TRUCE at ECAL

One of the projects I’m working on is called TRUCE: Training and Research in Unconventional Computation in Europe. As it says on the TRUCE project website:

Unconventional computation (UCOMP) is an important and emerging area of scientific research, which explores new ways of computing that go beyond the traditional model, as well as quantum- and brain inspired computing. Such alternatives may encompass novel substrates (e.g., DNA, living cells, or mixtures of the two) as well as new paradigms which, for example, support combined information processing and material production (as living systems do). UCOMP researchers draw inspiration from a wide and diverse range of sources, from physics, to chemistry, biology and ecology. The field is growing quickly, and has the potential to revolutionize not only our fundamental understanding of the nature of computing, but the way in which we solve problems, design networks, do industrial fabrication, make drugs or construct buildings.

TRUCE provides an ‘umbrella organisation’ to help coordinate, nurture and develop activities within the UCOMP community in Europe and beyond.

We ran a TRUCE workshop this Monday at ECAL, the European Conference on Artificial Life. Workshops at conferences are often run as mini-conferences themselves, with presented papers and posters. But we wanted to do something different, something ... unconventional.

One issue with unconventional computation is that conventional computers have a 60 year engineering head start. Although researchers can do what are actually amazing things with their slime molds, quantum computers, chemical droplets, bacteria, DNA, optical computers, and what-not, it’s early days yet, and the applications aren’t a patch on a smartphone. What we would like to do is think about what things will be like in about 60 years time in terms of unconventional computing.

So we decided that we should get some scientists together with some speculative fiction authors, and tell narratives of possible futures. We made a call for story ideas a few months back, and got a bunch of submissions. I put one in, too, so that the project could have an “inside view” of the process. The authors looked through the submissions, and each picked out an idea they thought they could weave into a story.

The aim is that each author will write their story set in their chosen scientific background, then the scientist will write an afterword, explaining the science in a bit more detail (or possibly explaining where the author ignored the science to make the story work!) These will all be published by Comma Press some time next year.

There was some preliminary contact between authors and scientists via Skype, then we all met up at the workshop for in-depth discussions. The author-scientist pairs scattered around the conference venue for most of the day, sitting in little coffee-fueled huddles, talking through the story ideas, and the underlying science. One attendee said “that’s the longest I’ve ever talked to someone who isn’t my wife continuously on a single subject!”

In the late afternoon, we all got back together and presented the current status of our ideas. Not all of them turned out to be dystopias, fortunately, but authors tend to want an interesting plot, which usually means things going wrong! But that’s fine: we can give warnings of futures that we don’t want to happen.

So, the authors get some futuristic scientific ideas for their stories. What do the scientists get out of the process? Well, some of my work is with biologists, building simulations of complex systems, which requires me to understand quite a bit of their science, which means I ask a lot of questions. One thing they say is “I like working with computer scientists, because they ask such different questions.” Different questions are good: they make you think about things from different angles, giving a different view on the problem.

And I can now say, I like working with authors, for exactly the same reason.

We’ll be having a second call for ideas soon. So, if you are researching some aspect of unconventional computation, and would like some unconventional discussion of your work, why not submit an idea? The second round won’t get to go to Sicily – sorry! – but you will get all the other spin off benefits.

And for everyone else: look out for the book next year.

Read More

Iain M. Banks, 1954-2013

Iain Menzies Banks

I remember during the 1987 Worldcon hearing the rumour that Iain M. Banks had climbed up the outside of the Brighton Metropole hotel the previous night, to get to his room.  He told the story himself at the 1990 Eastercon in Liverpool, during his Guest of Honour talk.  At the 1998 Eastercon, Iain M Banks and his alter ego Iain Banks took to the stage to discuss SF versus mainstream writing.  He told wonderful stories, both in person and in print.

In early April this year, he announced he had terminal cancer, and was unlikely to live beyond a year.  Just two months later, he has died.

Dammit.

Read More

sequestering carbon, several books at a time II

This is the catch from Amazon et al over the last fortnight, patiently waiting to be databased:

I'm already about a third of the way through Redshirts, and enjoying it immensely   It seems obvious where it's going, so I'm assuming it will instead go somewhere completely different.

Read More

How far to the Crowne Plaza?

We've just reserved our hotel room for Eastercon 2014.  The con is being held in the Crowne Plaza Glasgow.  The online booking system helpfully gives an indication of how far the various con hotels are from the venue.

