I have been a television addict for over a half-century and seen more fantastic visions than Thomas de Quincey ever did as an opium addict.  I’ve always planned my schedule around TV viewing and although I think of myself as a bookworm, I spend far more hours watching rather than reading and probably should consider myself a tubeworm.

On a number of occasions throughout my life I’ve tried to go cold-turkey from the glass teat, as Harlan Ellison used to refer to television.  I’ve never succeeded for long.  My wife and I have two DVRs, each capable of recording two shows at once, and there are times when I want more.  We have a 56″ high definition television that we stare at for hours and hours each week, and our cable bill is $120 a month.  (This doesn’t count the $80 my wife spends at her M-F apartment out of town with a third DVR.)  Every evening after work I look at TV Guide’s excellent online grid schedule to plan my evening’s fix - juggling the hours to watch and record.

Since I can’t watch as fast as I can find good shows I want to watch my DVR is always near full and I’m constantly forced to offload shows to my DVD recorder.  Mostly I prefer documentaries, but I do love movies on TCM, and a some regular TV shows like Lost, ER, Gray’s Anatomy, The Big Bang Theory, Survivor, Masterpiece, and a few others.

Unfortunately, this means all my best free time is taken up in front of the boob tube, although I prefer to think of it as my sixth sense that watches out over the world and universe.  My high definition channels PBS, Discover, National Geographic, History, keep me well educated about what’s going on beyond what I can see for myself.  Sure there are plenty of nights when there is nothing on, but I don’t ever complain that television is a vast wasteland.  It’s a cultural fire hose.

Even though I value television immensely, I often feel I should cut back on my watching, or even give it up entirely for stretches at a time.  There is more to life than vicarious living through video.  I tell myself I need a balance.  More and more I find it grating that my cable bill is $120 a month.  On one hand I couldn’t get anywhere near that much entertainment value for my buck elsewhere, but on the other hand it seems extravagant.  Now that I’m thinking about retirement and living cheaply, it seems like a big expense.

I’d also like to live a more varied lifestyle, put more of my off-work hours into other hobbies and exercise, so I’m toying once again with cutting back on my television addiction.  And I’ve thought of a simple solution to try.  First I’d give up cable TV completely and buy an antenna for my HDTV.  That would reduce hundreds of channels down to four, and force me to live without DRVs.  Through my Netflix account I can make up for TCM, HBO and other premium channels.  And through the Internet I could supplement my television diet with Hulu.com and other online video sources.  I could maintain my addictive lifestyle and save $1500 a year, but that’s not the ultimate goal.

To tell the truth this solution still leaves me with too much choice.  What I’d really like to do is spend all of my extra time on writing fiction, web development and blogging - activities that are a bit more mentally demanding, but I see this plan as the first steps of weaning myself off my TV addiction.  I don’t want to give up TV, but get my use under control.

To tell the truth, I loved the way television was back in the 1950s and 1960s when there was little choice and most people watched the same shows.  I enjoy Survivor now because it ignites so much conversation between people I know.  Ditto for Lost.  I wouldn’t watch Survivor if it was only me, but I like Lost enough to watch it if I had no one to share with, but I enjoy it best when I get to jabber with other fans.

I’ve been seeing news stories about our lives being too full, and that we try to multitask too much, and that some people get more done by doing less.  I think this current urge to cut back on cable TV coincides with that national trend.  It is fantastic that cable television can offer so many types of shows, but this diversity of choice has negative attributes too.  As we get more choice my wife and I find less to watch together.  As I get more choice I find even more to watch.  What I would really like is the discipline to only watch one show a day - be it an over-the-air TV show, Netflix movie, or a DVD documentary.

I couldn’t pursue this experiment if my wife lived at home during the week - she’s a worse TV addict than I am.  She’s agreed to let me follow my abnormal inclination until she gets to move back home.  I think part of my drive to explore these changes in lifestyle is because I’ve been thinking so much about retirement.  I figure if I’m not going to work then I need to be more active.  TV is okay if you work hard all day and want to come home and relax, but I worry what TV would do to me if I had all day and evening to watch.

This reminds me of a book I once read called Positive Addiction.  It was the author’s belief that to get rid of a negative addiction you needed to substitute it with a positive addiction.  I’m hoping I’ll get addicted to writing and web programming, as well as more exercise and yard work.  Hell, I might even lose my coach potato paunch.

My plan is to turn in my cable boxes next Saturday unless I lose my will.  I’m sure whatever happens will lead to another post.

Jim 

Reviewing books is a touchy subject.  On one side of the coin, publicly calling someone’s creative baby ugly is just a mean thing to do.  Flipping the coin over reveals the whole needy world of authors begging for any kind of press they can get.  I’ve always dreamed of writing a book and getting published - what joy that would bring.  But I can also imagine the soul wrenching torture of waiting for reviewers and readers that never come.  Anyone who takes the time to review books is a generous human being, at least in the eyes of new writers.  Most magazines and newspapers have cut way back on their space devoted to book reviews, and I think bloggers have come to the rescue.

I wish had the time and talent to review books.  Those reviewers who can read a new novel and write a review that promotes the book without giving anything away, that sets the context in relation to other books of similar style and stories, who gives just the right snippets to hook potential readers and provides a bit of background about the writer, are people with a very special knack.  Really good reviews of this sort will not only introduce you to a new book but will teach you something about literature in general.

I don’t have that knack, so I don’t try to review books.  However I love books and I love talking about them and I love exploring where books take me on intellectual safaris.  I like to think of myself as an explorer of reality, but I’m not a pioneering explorer.  I follow in the footsteps of others where they leave notes along their path - those clues are called books.  I don’t read to be entertained, although I do love entertaining reading.  I think of books as very complicated messages - not messages with meaning, but messages with information about exploring reality.

Most people get bored if their friends spend more than a minute talking to them in a stretch.  Few people have the patience for lectures.  Well, a book, either fiction or nonfiction, is a very long speech from another person, sometimes ten or twenty hours, and even forty or fifty hours in some special cases.  No one will be patient enough to let a friend drone on and on like that.  Thus writing, either essay or fiction, is the art of capturing attention.

This long winded intro, which I hope hasn’t tried your patience, is leading up to something.  I’m trying to do two things here.  One, get clear in my mind what I’m doing when I talk about books, and two clarify or justify statements I have made in the past that have caused problems.  I’m hoping the next time you say, “I hated that book” you will have a new context to express yourself, because this essay will be about calling people’s intellectual babies ugly.  The public often hates critics because they come off as superior, and it is true, some critics are downright snooty, gleefully firing down their cannonball sarcasms from a superior vantage point.

I sometimes annoy people with sweeping statements I make about books.  For example, I frequently say I find books written by Robert A. Heinlein after The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress are painfully unreadable.  Now I know there are many Heinlein fans that love these later books even more than his earlier classics that I cherish, and I think its these people I annoy the most.  I don’t mean to offend or be inflammatory.  At one level when I say I find a book painfully unreadable all I mean is I personally experienced those books as painfully unreadable.  The real question here, for scientific purposes we might say, is whether or not books have absolute qualities that can be judged and compared.

