You decide

An excerpt from The Happy Atheist has been published on Beliefnet. Now you can make up your mind easily: if you hate it, don’t buy it (although from what I’ve seen, the people who hate it don’t need to read it to make up their minds). If you love it and can afford it, sink some cash into the book (it’s quite pretty, white with blue trim, it might fit the decor in your bathroom quite well). If you’re kinda meh about it, or too poor to pay for it, enter the contest to win a free copy!

Oh, also, if you’re a group interested in bringing me out to your city to talk about the themes in the book, you can contact my publicist at Random House, Josefine Kals. I asked her if she was sure she wanted me to put her contact here, and she said yes — she knows not what she does, so be kind and circumspect.

All SF should be oceanic

Because that’s what we are and where we come from — and every cell contains a little ocean…a hot little ocean rich with complex contaminants and lovely energetic cascades. So I’ll share two wonderfully appropriate examples today.

NASA

NASA

Tonight at 8pm ET Jennifer Ouellette talks with JPL planetary scientist Kevin Hand about the new film Europa Report and astrobiology. You’ve all seen it, right? It’s a new independent movie that mostly gets the science right, with a scientific crew sent off on a long voyage to Europa to find out what’s going on in the gigantic deep ocean beneath the icy crust. Then it turns into a bit of a horror movie when they do find out. There were a few things that made me go “huh?” — why is the first major manned mission after decades of neglect going all the way to Jupiter? They seem to have an awfully easy time punching through an ice crust that has to be at least several kilometers thick. And shouldn’t the surface of Europa be as inimical to its deep-sea life as the surface of the moon would be to ours? — but I managed to suspend disbelief for most of it, which is a good sign for me, arch-nitpicky-nerd that I am.

You should listen in, it could be interesting. Or watch the movie, it is on iTunes.

The other thing is that while idling in Minneapolis yesterday I read Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross. It had a wonderfully intricate plot about interstellar banking (!) but there were a couple of sciencey bits that tickled me.

One is that the characters are all “robots” — humanity is extinct, we purely biological organisms are called “Fragiles”, and our cultural descendants are all engineered. They defy our usual conventions about robots, though. They’re made of cells called mechanocytes, larger and more elaborate than our cells, but with similar properties of managing thermodynamic flows and forming structural elements. I approve. I think life is always going to be a compromise between rigid durability and flexible plasticity, and modular subunits is always going to be the best way to go for allowing repair and remodeling. So despite being machines, these beings have all the properties of human beings and so can be relatable protagonists.

It also makes them far more malleable. Brain functions are entirely modular and stored discretely in a way that allows them to be maintained independently of the body, so one way to do interstellar travel is to transmit your software at the speed of light to a distant star, where a new body of mechanocytes can be assembled. This requires building an infrastructure at the other end, of course, which can only be done by sending machines at some small fraction of the speed of light to the target first, which is why the story is all about interstellar banking — it turns out that you need a stable way to maintain debt over centuries, and interesting protocols to transfer capital between multiple star systems most of whose inhabitants will never physically meet.

Anyway, the oceanic part: a lot of the action takes place on a water world called Shin-Tethys (Stross on world building). People adapted by engineering new bodies, so many of the near-surface inhabitants are mer-people. Meh. Who wants to have a compromise physiology? But the cool thing is that the robot-people who live very, very deeply and mine dissolved radioactive minerals are…squid-people. Yes, my utopia has a fictional existence. Furthermore, these are altruistic collectivist squid people. Squid people with a plan.

“…we plan to establish a world completely free of money, a world populated by a new teuthidian humanity, with a society based on consensus, not debt, and respect for collective autonomy, not competitive commerce. A world where the word ‘free’ will not be needed because nothing will cost anything and everything will be attainable!” Her skin shone with the pearly luster of her enthusiasm for the radiant future of the communist squid-nation: “I’m going to bring about the Jubilee! For the squid-folk, anyway.”

Wow. I thought I was the only one who had those dreams.

Recommended. Read a book, watch a movie, or listen to an interview tonight, your choice.

I survived my first book reading

I think it went well–I didn’t flub too much,and the crowd of 30 or 40 asked lots of good questions…but then, atheists always are full of questions. The staff at Barnes & Noble were also wonderfully gracious and helpful. The only weird thing is that afterwards several people mentioned the dissonance of the shelf of teen nonfiction behind me.

20130813-202506.jpg

Uh, Rapture Practice for teens? In non-fiction? OK.

The author of Rapture Practice has shown up in the comments — it sounds like a good book, not at all what I feared from the title.

Be gentle, it’s my first time

I’m cruising into Edina tonight to give my first ever reading and signing as an author — at 7:00 PM I’ll be at the Barnes & Noble in the GalleriaShopping Center, 3225 W 69th, Edina.

I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve pulled out a couple of short pieces from the book, I’ve got a general introduction to what it’s all about, but I don’t know how long I should sing and dance to entertain — I’m erring on the side of brevity right now, and know I can fill out any span of time by opening up to questions. Maybe some Catholics will show up! Or dudebros! Or maybe it will all be warm and welcoming. I can’t lose!

If anyone has suggestions about what not to do or can tell me about horrible experiences with authors, feel free to spin a yarn here.

Good choice for the New Humanist

The New Humanist has announced and posted the cover story for their next issue of the magazine: a celebration of Iain M. Banks. What does a science fiction writer have to do with humanism? All is explained:

…Banks also engaged, with the creation of the Culture, in a piece of sly, prolonged and magnificent anti-theism. I don’t so much mean because, here and there, he used his wide screen for explicit attack on elements of religion, as in Surface Detail’s Hieronymus Bosch-worthy demonstration of the repulsiveness of the idea of hell. I mean that the Culture itself represents an elegant absorption of, and therefore displacement of, one whole department of religious yearning. It offers, in effect, a completely secular version of heaven. With its sentient ships as omniscient as any pantheon of gods, and a lot more obliging and benign, and its vision of human nature uncramped from disease and hunger and oppression, and its rationalised equivalent to transcendence, it gives its inhabitants (and you as you read the books) all the pie in the sky they could possibly want; but transformed by being made wholly material, by being brought within the reach of human aspiration. Where religion, on the Marxist reading of it, is a kind of comprehensible counsel of despair, the heart of the heartless world, Banks supplies a counsel of optimism.

What’s in the box? Awww, WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

Oh, sure, Stephanie will tell you about all the other stuff going down at the Minnesota Atheists’ Regional Conference next weekend, the good and the bad, but she’s afraid to tell you what’s in the box. Well, I’m not…my sin is envy, and I’ll gladly share with you what’s in the box, just to steal a little attention.

Don’t look below the fold. Just don’t.

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