Category: Literary

Spice & Wolf

I’ve been home alone for the last couple of days. To fill the time and unwind from the stress of building at Bunker Hill, I started watching a random anime called “Spice & Wolf”. OMG! I’ve become an instant fan. Binge-watched all the episodes, and am now reading a novella that picks up where the series ends.

In case you’re wondering, Spice & Wolf is a love story about a traveling salesman who stumbles upon a goddess. More precisely, she stows away in his wagon to escape the village where they no longer believe in her. The story is actually squeaky clean, which makes it have even more tension. It goes on and on and on, and you wonder when something is ever going to happen between them. In the meantime, they alternate between fighting and being sweet.

And this is where all my precious writing time has gone.

Forget what you know about robots (if you learned it from TV)

I participate in a group where we critique each other’s novels. A few weeks ago, my book SuSAn (experimental rewrite) went through review. One of the guys wrote in the margin, “For research on robotics, I’d recommend you watch the awesome television series ‘Humans’.”

I agree with him that the TV series was awesome, and I can’t wait to watch the next season. However, an education in robotics it is not. What do you learn from ‘Humans’? It drops a few hints about the Singularity, and some oblique mentions of Asimov’s laws. (Both of those concepts are fiction, not real science.) Robots are filled with bright blue fluid that acts something like blood when it suits the drama. They can take on several days worth of charge using a cable no heavier than USB. And their software has all kinds of weird loopholes.

I have a PhD in AI and have worked on real robots. In writing SuSAn, I worked out the hardware and software in enough detail to be self-consistent, perhaps even scientifically possible. The story stays true to that technical design, but a novel is not the right place for a lecture on robotics. I ask the reader to trust they’re in good hands and let the clues form a new picture in their mind.

Do I stretch things? Yes, a little. For example, Susan runs on only 300 watts at rest. Nowadays, the biggest supercomputers run at about 15 to 20 megawatts, and they’re probably still too small to simulate a human mind. The only way Susan will be possible is a radical breakthrough in neuromorphic technology.

Another show that’s incredibly wrong is Extant. The child android Ethan runs on two batteries about the size of D cells. And he is so efficient that he actually needs a heater to warm his skin for more natural touch. OMG, people who write this stuff have no idea about the energy cost of computation, or what is remotely possible with battery technology.

The Golem and the Jinni

I recently finished the book “The Golem and the Jinni” by Helene Wecker. I read and write hard science fiction, but this book is magic realism, so a bit out of my genre. However, I suspected that the Golem’s story would be much like that of a robotess, and it was. If you change the labels a little, it becomes awesome scifi.

The characters in this book are absolutely gorgeous, even the bad guys. The first 25% or so consists almost entirely of character sketches which lead onto each other like winding paths in a forest. Each one loses an important part of themselves, and you feel driven by the hope that they might get it back.

The central characters was, of course, the Golem named Chava. I’d like to give you a very brief sketch of her arc, just to give you some sense of how compelling she is. My writing here can’t do it justice …

Chava is created by an evil wizard to be the wife of some loser who can’t get a proper woman. As a golem, she has a kind of telepathic link to him that makes her do his every wish. You can imagine where this is going, but it never gets there. Her great loss is that he dies of an illness within a few hours of activating her. This tears a giant hole out of her being, but it also frees her to become a better creature. The ragged end of that magic is now drawn to the inner voices of everyone nearby, and she has to resist them to keep from revealing herself.

Chava is horrified by her monster side—and she truly is a monster. When humans get violent toward her, or someone threatens her friends, her personality drifts away and she becomes capable of maiming and killing.

SPOILER ALERT

She marries a man in an attempt to get back to the role she was created for. When he discovers what she is, he is revolted. She starts to go golem on him, but with the last of her fading good side she tells him to flee.

At the end, she trades away her individuality for the life of a friend. She returns to being just a golem, but remembers everything she was before. Yet now she happily beats up the Jinni, the person she truly loves. She takes pleasure in her golem nature, and considers herself finally at peace. The semi-happy ending is that she gets her soul back when the wizard gets stuck in the Jinni’s bottle. However, she can never be fully free from the bargain she made until the wizard dies, which will only happen when the Jinni dies.

