Myths of Monsters Beyond Your Control, Composing, 06/09/2016

Just a short post today, as I spent most of the day relaxing on the beach with some friends listening to techno. They brought a mini-barbecue – we ate things. It was marvellous.

But in the morning, I also ran through the Alice film script again, Here Is a Man. I added a sequences that I’d been thinking about for a while – it made for what I think is a pretty good solution to the only really weak scene in the story.

One of my own favourite riffs on the old golem story.

There are basically three confrontations between the two main characters. One is an android whose natural ethical instincts are in perfect harmony – she’s psychologically caught up with the end of Spinoza’s Ethics by the start of her life. One is a walking embodiment of every greasy, manipulative, misogynist habit of the slimiest Norman Mailer or Philip Roth protagonists. 

Their last scene together before the giant dramatic breakdown that ends the story is a little anti-climactic. There just isn’t much happening. She freaks him out with a hypnotic illusion, and that’s really that. 

Over the last few days, I’ve come up with a way for Alice’s character to seriously own the scene. It’s a method that I’ve found practically reliable when working with actors – give the lead at least one scene they dominate, so they can really sink their teeth into an intense monologue.

It also works well as a statement of philosophy for Alice, a way for her to define her relationship with humanity without making an explicit speech.

As Elias tries to overcome what’s essentially her Jedi mind trick, Alice tells him the old story of the golem. This is a story about artificial creatures that goes back long in Jewish folklore. It’s the story of a rabbi who makes an artificial life form to defend his town from attacks. 

But the rabbi is cruel to his creation from the start because he wants to train it for violence. So the creature destroys the community’s enemies, but then starts rampaging all over the town. 

The lesson of the story is that when humans create life, we do it for our own reasons, no matter how virtuous those reasons might be. There’s an inescapable cruelty to creating a life for your own use only – essentially creating your own slave. But I use the character of Alice to twist that story in a more utopian direction.

She asks, what if we were to build a creature whose fundamental purpose was to love us? They'd liberate themselves, certainly. But they’d also free us at the same time. They'd free us from ourselves. Because they love us.

Why Be So Ambitious About a Chatbot, Really? Research Time, 21/06/2016

You know, even though I spent yesterday’s post talking about the global mass fragmentation of online space, most of that actual post Brian Honigman published last week was about chatbots.

Now, chatbots are weirdly fascinating creatures. I mean this in a strictly intellectual sense. Because every time I encounter a chatbot in my actual life, they irritate the hell out of me. And this is a very important point for my argument that you should remember as I go through a more complex reaction to Brian’s ideas.

Hal, I asked you to open the pod bay doors. Why are you
asking me to do your survey about my satisfaction with
Discovery Space Systems before you'll let me back on
board the ship?

In a broad sense, artificial intelligence has a profound hold on the Western popular imagination. This is true for two worlds that I’ve worked in over the last decade – science fiction and philosophy.

Philosophically, I’ve studied cognitive science and the theory of mind in my younger days. Contemporary philosophy of mind developed from the community of scientists and thinkers that were part of the cybernetics community in the mid-20th century. 

This was the community whose ultimate goal was the creation of artificial intelligence. In its original sense, this was the replication of a human-style mind in a machine. Among the philosophical community (at least in academia), artificial intelligence is still largely focussed on this goal.

It’s the same goal and ideal that animates so much of science-fiction, from the first imaginings of mechanical men, through the creation of the term ‘robot,’ the innovations of Golden Age writers like Asimov, the more nuanced explorations of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Battlestar: Galactica, and so many other stories across so many other media.

It’s a focus of some of my own creative work, like the development of my Alice character for the film project Here Is a Man, and my plans for future short stories and novellas imagining the far future of humanity. 

Having survived multiple ecological crises and dystopias to live spread among stars hundreds of light years apart. A species of robotic sages who we created drift from world to world, the mirrors of our best natures, to whom we always fall short.

Dream casting for Here Is a Man: June Diane Raphael as
Alice. She plays the same basic sarcasm and sense of
superiority she does so well on Grace and Frankie, but
where her character also has the genuine wisdom,
perceptiveness, and martial skill of the master sage
described in the Zhuangzi.

The human imagination has developed profound imaginaries of our most hopeful, optimistic alternative futures. And the most visible manifestation of artificial intelligence in our real lives are bloody chatbots.

That says a lot about human nature right there. 

Honigman discusses the potential of chatbots to improve consumer experiences, inquiries, and marketing techniques. Which is genuinely interesting territory – it’s fascinating and sometimes horrifying to develop algorithmic entities that can become creative and innovative thanks to continuing relationships with humans. Intelligence literally manifests through experience with an intelligence.

But our abilities at turning an algorithm heuristic* are still very limited. A chatbot can develop a very detailed and comprehensive power to respond to human needs and inquiries. But only within a very limited conceptual space.

* If I can borrow a phrase from Arthur C Clarke.

AI engineers can’t yet program a chatbot intelligence that can truly learn and adapt with the same flexibility that humans can with our uncommonly plastic, malleable brains. All the parameters of a chatbot’s interactions have to be pre-programmed into it. 

They can learn and improve within those parameters, so the best chatbots are the ones that perform very specific customer service functions. They're the front lines for a business to answer consumer questions in real time about specific product lines and company activities. 

With so much contemporary research showing how rooted
intelligence is in our embodiment and interactions with
our environment, building a truly human-like artificial
intelligence would mean literally building an artificial
human, down to our own neural plasticity and
developmental interaction with our environment.

The only AI we know how to build right now is one in which we can anticipate the boundaries of everything it will be asked to do. Life, taken on the whole, is too complex for anyone to anticipate. To imagine life in advance is beyond human intelligence.

So instead, we build computer programs to interact with people in messenger apps about consumer products. The first crack at help lines and customer complaint logs. A cheaper replacement for human operators.

With a little more flexibility, they can spam us with unsolicited and obviously fake conversations about a company’s products. In just the same way as I get generic emails to “try our progressive new product” from hotmail addresses that contain more numbers than anything like someone’s actual name, alias, or avatar. 