I don’t like reviewing books in the sense that I’m going to say yea or nay as to whether someone should buy and read the book.  I love reading good book reviews, and I consider quality reviews a real art form.  I’ll mention again, I can’t carry that tune.  What I do like writing about is my impression of books, and how they affected my life.  Hey, it’s all about me, isn’t it?  That’s a joke, and not my vanity slipping, but it’s also a truism.  Blogging is news at a personal level.  Blogging is memoirs in bite-size chunks.  I’m can’t write scholarly reviews like I read in The New York Review of Books.  I would love to be that well educated so I could put each book I read into a larger context and relate it to its peers.

When I write about a book I want to relate how it fits into my life.  When I criticize Heinlein’s later books people need to know I how much I admired Heinlein’s earlier books.  The first paycheck I ever earned when I turned 16 was spent on ordering all twelve of the Charles Scribner’s Sons books by Heinlein in hardback direct from the publisher.  I once wrote an essay for Lan’s Lantern, an old fanzine from the 1980s, about how Heinlein was my father figure growing up.  I remember waiting for each new Heinlein book after The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, expecting so much and always be so disappointed.

There are many factors to explore here.  Did I change by growing up?  Did Heinlein change as a writer?  Or if I had read the later books at age 13 when I discovered and read all my favorite Heinlein books would my opinions be different about them?  Have I gotten older enough, and well read enough, to look at all of Heinlein’s books and judge them with a mature perspective?

I just finished listening to The Cat Who Walked Through Walls which many Heinlein fans love because this story includes so many characters from Heinlein’s earlier much loved books.  Now I’ve read this book once and listened to it once, and it is probably the least offensive of all the later Heinlein books to me, but my personal opinion is the book is still mediocre Heinlein.  Oh, it’s more readable to me than The Number of the Beast or Friday, and its amusing to see what he does with the characters I loved from his older classic stories, and I do get a kick out of the meta-fiction, but ultimately I have to come down hard on this story.

Now if you love The Cat Who Walks Through Walls I’m not here to convince you that you are wrong.  I think the reasons why we bond with books are emotional and out of the range of analysis.  However, I do believe books have qualities that can be discussed and compared and maybe even judged.  The qualities are not as precise as the elements of physics and chemistry, but they are concepts we can get behind and even point to and say they exist.  Some of these qualities are characterization, plot, narrative, point-of-view, the accumulation of significant details, drama, and emotional conflicts.

If you enjoy reading The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and don’t want to be an English professor, critic, writer or literary scholar than these points won’t matter to you.  You buy the book, get your kicks and go on to your next read.  No big deal.  Maybe books do not have qualities that can be absolutely measured with scientific instruments, but those qualities can be discussed and judged.  The quality of any ruling is related to the quality of the judge and jury.  The judgement of giving The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to the MFA professors at the Iowa University writer’s program or Harold Bloom will be different from a group of fans at the hotel bar of a science fiction convention or panel discussion.

It is my thesis that The Cat Who Walks Through Walls could have been an outstandingly great novel but instead is a huge belly-flop.  Getting back to that explorer metaphor, let me say that Heinlein was aiming at a very ambitious idea, exploring new fictional territory with his World as Myth theory.  I don’t know if he was old and losing his writing abilities, lazy, or just corrupt by the power of writing, but The Cat Who Walks Through Walls fails miserably as a work of art.  I’m sure there are hordes of Heinlein fans who reread this book every year and find it delightful, but I’m not one.  Heinlein let me down big time.

Now here’s where my slip starts showing.  As an amateur explorer of the realms of fiction can I leave the notes that scientifically explain where I’ve been?  A good novel is built from many kinds of building blocks, and a great novel reflects the craftsmanship of each.  When I was a kid I liked to take mechanical alarm clocks apart to stare at the fascinating maze of mechanisms.  Exploring the world of fiction means learning how stories tick.

I know Heinlein intimately knew story engineering because he wrote so many masterpieces.  How can I judge him?  I’ve read a lot of great novels, and I’m slowly developing the sense for what makes them great.  I’m still in high school though.  How do I know that the later Heinlein books don’t involve master skills that I haven’t even come to recognize?  That’s a good question.  Like I said, I’m an explorer that follows in the footsteps of others.  I only have a vague sense of where the event horizon of the unknown lies. 

I think quite a lot can be said about how The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is put together.  First off its a book that depends on older novels for characterization.  If you haven’t read The Rolling Stones, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Number of the Beast and other stories, you’re shortchanged when you read The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.  And even if you are very familiar with these stories, there is still trouble.  Hazel Stone is not the same character in The Rolling Stones and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.

I know I’m about to make one of my statements that offends people, but here goes anyway.  The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is fan fiction, but of instead of being written by fans of Heinlein, Heinlein is writing the book for his fans.  However, the quality of the story telling is more like fan fiction in general, a poor parody of the original.  I know this was probably an emotional book for Heinlein to write, and I know his fans have a great emotional attachment for his characters, but is it only me that feels this books does a great disservice to the fictional people living in the original stories?

I’m not a reader who like sequels or long story series.  I often find a great novel is best left to stand alone, and writers shouldn’t cash in on earlier successes.  As far out as the concept World as Myth is, I can’t help think such stories are not much better than daydreaming about your favorite books and characters and making up your own fantasies.  I consider Heinlein a master storyteller - and I think it would have been far better for his career to have kept inventing new stories, characters and plots instead of recycling old ones.

However, if The Cat Who Walks Through Walls had at its foundation a novel as good as Have Space Suit-Will Travel, Tunnel in the Sky, Starman Jones and The Rolling Stones, and the World as Myth unfolded naturally as part of the storytelling this would have been a brilliant work of fiction.  Instead it’s a long meandering novel about crappy topics Heinlein was obsessed with and then near the end he throws in some World as Myth ideas and wraps things up quickly.  He should have stopped the book when he got these ideas, thrown out what he had, and then worked out a real plot to fit the idea.

To make this book a masterpiece requires letting the reader in on the gimmick as soon as possible, like the Jasper Fforde novels.  Second, and this is absolutely vital, is he needs to make his classic characters act and sound just like they did from the original novels.  Third, an again this is vitally important, he needs to make the mysterious enemies vivid and realistic.  To build proper tension and page turning power readers need to know what’s at risk as soon as possible.  A last minute explanation of the bad guys told and not shown at the end of the book is just pathetic writing.

I’m not a prude, but my most vicious attack on this novel will make me sound like one.  Having all of his “good” guys sound like a convention of smarmy talking wife-swappers is just gross.  I hate to sound like a teenage girl, but damn, Heinlein’s kissy-kissy talk and innuendo just made me want to puke.  And making his classic characters act out in this limp-dick porn flick is just tragic.  Having them go on and on about how they were going to kill people for bad manners is just a little psycho to me.  Evidently a lot of people and situations annoyed the hell out of Heinlein and he used this book to vent.  Some people want to call this satire but I think that’s whitewash.

Maybe Heinlein lost his mojo and these multiverse stories were the best he could do.  Personally, I thought The Rolling Stones was a perfect novel, and bringing back Hazel Stone was a fictionally fuck-up of an idea, ditto for the cast of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  Maybe I am a prude because I just don’t want the Hazel Stone, grandmother of Castor and Pollux, joking about being stretched out of shape by giant 25 centimeter cock. 

