The main branch of the Cambridge Public library is a thing of beauty. It reminds me of the kinds of facilities you’d expect on upscale college campuses; it doesn’t really even feel like the libraries I’m used to; beloved but decrepit, slightly funky smelling spaces filled with battered paperbacks and scratched DVDs and CDS.
There’s a new wing of shining glass and steel, and an old wing, all gothic and castle like; the new wing is all international machine-for-living style, cool but clean and efficient, with some comfortable seating in front facing the giant eco-window facade, a complex wall of glass and automatic sun-shades which supposedly make the building cheaper to heat and cool.
It also looks great, and is easy to sit and read near. One of the many failings of the glass-box style of architecture has been sun-related, with miserably dazzled employees shoving whiteboards and cabinets up against windows to shield themselves from atomic-blast-like sunlight. Not so here.
There’s a teen room, with diner-booth like seating and tons of YA books, graphic novels, manga, DVDs, even a few video games. There is a whole other room of graphic novels in the basement, next to the mystery and science fiction ghettos, but a nice subset lives in the teen room; likewise the children’s floor also houses some some stuff for older kids.
For parents of young children, the children’s floor is a dream of community come true; a huge rug with soft sculpted river-bottom-rounded-rock pattern in tans and browns, dominates one end of the floor where the board books and picture books live, and parents with infants and toddlers and preschool aged kids hang around up there, doing that total immersion parent thing.
On their own floor. You can’t hear them from anywhere else in the building. I would have loved to have used this room with my kids, but they were small before the renovation; now that my kids are teens, I like to go upstairs and watch the parents wrestle with their little creatures now and then. Long enough to remember how exhausting that was, as well as fulfilling, and then slip away back downstairs.
The old brown castle, which was once the whole library, is now a space filled with long wooden tables with plenty of electrical outlets (some don’t work; check before you fully unpack.) One room houses the computers, each cluster of four with it’s own color laser printer. (!) The other room is for people with books, magazines, newspapers, laptops, ipads.
They’re relaxed about food and drink; there are places where conversation is allowed, and quiet areas. The staff is great. The DVD library has thousands of titles, as does the audiobook section.
It’s a great place to be; to write or simply stare into the void.
Dwelltime, a coffee bar down the street from Cambridge’s only public high school and fabulous main library, feels bright, open, warm. A single row of tables along one side, and a few at the windows, provide the seating for the large, open single room. Heck, just look at the photo. It’s nice. Kinda zen.
As a jaded people, we are apparently over the expresso machine, we’re over dark roasts, bitter flavors, burnt offerings; now it’s all about the pour over, and an endless series of wine-like adjectives used to describe said medium roasted coffees.There are the usual expensive sandwiches and pastries in a glass case. You sign the ipad cash register with your finger, be prepared for that, or you’ll feel really old and stupid. I tend to just drink in these places because the seven to nine dollar sandwich offends me–for that much money I expect a giant pile of ethnic food. But that’s me. Four dollars for a cup of coffee is about as far as I can go.
I’m old enough to remember when every porcelain cup of coffee cost 35 cents, and they gave you as much as you wanted. It was bottomless. Because honestly, nobody wanted much of that foul liquid.
Met a writing friend there early and pounded out 1200 words. My body screamed at me for awhile, saying it wanted to sleep till noon, but I told it to hold that thought, and eventually it calmed and quieted and slipped away leaving only the words and the page and the voices in my head.
Dwelltime has virtually no electrical outlets, just one in the corner, and by 8:05 that seat was taken. Fortunately, I was pretty well charged. Do I need to carry an external laptop battery?
I tasted all the wonderful notes that the little card suggested I might, though I confess to being easily placeboed. A nice cold-grew iced coffee.
Here’s Jay’s Reasons to Write Outside Your House
It is embarrassing to nap in public.
It is illegal to fap in public. (if you don’t know what fapping is, read 10,000 rage cartoons on RRedit. I’ll wait.)
Retail spaces are cleaner and better organized than your home. The noise in your head generated by ominous piles of unsorted mail does not penetrate beyond the walls of your home. Flee that pile.
You are not expected to clean retail spaces.
You cannot do laundry in most retail spaces. (sure, you could wash out your underwear in the bathroom, in a pinch, but hopefully your situation doesn’t require that.)
Attractive people of the whatever gender(s) you prefer will drift about you, reminding your chromosomes that you are still technically alive. These selfish genes help prevent napping.