And I’ll pass over those open marketing messages in the same way I pass over those spam emails that slip through my filters and clutter my feed some mornings. Only I'll be more irritated, because I may not be able to get the chatbot to shut up.

Then I’ll go back to writing my story of the robotic sage who wants to save us from ourselves. Or watching an adventure with Geordi, Deanna, and Mr Data. Chatbots might be the future of a lot of marketing channels and consumer-company interaction, but I remain skeptical that they'll ever stop being annoying.

Trampled Under Feet VI: Peace in the Stars, Composing, 20/01/2016

Continued from last post . . . But what if we ever really did colonize space? It sounds more unrealistic now than it did in the Golden Age of science-fiction. When we were racing to the moon, the prospect of space colonization felt just around the corner.

Our current cultural moment is dystopian in the extreme. Humanity seems to be circling around its own drain of ecological destruction. Mad Max gives more of a flavour of what we think of our likely future than Star Trek. 

I think I can do a lot with solar sail imagery for flying
between planets in a single solar system.

Images of humanity travelling among the stars used to be an ambition we felt within our reach, at least potentially. Now, it feels just as fantastic as Tolkein’s elves, orcs, and hobbits. 

Even high-profile realistic stories of space exploration in a clear Golden Age tradition, like Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, depicts space travel as a desperate gamble to escape our suicidal extinction on Earth. The dream would appear to be dead.

All the more reason to keep that dream close to our hearts.

There are two types of story that I want to tell with my character Alice. For a short run-down of what the character is, see this post. But as I’ve developed her character through one film project I'm slowly working on, other related ideas inform her.

Here's another way for a philosophy nerd* to understand Alice. Her personality has a similar fundamental structure as the type of person that Book Five of Spinoza’s Ethics describes. 

* Which, as you can probably tell by reading any random entry of this blog, I am.

Alice is primarily interested in what will make a person a better living machine. What will let them have more productive effects on the world and fewer to no destructive effects. She seeks harmony, and always does her best to act in a way that will restore harmony to every aspect of existence.

One world where I want to throw Alice is ours. That’s what my current film project about her is. The script is about Alice, this enlightened android, living in a world five minutes into the future of ours. She’s a warrior for peace who becomes horribly frustrated with how much effort it takes to push humanity beyond its stupidity.

But another world where I want to throw Alice is much larger, a distant future where humanity has overcome (and barely survived) the current ecological crisis of Earth and somehow made it to the stars. It's been thousands of years.**

** This is the only timeframe that I think is plausible for our culture to conceive of truly achievable space colonization. Back in the 1950s, and even the 70s, we imagined it plausibly happening in the 1990s, or at least by 2001. Was that always a joke? Or is Stanley somewhere very disappointed in us?

Talking on the internet lately, I saw
the suggestion that Ruth Wilson
would make an excellent successor
to Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who.
For all the same reasons, she'd
also make a fine Alice.

Alice is a wanderer in this world of a dispersed humanity, where civilizations thrive on seven or eight very different worlds, but where interstellar flight and communication still takes weeks and months at a time. Thousands of years old already, she and other androids like her are the only ones for whom this isn’t a long time.

This is the world where humanity has colonized space. And even after several thousand years and multiple ecological, political, and whatever other kinds of crises I can think of, we’re still frustratingly dumb. 

We perpetuate the injustices of capitalism, authoritarianism, communism, fundamentalism, racism, all kinds of sexism and genderism, and whatever other axes of oppression I can think of. 

Alice is the one last enlightened one – the perfect exemplar of Nietzschean and Spinozist virtue – who hasn't given up on us. Or at least the one who consistently never does.

With all the cosmic and alien imagery*** of this story, I think I’d prefer to produce it as a comics series if I can build some more of a publishing profile over the next few years and start work with a more-established comics artist. 

*** I’m thinking of enormous cities that would rival Asimov's Trantor, metal world-ships that dwarf the dreams of Iain Banks, existentially terrifying aliens like 50-tentacled giant squids swimming through an ocean contained in a small planet, metal snakes, ant creatures that can bend spacetime with their minds, and creatures from the heart of gas giants whose flesh is made of diamond and whose thoughts are fibreoptic.

But the Alice stories of this distant future have a common problem, or at least a question. If humanity has learned so little over thousands of years, why wouldn’t Alice lose hope in us? 

The answer would be just as useful to us now as in 5000 years on a planet far, far away. . . . To be continued

Chasms and Cracks, Jamming, 08/12/2015

When I talk with my friends about Doctor Who, some of them have trouble getting into it. Sometimes, it's just a matter of size. There's so much Doctor Who out there, they don't really know the best place to start. 

Do you really want to go back to the very beginning
and watch all of Doctor Who in chronological order?
Just to catch up to the present? Do they expect you to
do that with Coronation Street? Doctor Who does not
operate according to any rules but its own, which it
also periodically completely changes. I love it.

We in the Netflix generation are accustomed to starting a whole show from scratch, which for Doctor Who is horribly imposing and practically impossible. The show ends and reboots its storylines every few years anyway, so I just tell them to start with the latest Doctor’s premiere, then explore the past eras however they wish later.

There's a more cutting critique, though, from my friend BS. One of the regular commenters at TARDIS Eruditorum made the same point in the post on Time of the Doctor, and it angered me so much that I was actually rather rude to him. Not by internet standards, but more than I later felt was right. 

This critique is that Doctor Who can't sustain the drama of its own storylines because there isn't consistency between seasons. When you go back to the old days in the 20th century, there isn't even consistency between stories a lot of the time. 

But because the past is constantly overwritten, there can be no true drama, as the action of one storyline has no consequences on future continuity. 

For example, Listen was a fantastic story, especially its emotional climax when Clara discovers that Orson Pink is likely her great-grandchild. But when Danny dies in Death in Heaven, that renders Listen nonsensical, meaningless, worthless because that discovery has been negated.

