/SFX/ CLOCK TICKING, FADE TO
/SFX/ DOGS BARKING IN DISTANCE
SAM: Like?
BECCA: Like.
SAM: (growls like a dog, sexy)
BECCA: Like?
SAM: Like.
/SFX/ DOGS BARKING IN DISTANCE
BECCA: Lick?
SAM: (giggles) Like.
BECCA: (howls like a dog)
Genres: Holiday Special
“Eat,” said MooninMama, “You have a long winter ahead.” LittlestOne turned her head away as MooninMama lifted the spoon of raspberry pie dripping with honey and caribou fat. LittlestOne was sleepy, too sleepy, for what she planned.
“I am already full,” said LittlestOne. Her stomach rumbled, giving away her lie.
MooninMama shrugged and set the plate away. It was beginning to get cold in the cave as the crackling fire burned down to embers. Soon it would be time to sleep, time to dream of spring, when they would awaken, shivering, and find that Santy Clawr had visited them.
(Continue Reading…)
Escape Artists is doing another donation drive, and giving you a load of holiday stories by Mur Lafferty in exchange for your support! Just like we did with the Alphabet Quartet, you can donate $50 or subscribe for $5 a month and get twelve audio stories! Five were previously published on Escape Pod (many of them rerecorded), two were published elsewhere, and five are completely new.
The Reason for the Season
MESSAGE REDACTED
Zuzu’s Bell
750,000 of Your Friends Liked This
Citytalkers
Santa in My Pocket
and six more!
And hey, did you donate to the Alphabet Quartet donation drive? Then these stories are automatically yours!
This time on Science Future: Various stepping-stones to human augmentation.
Science fiction inspires the world around us. It inspires us to create our future. So we look to the future of science to find our next fiction. We look to Science Future. The Science Future series presents the bleeding edge of scientific discovery from the viewpoint of the science fiction reader, discussing the influences science and science fiction have upon each other.
Last month we were treated to a story about human performance. EP318: The Prize Beyond Gold by Ian Creasey was about a human with incredible abilities surrounded by transhumans with mediocre abilities. It took place in a world where humans regularly modified their bodies beyond what we consider to be the human normal but focused on one human who hadn’t and might not and yet still had the chance to exceed all of them.
Yet the story was cheating in asense for the protagonist already had a capability that far exceeded that of the standard human template. So much so that he was under constant surveillance for the possibility of actual augmentation. The stealthiest augmentation for one competing in sports today is drugs. In the future, the definition of drugs might be expanded beyond simple chemical concoctions. Rohit Talwar, the founder of Fast Future Research, gave a talk at Intelligence Squared’s If conference about the possibility of digital drugs via direct manipulation of brain chemistry using transcranial magnetic stimulation. One could only assume this kind of manipulation would be extremely hard to detect. No chemical traces and nothing invasive or even ingested. Except that in The Prize our protagonist had his doppelgänger, which was an atomic scale simulation of himself. This copy could easily have been used as both a training and surveillance device.
It is hard to believe the precision needed to copy someone down to the atomic level could be easily done via external sensors and implants would obviously not be allowed for competitive reasons but they likely used a more advanced version of this system. Researchers led by the California Institute of Technology have created a series of microchips that can quickly and inexpensively assess immune function of a human from one single cell harvested from their body. With a device like that, occasionally sampling the body for a drop of blood and building a clone that could forecast the physical changes one might undergo after eating cake seems almost feasible.
The Gift focused more on the possibility of human enhancement. Changing a the body to give one abilities that they could never hope to achieve within a human genetic code. Two of the enhancements referenced were increasing intelligence and empathy. The brain is a complicated organ in charge of many things that we don’t understand and the idea of enhancing seems far off. Repairing it, less so. There is promising research in the field of cybernetics that helps repair brain damage. Created by Theodore Berger and his team at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering and researchers at Wake Forest University, a neural prosthesis is able to restore a rat’s ability to form long-term memories after they had been pharmacologically blocked. This is the first step to augmenting something like intelligence and empathy.