All of Heinlein’s personally favorite characters get put into a fictional juicer and blended into weird rabble of sex obsessed mob that chirp a weird innuendo patter and are almost impossible to tell apart.  When I read these multiverse stories I can’t help but believe that horniness was driving Heinlein crazy.  These later stories are preoccupied with sex, killing people, responding to annoying people, the reliability of witnesses, rude people deserving capital punishment, and so on.  Not only does Heinlein recycle his characters to death, he constantly recycles his pet peeves.

The trouble with writers who keep recycling characters is their lovely fictional children get abused and mangled till they become unrecognizable from the characters of the original classic works.  The books Heinlein wrote in the 1950s contain some of the most inventive science fiction ever written.  He create fantastic science fictional ideas and matched those ideas with believable characters.  At the time he was on the cutting edge of exploring the boundaries of science fiction.

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls like the other multiverse stories, end up being a convention of swingers flirting with each other in endless pages of cutesy sex talk and solipsism arguments.  The lesson here for writers is don’t write in too many characters, and don’t have them all sound alike, and most especially don’t have them all sound like teenage girls trying to write porn.  Two people in a complicated plot that leads to sex is one thing, but stories that end up in orgies of leering conversation is a huge writing mistake.

Another story telling mistake is to give your characters too much power, and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls illustrates this perfectly.  If your heroes can time travel, dimension travel, live forever, then nothing feels real or believable, and no fictional conflict builds tension, and all bad guys feel like straw men put up for target practice.  Characters are built through the limitations they face, not from the magical powers they weld.

I actually believe that The Cat Who Walks Through Walls could have been as great as any of my favorite Heinlein stories.  Heinlein hated editors, but if he had his own Maxwell Perkins it’s no telling how good these later books could have been.

I do think Heinlein was exploring new territory, he just left poor notes.  As Heinlein neared death I think he feared his own end and worried about the mortality of his beloved characters, so these World as Myth stories created a heaven for them and himself to live in.  It’s a fantastic idea, and maybe why so many Heinlein fans love these stories.  It doesn’t mean they are good novels.  What I ask is to imagine if they had been great stories with the same theoretical ideas.  I don’t know why Heinlein became so sex-obsessed in his later years.  Maybe he always had been like that but stern editors censored him.  Or maybe he believed if we were all free from hang-ups and lived in the future we’d be wife-swappers, and all men and women would be horn-dogs.

Right after I finished The Cat Who Walks Through Walls I put on Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton to listen to and instantly heard master story telling.  Ethan Frome was first published by Charles Scribner’s, the publisher of Heinlein’s best books.  If Heinlein could have written The Cat Who Walks Through Walls with Wharton’s skill of narrative and characterization it would have been lighthouse on the shore of a new fictional ocean.  Recycling famous characters and authors into new stories is sailing on a dangerous sea.  Look at what they are doing to Jane Austen and her children.  Theoretically it might become a new art form, but it’s going to be hard to please the lovers of the original classic stories.  Heinlein couldn’t please me and he’s my favorite author.

Finally, I have to wonder if the sexual relationships that Heinlein wrote about is something he really expected for future people.  Today conservative thinking believes that sex should be between couples, and we’re arguing over whether those couples can include same sex partners.  We liberals answer yes.  Heinlein is speculating that in the future we’ll accept group sex marriages and even relationships we consider taboo now, such as incest, which I think is hard to believe even for liberals.  Like I said, I think of these ideas as swinger fantasies.  And we are a lot more liberated about sex than we were before Heinlein wrote Stranger in a Strange Land.  Even Ethan Frome is exploring the boundaries of sexual relationships in 1911.  What human behavior will be in the future is solid ground for speculative fiction, so I can’t object to Heinlein trying.

However, even the best of Heinlein’s stories shows a weak knowledge of human behavior.  Heinlein wrote great stories for teenagers, but his adults all seem a bit daffy, mainly because the characters from his adult novels were talky, opinionated and horny to strange degrees.  For all his later stories that speculate about group marriages he never once wrote realistically about people in such a dynamic relationship.

Now this gets me back to novels being complex messages.  The best novels contain treasures of data about how humans and society work.  They contain lots of intimate observations.  Heinlein didn’t write these kinds of stories.  He wrote about fantasy people, like the fantasy people of the Oz books or the Edgar Rice Burroughs books.  Look at how many lives that Tarzan has lived.  I think Heinlein was hoping his characters would have the fictional vitality of of Tarzan, John Carter, Dorothy, Toto, and The Wizard of Oz.

In these times of genre writers stretching out the lifetime of their characters in book after book. like some Days of Our Lives never-ending soap opera, was Heinlein’s ambition all that strange?  Readers love hanging onto favorite characters, but I don’t know if that’s healthy.  If the Heinlein juveniles would have been twelve books about one character it would have meant eleven fictional universes never seeing the light of creation.  Will we ever know if seven Harry Potter books are superior to seven different stories J. K. Rowling could have written?

Again, I think if Heinlein had written The Cat Who Walks Through Walls with original characters about a fictional reality where authors, fans, editors, movie directors and other writers could easily reshape the lives of those characters in fantastic ways he could have created a memorable original novel.  I think he confused the idea by recycling his older characters, because they aren’t his old characters really, nor are they new original characters, that get to be born fresh into a new virginal fictional reality.

Ultimately, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is an excellent lesson for me on how not to write a novel.  Heinlein, indeed was exploring new territory and I have learned from his efforts.  I could write a whole book tearing this story apart line by line but would it really be worth the effort?  I wouldn’t mind seeing other writers try using this idea and inventing a World as Myth with Heinlein and his characters.  Especially if the writer was very astute at analyzing Heinlein psychologically.  And just because I don’t think this is a very successful book it doesn’t mean I don’t think Heinlein fans shouldn’t read it.

Jim

I’m not a kid anymore, and I find myself trying to keep up with the fast-paced world of the Internet that seems built for kids who need Ritalin.    I’m doing okay, even though I’m a slow learner.  I still don’t understand the value of FaceBook, MySpace or Twitter, and there’s always something new that’s coming out that increases the pace of information processing.  I’m 56, and so far I haven’t had any luck getting my circle of friends to follow along with me into this new world.  Hell, my wife doesn’t even read my blog.  I tell her I often write about my girlfriends, but she doesn’t bite.

Yesterday I stumbled across a video series that explains many of the current social networking technologies that I thought I should post here.  I’ll see if I can get my old fart friends to stop by and watch them, hoping they might catch onto these newfangled ideas.

The videos are from a company Commoncraft and are an excellent example of educational videos for the web.  You can stop by the Show page and see their catalog.  Or just jump over to YouTube and search on “in Plain English” and you’ll find them so you can send them to your friends or add to your blog.  I’m going to embed a couple here to show off.

Over at 1% Well-Read Challenge they have set up a reading dare that I found very enticing.  It is built around the book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, which I ran out and bought and highly recommend to anyone who loves to read widely.  It’s richly illustrated and gives fascinating tidbits and short plot synopsis for 1001 books.  Oh sure, if you read the reviews on Amazon and other places on the net you’ll see a lot of grumbling that they didn’t include this book or that, but ignore such whining because overall, editor Peter Boxall included an amazing line-up of stories to get to know.  I’m now reading through this rather massive volume trying to select the perfect 10 books I’d like to read for the challenge.  The challenge is rather simple - read 1% - that is 10 books in 10 months.  You can see the list of titles here.

