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‘Stochastic Man’ by Robert Silverberg is set in the dizzying future world of New York at the dawn of the third millennium. Long-haul flights now take place by rocketship, powdered bone is the social drug of choice among the middle-class, and group marriage is commonplace. But all of this is icing and has little to do with the plot.

Lew Nichols is the foremost expert in stochastics. Based on information available in the present, he predicts the future, with some accuracy. He meets a man named Paul Quinn who wants to be the next President and agrees to help him. He also meets Martin Carvajal, who can see the future more directly. Carvajal means to teach Nichols to see too.

Nichols meets Quinn at a party, and has this to say about his political charm:

On one level he was simply feeding back everything he had been told about me, and making an impressive performance of it, but on another level he was communicating his amusement at the outrageous excessiveness of his own con job, as though inwardly winking and telling me, I've got to pile it on, Lew, that's the way I'm supposed to play this dumb game. Also he seemed to be picking up and reflecting the fact that I, too, was both amused and awed by his skill. He was good. He was frighteningly good.

In a way, this describes writing as well. Often I have heard it said that a writer should have no style at all, shouldn't use whimsical turns of phrase or flowery, shouldn't do anything that distracts from the message he is trying to convey. Despite this, some of the greatest writers are known not just for what they say but how they say it. Henry James is the classical example; Wodehouse and Saki are others. Silverberg is similar in this book. There isn't really much plot at all — only a short story's worth — but he fills up the space enjoyably with deft descriptions of parties, the demographic make-up of nineties New York, the narrator's reflections on his situation, and the occasional gratuitous sex scene, without ever becoming slow or stodgy.

Unlike most Cassandra-related works, ‘Stochastic Man’ touches only lightly on the issue of what happens if you try to change the future. Carvajal tried it once, he reports, but the result convinced him never to try again, so he lives his life as if reciting a script, making no decisions, acting never through will but because he has already seen every moment of his life. This provides an interesting contrast to a religion that crops up: the “Transit creed”.

Transit is supposed to be Buddhism as re-imagined by California, and Silverberg's description is very plausibly Californian, though less plausibly Buddhist. Its credo includes the cycle of rebirth. To avoid rebirth and attain the next state of existence, the adherent must renounce all ego attachment. The other half of the credo is in accepting change: everything is in continual flux, there is no cause and effect, no pattern, no predictability. To ensure detachment from the idea of a fixed personality or fixed habits, the adherent must cultivate unpredictability.

Naturally, Nichols resists this philosophy, as he finds it incompatible with his idea of a predictable future described by the laws of probability. But as he gets further into Carvajal's world of unthinking acceptance of the future as he has seen it, the reader gets to see just how much his behaviour comes to match that of the Transit acolyte. Just as the latter might rearrange all their furniture or fly to India apparently on a whim, so the former might draw on a tablecloth or give all his money away simply because he has seen it happen. Though heading in opposite directions, they both reach the same end-point, rejecting cause and effect.

It seems that this beautiful concordance is the book's raison d'être, so it was quite unsurprising that the surface plot is a bit of a let-down. It doesn't have the neat sense of coming full-circle that the topic mandates, but fizzles out into what is to the reader an uncertain future.

After reviewing SAC the other week, I had to follow up with Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG. This follows on from the earlier series and touches on many of the same issues. As usual, I'll try to review without spoilering either series.

2nd GIG is different from SAC in many ways, obvious right from the start with its different title sequence and music. The new title sequence is much less striking, less awesome, than the old one, being animated in the same style as the show rather than pure 3D CG.

The same topic, of people acting independently yet in concert, is back in a new guise; this time it is not through direct memory transfer but by authorship. As I noted in my previous review, authorship can be considered as life creation, and this point is developed further, but too explicitly in my view. Having a virtual tachikoma hold up a virtual copy of a Dawkins book and summarise it is trite and pretentious.

Pretentiousness is the order of the day, as the plot for the first half of the series focuses on a series of essays. Investigating leads to the main characters reading these essays, which in turn leads to them discussing the essays in long and dull dialogues which are only marginally related to the rest of the show. There is a development about half-way through after which the essays take back seat to a discussion of individuality.

