As He Lays Incarcerated

Get it? ZING! More on As I Lay Dying's Tim Lambesis here.

Late 1800s Political Science Fiction

Cross-posted to the Late Enlightenment.

Here's an interesting old science fiction book: Better Days: Or, a Millionaire of To-morrow, by Thomas and Anna Fitch. This should rank with Bellamy's Looking Backward. Set in the authors' near future of the 1890s, in it a wealthy industrialist develops bombs powerful enough to level cities, that can be launched accurately from zeppelins or boats. To be clear, this is a utopian work - although it involves an early prediction of the nuclear age, the authors assume it would necessitate a global detente. The authors correctly understood some of the political ramifications: that these weapons would have to be regarded in a special category and their manufacture restricted by international agreement so that they did not proliferate; and so he also predicts a version of the League of Nations. What he failed to predict was how this would be accomplished; by a cartel of countries who openly have such weapons, and a secondary cartel of those who everyone knows has them but don't openly declare them. The book features various heads of state realizing and announcing that they must cease prosecuting wars and allow all their territories to return to home rule to avoid their own capitals being destroyed by other states or even small groups of revolutionaries who make the explosive agent ("potentite"). If it's that easy, it would seem his international non-proliferation police wouldn't be able to do their jobs. U-235 is harder to make than potentite and we still seem to be nervous about Iran. We should be glad it was nuclear weapons and not potentite! (Or microwaved sand as Nick Bostrom speculated.)


Above: Coronado is the north-pointing peninsula at top, and the islands are to the south.

Of local San Diego interest: the initial tests for the various heads of state are carried out from Coronado, long before it was selected as a naval airfield. Unfortunately the Coronado Islands are destroyed in the demonstration. (Although last time I looked out the window of Hillcrest Hospital I could see them just fine; so for this and other reasons, this is alternate history now I guess.) The authors were possibly more interesting than the book; the husband seems himself like a character made up for historical fiction. Thomas Fitch was an attorney and politician who served in the legislatures of no less than four of the states and territories of the time (California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona), which explains why his knowledge of the Western U.S. of the time was more than the caricature we often see from contemporary writers on the East Coast. In his legal career he also represented Brigham Young and Wyatt Earp. He proofread Mark Twain's manuscripts and hung out with Leland Stanford. Finally and most significantly, as an orator, he was credited with keeping California in the Union. Even if you can't forgive his book's inconsistencies and failed predictions, I think he did okay.

Starship Century Symposium UCSD

With Gregory Benford, David Brin, and others. At Atkinson Hall, UCSD. More information here.

The 70s Science Fiction Landscape of California

This is cross-posted to my California travel and outdoors/trail running blog, MDK10 Outside.



The Theme Building at LAX, from theinterrobang.com

The same guy (William Pereira) designed all of these buildings. [Edit - added later: incorrect! The LAX control tower was designed by the under-rated Gin Wong, who was a partner at Pereira and ultimately the CEO of the firm.] In order roughly from south to north:

San Diego: San Diego Airport, Grossmont Hospital, Scripps Clinic, and Geisel Library at UCSD

Irvine: the entire city more or less, including UC Irvine

Newport Beach: the entire city more or less

LA: USC's campus (he was a professor there), and that weird central building at LAX

San Francisco: SFO, and the TransAmerica Pyramid


Geisel Library at UCSD. The first time I saw this I literally stumbled across it, and I started looking around for Gort and Clatu.

Pereira was a major science fiction fan and intentionally designed things to look futuristic. Talk about life imitating art. (And some of these buildings ended up being used later in science fiction movies - that's the UC Irvine campus at that last link.) That said, a lot of these buildings do look pretty dated; to paraphrase the Simpsons, they look like what they thought the twenty-first century would look like in 1970.* But it's amazing that one person is responsible for so much of the iconic construction of this state, and more amazing that he's not more famous. One of Pereira's students also went on to some fame - Frank Gehry.

The whole state of California is named after a fictitious country in a sixteenth century science fiction novel, so maybe this kind of reification isn't so surprising.


*Ah, you read the footnote for more architecture-bashing! Excellent. Modern architecture in general often gets dated quickly because the ways it tries to be original become inextricably linked to a very narrow era - you don't look at a medieval cathedral and think "Oh my gosh, that's so tacky, it just screams fourteenth century." Another mid-to-late twentieth century American architect was Eero Saarinen, and his best-known works are probably the Arch in St. Louis, the international terminal at JFK, and the terminals at Dulles (you know, the ones that require a custom-made land-crawler as a shuttle. Stupid.) Note that of these, only the Arch has avoided looking dated, at least from outside, probably owing to its basic geometricality. Even Saint Wright suffers from this to some degree. Probably the worst offense in all architecture is here in San Diego, the Salk Institute, perpetrated by Louis Khan. Horrifyingly, every day one can find packs of drooling architecture students visting from Europe and Asia, memorizing this Golgotha of right angles, excited to return home and desecrate their own cities with a similar pile of cinder blocks. Just as with Wright's work and that of other famous architects, the bathrooms in the Salk are awful. (RE Wright, in Falling Water they're bad but in the Beth Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia they're criminal. Tiny, dungeon-like, insufficient for the facility, their function damaged by their size and remoteness - seemingly not an afterthought, but the victims of deliberate malice. The bathroom is the most important room in the building!)

American Gerontological Society Meeting in San Diego, Right Now Nov 15-18

For the Transhumanists and others interested in aging. Here is the information. Leonard Hayflick is there.

