Seeds of Change: sf anthology of stories confronting important social issues
John Joseph Adams sez,
Book's homepage, Seeds of Change on AmazonI've just launched the website for my new anthology, Seeds of Change. The stories aim to confront some of the pivotal issues facing our society today, such as racism, global warming, peak oil, technological advancement, and political revolution. It features original fiction from Tobias S. Buckell, Ken MacLeod, and Jay Lake, among others.
You can read the complete text of three of the anthology's nine stories on the website, in HTML, PDF, or Mobipocket format. There are excerpts available of the remaining six stories.
Other bonus features include interviews with the authors and further reading lists for people who'd like to learn more about the issues discussed in the stories. And finally, the site also features a book trailer which features a short dramatized excerpt of each story, along with original musical score (which you can also download as an instrumental MP3 track).
It's available in the usual online bookstores as well as in ebook format for Kindle, Sony Reader, and Mobipocket, and is available in all the usual formats from Fictionwise.
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Very cool.
I've been looking for some more hopeful science fiction after reading "Last Contact" by Stephen Baxter.
Apocalypses can be fun to visit, but I don't want to live there.
As long as the fiction is possitive, and allows for technology to answer many of our current problems, then I'd be cool with it. Possitive thinking gets you possitive results. Stinkin thinkin gets you nothin.
Gee, Jeff, can't stand it when people harsh your mellow? Gulliver's Travels was a good example of fantasy melded with social criticism. Wasn't too positive, but it certainly was a good read. Still, to each his own.
Anyhow, I've read the book, and I thought it was excellent. Lots of good stories on actual social issues, not just escapist fun stuff.
You know, when I finally got around to reading Down and Out a few years ago I didn't realize Cory would end up being such an influential guy.
I read Little Brother last week, and this week I got new laptops for my middle school kids and dropped a copy of the PDF on it for them. Next are bootable USB drives with Incognito and BackTrack Linux.
Thanks for standing up for what's right, and doing it in a way that matters, Cory.
and allows for technology to answer many of our current problems
There's your main problem right there. Technology doesn't solve problems. In fact, the issues listed above do not have any possible tech fix. Hopefully the authors realize that and don't resort to such tired SF clichés.
Noen, I think that's really the point of hard sf, or even softer: fixing problems or at least trying to with the help of technology. As tired as that may seem, that's pretty much the grist of it. Perhaps you think stone knives and bear skins would work better?
@#6: I think Iain Banks would disagree with you.
Most well known critics and historians of SF would disagree.
Take a good look at the recent Hugo winners and nominees, and see how many can get put in the category of "fixing problems or at least trying to with the help of technology". Stross's "Halting State" comes closest, but really, it's not about "fixing problems", it's about a bank heist.
Or the Nebula awards for that matter.
I think that's really the point of hard sf, or even softer: fixing problems or at least trying to with the help of technology.
1. Some problems can be fixed with technological solutions. But the ones listed above do not.
2. Worse, it is the reliance on technology which is itself a problem and does not have any possible tech "fix". Tools become crutches.
3. I am hoping that the stories do not have the giddy, gee whiz science approach that is, as I said, such a tired SF cliché.
"Technology doesn't solve problems."
I'm sure there are several hundreds of million people who weren't afflicted with smallpox or polio this century who'd disagree rather vehemently with you.
Also: how do you propose to feed 8 billion people (or even 800 million) without agriculture (itself a technology)?
How's that purified water in your tap working out for you?
Do you just shit in the garden? Sanitation "not fixing your problems?"
Oh my gosh...Cory and I agree on this. This is so nice. If Down and Out isn't about the evolution of the species via trans-humanist-post-scarcity utopian technology, I don't know what is.
I’m sorry, but I had an editor at Asimov’s tell me as much. You want me to give you his name so you can tell him in public that he's wrong? The futures problems are often caused by some form of technological hubris or another. That’s the plot device. The next step is to deal with it and within that frame work you build your story. Halting State is not about defeatism. I've read it and it's about dealing with security. Ian M. Banks would not disagree at all! Yes, technology causes problems, but the general core values of Banks’ universe (Culture) is that technology is the only path that takes organic life forward in evolution. That path can be combined with human sensibilities and sensitivities, but it’s a path of technology nonetheless. Tell me one book that has it all end horribly with out any redemption or salvation through man’s ingenuity and most-probable use of technology?
