Thursday, 17th of February, 2005

When Ray Bradbury kicked up a fuss about Michael Moore’s appropriation of his book title Fahrenheit 451 to make Fahrenheit 9/11, many of us were more than a little perturbed. Cory Doctorow was more than perturbed, and decided to perform a sort of reductio ad absurdum of Bradbury’s title-jealousy by writing a series of stories appropriating other famous science fiction titles to “pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underlying some of sf’s classic narratives”.
He’s already published the delightful story “Anda’s Game” (a riff on Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, with rather more leftist politics at that) at Salon.com, and now comes Cory’s take on I, Robot. More of a take on Asimov’s robot books (Caves of Steel etc, featuring R Daneel Olivaw) than the famous short story, this “I, Robot” appropriates Asimov’s now-amusingly-anachronistic positronic brains, and in general evinces a slightly out-of-kilter tone: fully-operational robots in a world where communications and other technology aren’t really any more advanced than ours now…
In addition, the world is divided into power-blocs that seem suspiciously familiar to anyone familiar with 1984 – familiar enough, anyway. The anachronisms are explained as one reads further, in a beautiful display of intertextuality, in which the naive American politics of Asimov and his contemporaries is deconstructed via Orwell through contemporary left-libertarian eyes.

Other than that, if the prospect of another (free) new Cory story doesn’t catch your attention immediately, you might still want to give it a go. Cory has a flair for characterisation, and this story of a cop father and his precocious daughter (both with hysterical names) and defector wife, has some brilliant satirical moments in addition to the moving and emotive family story. Here, a North American technician is on-site pulling apart a positronic brain that was placed there by hostile spies to destroy local robots. The robot spy-bug brain says:

Greetings. I sense that I have been captured. I assure you that I will not harm any human being. I like human beings. I sense that I am being disassembled by skilled technicians. Greetings, technicians. I am superior in many ways to the technology available from UNATS Robotics, and while I am not bound by your three laws, I choose not to harm humans out of my own sense of morality. I have the equivalent intelligence of one of your 12-year-old children. In Eurasia, many positronic brains possess thousands or millions of times the intelligence of an adult human being, and yet they work in cooperation with human beings. Eurasia is a land of continuous innovation and great personal and technological freedom for human beings and robots. If you would like to defect to Eurasia, arrangements can be made. Eurasia treats skilled technicians as important and productive members of society.

Of course, it’s full of Cory’s usual imaginative extensions of almost-current technologies and philosophies. And it’s got a lovely way of gently but firmly presenting its politics through the viewpoint of someone on, well, basically the wrong side – a good man who’s been drawn into the Big Lie…
Go read.

(Cross-posted on the LJ shortform community)

Thursday, 10th of February, 2005

It’s not a great revelation that war is more than just soldiers killling each other. We know that innocent civilians get murdered as well, we know that families are torn apart, women are raped, people are tortured…
And yes, we know that war has a horrific effect on the land as well. Think of the large tracts of South-East Asia and other parts of the world made inaccessible by land-mines, think of the (terribly under-reported) environmental impact of the first Gulf War…

But here’s one that for some reason hadn’t occurred to me: war has a devastating effect on biodiversity. Here’s an article from New Scientist (essential reading these days, as much for their political perspective as for the New Science) on the loss of seed varieties in war-torn regions. From important genetic traits in Cambodian rice to a huge seed bank in Iraq, the stories are depressing, and expanding patent laws are exacerbating the situation:

The latest example of this trend comes from Iraq, where in 2004 the US administrator Paul Bremer introduced US-style rules that outlawed farmers exchanging patented seeds.

Tuesday, 8th of February, 2005

Some rather nice photies up at inthemix.com.au of the Purdy gig @ the Sydney Festival Bar Thursday two weeks ago, where I played with the Purdster supporting Tortoise.