Infinite Improbability Issues:
Matrioshka Brains:
Black Hole Farming:
Iron Stars:
Psychohistory:
Showing posts with label science fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science fiction. Show all posts
Sunday, November 26, 2017
Infinite Improbability and other Puffs of Logic
I was delighted to come across a series of videos on Youtube discussing advanced science fiction concepts. I'm presenting a few appealing ones here for your perusal.
Infinite Improbability Issues:
Matrioshka Brains:
Black Hole Farming:
Iron Stars:
Psychohistory:
Infinite Improbability Issues:
Matrioshka Brains:
Black Hole Farming:
Iron Stars:
Psychohistory:
Saturday, October 28, 2017
Free Philip K. Dick: Download 13 Great Science Fiction Stories
via openculture:
Although he died when he was only 53 years old, Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) published 44 novels and 121 short stories during his lifetime and solidified his position as arguably the most literary of science fiction writers. His novel Ubik appears on TIME magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels, and Dick is the only science fiction writer to get honored in the prestigious Library of America series, a kind of pantheon of American literature.
If you’re not intimately familiar with his novels, then you assuredly know major films based on Dick’s work – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darklyand Minority Report. Today, we bring you another way to get acquainted with his writing. We're presenting a selection of Dick's stories available for free on the web. Below we have culled together 11 short stories from our collections, 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices and 550 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. Some of the stories collected here have also found their way into the recently-published book, Selected Stories by Philip K. Dick, which features an introduction by Jonathan Lethem.
eTexts (find download instructions here)
Although he died when he was only 53 years old, Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) published 44 novels and 121 short stories during his lifetime and solidified his position as arguably the most literary of science fiction writers. His novel Ubik appears on TIME magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels, and Dick is the only science fiction writer to get honored in the prestigious Library of America series, a kind of pantheon of American literature.
If you’re not intimately familiar with his novels, then you assuredly know major films based on Dick’s work – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darklyand Minority Report. Today, we bring you another way to get acquainted with his writing. We're presenting a selection of Dick's stories available for free on the web. Below we have culled together 11 short stories from our collections, 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices and 550 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. Some of the stories collected here have also found their way into the recently-published book, Selected Stories by Philip K. Dick, which features an introduction by Jonathan Lethem.
eTexts (find download instructions here)
- “Beyond the Door”
- ”Beyond Lies the Wub”
- “Mr. Spaceship”
- “Piper in the Woods”
- “Second Variety”
- “The Crystal Crypt”
- “The Defenders”
- “The Eyes Have It”
- “The Gun”
- "The Hanging Stranger"
- “The Skull”
- “The Variable Man”
- "Tony and the Beetles"
- "Beyond Lies the Wub" – Free MP3
- "Beyond the Door" - Free MP3
- "Second Variety" – Free MP3 Zip File - Stream Online
- "The Defenders" - Free MP3
- "The Gun" - YouTube
- "The Variable Man" – Free MP3 Zip File - Stream Online
Monday, July 25, 2016
Transrealism: the first major literary movement of the 21st century?
via The Guardian
It’s not science fiction, it’s not realism, but hovers in the unsettling zone in between. From Philip K Dick to Stephen King, Damien Walter takes a tour through transrealism, the emerging genre aiming to kill off ‘consensus reality’
A Scanner Darkly is one of Philip K Dick’s most famous but also most divisive novels. Written in 1973 but not published until 1977, it marks the boundary between PKD’s mid-career novels that were clearly works of science fiction, including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and his late-career work that had arguably left that genre behind. Like VALIS and The Divine Invasion that followed it, A Scanner Darkly was two stories collided into one – a roughly science-fictional premise built around a mind-destroying drug, and a grittily realistic autobiographical depiction of PKD’s time living among drug addicts.
It is also, in the thinking of writer, critic and mathematician Rudy Rucker, the first work of a literary movement he would name “transrealism” in his 1983 essay A Transrealist Manifesto. Three decades later, Rucker’s essay has as much relevance to contemporary literature as ever. But while Rucker was writing at a time when science fiction and mainstream literature appeared starkly divided, today the two are increasingly hard to separate. It seems that here in the early 21st century, the literary movement Rucker called for is finally reaching its fruition.