Cory: If I didn't already know that John Joseph Adams is quite a bit younger than I am, his use of that title would be a tipoff. May it be luckier this time around.
Jeff @2:
"Positive" just means "I liked the way the plot came out," or (at some houses) "I liked the way the characters talk tough about the intersection of engineering and social issues." It has no necessary relationship to the quality of the story.Since technology is already addressing a great many of our current problems, I have to ask what you mean by that.Recent advances in cold fusion, Lysenkoist biology, and marketing-driven R&D certainly bear that out.I get the impression that there's something out there in the literature that you're opposed to. What is it?
Noen, shame on you. You're letting your irritation with Jeff betray you into spouting tired cliches from bad old SF criticism. Worse, you're spouting tired old cliches about the ineffectuality of technology in a comment thread on a weblog. Getting down to specifics:
It does too. Sometimes it creates other problems, but it fixes what it fixes. We're no longer semi-starved in the early spring, when the winter stores have run low but the new crops aren't bearing yet. Shoe technology has done wonders for sore feet. The modern office really is starting to become paperless. There's a long list of medical problems, from tetanus to smallpox to Rh-factor incompatibility, that simply aren't problems for anyone with access to modern medicine. Dentistry has gotten noticeably better over the last couple of decades. So has access to reading material. Childbirth is no longer automatically assumed to be life-threatening. Sex is no longer automatically assumed to result in pregnancy. Cellphones solve a vast number of problems. Et cetera et cetera et cetera.And don't tell me that technology just fixes the symptoms, not the big underlying issues. One of the biggest issues we have is that Homo sapiens has always outbred the available resources. That fact has shaped our lives since the Pleistocene. The development of birth control actually changes one of the basic dynamics of human society. All we have now are implementation problems.
You don't know that! The oddest things can have a big impact on previously intractable problems.Don't be such a snot. Ken MacLeod, Toby Buckell, and Jay Lake do not write hackneyed old cliches. (Okay, sometimes Ken MacLeod does; but it's on purpose, and he does seriously weird things with them.)Noen, that is high-grade manure, and you know it. We are a technology-using species. Appropriate technology is still technology. Green engineering is still engineering. Unless you want to abjure technology, and instead try to achieve transcendence by sitting around naked and thinking about it real hard, you're going to be using that "crutch" just as much as anyone else.See this gauntlet? I'm throwing it down. Name me some of this recent "giddy, gee-whiz" science fiction that's such a cliche. Short fiction, long fiction, I don't care, as long as it was commercially published more recently than the beginning of John Joseph Adams's career.Moderator (TNH),
I have a dislike of dystopian futures as a setting, generally. I love Dune, but I don’t see that as dystopian, since I only ever really related to the Ixians. I like Greg Egan's answers to many of our problems.
I think you would have been massively impressed with the lightening show I saw over Green Bay a few nights back (if Tesla coils are cool). It was like fire works moving slowly over the dark bay, but the reflections off the water where so bright they illuminated the whole underside of the storm clouds and the inky water spout that was forming. Very creepy water tornado at night! And the thunder sounded out against the hard surface of the Niagara Escarpment and echoed like kettle drums for nearly an hour. Flash and boom…boom…boom… Storm fans everywhere would have been impressed.
Jeff: Oooh. I would have loved it.
I'll swap you for one I saw while driving from El Paso to Tucson one evening, around or just past sunset. There were ranges of hills or small mountains some distance away, running parallel on both sides of the highway, and long lines of thunderheads were perched on top of them. The sky was clear and still overhead, nearly dark. The rows of thunderheads, which were still faintly gold-pink from the last of the high-angle sunset, were randomly lighting up with silent flashes of internal lightning, mile after mile, as the last daylight faded.
Dystopias: In general, we dislike them when they don't work for us, or when their dystopianness seems artificial, insistent, or forced. When they don't bother us, we read them as a realistic take on the natural cussedness of creation. It's like cliches: if they don't bother us, they aren't cliches, no matter how many times we've seen them before.