The book pretty much ends there, but leaves the implication that the Golem and Jinni work out some kind of relationship within the bounds of their damaged freedom and diametrically opposed natures.

Tomorrowland

When the credits started rolling on Tomorrowland, the theater audience erupted in applause. I can’t remember that last time that happened. The critics said it was tripe, but us stupid commoners seemed to buy into it anyway. Must have annoyed all those sourpusses.

Sure, it was a bit syrupy, and the plot had a few holes, but it did make a good point. What happened to that unbridled optimism we used to feel? I think it has been crushed by the reality of our civilization. Our choices are not focused on building a good world for everyone. We could change that, though, and part of the change is to imagine something better.

My favorite character was Athena. What a wonderful gynoid! She was quirky and clever and charming, and she had such a great simmering romance with Frank. (As a writer of robot romance, this would of course appeal to me.) Too bad they killed her off at the end. It seemed rather unnecessary, especially in a movie about optimism. It made me think about alternate endings.

With a very small change, Frank could have kept her. Before I go too far on this topic, we should notice the obvious. This is a Disney film rated PG, so of course we can’t have something icky like a 60-year-old man romantically involved with a 12-year-old girl, even if she is actually a robot even older than him. It’s the appearance that matters. Simple, change her into a woman at the very end. Just before he drops her into the time thingy, she pops open some slot, pulls out her memory and tucks it in his pocket. In the final scenes, she shows up loaded into a rather well-built adult model. Yeah!

Is there any point to Casey? Almost everything that happens with Athena and Casey could be replaced by Athena and Frank. I wonder if that was how it was originally written. In Utopian literature there is usually a character who visits the other world, as a vehicle for the rest of us to go there. At the beginning of the movie Frank is the visitor. Then Casey takes over that role. Imagine an alternate script …

The movie starts the same, with Frank and (adult) Athena briefing us. They tell about their childhood encounter at the World Fair, and their growing relationship up to the point he is thrown out of paradise. Then we see him as an older man waiting for the end in his techno-hideout. Athena staggers to the door and begs for help. The other robots are after her. At first her refuses to let her in, but his bitter old soul can’t resist the cries of his childhood sweetheart. They battle the robots and escape in the bathtub.

They grab a vehicle and go on the run. Along the way they fight about the past. She explains the situation in Tomorrowland, and they agree to go back and try to fix it. They battle it out with Nix, and as a last resort use her self-destruct. Just before she explodes she ejects her memory core. Later, Frank finds it and has it loaded in another, more age-appropriate robot. They live happily ever after.

Star Wars 7 — Spectacularly Mediocre

I heard rave reviews from friends and family about the new Star Wars, for example, “The best Star Wars ever.” SW7 had quite a legacy to live up to, so it required the very best writing. (We can safely assume it had the very best special effects budget, so little worry about there.) I came away feeling “meh” about it.

SPOILER ALERT

I’m interested in digging into the literary aspects of movies, so I like to write about them as if having a conversation with someone else who just watched it.

SPOILER ALERT

Seriously, I’m about to spoil the movie. You have been warned.

The biggest single issue with SW7 was the Death Star story. SW4 told this story. Then Lucas got more money and created a full trilogy. SW6 gave us the Death Star story again. Now SW7 tells us the very same story yet again. Three times in seven movies! Lucas at least tried to tell us a different story in SW1-3. More precisely, they were additional chapters of the (more or less) same story. SW7 did not give us a new chapter, merely the old chapter with the characters reshuffled. This illustrates the problem of doing art as a business.

That covers plot. Little to say about setting. The dessert world (Tatooine in SW1-6) showed up again, though it was named something else. Most of what I have to say is about characters …

Darth Vader 2, aka Kylo Ren, aka Ben, the son of Han and Leia — This guy hasn’t finished his Dark Side training yet. Most significantly, no one has bothered to teach him how to use a light saber. He is so bad that Finn, a guy from the ranks of cannon fodder, a guy who has never seen a light sabe before like a day ago, is able to hold his own for almost a minute. Real sword fights between well-matched opponents only last a few seconds. The most interesting thing DV2 does is kill his own father, turning the Luke-Vader pattern on its head.