But what if dramatic enhancement was not really what someone like Michito was looking for? Well a discovery by Columbia University Medical Center researchers may lead to a better understanding how to fundamentally change the human body in subtle ways. They have shown that not all traits passed on to offspring without the use of DNA but instead naturally occurring viral agents called viRNAs which modify the creature’s RNA. RNA acts like DNA’s messenger in the body, relaying the code. So if the RNA is modified, then the DNA of the being is effectively bypassed. This kinda of science could be harnessed to create a slightly faster person or creating large-scale immunity against difference diseases.
Obviously research into human augmentation continues, be through a biological, technological, or chemical means. Stories like The Prize Beyond Gold will continue to give us reasons to achieve new and different levels of augmentation. Afterall, most of us will never be Michito but we could possibly be better than him.
There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means – either may do – the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier. – Benjamin Franklin
I sit beneath the dark green sky, overlooking the valley that has changed much over the years. What was once a stream has swelled into a river while, to the east, lush vegetation grows where I think there was once a shallow lake. I can’t remember definitely. The information is stored inside me, filed, itemized; I’m merely unsure how to access it. It will come to me. Later, when a random search, an unrelated thought, cracks open the proper conduits and a pulse of electricity resurrects the knowledge, unbidden.
Until then, I am content to wait.
Below my knee, the dented brass-coloured metal becomes the red of a tree trunk, substituting as a shin and foot. Like an antiquated peg-leg, like a stereotypical pira…pi…pi-
Pi is 3.1415926…
The organic substance must be replaced occasionally, but the concept has served satisfactorily for almost two hundred years. It was easy to jury-rig. Not so my mnemonic core. I lack the appropriate tools and diagnostic programs.
Yes. There had been a lake, teeming with the hoorah-thet fish.
I call them fish simply to provide a basis of comparative orientation. Fish only exist on earth, and this is not earth. Earth is a long, long way away.
(Continue Reading…)
Genres: Space
I hate to start out this way, but before we get to the reason I’m standing on this stool with a fez on my head, in the middle of the night, in front of a double-cal-king bed in a furniture store—which, yes, Officer, I swear I’ll confess I broke into illegally—before we get to any of that, there’s something I have to tell you. I know it’s awful, evil, and just plain wrong, but there’s no way around it, and you won’t understand anything else unless I say this right up front, so here goes:
Stephen was stoned.
And when I say “stoned” I mean he’d eaten enough brownies and smoked enough pot to put the economies of five or six minor countries into a severe, long-term deficit crisis.
It was okay. It helped him cope with the chemo. Mellowed him out. We didn’t have to fight over who got to hold the remote. He was better in bed too—not as neurotic.
Didn’t complain about my mustache when I kissed him. Suits me right for shacking up with a clean freak.
The weed was my revenge—well, the fact that the weed made it possible for him to eat. We had to grow our own—only way we could afford it, though I swear we probably spent as much on the electricity as we would have on the bud. Not a great climate for it, not in the winter.
So, the revenge part—that would be his appetite. When he smoked, it came back. It was the only time it came back. And there were only two things he could handle:
Brownies.
And chicken noodle soup. The really rancid stuff that came in a red and white can. (Continue Reading…)
In beginning, Josh think it funny to write review of book Bigfoot: I Not Dead using Bigfoot style of writing. However, realize will get annoying fast and not want annoy readers. So will stop.
While I was on vacation recently, a friend of mine gave me a copy of Graham Roumieu’s third Bigfoot book, Bigfoot: I Not Dead. At first blush, it looks like a kids’ book; it’s full of illustrations and the text is artfully hand-written. It’s also a very slim volume. But she and her husband both said it was hilarious, and it’s quite short, so I figured, why not?
After reading the book, I can say that I should find it funnier than I actually do. The style of humor is supposed to be right up my alley — Bigfoot is written as a self-deprecating, lonely guy who just wants to be understood, but occasionally gets angry about his life or the state of the world. I did laugh a few times, but mostly I just found it generally amusing in the way one finds the comedy club emcee’s jokes generally amusing.
