Promises, Promises
Yeah, it’s been a while. There’ve been deadlines: stories to complete, talks to give. Mostly met now, for the time being. I’m never deadline-free but the pressure’s off for a month or so. I’m back.
There’s Bulgaria to report on, the usual crunchy science if I can get caught up. Today, though, I’m going to fill you in on two things that are well underway but not yet finished. One of them you may have already heard about, because it’s got a big budget and it’s getting pimped all the hell over social media.
The other thing, though, will probably take you completely by surprise.
The Masochist Mod
You may remember my recent ascension to the ranks of X-Prize Advisoryhood. There’s a whole school of us, ranging from scientists to film-makers to authors. The first task assigned to each of us was to write an “optimistic” 3,000-word story about a “positive” future, one informed by technology that might be bootstrapped by the X-Prize itself. We were all given the same premise: Flight ANA0008 en route to San Fransisco passes through a timespace distortion over the Pacific Ocean and ends up in 2037. Each of us tells the story of one fish-out-water passenger as they come to grips with this new, hopeful future.
As you can see, they’re not exactly skimping on the production values (although one might wonder why the flight crew wouldn’t just steer around any giant cosmic bagel that reared up in their path…)
Once again, I asked Kathryn Cramer if she had perhaps mixed me up with someone else. She insisted that I had an appropriate sense of humor for the job. I suggested that some might say any story revolving around the phrase “weaponised Ebola” couldn’t possibly be optimistic almost by definition. She told me not to worry about it. I wrote a story called “The Masochist Mod”. She preferred “Firewalker”.
I handed it in last night. I have not yet heard back. I’ve been told it’s scheduled for upload on July 26— they’re adding one story per week for the next eight weeks— but that was by someone who had not actually seen what I’d written. The site went live yesterday, though: a very glossy, graphics-intensive production with 22 stories already in place. You should check it out: just scroll down the seating diagram, click on the passenger who’s story you want to follow, voila.
I’ve only had a chance to read a few so far. They are optimistic. If nothing else, I think “Firewalker” would be suitable company in the role of counterpoint.
I don’t know if my story will even run; but XPrize wants the word out now, so I’m jumping the gun a bit. In the meantime, here’s the briefest of dialog snippets to give you a sense of my optimistic future.
“Wait a second. Everyone had a brain interface when the flare hit? On the whole planet?”
“Well, no,” Tami admits. “Lots of people didn’t.”
“But none were Americans,” George says.
It takes Malika a moment to process this. “So you’re saying every single American had a brain interface in 2032.”
A moment’s silence.
“It was kind of a law,” Tami says at last.
“War on Terror,” George adds. “You remember.”
“Nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Stop terrorists before they commit crimes.”
“Stop terrorists when they just start thinking about them.”
“Saves a lot of time.”
“Plus, you know. Pedophiles.”
“Think of the children.”
They trail off.
That’s “Firewalker”, folks. AKA “The Masochist Mod”.
Let’s hope that someday soon, you can read the rest of it.
The Ultimate Fan Site
I’ve teased you, in the past, with intriguing illustrations and tactical maps that obviously have some kind of relationship to the Blindsight universe. (Figures like this, for example; or this.) I’ve never really told you where they came from because I actually wasn’t quite sure myself; some dude called Danil just kept dropping them into my mailbox. Pictures of space suits. Pictures of Theseus in LEO; Rorschach renditions. They all blew my mind; they were all delivered in utmost confidence (well, mostly. They said I could post a couple of shots). Some kind of fan project underway. I didn’t know much more than that.
I know something now, though. I know that those weren’t just illustrations: they were screen grabs. These things are animated. CGI. Game-level graphics at least; cinematic, even.
Now a teaser site has gone live, and— in service of driving traffic there— the embargo has been partially lifted. Not entirely, mind you; they’re trying to build interest for some later reveal, not give away their best tricks out of the gate. So I’m still partially muzzled. The clip I’ve embedded here [Update 30/06/17: replaced with more official teaser with soundtrack and title card!] is pretty fucking cool, but it’s not the most impressive sequence in their arsenal. You should see the attack on the lab-hab. You should see the way they make Scramblers swarm.