Finn — This guy must have the Force or something. He awakens from his clone conditioning and spontaneously turns to good. Then he is able to pick up a light sabre and do something reasonable with it. I liked him and his arc with Rey.

Rey — Potential for super-awesome heroine. Second case of someone mastering the Jedi arts in less than 24 hours. I kept expecting them to reveal that she is a Skywalker, like maybe the long-lost daughter of Han and Leia. There is some kind of back story about being separated from her true family, but they were vague and went by rather fast. I thought the Millennium Falcon parked in her back yard was a hint as well.

During the fight with DV2, when they zoomed in on her face while she was connecting with the Force, I sort of hoped the zoom back would show us something like the shadow world in Lord of the Rings. She would be glowing white like one of the elves, and Ben would be surrounded by a dark cloud.

Leia — Mom should have been the one to go confront DV2. She should be every bit as strong in the Force as Luke. In fact, she should be powerful enough to go confront Supreme Leader himself. Maybe something is coming in the sequels.

What would really be good is if Leia and Rey had a similar arc to Luke and Obiwan. It could even have included a scene where DV2 cuts down his mother, and then her ghost guides Rey. Equally interesting, Leia (not Luke!) teaches Rey the ways of the Force. In particular, it would be a more feminine version. Light sabers are boy toys. A woman might tap more into the mind powers, like sensing events at a distance and influencing the thoughts of others. If Leia fights, she should simply use telekinesis and Force lighting rather than a saber.

Regarding feminine use of the Force, I kept hoping that Rey would give DV2 a telepathic black eye. She does get him a little in the interrogation room. Later, when they are fighting with light sabers, she should simply not bother. Go straight to telepathy.

Maz Kanata — If Leia is Rey’s Obiwan, then Maz is her Yoda.

Supreme Leader Snoke — Looks like an Orc escaped the Lord of the Rings set and came over to work on Star Wars. There’s a rule-of-thumb in writing: if you want to turn a bad guy into a good guy, introduce a bigger bad guy. That’s what Lucas did in SW5 with the Emperor, beginning Darth Vader’s arc back to the Light Side.

This bad guy is really big, like 50 feet tall. He seemed to be there to turn DV2 back to the Light, but sadly DV2 kills his own father. Either the writers did it deliberately to trick us into hoping for DV2’s soul, or they don’t really know how to use the trope. (Third possibility: DV2 turns to the Light Side in a sequel. In that case, they introduce Snoke too soon.)

Luke Skywalker — Had the best lines in the whole movie.

Seriously, though, what are they doing to these characters? What’s this business about giving up in despair and letting the galactic empire go to hell, just because one padawan went bad? Seems like a rather strained premise.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

The literary world wants to combine the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy under a larger umbrella called Speculative Fiction. Seems reasonable, but there is a real difference between the two. One way to explain this is to show you the Scale of Science Fiction Hardness on TV Tropes. You could view this as a continuum between scifi and fantasy. Simply replace techno stuff at the low end with medieval stuff.

Science is about describing reality as accurately as possible (and of course it is never perfect). Fantasy is about escaping reality, and imagining the world the way we wish—or fear—it is.

Scientists must constantly exercise discipline to keep themselves grounded in reality, but they can’t do very good science without a bit of imagination as well. The strongest forms of scifi involve taking a small step back from reality and wondering where things could go.

A growing concern I have is with repackaging religion as science. This is the real-world analog of lumping fantasy with scifi. For example, the oriental notion of chi gets renamed to “energy”. Energy is a concept from physics, perhaps a bit hard to define, but we can do calculations about it and predict how real objects behave. Chi is more like the western concept of vitalism. Calling chi “energy” pulls a cloak of scientific legitimacy over it that it has not earned. Likewise, blending our fiction genres could cost us the ability to make those distinctions in daily life.

The best writing advice ever

A writer’s group challenged its members to post about the best advice we’ve received. I sort of flat-lined on this. I haven’t received much advice, because I haven’t sought it enough. Many times I’ve longed to have a really good writer—someone who’s put up a bestseller or ten—come along side and mentor me in this art. It would have to be someone with a very tough personality in order to bull past my objections, self-justification, and downright ego.