Recent studies suggest that studying in different places improves data retention. I’m going to climb out on a limb and suggest that this generalizes to a variety of cognitive tasks; the noise, the chaos, all of it, breaks The Silence and defeats the blank page.
I could go on and on but it’s time to write. Wish me luck.
The Future, Joy said, might not need us. It certainly didn’t need most of the science fiction I’d been reading.
The singularity scared the crap out of me.
Heinlein’s Future History, already long in the tooth, had dissolved long ago. Asimov’s wonderfully mathematically predictable Galactic Empire, his well-behaved human sized and shaped robots, vanished. Niven’s Known Space was a construct only a shade less retrograde than EE Doc Smith’s Civilization (capital C) of the Lens of Arisia. Even David Brin’s Uplift Universe, felt suddenly flimsy, absurd.
Where was the runaway superintelligence? The bush-robots with a billion nanoscale tentacles transforming matter into fluid dreamlike possibility?
All my beloved SF was simply make believe. Fantasy, like Narnia, like the Lord of the Rings; only fantasy with delusions of possibility, embarrassing delusions at that.
Somewhere along the way, That Universe We All Dreamed Of, of spaceships and empires and alien races, became a TV show, first and foremost, in my mind. A television show carefully rigged not to upset us. Humans, and human-like aliens, in charge. No immortality–death is meaningful! What a relief, that! Can you imagine if it wasn’t? If we were the last generation doomed to die? Wouldn’t that be HORRIBLE?
Oh, sure, even on TV, there were brushes with Godlike beings, but generally these Gods were even more childish than the human characters who confronted t hem, and like Superman’s Mister Mxyzptlk, they were outsmarted every 42 minutes. Our machines never become smarter than we are, though we occasionally create one like Data, who was our equal. But we always break the mold, after making him.
Human level AI, in these shows, is always an oddity, a side kick, comic relief, Pinnochio, a pet.
And merging with our technology? Um. No. That’s just rape, Look at the Borg. Real humans don’t merge with anything.
So in my ‘serious’ SF I stuck to the Gibsonian near future. When Gibson and Sterling foresaw the next 30 years of American politics in the essay “The Privatization of Public Space,” in the 80s, a vast perversely enjoyable literary dystopia opened up, characterized by staggering income inequality, vicious anti-heroes and moral ambiguity, ascendant information technology, and nascent, childlike – godlike AI (this AI was unaware of the runaway Vinge essay, I guess) seeping in around the edges.
Here was a place full of stories. Here was the present writ large, for Gibson told us, SF was about the present, and we all pretended we’d known that all along.
One of the things that kept my storyteller in Gibson’s shadow was Extropians. A group of science fictional types interested in a lot of typical science fictional things; immortality, life-extenstion, information technology, and the components of the singularity; artificial intelligence, human / AI hybrids, uploadable identity, nanotechnology and Nearly Infinite Everything.
You might have thought such people would have interesting things to say about the many potential shapes of the future, of societies disconnected from the scarcity that characterized so much of human history. You would be wrong, though, because to a man, and they were almost all men, these people were fundamentalist right-wing libertarians, hostile to every and all public institution that has ever existed outside the free market.
The libertarian lover of the Rule of Law, that can’t abide, well, a Legislature.
I recall only one other progressive dumb enough to subject himself to the angry libertarian boot stamping the human face forever, Charlie Stross. He mostly laid low, absorbed the interesting and tuned out the silly noise, and has created more fiction about the Singularity than any other writer to date, I’m guessing.
I’m guessing, because I’ve never been able to make myself read any.
I gave up on SF, on being a fiction writer; I did other things. I raised two kids. I played in the dot.com bubble. I wept, underemployed in its aftermath–it was almost as if the libertarians of Extropia had detected that I was being paid too much money, and shut the whole thing down. I watched peers grow rich, cash out. I swirled around these events, a kind of outsider, and a kind of insider / visionary, because to some degree, the world had become Science Fiction, and I was living it–working on the global computer network for God’s sake.
And now, my kids old enough to be tired of me, I find myself staring at the collected works of The Singularity; new stuff by Drexler and Moravec and Kurzweil, at the fiction of Charlie Stross and others. I’m reading it all now, as if it were, well, a job. Because I love science fiction, and I’m going to write it again. I am writing it again.
I sold four stories to Asimovs in 2013. So far.
I can do this. I am doing this. But I’m still finding my way. But I’m no longer afraid of the Singularity; I’m not sure why.
