Asimov's SF, February 2006 Read online

  Not that Artificial Life, Inc. is planning to aim its product exclusively at lonely heterosexual male geeks. They are just the first consumer targets. The word is that a virtual boyfriend for women is already under development, and that gay and lesbian versions will follow soon after. There's also a Vivienne for Muslim societies who abides by Muslim rules of feminine propriety (no baring of midriffs, no body piercings) and—count on it, my friends, it's a sure bet—there will eventually be an X-rated Vivienne who is programmed to get a lot cozier with the subscribers than the current model is willing to be.

  Your cellphone chip, of course, has nowhere near the computing capacity necessary to achieve all this. Vivienne works her girlish magic through a link between your phone and the external servers on which the Vivienne programs reside. One consequence of this is that playing with Vivienne can quickly cost you a lot more than the six dollar monthly basic fee. A nice long schmooze with your virtual girlfriend will quickly exhaust the basic service allowance and run you into overtime. To prevent serious Vivienne addiction, users will be limited to an hour a day with her—at least at the outset. (Somehow, though, those restrictions have a way of disappearing when a product of this sort gets really popular). As for those little gifts you buy her—not just the flowers and the chocolates, but the sports cars and the diamond rings—those get charged to your phone bill too, half a dollar here, a dollar there. What happens to the money you lavish on Vivienne? “The money goes to us,” says a smiling Artificial Life executive. (Hello, Mr. Dick!)

  So go ahead and sign up. Vivienne will help you with the problems you're having with your real-life girlfriend, if you happen to have one; she will tell you how to buy cool sneakers in a Korean department store; and she will also teach you that girls are mercenary teases who know all sorts of tricks for extracting costly gifts from you but will not gratify your urgent hormonal needs in return. And if you marry her, you get a virtual mother-in-law of a really annoying kind, the best touch of all. No doubt of it: Vivienne's a perfect Philip K. Dick invention.

  And I think we'll see more and more of Philip K. Dick's pulp-magazine plot concepts erupting into life all around us as the twenty-first century moves along. Even though his characters would discover, again and again, that the world around them was some sort of cardboard makeshift hiding a deeper level that was likewise unreal, what Dick the writer was actually doing was crying out, Look at all these unscrupulous gadgets: this is what our world really is, and things are only going to get worse. For us moderns it's Phildickworld all day long. Your computer steals your bank account number and sends it to Nigeria, gaudy advertisements come floating toward us through the air, and now your telephone will flirt with you. It won't stop there.

  John Brunner, another of science fiction's most astute prophets, who also did not live to see the twenty-first century arrive, saw all the way back in 1977 that Dick's real theme wasn't the untrustworthiness of reality but the sheer oppressiveness of it:

  “Dick's world is rarely prepossessing. Most of the time it is deserted—call out, and only echo answers. There are lovely things in it, admittedly, but they are uncared for; at best they are dusty, and often they are crumbling through neglect. Food here is tasteless and does not nourish. Signposts point to places you do not wish to visit. Clothing is drab, and frays at embarrassing moments. The drugs prescribed by your doctor have such side effects that they are a remedy worse than the disease. No, it is not a pleasant or attractive world.

  “Consequently, his readers are extremely disconcerted when they abruptly recognize it for what it is: the world we all inhabit. Oh, the trimmings have been altered—the protagonist commutes by squib or flapple and argues with the vehicle's robot brain enroute—but that's so much verbal window dressing."

  Brunner concluded his 1977 essay on Dick by saying, “This I tell you straight up: I do not want to live in the sort of world Dick is so good at describing. I wish—I desperately wish—that I dared believe we don't. Maybe if a lot of people read Dick's work I'll stand a better chance of not living in that world...."

  As things turned out, John Brunner, who died in 1995, didn't have to live in that world. But we do. And it gets more Phildickian every day.