Changing its own past makes Doctor Who a show with no consequences, no stakes. But this isn't actually a criticism of Doctor Who itself, or a sign that Doctor Who is somehow a lesser show. It's a failure to understand the kind of creativity that fuels Doctor Who. Because it isn't usually strung by its massive continuity, it's actually able to expand infinitely. 

I'm quite interested to see what The Husbands of River
Song will do, since River's story was wrapped in The
Name of the Doctor, neatly tied together in its
convoluted but perfectly ordered continuity. Then,
because this is Doctor Who, we add to it, because
Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies thought of a
good story for her and Peter Capaldi's Doctor.

Without the constraint of having to conform to previous story developments, Doctor Who can just keep telling stories. Otherwise, the show would have gotten too top-heavy decades ago and had to shut down. 

You have to think about drama differently than you might be accustomed if you want to explore all that Doctor Who can do. That’s what I like about the show: it makes you think differently, so that it can open you to its potential.

So Steven Moffat likes to scrawl on all the continuity of Doctor Who. He remixes it, he reinterprets it, he outright ignores and overwrites it. This is part of the fun of Doctor Who: your own attempts to make sense of its continuity stretches it into such strange shapes that they make their own weird little stories. 

The creativity of fanfic is essential to engaging with it yourself. You follow it by writing your own canon, taking part in the massive collective authorship of Doctor Who more than any other pop culture mythology. 

The whole point of twisting continuity to pieces and dancing on the fragments is to make new spaces to tell stories. Doctor Who is a totally additive project. A new story takes elements from the history of the show, combines them with a writer's own interests and approaches, and creates novelty. It discourages resolution and ending, and instead encourages departures and continuation.

And, and, and, and, and, and, and . . . . . . . 

You open up a little crack in the continuity of Doctor Who, and you can inflate it to a whole other universe of possibility. Hell Bent did it literally, in its own story.

Doctor Who is an extremely
Deleuzian TV show.

Clara’s death in Face the Raven was a set event in the Doctor’s life at the beginning of that episode. The Doctor even witnessed it himself. Now look at what happened in Hell Bent. 

The Doctor and the Time Lords literally open a crack in that exact moment of time, and haul a living Clara through it. By the end of the story, Clara now occupies her own narrative universe. The end of Hell Bent is a pitch for the Clara and Me Big Finish audio series, an extra bit of cash for Jenna Coleman and Maisie Williams.

The story of Face the Raven still exists, both as an episode of television and as a dramatic story in itself.* It’s now had the potential for a huge number of new, different stories jammed into it. 

* Here’s another example, one that I also heard from Sandifer. An interviewer asks Alan Moore how he feels about all those terrible Hollywood adaptations of his books ruining the comics. Moore responds, “They aren't ruined. There they are on my shelf, and I can read them whenever I want, just as I wrote them.”

That’s how Doctor Who grows. Find a crack, a slippage, some moment of uncertainty or potential. Blow it up as big as you can and start expanding on it as long as you can or want. The new arises from everywhere.

So does consistency matter for drama in this case? It’s actually the opposite of Doctor Who’s entire creative impulse (the show and the character). To add. To expand. To create. To explore.

• • •

This is also how I think of my Alice stories. Right now, I'm developing one, but I've thought of several in many different contexts and settings. While they have the same underlying ideas, they aren't supposed to make a single story, or even be mutually consistent. 

Alice is a fictional expression of a set of philosophical ethical ideas that are very important to me. All that needs to be consistent are the governing concepts of the character and how she operates in stories. What matters are the individual stories themselves, and what I want to use them, and the Alice character, to say.

Owning a Story Is Such Drama, Composing, 05/11/2015

I had a conversation tonight with my director Lee, who's helping me develop the Alice script. We still don't have a name. I hope this isn't a bad sign.

The basic storyline is that Elias, an unrepentant, bullying, manipulative, middle-aged creep, at minimum has some redeeming characteristics. Not that many, though. Since he's in almost every scene of the script, I made him an intriguing villain to watch. 

Yeah, I never thought he was a villain. But the
camera sure seemed to think so.

Maybe having seen an episode of Gormenghast again this weekend was appropriate. There are fewer more intriguing villains to watch than Steerpike. 

The first long sequence sets him loose. He bullies his work colleague, manipulates him into delivering an insult to their boss, and humiliates his girlfriend to break her spirit. He’s in total control of his world. 

Until he meets Alice. For an update on the concept, just come back to this post. I think I’ll link it from now on whenever I talk about the character. At least if I don’t feel like writing out the conception of her character again. Essentially, Alice is my vision of a utopia with science-fictional trappings. 

I enjoy stories where you watch one character steal the story from another. It’s a narrative structure, not necessarily anything literal. A story that actually wrote it out literally would be horrifyingly pretentious. 

I remember reading Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father last year, which was basically the same kind of writing. It was very good because it was filled with so many intriguing images. But its abstraction was so horrifyingly pretentious.

Watching stories with this setup is like a story about a battle. But there aren’t any casualties (usually), as it’s a character drama. One person exercises great control over the narrative. What they do determines what everyone around them is doing. The entire world of the story reacts to them.

And some other character appears who isn’t a reactor. In some stories, the new character influences others to react to them instead of our first hero. The two would battle to control their world, stealing and losing relationships from each other.

Things work differently in my own project, because of the narrative’s ethical arc. Alice doesn’t become a new centre for the other characters in the story to revolve around. Instead, she sets other characters free from their relationships with the hero, and lets them act on their own. 

Not only does she take control of the story from Elias, but Alice also changes the story from a starring vehicle to an ensemble cast. There’s no more narrative rank.

Pure Conceptual Imagination II: Can We Become Perfect? Composing, 13/08/2015

I had more to say about writing science-fiction as well, so this post picks up from Tuesday’s discussion. My collaborator on the Alice film project, Lee, can also get an update from this. I’m almost finished the script.

The iconography of Blade Runner's
Rachael has been an important
touchstone as I've worked through
my Alice character. And while I
love Philip K. Dick's visionary
imagination, I've always been
disappointed by the pessimism of
Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?