You will, some day. For now, though, you’ll have to settle for what you see here, and whatever may show up over at blindsight.space. Sign up for their mailing list. If you’ve got graphic skills, I know they’re looking.
I wish I could show you more. I’m utterly gobsmacked by pretty much everything these guys have shown me, and it’s only getting better. I may not have many fans, but I definitely have the best ones.
If CGI chops translated into sniper skills, I’d have an army that could take out entire Senates.
Oh, all right. A few more stills for you.
All the solar system objects in this sequence are real; they were extracted from the IAU database and cycled through to their predicted positions circa February 2082.
Okay, that’s enough. Now it’s off to bed with the lot of you.
.
Goddamit, those screens look amazing. It looks like it’s gonna be a Blindsight animated trailer?
And can’t wait to read Watt’s flavoured optimistic future. Think of the fans. Won’t somebody please think of the fans!
The logistics (cost, effort, etc) of that don’t make any sense, plus, the 80% of Americans who are suspicious of gov’t would revolt over mandatory brain interfaces.
I’ll bet every single last story does not address this graph:
http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Population-1950-2100-b.png
How do you ‘solve’ massive population growth in region which have are economically dysfunctional, riven with religious strife and have no stable governments?
21st century will get spectacularly ugly. Bioweapons will almost certainly be involved at some point.
Why would an employer allow you to deal with valuable merchandice/information/IP if they couldn’t be sure of you?
Why would a credit card company extend you their special low interest credit card if you were planning to default?
In a competitive world, wouldn’t denying your children the latest, best and FREE interface to GoogleNet be tantamount to child abuse? Are you a pedophile? How do we know that? How do YOU know that?
Better get this Elon the-good-billionaire Musk designed neural lace implanted, so we can all rest easy.
It’s easy to see a million forms of social, judicial and legislative pressure being brought to bear on a disoriented and confused population.
Wow. The Rorscach is *exactly* how I’ve always pictured it. Which I guess is a credit to how descriptive the text it.
Wow – really wow – those blindsight movie shots look amazing. Must be the first time in 20 years I’m looking forward to a movie. Hope they manage to pull through and finish it.
That seems self-contradictory. How would population keep growing so fast if there is lack of resources, economic dysfunction, and continuous war and disease? The carrying capacity should be much lower there. That extrapolation is only realistic if they resolve the economic issues in a huge way, even then the growth migh level off as it did in other places.
Because if you steal from them they tell the police and you’ll be arrested unless you go to a country with no extradition or hide in the woods.
Works okay.
I think you seriously overestimate the intelligence of the average North American.
Hell, you wouldn’t even have to mandate it. People have already, by the billions, paid for the privilege of attaching themselves to little tracking devices that continuously report where they are and what they’re doing. In fact, their biggest concern seems to be how to get the bestest and latest tracking devices.
The point is to stop corporate whistleblowers, ie revealing corporate crimes, for which one does not–yet–get arrested for. And it’s as much as about corporate espionage, which is currently rampant without brain hacks, and arrests seem to be pretty rare unless stupidity or select foreign countries are involved.
Peter Watts,
I agree. You don’t have to force anything, you just make it attractive and sell it to them.
I’m reminded that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, which addresses how the oppressive future of Orwell’s 1984 might really come into being.
Probably 90% of those 80% of surveillance-suspicious Americans own smartphones and update their Bookface profiles somewhat regularly. Also are not shy about expressing their views in public forums, website comments, etc.
They will use the mandatory brain interfaces to talk about Jesus and how they hate de Gubbimint. And no one will even be able to make fun of their spelling and syntax. Win-win.
I don’t really see how the two works overlap. Then again, I never got why people think of Brave New World as dystopian (while 1984 is, IMO).