If I had to live in some piece of futuristic scientifictional worldbuilding, I think I'd pick James White's Sector General series.
Noen, shame on you. You're letting your irritation with Jeff betray you into spouting tired cliches from bad old SF criticism.
You're probably correct about that a little bit but to be honest I'm unfamiliar with "bad old SF criticism". I've never read such criticism or participated in any such discussions. I'm not saying that all SF is bad, just that some is.
What did I say? I said: "Some problems can be fixed with technological solutions. But the ones listed above [can] not." The problems listed by you and Cory are trivial problems, racism is not. I would say the list of problems above are intractable problems that have no easy tech fix or no tech fix at all. And I know for an absolute fact that the problem of over reliance on technology has no possible technological fix what so ever.
Unless you want to abjure technology
I don't, I never said that. This is yet again that same obstacle that I keep running into. It's that concrete, black or white thinking that keeps popping up. I don't think that way and the world doesn't work that way. How do I get around this? You may feel I'm a troll Theresa, I'm not (though I've made plenty of mistakes). I really have a hard time effectively communicating where I'm coming from. Part of it is probably me, but not all. A lot of times it feels to me like all I have to do is to say something and then people run around with their hair on fire.
Here is how it looks to me, I have this model of the world in my head (everyone does) that says that everything comes in shades of gray, everything exists on a dialectic. But everyone else, it would appear to me, thinks in terms of black or white, what I (and many others) call stinkin' thinkin'. So when I say something that seems obvious to me, like "technology cannot solve our most important problems", everyone goes "Oh my god you want us to all live in caves!!!"
When I say that technology doesn't solve most problems I of course don't mean that we should go back to being hunter gatherers (to be honest though, they were probably happier). How can you possibly think I meant that?
Technology simply cannot solve social or political problems such as racism or other systemic societal issues. These are human problems that require human solutions. At most technology can delay the need to address them or paper over the real conflict until it crops up at a later time. But in the mean time the problem has only deepened and the tech fix has most likely generated additional problems of it's own. Tht's nt slvng thngs, tht's ftshsm.
Stories however can suggest solutions, frame issues or at least raise consciousness about something and thereby do valuable things. The science in that fiction can figure prominently, or not, but it will never in and of itself solve any problem. People do that, not science.
See this gauntlet? I'm throwing it down. Name me some of this recent "giddy, gee-whiz" science fiction that's such a cliche.
Sure thing, I've had a chance to read "The Future by Degrees" by Jay Lake. It's exactly the kind of magical thinking that I was talking about. Wave the magic wand of SCIENCE and poof, all our problems disappear. First, the solution is no solution at all. Global warming isn't going to be solved by any tech fix. Not even the magic of room temp superconducting cloth. It's coming no matter what. At best, real world technology will help us to mitigate the worst of it but that boulder is rolling downhill and there is nothing in the world that will stop it. Second, it reads like adolescent fiction to me. Babes and guns and explosions and the geek saves the world. Cliché much? Oh ya, big time.
If I had to live in some piece of futuristic scientifictional worldbuilding
I don't want to live in anyone's ideal world. There is a word for fantasy made real. It's called nightmare.
Smallpox vaccination, sanitation and agriculture are trivial?
I'd love to see you get by without 'em.
Moderator (TNH), that was a wonderful image, decribed very nicely. Michigan has had some fastastically showy storms this season.
Global warming isn't going to be solved by any tech fix.
I think your issue is one of definition.
There isn't going to be a magic box, unveiled by Al Gore at a press conference that sucks up toxins and spits out clean fuel. Sadly.
But technological advances will give us cleaner energy sources, help us create sustainable agriculture and allow us to design better communities that are more in line with the environment.
It's not a single cure-all, doesn't work like that. But tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, MILLIONS of little fixes to a very big problem.
Of course behavior change is part of that, but technology makes that transition easier on a large scale.
@#16: Noen didn't say that there are no problems that technology can solve, but there are some problems that technology can't solve. Your examples are just a straw-man distraction. How about responding to Noen's example: racism? How is technology going to fix that, short of inventing some tool to blind everyone, or turn every one the same color a la 'The Lathe of Heaven'?