As the book is so short, it doesn’t really justify one of my usual 1000-word reviews, but I do want to call attention to some of my favorite bits, including:
As for the pictures: I don’t really know how to review, critique, or even react to artwork*, but I’ll give it a shot, since after all this book is illustrated: the artwork is good, and appropriately primitive-looking — after all, Bigfoot is ostensibly the writer of this book. The pictures really fit well with the narrative. The ones containing blood aren’t quite as good, I think, perhaps because that part of the narrative gets away from Bigfoot’s “trying to fit in as a person” dialogue in favor of his “I’m a giant forest creature who can bash your head in with one blow” dialogue, but overall it works quite well.
Bigfoot: I Not Dead retails for $15 USD, according to the UPC on the back. I don’t think I could pay that much for a book this short, and I’m glad it was a gift. However, I do think the book is funny enough to be worth reading, especially if you enjoy juvenile humor and/or retellings of the lives of mythic creatures. If you can find it in the library, or you’re one of those “go into the bookstore, sit on the couch, and read a book” people, why not grab all three Bigfoot books? Most folks should be able to read them all in one sitting.
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Note to Parents: This is not a book for young children, despite its appearance, size, and font. It contains violence, adult language, and discussions of sex. I’d say it’s PG-13 at worst, though. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.
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* My grandfather, now that he’s retired, has taken up art — he paints, carves wood into really amazing carnival horses (especially for someone suffering from Parkinson’s in his dominant hand), and he’s learning to play the piano. When we visited his house during Thanksgiving weekend, he showed me everything he had made and was currently working on. I tried to make the appropriate appreciative noises, but I felt like I was being repetitive. I’m certainly proud of him, and I often talk about his work when grandparents come up in conversation, but when it comes to actually reacting to artwork for the sake of artwork, I often have difficulty. I suppose members of my family who don’t read genre fiction but are forced to read my writing are the same way.
The hero is cornered by the bad guys! Thinking quickly, she pulls out a brace of throwing knives. She flips the knives at two of her attackers. They go down, one clutching the knife embedded in his chest, the other lying still with a knife in his eye.
Stop doing this. Writers, moviemakers, everyone — just stop. Unless your hero is also wielding a magical get-out-of-physics free card, thrown knives don’t work that way.
One of the most important aspects of a weapon is its stopping power. That is, its ability to stop your attacker in his tracks and render him incapable of hurting you any more. Some weapons, such as pepper spray, do this by inflicting severe pain and blindness. Others, like a sword, inflict enough physical damage to make further attacks impossible. Thrown knives are usually shown to be the latter sort of weapon. In reality, thrown knives have negligible stopping power because they lack three crucial elements: Mass, velocity, and accuracy.
It takes quite a lot of force to push a knife through skin and muscle and bone. The force with which a weapon hits its target is determined by its mass and its velocity. Knives are relatively light — an alleged throwing knife that I borrowed from a friend weighs only 50 grams (~1.8 oz). The heaviest knife in my collection still only weighs 310 grams (~11 oz). Throwing spears are far heavier. This modern example weighs in at 1134 grams (2 lbs 8 oz). A person who uses a knife in hand-to-hand combat benefits from the ability to put their body weight behind each thrust. A thrown knife, on the other hand, has only its own weight to work with. When you see a thrown knife in a movie that has buried itself up to its hilt in the bad guy’s chest, what you are seeing a cliché with no basis in reality.
Light projectiles, such as bullets, have to rely on the other side of the equation: Velocity. The muzzle velocity of the popular 9 mm cartridge is usually around 400 m/s* (and this round is still not considered powerful enough for self-defense by many experts**). Compare this to a fastball, which travels at around 40 m/s — a speed that is still far above what can be achieved with a thrown knife. In fact, the fastest speed I could find for a thrown knife was only 16 m/s! The essential difference between the thrown knife and other ranged weapons is its lack of mechanical advantage. Bows use the energy stored in the curve of the limbs. Guns use chemical energy stored in gunpowder. Atlatls and slings are essentially big levers, multiplying the reach of the thrower’s arm and thus the speed with which the dart or stone is thrown. A throwing knife, in contrast, relies solely on the velocity that a human arm can give it.