Fatman,
Huxley wrote Brave New World as an anti-utopia, and arguably it’s a mirror image of the concerns of 1984: two sides of the same coin.
Well, it looks like I’d better get my digital sculpt of Sarasti finished then. Wait too much longer, and this outfit will have visualized a definitive rendition by virtue of that slick animated production–the tyranny of film being what it is over our imaginations.
The Theseus looks great there.
Congrats on getting your X-Prize entry in. You may not be optimistic about our future, but I’m optimistic about yours.
DA,
So you have a Sarasti model being developed? Can you please contact me at danil@myshli.com
I think we should join our forces instead of competing =)
“Based on Peter Watts novel”
In the future there will be no the, a, or ‘s
In grim darkness of far future, there is only Slav.
A phone that can be turned into a bug is one thing, but putting electronics into your head is way more ‘icky’. Perhaps a marketing genius could solve that.
And at the same time you have people who refuse to talk about politics either in real life or on Facebook because the entire thing is batshit insane tribal and it is both risky and a complete waste of time to even utter a political opinion.
Johan Larson,
Ahaha, sorry, next time we`ll make Russian-only version. “Основано на романе Питера Уоттса” sounds much better, right?
Hey, we’re not talking scalpels and bone saws here. They’ve already got injectible electronics that you can pump into the brain through a needle; once inside, they unfurl and integrate with the neurons all on their own. Neural dust is also on the drawing boards: an infestation of tiny silicon sperm cells that you can inject via the bloodstream, and which make their own way across the blood-brain barrier to set up shop. People are already talking about– this is a direct quote– “wireless consumer brain interfaces”.
And given that getting one will ultimately be less invasive/painful than getting your ears pierced? Basically, only the anti-vaxxers won’t be on board.
Well, the anti-vaxxers and anyone who worries about mind control…
Hi Peter. I’ve been looking for an excuse to ask a couple of blindsight adjacent questions. I hope this is okay. : )
1. In Echopraxia’s Prophet chapter, Brüks “[has] a visitor that afternoon, watched for almost an hour as it grew from speck to heat-shimmer to biped staggering across the eastern flats…” Visitor is never mentioned again. Is this a callback to the mimetic.. *thing* that disguises itself as Brüks and then escapes the tornado at the start of the book? Or something more oblique?
2. Is the 3rd book still a thing?
3. If so, is there an ETA?
Best,
L
This is what’s so frustrating about much of modern science fiction. A plane travels through a “timespace distortion” and successfully travels in time, upending everything we think we know about the plausibility of time travel, forever altering our world and rendering most other discussion trite by comparison–and it just gets turned into an excuse to let the Futurati get up and harp on their various pet issues.
“Hey, it’s great we used tech to cure racism and solve wealth inequality and all–but you think maybe we should be talking about that giant Time Sphincter we just flew through? I don’t know. That seems like kind of a big deal.”
Nope. The visitor was simply a rogue viral zombie staggering across the stage, an indicator of the ongoing societal collapse happening in the rest of the world. That mimetic thing at the start was set up by Valerie to lure the Bicamerals’ weapons systems into locking onto a false target.
Far as I know. Although I haven’t sold it yet. Or even pitched it. Or even written the outline.
Not yet. Remember that, childishly infuriated by the megasuccess of all the Dan Browns out there, I’ve decided to try being dumb and popular instead of smart and obscure. So the next book will be a near-future technothriller.
Not that I’ve written, pitched, or sold that one either mind you. I keep getting caught up in other smaller projects. (If it makes you feel any better, I handed in Freeze Frame Revolution a couple of weeks back. My editor seems fairly happy with it.)
Since the vignettes are supposed to be all about how XPrizes save the world, I’m hoping to run into one where they give out an XPrize for the first person to figure out how to harness the power of the Cosmic Time-travelling Sphincter. I’m about a third of the way through the stories, though, and most don’t address it at all. (Greg Benford and I did, at least. We both invoke black holes.)
That’ll be a rather big group once it’s a real possibility, not just something schizophrenics believe.