Historically there has been a contrast between the wills of individuals and the will of the state, the latter of which is not the sum of the former. Sato (thus Shirow by proxy) has one of his characters claim that direct mind-to-mind interaction mediated by the internet brings into existence a second collective will, distinct from society as a whole. Despite quite some exposition of this point I was unable to spot any basis for believing it. The tachikoma again come to the rescue by contrasting their individuality in spite of synchronisation, as discussed in the first SAC, with the phenomenon that humans, both in society at large and specifically in the series, can act and even think collectively despite our individuality.

This is punctuated by a certain amount of character development absent from the first SAC, bringing the series dangerously close to soap at times. One episode features Kusanagi travelling to Hong Kong, encountering an annoying teenage boy, and sharing a hotel room with him. The occasional bouts of fanservice (of which I disapprove in general as being incredibly silly) are not as bad as in most anime series, but still come to a head when the boy, noticing Kusanagi's full-cyborg body, asks her if she can still have sex. The resulting dialogue does not bear repetition. Much later in the episode, Kusanagi comments, in perhaps the least propitious translation ever, “That kid had more spunk than I expected.”

Finally, matters come to a head in the last few episodes with all-action excitement. Again, Batou ends up screaming, “Motokoooooooooooo‥” at a crucial and dramatic moment, but this time the symbolism goes too far by having him carry a piece of steel girder in the shape of the Cross, silhouetted against the sky. I felt sick to my stomach.

The stealth subplots of the original are back, but the series is more focused towards its central plot with fewer stand-alone episodes. This means that this series doesn't deal with Issues to the same extent, taking the show away from sf and closer to high-tech spy action thrillers. The more straight-line development of the plot also means that the stealth subplots are belaboured a bit.

In one stand-alone episode, Batou is shocked, and I was surprised, when he manages to work out the plot twist half-way through the episode by deciphering the handy hints the author had left for him. I was quite impressed that they hadn't felt the need to make the plot completely obvious, until it turned out that he hadn't worked out the plot twist and three or four clues later he was shocked again.

Whereas the first SAC was set in an affluent future of megacorporations and the middle class, 2nd GIG deals with the uglier underside, the proletariat. The plot revolves around a refugee crisis, and features shady weapons deals and smuggling, suicide bombers, shanty towns, and exploited workers.

This ugliness is reflected in the visual aspect of the series, which is a lot less shiny than before, and I find it a lot less pretty too. In a parallel development, the tachikoma are less cutesy, and they have a bigger rôle to play in the series. OTOH, I find their dialogue this time round is much less carefully written, less careful to avoid anthropomorphising them, and the shorts at the end of each episode are more lightweight and not as entertaining.

The first SAC considered that not only are ideas life-forms of themselves, spreading from human carrier to human carrier, but like any other infection they manifest themselves, the symptoms being action on the part of the human host. Although it's not as thoughtfully presented as its predecessor, Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG goes further to consider what happens when ideas mutate inside their carriers to produce different and unexpected symptoms. Even the supposedly regulating effect of the author/mediator cannot completely control the outcome when this happens. The eventual outcome of Kuze's plan (as well as his backstory), the tachikoma's actions in the final episode, and Kusanagi's behaviour after crossing Kuze's ghost-line, can all be considered illustrations of this effect.

Many times I have said that the chief reason I watch anime is not because of any Japanophilia, or a love of the medium, but because almost all of the good TV and film sf at the moment is anime. Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex is a good example of this.

I found it very reminiscent of the original series of Star Trek. Star Trek was created at the dawn of the Space Age, when space brought us promise of “strange, new worlds” to discover. It used what was then the latest TV technology to show us the technology of the future: the spaceships, the phasers and communicators. Its one-story-per-episode serial format kept it moving, and its mix of writers ensured that there was a good balance between futuristic coolness, action, and genuine science-fiction storytelling.