Finally, there’s the question of accuracy. Even a light, slow projectile can be deadly if it hits its target in just the right way. Pointy projectiles — bullets, arrows, darts, and spears — travel pointy-end-first, making them aerodynamic. They often spin on their long axis for stability, like an American football. Knives, on the other hand, spin end-over-end. This creates comparatively large amounts of wind resistance. Thus, a thrown knife will lose what little velocity it has very quickly, making it next to useless at long range. The end-over-end spin also means that a knife spends very little time with its pointy end towards its target. Even a talented knife thrower is more likely to hit her target with the side or the butt of the knife rather than its point when the target is moving, as in a melee. Combine that with the knife’s limited range, and your hero would probably be better off walking up to the bad guy and stabbing him in the face.
My favorite depiction of how thrown knives could be used in hand-to-hand combat is in Steven Brust’s Taltos series. Our hero, Vlad, frequently gets himself into scrapes where he’s outnumbered by people who are bigger than he is. One of his tricks for winning these fights is to throw a knife. The flying piece of pointy steel makes his opponent flinch, giving him an opening. He does not expect the knife to hit the person point-first, and he certainly doesn’t count on the knife to kill anyone. Killing someone with a thrown knife is not impossible. It just isn’t something that a character can rely on in a life-or-death situation.***
Even with years of training, throwing a knife is still slightly less effective for self-defense than throwing a large rock (rocks are cheaper, heavier, and sometimes more aerodynamic). Please, the next time you’re arming your hero or her sidekicks for combat? Leave the throwing knives at home. They’re silly, they’re clichéd, and physics doesn’t work like that.
* This number is a rough approximation. Actual speeds will vary by load and barrel length. However, it’s still way faster than a knife.
** I will not indulge in the fast & light bullet vs. heavy & slow bullet debate here — .45 ACP still goes way faster than a knife.
*** Hunters who use throwing knives are usually after small game, like rabbits and squirrels. They also use very heavy knives.
I think most people can agree that the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963 was a watershed event in human history. It led to Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, and possibly a prolonged Cold War*. Had he not been shot in Dallas on that day, perhaps Vietnam might not have happened, or at least been smaller in scope. Perhaps the Civil Rights movement might have unfolded differently. Perhaps the Cold War would’ve escalated into a full-blown nuclear conflict between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
There’s really no way to know what would’ve happened, other than via alternate historical fiction. Which is exactly what Stephen King’s latest novel, 11/22/63, is all about.
That’s when Al drops the bomb on him: for the past four years, he’s been living in the hole, trying to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. He’s amassed a notebook full of research, one that he can no longer use because he knows he has very little time left. So Al implores Jake to take on the mission.
Jake, meanwhile, has plans of his own for the rabbit hole. On October 31, 1958, the father of one of his adult education students back in 2011 murdered an entire family, and Jake wants to set it right. That’s when he learns that the past is obdurate — it doesn’t want to be changed. It’ll throw up obstacles to try and stop anyone who does. And if it’s this hard to save one family — a minor part of the tapestry of history — how hard is it going to be to save the leader of the free world five years later?
In general, I’ve enjoyed what Stephen King novels I’ve read, with the exception of The Regulators and Desperation, which I think I may have been too young (at the time) to get the full experience out of. King has written the only book I’m too scared to read again — The Sun Dog, about a Polaroid camera that takes photos of a dog about to attack, and nothing else — and, clearly, he knows his craft well enough to keep putting out bestsellers that are later adapted into TV shows and films. I did enjoy 11/22/63, despite its slow start; clearly the novel was exhaustively researched, and although it does have the requisite Maine scenes, there are a lot of other set-pieces across the eastern half of the U.S. as well. In the past, Jake travels to two towns in Maine, along the eastern seaboard, southwest Florida, and finally to Texas where Oswald is going to shoot Kennedy.