Transrealism argues for an approach to writing novels routed first and foremost in reality. It rejects artificial constructs like plot and archetypal characters, in favour of real events and people, drawn directly from the author’s experience. But through this realist tapestry, the author threads a singular, impossibly fantastic idea, often one drawn from the playbook of science fiction, fantasy and horror. So the transrealist author who creates a detailed and realistic depiction of American high-school life will then shatter it open with the discovery of an alien flying saucer that confers super-powers on an otherwise ordinary young man.
It’s informative to list a few works that do not qualify as transrealism to understand Rucker’s intent more fully. Popular fantasy or science fiction stories like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games lack a strong enough reality to be discussed as transrealism. Apparently realistic narratives that sometimes contain fantastic elements, like the high-tech gizmos of spy thrillers, also fail as transrealism because their plots and archetypal characters are very far from real. Transrealism aims for a very specific combination of the real and the fantastic, for a very specific purpose, that seems to have become tremendously relevant for contemporary readers.
The potential list of transrealist authors is both contentious and fascinating. Margaret Atwood for The Handmaid’s Tale and her novels from Oryx and Crake onwards. Stephen King, when at his best describing the lives of blue-collar America shattered by supernatural horrors. Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, among other big names of American letters. Iain Banks in novels like Whit and The Bridge. JG Ballard, as one of many writers originating from the science-fiction genre to pioneer transrealist techniques. Martin Amis in Time’s Arrow, among others.
This proliferation of the fantastic in contemporary fiction has at times been described as the “mainstreaming of science fiction”. But sci-fi continues on much as it ever has, producing various escapist fantasies for readers who want time out from reality. And of course there’s no shortage of purely realist novels populating Booker prize lists and elsewhere. Both sci-fi and realism provide a measure of comfort – one by showing us the escape hatch from mundane reality, the other by reassuring us the reality we really upon is fixed, stable and unchanging. Transrealism is meant to be uncomfortable, by telling us that our reality is at best constructed, at worst non-existent, and allowing us no escape from that realisation.
“Transrealism is a revolutionary art form. A major tool in mass thought-control is the myth of consensus reality. Hand in hand with this myth goes the notion of a ‘normal person’.” Rucker’s formulation of transrealism as revolutionary becomes especially meaningful when compared to the uses transrealism is put to by the best of its practitioners. Atwood, Pynchon and Foster-Wallace all employed transrealist techniques to challenge the ways that “consensus reality” defined who was normal and who was not, from the political oppression of women to the spiritual death inflicted on us all by modern consumerism.
Today transrealism underpins much of the most radical and challenging work in contemporary literature. Colson Whitehead’s intelligent dissection of the underpinnings of racism in The Intuitionist and his New York Times transrealist twist on the zombie-apocalypse novel, Zone One. Monica Byrne’s hallucinatory road-trip across the future of the developing world and the lives of women caught between poverty and high-speed technological change in The Girl in the Road. Matt Haig’s compulsive young adult novel The Humans, which invites the reader to see human life through alien eyes. Transrealism has 30 years of history behind it, but it’s in the next 30 years that it may well define literature as we come to know it.
It’s not science fiction, it’s not realism, but hovers in the unsettling zone in between. From Philip K Dick to Stephen King, Damien Walter takes a tour through transrealism, the emerging genre aiming to kill off ‘consensus reality’
A Scanner Darkly is one of Philip K Dick’s most famous but also most divisive novels. Written in 1973 but not published until 1977, it marks the boundary between PKD’s mid-career novels that were clearly works of science fiction, including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and his late-career work that had arguably left that genre behind. Like VALIS and The Divine Invasion that followed it, A Scanner Darkly was two stories collided into one – a roughly science-fictional premise built around a mind-destroying drug, and a grittily realistic autobiographical depiction of PKD’s time living among drug addicts.
It is also, in the thinking of writer, critic and mathematician Rudy Rucker, the first work of a literary movement he would name “transrealism” in his 1983 essay A Transrealist Manifesto. Three decades later, Rucker’s essay has as much relevance to contemporary literature as ever. But while Rucker was writing at a time when science fiction and mainstream literature appeared starkly divided, today the two are increasingly hard to separate. It seems that here in the early 21st century, the literary movement Rucker called for is finally reaching its fruition.