Now, move forward forty years. The Internet Age is upon us, and the new frontier is between the computer and the mind. GitS SAC draws from the traditions of the cyberpunk genre, but combines them with the real-world experience of internet communities, e-business, the blogosphere, and hacker culture to create an immediately convincing environment, rich in detail. It stands up to the challenge of visually depicting man's new interaction with machine in this environment. But just as Star Trek was heavily influenced by the Western without feeling bound to its plot formulae, so does GitS SAC manage to be post-cyberpunk while drawing its structure more from an Asimovian mystery than a Gibsonian action-adventure.

Watching the films Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell: Innocence wasn't enough to make me rush out and watch this series. I thought the films were slow-moving and ponderous. The first provided an interesting introduction to the universe but its issues were issues that had been done to death before. The second was very slow, and its various topics of discussion — man making machines in his own image, the mutability of memory, and the end justifying the means — were squashed together onto an encompassing theoretical foundation without enough support to take their combined weight. Both films, if not visually dark, were at the least brooding.

So when FlipC eventually convinced me to watch GitS SAC, I was pleasantly surprised. It's visually much lighter than the films, though it isn't nearly as elegant or attractive. As an anime, it's well-done. The English-language dub is of good quality, with only one or two spotty translations. The CG is subtle, mostly used for backgrounds and robot animations, apart from a breathtaking full-CG opening. They even shied away from too much fan-service or excessive gore, having only a little of both of these. The music depends heavily on taste, being part of the current trend in anime to have quite experimental sonic ambience. I liked it: it's closer to the impact of Appleseed rather than the Philip-Glass-esque twinkles of Innocence.

But the most important contrast between SAC and the films is in pace. Unusually, the series makes an explicit distinction between “standalone episodes” which have one storyline per episode, and “complex episodes” which all contribute to a single story arc. The half-hour episode is the TV equivalent of the short story, and having to fit a whole storyline into that much screen time keeps it moving without stopping to swap proverbs or have deep, meaningful monologues. As well, each episode is suffixed with a short featuring the “tachikoma” robots of the main show performing some peripheral light entertainment.

As a side note, FlipC found the tachikoma really annoying, and I did from time to time, but it strikes me that that's what they're there for. Even Star Trek had Chekov's continual “the Russians inwented it” for comic relief, and I'm amused that the stylistic function of a Russian in the sixties could be performed by unanthropomorphic, unandroid robots today. Furthermore, the plot as it is couldn't really have been done without them, and they lend some philosophical weight to what follows.

The complex episodes are interleaved, in screen and narrative time, with the standalone episodes. Unlike Star Trek, the series is conceived as a single entity, and the main plot of each episode conceals a small collection of stealth sub-plots which progress over the course of the series.

The standalone episodes thus each get to discuss a different issue, and there are as many issues in this universe as there are alien races in Star Trek. They also manage to keep the pace going by resisting the tendency to become soap, leaving character details tantalisingly thin, as they should be. Even the complex episodes manage to have enough action to keep them moving, though they have a lot more philosophical ground to cover and even pretensions at literary references to maintain. Not all of the references were convincing, but I was impressed at the reasoning behind the presentation of each point.

Our old friend the mutability of memory is back, but this time accompanied by a realisation that this is not a phenomenon exclusively of the digital age. It doesn't link the high-tech falsification of records to the ancient technique of book-burning, but it does briefly note that the vulnerability of cyber-brains to having their memories hacked is just a new expression of the vulnerability of natural brains to artificial memories and memory loss.

Towards the end of the series, it makes an impressive leap to the idea that the reinforcement of the brain with external, electronic memory stores is simply another step in an age-old tradition of bolstering our feeble memories with physical mementoes and souvenirs to remind us of our experiences. One could go further (though staying in-universe, it doesn't) and say that today's obsession with hoarding (first paper, now digital) photos and videos of our experiences is an intermediate stage between the purely physical mementoes of the past (“been there, bought the T-shirt”) and the purely informational mnemonics of the future.

