I was reading through Annalee Newitz’s piece in last month’s Smithsonian about Neal Stephenson’s efforts to create a more optimistic science fiction in the wake after reading Emily Nussbaum’s piece on Community and Doctor Who in the New Yorker, and the combination struck me. The thing that I’m most interested in seeing in my science fiction right now is not solely new technology, and not solely explorations of what relationships might look like in the future: I’m interested in explorations of what our relationships to our new technology are going to be like.

One of the things Emily praised about Doctor Who in its latest incarnation was its exploration of how a specific technology—time travel—affects characters’ relationships to each other, and enhances fears of abandonment, missed chances, and the need for profound patience with the people you love. Stephenson, Annalee writes, has a more concrete set of motivations:

“We have one rule: no hackers, no hyperspace and no holocaust,” Stephenson says. He and his collaborators want to avoid pessimistic thinking and magical technologies like the “hyperspace” engines common in movies like Star Wars. And, he adds, they’re “trying to get away from the hackerly mentality of playing around with existing systems, versus trying to create new things.”Stephenson’s greatest hope is that young engineers and scientists will absorb ideas from the stories and think, “If I start working on this right now, by the time I retire it might exist.”

I think what I’m curious about is a fusion of the two. Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel 2312 is about precisely that dilemma: what happens when humans who are interconnected to their personal computing devices to the point of having them embedded in their bodies, discover that computing’s evolved to a higher level such that they aren’t sure they trust something they’re intimately connected to? What happens when they date someone or get involved in professional relationships where someone wants them to detach? These aren’t exactly new questions—Orson Scott Card posed a lot of them with his character Jane, a sentient expression of the internet, in Speaker for the Dead—but Robinson feels like he’s riffing off Siri, the Apple personal assistant that doesn’t work as well as we’re told it will, but that we’re supposed to want to like quite a bit.

And these aren’t the only technologies that pose those kinds of questions. Watching Star Trek a couple of years ago, I was struck watching Bones repeatedly stab Kirk with injections. I have a nut allergy, and my Epi-Pens are a source of both great comfort and anxiety to me. I’m glad they exist, but I’m terrified of actually having to jab myself with one, and I was both uncomfortable and fascinated to see Bones doing that repeatedly as if it was no big thing. I’d be curious to hear from long-time Trekkies in the audiences whether there are episodes of the show or movies I might have missed that address what it’s like to have medical technology that good. Do people take more risks? Do doctors overmedicate patients? Does it lead them into error? I feel like we have a lot of science fiction, whether it’s John Scalzi’s work or The Forever War that discusses how medical technology changes decision-making by soldiers. But from a doctor’s perspective, I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a tool that powerful at your disposal, and I’d love to see a futuristic medical show that explores some of those questions. I’d totally watch a show about a futuristic Atul Gwande (or, who am I kidding, Shonda Rhimes 2032 show Space Mistresses).

Good gadget design or carefully thought-out rules are a first step towards good science fiction. But just putting those tools or those rules into action without meditating on them aren’t the only way to tell stories with them.

Both before and after their founder’s death, Andrew Breitbart’s entertainment site, Big Hollywood, was making hay (and presumably garnering pageviews) by complaining about the presentation of Sarah Palin in HBO’s movie adaptation of Game Change. Now, one of Palin’s strongest Hollywood defenders, filmmaker Stephen Bannon, has been named one of the people who will steward Breitbart’s stable of publications: he’s a founding board member of Breitbart News and now will become executive chairman of the company.

It’s not entirely clear what the change in leadership will mean for the fiscal health of the company or for Big Hollywood’s coverage in particular. It’s had to imagine that any one person, much less any set of people, will be able to neatly replace Breitbart as an enthusiastic fundraiser or as a public face of the brand. The Undefeated made just $100,085 at the box office, and Bannon’s other movies haven’t exactly set the world on fire. Big Hollywood already devotes considerable space to the complaint that Hollywood isn’t responsive to conservative values and is leaving a substantial conservative market untapped. Whether Bannon’s elevated role in the company increases the volume of those complaints or provides new perspective on them remains to be seen.

This post contains spoilers through “Day 4″ of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. Feel free to spoil beyond that in comments, but please label your posts as such. For next week, let’s read through “Day 7″.

So. Abdallah Jones. I tend to think that Stephenson is doing a nice, if slightly exaggerated, job of discussing masculinity, femininity, desirability, and the Midwest. But how I feel about this book is, I suspect, going to depend on how well Stephenson walks the line in telling a somewhat silly, exaggerated story about fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, an issue that’s serious not because it has a nasty tendency to kill people, but because of how the existence of it affects other people’s behavior and decision-making.