Transrealism argues for an approach to writing novels routed first and foremost in reality. It rejects artificial constructs like plot and archetypal characters, in favour of real events and people, drawn directly from the author’s experience. But through this realist tapestry, the author threads a singular, impossibly fantastic idea, often one drawn from the playbook of science fiction, fantasy and horror. So the transrealist author who creates a detailed and realistic depiction of American high-school life will then shatter it open with the discovery of an alien flying saucer that confers super-powers on an otherwise ordinary young man.
It’s informative to list a few works that do not qualify as transrealism to understand Rucker’s intent more fully. Popular fantasy or science fiction stories like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games lack a strong enough reality to be discussed as transrealism. Apparently realistic narratives that sometimes contain fantastic elements, like the high-tech gizmos of spy thrillers, also fail as transrealism because their plots and archetypal characters are very far from real. Transrealism aims for a very specific combination of the real and the fantastic, for a very specific purpose, that seems to have become tremendously relevant for contemporary readers.
The potential list of transrealist authors is both contentious and fascinating. Margaret Atwood for The Handmaid’s Tale and her novels from Oryx and Crake onwards. Stephen King, when at his best describing the lives of blue-collar America shattered by supernatural horrors. Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, among other big names of American letters. Iain Banks in novels like Whit and The Bridge. JG Ballard, as one of many writers originating from the science-fiction genre to pioneer transrealist techniques. Martin Amis in Time’s Arrow, among others.
This proliferation of the fantastic in contemporary fiction has at times been described as the “mainstreaming of science fiction”. But sci-fi continues on much as it ever has, producing various escapist fantasies for readers who want time out from reality. And of course there’s no shortage of purely realist novels populating Booker prize lists and elsewhere. Both sci-fi and realism provide a measure of comfort – one by showing us the escape hatch from mundane reality, the other by reassuring us the reality we really upon is fixed, stable and unchanging. Transrealism is meant to be uncomfortable, by telling us that our reality is at best constructed, at worst non-existent, and allowing us no escape from that realisation.
“Transrealism is a revolutionary art form. A major tool in mass thought-control is the myth of consensus reality. Hand in hand with this myth goes the notion of a ‘normal person’.” Rucker’s formulation of transrealism as revolutionary becomes especially meaningful when compared to the uses transrealism is put to by the best of its practitioners. Atwood, Pynchon and Foster-Wallace all employed transrealist techniques to challenge the ways that “consensus reality” defined who was normal and who was not, from the political oppression of women to the spiritual death inflicted on us all by modern consumerism.
Today transrealism underpins much of the most radical and challenging work in contemporary literature. Colson Whitehead’s intelligent dissection of the underpinnings of racism in The Intuitionist and his New York Times transrealist twist on the zombie-apocalypse novel, Zone One. Monica Byrne’s hallucinatory road-trip across the future of the developing world and the lives of women caught between poverty and high-speed technological change in The Girl in the Road. Matt Haig’s compulsive young adult novel The Humans, which invites the reader to see human life through alien eyes. Transrealism has 30 years of history behind it, but it’s in the next 30 years that it may well define literature as we come to know it.
Friday, February 20, 2015
New quantum mechanics theory says parallel universes exist, interact
From RT:
To the average person, quantum mechanics is the convoluted, science fiction-y branch of physics. A radical new theory plays into that, proposing that parallel universes exist and interact with each other ‒ and that scientists may be able to test for them.
Prof. Howard Wiseman, a physicist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, along with his collaborators Dr. Michael Hall, also of Griffith University, and University of California, Davis mathematician Dr. Dirk-Andre Deckert, published their new "many interacting worlds" (MIW) theory in the journal Physical Review X. They posited that other universes are real, exist in vast numbers and exert influence on each other.
“The idea of parallel universes in quantum mechanics has been around since 1957,” Wiseman said in a statement. “In the well-known ‘Many-Worlds Interpretation’, each universe branches into a bunch of new universes every time a quantum measurement is made. All possibilities are therefore realised – in some universes the dinosaur-killing asteroid missed Earth. In others, Australia was colonised by the Portuguese.”