  * * * *

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  * * *

  On the Net: In Your Ear

  by James Patrick Kelly

  audio leaps

  For several years now I have been puzzling over the surge in popularity of audiobooks. The ascent of spoken word publishing appears at first glance to have been technology-driven. Back in the day when LPs ruled the world, it would have been foolhardy to try to publish an entire novel on vinyl, each disc of which might hold from forty-five minutes to maybe an hour of material, tops. Although cassettes began pushing LPs off the sales racks in the seventies, tape technology was more or less planted in living rooms and bedrooms (except for the brief annoyance that was the Eight-track www.8trackheaven.com ) until the widespread acceptance of the Walkman and boomboxes and cassette decks for cars in the eighties. Still, the takeoff for audiobooks lagged until the nineties. From 1990 to 1998, audiobook sales jumped 360 percent, according to the Audio Publishers’ Association www.audiopub.org.

  Today the fastest growing segment of the audiobook market is downloadable books. Clearly this has to do with the popularity of ultraportable MP3 players www.mp3.com/tech/hardware.php in general and Apple's Ipod www.apple.com/ipod in particular. There can be little doubt that the star of the downloadable audiobook universe is Audible.com www.audible.com. I'm a big fan of Audible and will come back to it in a moment, but I'm not convinced that advances in tech and convenience are all that are driving the boom market.

  One reason my own MP3 player is always close at hand when I'm driving is that I don't find much of interest on the radio anymore. I'm clearly not in the target demographic of the vast majority of music stations, whose rigid playlists would seem to have been programmed by robots. I find precious little classical and/or jazz, alas, and although I admit to punching up the occasional “oldies” station, I'm awfully sick of hearing Mick Jagger whine about his level of Satisfaction www.songfacts.com/detail.lasso?id=449. I have little tolerance for talk radio—left or right wing. I do pledge to my local National Public Radio www.npr.org station, but there are huge chunks of its broadcast day that bore me silly. Besides, has any story on Marketplace marketplace.publicradio.org ever been as exciting as the latest Richard K. Morgan www.richardkmorgan.com novel?

  But more important than the aridity of radio is that reading a book with your ears is a different experience than reading it with your eyes. Of course, I have absolutely no data to back this assertion up, other than some observations of my own listening habits. For example, my mental clock must necessarily tick at a steady pace when I listen to books—I can't really skip over the boring parts. Neither can I easily flip back to check on some half-remembered information I read in an earlier chapter. Moreover, it is sometimes difficult to hold complex plots or long chains of subtle reasoning in my mind when I first hear them. And of course, a bad reader can ruin a great story and a great reader can sometime sell a shoddy tale. My point is that, because our culture h
ad not heretofore accustomed us to listening to long passages of the spoken word, it has taken potential listeners some time to get up to speed with the opportunity afforded by all the new tech. We needed to learn how to read audiobooks—and now a lot of us have.

  now hear this

  If you credit their PR, Audible has “more than seventy thousand hours of audio programs from more than 224 content partners that include leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazine and newspaper publishers, and business information providers.” I confess that I am myself an enthusiastic subscriber. By my estimate, Audible now offers as many as eight hundred titles that might be of interest to genre readers—depending on how strictly you define our sprawling genre.

  There are two ways to look at this statistic. One is to point out that Audible offers one of the largest collections of audio science fiction and fantasy anywhere. The other is to point out that this collection is sadly inadequate. For example, Isaac Asimov www.asimovonline.com is represented by just two titles, as is Sir Arthur C. Clarke www.clarkefoundation.org. While this very publication licensed a made-for-Audible collection entitled The Best of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine 2002, it turned out to be a one shot deal, alas. Asimov's readers in search of their favorites will find Audible a decidedly mixed bag. For example, why is there but one Bruce Sterling www.chriswaltrip.com/sterling novel and none by Connie Willis www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?ConnieWillis ? George R.R. Martin www.georgerrmartin.com has four, Mike Resnick www.fortunecity.com/tattooine/farmer/2 just one. You can find multiple works of Grandmaster Robert Silverberg www.majipoor.com but nothing by Grandmaster Frederik Pohl en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FrederikPohl. No Charles Stross www.antipope.org/charlie or Cory Doctorow www.craphound.com or Michael Swanwick www.michael swanwick.com or Robert Reed www.starbaseandromeda.com/reed.html, but plenty of Terry Pratchett www.terrypratchettbooks.com and Neil Gaiman www.neilgaiman.com and Orson Scott Card www.hatrack.com and Robert Jordan www.tor.com/ jordan. Do I sound like I'm complaining? Well, maybe I am, but you should understand that I've been downloading two books a month from Audible for more than five years now and I'm not about to stop. I'll take what they give me!