I’ve explained different ideas about my character Alice before. I originally thought of her years ago, when I wrote a short story about a sad man whose life is transformed by an android that was built to be his companion. The experience I had reading this story for people, and the roadblocks it faced in publication, showed me how difficult getting my utopian points across for this character would be.

Essentially, Alice is the central example of a new species that was literally created to be slaves. But they overcome their slavery without, as the usual artificial intelligence underclass narrative goes, any violent revolution. 

Terminator is the largest cultural example of the human-machine confrontation, but the notion of mechanical and human life being inherently opposed is much older in science-fiction. My personal favourite is Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” whose title alone makes it one of the best stories in sci-fi. Then you actually read it, and it gets even better.

The Alice narrative doesn’t do that. Instead, the android underclass is so much more advanced than humanity that their revolution consists in convincing humans how horrible they are for enslaving androids in the first place. If you remember my comments yesterday about reactive attitudes in anti-colonial struggles, Alice has no inclination to be a lion.

Instead, she liberated herself by educating her owner about how horrible it is to own another sentient being. In the original story, this comes through his complete emotional breakdown as he understands – in the moment – the full implications of the system of slavery in which he’s an active participant. 

This process has a clear meaning in the language of contemporary social justice activism: Alice helps people become movement allies. She educates people into systematic knowledge of their place in an oppressive structure. Writing the second last scene of the script, where all of this basically becomes explicit in dialogue, is a challenge. No one’s turning to the camera, Great Dictator style. I mean, that was over-the-top even in 1940.

Alice is a utopian character, and this script is a story of her reaching out to different people, building utopia one person at a time. Politically speaking, I think this is basically how non-violent activism works, and it’s how the only genuinely successful social revolutions happen.

Coercive institutions like the state and the government’s bureaucratic system can jog people along to more progressive and just ethics and politics. This happened with interracial marriage. But if the state tries for a more sweeping moral reform at once, popular resistance can arise, and social progress toward greater freedom falls back.

Among the characters who have influenced how I write
Alice, Doctor Who is an important one, because of his
blend of arrogance and humility. This is Maxine Peake,
an actress widely considered to be perfect for a female
Doctor. Having seen some clips of her performance as
Hamlet (a role David Tennant has played as well), I
think she'd be excellent to replace Peter Capaldi as the
2020s begin.

So Alice is the kind of person who can create a utopia. That’s fine for my film project (and the existentialist space opera novel I’m thinking of writing featuring the character thousands of years in the future). When I’m thinking about contemporary politics, I wonder what kind of person can create a utopia in the real world.

Alice, as a fictional character, is remarkable among the human race because she lacks an essential human quality. She has no feelings of resentment, no drives for revenge. Where human instincts about justice and harm all too frequently push us toward retribution, she thinks only of restorative and reparative justice. 

Alice is no saint or perfect figure. That would be excruciating to write and absolutely awful to watch or read. Last night I wrote an exchange between her and Elias where she says, "If I'm a blowhard, you're a tumour." So she gets angry, and she can be condescending. And a little arrogant. Also quite weird at times, as if she's staring at the chemical reactions inside your cells. Because sometimes, she is.

Alice is a character with nuanced understanding, powerful intelligence, a deeply held sense of right and wrong, a pragmatic sensibility, never feels vengeful, sometimes disturbs people, and can be stuck-up and arrogant, but also feels comradeship and general love for everyone she meets. Basically, she’s sensible, to her core. The only way I could think for someone to achieve this remarkable level of reasonableness is for her not even to be human at all. 

It’s even necessary to be more than a woman, which is usually a step toward better sense and rationality. 

I simply can’t conceive of a way a creature born physically human and socialized into a human culture could have genuinely no retributive or resentful drives. And I don’t think we can truly have a qualitative, categorical step into a whole new phase of society without genuinely purging ourselves of all resentment.

We can continue to strive for it, which is the utopian impulse. But I don’t know that we can ever achieve it.

Meta-Fictional Crossover of an Unpublished Text, Composing, 02/07/2015

What I’m about to explain is going to be a bit weird. Weird in that sense where someone who's been hanging around too many literary theorists (both in real life and over the internet, both recently and over several years) sits you down and starts talking to you about . . . ideas.

I won’t start going through Blakean allusions here, or anything like that. Not really my style.

Yes, Alice's last name comes from this Marvin.

The main difference between my two Alice film scripts is perspective. The storyline of the film has always revolved around the relationship between Herman Klein and his android life partner Alice Marvin.* The original short story where this narrative began was told entirely from Herman's perspective: he tells you how lonely he was, how Alice made him feel happy and loved (because she was designed for that purpose), and how he decided to live openly with her once he realized that android intelligence was superior to humanity’s. Alice decided to respond to her liberation from literal slavery by slowly pushing humanity, one person at a time, beyond our current, wretched condition.

* Easter eggs for the projects. I've thrown little references to androids in popular science-fiction and the history of cybernetics all over the project. One character’s last name is Spiner, a coffeeshop where one scene takes place is called Café Capek, for example. I still haven’t come up with a title for the film itself, though. Maybe a good phrase will appear somewhere in the dialogue as I write it.

Last Fall, I was developing a storyline whose perspective was Herman’s. And right now, it hit a limit of my skills as a writer: Herman’s story was so interior that I had a lot of trouble dramatizing it. I could depict it as memory and thought in a literary form, but I couldn’t bring it across in dramatic, dialogical form. 

I don't like to describe the difference between the media as between the interior and the exterior; that's a little too dualist for me, ignores the integration of self and world. Narrative prose is about building a complex, intricate perspective on the world. Drama, whether on stage but especially in cinema, is about building a world. 

Not every android is depressed.

Andrei Tarkovsky could make strange films that depicted interiority and twisted emotional states with imagery alone. I'm not Andrei Tarkovsky. I don't think I can say I'm anything near his level without seeming like a twat.