“But critics question the reality of these other universes, since they do not influence our universe at all,” he added. “On this score, our “Many Interacting Worlds” approach is completely different, as its name implies.”
There are three main points to the MIW theory, according to the Griffith statement. First, that the universe we live in is just one of an unknown “gigantic” number of worlds, some of which are “almost identical to ours,” but most are “very different.” Second, all of the worlds are “equally real,” existing continuously through time with precisely defined properties.Third, quantum phenomena arise from “a universal force of repulsion between ‘nearby’ (i.e. similar) worlds, which tends to make them more dissimilar.”
“All quantum effects arise from, and only from, the interaction between worlds,“ the physicists explained in their abstract.
Hall said the radical new theory may even create the extraordinary possibility of testing for the existence of other worlds.
“The beauty of our approach is that if there is just one world our theory reduces to Newtonian mechanics, while if there is a gigantic number of worlds it reproduces quantum mechanics,” he said in the statement. “In between it predicts something new that is neither Newton’s theory nor quantum theory. We also believe that, in providing a new mental picture of quantum effects, it will be useful in planning experiments to test and exploit quantum phenomena.”
American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once noted: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” And the MIW group admits that their theory is a bit out there.
"Any explanation of quantum phenomena is going to be weird, and standard quantum mechanics does not really offer any explanation at all ‒ it just makes predictions for laboratory experiments," Wiseman told the Huffington Post in an email. "Our new explanation... is that there are ordinary [non-quantum] parallel worlds which interact in a particular and subtle way."
Motherboard asked if the theory suggests that humans might someday be able to interact with other universes.
"It's not part of our theory," Wiseman replied. "But the idea of [human] interactions with other universes is no longer pure fantasy."
Others in the quantum mechanics field ranged from skepticism to excitement, Huffington Post reported, noting there is no consensus on whether “many interacting worlds” exist or interact.
"There are some who are completely happy with their own interpretations of QM, and we are unlikely to change their minds," Wiseman said in his email. "But I think there are many who are not happy with any of the current interpretations, and it is those who will probably be most interested in ours. I hope some will be interested enough to start working on it soon, because there are so many questions to answer."
Read more: http://www.sci-news.com/physics/science-many-interacting-worlds-parallel-universes-02249.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-poirier/quantum-weirdness-and-many-interacting-worlds_b_6143042.html
To the average person, quantum mechanics is the convoluted, science fiction-y branch of physics. A radical new theory plays into that, proposing that parallel universes exist and interact with each other ‒ and that scientists may be able to test for them.
Prof. Howard Wiseman, a physicist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, along with his collaborators Dr. Michael Hall, also of Griffith University, and University of California, Davis mathematician Dr. Dirk-Andre Deckert, published their new "many interacting worlds" (MIW) theory in the journal Physical Review X. They posited that other universes are real, exist in vast numbers and exert influence on each other.
“The idea of parallel universes in quantum mechanics has been around since 1957,” Wiseman said in a statement. “In the well-known ‘Many-Worlds Interpretation’, each universe branches into a bunch of new universes every time a quantum measurement is made. All possibilities are therefore realised – in some universes the dinosaur-killing asteroid missed Earth. In others, Australia was colonised by the Portuguese.”
“But critics question the reality of these other universes, since they do not influence our universe at all,” he added. “On this score, our “Many Interacting Worlds” approach is completely different, as its name implies.”
There are three main points to the MIW theory, according to the Griffith statement. First, that the universe we live in is just one of an unknown “gigantic” number of worlds, some of which are “almost identical to ours,” but most are “very different.” Second, all of the worlds are “equally real,” existing continuously through time with precisely defined properties.Third, quantum phenomena arise from “a universal force of repulsion between ‘nearby’ (i.e. similar) worlds, which tends to make them more dissimilar.”
“All quantum effects arise from, and only from, the interaction between worlds,“ the physicists explained in their abstract.
Hall said the radical new theory may even create the extraordinary possibility of testing for the existence of other worlds.
