Nightlife Going Green

Nighttown -- a concert venue in Rotterdam that is now bankrupt -- will reopen as a high environmental-friendly club renamed Watt.

They're expanding the capacity to 1400 people, but more interesting are the sustainable aspects of the makeover:

• Solar panels;


• Windmills;
• Rainwater used as flushing water for toilets;


• A 'greenwall': a wall from which plants literally grow;


• Energy-efficient LED lights;


• An energy-generating dance floor;

I especially like the last one: it's a product developed by Sustainable Dance Club, a Rotterdam company. Here's an impression, and here's how it's supposed to work.

I have been to Nighttown quite a few times, and I do hope that when it reopens as 'Watt', that they will program a couple of bands I'd like to see, so I can check out the venue, as well. Planned reopening date is September 4 (typically, guitarist Mike Watt played in Nighttown back in April 3, 2005: almost exactly two years ago).

Anyway, this is one of those things that make me optimistic.

Writers, Alzheimer, Death

In the past 24 hours, two great writers died.

Arthur C. Clarke: a giant in the SF field. Not much I can add to the countless obituaries and appreciations, only a few personal notes. Although I read much more of his novels later, the ones I read first -- at the impressionable age in my early teens -- were also the famous ones: 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama. I saw the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and while I didn't understand much of it at that time, it did make an enormous impression.

Even if he didn't invent it, Clarke was -- in his time -- the very best practitioner of 'sense of wonder': his best works imbued with an inherent pining for progress, and an overarching impression of awe, a transcendental quality if you like.

Hugo Claus (English Wiki): A Belgian, multi-talented artist (although he was mainly a writer) who wrote poems, short stories, novels, plays, screenplays. He directed movies and he painted. He was one of the Flamish writers I enjoyed very much when I read a lot of Dutch literature in my student days (along with Louis Paul Boon and Hugo Raes).

Hugo Claus suffered from Alzheimer's, and he had requested euthanesia -- according to Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant "he didn't want to suffer a long and very painful end like his father had." So he chose his moment of death.

Which leads me to Terry Pratchett, who has been diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer's. I am a big Pratchett fan, and while I'm an atheist and don't believe in fate, in this case it's almost as if the world tries to tell me something:

Match It For Pratchett.

I donated $50.

Optimism in SF: Is It Dead?

On the one hand, this might seem a somewhat belated reaction to Jason Stoddard's blog posts "Strange and Happy" and "More Strange and Happy". On the other hand, my column in the BSFA's magazine for writers, Focus, published on January 2007, was about exactly the same topic. It is a recurring one.

So, to show where I stand for those outside the BSFA, I'm reposting it here:

Let’s face the future with a smile

In my first column for Focus under Martin McGrath’s stewardship (and thanks to Simon Morden for the previous years), I’d like to start with a challenge.

In the last couple of years, SF short stories have been predominantly dark and pessimistic. Not all of them – there are obvious exceptions, like for instance Jason Stoddard’s “Winning Mars” (IZ #196) – but the majority most definitely is. I was discussing this with the afore-mentioned Jason Stoddard, and we agree that it’s almost as if it’s forbidden to write an uplifting story.

Problem is, that writing a convincing optimistic story is difficult, very difficult. Or, to quote Gardner Dozois: “As someone who has written post-apocalyptic stuff myself, I can tell you that it IS easier. It's easier to write about how the current world went wrong than it is to come up with believable ways how the current world is going to survive and prosper (to say nothing of changing in unexpected ways).”

For example, High Country News (HCN) magazine put out a call to submissions for the 2006 Summer Reading Issue, calling for a short story that showed how things developed for the better in the American Midwest. They already had a dystopian story (Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Tamarisk Hunter”), and wanted to offset it with an optimistic one, and they were willing to pay well (30 cents a word). “We’re not looking for an idyllic utopia, but a realistic assessment of people and their place in the landscape.” Many stories were sent in, none were taken. Or, to quote their Special Summer Reading Issue’s editorial: “Some interesting glimmers, but no one had a plausible explanation for how we might get from here to there.”

At LACon IV, Paolo Bacigalupi told me that the readers of HCN were both extremely well-known and highly critical about all matters Midwest, so that trying to write a convincing optimistic story about the American Midwest was like trying to pass a fictional story about a Theory of Everything through an editorial board consisting of Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Edward Witten. Well-nigh impossible.