(Little did I know until I read his Wiki bio that he discovered Mycoplasma pneumoniae, i.e. the pathogen that causes walking pneumonia. Cool.)

Oct 19 7pm, San Diego Transhumanists at Rock Bottom

The title is "Understanding Paths and Goals to Our Improvement" for the San Diego Transhumanists at Rock Bottom in la Jolla.  RSVP here.  Sorry, no outdoors bonfire this time, but this way we can have good beer and food.

Oct 19, I'm Doing a Talk for San Diego Transhumanists

This Friday October 19 I'll be doing a talk entitled "Understanding Paths and Goals to Our Improvement" for the San Diego Transhumanists. RSVP here. It will be informal and relatively brief with discussion afterward, and I'm planning on doing it outside with a bonfire (exact location to be announced in the next few days). Bring a snack and a fleece if it's chilly, or just modify yourself to tolerate the cold better, your call.

Metal Update - GWAR Nov 3 in Santa Ana

Gwar at the Observatory in Santa Ana, November 3rd. Bunch of San Diego types coming up for the show. If you see me in there say hi. Or better yet, say America Must Be Destroyed.

Also, saw the Iron Maidens in Carlsbad last night. I'd missed them three times before and finally found out about this one, literally an hour before it started. Dayum was that a fun show.  They're in San Diego again on Saturday November 10th at Pure Platinum in Kearny Mesa.

And finally, see if you can spot the Ride the Lightning reference in this article.

San Diego Transhumanists

Just went to my first one of these this past Friday.  I liked it a lot because it was structured, kind of like a nano-TED.  Check out the next one here.

Nerdcore Night at the Ruby Room, 8pm Thurs 4 Oct

I just ran across the San Diego Speculative Fiction Society, Inc. which among other things is the sponsor of the San Diego Sci-Fi/Fantasy Meetup Group. They're even having a con this weekend, but I'll just be going to Nerdcore Night this Thursday 4 Oct 2012, 8pm at the Ruby Room in Hillcrest.

More Nerdy Things in San Diego

The personal drone company 3D Robotics, which also has a manufacturing facility across the border in Tijuana.

I Ain't Never Seen THIS Autobot Afore

From Comic-Con 2012, San Diego.

Oration On UCSD Architecture

"UCSD’s continued expansion into a science-fiction nightmare: It’s been a growing monstrosity for decades. Where there once stood mighty eucalyptus groves and quaint ’70s wooden ranch architecture, there are now mostly big gray concrete boxes. Nothing’s human scale. One of the last campus sweet spots, the charming University Center, with its 1950s Camp Matthews bungalows and grass field, was leveled a few years ago to make way for the giant, hideous Jacobs School of Engineering building. Wanna feel like a cyborg sent for reprogramming in a dystopian future? Borrow $80,000 and get a degree from the University of California. "

Well that's nitpicking isn't it.

I might not join the writer of this erstwhile San Diego preservationist in UCSD-bashing, but in all seriousness, I'm not a big fan of the nearby Salk Institute. Like many people I'm not a big fan of mid-to-late twentieth century institutional modern architecture in general. Anything that attempts to create its own style looks dated very quickly (ever see the quaintly 60s international terminal at JFK? Eero Saarinen, same guy who did the St. Louis Arch. Only the Arch remains in good taste since it's too simple to identify with any one era.) And the worst thing about modern architecture, since it's clearly meant to impress one-time visitors rather than the people that work there? The bathrooms always suck. This is the most important room in the building as far as I'm concerned, and in the Salk they're a disaster, just like in many of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings. Beth Shalom Synagogue in Philadelphia, one of his last structures, is a perfect example.

A New San Diego Intellectual-Type Gathering: Transhumanism

The Transhumanism Meetup! Behold its majesty! (H/T Jamie from Rational Thought@UCSD.)

And while I'm at it, check out the DarkStar library and gaming club at UCSD, which is a central hub for all things awesome i.e. geeky on campus. Not surprisingly it's in the same building as frequent hosters of metal Che Cafe.

And another thing! A new metal satire site. Like the metal Onion. (H/T Ian from Nerd Metal.)

All these geeky groups in San Diego are getting too hard to keep track of (listed here earlier). Pretty soon we'll run the surfers and stoners out of town and people in San Francisco will start telling us to relax and read less.

Nomad 927, Choke (2011)

Check out Nomad 927, a San Diego experimental band. If you think of a very well thought-out Pelican with vocals, you'd be close. As cannot be pointed out enough, metal is awesome, and science fiction is awesome, and the song below has a famous insane computer in it at one point. What more do you need you idiot?!?! Their debut live performance (the anti blackout show) is tomorrow (today really), Tuesday, October 4 at 7:00pm at the Park Gallery in University Heights, San Diego. Click the little play button to hear their song Choke.

Choke (vocals by Gerg, music by Chanauk by Nomad 927 (Listen with headphones)

Get more of Nomad 927 here.

More Speculative Fiction from Tijuana

This time by Pepe Rojo in Flurb online. (Previous TJ sf here.)

This story has flavors of both Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard. For example:

"A calculator decided to swap religions and went for the hexadecimal system. Destroyed a week’s worth of work. The experts are working on it. How about you?"

"It was an awful day," Dolly answered with a smile. "Everything was going well until the paper came. It was written in another language, but the pictures and the cartoons were all right, so I decided not to worry about it. At noon, the fridge had a nervous breakdown, and it defrosted. When I walked in, the kitchen was flooded. I had to mop the floor, sweep it, call the supermarket for more ice, and then call the therapist. He promised to have the fridge back this weekend."