What we learn about Jones in these chapters is this. He’s competent enough to escape Ivanov, Sokolov, and their gang, which even if it was Sokolov alone would be no mean feat. We know he has a sense of humor, however dark its direction. Telling Zula that “I would suggest an end to pluck, or spunk, or whatever label you like to attach to the sort of behavior you were showing back on that pier, and a decisive turn toward Islam: which means submission. Just a thought,” is scary and evidence of a midset distinctly unlike our own, but undeniably funny. Ditto for their exchange: “What’s the only thing more attention getting, on the streets of Xiamen, than two niggers handcuffed together?” “I give up.” “Two niggers handcuffed together with a Kalashnikov.” We know he’s a creative, improvisational thinker: thus the deal with the pilots. And we have his basic biography, which is sort of a combination of George Jackson and Osama bin Laden:

..The Welsh terrorist Abdallah Jones, who was of particular interest to Olivia because he had once blown up Olivia’s great-aunt’s bridge partner on a bus in Cardiff. He was (as she learned) of West Indian ancestry, that is, the descendant of slaves brought to the Caribbean to work on sugar cane plantations. He had grown up in a Cardiff slum where he had acquired an addiction to heroin. He had kicked that addiction with the assistance of a local mullah who had converted him to Islam. Chemically unshackled, he had taken an undergraduate degree in earth sciences at Aberystwyth and followed that up with graduate instruction at the Colorado School of Mines, where he seemed to have learned a hell of a lot about explosives. Returning to Wales, he had fallen in with a radical cell of Islamists and cut his teeth blowing up buses in Wales and the Midlands before migrating to London and graduating to tube stations. When those activities had rendered him the object of intense police curiosity, he had moved to Northern Africa, then Somalia, then Pakistan (the site of his largest single exploit, killing 111 people in a hotel blast), then Indonesia, the southern Philippines, Manila, Taiwan, and now—strange to relate—Xiamen. All those steps had made perfect sense except for the last two. To say, as people frequently did, that Abdallah Jones was to MI6 what Osama bin Laden had been to the CIA was to miss a few important points, as far as Olivia was concerned. It was true that Jones was MI6’s highest-priority target. So to that point, the comparison served. Beyond that, as Olivia took every opportunity to point out, comparing Jones to bin Laden was dangerous in that it minimized the danger posed by Jones. Bin Laden’s best days had been over on September 12. One of the most famous men in history, he’d spent the rest of his life huddled in various hiding places, watching himself on TV. Jones, on the other hand, was little known outside of the United Kingdom, and even though he had blown up 163 people in eight separate incidents before his thirtieth birthday, there was little doubt that he would kill many more than that in the future.

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This post contains spoilers through the “Day 0″ section of Reamde. If you want to spoil beyond that point, please label your comment as such. For next week, let’s read through “Day 2.”

This is a brick of a book, and the plot doesn’t really take off in these first two sections of the novel, but as is often the case with Neal Stephenson, I’m not sure really sure I mind that much because I’m so interested in two things that he’s doing: meditating on Midwesternness, and looking at how those values translate into the two main characters, Richard Forthrast and his adopted niece Zula.

Stephenson’s a wild, sprawling plotter, but he’s also a wonderfully immersive world-builder, and it’s nice to see that he still has his touch when he takes on a setting that doesn’t involve thief kings, or mouse armies, a world that’s essentially like our own. It’s hard to tell if the Forthrast ancestral homeland is at an inflection point. Things are clearly changing, as demonstrated by the wind turbines, which Richard sees as “these pharaonic towers rearing their heads above the prairie, the only thing about this landscape that had ever been capable of inspiring awe. Something about their being in motion, in a place where everything else was almost pathologically still, seized the attention; they always seemed to be jumping out at you from behind corners.”

That tension, between what’s enduring and essential about this point of origin, and how much the characters can adapt beyond it, strikes me as something that’s going to be critical to the novel. Richard seems to see the fact that the Forthrasts landed were they did as proof of some sort of animal instinct: “Richard sensed a gradient in the territory, was convinced that they were on the threshold between the Midwest and the West, as though on one side of the crick you were in the land of raking red leaves across the moist, forgiving black soil while listening to Big Ten football games on the transistor radio, but on the other side you were plucking arrows out of your hat. ” And even when he’s behaving in a way that seems singularly un-Midwestern, as is the case when he goes after Zula’s absent initial adoptive father, he realizes that, in his own Hummer-renting, leather-jacket wearing way, he’s just bringing Forthrastness into a new generation, “manifesting, not as an avatar of Richard, but as an avatar of his whole family.” There’s a wildness to the Forthrast legacy not expressed by “the offspring of Nicholas who had settled down and lived exemplary, stable, churchgoing lives in the upper Midwest,” a sense that the true legacy of the family isn’t in settling, but in the journey that got them to their ancestral home in the first place, Richard’s sense “that it probably had something to do with the farm in Iowa and his knowing, even at that age, that whatever Dad’s last will and testament said—however things were handled after his father’s eventual demise—he wasn’t going to be part of it. If he wanted to own land, he’d have to go out and find some.” And of course, even at home, things are different. As Richard notices when he stops on his drive:
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The bridge is yours.

-Is Adele’s voice going to end her career prematurely?

-Yet another reason to love Neal Stephenson: he wants science fiction writers to lay down roadmaps for the future.

-Post-Katrina thrillers.

-The Supreme Court could return a lot of works to the public domain.

-Team Bondi is dead.

We’ve got enough response that I think we’re going to go ahead with Neal Stephenson’s Reamde as our next book club book. Because this was a late decision, let’s start at a slower pace and read through Day 0 for Friday, see how it goes, and then go a bit faster in weeks to come.

I know I said we’d do The Yiddish Policeman’s Union next, but would folks be up for doing Neal Stephenson’s Remade instead and Yiddish Policemen’s Union after? I’d really like to read Reamde with all of you. Let me know what you think. If folks are generally OK with this, I’ll post an initial assignment for Reamde on Monday and we’ll get talking on Friday.