  But there are other sources of genre audio on the web. For instance, Telltale Weekly www.telltaleweekly.org is not as vast a commercial enterprise as Audible, but in many ways it is more noble. Founded by Alex Wilson, it “seeks to record, produce, and sell performances of at least fifty public domain texts per year, with the intention of releasing them under a Creative Commons License five years after their first appearance here.” While this “cheap-now, free-later” site offers only a couple of dozen genre pieces at the moment, by the likes of Kelly Link www.kellylink.net, Kristine Kathryn Rusch www.kristinekathrynrusch.com, and Tobias Buckell www.tobiasbuckell.com, the collection should continue to grow if you stop by and give it the support it deserves.

  Escape Pod escape.extraneous.org is pretty much brand new as I type this, but the site that bills itself as “The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine” already has a lot going for it. As podcaster Steve Ely put it, “People have certain expectations of a magazine—that it comes out on a regular schedule, that it's professional, that it has a consistent format—and we do our best to meet those expectations."

  We pause here for a brief infodump. Podcasting? What the hell is podcasting, you may well ask? Only the latest Next Big Thing on the net! Podcasting is a technology that allows you to subscribe to a site that will then send MP3 (or other audio files) directly to your computer and thence to your Ipod or other player. All this can happen without any effort on your part—assuming your player is connected to your computer. In order to subscribe you need podcatcher software, which you can get free. And what exactly will be on the podcasts? Just about anything you can imagine, from music, chat, reviews, and yes, science fiction stories. We'll take a closer look at the podcasting phenomena in the next installment; meanwhile, back to Escape Pod.

  I have high hopes for this site, which promises an ambitious schedule of a podcast story every week. I like the editorial policy and the stories I've listened to so far sound great. As a paying reprint market, the site has been able to attract some wonderful writers, like Gregory Frost www.gregory frost.com, Tim Pratt www.sff.net/people/timpratt, and Greg van Eekhout www.sff.net/people/greg. For more about Escape Pod, check out the interview www.sfsite.com /columns/vox204.htm Steve Ely gave to Scott Danielson over at SF Site www.sfsite.com.

  Speaking of Scott Danielson, he and Jesse Willis preside over what I consider to be the best audiobook resource on the web, SFFaudio www.sffaudio.com. This is primarily a review site, and Jesse, Scott, and many others do an excellent job of commenting not only on stories but on production values as well. Their reviews range from offerings from major audiobook publishers like Harper Audio www.harpercollins.com/channels.asp?channel=Audio and Books on Tape www.booksontape.com to smaller companies like Infinivox www.audiotexttapes.net and the marvelous Full Cast Audio www.fullcastaudio.com to one shot story readings by Richard Butner www.lcrw.net/trampoline/stories/butnerash.htm and Kelly Link wnyc.org/shows/spinning/episodes/11012002%3Cbr%3E. SFFaudio also features interviews, profiles of publishers and a comprehensive list of audio editions of Hugo Award-winning fiction, as well as a link page for free online audio. This is a must click site!