When I get the time, and I’m afraid I say this much too often and never find the time, I’m going to set up a web site for general books like I set up for science fiction.  My Classics of Science Fiction created a recommended reading list by finding 28 sources of recommendation, building a cross-tabulation database of all the titles and then deciding that any book that had been on 6 or more of the 28 sources would make my Classics of Science Fiction list.  I would use 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die as one of the sources for a Classic Books to Read web site.

Since I started blogging I’ve discovered the concept of the reading challenge, which is a fun blogging activity.  Over at A Striped Armchair, Eva seems to be the queen of reading challenges, and you can find a lot of good information there.  I don’t have Eva’s ability to read so many books quickly, so I think I’ll start out slow and just stick to this one challenge for awhile, but if you’re a bookworm, I bet they’re addictive.  Although scanning down Eva’s right hand column makes me want to bite off a lot more than my eyes can chew reading-wise.

One reason this reading challenge is so enticing is because of the reading rut I’m in.  I read all the time, but I seem to be going through a period of less than stellar books.  I’m finding plenty to read, even very good books, but few books this year have really jazzed my mind.  The last was The Road by Cormac McCarthy back in January.  That’s the thing about being a jaded bookworm - reading is only as exciting as your last great book.  I want every novel to go nova in my brain.  And when I finish that explosion I hunger for a book that will go supernova.

Then I’m willing to back off and read some gentle books for awhile, maybe some nice informative non-fiction, or even a crappy guilty-pleasure novel, but eventually, the gnawing returns and I need another nova level fix.  That’s where I’m at right now.  I want something that will make every white blood cell tango in my veins and give me a reading fever.  As every bookworm knows, unless a book makes you willing to give up food, sleep and sex and contort you body for hours clutching a tome until it hurts, then it’s not much of a page turner.

Scan the list and let me know of any that have blown your mind.  I’m looking for 10 Supernova Books!

Jim

Science fiction has always entertained the idea that travel between the stars would be no more arduous than travel between countries around the world today.  Because science fiction is basically adventure fiction, rocketing between Star A and Star B isn’t very exciting plotwise, so writers long ago imagined theoretical faster-than-light drives.  Anyone who has studied physics knows that these ideas are fantasies, and they contradict the notion that science fiction is based on science.  So as readers, should we accept science fiction as unscientific fun, or should we ask science fiction writers to be more scientific?

If travel between the stars was as slow as it took knowledge to evolve from Aristotle to Einstein would it still make for exciting fiction?  Science fiction has hinted at the immensity of generational ship travel, but it’s hard to write a novel that contains centuries of human activities.  I would think most novels would end up being about just the journey or jump to the destination and be just about the evolved world-building of starting a civilization on a new planet.  Interstellar war wouldn’t make any sense storywise, and neither would commerce between planets within a galactic empire, killing off two main sub-genres of SF.

Has any science fiction writer pictured a future where there are dozens of settled worlds and communication between them take years and decades?  Imagined if we had already colonized six other star systems, how would that feel to us people living on Earth?  Would it really feel any different than watching stories about China in the news?  Or imagine blogging with people from the six colonies - reading a steady stream of daily posts could be exciting - but commenting would be pointless.

There are hundreds of diverse countries around this globe that most people ignore in their daily life.  Sure, future people might watch an occasional documentary set on another world just like we watch a National Geographic show about an exotic Pacific island now.  Slower than light travel and speed of light communication will make an odd expansion of the human sphere of influence.  We could stay constantly in contact with generation ships and influence each other’s language and culture.  Just imagine new songs, television shows, books and movies coming from generation ships and colonies on distant planets.

A cool novel would be following two friends, one on Earth and one on a generation ship, staying in contact by a steady stream of messages where the time lag of replies grows ever longer.  Heinlein hinted as the possibilities of such a story with his novel Time for the Stars, but he cheated and used instantaneous telepathy as a form of communication.

Once I started thinking about STL travel to the stars I realize that science fiction hasn’t even begun to explore the idea.  Science fiction has fixated on space opera, military conflict and galactic civilizations, all from the realm of fantasy to the almost complete exclusion of how things might be.  Why is this?  Obviously, adventure fiction is built on conflict - where fighting nasty aliens is thrilling and the politics of interstellar empires offers far more intrigue.

It also shows a lack of imagination.  Two recent literary novels using fantasy and science fiction techniques, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, absolutely kicked our genre’s ass when it came to plotting outside of the traditional genre box.  Too often science fiction writers find their inspiration from science fiction tradition, like John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, a book I had much fun reading and which felt like delicious SF nostalgia rather than Cirque du Soleil storytelling dazzle that I got out of The Life of Pi or The Time Traveler’s Wife. 

I’m guessing that future SF writers of the talent of Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke won’t use golden age giants for their models, but come out of left field with stories that surprise us.  And one area where I’d love to be surprised is by reading stories that make me think I might be reading real possible futures.  I used to think reading history was a way to know the past, and reading science fiction was a way to imagine possible futures.  I hate the idea of dying and not know the future of mankind, so I always loved science fiction as a way to speculate and sooth my existential sadness about the future, however the older I get the more I’m disappointed with the help I’m getting from science fiction.  Some science fiction stories do admirably work at what I want, but too often science fiction has become recursive, like standing between two mirrors, mesmerizing but limited.

I’m not saying that generation ships are the only way to envision mankind traveling to the stars.  What if travel could be speeded up to a significant fraction of the speed of light?  Then it’s possible to write about people who make the whole trip from one star to the next.  It is physically possible to travel such speeds but it is highly unlikely it will ever be done by humans, but I’m more than willing to explore the possibilities.  I don’t think science fiction has really explored the nature of relativity all that well.  There were some stellar examples like Tau Zero by Poul Anderson and The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.

One inherent barrier to what I’m talking about is SF novels are from the POV of the characters on the cutting edge of the action.  The reader gets to experience reaching another world but never understands what the rest of humanity feels about such a success for our species. 

Imagine a classroom of students adopting a young astronaut on the first near-light speed trip to another star.  To the astronaut, the trip will be a few years to him, but a lifetime to those kids.  What if Neil Armstrong’s whole trip to the Moon took our entire lifetime, and his story was one we followed avidly our whole life, sharing with friends.  Can you imagine a novel about thirty 13-year-old school kids meeting a 25-year old man before his trip, and then a group of 83-year-old grown-up kids meeting him again when he returned and was only 35? 

Now the kicker, whose story would be more interesting?  The guy who got to go to another star, or the group that got to experience seventy years of life on Earth during a time when mankind was going to the stars?  The genre writer would pick the astronaut, but the literary writer would pick the kids.

Living in space is so much different from the dreams of science fiction.  It has been my theory that science and science fiction diverged back in the 1960s when space travel became a reality.  It is theoretically possible for mankind to live in space despite all the harsh realities of the dangers it poses.  Future space ships that travel between the stars will probably be large asteroids that are flung between the stars, to drift at speeds far below the speed of light.  They would have be self-contained worlds, with energy systems that could function for centuries.  The art of recycling would have to be near perfect.