As the series draws to a neatly formulaic conclusion that unites the traditions it draws upon — spy thrillers, cyberpunk, and high-tech anime — it also unveils its main point.

In the universe of the show, direct memory transfer between humans is possible, and after seeding the idea with episodes in which Kusanagi and later Batou are driven to action by receiving someone else's memories, it returns to this point for the final episode. At the same time as it explains the mechanism, it cleverly notes that this is not a new concept. Indeed, it underpins the notion of authorship itself: if you consider art as the transmission of feeling, then you can say that any thesis-bearing work of art or literature, any piece of propaganda, persuasion, or satire, is an attempt to do the same, to impose upon the audience's minds your own impressions or experiences, real or imagined, to inspire, even compel them to a particular state of mind and maybe even to action.

Founded on this, it advocates a kind of “light the blue touchpaper and retire” activism, as a special case of action through inaction, citing the existing phenomenon of an author whose works persist and develop even though he makes no further contribution to them. Perhaps the most obvious concrete example is how a single poorly translated line from an obscure game called Zero Wing can induce highly stylised behaviours in people from all over the world without any further action on the part of its author. Reasoning further in this direction would reach the viewpoint presented by Stephenson in ‘Snow Crash’, but GitS SAC takes a different angle.

These autonomous ideas can even be connected to the idea of information as a life-form in its own right, reproducing via human hosts, prospering or becoming extinct according to evolutionary pressures. Under this model of authorship, every time you publish something, no matter how quietly, you are putting a new entity into the ecosystem of ideas, where it will live or die by its evolutionary fitness and the chance events it happens upon.

Through juxtaposition of dialogue (in particular, the line, “It'll remain that way as long as you and I want it to”), it also makes an implicit contrast between this hands-off development and hands-on control of one's creations. In fact, one could even view Aramaki's actions towards the end of the series as an example of using this contrast strategically. This interpretation is an interesting adjunct to the explicitly mentioned view that the hands-off mode, the “vanishing mediator”, is a regulatory mechanism, but I am unconvinced on this point.

Also, this thesis is particularly apt when considered in the context of the Ghost in the Shell universe, first conceived by Shirow but since developed and expanded by others, both with and without his further intervention. Many authors have reported that the promulgation of their work is something that tends to happen behind their backs, which is why the idea of ideas as life-forms has been so widely popular. What GitS SAC adds to the discussion is the idea that manifestos can be not only distributed but also enacted in the same way, and where it stops short is when it reaches the realisation that each author is a carrier, not a creator, of his ideas. To my mind, this, not curiosity, is the antidote to memory synchronisation where individuality is concerned: that in writing this article I am not only promulgating the plentiful, beautifully presented ideas of Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex, but also combining them with other ideas I have previously been infected with.

Like all good sf — like Star Trek, even — it's not about the future, it's about the present.

I quote from one of Arthur C. Clarke's introductions in his ‘Collected Stories’:

Written as an entry for a short story competition run by the Observer newspaper, on the subject ‘2500 AD.’, ‘The Star’ wasn't even a runner-up. However, on magazine publication, it received a Hugo award in 1956.

Decide for yourself whether that says more about the Observer or the Hugo awards, but before you do, consider that ‘The Star’ is one of the most awesomely awesome sf stories I have read, so awesome I have two paper copies of it.

I first came across it in ‘Peter Davison's Book of Alien Worlds’, a 1983 short-story collection blatantly targetted at people who read Target novelizations of Dr Who, among whom I counted myself at the time. Nestled among some quite good sf, a rather uneventful piece by Ray Bradbury, and Clarke's earlier (and marginally less good, but equally memorable) ‘History Lesson’, it shines out of that book like a star, right from its first sentence.

It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican.