Also, Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden had planned to edit an anthology called ‘Up’, filled with stories about how the future changed for the better. That was back in 2002, and as far as I know that project is still on ice.

Now, I’m not asking you to please the readers of HCN. However, I am getting fed up with all these dark and dystopian stories. I agree with Jason Stoddard when he said that Paolo (Bacigalupi) is a great writer, but that his stories sometimes make me scream in despair, because of their bleakness. And I sincerely wonder if writers *really* like a challenge.

So here it is: write an ambitious story about how the future changes for the better: one that is convincing, as well. As realistic and plausible as you can get it. Then send it my way when I re-open Interzone for email submissions (probably May 2007, but keep an eye on our website and Ralan.com), or to another market. Get it out there.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we should go back to unlimited, naïve optimism of the pulp era, or the 50s. It also means we shouldn’t aim at the romance genre’s HEA (happily ever after) as a prerequisite. No: we live in the 21^st Century, so give me a 21^st Century story. Let it be grounded in the real, but a real that is more than just nihilistic, cynic, diffident, or disinterested. The progress can be incredibly hardfought, the progress can be met with all possible resistance, have setbacks, and all. But in the end, let there be some kind of progress.

In short, give me a gritty pollyanna, and show me it’s not an oxymoron.

And, while we’re at it, let it be ambitious. Joe Sixpack getting a better job is trivial. Jane Doe winning an office argument is boring. Reach for the sky: try to find at least a partial solution, a partly positive development from the great problems of our time. You could do worse than reading through Edge’s article “What Are You Optimistic About? Why?”, where some of the greatest minds of our time answer exactly that question. Obviously, Jason Stoddard and I are not the only ones who are tired of this trend of depressive thinking.

Don’t be a part of the problem, be a part of the solution. Write that story: it’ll be a hard, enormously hard. But the reward is phenomenal. Be inspired, and then be an inspiration. Let’s face the future with a smile.

So, has this little 'call to arms' generated some upbeat fiction sent to Interzone? Well, judging from what I've seen so far the response is decidedly less than overwhelming. Not sure why, but here are three guesses:

1. Writers only like 'easy' challenges, not truly 'complex' ones. For example, if a well-known editor says he hates elves, then writers jump out of the woodwork with elf stories just to prove him he's wrong. However, ask them to do something that actually challenges their own assumptions -- a convincing upbeat story, or a convincing near-future story, let alone a combination of the two -- then the utmost majority logs off. Too hard.
   
2. The reasoning of 'How can you write an upbeat story in the current dark en depressing political and economic climate?'. Well, I like to think that good SF tries to be ahead of the curve, and that it tries to lead instead of follow, and that it might try to set a good example (and not *only* dystopias as dire warnings: if something's done to death...). Silly me for thinking that.
3. SF actually likes to wallow in self-despair, and loathes getting out of its self-imposed ghetto. Nothing worse than 'normal' -- or even young -- people being attracted to it, right?

Now, if there is a publisher out there interested in doing an SF anthology of upbeat stories, then I am hereby volunteering to edit it. Just goes to show I'm an optimist at heart.


(Side note: maybe we should become Hispanic.)

Brasyl: an appreciation

At TTACon 9 I had -- among many other discussions -- a talk with Paul Raven about Ian McDonald's novel Brasyl. I thought it was one of his best, Paul ranked it lower, and specifically lower than River of Gods. I then tried to make the point that -- for my money -- River of Gods was, metaphorically speaking, where McDonald's heart was (evidenced not only by its higher page count, but also by a slew of short stories set in the same world, released as a collection by Orion called Cyberabad Days), but that his mind was in Brasyl. And while there have been a veritable slew of raving reviews, there were also a couple that were not convinced of the novel's intellectual merit:

• Martin Wisse at rec.arts.sf.written thinks it didn't deliver:

The big revelation at the end of the novel is perhaps not a hoary old cliche yet, but neither is it as fresh or strange as I would've expected from McDonald.

• Tim Martin at The Independent was also ultimately disappointed:

The real problem with Brasyl lies in the strange lack of invention that it brings, late on, to a fascinatingly weird premise. [...] when it comes to the crux of the book, the reader is surprised to find all the dark narrative mutterings about quantum theory and the multi–verse boiling down, after some fairly obvious foreshadowing, to a a thriller dénouement that involves a bunch of dimension-hopping assassins equipped with diminutive lightsabres.