One property of a metric is that the distance from somewhere to itself, d(x,x) = 0, for any x. However, the booking system seems to be using a more science fictional metric, since it thinks that d(Crowne Plaza, Crowne Plaza) = 176 yards.

Possibly the hotel is beside itself with joy at hosting Eastercon?

Read More

Evernote and the Con

Every year we attend the British National Science Fiction Convention, or “Eastercon”. My first Eastercon was in 1984, and we haven’t missed one since 1996. It’s a great four days, of guest of honor talks, of serious scientific talks, of panels discussing authors and sub-genres, of silly SF-themed quizzes, and of meeting up with friends.

I take notes at cons, partly as a conditioned reflex, and partly because there are interesting ideas, and suggestions of new authors of books, that I want to follow up later. I have put some of my notes up on my website. But the last couple of years, I haven’t had the time (or the inclination) to transcribe the resulting 30–50 pages of notes, so they are languishing on paper only.

Recently at work, I’ve moved from paper to a computer-based daybook, based on Evernote. It started as an experiment, to see if it would work, but within a month I had abandoned paper note taking completely, and am exclusively Evernote-based. So I decided to trial Evernote at this year’s Eastercon, too. Here’s how it went.

Before the con

Gone are the days of waiting to get the Con programme guide on arrival at the con hotel. Nowadays it is up online in advance. So the day before we were due to drive to Bradford (these cons are in such exotic locations) I sat down with the online programme guide, and decided which items I would attend, from the four parallel sessions. First I created a new Evernote notebook for SF cons. Then I made a new note for each chosen item, adjusted its “creation time” to that of the item itself, and copied in the item title, location, and abstract. This had the helpful side-effect of giving me a schedule I could easily consult on my phone when I wanted to know where I was supposed to be next, and a reminder of what it was about.

At the con

I used the same Samsung N145 Plus Netbook for note-taking that I use at work. This has a 10" screen, and a nice keyboard that accommodates my just-about-4-fingered, semi-touch typing skills (although the Caps Lock is a bit too easy to hit accidentally).

ouch!

It weights in at 1.2 kg, which is fine for toting around between talks, but after a couple of days of it resting on my lap as I took notes, I became uncomfortably aware of its two sharp little feet at the back. It also runs quite hot. However, the battery is nicely long lasting: the Friday and Monday were less than full days, and I got by with a single charge; the Saturday and Sunday, being longer, required a recharge. One day that involved leaving it charging in the hotel room over dinner; the other day I found an unoccupied power socket in the programme room, and sat by it for that item.

It was all very straightforward to use: arrive at the item, sit down, open netbook, type in my password, click on the item’s note, and start typing. The keyboard is quiet, and so (hopefully!) the sound didn’t disturb anyone around me. And this set-up has one great advantage over manual note-taking. In the main programme hall, tech switches the lights off during items (I assume this is to aid with recording said items). This makes it rather difficult to take hand-written notes. But with the netbook, I just closed it up slightly (to around a 90 degree angle), which directed enough light from the screen to illuminate the keyboard sufficiently. Another advantage: no writer’s cramp. A further advantage: the notes synchronise to the cloud, so I didn’t have to make backups during the con.

After the con

Back home, I synched Evernote on my desktop machine, and started tidying up the notes, correcting spelling mistakes, removing irrelevant and incomprehensible bits, and tracking down interesting references and linking to them. This took about half a day (partly because I was spending time reading up about some of the interesting stuff I’d found). Once I was happy with the notes, I made a new note to act as an contents list for the entire event, comprising a bullet list of links to each of the item notes. That was very easy to do using Evernote’s “Copy Note Link” function. I sorted the list into earliest first order (rather than the latest first order I usually use), selected all the notes, then exported them as a single HTML file. I edited that file with Notepad++ (my current HTML editor of choice) to add in some preliminary material, and modify some of the formatting provided by Evernote. Hey presto, my con report web page! Everything from “Programme highlights” onward is output from Evernote. All in well less than a day.

What I’ll do differently next time

This was definitely a great success. However, next time I will add a little more markup to my note templates, to tag the title, panellists, and summary parts. This will let me use Notepad++’s regular expression-based search and replace more easily to modify Evernote’s formatting to my specific requirements. And that’s it, essentially.