Overzealous, naive researchers say something, it gets spiced up by careless bloggers or journalists into a more viral form, and a lot of people suddenly have stupid opinions.
Seems far more likely to destroy the world rather than that other thing. Even if the disturbance itself isn’t stable, assuming the “vintage” jet and the passengers aren’t seized by a single government and quarantined, and it becomes news and the passengers and cargo are subject to international scientific verification through various material and biologic dating methods, it would kick off an unprecedented scientific moon race.
Nations would compete aggressively for access to the airspace around the disturbance. No nation could tolerate another being even suspected of being close to solving the mystery, because the stakes are too high. If anyone figures out how to successfully recreate time travel, they gain nothing less than the ability to manipulate reality, and potentially reshape the world as they see fit. Nuclear first strikes would be going off like champagne corks on New Years eve.
I suppose the best case scenario is that a single government “disappears” the jet and its passengers, and manages to pursue research secretly–that would at least maintain stability until they’re reading to start shaking reality like an etch-a-sketch.
Of course this assumes many things. There are important questions to answer. Can time travel happen in any direction, or only forward? Is the time sphincter basically a unique wormhole that connects only 2 specific points in spacetime, or could such a thing be deliberately recreated between two other points? Have we really traveled forward in our own timeline, or landed in an alternate universe where things may or may not happen like they would have in our own, essentially nullifying the predictive nature of the experience?
I’m sorry–why were we talking about anything else again?
Wait wait wait…a Blindsight animated movie? Have i been uploaded to some advanced substrate into a virtual reality where all my wishes do come true?
If so, then my next wish is a 1000+ pages novel in the Sunflower Universe..make it so!
So 1% of the population doesn’t get the implants. Big deal. No one’s expecting 100% brain-implant coverage.
But if you’re just one poor soul on the vintage plane, would your first reaction be to discuss the physics of the space-time anomaly (insert block of boring AYKB dialogue), or get to know this awesome Utopian society better?
Well, I doubt I’d be coherent, having succumbed to the psychological trauma of the situation, and the story probably wouldn’t be interested in hanging around long enough for me to get over my fits of gibbering.
I was just calling into question the tactical soundness of using an event so momentous that it would forever alter our understanding of reality, and trivialize anything that comes after to set up your platform for technological soapboxing. For people that are interested in that sort of thing, it seems like a Buck Rogers suspended animation scenario would be easier to accept without blowing out whatever pet issues the writer wants to service.
You can’t compete with a time sphincter though. That shit is just way more interesting than learning how dental nanomachines have obliterated gingivitis, while whitening the teeth, and also restored the ozone layer.
Speaking of brain interfaces and everyone’s favorite border security apparatus:
Slate: Facial Recognition Scanning at Airports for Intl Flights
Funny. Brain implants, total mind control and war on pedophilia reminds me Victor Pelevin’s book “Love for the three zuckerbrins”. Of cource nobody here never listen something about Pelevin or his texsts.
And you cant read that book because it was not translated in english.
Those screens look phenomenal, and the rendering of Rorschach is incredible too.
Can’t wait to see what this project leads onto, if the creator is reading this beautiful work!
I’ve been an admirer of Pelevin’s fiction for years.
Do you have an idea of how many people in the US don’t bother voting or are openly suspicious of government, elites and new things?
A lot more than 1%. Same everywhere.
I was the last person I know (in the US, and anywhere else) to buy a smartphone. Even the conspiracy loons in my acquaintance had one years before I did. Full disclosure: I gave in eventually.
Most anti-government types won’t really see the connection between a brain implant and the government spying on them (case in point: social media). Voting has nothing to do with it. Shiny. New. Toys.
Reading that snippet from the story reminded me of a chilling book called Harmony that I read last year: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7326876-harmony
Funnily enough, back when I was reading reviews of that book, one reviewer succinctly described it as “imagine Peter Watts wrote a book about public health”.
