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Jan. 17th, 2016 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSunday shopping didn't happen because, genius that I am, I forgot to do the laundry. All my thermals were in the wash, and it's freezing outside. I just decided to prioritise.
I did the laundry now, just have to hang it up.
Also today I discovered a 96K word fanfic is now finished and is absolutely delightful so far. Vorkosigan, canon pairings, tons of plot. I haven't finished it yet but I want to draw little hearts around it so far.
I also finished one of the library books today and realised a few chapters from the end which bit of it I just couldn't go along with. The whole thing is based on a gradual loss of human culture because the culture goes against 'information hoarding' as likely to encourage consumerism and greed, so even the central databanks get pruned relentlessly and old texts (like anything we've heard of) are deliberately lost. And I could go along with that as censorship, but I just kept repeatedly bouncing out of the story on the technical side of it. At one point one of the main characters goes to smuggle out a bunch of books, and each individual book is an individual tape or reel. She needs a whole bag to carry them. And this is meant to be the future. As it turns out it's the future as imagined by 1992, which... I just couldn't swallow for long enough for the plot to get on with it. I mean, as per this morning's google, the entire library of congress can fit on ten thumb drives as available 2016, and yet this book theorises the future will have to pick and choose which written texts to take with them into space because of weight concerns? The number of texts they were talking about could fit on your sim card. Easily. You wouldn't have to lug a heavy bag around. Which also makes 'data hoarding' and trading sort of inevitable? If and only if they continue to have data storage media still available. So I looped back around to it being deliberate censorship, but the level of technological sabotage necessary to get far future tech to do that is just... utterly implausible to me.
I also didn't like the book. Not any of it. It was creepy in ways I didn't much want to think about.
But I did like the bit where far future humans come back to earth and utterly fail to grok the concept of mobile animals with eyes and mouth noises and so forth that are not actually intelligent. They only saved the humans, you see, so the only mobile life they've ever met is human, and they can't get their head around the idea of non-sapient species. That's the sort of mind trip that SF is for. Humans would become very Other if they lost all their friend species.
I think the book is called Alien Earth? Megan Lindholm? I can't see where I've put it.
I went to the library to get SF written by women and it's just very hard to find. Paranormal romance, sure, Fantasy, fine, and some SF I've already read and bought, but anything I don't already got is very likely to be steampunk or vampires labelled as SF, and that's not really what I'm after. Outside of tie-ins I've only got Bach and Bujold, Cherryh, Huff, Leckie and Moon, McCaffrey in the other room, that can't be all the women SF writers, I've got bunches of anthologies with short stories in by women. Spaceships! I'm sure we've written about spaceships!
... maybe I should go back to my writing about spaceships. I stalled years ago but it didn't suck in my head.
I think part of the problem is that random books by men tend to get labelled SF if they're even a little SF, like vampires but sort of modern ish, but random books by women get labelled fantasy even if there's serious overlap. There's probably stuff I'd want to read but don't know it from the covers. Which was why I bought so many anthologies, so I could write the author names down. But a bunch of the urban fantasy I've read was very SF in frame, like with elves and demons that were big into biotech in worlds with flying cars and serious computing. They were mostly about hitting things with swords until a mystery got solved though, the usual magic PI central character. Interesting fusion stuff. I think it's pretty plausible in some ways because as soon as humans can start messing themselves around there's going to be people trying to be elves, and all sorts else. Mods that optimise in different directions, specialisations that go with particular ideological positions and work best with certain roles. And then there will be their kids, with all the mods and none of the beliefs. It'll get interesting in all the ways humans can imagine, and they've been imagining elves and so forth for a really long time.
I was in the bath today and started thinking about how much more likely it is that we're living in a simulation than in a real physical world. Like, okay, there's one physical universe, and in it develops one intelligent species, and they get computers that can play Sims, only much much more complex. With the way computers are going right now it won't take a global network to make the matrix, they'll be personal computer sized in a generation or 3. Long before we get to other planets under current speed of space flight development. So people will run Sims, lots and lots and lots of them, and they'll be brilliantly complex ones. So for every physical universe that exists there's a bazillion of simulated ones. And if the sims are complex enough do the simulations start developing simulations? Is it turtles all the way down?
Of course once you've had this thought there's not much you can do with it except notice you've been in the bath rather a long time just kind of staring at the candles thinking woah.
Except if the universe is just actual physics then it will probably keep on doing what it's doing whatever we do, unless we use like actual chemistry and physics and stuff to make changes. But if it's a simulation then there's probably cheat codes. Or even ways to petition the programmers. Like old school deities and so forth. And it would even make sense for the rules to change, like if the player just got bored and left things to run in the background, then maybe came home after school and they'd accidentally run it forward a thousand years. It'd be all magic an miracles, if someone got the cheat codes, or the player took an interest.
And if there's way (way way way) more simulated universes than there are physical ones, then logically there's way (way way way way way) more universes where magic and so forth would in fact work.
... this doesn't really get me anywhere, but there you go, it's a thought.
So does lack of magic suggest we are in fact in a nice solid real universe?
Not so much, because different playing styles, maybe uninstalling cheat codes after the dev phase. (Which would also explain the difference in the universe in the age of miracles.)