I think part of the problem is that people who adhere to a particular mind-set, whether it's the sci-fi fan's 'the world would be a better place if we had the right technology', or a Christian's dogma, believe that they have the solution to the world's problems. They are generally naive and deluded.
"We're pretty down on utopian thinking around here, preferring a more fiasco-by-fiasco approach to perfection." -- Stewart Brand, The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1971.
@19:
I know you addressed this to Cory, but I'd like to take a stab at it.
Racism: Simple answer, communication technology. Start with radio. Edward R. Murrow made common cause between the people being blitzed in London and America by putting his microphone to the street and letting Americans hear the calm, orderly footsteps, smashing Nazi propaganda of a panicked Britain.
Then television. From entertainment breaking down barriers, to news events shown to millions (MLKs speeches, the water-cannons turned on protestors at selma, Watts riots) it became harder and harder to hide your head in the sand and ignore people who happened to be of a different color.
The internet, billions of people connecting around the world. The "other" is relative when you can video conference with someone in Chile. Look at Xeni's videoblogs from Latin America, showing the human face of people thousands of miles away.
Communications technology lets us connect and makes tribal barriers less and less distinct. 500 years ago you might never leave the 10 miles around your village, 200 years ago, you might never leave your state. 100 years ago, you might never leave your nation. Now I'm talking to you from Chicago. Where are you?
Are there drawbacks, of course, but technology can bring us together, show us our commonalities, our shared nature, in wonderful ways.
I confess, I'm an eternal optimist. But I'd rather be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right.
Yep, we're all measurably better off in a myriad of ways with technology, but that does not, in any way mean the the only science fiction of quality has to present solving problems with technology as a plot.
Technology is wonderful. I love living in the future, but if all my SF was nothing but optimistic problem solving via technology, I'd dump the genre in a flash.
Having actually read the Seeds Of Change anthology, I can say that one of my favorite stories in it was Ted Kosmatka's "N-Words" which was about cloning, Neanderthals, and racism. It was not a story where technology saved the day. The day was not even save. It wasn't in danger in the first place.
If I were to describe the overriding theme of the book, it would be that real positive change does not come about unless you make hard, sometimes unpopular choices, that there's a cost, but heroic people are the ones who make it. This is something on a macro or a micro scale.
There's also a good deal of social criticism in the book, which is a welcome change.
MGFarrelly @21 is right. Technology really has put a dent in racism.
The social taboo against dyeing your hair collapsed right around the time undetectable hair dyes came on the market. It would be interesting to see what would happen if we made apparent race a meaningless signal.
Nerdler @19, those cliches didn't work when Noen used them.
Noen @15, if you keep dishing out cliches with a soup ladle, I'm going to have to give up on this argument with you.
No. You're making sweepingly general statements, and you're not specifying works and authors. I would like you to be more specific.Prove it. Give us some substantiation. Justify that belief. You just keep repeating that "some problems can't be solved by technology," as unthinkingly as the truly dimwitted sort of Christian says "You'll be sorry you said that when Jesus comes back!"So tell us: Why is it that some problems are magically immune to being alleviated by technology? What distinguishes them from problems where technological fixes are appropriate? How can you tell the difference?
You're cheating. I gave you one perennially intractable problem that's plagued humankind since we took to standing up on the savannah: H. sapiens always outbreeds the available resources. I pointed out that we'd actually come up with a technological fix for that: reliable contraception. Now all we have left are implementation problems, like getting power hierarchies built around the original problem to loosen their grip on our throats.That's exactly the same kind of nontrivial "human problem" as the others you've named. It has a long history of causing problems. It's the chief reason we're not hunter-gatherers any more. The relentless pressure of human population growth has generated a nearly endless succession of large-scale ecological disasters and small everyday cruelties. And what kind of "human solutions" have we come up with? Infanticide, generally. Starvation for the powerless and poor. Forced celibacy. Systems of social legitimacy and illegitimacy that boil down to whether the child's parents have contractually committed sufficient resources for its upkeep. Innumerable burdens laid on women, because both genders are subject to the same biological urges, but women are the ones who bear the inconvenient children.