But the book isn’t just about that. Even if Jake does have a mission which will end on November 22, 1963, when he — he hopes — stops Oswald from committing murder, he can’t spend the entire intervening time just doing nothing. I mean, I get bored on a Sunday afternoon if there’s no football on TV, and that’s in 2011 when there’s plenty of other things to do. Eventually, after setting right some wrongs, Jake settles in a small town in Texas — the first truly-friendly place he’s found since coming to the past — and takes up his old mantle as an English teacher.
That, I think, is where the story starts to get good. It more-or-less ceases to be about Oswald and starts being about Jake, and how he conducts his life in the past. And what he learns is that, be it 1961 or 2011, life still goes on. People go to school, go to work, and fall in love, just like in his own time.
On Star Trek, time travel is often used to right a wrong or fix a mistake, or even just to do research into the past. The thing about Star Trek is that, at the end of the episode (or movie), everything wraps up in a neat little bow. Lieutenant Christopher is returned to his fighter jet, the whales save earth, Captain Sisko isn’t killed in an engineering accident, and Harry doesn’t miscalculate and kill the entire Voyager crew. 11/22/63 shows us that that’s not exactly the case — which, I suppose, is what happens with a lot of alternate history and time travel fiction. King reminds us often that the past does not want to be changed, and it will fight any way it can.
And it fights Jake pretty hard, even going so far as to exact revenge upon him for what he does.
I found 11/22/63 to be somewhat of a departure from the King fiction I’ve read in the past — there are no monsters, no supernatural forces, no blood-showers at prom**. Just a rabbit hole in the stock-room of a diner that, when you walk through it, takes you to September 9, 1958 and allows you to change history. The rest of the novel is almost pure historical fiction — a man of today experiencing the past first-hand. It speaks to King’s exhaustive research on the subject, as well as his storytelling skill, that someone like me (whose favorite era of American history is 1875-1930) can pick it up and become immersed in it almost immediately — it’s believable, relatable, and damn interesting.
According to Wikipedia, 11/22/63 was released at the beginning of November 2011 and quickly became a bestseller. I can certainly see why. It’s a doorstop all right, but it’s a doorstop you won’t want to put down. I definitely recommend it.
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Note to Parents: This is a Stephen King novel. It contains explicit sex and explicit violence, as well as adult language. I don’t think the sex is anything today’s older teens can’t handle, but as for the violence… just remember that King has been doing this for a long time and, unlike in an R-rated film with a fight sequence, King is fond of taking away all hope a character has of escaping unscathed… and then having someone beat the crap out of him. Keep that in mind. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.
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* I wasn’t a history major, but according to the book, JFK was trying to end the Cold War.
** That’s what happens in Carrie, right? I’ve never read it, or seen the film. Sorry.
You would think that after all the years I’ve spent schlepping cargoes around the galaxy I’d have learned not to get involved with the locals, especially when they’re not humans. You would think.
A Yanuleen sat down across the table from me in a bar at the edge of the landing field outside of Yanult’s largest city. Yanuleen are furry little folk, bipedal and about a meter tall with six multi-jointed arms poking out at odd intervals around their middles. This one blinked beady, black eyes at me, “Greetings Sentient Being.”
“Uh, greetings.”
“Isn’t it a glorious piece?” My new buddy pointed an arm at the artwork on display in the middle of the bar.
Yanuleen are a bit nuts for that type of thing. They have artwork, mainly sculpture, everywhere, even in a bar. To me it just looked like a three-meter tall bundle of twigs with pieces of broken pottery tossed in at random.
“Very nice.” Being in a foul mood, I took a drink and stared at the Yanuleen.
“Here is being Klonoon.” He pointed all six arms at himself, in the manner of his kind. “Might here also being Captain Anne Katya Shim, who is having a cargo of entertainment modules impounded by the Port Authority?”
(Continue Reading…)