We evolved through the forces of nature acting on us.  Whether you believe evolution is about divine choice, the natural interplay of predator and prey, or maybe some combination, we have not been the primary actor own evolution. Perhaps we lost our full coat of hair when we learned to take shelter, but the decision we made was to take shelter and the loss of hair was an unintended consequence.

Now, we are poised at the edge of a cliff with the tools to become the force of our own evolution.  I believe that some of us will fall off of that cliff, plummeting to our own deaths, and maybe taking others with us.  And some will fly.

In THE SILVER SHIP AND THE SEA, I pit two civilizations against each other.  One wants to “stay human” and the other embraces both lasting and short-term change. 

In today’s society, we are having the same argument, only with ourselves.  For example, look at the stem cell battle.  Yes, its relevance for genetic engineering is tainted by the right to life issues that surround work on embryos.  But beyond both sides of that argument, stem cell research is about using genetic tools to fix disease.  We already test in utero for certain diseases, and often abort damaged fetuses.  While we aren’t yet publicly tinkering with creating humans that have different traits (smarter, stronger, faster, prettier, healthier), we are making glow in the dark fish for pets.   We are cloning cows and modifying corn and lawn grass.

Active political groups in many countries argue against all forms of genetically modified organisms, and influential people have written about the dangers of playing with the genome.

There is an entire movement of people that associate themselves with the words transhuman and posthuman.  Transhumanism is the point where we have seriously changed ourselves, but remain recognizable.  It assumes we’ve altered our species through a combination of genetic engineering, machine augmentation, nanotechnology, and other sciences.  To be post-human is to be unrecognizable, perhaps uploaded and bodiless.  While Larry Niven and I have written together about uploaded beings, in this series, I’m only addressing changed humans, or transhumans.

In the SILVER SHIP AND THE SEA, I explore the ways that a world containing both classic and augmented humans breeds new opportunities for fear and prejudice.  If we had trouble with different colors of skin (and in some ways, still do), how much more trouble will completely different subspecies of humans cause us?  In READING THE WIND, out July 22^nd, I also begin to look at what a world full of changed humans might be like. 

Below are some interesting links if you want to explore this further.  As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

Website marketing glow in the dark fish:  http://www.glofish.com

Campaign against GMO’s: http://www.foei.org/en/campaigns/gmo

Reference material on the word posthuman: http://www.reference.com/search?r=13&q=Post%20human

Excellent article at Ray Kurzweil’s KurzweilAI site that explores posthumanism: http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0611.html?printable=1

Some design ideas:  http://www.natasha.cc/primo.htm

Other bits Cory said in Q & A that resonated for me:

That there is a myth about young adults only wanting to read about young adults.  Since I’m writing a series that is doing well in the YA market even though it’s sold as adult fiction (and I think it is both), that was a nice reminder.  When I was a kid, I read about Valentine Michael Smith and Jubal Harshaw, about Gil the Arm, about Merlin (everything from Mary Stewart to Mallory, from T.H. White to Marion Zimmer Bradley).  Almost everything I read was about adults.  In fact, by the time I was ten or so, I though Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were dorks.  A nice reminder, since for some reason I was worrying about it.

Cory also mentioned (I think quoting someone else) that obscurity is the enemy of the writer.  So support for blogging!

I took the bus over, and this time there was no handy eastsider to hitchhike back with.  At the bus stop, a long-haired young main with a red ponytail was juggling a red ball.  Juggling might not even be the right word - it ran up and down his arm and flitted through his fingers and paused on the back of his palms.  It turns out he’s just moved here from New Orleans, he likes Seattle, and he has been practicing the red ball thing for a year, and has high ambitions of doing more with it.  I’m not sure what - but who cares?  I almost never have random conversations with strangers any more.  It was a nice five minute interlude.

I got to sign my first mass-market copy of THE SILVER SHIP AND THE SEA, which came out July 1, and which I finally actually saw and held in my hands yesterday, where I paid full price for a copy at my local Borders.  Tor did a nice job - it’s got shiny letters, the cover is a nicely muted version of the hardcopy cover, and the book design is nice.  The print is too small for my old eyes, which means I put too many words in the book.

 I will be reading at the University Bookstore with Jay Lake on July 24th.

We were born wild.  Our environment helped to shape us.  And now, in large part, we are shaping it.  Much of the world is now cultivated land.  Some is literally cultivated:  farms and fields.  Some is protected and preserved:  refuges and national parks.  Very little of our land simply “is.”  It was big news a few months ago that a civilization without much outside contact was sighted in the Amazon jungle.