In part, because everyone I know who actually works in AI finds the short-term time frames of Kurzweil and Moravec silly. In part, because I’m learning, finally, not to take ideas so… personally. And in part because I like fantasy, science fantasy, too. This is why we have Steampunk and Retro SF and Star Trek and Star Wars and Dr. Who, still. it’s fun to think about a long term future without a Singularity. And one can do that, plausibly, by picking away at any of the many tenets of Post humanism.
I’m not going to let a bunch of angry libertarians own the future.
An Extropian once explained that the moneyless utopia of Star Trek would never exist, because in the end, carbon atoms were scarce, and he needed to build a brain the size of jupiter. Freeloading Hippies would not be tolerated, would not be allowed to stand in the way of his Jupiter Sized Brain. So I packed up my bag of tricks and went home, twenty years ago.
Well, I’m back.
Whatever the Singularity might be, or not be, might become, it will be informed by the culture that creates it and I am part of that culture. I’m going to argue for any number of entertaining possilbities, Utopian, Dystopian, but mostly that In Between state that seems to most closely resemble Reality.
Interesting times, to be sure.
Stay tuned. What my reasoning lacks in rigor, it makes up for with perverse fun.
To infinity, and Beyond, to borrow a phrase from a cartoon toy. To make art out of crap, as Michael Swanwick told me I would do one day, at Clarion. To Boldly Go.
In a move which stunned many in the scifi community into numbed silence, Jay O’Connell was named by the BBC as the new Doctor Who, the 12th doctor in the long-running British SF franchise which is ironically enough exactly as old as Mr. O’Connell himself.
“First of all, I want to apologize to all the fans,” said a visibly distraught Mr. O’Connell. “I’m fifty. I’m baldish. I have no acting experience per, se. I’m a fan too, and had the same reaction you did when they called me. Really? I mean? Really?
“Another guy? Another white guy? another straight white guy? An old straight white guy who isn’t even hot? Wow. I mean. Wow.”
“But when I was told, that there would be no sexy co-stars this season, and the entire series would be shot on a shoestring budget as a nod to the show’s humble beginnings it started to make sense.
In a meeting with the show’s writer’s and producers, it emerged that many were sick of the fan’s demands that the Dr consummate his relationships with his many absurdly attractive companions, finally, for god’s sake, alien or no. Also, the endless ‘Love conquers all,” trope was getting a bit shopworn.
“Then it occurred to us… who inspires less sexual feelings, less sense that love conquers all, than a balding middle-aged white man? We knew we were onto something.”
Software designed to ferret out the individual least likely to inspire fan lust located Mr. O’Connell via his facebook page, and the rest, as they say, was history.
“You couldn’t have someone like Amy Pond fall in love with me,” Mr O’Connell said. “I mean, eww. People would hate that. Not to mention the actress. So I’m to be surrounded by robot characters made out of cardboard boxes.”
“Most of the seasons will be shot in a few deserted quarries, with the climax occurring in that brewery which JJ Abrams keeps using as the guts of the enterprise. We’re going old school. There will be big paper mache rocks. Stock footage of nazis. I’ll be wearing one of Shatner’s vintage toupes. Spaceships will have seating made from office chairs with wheels on them. We’re going to have models, real models, small plastic ones, hanging from fishing line with sparklers stuck in them.
My warddrobe will consist of my own set of aging, stained t-shirts and shorts. I’ll wear birkenstocks, and run oddly in them, in that way you have to run in birkestocks so they don’t fly off your feet.
“Birkenstocks are cool!” I might say, as I gasp for breath. I can’t run very fast. I have asthma.
In important scenes, my glasses might fly off, leaving me effectively blind. “Time out!” I’ll say. “I can’t see anything!”
I’ll engage in witty banter with my robot companions. “Good prostate morning,” I might say. “Pretty easy to get the stream going. Glad it still works after 500 years.”
In my first season, I will talk several computer based civilizations into self-destructing, I’ll defeat a matriarchy of women wearing steel brassiers, I’ll teach a hive mind the wonders of individuality, and I’ll travel back in time to create the universe, and then, travel back, and uncreate the universe. I’ll do this over and over again until I’d told by the robots to knock it off. I’m old! I’m 500! Who knows what I’ll do!
I will slaughter an entire planet of conservative republicans, and then realize, that ironically enough, this wasn’t the best way to handle this kind of thing. Remorse! I’ll travel back in time and stop the universe again. The robots will start it up and I’ll come back, wearing a different toupee, and new sandals.