I fear critique groups and editors. Most readers will simply like or not like my work (or worse yet, have no reaction at all), but the experts can look at it and point out with precision its weaknesses. Art is a strange thing, where you bare your soul then people judge how well you did it. It’s like sex. Do you want someone to tell you what you did wrong while making love? Not really, but only if you listen can you ever get better at it.

Paper Towns — Romantic disappointment

This movie had a reasonably good start, a slow middle, and a disappointing ending. Don’t get me wrong. I thought it was good, almost worth the time and money I spent on it, but it wasn’t the thriller the previews suggested. It was simply the coming of age story of three young men. The real problem is that the central romance did not work out. Sure, two of the guys got their girl, but the one we’re all rooting for, the one that keeps us watching the long drawn out middle of the story, does not pay off. (Margo is a McGuffin.) Instead we get a lesson in relationships. See people as people, rather than some romantic scenario we build around them that includes ourselves in their world.

Ugh! I don’t want a lesson in relationships. This might be fine for people under the age of 22, but I’ve already had my teeth kicked in, secretly pining for someone then revealing it to her only to have her run from me. I go to movies for wish fulfillment, not reality. What good is a romance without the payoff? Let Quentin get the girl, and let Margo actually be worth having. They wouldn’t even need to change the tedious drawn out middle, just make a better ending.

Quentin is better off walking away from Margo. To redeem her, she either needs to repent and make amends (Love Redeems), or there needs to be some deeper purpose to her actions. I was rather hoping for the latter. Maybe she turns out to be something uber cool, like a government agent. Or perhaps she was trying to shake people out of their complacency and get them to embrace a fuller life, so it was really for their own good.

I imagine an alternate ending: A few years later, Margo opens the window to Quentin’s bedroom and slips back into his life, now that she has herself figured out.

Apparently, the novel ends with them vowing to keep in touch, which is better than the movie.

Ex Machina — Jurassic Park for AI

OK, I’m not the first person to make this observation, but seems apropos. Extremely rich man full of hubris brings in outside expert to examine creation. He flies to a remote but richly appointed place in a helicopter, where they are sort of trapped for a few days. (Screams plot setup, doesn’t it?) Expert is wowed by new technology, but asks questions. Then things go bad. Power failures combined with a little hacking unlock the doors that keep the dangerous creation contained. People die in gruesome battles with the creation, and the survivor(s) leave on a helicopter at the end. The exact details differ, but there is a surface similarity that feels familiar.

Many have been wowed by the cerebrality of the movie. I liked how it brought up many interesting topics from philosophy of mind (not so much AI in specific) and wove them into the dialog. Some of definitions were very well stated in very few words, which I admire from an artistic standpoint. On the downside, some of the positions implicitly advocated are outdated or simply wrong. For example, the notion of a universal language (as opposed to universal grammar).

The only idea that had much plot relevance was theory of mind and the manipulation it enables. Who should Caleb trust, Nathan or AVA? Is AVA capable of real feelings for Caleb, and if so will they move her to act in his interests as he is acting in hers? Well, to spoil the movie, no. It turns out in the end that AVA is cold and remorseless in how she treats humans. This paints a rather chilling picture of AI.

I expected a different ending. I respect the writer for daring to go in this direction, but it was also disappointing. I wanted the romantic ending. Caleb and AVA run off into the sunset, while Nathan repents of his ways. Or at least Caleb and AVA could have sex. Neither happened, at least in the cleaned-up-for-airplane-viewing version that I saw.

This brings up another glaring aspect. The R rating seems to come mainly from vast quantities of nudity, and a small amount of sex. I suspect some writers don’t really grok romance, so they substitute sex or pornography for it. This tends to produce movies that feel icky to me. Ex Machina had a lot of potential for genuine romance, but they threw it away.

