybe there were black Lords in England in 1828… all I know is I’ve never seen one in a Jane Austin adaption and history books and literature from the time I studied in school was conspicuously silent on the subject of non-white protagonists.)

But does that mean I shouldn’t do it?  If all my precious threads stay in my notebook and never see the light of day, does it matter if I simply wave my hand over those historical changes and make the effort to be less privileged in my writing?  Or should I cling to my ‘artistic integrity’ like a stranded sailor to a piece of driftwood?

‘Artistic integrity’ is often a mask used to hide some very ugly things.  My well-bred Regency lady has a supporting cast of divergent skin tones and sees nothing remarkable or odd about it.  The world still works the way I planned it.  And I’m sleeping at night just fine.

And, of course, I don’t want to be guilty of reinforcing those same, skewed cultural narratives which conviently forget about whole populations of people.

But still… the pedant in me doesn’t sleep easily and I know him well-enough not to turn my back on him.  I think perhaps we’ll have to reach a compromise and, rather than just waving my hand, I’ll have to put some actual thought and effort into it.  And that seems only fair:  Why should my own history be the only one to get special treatment?  The idea that history can be put into boxes is an illusion anyway–it’s all Our Story, connected like the threads of a jumper.  And you can’t go picking and pulling at one without pulling on the others and changing the shape of the whole.

, , , , , ,
Read More

4 Cracked.com Lists that Will Make You a Better Writer

January 6th, 2011 Posted in Links, Writing
1 Comment »

I’m not going to pretend that Cracked.com is anything that it isn’t. By which I mean that their idea of sophisticated humour is ‘your mum’ jokes and their idea of intellectual debate is also ‘your mum’ jokes.

However, like all great humorists there’s some smart minds working away behind the scenes, and occasionally something will slip through that, washed of it’s inevitable trappings, will make you sit up, think and rewrite some of your favourite scenes. Hell, they may even make you rewrite the whole damned story.

Things like…

5 Reasons the Future Will Be Ruled by B.S, by David Wong

People like to talk about post-scarcity futures. You know, like Star Trek: We’ll have everything we need, no one will need to go without and our only problem is becoming addicted to holosuite porn programs.

But the truth is, we are already in a post-scarcity future for many of the things we consume. Didn’t realise? Well, that’s because companies are working very hard to make us keep paying for things anyway…


6 Deadly Injuries You Think You’d Survive (Thanks to Movies), by Dennis Hong

We all know how it is: You need your character to have a bit of a dramatic moment and right there, in front of your eyes, are a dozen stock scenes from your favourite films that you can whip out, put your protagonist in and revel in the moment of badassery.

The problem is that most of those scenes will end up killing your character. Or turning them into a vegetable. Or at the very least putting them in hospital for an extended period of time, thus ruining their chances of rescuing the love interest and delivering the philosophical message of the piece.


7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly), by David Dietle

You hang around spec-fic long enough, you’re going to hear about zombies. Hell, if you hang around the Internet you’re probably lucky if you can go more than three webpages without the shambling dead making an appearance. And, with all that exposure there’s a part of your mind that starts to think, ‘hey, I should do something with zombies… that could be cool’.

But before you break out the chainsaw, there are a couple of small gaps you’ll need to bridge. By which I mean you’re going to need throw out, stamp on, bury and burn an awful lot of physical laws which tend to make life as we know it possible.


6 Insane Laws We’ll Need in the Future, by Mark M.

The future’s going to be a great place, isn’t it?  Post-singularity machines, genetic engineering, designer babies for fashion or war… The sandbox is such fun to play in.

But it’s worth remembering that people have a habit of taking brilliant spec-fic ideas and dragging them, kicking and screaming, into unforeseen territory.  I mean, you remember the world of Tron?  That was the dream.  What did we end up with?  Facebook, emails from Nigerian royalty and Goatse.  So it’s pretty safe to assume that people are going to screw up all our other beautiful plans, and the law’s going to need to find ways of making them pay.


All images shamelessly leached off Cracked.

,
Read More

Space: Where the Sun Doesn’t Shine

December 16th, 2010 Posted in Links, news
4 Comments »

A recent post by Calvin Johnson on the Science in My Fiction blog about quantum and sub-quantum mechanics has got my head back in the stars again (galaxies and quanta are pretty much the same thing in my head, which is probably why I wouldn’t make an adequate physicist, let alone a good one).

So, it was with due glee I read the news about Voyager 1 reaching a new milestone in its quest to leave the solar system. The solar particles it’s been watching has started to move sideways, instead of outwards.

Bare with me while I bunch my bacon-like fingers over my gammon-like palm*1 and try and explain why I think this is so amazing.

A NASA graphic showing Voyager 1 leaving the termination shock and entering the heliopause

NASA gets all the best graphics

Okay, so first off you need to stop imagining space as being empty. Instead, imagine it being full. Full of hydrogen particles, magnetic fields, that kind of stuff. But full. Imagine the space between star systems is, in fact, full of liquid.

Now, in our liquid space we have stars. Stars are throwing out a vast amount of stuff, with an even vaster amount of energy. They’re doing this so effectively that they push out all the interstellar liquid and create their own ‘bubble’. Inside the bubble, there is no interstellar liquid, just material from the star.

So, everything in our star system comes from our sun. Every photon, every hydrogen atom, every magnetic field. Sol has created an impenetrable bubble for us to exist in. Every thought, every feeling, every action, every hope, every dream of humanity and every observation and deduction about the universe we’ve made has existed in this bubble. Think of it as a womb, if you like. Nurturing and protecting us for the last five million years. Assembling the atoms and ions which lead to life as we know it being formed.

For the first time, the first time ever, humanity is reaching outside of it’s bubble to the greater universe. We’re kicking at the edges of our Solar womb and letting the universe know that we’re alive and frisky in here.

I love the idea that, in a few hundred years time, little single-person crafts will be racing over Voyager 1’s flight path in a race to be the first to cross the heliosphere in honour of its achievement, the same way people run marathons today.

That lovely little bit of 70’s tech is around sixteen light-hours away from Earth. Pretty awesome, eh?

(If you want something a bit more technical and informative than artsy rhetoric, Wikipedia’s article on the heliosphere is a very good place to start.)

And speaking of pretty awesome, Star Trek Online is giving you the chance to design the next starship Enterprise. Hang on, that didn’t come out quite right. You can design the Enterprise-F. That sentence is so awesome that any swear words would only take away from its impact.

Draw your design, and upload it.

My skill at drawing spaceships runs to Biro sketches on Post-It notes at work. But I’m going to enter. You know why? Because if I don’t, every single version of me from the past twenty years*2 will channel their rage and rip holes in the space-time continuum, converge on me and literally tear the flesh from my bones with nothing more than their bare fingers, and maybe their teeth.

I’m not going to win, but you know what’s worse than losing? Going around for the next thirty years telling people that you probably would have won, but didn’t bother entering because you were, ‘too busy’, and then shrugging it off like it’s not important. I won’t be that guy. Not this time.


*1 Y’know, bacon, gammon, fist… Ham-fisted…

*2 If we assume a new ‘version’ of me is created every second, which doesn’t seem unreasonable, then that’s 630,720,000 versions of me. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to deal with one angry version of me, let alone over 630 million of the buggers.

, , , , , , ,
Read More
Older Entries