What I’d like Evernote to do differently

Evernote is great, and the more I use it, the more I like it. But it’s not perfect, and the more I use it, the more the imperfections bug me. The main niggles from the con use:

1. Undo. It doesn’t always work properly. Most of the time, it’s absolutely fine, doing what you’d expect. But every so often, it doesn’t restore to the exact previous state. A typical problem: paste in something with a format, realise you meant “Paste as plain text”, undo – but it doesn’t (always) reset to the previous format.
2. Bullet list indent,outdent commands. These don’t always work properly. Again. most of the time, everything is fine: use tab or the icon to indent, use Shift-tab or the icon to outdent. But if you copy a bullet list, this can get messed up, and on indenting/outdenting, the bullets disappear. This is a big deal for me, as I am an inveterate user of nested bullet lists.
3. Spelling mistakes. As you type, spelling mistakes are highlighted with the usual red wiggly line. However, when you move away from a note and come back, notes no longer highlight the spelling mistakes. This made the “tidying up” process harder. SF notes have a lot of weird words in them, and it’s easier to scan and ignore the red wiggles than step through the list using the manual spell-checker.
4. Daylight savings time. This one is bizarre, and very annoying. As is often the case, Daylight Savings Time (here the move from Greenwich Mean Time to British “Summer” Time) kicks in over the Easter weekend (hey, let’s steal an hour from your holiday weekend!) On Sunday morning, I noticed that all the “created” times on my Sun/Mon notes were out by an hour: Evernote had changed them! It had decided that, when I created a note during GMT, even though I created the note for a time when BST would be in force, it needed to update it. Mutter, mutter. Later, when looking back at my previous notes (all my previous notes), I discovered that their creation times had also changed by an hour! That is, Evernote is currently displaying the creation times of all my notes, no matter when created, in BST. I can think of no circumstance when this would be the desired behaviour. This is definitely a bug. I suspect Evernote is treating daylight savings time as a different time zone, and “correcting” for the change (which is often not what is wanted in that case, either).

However, despite these grumps, I’ll be continuing to use Evernote. The more I use it, the ever more useful it becomes, because the more material I have in it, have linked from it, and can access really easily.

Read More

films I watched on my hols

This Christmas there were a bunch of watchable films on TV -- so we watched them.  

• An Unexpected Adventure (well, we went to the cinema for this one!)
• Shrek Forever After : Shrek 4, better than Shrek 3
• Alice in Wonderland : the Tim Burton version
• How to Train Your Dragon : Scottish Vikings and their American kids
• Moon : underwhelming
• Up : most implausible use of a helium balloon

That's probably more films than we'll watch in the rest of the year put together.

Read More

interesting use of the present tense

I was surfing an on-line TV channel guide, to find when a particular episode of Wizards v Aliens  that we had missed was being repeated.  I came across:

TV channel guide. See what you can watch today, yesterday and tomorrow.

"See what you can watch yesterday".  This really is living in the future (but watching the present)!

Read More

ratty book review

My favourite tongue-in-cheek film review, attributed to Rick Polito in the Marin Independent Journal, goes:

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she encounters, then teams up with three total strangers and plots to kill again.

Now this is being challenged for brilliantly missing the point by an equally great book review. Reported by Laurie Taylor (back in 2005: never mistake this blog for being up-to-the-minute!), it's a review by the Vice Chancellor of that leading-edge educational establishment, the University of Poppleton. The VC's choice for Book of the Year is reported thus:

... it told the story of a middle-aged man who fails to recognise the benefits of the community in which he resides. Instead of identifying with its mission statement, he persists in pursuing a selfish, individualistic path and ends up having an illicit sexual relationship with a close organisational colleague.

Fortunately, there is a happy ending. Following an intervention from Human Resources and a slightly overdramatised episode involving large rats, he realises his mistakes and re-commits himself to the ongoing strategic plan.

I wouldn't have identified it without the rat reference.




----
Congratulations if you recognised the film as The Wizard of Oz.

Read More

meme goes mainstream

Okay, so the punchline is obvious, but it's still fun!

from Life as I know it

Read More

Middle Earth today

Read More

quote of the day

To all of you who don't realise we are already living in the future (albeit one without jet-packs), here's a thought from Charlie Stross:

"to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF."

Read More

other Grays

While writing about The Puppet of Dorian Gray my thoughts turned to alien grays (as you do).

These are all over the place around here.  There's the signpost on the A14 to Hemingford Grey (maybe the resting place of a famous historical alien?)  Locally, Greys of Ely are so well assimilated into the community that they run a transport business.