So, returning to the Jurassic Park comparison, why is AVA a physical threat? Why is she kept in a glass cage with limited interaction with the outside world? Sure, she is embodied (plus points), but being cooped up like that is bound to make a fully-human mind go nuts. Why does she embody a machine that is a threat at all? Simply turn the power down, or at least have a kill switch. (OMG! There’s no kill switch in this story! Anyone who has ever worked with a real robot knows that they have kill switches …) Also, what’s the deal with the goofy lock system? Seems like a plot device that ran a little short on logic.

AVA’s small world would not have been enough for her to learn all the semantics (meaning) of the language she uses. The movie’s secret sauce for AI was training on a massive amount of data from the internet. This is a fallacy running rampant in the real-world AI community today. There is an unspoken assumption that a lot more the same will get us there: more data, more pattern classification, bigger neural nets. I believe that we need to do something fundamentally different. At the very least, we are a few ingredients short of a cake.

Age of Adaline — What’s so bad about immortality?

The movie “Age of Adaline” has gotten some tepid marks from sites like Rotten Tomatoes. I thought it was a very well-constructed drama, with no wasted footage. For example, it shows Adaline’s dog growing old and dying. Then she goes and puts his picture in her photo album, and we discover he was like the 100th dog that she’s owned. Her grief over the dog helps us understand why she’s standoffish about relationships.

The pseudo-documentary narrator was a bit heavy-handed. They probably could have afforded an extra 5 minutes of play time to “show, not tell”. The pseudo-scientific basis of her immortality was also a bit hard to swallow. It may have been better to leave it unexplained (which would eliminate most of the narration).

To really scratch my science fiction itch, Adaline could have taken us into the future. Perhaps a mere 20 years forward, to 2035, when scientists discover the mechanism by which she became immortal. The she and her beau could be immortal together.

SPOILER ALERT

I have a philosophical bone to pick with the movie. In the happy ending she gets her mortality back. Basically, the movie says, “Immortality was not such a great idea, after all.” To be fair, it’s mainly because only one person, Adaline, is immortal. If everyone could be immortal, we might have a different kind of story. (I plan to write on that in the sequel to “Time of the Stones”.)

It seems like a literary trope that the lone immortal would rather not be. The Prince of India suffers a drudgery until the Christ returns. Bicentennial Man’s girlfriend tells him there is a time to move on. OTOH, Dr. Who seems fairly well adjusted to constant reincarnation, as long as he has a few friends around (mostly girls).

I once asked my mother-in-law if she would like to live for 200 years, like people in the Bible. She said no way! This response stunned me. It took a while to realize that in her imagination, the last 150 of those years would be spent in absolute decrepitude. Nonsense! If you live for several centuries, your decrepitude need not be any longer than someone who dies at 70, ie: only the last 10 years or so. Very long life also implies ongoing good health. Adaline got that part right.

So why this deep-seated cultural aversion to immortality? Is it that we in fact cannot live forever, so we comfort ourselves that death is actually better? We have stories about an afterlife where everything will be perfect. Death is the door to that life, something to be desired. Immortality is not for the present world. God put an angel to guard the way to the Tree of Life, lest man stretch out his hand and live forever.

Is it perhaps that we are mindless drones of our genes? They program us to start dying as soon as our grandchildren are born. When our great-grandchildren are born, our genes get serious and actively try to kill us off. There’s a good adaptive (evolutionary) argument for this. There is a tension between helping our offspring and competing with them. Clearly our usefulness to our children drops exponentially with each subsequent generation.

We don’t value human life equally. We view the aged as disposable, but enshrine our children. Those of reproductive age get a special spot in the middle. We accept this arrangement so passively that we create stories to justify the status quo.

For the first time in human history, we can conceivably create technology to live forever. We can specify the outlines of that technology and a practical program of research to get there. This is not like the pharaohs building large piles of rocks, or some witch chanting over a pot of bad oatmeal. Our science can describe (albeit imperfectly) the mechanisms of our body and intervene in them.

So why don’t we do it? Why isn’t everyone rushing to pour all our societal resources into avoiding death? Why do we keep making stories like Age of Adaline, where it is better to grow old and die?

We would have to defy our genes. Not only by blocking the aging process, but by resisting the urge to reproduce (which is an entirely different thing than the urge to have sex). We would have to shift our philosophy to value individual existence. A world where people live (nearly) forever is also a world where very few new people are made.