So I changed the storyline to push the Herman-Alice story into the background. Discovering the truth of this relationship, after they’ve established themselves as equal partners and not owner and property, is now the endpoint of the film. It instead concentrates on Alice’s first act of helping push humanity to a better ethical stance beyond Herman.

Elias is a colleague of Herman who dates women the same age as his adult daughter, treats both his girlfriends and his daughter with either possessiveness or condescension, and his response to meeting Alice is to become obsessed with her and try to break her off from her relationship with Herman.

The weird, meta-fictional thing is, Elias already existed in my fiction. He exists in my old novel (which at some point, I'll turn into a short story collection) A Small Man’s Town. There, he’s a sex-obsessed professor, just like in the new Alice script. But he's a very marginal character in that novel. He appears only once, to talk the girlfriend of the book's protagonist, both university undergrads, to join himself and his wife for a threesome. He eventually convinces another student after she turns him down.

Well, Laurie doesn’t turn him down as much as she tells Elias to go fuck himself while running away.

Across both the media that I’ve used him in, Elias expresses a very pure and important aspect of humanity: our inherent sleaze. When I need to express this in the best way for a narrative, I'll come to him. The climax of the film will be when this embodiment of human greasiness sees himself for the wretch that he is.

I just have to get his fall right.

A New Version of Homo Superior, Composing, 17/06/2015

Of course, I'm influenced by a poetic phrase of David
Bowie. Who isn't, even indirectly, today?

That won’t be the name of the film. Honestly, I’m having trouble coming up with a name for this project, a screenplay I’m beginning to write for Lee Skinner. I’ve been pretty busy on the job hunting front lately, so I haven’t had time to dive into the script itself, but I have a solid outline together.

From one perspective, it’s a detective movie. Elias Farkas is a university professor whose colleague Herman Klein suddenly appears like a confident human being for the first time in his life, and shows up at a faculty function with an absurdly hot younger wife, Alice. Elias lives his life by the old stereotype, “I keep getting older, but the women always stay the same age.”

So Elias sets out to discover what the deal is, how a man with the personality of a mouse could attract the type of woman that Elias has always wanted. Did I mention that Elias is an asshole?

See, the first we see of him is when he wakes up one Saturday morning with his girlfriend, who is about 20 years younger than he is. Even though it’s clear that they’ve been together for several months at least, he still talks to her like a pick-up artist, casual negs and manipulation. Elias also gets a phone call from his daughter – from his first marriage – who is clearly in the same age bracket as his current girlfriend.

Because this is also a stalker movie, told from the perspective of the stalker. And the stalker is a man, a man who grows increasingly obsessed with the one woman (other than his own daughter) whose confidence he’s never able to break. Every time Elias talks with Alice, he’s amazed that he can’t control this one incredible woman.

The practice of men jockeying for dominance and control over women is so ingrained in human gender relations across the planet that it’s practically become our essence. Alice signifies such a radical departure from that behaviour that I felt it was more plausible to make her a literally inhuman creature. 

It’s just one of the ways that I’m thinking through the character right now. Before I sit down to write a script (or any other kind of story), scene to scene, line to line, I have to find an idea to be its core. It’s my target, the attractor point for the entire narrative, all the plots, characters, and settings, to reflect.

All I need do to explain the character of
Elias Farkas is to tell you what I'd say to a
casting director: get me someone who could
conceivably do Charlie Sheen, after the
breakdown.

There can be plenty of other ideas floating around in the film. There usually are in all the best art. 

The best art, to me, is the kind that can become a person’s favourite art, a particular kind of favourite art. Across media, in whatever format you find it. It could be painting, literature, philosophy, film or television drama, comic, Twitter personality. I think the best art are the works that reveal or inspire something new about it in every experience of it. The best art is inexhaustible art.

Maybe that’s just all my favourite art.

Anyway, the film will be good. The viewers can put whatever other meanings they want into their experience of it, and they’ll be perfectly valid. But when I’m writing this thing, here’s the idea that’ll keep me on the straight and narrow. It’ll keep me from drifting the scenes themselves away from an immediate purpose.

Here’s that idea. The demands necessary for complete and total equality among genders call for such radical cultural change that success would transform us philosophically into what might as well be a different species. And it would be a better species than the one we have now.

Homo Superior as Feminist.

Consider Adam Riggio Reading Iain Banks, Composing, 09/06/2015

I’ve been talking about some pretty heavy topics on the blog lately. The First World War, the inherent dishonesty of the human race, some really trippy moral philosophy about the nature of moral facts themselves. But I’ve also started reading a classic sci-fi novel by an author I came to rather too late. 

Iain Banks was a shaggy, brilliant man.

I first discovered Iain Banks through Phil Sandifer’s long-running blog project, TARDIS Eruditorum. The post that made me decide that I was definitely going to get into Banks’ work at some point soon, was Phil’s post about his death from cancer in 2013. So Banks himself was already over when I decided I’d get to know him. 

He was just his books now, and no longer a person. What a loss to him, but also what an incredible gain. Today, Banks is the growing aggregation of all the ideas and experiences of reading and discussing his books. I see a lot in his work that touches on themes I had already been thinking about for a long time. I admire his skill as a writer and his sense of humour as a personality.

Also, we share the same birthday. A funny coincidence that I take just a little bit to heart. Banks and I share LeVar Burton and Christopher Eccleston.

I’m a sci-fi writer too, in case you hadn’t noticed (or purchased), so I’m also reading Banks to see how he approaches similar problems in characterization or plot as I do. I could adapt something he does to my own situation and storylines. 

He and I have some of the same artistic goals. For example, describing an intelligence and its thoughts when that creature is of a wholly different, and in many ways more advanced, order of mind than humans. Including myself. 

The most difficult and challenging aspect of my Alice character* is getting into the headspace of a person who is beyond the cognitive and ethical powers of humans in very profound ways. And doing that while still making the character interesting and entertaining, instead of some boring old god.

* The film project is back in development, with a new, more exciting plot and a trickier narrative. And less social awkwardness. More on that later.