The considerable amount of beer consumed that day most probably didn't make my argument very cogent, so I'll reformulate it -- hopefully in clearer terms -- here. For the record, I think McDonald delivered for a good 99,5%, and could have for the full 100% if he had given it a final twist, which ties in with Tim Martin's remarks. I'll get to that.

The high concept behind the novel is the existence of a simulated multiverse, which is generated by a Universe-wide quantum computer in the original, 'real' Universe. McDonald acknowledges the modern-day godfather of the multiverse David Deutsch (and specifically his thought-provoking The Fabric of Reality), and the idea of multiple realities being simulated on a Universe-wide computer stems from Frank Tipler's The Physics of Immortality (whose concept of an 'Omega Point' is also treated in The Fabric of Reality).

McDonald, however, does give his own twist to these concepts. For one, Tipler's 'Omega Point' -- where exponential growth of intelligence eventually enables control over the Universe over the largest possible scale -- was (at the time, 1994) believed to be taking place during the Big Crunch (Paul McAuley's Confluence trilogy takes Tipler's 'Omega Point' seriously). In the meantime, though, astronomers have found that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating (hence the search for the 'dark energy' that powers that acceleration), making a Big Crunch unlikely. So McDonald projects this 'Omega Point' on a forever-expanding Universe, where the multiversal simulation still is crunched, albeit at an ever-slower rate (which the inhabitants of the simulation won't notice, at least for a while, as their 'time' is simulated, as well).

The main point is, though, that the multiverse of Brasyl is a simulation. In The Fabric of Reality David Deutsch posits that the multiverse is real, and one of the main points of his arguments for that is the double slit experiment. This is one of the greatest puzzles of modern physics: the interference pattern also appears when the particles (photons or electrons) are sent through the double slit one by one, seemingly suggesting that one particle interferes with itself.

David Deutsch's solution to this mind-boggling phenomenon is that this single particle interferes with its ghost from another Universe, hence a reality that consists of more than one Universe. (Apart from the Copenhagen interpretation other scientists have tried to explain this like, for example, the late David Bohm (with his interpretation of the 'hidden variables' interpretation, called 'undivided whole' or 'ontological interpretation') and John Cramer -- with his 'transactional interpretation' where waves travel both forward and backward in time, which might be supported by Julian Barbour's view in The End of Time that [as far as I can understand] time is an emergent phenomenon, not a basic property, and thus time arises from the quantum background like temperature arising from the average kinetic energy of atoms: see also New Scientist issue 2639 of January 18, 2008; main article "The Time Illusion". But I digress...;-)

This ties in with the simulation argument: the notion that our reality might be nothing more than a very advanced simulation. This is an interesting thought experiment: *if* reality as we experience it is a simulation, then *how* would we know this?

The simple answer is: if the simulation is perfect, we would never know (and David Deutsch argues that a universal quantum computer can render an environment to any degree of accuracy. Well, maybe if that environment is limited. But not if that environment is a whole Universe, let alone a multiverse, I strongly suspect). There is no point, at any level, where this simulation would break apart, and for us -- the inhabitants of that simulation -- the difference between the perfect simulation and an *actual* reality cannot -- by definition -- be noticed (otherwise the simulation isn't perfect). For us it would literally make no difference (up until the point where the experimenters would stop the simulation).

Now, in my day job I'm a technical specialist. I've worked with a variety of high tech equipment, and in my experience a perfect machine does not exist. Extremely sturdy, immensely reliable machines: yes. But even these will never work perfect *all the time*. There's a name for perfect machines: perpetuum mobiles.

Therefore, I personally think that a perfect simulation is also impossible. If our reality is a simulation, there will be a point where the seams of this simulation will show. Reading Brasyl, the thought struck me that if indeed our reality is an extremely sophisticated simulation, maybe the simulation breaks apart at the quantum level, for instance with the crazy results of the double slit experiment?

Now, as far as I understand, this is not what McDonald is actually proposing in Brasyl: but he does posit that the three strands of his novel take place in parallel worlds of a simulated multiverse, and throughout the novel there are moments when the simulation shows through. Most clearly through the quantum knives(*), also through the golden frogs that, through observing a single photon, experience the whole multiverse, and I do remember a scene where Edson mentions that he sees a plane flying over Sao Paolo, very low, without hearing the engines (it's been two weeks since I read the book, and my memory certainly isn't perfect). As the novel progresses, these seams in the simulation become gradually more apparent (Marcelina's double, Fria's double, Father Luis's visions of the multiverse, etc.).