Such space travel is a far cry from the adventures of Hans Solo and Captains Kirk and Picard.  Do science fiction readers have the patience for such stories?  Robert A. Heinlein imagined the fantastic tale of people forgetting they were the crew on such ship in Orphans of the Sky.   Brian Aldiss wrote a very similar story called Non-Stop/Starship.  In fact, most generation ship stories, including the more modern ones like Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo and The Book of the Long Son by Gene Wolfe can’t get past the idea that the inhabitants of such voyages will forgot their missions.  Wolfe goes go way beyond Heinlein by imagining a vastly complex society that is far more interesting than space travel itself.

Has any science fiction writer imagined such a generation ship society that remembers their purpose and creates a society that reflects what living between the stars would be like with the full knowledge of where they are and why they are there?  Like I said earlier, it’s probably easier to just skip the journey and create a new world for your characters to have their adventures.  But isn’t this just a way to set Lord of the Rings on another planet?

When does science fiction turn into fantasy?  Think about it.  Wherever we go in the universe, humans will all face the same problems.  Air, water, food and shelter.  After that comes community and civilization.  If we don’t forget like those characters in the Heinlein story, we’ll always have an ever-growing body of science and knowledge to work with and use.  In other words, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy.  It will be like on Earth, but somewhere else, but with a vastly different society and culture, but will it be that different?

Science fiction was born during a time when the knowledge about other planets could easily fit into a single volume.  In the 21st Century a SF writer needs to read dozens of books to scratch the surface about what astronomy now knows about outer space.  It seems when NASA probes starting sending back photos SF stopped trying to deal with space reality.  I find it amazing that when NASA started succeeding, Heinlein shifted his focus from outer space science fiction, to the inner space of sexual/social science fiction.  That was a brilliant career move, but unfortunately he stopped being speculative and entered a personal recursive mode, restating the same ideas over and over again in each new book.  If only he had been as inventive as he had been in his 1950s space books.

What if mankind never goes to the stars, or even to Mars?  That’s one area that science fiction has totally failed to explore.  Science fiction has always assumed the final frontier is outer space - what if that’s a bust?  What if our species is trapped on Earth for millions of years, what does that do to us psychologically?  What if robots get to conquer the galaxy but we don’t?

Has science fiction become a steady-state recursive universe because of faster-than-light travel fantasies?  Has science fiction become entrenched in a Ptolemaic world view and desperately in need of a Copernicus?  Has our faith in FTL stories kept us from understanding what modern day Galileos are telling us?

Science fiction will always be exciting to kids because all of its great ideas are still new to them.  However, as readers grow older and have several hundred stories under their belt, science fiction stops being novel.  It gets harder to find truly sense-of-wonder stories.  I’d like to think if science fiction tried to recapture its relationship with science it might find new realms of wonder.

Jim  

Over at Discover Magazine they have an article “How Big Is Discover’s Carbon Footprint?” that is a perfect justification for going paperless.  At the end of the essay they campaign for the reader to recycle her issue of Discover Magazine, but I can’t help but wonder why they aren’t promoting electronic editions of their magazine.  Sure, if you read the paper copy, do recycle it, but also consider switching to a paperless solution.  Please read the article and try and imagine the impact that thousands upon thousands of magazines produced around the world has on the Earth.

Now that we have so many alternatives to paper I can’t help and wonder if the print publishing industry isn’t unethical.  The linked article above does give an excellent picture of what goes into producing a magazine.  I am currently a subscriber, but I plan on not renewing my subscription.  Don’t get me wrong, Discover is a fantastic science magazine.  I don’t want it to go out of business - in fact, I wished it was many magnitudes more successful because it provides valuable knowledge about our changing world.

Like I have pointed out, there are many ways to read a magazine other than by holding a paper copy in your hands.  I discovered and read this article through an RSS feed I have for the magazine.  I hope the publishers make plenty of money off the web edition because it easy and free to read.  If there was a Zinio or Kindle edition I’d consider them too, or even an audio edition from Audible.com. 

Zinio is an excellent way to read a magazine on your computer and have it look exactly like the paper copy.  On my twenty-two inch Samsung 2253bw LCD monitor, the standard magazine requires no horizontal or vertical scrolling to view a two page spread.  If I hold a paper magazine up to my monitor, it fits within the screen area, so the Zinio reader is perfect for the modern LCD screen.

What I would really like from Discover Magazine, or any other magazine for that matter, is a service rather than paper.  Publishers should offer two methods of delivery:  the free web based system paid for through advertising and a pay-for subscription service with extras.  If I paid extra I’d want easy to read electronic editions, full access to all the back issues, freedom from online ads but get to see the original print ads, the right to email full-text articles to friends, and other imaginative marketing bells and whistles.

I have to say though, the free RSS feed is a pretty groovy way to read Discover Magazine - I just need to figure out a way to put a LCD next to the porcelain seat in the smallest room of the house and I’d really wouldn’t ever need a paper copy.

Jim

What I’m really asking: Is it time to make another movie version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?   Blade Runner was a masterpiece film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece novel, but it was just one interpretation of a very complex story.  I first read the novel in 1968 when I discovered it on the 7-day new book shelf at the Coconut Grove Library in Miami.  I can still remember reaching up to pull this very strangely titled book off the top shelf.  Even the cover was bizarre, far beyond the weird science fiction standards of the time.

I have read the book and seen the movie many times, and just recently I listened to an unabridged audio edition read by Scott Brick entitled Blade Runner, even though he was actually reading the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  It’s sort of sad when the public has to be sold a classic book by using the movie title.  Whenever I reread the book I’m always amazed by how well the movie got the book but also disturb by how much was changed and left out.  As soon as I started listening to the novel this time I kept thinking they really need to make a movie version that’s closer to PKD’s original vision.

Blade Runner is famous, and Ridley Scott keeps trotting out tweaked versions every decade or so, keeping his film version prominent in the public eye.  The Library of America just released Four Novels of the 1960s that includes Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which ups the ante on the novel’s value.  Dune has had one movie version, a television miniseries version and now another film version is in the works.  There have been many science fiction novels that have had two or more media productions, including The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Thing, and so on, so the idea of remaking Blade Runner isn’t totally crazy.

The reason to make a new version of the novel is to try and get closer to PKD’s actual story.  Blade Runner used most of the major plot, but left out most of the subplots and many fascinating themes, and it reversed the polarity of the audience’s attitude towards the androids.  In the PKD novel the androids are bad and the reader ends up wanting them killed.  In the movie, the audience feels sympathetic to androids and wish they could live.  The movie leaves out the obsession about owning live animals, Mercerism, the fake police station, the mood organ, the other bounty hunter, Rick having sex with a very different Rachael, Rachel killing the goat, kipple, and so many other fascinating ideas.

Philip K. Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? at a particularly significant time in U.S. history, during the peak of the sixties, facing the issues of the Vietnam War, civil rights, psychedelic drugs, and so on.  PKD was obsessed with two questions:  What is human? and What is real?  I believe the androids in his story had nothing to do with science fictional robots and future tech - they were metaphors for what Dick hated about people and what he thought made them inhuman.  Dick could not believe humans could have committed the atrocities of the holocaust and wondered how to explain the human-looking creatures that ran the ovens?  Ridley Scott and crew seem to be asking:  Can mankind recreate humans?  This is a very different theme.