There is a blue heron rookery in Kenmore, just north of us.  It is completely fenced in, apparently the only way to keep the bird’s nests safe, even though they are clustered high and huge in three tall trees. Last fall, I participated in the bizarre exercise of weeding a local park.  Yes, it makes sense to remove invasive plants so native plants can thrive.  Yes, in fact, we have to do it, or lose the park trees to English Ivy.   But really, think about it.  We have progressed to the point that we have to weed our wild places.

I live in a city.   I’m pretty sure all of the land is owned by homeowners, business, or the government.  It all needs some level or another of human attention to thrive.  Yes, if we all died off, nature would find a way to prevail, but that’s not my point here.  We’ve taken on the job of caring for the almost all of the garden.

In THE SILVER SHIP AND THE SEA, and even more so in READING THE WIND, two human cultures clash.  One lives on a wild world, and refuses to change itself.  It doesn’t attempt to control much of the world, either.  In fact, for the original settlers, it is a struggle even to survive.  They are beset by chaos and wildness which they have little control over.  Trip vine and thorn; paw and jaw and sharp claw. 

And then, a competing claim is made by the altered, people happy to change themselves, and intent on changing the world of Fremont.  These same people come from Silver’s Home, where all things are controlled and designed.  Where humans and data interact almost seamlessly and kitchen gardens can have different ecosystems than the back yard down to humidity and temperature. 

We are somewhere on the pendulum between these two societies.  I believe we have changed Earth so it is more like Silver’s Home than like Fremont.  We have intervened so much, we will have to continue to intervene to manage the climate and the flora and the fauna and to keep Earth someplace we can call home.  What do you think?

Please feel free to comment, and also to leave your ideas for future blog post topics.

Sometimes science fiction is just a good story.   And all of the best science fiction is a good story, even if it’s also more.  Since I’m a futurist, the things I talk about and think about end up in my books, some on purpose, and some by accident.  For example, as I was writing THE SILVER SHIP AND THE SEA, the Iraq war was just being contemplated, and eventually beginning.  The book acquired a much stronger message about the evils of war than it probably would have if it weren’t being written next to real-world war.

I hope these blog posts will be conversational and that readers and friends will comment on them.  I plan to put out a post every Sunday starting on July 6th.  Topics will be things like living on a wild world versus a world that is largely created and managed by people, and how taking charge of our own evolution through genetic engineering might change us. 

I’m also interested in writing about topics that interest readers.  Please feel free to email me (use the contact button on this blog) or post ideas here in the comments.  While I may also choose to answer plot or character questions, I’m really looking for questions about the science or, more exactly, the social implications of the science in this book.  I use nanotechnology and genetic engineering and other tools in the books.  Since these stories happen far in our future, the science doesn’t match our real science today, although I tried to keep it plausibly linked.  I’m fascinated by how the science we are experimenting with today could change us as humans in the future, and that’s what I tried to write about.  As well about the fate of six genetically engineered kids.

I hope you enjoy this series of posts, and the books. 

By the way - he’s pretty good at titles, too.  I tend to remember his titles word for word.

So the room is half full.  We’re sitting in theatre-style seats, and on the stage - lit for video - are the diminutive and energetic super-librarian Nancy Pearl and the tall slender writer.  Mr Gibson speaks in a slow drawl, with what is either an accent or a ghost of a lisp, and his words are carefully chosen.  You can see he’s thinking.

A few of the high points (summarized, so my apologies if I don’t get it right):

As he’s talking about history, he mentions that sf did so well because at one time it was beneath contempt.  “Eugene McCarthy didn’t know what sci fi was saying about him.”

Nancy asked if he wrote to make sense of the world, and he said he writes to find the questions, not the answers.

In line with a comment we often make over at Futurist.com, Nancy asked “Does the present change the past?”  and Mr. Gibson answered that it does - that as we learn more about history, as we dig further, we learn more about the past.  Our view of it changes, which changes us. 

Two other concepts of interest:  A novel where the novelist is in complete control of his or her characters is probably boring, and the most interesting contemporary science fiction is science fiction that could not have been written a decade ago.

You should be able to stream this for yourself on the Seattle Channel. 

In this case, we read George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Throne’s, Molly Gloss’s Hearts of Horses, and Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth.  First off, I liked all of these.   So what did I learn?

In the context I’m using, setting is description of place, and also the details of the world - so it’s what one traditionally thinks of as setting as well as information.  That works with these three books since two of them are historical and one is fantasy:  none of them is set in a place we recognize from our day to day life.  If I presume most of you are science fiction writers and readers, you’ll recognize that situation.  Science fiction is seldom set in a place and time we’re comfortable with.