To those thinking American’s (anyone really) would not jump at the chance of a brain implant… think again. Imagine a device that can text your thoughts for you, hands free. Imagine that same device can inject 4k video directly into your visual cortex. Lay back and enjoy a movie on any size ‘screen’ you like, in perfect clarity no matter how bad your eyesight is. If we ever get that far society is in for one hell of a shock!
Medical applications aside, I can’t imagine anyone (save one) over the age of 30 that thinks this is a good idea. Not even starting in on the terrifying security and privacy implications, look at all the people routinely destroying themselves with Twitter and social media. And now you want to remove even that minor roadblock to giving instant access to people’s idiotic stream of consciousness? It’s difficult to believe even millennials are that narcissistic.
At least Trump would like it. He could finally broadcast his brain flatulence no longer encumbered by those tiny hands and stumbly fingers. Perhaps we’ll discover that “covfefe” really wasn’t a typo.
But then I’ve never owned a smart phone either, so I’m probably weird. Or old. Or both. Somehow, though, I doubt that high functioning alcoholism and a direct brain to text interface would be a good pairing.
@livens
I’m not happy with my phrasing here, and I hope you understand I was just speaking in a general sense, and not aiming any of these comments in your direction specifically.
Maybe I need one of those new-fangled brain interfaces after all for clarity’s sake, although I’m not sure how you could convert stray surface thoughts about boobs and alcohol to coherent speech.
Did you see the unofficial contribution to the X-Prize thing Charlie Stross posted on his blog this week? No need to worry about yours being the only realistically negative take. This made me cackle: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/07/report-on-seat-14c.html
Brain interfaces, in the land where the Mark of the Beast is taken seriously?
The problem I have with this whole series is that it just isn’t set far enough in the future. Twenty years from now isn’t that far away. Twenty years ago was 1997, which wasn’t a dramatically different world. Cars, planes, trains? Yup, all of those. Computers, internet, cell phones? Yes, all of that, too. I would argue that the only really big change in the last twenty years was 9/11. And that really only augmented a military/security complex that was already big and powerful; it didn’t create something new out of whole cloth. The whole series would be better if the ANA flight landed in 2067 or 2117.
Why, yes. Studio Ghibli is putting it out in collaboration with Ralph Bakshi.
Yeah, I have my concerns too. The official recruiting line was “advisory” panel, which implies, you know, commentary. Critique. But this inaugural effort seems more like straight-up cheerleading, which is not really my cuppa.
I liked that. But mine’s darker.
Kathryn’s initial response to my submission was “Not sure how the Powers that Be are going to take the ending.” That was almost two weeks ago, and I still don’t know.
Yeah, but even the most optimistic scenarios have Humanity extinct by then.
Let me tap on the “Would you like to know more?” button, just in case that wasn’t plain snark.
Now I *really* want to see this…
DA,
on the other hand it would save programmers from RSI.
I believe that’s covered under my “medical applications” exception. Theoretically it would be a wonderful thing for people without the use of their hands or vocal cords. But I’m not going to let that get in the way of a good old man rant about Millennial culture.
If senses comes to their cheerful minds and suddenly they realize it was all just one big mistake… would you still post your story online? Pretty please?
Yes. Yes I would.
Any word yet on when Firewalker will be published on the X-Prize site? I’ve checked several times, but it’s not up yet.
Still not sure it will be; there’s some resistance to the idea that a story can both end with the extermination of billions and yet still be “upbeat” in tone.
I handed in my latest and last revision just this afternoon. It is last because whether they take it or not, I simply don’t have the time to dick around with it any more (I’m giving a lecture at Concordia in a couple of weeks, plus I’m supposed to have the final revisions on Freeze-Frame for about the same time.)
Anyhow, I should know one way or another in a day or two.
Also it’s not called “Firewalker” any more. It’s called “Incorruptible”.
august…
Not published yet
fandom demands the teasing to stop (alternatively, insert “surely op will deliver?” meme image here…)
It’s up! That was… a fucking ride. Holy shit. I don’t know how I feel about that ending, but it was damn enjoyable.