Should A New Version Be Faithful To the Novel

Would a new version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? have to be faithful to the PDK book?  A lot has happened in the world since 1966 when PKD wrote the book.  Now that humanity is destroying the planet and making animal species go extinct faster than mother nature, what if there were a race of androids that were fighting humans to stop us and save the world for their reasons?  In PKD’s story, humans are superior because they have empathy and love animals - well, it appears Dick was wrong because we have failed at both.

Robots in today’s society are popular and loved.  I have an issue of the hobby magazine Robot sitting right beside me and it shows our drive to build androids.  Commander Data is one of the most loved all all the Star Trek characters.   There is something that challenges the modern mind to build an android that’s better than ourselves.  If the 1982 audiences felt sympathy for the androids of Blade Runner, what would the audiences of 2008 feel?  The 2004 film I, Robot got away again with evil robots, so we know audiences can accept robots in bad guy roles, but is that what people really want?

Even in the original 1966 novel, Philip K. Dick walks a tightrope by creating a race of artificial slaves that want to pass for humanity - doesn’t that beg for the reader’s empathy?  Well, at the time PKD ends up saying no.  In the novel, androids will kill humans, betray their own kind, but most importantly they will kill and torture animals with a total lack of feelings.  They are all intellect and no emotion.  Rachael has sex with Deckard, not out of love, but because she knows bounty hunters become sympathetic to androids and can’t kill them after having sex with her.

In the novel androids are incapable of feeling love.  Dick wants the reader to believe there are humans that look just like us but ultimately lack that qualities that make us good.  I feel that in the violent times of the 1960s PKD had specific people in mind.  I assume Dick is not writing a book advocating killing off empathy lacking humans but is merely telling us we all need to kill off that portion of our psyche.   Blade Runner confused the issue by suggesting that androids do deserve our sympathy.  It further screws up the story by suggesting that Deckard is an android.  I really hate this twist of Ridley Scott.  It actually hurts his own work of art.  Part of the beauty of the film is a human falls for an android and an android falls for a human.  If they are both androids you lose a lot of philosophical zest.

What I’d Like to See

Ultimately, what I’d like to see is a new version that is extremely faithful to the book except that it will be ambiguous as to whether humans or androids are truly good.  As long as they kill each other who can be the morally superior species?  If homo robotica can develop a will to live, an empathy for life, a sense of ethics, and a desire to preserve Earth, mankind, as well as all the other species, will such an artificial life-form be bad and worthy of destroying even if it kills out of self-preservation?

The next version needs to add the philosophical aspects of religion and mass culture that Dick explored with Mercer and Buster Friendly.  Also, Deckard needs his wife to contrast any possible relationship he will have with Rachael.  At one point in the book Deckard comments that Rachael and her kind have more will to live than his wife, Iran.

Then there is the whole choice of casting.  Harrison Ford brought an action hero aspect to the film that wasn’t in the book.  From the recent audio production I pictured Deckard being a lot like a younger William H. Macy, more of an average guy with a tendency to doubt over action.  Rick and Iran have a lot of marital problems that help set the philosophical stage when we ask what it is to be human.  A Sean Young type actress is perfect to represent the temptation of an artificially perfect woman.

And that brings up we humans want to be as perfect as artificial beings.  After PKD’s death there emerged a science fictional story line of downloading human minds into artificial bodies, which essentially combines humans and androids into a yet unnamed construct.  This new being goes beyond the bionic man and woman.

I had a friend that used to argue most vehemently that if an artificial intelligence was ever created it would always turn itself off.  My friend could never fathom programming the artificial will to live.  I, on the other hand, never could imagine any creature, live or artificial, that was self-aware willing to turn itself off if it wasn’t suffering.  I always assumed that awareness is always preferable over non-existence as long as there is no real incentive to shut down.

Any future film version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? will need to deal with these philosophical issues of identity.  In 1968 and 1982 we imagined PKD’s fictional world dark and decaying, suffering from the effects of a nuclear holocaust.  Any future film version will probably use the backdrop of an ecological holocaust.  The current debate over global warming centers around a very deep conflict over whether mankind is the cause of our own potential doom.  In any mythic archetypal story about the lethal conflict between human versus artificial humans and the ethical considerations of which species is superior will have to deal with this ecological issue.

Like the classic SF short story, “Farewell to the Master,” which was made into the memorable science fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, we have to remember the roll of the robot, Gort, who belongs to a race of robots that rule the humans to protect them from themselves.

The science fiction stories Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner exists on the razor’s edge between the hated world of robots in the Terminator movies and the acceptance of Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation.   Any future film version of our story needs to continue being a blade runner riding the razor’s edge between those two positions.

Engineers and computer scientists are working full tilt to build robots and artificial intelligence.  The question will not be if robots will shut themselves off - the question will be how they judge us, their gods.  Most science fiction that gets to this point, imagine homo robotica taking the dominant position and wanting to snuff us humans out like cockroaches.   Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner explores the Romeo and Juliet world of the ever feuding Capulets and Montagues, which is why it remains so fascinating.

Jim

I’m going to kill two birds with one stone in this post.  I started out researching electric cars and quickly discovered one of the best sources of information on them is Wikipedia.  Since this came just after seeing a major attack on Wikipedia the contrast of the two stories is too hard to ignore.  If you have time, look at this video “The Truth According to Wikipedia.”

These people think Wikipedia is evil but my experience is just the opposite, I think Wikipedia is very positive and creative, and represents a new paradigm in thinking and transmitting knowledge.  I wanted to find out about electric cars and Wikipedia provided a very comprehensive survey of what’s going on with that technology, and had links to more information and related articles.  I jumped over to the Encyclopedia Britannica and found zip - well that’s due to the fact that it’s a sales site and doesn’t offer a way research electric cars without paying.  I bought the deluxe DVD of the EB over a year ago and it included one year’s access to the online version of EB.

For awhile whenever I looked up something I’d check EB first and then Wikipedia and in all cases I preferred the information I got from Wikipedia, so I stopped using EB.  I could check my DVD copy of EB for what it says about electric cars, but I didn’t reinstall it on my new machine and I don’t feel like hunting down the DVD right now.  And it will be out of date.  In other words, if Andrew Keen and company want an authoritative encyclopedia to compete with Wikipedia it needs to be on the web and free.  I can understand EB wanting to make money but can’t it make money like all the other commercial Internet sites through advertising?

Even if you aren’t interested in electric cars, look at the Wikipedia entry for electric car and plug-in hybrid.  I found the stub for electric cars at EB and it promises 227 words if you buy the online subscription.  Wikipedia is offering thousands of words of info for free.  Sure there’s a chance that some of Wikipedia’s facts might be wrong, but I think the group effort looks extremely good.  I learned all I needed and wanted to know and more.

The major criticism for Wikipedia is it’s written by amateurs - but the results look very professional to me.  I was quickly able to learn about the different types of electric cars, their histories, and the planned models on the drawing boards.  For the plug-in hybrid, the technology I’m most interested in, Wikipedia gives continuously updated listing of press reports.  Other than finding insider blogs from fanatics about electric cars, I can’t imagine needing more information than what Wikipedia is presenting.

