Author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie
Remember how I always wanted to write a specfic story about the tax code? That story, “You’ll Always Have the Burden With You,” has been sold to Dagan Books for the IN SITU anthology.
Now this isn’t a specfic story involving the tax code PLUS Lisp programming, which I have yet to write. But I’m halfway to completing my goal now.
Suppose we do the following:
Let A = MOVE LEFT 1 UNIT; Let C = MOVE DOWN 1 UNIT; Let G = MOVE RIGHT 1 UNIT; Let T = MOVE UP 1 UNIT;
Then we can map any genome into a random walk, a kind of Etch A Sketch with DNA as the commands. The result might be interesting as a sort of message/art.
Here are a few examples.
Bacteriophage MS2, a virus.
Bacteriophage Φ-X174, another virus.
A small section of the genome of Canis lupus familiaris, the dog.
Seems like a promising premise for a story…
The quick-and-dirty script I hacked up for drawing these can be found here.
My first posthumanist story, “Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer,” has just been sold to F&SF. I’m really excited.
And now I’m working on a prequel for it.
It really helps when you have good first readers who can see what’s wrong with your drafts and give helpful suggestions. Couldn’t have done this without Lisa, my wife, and Erica Naone, my writing partner.
I’ve been thinking for years about writing a specfic story involving the tax code. I’ve also been thinking for years about writing a story involving pneumatic tube transport.
And now I’ve done both. (No, the PTT story is not really about “an Internet made of tubes” — though if you agree that the railroad was the Victorian Internet, then the analogy may apply to my story as well.)
Now we’ll see if I can get them published.
Back in August, Shelly Li and I wrote a short story together (which you’ll see soon) that conjectured about the existence of life on the “fourth planet orbiting Gliese 581”).
From Space.com, today:
Unlike Gliese 581c, the newfound planet Gliese 581g looks much more hospitable. It is orbiting within the habitable zone of its parent star.
Liquid water could exist on some part of the planet’s surface, which seems to have an average temperature between minus 24 and minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 31 to minus 12 degrees Celsius). Gliese 581g completes an orbit every 37 days or so.
Gliese 581g is the fourth planet around the star.
Sometimes we get it right :)
I don’t think much of scifi is about “predicting the future” at all. A great deal of scifi is really fantasy, just with equations instead of incantations. They are still stories about our world and us.
But one bit of modern scifi, posthumanist or transhumanist scifi, does engage in what I think of as pretty serious future prediction. (I personally call this genre “awesome scifi” because that’s kind of how the prose and technology come across.)
I doubt that writers in this tradition will have any better luck in getting the future right than Jules Verne or the Golden Age writers, but they are thinking seriously about the implications of cutting-edge engineering for us, and their conclusions are interesting.
I myself have not had much luck with writing in this genre — well, we’ll see. I do have one thing making the rounds now…
Sometimes the myopia of contemporary politics makes you forget how quickly technology itself can change the terms of the debate and what people think are worth fighting over. This really is powerful stuff.