And what has technology given us? Contraception that works.
I made this same point earlier. You ignored it. Would you like to address it now?
I'll add another to the stack: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Before the invention of psychiatry, OCD cases were badly treated. After the advent of psychiatry, OCD cases were treated slightly better, and asked why they wanted to behave that way. Over the last couple of decades, though, as we've learned more about neurochemistry, we've developed drugs that in some cases can repatriate OCD cases to normal life and normal society. It's an enormous mercy.
Depression's another miserably intractable "human problem" we're starting to be able to treat. There's a long list of mental disorders, from Tourette's to schizophrenia to chronic rage, where we're beginning to understand them, and looking forward to being able to treat them effectively. Are these not the most human of human problems? "Human solutions" haven't helped them. Technology has, and it'll help them even more in the future.
I've given you solid counterexamples to your "technology can't help" argument. Unless you can come up with some solid basis to defend it, it's down for the count
Nope. Nothing you've offered so far comes up to the status of "fact."You've never established that the problem exists, or defined what it is and how it works. I suggest you start by proving that it exists.Also: Please explain why you're now arguing about "an over reliance on technology," when last time around it was "reliance on technology," period.
Since it's currently an asserted but totally unsubstantiated non-problem, no fix is required. If you insist on one, try sprinkling the problem with fairy dust. It's a brilliant cure-all for nonexistent problems.I don't think that way either, so do please stop condescending to me about how wonderfully subtle and grayscaled your mental processes are. Here's the actual exchange:You're trying to shift the grounds of your argument. Previously, you were inveighing against "reliance on technology." That's why I said your alternative was to sit around naked and try to achieve transcendence by thinking about it really hard. It was a logical response to the argument you actually made. Now you're talking about "over reliance on technology," and pretending that I'm inexplicably casting the world in terms of absolutes.Did you think that one was going to get past me?
If troll is as troll does, you qualify. Your most egregious trollery hasn't been on Boing Boing, but on my own weblog, Making Light. More than once, you've gone over there and done your best to start a fight. Unfortunately for that ambition, the locals saw through you, countered your aggression, quietly researched your history, outed you, and then treated you kindly. You don't seem to have liked that, because you left and didn't come back for a long time.Your most recent visit was on July 17-18 of this year, in the thread about the Trinity bomb test, starting around comment 54. In that and subsequent comments you were deliberately being offensive. You were also retailing the exact same brand of trite, ignorant, fake-psychologizing BS about science fiction and its fans that you've been dishing out here. The locals were not fooled.
So tell me: what is this thing you do that looks exactly like trolling, but somehow isn't?
The last time you were on Making Light, Joel Polowin offered you this link. It's still appropriate.Yup. Everyone does. There's nothing unusual about you there. You're wrong. They actually have quite complicated thought processes. In my own case, I was pointing out to you that your own arguments had excluded all possibilities but one. That doesn't mean I think in black and white. If your arguments had excluded all possibilities, and I'd told you so, that wouldn't mean I think in monochrome.Yes, and I'm sure you derive a great deal of satisfaction from it.My own tribe also has a term for certain thought processes we distrust. We call these "magical thinking."