Oddly, the best use of setting and world building for me was Molly’s work on Hearts of Horses.  It’s set in historical Oregon, sort at the end of the Wild West and during the world war.  She gets extra kudos for her world-building because it was so sure, so invisible, and yet so always present.  Here is a small quote from her work that I loved.  “Snow began to fall out of the darkness that night and fell straight down all the early hours of the morning, and by daybreak it stood about a half a foot deep everywhere in the lower valley, though the sky then cleared off and a pale sun lit up the newborn world.”  I’m there.  Are you?  The whole book is infused that much deftness.  Small details, confident prose that shows off the setting and not itself.

George R.R. Martin’s work is as good.  It’s much showier — almost overwritten, but a good fit for his series.  I’ve already posted on this one in detail.   A simple setting comment like the Gloss above (and from the book I’m currently on having had to keep going with the series once I started it and even though I’ve read it before - if I was discussing hooks we’d have a book on them from this series).  Anyway, “The walls were equal parts stone and soil, with huge white roots twisting through them like a thousand slow pale snakes.”  Now, that does the job, right?  And that’s a single sentence buried in a paragraph.  Read it out loud and hear the sound of the line.

Follet’s work is about cathedrals, and the people who built them long ago, in the days when masons were learning to make more advanced arches.  I expected a lot of setting.  Especially since the book is almost a thousand pages long.  Yet this was the sparsest on setting of the three.  What’s there is done well, but Follet’s strengths as a storyteller are more in character and situation in this book.

It’s an industry that matters - read it online or get ink on your fingers.  But we need a free press, and while the blogosphere is a grand part of that, we need press that has some funding and staff as well.  Think of the blogs as our militia and our outcriers and the papers as the army.  Try to find one with independent ownership and a good investigative staff.  The Seattle Times comes to mind.  But then, it’s my own local.  There are surely other good ones out there.

We’re living in an age of science fiction coming true.  Read the paper, and you’ll find it all around you.  A few snips from today’s:

• “A Bellevue vascular surgeon dreamed up a vest that thumps and prods you when you’re playing video games.”  Put a vest like that on a soldier in the real world. 
• “Biotech and pharmaceutical industries … argue that anything short of financial capital punishment..”  Financial capital punishment.  That’s a term to re-use, and the article is lovely support for the scifi trope that big business in bad. 
• “A defective tire-valve stem made in China killed a Forida driver.”  Now make that designed to fail and stop America from driving for two weeks.  Or , if you write humor well, make it hysteria with no substance, whipped up by media, and stop America from driving for two weeks. 
• “The US military has disputed claims of detainee abuse, citing paperwork filled out by the [abusing] soldiers.”  Any military sci fi story can use that.  Or any contemporary military story.  Or a contemporary literary fiction piece about a detainee’s family. 

People who ask where writer’s get their ideas probably don’t read the paper.

The paper doesn’t make you wait until they’re good and ready to read the headline-teaser story.  I refuse to WATCH news short of a major disaster or something else I really need the visual footage for.

My last reason for the day?  I get exposed to news I wouldn’t hunt down on my usual trips through the world.  I listen to NPR and read mostly liberal and writing blogs.  I tend to sort for progressing views, and like libertarian and peace-loving and democratic viewpoints.  It’s good to get exposed to all sides of an issue.  How else are you going to make your villains seem real?

So I’m off to go read today’s paper.

My job for the group this time is to analyze setting, which is a treat for this book.  I’ll blog a few lessons learned from that exercise after we meet this weekend.  But I noticed I really, really couldn’t put these books down even though I’m not reading them for the first time (except A FEAST OF CROWS, which I still haven’t read - I put that off until I found time to read these things all again, since there as such an awful gap between release dates in the series at that point - side lesson:  don’t do that to your readers).

One strength of these books is the opening of every chapter.  It’s like Darragh’s voice in the back of my head saying “See?  See?”  I’ll reproduce a few below for illustration:

“The courtyard rang to the sounds of swords.” - sound, place

“Through the high narrow windows of the red keep’s cavernous throne room, the light of sunset spilled across the floor, laying dark red stripes gainst the walls where the heads of dragons had once hung.”  - sight, place, mood

“The woods were full of whispers.  Moonlight winked on the tumbling waters of the stream below as it wound its rocky way along the floor of the valley.  Beneath the tress, warhorses whickered softly…”  Sound, sight, mood again.

My personal favorite from this book:

“The heart was steaming in the cool, evening air when Khal Drogo set it before her, raw and bloody.” - how could you NOT read forward after that?

Darragh was right to chastise me.  At that time, I was opening my chapters with things like catching the reader up - “For the last two days…” I’m better now, but not yet as good as George R.R. Martin, for sure.  But if you have a few of those books laying about, pick one up and read the beginning of every chapter.  Pretty impressive.