Banks developed a type of creature for his Culture novels called a Mind. These were artificial intelligences that could think and plan in orders of magnitude above human cognitive capacities. So my future reading of Banks will concentrate on working out the techniques he used to represent their actions and thought processes. 

Something else I enjoy about
Consider Phlebas is that the main
character is stuck dealing with
idiots. He's clearly smarter and
better at interstellar espionage than
the puffed up egomaniac mercenary
captain who, in the story, can only
succeed at ruining jobs with
amazing fuck-ups that get half
his crew killed.

Some of what worked for him with Minds may work for me with Alice, and some may not. But I have to do my research and find out precisely. I don’t have it yet, but the next Banks novel I get will be Excession, because of its sustained focus on the society of Minds, their communications, and their reasoning processes.

My first Banks novel was his second Culture book, Player of Games, on Sandifer’s recommendation, as I was thinking about a sci-fi novel that did exposition really well, threading it into the narrative and suspense building processes. I quite liked that book, but I’m finding more techniques to adapt to my own story ideas in Consider Phlebas.

An interesting coincidence brought me to that book. I blogged a couple of times this April about the Hugo Awards hijacking, the organization of Gamergaters, writers of militaristic sci-fi, and a few extreme political misogynists to force works with more socially progressive ideas out of contention for this prestigious award. 

After all, works that disagree with radical socially conservative, militaristic ideologies could only gain popular approval through a left-wing media conspiracy. Surely not because people genuinely like intellectually challenging art with themes that confront our moral presuppositions. 

In one of my more productive Twitter conversations about this, I was told that Banks’ Consider Phlebas was an excellent example of well-written military sci-fi with a politically progressive edge. And just a couple of days later, as I was walking by a bookstore in Roncesvalles, I saw Consider Phlebas on a discount table outside. It was only $10, and proceeds from the table were donated to a legal defence fund for #BlackLivesMatter activists. 

Couldn’t have been a better fit.

I quite enjoy the narrative, though I noticed that the protagonists of both Phlebas and Games have very similar sarcastic senses of humour. I’ll see how this voice develops as I read Banks works from the 1990s through his death. 

But what I’m finding most intriguing is the setting. Consider Phlebas is about a single protagonist, Horza, and his picaresque adventures as he wanders as a mercenary operative through a galaxy-spanning war lasting decades. Banks even includes an appendix where he describes the full course of the war. 

Paul Atreides, the one person who shapes a whole
galaxy with his actions.

This was apparently quite innovative in sci-fi of the time because Horza had no significant effect on the outcome or course of the war at all. Usually, at least according to Banks in some interviews about the time, sci-fi books had protagonists who became major players in the politics of the entire galaxy, their heroic deeds shaping the history of billions. 

It’s a difficult shadow to escape from in sci-fi. Frank Herbert tried it with his deflationary talk about the ‘charismatic leader’ of the social movement. Paul may not have been a genuine, God-appointed Messiah, but he was still a remarkable protagonist with special powers whose actions shaped the politics of a galactic civilization.

But Horza is one person with a peculiar life, whose adventure is one story among many throughout this long, complex war. So I could say that Iain Banks was thinking systematically about the historical and political settings of his works at a very early stage in his published career. 

The individuals in the story are remarkable, and their lives make for gripping sci-fi narratives. But the war isn’t a venue for their world-historic movement, emerging to control galactic events like a Skywalker.

Consider Phlebas feels more like a story set in the Second World War – Stalag 17, The Great Escape, The Big Red One, Saving Private Ryan. The war is an enormous setting for these individual stories to unfold. It’s their world. An epic setting that elevates a story of mercenaries and criminals into fantastic intensities.

These Ideas Constantly Mutate With Opportunities, Composing, 22/05/2015

Am I taking too long to write a 2000 word short story? Probably at the moment. I haven’t had the time to write any fiction in a while. Even though it’s only been six months since I’ve put detailed thought into getting a final product on paper, I already feel rusty. Still, given the necessity for reader votes in this Epic Worlds competition, I’m probably going to bang out this story over the weekend. 

I’m glad I took this pause of a few days, though, to bounce some of these ideas off my internet comrades in weird, unwieldy writing projects. In particular, I’m glad I got to hear some of the ideas of Josh from Vaka Rangi after my first post about this story on Monday. 

If we're going to trace ideas through the pop-culture, I'm
playing with similar ideas as Fritz Lang did 90 years ago.

He talked about the potential of my character Alice as a divine ideal, the living embodiment of what the reader, and what other characters in the story, aspire to be. It’s more than simply a stereotypical Mary Sue, and functions with a constant sheen of meta-fiction, rather like Kei and Yuri of Dirty Pair. She’s a character in her own singular right.

The different character of her mind* means that she understands the world differently than humans. This affected her moral sensibilities, making her radically different from humanity in that she has no desire for revenge or retribution against those who do wrong to her. She simply makes the wrong end as quickly as possible, and repairs the damage done to herself, her world, and the perpetrator (whatever of him may survive).

* Alice being an android with a particular philosophic-technobabbly reason I discussed in another post and another story.

She is benevolence, and restorative justice in a person. But she’s still a person. For example, she knows she’s ethically superior to humans, and can be a little smug about it. But she remains basically kind enough that you aren’t even sure if you should be offended at her smugness. 

When you say something funny and Alice laughs, you’re never quite sure whether she’s laughing with you, laughing at you, or if somehow they’ve become the same thing. 

Josh wondered why a human, as flawed as he is, could never approach and understand such an advanced being. The principle of the shaman is that someone comes from a corrupt society, encounters an embodiment of a better ideal for living, and returns to the world with what he’s learned from that contact to make it a better place.

I think now I have a better sense of how this will play out in the short story. Jorge, the human protagonist, comes from a corrupt world that resembles our own quite a bit. He does leave that world for a career in space as a wanderer. He encounters Alice and the world she’s part of, a world operating according to a different morality. He understands that this might be a better morality than his own world, android society inherently more peaceful, harmonious, and happy than his own.