Obvious to you. Really not obvious to others.Nope. To repeat: I was pointing out that that was the necessary conclusion of the arguments you were making. Since you've redefined "reliance" as "over reliance" since then, you may find the distinction confusing.We don't know that.Because it was the logical implication of what you said.That is a completely unsupported assertion. Furthermore, if you don't mean to suggest that the means of production and the physical and economic conditions of peoples's lives have no effect on their thinking, behavior, or general happiness, you ought not be making that argument.(1.) Define "human problem." (2.) Define "human solution." (3.) Please justify your decision to define technology as "not human," and humanity as "not technological." (4.) Please explain how you can distinguish between human and technological problems. (5.) Please define and describe the characteristics of human problems that make them impossible to address via technology. (6.) If you can't answer questions 1-5, you're speaking gobbledegook. Please drop out of the argument.Parity is a basic test of philosophical propositions. Please explain how technology is capable of causing problems, but not solving them.Another parity check: why is it that technology can only make things worse?That's not an argument; that's inadvertent parody.Yet another parity check: why is science uniquely unable to solve problems? That's an extremely strange characteristic for anything to have.To quote Xopher reacting to another one of your little oppositions of "humans" and "science": "People have nothing to do with science? There's no science that deals with people? Scientists aren't people? I now have stupid all over me."That doesn't happen in the story. Not at all. Not even slightly. There's a discussion of the possible applications of a fairly clever heat-transfer device, but that's all.Either justify that, or abandon it.I'm sorry. I'm not going to keep being polite and talking about parity. What you're saying there can't possibly be true. You're saying that technology can cause global warming, but can do nothing to alleviate it. The universe doesn't work like that. The power to do things doesn't have a directional bias for good or evil.That's a bizarre misreading. You've got it completely wrong. Jay Lake deliberately deglamorizes his characters and their situation. If that's a specimen of your literary analysis, you're incapable of reading and interpreting fiction.There you are again with your universe in which things can only get worse. It's a complete fraud, as fake as believing that things can only get better.Smallpox vaccination, sanitation and agriculture are trivial?
Comparatively speaking of course. These are easily solved problems. Wash your hands, plant your crops. The other issues are not so amenable to a simple technological fix. My pointing out this fact does not imply that I think we should go without them.
I think your issue is one of definition.
No, global warming has no tech solution. Here is the problem: You are standing at the base of a hill, there is a giant boulder rolling downhill towards you. You've known about this since the '80's and you have the means to get out of the way. But you're just standing there, not moving. Why is that? Does that sound like a problem for science? Sure, we could play games and pretend there is a great big umbrella in the sky that solves all our problems and we can go on burning all the oil. It's a fantasy, meanwhile there you are, not moving. That's the problem, it's solution is not technical.
Racism: Simple answer, communication technology. Start with radio.
How well did that work out in Rwanda?
I can say that one of my favorite stories in it was Ted Kosmatka's "N-Words" which was about cloning,
Yes, I liked the clip of it that I read also. It was very good. If there is more like that in the book I would probably enjoy it. That isn't what I'm reacting against anyway.
The lovely Theresa:
Prove it. Give us some substantiation. Justify that belief. You just keep repeating that "some problems can't be solved by technology,"
What is your place in the world Theresa? How should you live your life? How should you treat the people around you. Should you treat those who are close to you differently than those who are not? What is your reaction to the sunrise, to a thunderstorm, to a crowded street? What do we mean when we talk about freedom? What is one's responsibility towards others? These and other questions like these do not have technological solutions. We have to work these things out for ourselves. Once we do we can then employ technology as the means by which we act, but the solution lies within ourselves. We have to decide. We have to choose. Technology is external, it cannot make our choices for us.
I pointed out that we'd actually come up with a technological fix for that: reliable contraception.
Oh hey! That's great! Problem solved then huh? Oh... wait...
Now all we have left are implementation problems, like getting power hierarchies built around the original problem to loosen their grip on our throats.
I say nuke 'em, that'll solve it. So... where exactly is this problem located? We have the solution at hand so why isn't it solved? You claim that all problems are solvable by the application of the appropriate technological fix right? So why isn't it fixed? This is the kind of myopia that I'm talking about. I mean, it should be clear that the real problem is political, not technical. And isn't that what I have been saying?
You're trying to shift the grounds of your argument.
No Theresa, here is what you said "Green engineering is still engineering. Unless you want to abjure technology". This is a false dichotomy, as I indicated. And BTW, sitting around thinking about things is a really good way to solve problems. Theory is important.
It was a logical response to the argument you actually made.
No, it was an emotional response. When someone points out that being overly dependent on a particular tool or technology can itself become a crutch, a handicap, and then one's response to that is to throw your hands up in alarm. That's not logic, that's emotion.
So tell me: what is this thing you do that looks exactly like trolling, but somehow isn't?
It was a flame war. You ever been in one? Said a lot mean things that you later weren't all that proud of? Links please. How about in your personal life? Ever gotten really angry and said a lot of hateful crap? Examples please, because otherwise you are just using your relative anonymity and powers as a mod as a crowbar to beat me with. I am an imperfect human being just like you. Only I can't link to your failures because they are most likely off line.