That's a striking opening line, and the prose throughout is more grandiose, less chatty, than Clarke's usual. The story is about a Jesuit astrophysicist charting the frontiers of space in the far future, who suffers a crisis of faith. It sounds like a recipe for boredom and cheap, anti-religious dogma, but Clarke neatly skirts coffee-house theology to reach original thought. Unlike many of Clarke's stories, the plot doesn't hinge around little-thought-of implications of the physical laws, or the mechanics of space travel and moon exploration, but the detailed and glossy depiction of space and its astronomical occupants is unmistakeably Clarkean. This made the story accessible to me as a boy but the gravitas of its subject matter and the lavishness of its prose made it much less patronising and adventure-y, and more involving, than its neighbours in the collection.

The striking opening is matched, in the best possible way, by an unforgettable ending. After what must be more than a decade since I first read it, the after-taste of that shock I felt when Clarke revealed how unexpectedly he'd deployed his One Assumption still lingers when other stories have been forgotten, and re-reading the story brings back a lump to the throat.

I've never come across anyone who had anything bad to say about ‘The Star’, except (hypothetically) the judging panel for the Observer. The story is an excellent ambassador for science-fiction, having nothing to do with space adventure and no technobabble, and everything to do with human feelings and mind-expanding novelty.

A while ago, CUSFS had a discussion about what constitutes hard sf. Though there was some variation, we formed a consensus that hard sf is where everything works: all the physics, though often a little fantastic, is mathematically sound and well thought-out. The mechanics of space travel, or biotechnology, or teleportation, or whatever the book is based on, have been considered by the author in great detail, and there is often an appendix, an in-universe technical manual, or an “as you already know” monologue explaining how it all works. (It is usually books, by the way. There are very few hard sf films or TV shows, by this definition, but I suppose ‘Journey into Space’ would be a dated example on radio.) One might say that the very name suggests this: the science comes first and the fiction comes afterwards. If you have it the other way around, writing the fiction first and then coming up with technobabble, you end up with fictional science. This is not to say that soft sf cannot be good, it's just not the same.

Poul Anderson's ‘Tau Zero’ seems to be widely regarded as one of the great works of hard sf. So I read it with the expectation of having my mind blown. I was therefore disappointed to get a modest but enjoyable space opera.

The problem with interstellar exploration and colonisation is that it's really slow. Stars are a long way apart, and this pesky special relativity business means you can only go so fast. Apart from having a fixed speed limit, there is time dilation to consider: as you approach the speed of light, time outside seems to go slower. If you do go back home, you find the people there have aged much faster than you: after a reasonably long journey, your only family might be your grandchildren.

But time dilation goes both ways: time on Earth seems to go faster as measured by the ship, but time on board ship goes slower as measured by the cosmos. Even if it does take centuries to reach your destination, by going at a great enough fraction of the speed of light you can make sure the journey only takes a few weeks or months for those on board. If you keep pushing backwards with a constant force, your rate of acceleration will decrease as the cosmos sees it, but because your time dilation increases, you can keep accelerating as much as you like from the point of view of the crew.

This is the situation Anderson places his crew in, a crew of scientists and engineers on a nine-year mission as they measure time, to reach the new world that they will then call home. But something goes wrong. The grandiose and towering descriptions become increasingly epic as the ship's inverse tau — it's time dilation factor as seen from inside — asymptotes towards zero as they get further and further from the Earth they left behind. This really is hard sf at its hardest: the simple mathematical outcomes of relativity form the foundation of an elegant, intergalactic backdrop. But a backdrop for what?

There are fifty colonists: twenty-five men, and twenty-five women, all ready and able to breed a new race to inhabit their new planet. They're cooped up together in a small ship with a distant captain, a female first officer who is more than willing to boost her male colleagues' morale, an authoritarian, inflexible constable, and a whole library of clichés. Thus it is that the maybe two-thirds of the book not consisting of hard sf is, in more than one way, Heinleinesque. In fact, that's putting it mildly. The book reads like a syncopated gossip column punctuated with a philosophy of social engineering that even Anderson has one of his characters describe as Machiavellian.

I'm afraid that despite all the hype, I couldn't recommend this book. The author's choice of words is impeccable, and his descriptions of every detail, from the scale of the cosmos to the light fittings, are at once precise and evocative. But reading them entails also sitting through the superficiality of his attempt at human interest.