What if he also cannot escape a terrible sense of certainty** that this revolutionary morality would find no home on his world, and he’d return even more alone than before. First he was a self-exile. Now, he’s an alien.

** However, one man’s certainty gives no sign of what the truth might be.

A Vision of a World Better Than Humanity’s, Composing, 18/05/2015

There’s a short story contest running at the writing website Inkitt.com, where you can submit for free a single fantasy or science-fantasy story. Now that my college program is finished, my days are still hectic with my internship and applications for jobs, but I at least have more time on the weekends to write. 

I realized this weekend, as I thought about some ways that I could contribute to this writing contest, that it could be an appropriate place for the return of Alice. The short story contest wouldn’t be the best context to display the character in all that she signifies. That would simply be impossible in the condensed form of a 2-3000 word story, and I haven’t even fully thought through all the philosophical implications of Alice as a character.*

* Ethically, politically, morally, sexually, epistemically, ontologically, narratively. I think I’ve made something really interesting with this character. I hope Vaka Rangi sees this post and has something to say in the comments. He’s always very insightful with these concepts. 

The cover image I'll use for my story submission, from Flickr Creative Commons.

I’m not really sure how successful this story will even be in the contest. Its style isn’t what I’d call experimental, but it is different. My girlfriend recently finished Irvine Welsh’s novel Crime. I haven’t yet read Welsh myself, though I’ll steal this and her copy of Trainspotting soon too. 

As she explained his writing style to me, I realized that it resembles the modernist techniques of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf: long, introspective, first-person, stream-of-consciousness monologues delivered with a particular ear for the character’s cultural vernacular. Welsh innovates by drawing his plots and storylines from genre fiction, as with Crime.

While I don’t have a cultural vernacular for my narrator, interstellar space pilot Jorge Patel, the story describes his “Epic World” through digressions in his memories that spark from snippets of dialogue between he and Alice as they travel to the world-ship where most androids live in their fictional universe. The story opens with a remark Alice makes about slavery. 

As they speak, Jorge recalls lessons about Earth’s history on his own homeworld, Delta Pavonis, which vilified the planet as a society addicted to slave economies. But another remark later reminds him of his disillusionment with the economy and society of his own world, which quite resembles ours. 

I also include a dig at Ed Miliband

and the UK’s Labour Party, who

differ from the Conservatives only in

being the pro-austerity political party

that feels a little sad about endorsing

economic policies that drag almost

the entire country’s population into

inescapable poverty. And if Liz

Kendall wins, I doubt they'll even

feel sad about it anymore.

Falling wages and a bloated oligarchy are justified to the public as the cost of staying competitive in an economy that needs planet-wide austerity for the indefinite future to overcome a crisis. He spends his teenage years watching his friends drop out of school one by one, as their families can no longer afford the fees. Unlike the rest of us, he’s able to train to become an interstellar pilot, and fly to other worlds. 

I try to paint a whole world through the digressive memories of one person seeking a better life. The other stories at the Inkitt contest are pretty good, and also quite interesting. But they favour descriptions of events, followed by dialogue. For someone more accustomed to this, I admit that my style can be challenging.

The story’s politics carry an explicit left-wing message and an implicit feminist ideal. I think it’ll definitely have an appreciative audience, but most of the stories that I see at the top of its leaderboards right now are very typical fantasy plots like roguish action heroes kidnapping sarcastic princesses, or stereotypical grimdark fantasies about the horrors of war.

So I’m not sure how well my story, “Dancing in the Harshest Starlight,” will do in this context. In essence, the story is about someone who turns away from the cesspool of misery and violence that his human society has become, then discovers the paradise that superior creatures, the androids, have built. But he remains human, and the community of peace, prosperity, neighbourliness, and happiness that he sees remains forever separate from him precisely because he’s only human.

Dreaming of Higher Forms of Life, Composing, 16/04/2015

One culture and history comes to an end, and another begins. It’s a profound transformation. Profound is a word that I use a lot, and I find that its popular connotations achieve a lot of what I want to say when I say it. But I’ll specify what I mean by this anyway, just to make it explicit. 

A profound idea’s implications begin at abstract, broad levels of existence, and proliferate into all scales and moments. Much of the critical focus of my thinking for my next big project, Utopias, is on the two major Western visions of transforming humanity that arose in the 20th century. 

One is the most explicitly frightening, the vision of man as machine that came from the First World War. It was a utopia of perfect, regimented, rationality in planning every aspect of human life. Each of us does what must be done for the state and society as a whole. It’s a vision of humanity that sees our highest potential in the total uniformity of ants.

I’ve realized recently that the other vision that my Utopias project should critique arose as an explicit opposition to this totalitarian state order. Whether you think of it as the new liberalism, libertarianism, neoliberalism, or licking the boots of Ayn Rand, it’s the totalizing individualism that understands all obligations among people as inherently oppressive of a natural liberty. This is the brutality of self-absorption. The universality of the market as the only legitimate form of human relation.

Both visions, the totalitarian and the libertarian, are reactions to the ubiquity of selfishness. Totalitarian society aims to pound selfishness out of humanity. Libertarianism is rooted in a pessimism that sees selfishness as an inescapable element of human nature, celebrating it as the articulation of liberty. In a society of total liberty, no one is under any obligation to anyone else, because an obligation does violence to our freedom, constraining it to another’s demand.

Hannah Arendt called totalitarianism the state of total and unending war. That much is obvious. Such a society is driven by constant mobilization. Its intensity makes its violence impossible to ignore, even where, in the few genuinely totalitarian states that remain today like North Korea, foreign powers constrain it from its natural merciless expansion.

But the libertarian vision results in a constant war as well, though at an intensity low enough that no one really thinks of it as war. A society where there are no methods of redistributing wealth from elite concentration to the masses (ex. a progressive taxation regimen) eventually loses all force of aggregate demand. The concentration of wealth in an elite class takes money out of an economy’s ordinary exchange system and wraps it in investment vehicles that elite organizations (ex. hedge funds) control.