Nope. To repeat: I was pointing out that that was the necessary conclusion of the arguments you were making. Since you've redefined "reliance" as "over reliance" since then, you may find the distinction confusing.
You're playing semantic games, very typical for the web. Well then what does reliance mean? My dictionary says: "The state of relying on something". Ok, what does that mean? Verb: rely on "Be dependent on, as for support or maintenance". Which was my point i.e. that being dependent on technology can present it's own problems that one should be aware of.
1.) Define "human problem."
Problems of or relating to Man's place in the world. What shall I do? How shall I live?
(2.) Define "human solution."
The choices that we make in our lives.
(3.) Please justify your decision to define technology as "not human," and humanity as "not technological."
Technology is external to our being. Who we are is not defined by the tools we use.
(4.) Please explain how you can distinguish between human and technological problems.
Human problems are problems of and between people. Problems between people cannot be solved by any technological means but it may facilitate a solution.
(5.) Please define and describe the characteristics of human problems that make them impossible to address via technology.
The root cause of many of our most intractable problems lies within our selves, with our relationship to the world. This lies outside of technology's sphere of influence. No technology is going to decide for you how you should respond to reality. You and only you can do that.
(6.) If you can't answer questions 1-5, you're speaking gobbledegook. Please drop out of the argument.
False. It's important not to dismiss out of hand those you don't at first understand. They may have a message you need to hear.
Please explain how technology is capable of causing problems, but not solving them. [...] why is it that technology can only make things worse?
It was not my intent to imply that technology can only make things worse. But it is not unheard of for superficial technical solutions to have unintended consequences that spiral out of control.
"Tht's nt slvng thngs, tht's ftshsm."
That's not an argument; that's inadvertent parody.
My my sch prd! Ftsh hs mnngs bsd th sxl n y knw. " chrm sprsttsly blvd t mbdy mgcl pwrs". Fr sm ppl scnc hs bcm ftsh bjct. Dwkns nd th Nw thsts nd crtn sbst f SF hv ths tndncy f lvtng scnc t prvlgd ntlgcl stts. t's nnsns.
"The science in that fiction can figure prominently, or not, but it will never in and of itself solve any problem."
Yet another parity check: why is science uniquely unable to solve problems?
I have a different response to the world than you do. "How shall we then live?" is not a problem that I expect any science to be able to solve for me or for anyone. It's just a tool. Tools do not solve problems, people do.
To quote Xopher reacting to another one of your little oppositions
It's inappropriate to speak for other people but you just had to get your dig in huh? You'll notice a complete lack ad hominem on my part. I'd appreciate it if you could return the favor. Thanks.
What you're saying there can't possibly be true. You're saying that technology can cause global warming, but can do nothing to alleviate it. The universe doesn't work like that. The power to do things doesn't have a directional bias for good or evil.
It is entirely possible for me to nudge a boulder and start it rolling downhill and yet have no ability to stop it once it has started. This is what we've done. We cannot undo it and we cannot stop it. We have a choice, we can accept the reality of what is happening and start doing those things within our power to adapt or we can do nothing and hope someone else will save us, but they won't. The later is a fantasy, a delusion.
That's a bizarre misreading. You've got it completely wrong.
It's my opinion. The femme fatale uses her sexual wiles to deceive our hero and steal his secret but he narrowly escapes death twice and geek boy quite literally saves the whole world? No glamor there? This is pure boilerplate adolescent wank material here. Now showing at a theater near you, in tights.
"There is a word for fantasy made real. It's called nightmare."
There you are again with your universe in which things can only get worse. It's a complete fraud, as fake as believing that things can only get better.
You may wish to live in a Utopian fantasy, which was what was being discussed, but I do not. You may even believe that it is by projecting our fantasies onto the world and thereby realizing our dreams that we make the world a better place. I emphatically do not believe this and history supports that view. I prefer to live in the real world.