But what got me worried recently was seeing a van with a logo warning of Grays Surfacing.  I didn't even know they lived underwater!

Read More

it's gravity, Jim, but not as we know it

I’ve just finished Angry Birds * Space (which everyone seems to call Angry Birds in Spaaaace, of course), released March 2012.  So that didn’t last long, either.

This time, the birds and pigs are fighting it out in space, and the birds have rocket drives.  There’s gravity in some places (near planets), and not in other places (not near planets). Only it’s not as simple as that. The existence of a gravitational field is shown by a red disc centred on the planet. Inside the disc there’s gravity, with the force directed towards the centre (I can’t tell if it’s 1/r^2 or constant on my little tiny phone screen); outside there’s no gravity. Gravity just switches on when an object enters the disc. Real gravity in space doesn’t work like that, of course.

Outside the disc, in the no-gravity regions, things travel in straight lines. So far, so good, maybe. But they gradually drift to a halt. No gravity, okay, but friction?? (Which is why the birds' rocket drives are on all the time.)  Real gravity in space doesn’t work like that, of course.

Also, there are some “black holes”: nothing visible at the centre of the gravity field, but stuff does get broken up if it goes there. There are also, confusingly, sometimes large planets with no gravity field at all, that act as hard (but massless!) obstacles. (Cases with invisible gravitating black holes plus visible gravity-free planets are particularly … interesting.)

There are two new birds: a light blue "ice cube" bird which freezes stuff, making it easier to break later, and a purple ("Lazer") bird that boosts in the direction of your tap (instead of the yellow Lazer bird that boosts along its tangent when you tap).

It's a Small World

The planets are very small – Clanger-esque, or even “Little Prince”-like.  In order to erect buildings on these small spheres, there are often large flat platforms. Sometimes this can lead to an almost square planet. Even with these platforms, gravity still points to the centre of the planet, so there is a small resultant force along the direction of the platform. I was delighted to notice, when an ice block was at the end of a platform, it slid towards the centre, overshot, then slid back: simple harmonic motion in action. Yay!

Square planets!

I did this time go for a perfect three stars on all levels.  That’s because the alternate-physics is fun, and three stars often required an interesting solution exploiting the possibilities, especially where planets are so close their gravity-discs overlap. Fortunately there is a helpful little "preview orbit" dotted line, that gives a partial clue to the final trajectory.  (The "Golden Eggsteroid" extra levels are great little spoofs on Space Invaders and the like.)

So, I’m just back from the Science Fiction Eastercon, where I was telling a friend that I’d nearly finished Angry Birds Space. So that’s all three done! (Vanilla, Seasons, Space) There’s also Rio, he said.

AAARGH! WHY DID YOU TELL ME THAT!

I’m now on Rio level four, collecting golden bananas…

Read More

The Puppet of Dorian Gray

Puppet Cliff Richard

I was reminded of this by Jo Walton’s marvellous Oscar! post, and in particular her inspired casting of Cliff Richard as "Dorian Grey".

Several years ago we worked out just why Cliff Richard, the “Peter Pan of Pop”, doesn’t age.  Made back in 1966, the film Thunderbirds are Go included a sequence with Cliff Richard and the Shadows, played, of course, by puppets.

To the right we see what the Thunderbirds puppet of Cliff Richard looked like in 1966.

Today, stored in Cliff Richard’s attic, that puppet is now terribly wizened and aged.

Or maybe not.

Read More

best April Fool evah

I was reading Jo Walton's review of the new film Oscar! over at Tor.com, thinking, this is weird, but sounds interesting.  She had me going right up to the point where we learn that Dorian Grey [sic] is played by Cliff Richard. ROFL!

The fact that it didn't strike me as at all implausible, just interesting, up until then (and then only the total perfection of that casting made me realise something was Just Not Right) demonstrates the surreal SFnal world I inhabit most of the time.

And I really want to see this film!

Read More

it was 30 years ago today

that Acorn Computers launched the BBC micro.

I got a model B Beeb while I was doing my PhD, and had great fun learning to program.  (I already knew Fortran IV, but until reading Structured Programming with BBC Basic, I hacked, rather than programmed.)  I used my Beeb to do some real science (see the acknowledment section on p544), and even wrote some articles on fractals for Acorn User.  Happy days, and so long ago.