(*) = I strongly suspect that an *actual* knife that can cut through anything at the quantum level is impossible, because of the Uncertainty Principle. Cutting apart bonds between molecules or atoms: yes. Stripping all electrons from an atom, or severing nuclear components (protons & neutrons; or even quarks): I don't think so. However, the quantum knife in Brasyl operates in a simulated environment, so is the equivalent of a carefully aimed delete button, or a highly fine-tuned decompiling tool.

Ultimately, one might argue that setting the whole novel in an extremely sophisticated simulation is a copout: since it's all virtual, things can take place that are not possible in an *actual* reality. Like golden frogs seeing the multiverse through the observation of a single photon or a 'Q knife' that literally cuts through everything.

However, in my opinion McDonald played fair: he carefully foreshadowed this, very subtly at first, and increasingly as the novel progresses. Also, the liberties he takes are all necessary to bring the concept forward, and carefully measured out. He could have easily taken this freedom from physical laws to excess, but he didn't: restraint is, in this case, the mother of invention.

More importantly, the major players in Brasyl -- and the reader -- finally come to grips with the (simulated) world they live in. So what do they do with that knowledge? As mentioned above, Tim Martin was disappointed that it all only led to a thriller game of assassins fighting each other.

I remember someone commenting (not sure of this was from some review or blog post I read, or from an actual conversation: forgive my fleeting memory) that having a (French) inventor travel down the Amazon in 1732 with the equivalent of an analytical engine, some 60 years before Charles Babbage was born, thus enabling Dr Falcon to understand, way ahead of his time, the real implications of his situation, was too much of a sleight of hand.

Against this I would argue that somebody must find out the actual 'fabric of (un) reality' first, and that in an extremely sophisticated multiverse simulation this will be at the earliest possible point in history (the most unlikely, yet still possible early discovery of all the possible reality simulations).

And that is what the Father Luís/Dr Falcon/Diego Gonçalves thread is about: this is where the seams of the simulation came apart first. This where the larger implications of the situation were interpreted: and since they had 18th Century mindsets the larger picture they drew was predominantly religious: Diego Gonçalves believes that the simulation must not be disturbed as it is God's plan; while 'the Order': the Father Luís/Dr Falcon group eventually (not immediately in the very beginning, but increasingly as they explore their multiverse) realise that the Mother Universe on which their simulation is running is running out: the accelerated expansion is slowly ripping it apart, and this will ultimately disrupt all the simulated worlds. So 'the Order' wants to break out from the simulation into the *actual* world, and the Gonçalves group believes this is blasphemy of the highest degree, and sends out assassins to prevent this.

Admittedly, this does look very much like a thriller denouement: powerful cabals plotting each other's demise. However, they both think they are fighting for the highest stakes: to preserve the Universe. Even if they disagree on how it should be achieved.

The only thing that I found slightly -- minimally -- disappointing was that the '1732' thread did not make it unambiguously clear that *this* Father Luis/Dr Falcon world was the very, very first where the conflict between the Order and the Gonçalves group originated: it would have tied everything together, very neatly.

Possibly that's why McDonald didn't do it: this conflict would have started in more worlds than one, rendering this simulated multiverse a bit muddy, somewhat fuzzy. Almost like the real world...

Back in August 6, 2005 I sat next to David Pringle at the Hugo Award ceremonies. When the Hugo for best novel was presented, David told me that he was rooting for River of Gods, and I completely agreed with him. It lost to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell --whose promotion budget and sales were an order of magnitude greater than that of River of Gods -- but by a relatively small margin. This year I hope Brasyl not only gets nominated, but that it gets the nod in Denver on August 9.

Transcendence Express, Re-Redux

Sometimes, the strangest things happen.

Today, Hub editor Lee Harris informed me that my story "Transcendence Express" -- which originally appeared in Hub #2, the last print issue -- will now appear again in Hub #44: the February 5 online issue (it also appeared as an audio version read by Jack Mangan on Escape Pod).

This on top of his choosing the story as the best of Hub of 2007.

(Also, Vincent Chong's illustration for "Transcendence Express" was long-listed for the BSFA Award, but didn't make the shortlist. Oh well, you can't have them all...;-)

His reasoning:

Our print runs were significantly lower than the size of our current readership, so we have decided to cherry-pick some of our favourite stories from those two issues, and reproduce them here, every now and then, in order to allow our swollen membership (stop sniggering at the back) to enjoy some tales that might otherwise be missed.