Thr s cmmn rc tht frms th bss f why bjct t th knd f shllw dlscnt fntsy tht s s mch f scnc fctn:
There is the world and there is our reaction to it. But we sometimes can't cope with the full weight and horror of the world so we escape into fantasy. But no one can live in a fantasy world. It falls apart and becomes an even worse nightmare. So we flee back to reality and it is there that we can start to heal, to deal honestly with the world and accept it for what it is.
"and they were conversing with each other about all these things. And while they were conversing and discussing. He Himself approached, and began traveling with them. But their eyes were prevented from recognizing Him. And He said to them:
"What are these words you are exchanging with one another, and why are you so sad?"
Well, really, she has been criticizing a specific subset of SF, no? And I really like "I don't want to live in anyone's ideal world. There is a word for fantasy made real. It's called nightmare." This is both general and true. Unless I'm mistaken, you both were starting to understand each others arguments towards the end, there.
Noen, I fully support Teresa's use of my quote, and in fact am flattered by it. You fail to grasp that science is a human activity, and that technology is a human creation. Appropriate technology (a phrase which, it appears, you must find oxymoronic) is not dehumanizing (because "not dehumanizing" is one of the criteria for being labeled "appropriate").
Example: I don't have the skill or steadiness of hand to fill my chocolate shells exactly as far as I want to, without either over- or underfilling them or slopping the filling on the top of the mold. Technology: a fondant funnel. Now a simple and easy-to-learn motion of my hand (releasing the dispensing lever) stops the flow of filling on a dime. Result: I can get 20 chocolates out of 20 cavities, instead of about 15. Result: I waste less chocolate and make less mess. Result: my friends get more chocolates. Result: Less frustration for me. Negative consequences: I'm out the cost of the funnel (but waste reduction compensates, so it's already paid for itself); I'm out a small amount of counter space; I have to wash the funnel (energy, work, carbon footprint compensated by not running the melter the extra time required to redo a batch).
As for your boulder analogy, if someone applies the technology of an axe to a big enough tree in the right place, it will stop the boulder. True, the wise will also scurry out of the way. No one is saying that changing how we live isn't important, or won't help. You seem to be saying that technology won't help at all; which is patently absurd. Especially since applying appropriate technology IS a change in the way we live: passive solar water heating is a technological AND a lifestyle solution.
If you're saying a technology fix won't be enough by itself, I agree that that's probably true. But if someone develops, say, a way to greatly increase the atmospheric albedo of the planet (reflective particles in the upper atmosphere, maybe?), we'll both be wrong to have said technology can't solve the problem.
And if you don't start spelling Teresa's name right, I'm going to start ridiculing you by using amusing (to me) versions of your name. You can spell Teresa; you just don't bother.
Eustace 25: "fantasy made real" can also be "dreams come true." If all Noen's fantasies are nightmares, that's terribly sad, but it's not true of the rest of us.
I tend to define dreams as something that you would really want to come true and would actually make you happy. I see fantasies as something that might not work out that well in real life. Fantasies, which owe no allegiance to any rules like the laws of physics, can retain their power by remaining fantasies.
"and Soho picked up his brush, wrote the character for "dream", and died."
'Race' has been destroyed by technology. Spencer Wells and his colleagues, using DNA-tracing lab technology, followed a human band of African migrants from 60,000 years ago to the ends of the earth. It seems every human alive today can be traced to those desperate few hunters and gatherers. They can prove it. Case closed.
If race falls, can racism be far behind?
If all Noen's fantasies are nightmares, that's terribly sad, but it's not true of the rest of us.
My dreams are wonderful but that's not what I'm referring to. The fantasies that I'm talking about are where you think you are talking to me. There is no such person as noen or Xopher or Teresa. These are disembodied voices (objet petit a) that lack any substantial reality. The fantasy world you inhabit is the one where you think I'm real.
Christ on a bike, can't you all quit whinging? You either like some or all or none of the stories, simple. No need to get so verbose and heated. I can't even be arsed to read all these bloody comments, I'd rather be reading classy writing.
I happen to be blogging about a free MP3 instrumental track I was putting up for download and Zemanta (Google it, very cool) referred me to this post about the mp3 download for the soundtrack of the trailer. It's a really nice soundtrack so I recommend checking it out.