“The beauty of our approach is that if there is just one world our theory reduces to Newtonian mechanics, while if there is a gigantic number of worlds it reproduces quantum mechanics,” he said in the statement. “In between it predicts something new that is neither Newton’s theory nor quantum theory. We also believe that, in providing a new mental picture of quantum effects, it will be useful in planning experiments to test and exploit quantum phenomena.”
American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once noted: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” And the MIW group admits that their theory is a bit out there.
"Any explanation of quantum phenomena is going to be weird, and standard quantum mechanics does not really offer any explanation at all ‒ it just makes predictions for laboratory experiments," Wiseman told the Huffington Post in an email. "Our new explanation... is that there are ordinary [non-quantum] parallel worlds which interact in a particular and subtle way."
Motherboard asked if the theory suggests that humans might someday be able to interact with other universes.
"It's not part of our theory," Wiseman replied. "But the idea of [human] interactions with other universes is no longer pure fantasy."
Others in the quantum mechanics field ranged from skepticism to excitement, Huffington Post reported, noting there is no consensus on whether “many interacting worlds” exist or interact.
"There are some who are completely happy with their own interpretations of QM, and we are unlikely to change their minds," Wiseman said in his email. "But I think there are many who are not happy with any of the current interpretations, and it is those who will probably be most interested in ours. I hope some will be interested enough to start working on it soon, because there are so many questions to answer."
Read more: http://www.sci-news.com/physics/science-many-interacting-worlds-parallel-universes-02249.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-poirier/quantum-weirdness-and-many-interacting-worlds_b_6143042.html
Saturday, February 14, 2015
VALIS
From Wikipedia:
VALIS is a 1981 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. The title is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, Dick's gnostic vision of one aspect of God.
It is the first book in the incomplete VALIS trilogy of novels, followed by The Divine Invasion (1981). The planned third novel, The Owl in Daylight had not yet taken definite shape at the time of the author's death.
VALIS is a story of a man, named Philip (same as the author), and his journey to find God with his alter-ego, Horselover Fat. Most of the story is a narrative that disguises a set of theological ideals established by Dick. The major subject of this narrative is spirituality, as both the protagonist, his alter-ego, and the author (who are all essentially one and the same) are ostensibly obsessed with several religions and philosophies, including Christianity, Taoism, Gnosticism, and even Jungian psychoanalysis. They are searching for a cure for what he believes is simultaneously both a personal and a cosmic wound.
Synopsis:
VALIS begins with the attempted suicide of Horselover Fat’s friend Gloria, offered in a standard third-person point of view. Almost immediately, however, a first-person narrator interrupts to declare, “I am Horselover Fat, and I am telling this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity.” This first-person narrator, named Philip K. Dick, is for all intents and purposes identical to the author of the book. As a result of a mystical experience involving the Christian fish symbol and a beam of pink light, Fat is convinced that the world as he sees it—that is, California in 1974—is in fact an illusion laid over Imperial Rome. This illusion is the product of an evil entity opposed by VALIS, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, which—depending on Fat’s mood and who he is talking to—is either an alien intelligence, an immensely sophisticated mechanism, or an incarnation of pure living information.
Halfway through the book, the character Philip K. Dick has a dream that convinces him that much of what Fat says, if not strictly true, is at least not crazy. Even though Fat proposes that he is a sort of superimposition of a man who lived during the time of Jesus Christ and that through this man benevolent aliens have begun to communicate with him, Dick begins to take him seriously enough to argue that what Fat is seeing as a divine being is in fact himself in the distant future. Shortly after this, the three (four) of them go to a movie called Valis, which includes an experience much like Fat’s pink-beam epiphany. Believing that the film has encoded a message to him, Fat goes looking for its maker, whose daughter is an incarnation of Sophia, or wisdom. In her presence Fat and Dick are healed and made whole. They become one again.
Sophia dies shortly after this, and Fat separates from Dick once again. Fat searches for a new savior he believes is about to be born into the world. He comes back with the words KING FELIX, which Dick then sees in a television commercial. This provokes Fat to go searching again, and Dick himself remains in front of the television, watching carefully for the next signal from VALIS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS
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