I learned quickly from Wikipedia what kind of electric cars are for sale.  The ones I can afford, I don’t want, and the ones I want, I can’t afford or they aren’t in production yet.  I also learned that certain types of electric cars have restrictions to driving on roads with 35mph or less speed limits, which is another reason why I don’t want the affordable electric cars.  The information was so good at Wikipedia that I don’t even feel the need to search further.  Wikipedia is even supplanting the Internet. 

My conclusion is I need to wait for the automobile industry to come up with a good solution.  Not only that, it looks like it will be a long time before Detroit or Japan offers a $20-25k plug-in hybrid that will be practical for the average driver.   It appears for the next few years the best electric cars will compete in price with the more expensive models of Mercedes.

This brings me to the second bird I wanted to kill with this stone.  If global warming is the crisis that scientists are saying it is, why hasn’t our government and others around the world jumped in a created a crash program to manufacture low cost plug-in hybrid electric cars?  If what scientists are saying about global warming is true it’s far more terrifying than anything Osama bin Laden plans to do, or more threatening than Iraq five years ago.  Why is Muslim terrorists more scary than a threat that promises to grind civilization down world-wide?

Politicians who avoid the issue of global warming do so because they fear fighting it will hurt the economy.  I would think one major solution to keep the economy stable and fight global warming at the same time would be the development of an ecological car.  Plug-in hybrids appears to be the next intermediate solution - they still use gas, but much less, so they will work with the existing infrastructure of gasoline supplied energy stations.  Plug-in hybrids will also benefit from people who install solar energy panels on their houses.  If you create a Marshal Plan like effort to promote both technologies we could lower our oil consumption and lower our use of coal in electrical production and thus find two major ways to lower our carbon footprint.

I think our leaders are still in the authoritative mindset of people who are attacking Wikipedia, but the world’s population acts more like the human dynamics that create Wikipedia.  Car makers still want to sell expensive Encyclopedia Britannica editions.  What we need are leaders who can promote solutions to global warming in the same way Wikipedia succeeds.

Jim

Daydreaming about retirement makes me wonder just what I would do if all my days were free from the 9 to 5 job.  My biggest fear is I would become a couch potato and die soon after retiring because I’d let myself go.  What I need is a good routine, a way to pace myself and maximize the use of my free time.  Now this is all speculation because I’m not going to get to retire soon.  If I’m lucky I could retire in another year and work part-time, but only if I’m brave enough to find a good part-time job.  It would be so easy to just keep working where I do because I like it so well.  Thus I want to contemplate this possible future to help make it happen.

For now, I’d like to imagine my perfect routine day.  To begin with I want to get up early - I don’t want to waste any precious free time.  If I had discipline, I’d get up at 5:30 and do yoga and Bowflex exercises for a half hour and then shower and dress.  To be honest, I barely exercise now, beyond walking a few times a week, doing some half-ass make-up-my-own yoga to help my back when it gets stiff, and a rare bout of Bowflex when my arms feel particularly flabby.

As you can see, my perfect routine day also involves becoming a new person.  I wonder if that’s possible?  I’ve been meaning to change myself since I was a teenager and it hasn’t worked yet.  A recent article in Wired, “Brain Scanners Can See Your Decision Before You Make Them” suggests that we lack will power or free will.  I’ve read other books about the brain that cover this territory, suggesting that we have subconscious actors in our head that make the real decisions and our conscious minds go along thinking they decided and are the real bosses.  Thus, I’d add to my morning schedule a bit of meditation hoping I could tune into these inner mechanisms and wrestle control.

I don’t know why, but I’m the most inspired with writing ideas during my morning shower, so I think my routine should be built around this.  I’d like to start writing right after getting dressed and maybe eat breakfast at my desk.  I start the day fully charged and slowly drain my mental batteries as the day progresses.  I’d want to use my best time and mental energy for writing.  Devoting mornings to writing and focusing on fiction is the key to optimizing my energy curve.  This should take me to nine or ten o’clock.

At this point I’d like to read a single non-fiction essay that has great inspirational impact.  Detailed facts are a major fuel for my mental fires, and I need something I can contemplate in my spare cognitive moments for the rest of the day.

About now, if I have to work part-time I’d like to go off for my four hours.  I should snack some because I’d want to work through the lunch hour.  It would be great if work was close enough to walk or bike so I could combine exercise with transportation time.  I’d also listen to books on audio while commuting - thus providing triple multitasking.  During this phase of my life I will be getting most of my book reading done through my ears.  I’d listen to books during housework, yard work, travel and exercise.

Even if I could afford to quit work full time it might be good for me to have one or more part time jobs.  Working in a library or bookstore might be rewarding.  Computers are my work life now, and it would be good to get away from them and do something different, but on the other hand I could be very useful as a Old Geek Computer Fix-It man, and it might be more profitable.  On the other hand it would be more of a challenge if I could start a business developing custom software.  However, running a business usually means 60-80 hour workweeks, and I most definitely do not want that.  I think whatever I do, my perfect daily routine would want me to work more with people and less with machines.

After work I will need a small meal and a nap.  Currently I need two naps a day and I don’t expect to change.  I wish I was one of those people who can sleep five hours and run like a race horse until the wee hours.  I’m not.  Currently I need to nap in the early evening so I can stay up late.  I can’t stay in bed 8-9 hours at a stretch because of the arthritis in my hips.  I get pretty stiff and hurting after 5-6 hours, and I even have to spend part of my night sleeping in a La-Z-Boy.  Getting old and breaking down presents some interesting problems to deal with, and sleeping and living with a growing pain load are two of them.

I know my perfect routine days will coincide with the slow downward slide of health.  I’ll be Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill and to beat the system I’ll have to squeeze as much positive life out of the time I have.

After I get up from my nap I’d like to have some socializing time, either with my wife or friends.  This will be a good time to watch TV or movies, and eat dinner together, or even play group games or share hobbies.

I’ve always loved television, but I don’t know if I want to waste too much of my freedom on the tube.  I love having a good show to look forward to, like Lost or John Adams.  I like watching television with other people.  For each day I wouldn’t want to watch more than one show or movie, which means devoting no more than 1-2 hours to sitting in front of my HDTV.  I’d want about one-third fiction to two-thirds non-fiction mix.  The world of documentaries have gotten to be a fantastic genre in recent years. 

Shows like The Universe, Planet Earth, Frontline, NOVA, The Miracle Planet, Independent Lens, Naked Science are amazing sources of information and entertainment.  I can’t believe I know so few people who watch these shows.  I’m surprised so many people as they age lock into their favorite entertainments and hide from the current world.  Modern cable television with its hundreds of channels is a sixth sense that allows us to roam the globe and keep up with countless human endeavors.  The Internet gets all the press about social change, but cable television is just as powerful.  Its another medium that brings the people of the world together.  I expect to be watching cable television when I pass on - I want to go out knowing as much as I can before I die.

Part of my perfect routine day will involve blogging.  I hope as the years go by blogging becomes even more sophisticated.  Probably after my social time I’ll take another nap and then get up and spend the rest of the evening blogging and working on hobbies.

I have a number of hobbies I’d like to pursue, but the one that I think would be the most fun is to recreate the experiments from the old “Amateur Scientist” column in Scientific American.  I bought a CD-ROM that collected them years ago and put it away for my retirement years.  Amazon doesn’t seem to sell it anymore, but v. 3 appears to be still for sale here.  I think it would be a fun hobby to work out lesson plans for schools on how to do basic scientific experiments.  Combine the Make impulse with Teach impulse.