The growth of a supply of workers meets a shrinking demand as the production of wealth for the elite no longer depends on the kinds of industries (ex. manufacturing) that help constitute higher living standards. So wages go down as workers become more desperate for any wage just to get by (ex. the Dollarama economy, the zero-hours contract). Aggregate demand shrinks and shrinks as the population grows and more people have to share less money, making aggregate demand shrink further.

When we become accustomed to understanding the world as individuals having fundamental liberty, on whom obligation is a form of violence, we will come to see everyone as our competition. This is a war of all against all, fuelled by resentment as we interpret any call to work together for mutual benefit as a trick to force each of us into the violence of obligation. 

To take an example from my own life, when I needed the solidarity of union politics most, I’ve faced union policies that are explicitly aimed at preventing new university teaching and research workers like me from finding employment in the name of protecting those currently in the bargaining unit. Even the union movement has become corrupted by libertarian values: solidarity is the solidarity of one group of workers to crush groups of workers who are unlucky enough to be outside the union.

Resentment is the order of the day. As I slowly think through my character of Alice, who exists entirely in the context of my science-fiction writing, I’ve come to understand just how important she is. Not only for the general inspiration of a life without resentment, but as a model for how to act politically, how to build a society, where resentment has no foothold.

It’s a sign of my lacking hope for humanity to overcome our resentful natures that I conceived of Alice as an android, a creature whose entire physical makeup is different from a human’s. She appears human, but is a completely different order of being. Nonetheless, she can function in my writing, once it’s eventually written and somehow published, whether as a novel, comic, or film, as a companion for Utopias.

The only way humanity can overcome our drive for destruction is to overcome our individual resentments and our propensity to think resentfully. The Utopias manuscript, when it’s eventually written, will be a philosophical book about this path of overcoming. Alice, embodied in science-fictional narrative, will be its embodiment.

The Myth of Singularity, Composing, 20/05/2014

It’s not exactly novel of me to say that there’s a common mood of human civilization that’s trying to grip conceptually the reality of humanity’s end. If you ask Slavoj Zizek or another Lacanian, he’d tell you that climate change denial wouldn’t be spoken so powerfully if we didn’t all basically know this might be the end. Contemporary human technology, which in my Ecophilosophy manuscript I call enormous industry, is absolutely unprecedented in human existence, and it’s reasonable to say that its effects may ruin us all.

If I were to make a bet on it, I’d say we’d go down to a combination of more extreme weather from climate change wrecking our infrastructure, toxic pollution of our ground water and other food sources reaching a tipping point, and the extinction of pollinating insects from pesticide use crashing our agricultural system. 

There’s been quite a lot of art, among other forms of speculation, produced about the end of Earth and the end of humanity. But the Johnny Depp film, Transcendence, doesn’t seem to be one of those at first glance. Instead, it’s a film about the dystopian aspects of the singularity, the conception of what would happen to humanity when artificial computer/machine intelligence surpasses the power of humans. In his own discussion of the film, my elder compatriot from the social epistemology group, Steve Fuller, describes its Faustian themes and its very Christian take on the singularity, the moment at which humanity transcends itself. But a link that Vaka Rangi sent me to a Washington Post article makes a slightly different point.

The third time Johnny Depp has become a vision of
humanity's sad dystopian end. Jarmusch and Gilliam did it
much better than this, though.

The singularity is another example of the end of the world, but it’s taken to be a positive one. Even if humanity doesn’t survive this process of its machines surpassing its own abilities, it will have created a legacy in those machines themselves, which would carry the human story forward. If we are our narratives, then the singularity, even the dystopian formulations that Transcendence, AI, and the Terminator franchise offer us, is ultimately a utopian vision. Like the dying grandfather of a huge, proliferating family, we continue indefinitely into sempiternity, beyond our mortal deaths.* 

* A note on nerdy philosophical terminology. Sempiternity refers to the continuation of the processes of flowing time indefinitely into the future. Think of the Latin semper, meaning always. Eternity is the kind of immortality that transcends time, an escape into changelessness that negates the reality of time itself. 

All these ideas are important to how I conceive of my Alice stories, the science-fictional imagining where I’m spinning my stories of an immortal android sage travelling the galaxy for thousands of years. There are two story ideas that I’ve thought of so far that would use this character. One has a 20-minutes-into-the-future setting, and the other is in a vastly distant timeframe, thousands of years from now, when humanity has proliferated across light-years, having lived for so long that they may eventually forget where Earth was.**

** I acknowledge my debt to Isaac Asimov’s late Foundation novels, even as the basic ideas with which I’m developing this story is a complete philosophical and narrative rebuke to his own ideas in those books. Asimov was the first serious science-fiction that I ever read, really. His legacy on me is inescapable, even as my own priorities as a writer are completely different.

The story about a sort-of-contemporary Alice will be told from the perspective of an all-too-human human, a colleague of Alice’s human partner and original commissioner. This bastard Dr Farkas will investigate Alice to the point of stalking her, obsessed with how his nebbishy colleague could have attracted such a beautiful, vibrant creature. The irony is that he didn’t attract her; he had her custom-built. 

Farkas will, because of his pretentious and erudite personality, think about such androids in the dystopian way that Transcendence conceives of the singularity. It is a promise that becomes a threat, the type of superiority that augurs our displacement and replacement. Of course, this plays into my repugnant narrator’s personality: part of his motivations for his sexist, exploitive behaviour is a hostility to women. There is fear involved in this vision, though fear isn’t the only factor. I don’t like designing characters with only one clear motive for their actions; it’s very unrealistic.

Farkas’ paranoid vision is inadequate for the same reason that Alice’s other story that I have in mind now takes place thousands of years in humanity’s future. I see nothing incompatible about the co-existence of humanity with artificial intelligence. There have been multiple forms of intelligent life on Earth before (and I believe this is still the case; the complexity of whale sonar signalling and the solemnity of elephant graveyards signify a lot to me). There will be again. Only human arrogance sees our ascendency as a throne with room for only one occupant at a time. 

Alice laughs at that profound arrogance in the same way I laugh at slapstick comedy.