Hub Magazine currently reaches nearly 6,000 readers every week (and growing)

More readers? I certainly won't complain, rather the contrary. If Escape Pod's statistics are correct, then well over 22,000 people downloaded the audio version. Together with Hub's claim of over 6,000 readers, this piece might have reached close to thirty thousand people...

Free IGMS stories

Apologies for the low blogging amount: be assured that my fiction writing amount is even lower the last couple of months.

Anyway, Edmund Schubert, editor of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, pinged me to say that IGMS is putting up a number of stories for free here.

• Issue one’s free story will be “Trill and The Beanstalk” by Edmund R. Schubert;
• Issue two’s will be “Yazoo Queen” by Orson Scott Card (from his Alvin Maker series);
• Issue three’s “Xoco’s Fire” by Oliver Dale (up February 14);
• Issue four’s “Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” by Eric James Stone (also up February 14);

Each story is fully illustrated by artists who were commissioned to create artwork to accompany that tale -- as is every story published in IGMS.

So there you go: an online prozine with a subscription model (like Baen's Universe) that's trying to be financially self-supporting. Interesting times, and you can check some of their fiction out for free.

Frankly, the battered SF fiction magazine market could use a success story, or two.

TTACon 9

Sorry about the short notice, but here comes, for the first time in over a year...

TTACon 9

Date: Saturday February 9, from early afternoon onwards;

Place: London

Venue: Filthy McNasty

Adress: 68 Amwell Street,, London,, EC1R 1UU (copy & paste this in Google Maps, or -- as described by Dave Matthew):

It's about ten minutes from Kings Cross on foot. (Leave the station, turn left, keep walking up the hill, turn right when you see the tapas bar on the other side of the road).

Special Guests: Ellen Datlow, Pat Cadigan, John & Judith Clute;

Also attending: a variety of people from Interzone & Black Static.

Beers on tap: Guinness, Hoegaarden, Red Stripe, Adnams and a large variety of whisky...

November Email Submissions

I should have posted this two weeks back, but forgot in all the maelstrom of other things demanding my attention: I sent out responses to all submissions of the November email reading period by January 14. If you haven't received either a rejection or a hold, then do query me, as either something got lost, or your story fell through the cracks. I also still keep getting mail daemon delivery failures for two people: Bruce Golden and Rick Norwood. Please contact me at Jetse (dot) deVries (at) gmail (dot) com, as my replies are not reaching you. Whittling down the last 30 to a final 15 for my colleagues right now.

Clarkesworld Magazine Poll

Clarkesworld Magazine is holding a poll where you can vote for your favourite Clarkesworld Magazine stories of 2007.

You can vote for up to three stories.

Obviously, my story "Qubit Conflicts" is one of them, and if you really liked it, you could even vote for it (a little egoboo here, where Blue Tyson selected it as one of his personal year's best).

Also, the more votes get in, the better the feedback for the Clarkesworld Magazine people.

Interzone November Email Submissions Update

Quick Update: I've read through about some 240 of them, but am about 100 behind in replying. Now I am trying to catch up on my replies, but have had two replies to two email addresses that give me permanent failures. Both are netzero email addresses (one netzero.com and one netzero.net).

It's strange, because my 'receive acknowledges' went fine to these email addresses a couple of weeks ago, and now I've tried resending my response several times and get nothing but permanent errors.

Anyway: Bruce Golden and Luke Jackson: if you read this, please contact me at Jetse (dot) deVries (at) gmail (dot) com.

UPDATE: I got through to Luke Jackson on an alternate email address. However, in the meantime there's another netzero bounce: Scott Rollsen, if you read this, please contact me as well, as my reply to you bounced, as well.

Also google itself is blocking some of my replies, thinking I'm sending out spam! They do get through on a resend, but it surely can't be the idea to repeatedly resend messages. This happened four times today (December 22), and it's quite annoying.

I struggle onwards.

UPDATE 2: signs that your brain is trying to tell you to stop writing responses for the night sometimes manifest as typos.

• comaprison (when I meant 'comparison);
• meatfiction (when I meant 'metafiction');

Those are the ones I caught. So do please bear with me if you see a funny (and most likely unintentional) typo in a personal reply from me.