I’d also like to experiment with robotics and artificial intelligence, but on a kid level, something like Lego Mindstorms kits.  I guess when guys get old they want to play with toys again.

Finally, I’d like to close out my day by reading a short story.  I find short stories to be intense compact communiqués from deep within the souls of other people.  I’m surprised they aren’t a more popular art form.  To me short stories offer the most bang for the literary buck.  Short stories combine feats of imagination with encapsulated emotion - and a good story should bring tears to your eyes, whether it’s dramatic or comic.  Great ones should make the top of your scull feel like it’s lifting off your head, like the rush of an intense but quick acting drug.  Short stories should leave you drained like you’ve just mind-melded with another human for an hour.

I’d want to leave this fictional rush to just before bed time hoping it would affect my dreams.  I’d like to get to sleep by 11:30 so I could get a good six hours sleep and be up and at it again by 5:30 the next morning.  As you can see I expect to cram a lot into my retiring years.  I’ve been working for decades, during the best years of my life, and this has been zapping all my energy.  I’m hoping my golden years are ones I can get a lot done and make up for all those years I was too tired to do anything but veg out in front of the boob tube.

Jim

A couple weeks ago at a meeting of my local astronomy club I heard a talk about the upcoming International Year of Astronomy 2009.  This reminds me of the famous International Geophysical Year when the U.S. and Russia first launched satellites into orbit back in 1957-1958 and brought about the Space Age and the amazing explosion of knowledge about our universe. 

If the IGY was about new discoveries, it seems the purpose of IYA2009 is to celebrate the 400 years since Galileo started using his telescope and to enlighten the worlds billions to the great discoveries of the science of astronomy.  We are currently living through a renaissance of astronomical exploration and I think most of the world’s citizens are missing out on the excitement.  This is a great time to throw a year long party for astronomers.

At my astronomy club meeting and at the IYA2009 web site there is a great push to find ways to get people to an eyepiece of a telescope so they can experience observation first hand.  I think this is a grand goal, but we should push people further than just showing them the rings of Saturn.  There’s a lot more to astronomy than pretty stellar tourist sites - astronomy is a long succession of conceptual breakthroughs that have changed the course of history and philosophy many times and is the foundation for the scientific age.

I think one project for the IYA2009 is to define the essential lessons needed to understand the science of astronomy.  Since we have eight months before IYA2009 begins this would be a good time for amateur astronomers around the world to tally what those lessons should be and campaign with the IYA2009 to find scientists and educators to develop those lessons to distribute all next year. 

Wouldn’t it be great if we could find 52 essential lessons of astronomy that could be taught across the web each week.  Using web pages, podcasts, videos, computer programs and any other instructional tool to let as many people as possible try than hand at teaching these 52 concepts.  Use astronomy as the subject to show off the potential of the web to teach millions.

Lessons is astronomy are all around us.  PBS, Discovery and History channels have astronomy related shows almost every week.  Bookstores have shelves of new astronomy books and sell several great astronomy magazines.  The Internet is loaded with diverse astronomy sites.  The question is how many people know about the essentials of the science?  It’s the 21st century but I think most of the worlds billions think of the heavens only in terms of the speculations taught by ancient religions or from misinformation brought about from science fiction movies.

How many of the nearly seven billion inhabitants of Earth really understand that our planet orbits the sun?  And how many of those know how to theoretically prove it?  And even still, how many from the last group could actually prove it?  Astronomy is the history of those people who could figure out ways to test and prove observations about our universe.  What I’d like to see the IYA2009 do is teach people the most important 52 scientific techniques used in understanding what we know about the Universe today.

Week 1 - The Stick

I’ll start off with an example of what I’m talking about.  Recently, while reading Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book Death by Black Hole, I was enchanted by his chapter about how much astronomy can be taught with a stick.  Most people have heard of stories about ancient cultures building monuments like Stonehenge or the Pyramids that scientists have reported were used in observational astronomy, but do you know how they worked?

Astronomy began long ago by people watching the sky.  I’m not sure modern kids understand that thousands of years ago they didn’t have television or even electricity, so the night sky was a lot more captivating then now.  You also have to understand these ancient dudes didn’t have clocks or even concepts like years, months, hours, minutes, and seconds.   They did have seasons and days, which I hope you can understand why.

It doesn’t take much observations skill to notice that day and night repeat, but it takes a little more brain power to notice the seasons coming and going and how to reliably predict them.  If you plant a stick in the ground and make notes about its shadow you’ll eventually start learning some cool stuff.  The National Science Teachers Association even offers lesson plans for elementary school kids and you might even like to take a look at what they do.  Sadly, these simple astronomy lesson plans seems to be singular, with most other web sites referring back to them.  A search of “Teaching astronomy with a stick” should bring up hundreds of unique individual pages, but it doesn’t.

Modern classroom teaching is mostly cramming kids full of words and numbers with the expectation they can puke them out later in the same order they were shoved in.  Instead we should be teaching kids how to learn on their own.  The tests should ask - 1. Prove how you know the seasons change, 2. Prove how you know the Earth is round, 3. Prove how you know the Earth orbits the Sun, and so on.  Then expect the kids to explain how they learned these truths from their own various experiments, including planting a stick in the ground and watching it, taking notes and making observations for years.  Make them work at learning, force them to develop discipline, expect more from them than memorization.

Great Expectations

Of course I know I’m asking a lot of IYA2009 - but hey, they brought up the idea.  Is IYA2009 going to be some PR fluff for telescope sales, or should it do something profound?  Maybe 52 lessons in science are too many - we could lower our sights to 12 monthly lessons.  I’m fond of the The Teaching Company that offer college level lectures for fun learning.  They build their courses around collections of 30 minute talks that come on audio and video and can include supplemental books.  52 thirty minute lectures would be 26 hours of teaching for the whole year.  About one college course taught in a semester spread out over a whole year.  I don’t think that’s too much.

It would be great if IYA2009 or its supporters could offer podcast subscriptions so people would automatically receive a 30 minute lesson each week of next year.  The audio lessons could point to a web page with supporting material, and if we’re lucky, maybe even downloadable videos that expand on the teaching.  And to make things perfect, I think each lecture should have lesson plans for teachers in K-12 classrooms.  Finally, a complete DVD course from the year, like those sold at The Teaching Company, could be given away as .iso downloads.

For this idea to work I think it would take something like the open source software paradigm to get people started.  Build it from the ground up with contributions.  There are countless astronomy clubs around the world that want to participate in IYA2009 and each could promote and campaign for particular weekly lesson and how to support them.  There are also countless academic professionals that teach astronomy and physics that could join in.  And there are countless instructional design professionals that could aid in the development of the lessons for the web.  Teaching astronomy would be a very good way to marry the potential of computer based instruction with a specific learning goal.  The emerging RIA (Rich Internet Applications) programming tools could be used to demonstrate their power.

I like this idea of an international year to learn something new.  It’s like when a city starts a community wide book club.  I think 2008 is unofficially the year of climate studies, or maybe 2010 should be the official year.  The idea of the world getting together to studying something globally sounds like lots of fun and I hope they pick a new topic every year.

Jim