30 years ago, in fact.  That's the reason for the post.  We all know about Moore's law, commonly quoted as "computer power doubles every 18 months" (although of course the reality is more complicated, but let's go with this for now).  One doubling of power doesn't sound much, but what happens after 30 years of Moore's law?

30 years is 20 doubling times. 2^20 ~ 10^6. (Impress you friends with fast mental conversions between powers of two and powers of ten by remembering 2^10 = 1024 ~ 10^3. Caveat: any friend who would be impressed by this feat probably already knows how to do it.)  So that would mean today's PCs are one million times more powerful than the humble Beeb.  Is this true?

• Memory: 32kB RAM (yes, 32 kilobytes).  32 GB isn't common today (although it is on a reasonably high end scientific workstation): more like 4 or 8 Gigs typically, so, a quarter of a million times as much memory.
• Processor (6502A) speed: 2 MHz.  More like a thousand times faster today, with a 3GHz processor (but, of course, that's with a 32 or 64 bit processor, not the Beeb's 8 bit one, and then there's multi-core, dual processors, and what not, giving another order of magnitude).
• Screen: max resolution 640x256 (2 colours), or 160x256 (8 colours), using 20 kB of video RAM.  Today, my flat screen is 1920x1080 (4 billion, or 32 bit, colours), so that's about 8MB of video memory, or 400 times as much. 
• Disc storage: a cassette player, or an optional 100 kB 5.25 inch floppy drive once you got fed up with waiting for programs "Loading...". Today, a 500 GB hard drive is more typical: that's 5 million times as much.

Okay, not every feature is a million times more, but combined, today's PCs are easily a million times more powerful than the Beeb.  And for less money!  The BBC Model B cost £399 (which is about £1200 in today's money), but that didn't include the monitor or floppy drive. The Torch dual 800 kB floppy drive cost around £800, although you got a Z80 co-processor thrown in for that.  In March 1987 I bought a 28MB (yes, megabyte) hard drive for £745 (or about £1600 in today's money).

To get a better feel for what this doubling means, think of a slightly older computer, Deep Thought, which took seven and a half million years to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.  That was in 1978, or 33 years ago, or 22 doubling times, or 4 million times.  If that was a speed improvement, today's equivalent of Deep Though would take only 2 years to calculate the answer!  Not so impressive now.

But wait, you say.  Douglas Adams was a genius.  He would have taken that into account.  The real Deep Thought would have kept upgrading itself, but even so still took 7.5 Myr to calculate the answer.  7.5 Myr is 5 million doubling times, or 10^1,500,00 more powerful.  That would make the Deep Thought who gave the answer 42 to the philosophers' descendents umimaginably more powerful than the original (if such a machine is even possible in the current universe).

Anyway, happy birthday, Beeb!

Read More

I wouldn't stand in its way

My Sunday breakfast ritual includes reading the latest New Scientist magazine over cereal and coffee. Well, when I say "read", I mean skim through mostly, and read a few articles that catch my eye (which always includes all of Feedback, of course).

This week there is an article called "Brain Donors", on how humans can help AIs do their jobs. It includes the sentence:

If a machine cannot understand what you are saying or move around safely, how can you expect it to load your dishwasher?

This made me flash back to a plot element from Robert Heinlein's 1956 novel The Door into Summer (which I read in the 1970s, where the "present" part is set, with its "future" part being set ages away, in that shiny futuristic year 2000). In this the hero, Daniel Boone Davis, is an inventor, wanting to invent stuff to help ordinary people. He invents "Drafting Dan" to help him draft the blueprints of his inventions, and "Flexible Frank" to help around the house. In the book, the emphasis is on mechanical reproduction of the ways things are currently done by people. Drafting Dan never happened, but CAD has. Flexible Frank, washing up standing at the kitchen sink, never happened, but dishwashers have.

In other words, the technology that replaces human effort doesn't just trivially reproduce the human behaviour (washing up at the sink): it reproduces the desired effect of that behaviour (clean dishes), but in a way more appropriate to a mechanised solution.

I first experienced a dishwasher at a friend's house in 1977: despite having offered, I was delighted that I didn't have to help wash up after lunch, and thrilled instead to help load this marvellous machine. I was skeptical of the amused claim that "loading and unloading it becomes the chore". Even now, although I no longer positively enjoy the loading task, I still find in preferable to the real chore. But if a robot wanted to do it instead, I wouldn't stand in its way.

However, the moral of this tale is that technology solves our problems in ways different from how we solve them. So I should no more expect this latest chore to be eased by a robot loading a dishwasher, than to expect a robot to stand at the sink washing up.