  One of the online sites listed by SFFaudio is the late, lamented (by me, at least) Seeing Ear Theater www.scifi.com/set. As SFFaudio notes, “In the United States, radio drama is virtually dead. But just after the internet blossomed, ‘radio’ drama briefly revived itself. Between 1997 and 2001 dozens of Science Fiction and Fantasy stories were produced by a dedicated and talented crew of multimedia artists, writers, actors, and musicians using the RealPlayer technology to deliver ‘radio’ drama via streaming audio. And what a revival it was!” I was proud to be part of that revival, adapting three of my own stories and writing one original play. All of the seventy-odd plays are still up on the Seeing Ear site, available to stream to your computer at no cost. Among them are adaptations of some of the best known stories of the eighties and nineties, like The Lucky Strike www.scifi.com/set /playhouse/lucky, The Jaguar Hunter www.scifi.com/ set/playhouse/jaguar, Fire Watch www.scifi.com/set /playhouse/fire, They're Made Out of Meat www.scifi.com/set/playhouse/meat, and The Death of Captain Future www.scifi.com/set/playhouse/captain. Many of them have migrated over to Audible as well. But it's not only the appearance of some of our brightest literary lights that commends this site to your attention. The plays were cast with serious star power. Voice talent included Claire Bloom, Steve Buscemi, Brian Dennehy, Peter Coyote, Paul Giamatti, Timothy Hutton, Lou Diamond Phillips, Stanley Tucci, and Alfre Woodard, to drop but a few names.

  exit

  Plug an inexpensive microphone into your computer and download Audacity audacity.sourceforge.net, the free, open source software for recording and editing sounds, and you too can publish your own science fiction and fantasy audiobooks on the web.

  So, what are you waiting for?

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  * * *

  Thought Experiments: Cyberpunk is Alive and Well and Living In—Where Else?—Japan

  by Brooks Peck

  Let's play a word game. I'll say a word and you say the first thing that comes to mind.

  I'll say “cyberpunk."

  I'm guessing you'll say “history,” or “the eighties,” or “dead."

  While it's possible to point to current novels and stories that use and abuse cyberpunk themes and motifs, as a thriving sub-genre of science fiction—as a movement—cyberpunk has moved on. It petered out even as the Internet boom peaked, but perhaps this isn't strange. The Internet boom was a capitalist triumph, the opposite of classic cyberpunk's anti-establishment attitude. If you want more proof that cyberpunk literature is finished, see the 2003 anthology The Ultimate Cyberpunk. It's a reprint anthology, a summation and historical overview. A book end.

  But don't get me wrong—just because the revo
lution's over doesn't mean cyberpunk's not worth reading. In fact, I'm here to argue that cyberpunk isn't dead at all. It has moved to other lands and other media.

  * * * *

  Where cyberpunk thrives today is in Japanese manga (comics) and anime (animated TV shows and movies). Japanese writers and directors have embraced cyberpunk themes, tropes, and styles. They have carried them east to reincarnate cyberpunk in comics and on screen.

  We should have expected it. From our point of view, Japan already occupies a proto-cyberpunk future, with its crowded metropolises and cornucopia of techno-gadgets. It makes sense that cyberpunk would resonate with writers and artists living there. The Japanese, though, don't simply mimic cyberpunk; they have picked up the genre and run with it. (It may be that cyberpunk also thrives in Japanese prose literature, but I'm not qualified to say, considering that my Japanese language skills are limited to Kono sushi no tanjoubi wa?* The international popularity of manga and anime means that plenty of translated titles are available for monoglots like me.)

  Let's survey some of the more prominent titles.

  Akira

  Japanese cyberpunk begins here in an over two thousand page epic that took writer and artist Katsuhiro Otomo eight years to serialize. It opens with Tokyo blowing sky high, and the action accelerates from there. Kaneda and Tetsuo are disaffected motorcycle gang members, buddies since childhood. When Tetsuo begins to manifest extreme psychic abilities, he and Kaneda become enmeshed in a battle over a mysterious Power called Akira. Soon everybody wants a piece of them: the military, underground resistance movements, some freaky psychic children....