Our Cyberpunk World: Introducing James the Robot Bartender

The article: James The Robot Bartender Knows When You Want A Drink (TechBeat)
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In a previous entry of this series I posted about robot wait staff in Japan and China. Now in England there's a new robot bartender who doesn't just mix drinks efficiently, it has the social processing power that allows it to tell when a patron wants a drink. Its name is James, and it's part of a research project that aims at greatly improving robot-human interaction. Still, I'm sure some human bartenders are worrying for the future of humans in their line of work...

Spanner R4 Extra Update: Cascadia Has A Real Flag!

I read this article on the soccer fans of Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland, and how they've been bringing out the Cascadian flag. Well, guess what? Cascadia really does have its own flag! In fact, you can buy one!

The site where you can buy the flag defines Cascadia as the entire Pacific Northwest envisioned as a potentially independent nation. My definition in Spanner is considerably smaller, basically western Washington and Oregon combined with southwestern British Columbia, set apart as a sort of Indian reservation for liberals by the Conservative Revolutionary federal government, essentially the Cascadia of Ernest Callenbach's utopian novel Ecotopia without the California part that Callenbach was focused on.

But guess what? Even this "rump" Cascadia is still secessionist and rallies under the Douglas Fir flag a.k.a. "The Doug". That body of water in the northern part of the state, around which the urban heart of Cascadia nestles, is still called by Cascadians the Salish Sea. And the entire theme of "legal in Cascadia but not in America" just has to carry the implication of "Cascadia wants to be independent of the American Empire", and so do all those references to the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement that I threw into the Third Revision last year as they happened. And what could Chapters 21-23, the last three chapters of Spanner Book 1, be about but Cascadia trying to be independent, with the Doug waving throughout the aspiring nation?

I slapped my forehead and cried out, "But of course!"

EDIT: It turns out Cascadia has a Native American name as well: Chinook Illahee. And Illahee just happens to be the name of a neighbourhood in Bremerton, come to think of it...

Our Cyberpunk World: Now You See Me, Now You Don't

The article: Invisibility cloaks: Now you see me, but for how much longer?

Invisibility cloaks. Science fiction, right? Even better, fantasy! (see: The Arabian Nights or Harry Potter, etc., etc., etc....)

Think again.

Like the jetpack, aircar, and hoverboard, the invisibility cloak is now a reality. You can't buy them now, of course; the technology's still in the research stage, and the military and police demand first dibs Or Else. However, the cloaking device is more cyberpunk than those other sci-fi cliché technologies. Like teleportation as used in Alfred Bester's 1950s proto-cyberpunk classic Tiger, Tiger a.k.a. The Stars My Destination, cloaking is the wet dream of assassins and terrorists. Just look, for instance, at Spanner Chapter One...

Here's how it works. You're a terrorist, secret police agent, black ops super soldier, or serial killer. You put on an invisibility cloak (or your uniform is a cloak) and switch invisibility on. Now you can kill without anybody knowing you're there; your victim will look like Abu Alhazred being eaten alive in the middle of the souq by the demon Yog Sothoth.

There's three problems. One, no cloaking device will ever be able to hide your fingerprints or footprints. Observant Trackers and CSIs will still be able to see what you left behind and follow the clues all the way back to you. Two, cloaking involves materials that bend light rays, so it will never be perfect; you'll still be visible to the trained eye or special goggles. Third and worst of all, you never know if you yourself are being tracked...

Soon the cyberpunks and other science fiction writers will lose control of this technology. Very soon, it'll be all over the spy, terror, and police thrillers...

Our Cyberpunk World: The Sexbots Are Here

The article: Sexbots Will Give Us Longevity Orgasm (and many more linked from there)
[Update: Other relevant articles include The Future of Coitus: Life-Long Loving with a Sexbot, The Implications of Sexbots, and How Will Sexbots Change the World?]

You'd think sex robots are something out of a cyberpunk science fiction novel. Well, they were, back in the 1980s. Comes the Internet age around 1995 or so, and when the "cyborgasm" fad got boring, robot designers turned to more enduring cyberpleasures and began building sexbots. Fifteen years later, they're on the verge of entering mass production. They're also on the verge of being banned by puritanical tyrannies such as the United States of America. Ironically, it'll be because many feminists hate the idea — because it'll give some heterosexual men an excuse to abandon women altogether, to the point of declaring women obsolete. Of course, they conveniently forget to realize that women are using male sexbots engineered and programmed to give them sexual pleasures of a high level that no man, hand, dildo, or vibrator can pull off.

Sure, some men will get so addicted to their sexbots that women will seem sexually boring and merely human in comparison. The same goes for women in relation to men. Inevitably, some creative robot engineer will come up with sexbots specifically designed for same-sex robosex, particularly the male models with self-lubricating penises like seme characters in Japanese yaoi manga. And, of course, some people will be just plain robosexual and not even be attracted to other humans at all.

Now fast forward to 2014 and Spanner. Sexbots are now being mass produced in Japan and Europe. America is ruled by a dictatorship theocratic enough to ban sexbots on principle (i.e. because of the Christian Right's holy hatred of sex or anything else remotely fun). That makes sexbots highly prized contraband, and you bet the Mafias will quickly secure a lock on sexbot distribution in the New Confederacy. Strangely enough, the United Corporations' sex-fascist Eugenics Institute doesn't have a problem with people having sex with robots as long as sex between humans remains rigidly regulated "for the improvement of the race". A new way to bring down a high-ranking politician, cop, or pastor in an inferno of scandal? Catch him purchasing or using a sexbot. Meanwhile, sexbots become status symbols and fashion items among the "morality"-averse antiprohibitionists. You can buy one off the Mafias, or steal it from them (a favorite Team Spanner recreation), or kludge up one or a few of your own.