Read More

troll quotes

A Boing Boing post introduced me to the concept of a "troll quote": a well known quotation, misattributed to one person, along with a picture of yet another person.

Back in 1999, Michael F. Stemper contributed to the rec.arts.sf.written ultimate troll competition: "Does anybody know if Harlan Ellison will include Alexi Panshin's essay on Heinlein's views on gun control in The Last Dangerous Visions?" So when I was reading the Boing Boing comments, and came across Gulliver's suggestion at #33 --- "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. ~ Ray Kurzweil. I'd go with Harlan Ellison for sheer piss-off factor." --- I'm afraid I just couldn't help myself.

Read More

legal science fiction

I occasionally get emails about my website, including questions about SF. I'm no expert, but sometimes I (or more often, my other half), can provide a bit of an answer.

Here's the latest question in my inbox:

I'm writing short stories about law. The story criteria are:

1. Uninvented technology. This is, to me, the sine qua non of SF.
2. The story focuses on law. A simple reference to a statute is insufficient.
Police procedurals are unacceptable.

Examples of good stories of this sort: "A Loint of Paw," by Asimov; "The Sixth Palace," by Silverberg.

Is there a bibliography already done, the subject of which is SF law stories as I define that category?

Have you any recommendations for the bibliography? I'm a bit short on novels which fit the criteria. Only the Circuit trilogy by Snodgrass comes to mind.

I don't know of any bibliography, but I (rather, we!) can provide a few more examples, after a quick trawl through memories and bookshelves. One trope is to use a trial to get the protagonist out of the military, or out of society, so they can go off adventuring, or go undercover, or something; see, for example, E. Everett Evans, Man of Many Minds. We've tried to avoid listing such "trivial" trials that are there just to set the (otherwise unrelated) plot going, and to list ones where the trial is an integral part of the story (if not always the focus). But there is no sharp line.

Lloyd Biggle Jr, Monument, is about establishing and gathering evidence for court cases about who owns a planet, and uses an obscure point of tax law to win the day.

Miriam Allen deFord's anthology Space, Time and Crime has several relevant stories. Check out "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time"'s throwaway reference to a famous lawyer.

Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, has a trial.

There are court cases in Heinlein novels, such as whether Lummox is a pet in The Star Beast, and whether humanity should be allowed to survive, in Have Space Suit, Will Travel.

Frank Herbert's Bureau of Sabotage stories can involve court cases: see "The Tactful Saboteur" and The Dosadi Experiment.

In Larry Niven, "The Ethics of Madness", the court case is central to the plot.

Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty includes a murder trial, where the defence is essentially that it's okay to kill someone who is shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre. It's not central to the plot so much as indicative of the overall philosophy of the book.

Pohl and Kornbluth, Gladiator-At-Law, might fit the brief.

Jerry Pournelle's "High Justice" features a Solicitor General.

Charles Sheffield, Space Suits, is a collection of short stories about Burmeister and Carver, Shysters-at-Law, and their legal exploits in the solar system. He has also written the short story "Humanity Test", which is at the opposite end of the humour spectrum.

Robert Sawyer, Illegal Alien, has an alien visitor tried for murder.

Cordwainer Smith, "The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal", ends in a trial -- well, a verdict -- about the use of a time machine to create an entire sentient race.

There is a whole sub-genre about whether something non-human (computer, robot, alien, uplifted animal) should be given the status of human. Probably Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man" is top here, with also Heinlein's "Jerry was a Man". Scalzi's The Android's Dream includes a scene about the legal status of one of the protagonists.

MilSF is replete with courts martial. For example, there is the court martial of Pavel Young in David Weber's Field of Dishonor, and a couple of courts martial in Heinlein's Starship Troopers (one being used as an example to the hero not to request his own court martial later!).

There are alternative legal systems -- for example, ones where the whole community gets to vote on a punishment, such as in Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage.

If we are allowed TV SF, there are some Star Trek episodes revolving around court cases, and there is the Battlestar Galactica trial of Gaius Baltar.

Any more?

Read More

Elisabeth Sladen, 1948-2011

I was wondering what to say. Then I saw this on Dork Towers, which captures the mood precisely.

I grew up traumatised by Doctor Who (in the best possible way).

Well, I never really grew up, of course. I was a fan of the spin off Sarah Jane Adventures, too.

Goodbye. You are missed.

Read More