Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind?

There’s a sense of anticipation at the Plokta gathering as Doctorow
prepares to interview Stross in the Chequers conference room. This writer-on-writer interview is one of the weekend’s highlights: two of the top minds in science fiction freely trading ideas with each other and the audience, arguing about everything from the progress of artificial intelligence to the often tenuous relationship between science fiction and science itself. Doctorow distills this last issue into a single question: “Would Frankenstein have been a better novel if Mary Shelley had gotten the biodetails right?”

They debate the point a bit, then Stross suggests, “Maybe she was right for her time.”

SF writers bend and twist physical laws for the sake of the story—sometimes, Einstein be damned, you need faster-than-light travel to get your hero from one side of the galaxy to the other. But Stross’s comment about Shelley applies directly to those who are writing about the Singularity: They try to be as accurate as they can for their time, to extrapolate from current trends.


Doctorow says he cheats only under narrative duress. In Down and Out,
for example, when people need to
be restored from their backup copies, doctors download their brains into freshly cloned bodies. The idea of ready-made clones is fairly magical (in reality, clones would begin as embryos and grow into adults in normal time), but the device is critical, as it enables
a recently murdered character to jump right back into his old life to find
his killer.


Respect for accuracy comes naturally to geeks, but it’s also a way to avoid what Doctorow calls “peevish pedantic corrections” from fans, who are as demanding as they are loyal. Novelist Larry Niven knows this all too well. During the 1971 World Science Fiction convention, MIT students protested the physics in his book Ringworld by roaming the halls and chanting, “The Ringworld is unstable!”

Stross, Doctorow and their crowd don’t limit their laserlike focus to their own pet interests, or even to technology. For them, writing futuristic
science fiction isn’t just about understanding relativity and estimate the approximate surface area of a solar-sail spacecraft capable of traveling at half the speed of light. You have to factor
in politics and civil rights too. You have to think long and hard about the capabilities of a robotic pet cat with human-level intelligence, and then you have to ask whether it should have the right to vote.


The result of such maniacal attention to detail is a host of stories that are bursting with wild ideas. Greg Egan, a computer scientist and writer who was one of the innovators of Singularity fiction, developed an entirely new theory of cosmology for the post-Singularity universe in his most recent novel, Schild’s Ladder. He calls it Quantum Graph Theory, and the work has his fellow writers—some of whom are physicists—scratching their heads half in confusion, half in awe. (Stross has jokingly speculated that Egan, whom
few if any people have actually met, may be an artificially intelligent being. Perhaps he/it is refusing interviews for fear of failing the Turing test.)


In Appeals Court, a story that Stross and Doctorow co-wrote, mangroves in the Florida swamps have been reengineered to harness wind energy. And “Halo,” the fourth chapter of Accelerando, is about as technologically dense as science fiction gets. In one scene, Amber, the daughter of Manfred Macx, receives a package from her long-lost father. The FedEx courier uses a rapid DNA sequencer to ensure that the recipient is really her, which is a fun possibility, but Stross demonstrates the true breadth of his knowledge when the package opens itself up and reveals a 3-D printer based on Bose-Einstein condensates, a highly unstable form of matter first created in 1995. It’s a classic SF technique: While the physicists are still busy trying to find ways to create and manipulate their Bose-Einstein condensates and publish more papers, Stross is crouched over the laptop in his office, mining electronic copies of these papers for ideas, figuring out what their work might lead to in 20 or 30
or 100 years.


So are these writers predicting the future, or are they just having some highly intelligent fun? When I ask Vinge, the godfather of Singularity fiction, he paraphrases Robert Heinlein. (Science fiction is a large, incestuous family—Joan Vinge, Vernor’s ex-wife, is also an accomplished SF novelist—so when you ask one writer a question, he or she often gives you another’s answer.) If you have 1,000 monkeys, or SF writers, Heinlein said, some of them might get it right.


The good stories, Vinge adds, should at least provide useful guideposts for the future. “A well-written SF story is like running a simulation with certain types of driving ground rules,” he continues. “When something comes up, you can say, ?You know, that’s a little bit like the pre-symptoms of scenario Z.’ Then you’re immediately in tune with what some of the possibilities may be.”In Accelerando, the first creatures to be uploaded are not humans but lobsters. Stross says he got the idea from an article about a group of UC San Diego scientists who had created a functioning electronic version of a small section of the brain of a California spiny lobster. Stross summarizes the research paper for me but says he hasn’t been able to track it down since then. Part of me, I confess, is wondering if he is exaggerating, creating a story to back his story.


A few days after I return to New York from the Plokta conference, I find the San Diego researchers on the Web and check with Stross to make sure they’re the right ones. Then I forward a link to the first story In Accelerando, the aptly titled “Lobsters,” to the scientists. A few hours later, a physicist in the group, Henry Abarbanel, calls me. He’s excited but a little confused. Excited that his team’s work helped to inspire a massive SF novel, perplexed because he can’t find any specific reference to their research in the story, although there is lots of stuff about uploaded lobsters. We talk a bit about science fiction in general—he was an Asimov fan as a kid—and then Abarbanel explains what he and his colleagues are doing with those lobsters.


The research, led by biologist Allen Selverston, focused on the California spiny lobster because only 14 neurons govern a key part of its gastric tract. This number of neurons is unusually small, which makes the area easier to model. Still, understanding the neurobiology of those 14 neurons was not easy. It took Selverston 25 years. Then Abarbanel and his colleagues needed two more to figure out how to re-create the system electronically. This work, too, was difficult: Abarbanel likens the process to having all the parts of a 747 laid out on the floor of a hangar with no instruction manual on how to put them together to make an airplane.


All that work, and they’ve electronically simulated just 14 neurons. That’s a far cry from uploading
the 10¹¹ neurons that make up the human brain. Naturally, I assume Abarbanel will laugh at the idea that uploading a human mind could ever be possible. But it turns out that he approves of Stross’s leaps of imagination. “Frankly, I don’t consider it to be crazy,” Abarbanel says. “Whether it’s five years or 10 years or 500 years, I have no doubt that we’ll figure out how to do it.”

This new brand of science fiction, I realize, like all the best SF before it, is not just about predicting the future or pushing an agenda or even plain old entertaining techno-fun. It is all that, but it’s also about expanding the boundaries of the possible, building far-out worlds and then populating them with characters who bring the big ideas down to Earth. “That’s what you’re supposed to do in science fiction,” Abarbanel tells me. “You make a leap that’s 10 orders of magnitude beyond what we can actually do. If they don’t do that, then we don’t get there.”