Sexbots aren't just something out of 1980s cyberpunk novels, or 1970s New Wave science fiction for that matter. Like jetpacks and aircars, they're already here; the only question is what they cost and when they'll go into mass production.

Next: the dark side...

Spanner: Morality Is Not the Point

Lately I've been paying too much attention to a site called Television Tropes & Idioms and listing the tropes relevant to Spanner in a Microsoft Word document. When I got to Character Alignment, I realized, for the first time since I started my first preliminary work on this story in 1992, that in a story about a revolution sparked by a monkeywrencher against an oppressive technocracy, morality is not the point. In most stories, the vertical axis on the alignment chart (good vs. evil) is the focus, and most writers (and moralists) conflate "order" with "good" and likewise "chaos" with "evil" (hence the trope Anarchy Is Chaos and its twin, Democracy Is Bad, which Spanner puts in the mouths of Lawful Evil villains but utterly rejects). Spanner is about freedom, not morality.

Spanner and the Incident at Wold Newton

On December 13, 1795, a meteor fell near the village of Wold Newton in the Wolds of East Yorkshire, England. According to the late Philip José Farmer, science fiction author (of Riverworld fame) and genealogist, these people were nearby at the time:

• John Clayton, third Duke of Greystoke, and his wife Alicia (né Rutherford), sister of...
• George Edward Rutherford, eleventh Baron Tennington, and his wife, Elizabeth Cavendish;
• Honoré Delargardie and his wife, Philippa Drummond;
• Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth Bennet;
• Sir Percy Blakeney (the Scarlet Pimpernel) and his second wife, Alice Clarke Raffles;
• Sir Hugh Drummond (Philippa's brother) and his wife, Georgia Dewhurst;
• Dr. Siger Holmes and his wife, Violet Clarke Raffles (Alice's sister);
• Sebastian Noel, a friend and student of Dr. Holmes; and
• four coachmen: Louis Lupin, Albert Lecoq, Arthur Blake, and Simon MacNichols.

The radiation from the meteor mutated these people, who became the ancestors of several of the greatest heroes in literature and pop culture. Farmer focuses in particular on three of them: Sherlock Holmes, descendant of Siger, and two Greystoke scions: John Clayton-Wilder, the eighth Duke of Greystoke, better known under the name Tarzan; and Dr. James Clayton "Doc" Wilder, Jr., whose adventures were fictionalized first as "Doc Ardan" (in French) and then, more famously, as Doc Savage.

Our Cyberpunk World: Humans Infected by Computer Viruses!

One story currently causing a firestorm in Britain is the case of the computer scientist who infected himself with a computer virus. Dr. Mark Gasson of the University of Reading put an RFID (radio frequency identification) microchip into his wrist as a kind of lockout device so that only he can enter his lab and use his phone; since, as he explains, RFID technology has advanced to the point where the chips have become full-blown computers, they can now get infected by viruses. Gasson's chip is the first to be infected. But that's not all, unfortunately...

Gasson also proved that his infected chip can pass the virus on to any system, internal or external, that it connects to. Some cyberterrorist could even use RFID viruses to take control of entire corporate and national computer systems and either destroy them or hijack them in a computer-viral form of the hostile takeover. If microchips are implanted into brains, either for police surveillance or brain enhancement, computer viruses could even be used to hijack people and turn them zombies (in the original African magic-war sense) like the computers hijacked and controlled by botnets.

If there's any reason to stop our increasingly paranoid elites from forcibly microchipping us, this is it. But if you write cyberpunk science fiction or technothrillers — or if you're a malicious hacker or techno-guerrilla — you could run away with this idea. And so I'm going to make it a major plot element of Spanner.

Here's the original BBC interview of Dr. Mark Gasson:

NaNoWriMo Prep: Pop Culture Research

I'm not touching my index cards for my NaNoWriMo novel Dirty Pop till just one week before NaNo begins. But that doesn't mean I can't do some Internet research on the pop culture world in which main girl Charlie is trying to make her mark in.

First of all, there's the behind-the-scenes stuff that's going to be the tricky part: managers, crew, labels, legal stuff, etc. What you see on MTV or YouTube has a huge infrastructure behind it, and it needs to be part of the story.

Second: fashion. That's always been difficult for me to imagine, much less draw. In the non-Disney pop music world Charlie is trying to break into, it's important to have the right style — and right now that style tends to be a cross between the outrageous and the science-fictional.

Third: What real-life pop-cultural figures do I want to loosely base characters on? No, there won't be any roman à clef type stuff with thinly disguised real-life characters; my imagination is too powerful and strange for that. Knowing as well as I do how I work, I'm likely to mix, match, and mutate characters till they only vaguely resemble their real-life inspirations. Case in point: Charlie's mother Drusilla, a major villain in Bad Company and Black Science as well as Dirty Pop. As a New Age cult guru, I threw together at least half a dozen real-life cult matriarchs into the blender and set it to "puree". Dru has elements of JZ Knight (of Ramtha fame), Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Sylvia Browne, and my family's ex-guru from the late 1970s and early '80s, along with the fictional character Erica Kane (from the soap opera All My Children). (My suggested casting for the role: Cate Blanchett, unless it's Meryl Streep in full "Nuclear Wintour" mode.) This is the kind of character mashup I have in mind.

A good idea to keep in mind is that sometimes even the most frivolous pop-cultural confection needs some intensive research, even if it doesn't need quite the research that a political thriller about an evil military corporation that invades America needs. Of course, it shouldn't be overdone; that way lies procrastination...