Of course then you have to wonder what the simulation would be for. And, like, in Sims you can get lots of shinies if you fulfil your lifetime wish? Are there any shiny menus to unlock? Or is it something way more serious and philosophical going on, and noticing that the simulation exists is going to piss off the people making the simulation?
It's the old problem with Descartes Demon, except sort of the other way around. I mean, you can start with knowing there's a physical universe out there somwhere and still not know if you're in it, on account of you also know that simulations exist and are getting much cooler.
If it's just more mathematically logical to think you're in a simulation... it's kind of like woah like big time, but then you can't do much about it so you pretty much have to act just like you know for sure it isn't a simulation.
Because either way other people are almost certainly as real as you are.
You just don't know how real that is.
... okay, I need to hang up laundry and think about something actually useful.
I did the laundry now, just have to hang it up.
Also today I discovered a 96K word fanfic is now finished and is absolutely delightful so far. Vorkosigan, canon pairings, tons of plot. I haven't finished it yet but I want to draw little hearts around it so far.
I also finished one of the library books today and realised a few chapters from the end which bit of it I just couldn't go along with. The whole thing is based on a gradual loss of human culture because the culture goes against 'information hoarding' as likely to encourage consumerism and greed, so even the central databanks get pruned relentlessly and old texts (like anything we've heard of) are deliberately lost. And I could go along with that as censorship, but I just kept repeatedly bouncing out of the story on the technical side of it. At one point one of the main characters goes to smuggle out a bunch of books, and each individual book is an individual tape or reel. She needs a whole bag to carry them. And this is meant to be the future. As it turns out it's the future as imagined by 1992, which... I just couldn't swallow for long enough for the plot to get on with it. I mean, as per this morning's google, the entire library of congress can fit on ten thumb drives as available 2016, and yet this book theorises the future will have to pick and choose which written texts to take with them into space because of weight concerns? The number of texts they were talking about could fit on your sim card. Easily. You wouldn't have to lug a heavy bag around. Which also makes 'data hoarding' and trading sort of inevitable? If and only if they continue to have data storage media still available. So I looped back around to it being deliberate censorship, but the level of technological sabotage necessary to get far future tech to do that is just... utterly implausible to me.
I also didn't like the book. Not any of it. It was creepy in ways I didn't much want to think about.
But I did like the bit where far future humans come back to earth and utterly fail to grok the concept of mobile animals with eyes and mouth noises and so forth that are not actually intelligent. They only saved the humans, you see, so the only mobile life they've ever met is human, and they can't get their head around the idea of non-sapient species. That's the sort of mind trip that SF is for. Humans would become very Other if they lost all their friend species.
I think the book is called Alien Earth? Megan Lindholm? I can't see where I've put it.
I went to the library to get SF written by women and it's just very hard to find. Paranormal romance, sure, Fantasy, fine, and some SF I've already read and bought, but anything I don't already got is very likely to be steampunk or vampires labelled as SF, and that's not really what I'm after. Outside of tie-ins I've only got Bach and Bujold, Cherryh, Huff, Leckie and Moon, McCaffrey in the other room, that can't be all the women SF writers, I've got bunches of anthologies with short stories in by women. Spaceships! I'm sure we've written about spaceships!
... maybe I should go back to my writing about spaceships. I stalled years ago but it didn't suck in my head.
I think part of the problem is that random books by men tend to get labelled SF if they're even a little SF, like vampires but sort of modern ish, but random books by women get labelled fantasy even if there's serious overlap. There's probably stuff I'd want to read but don't know it from the covers. Which was why I bought so many anthologies, so I could write the author names down. But a bunch of the urban fantasy I've read was very SF in frame, like with elves and demons that were big into biotech in worlds with flying cars and serious computing. They were mostly about hitting things with swords until a mystery got solved though, the usual magic PI central character. Interesting fusion stuff. I think it's pretty plausible in some ways because as soon as humans can start messing themselves around there's going to be people trying to be elves, and all sorts else. Mods that optimise in different directions, specialisations that go with particular ideological positions and work best with certain roles. And then there will be their kids, with all the mods and none of the beliefs. It'll get interesting in all the ways humans can imagine, and they've been imagining elves and so forth for a really long time.
I was in the bath today and started thinking about how much more likely it is that we're living in a simulation than in a real physical world. Like, okay, there's one physical universe, and in it develops one intelligent species, and they get computers that can play Sims, only much much more complex. With the way computers are going right now it won't take a global network to make the matrix, they'll be personal computer sized in a generation or 3. Long before we get to other planets under current speed of space flight development. So people will run Sims, lots and lots and lots of them, and they'll be brilliantly complex ones. So for every physical universe that exists there's a bazillion of simulated ones. And if the sims are complex enough do the simulations start developing simulations? Is it turtles all the way down?
Of course once you've had this thought there's not much you can do with it except notice you've been in the bath rather a long time just kind of staring at the candles thinking woah.
Except if the universe is just actual physics then it will probably keep on doing what it's doing whatever we do, unless we use like actual chemistry and physics and stuff to make changes. But if it's a simulation then there's probably cheat codes. Or even ways to petition the programmers. Like old school deities and so forth. And it would even make sense for the rules to change, like if the player just got bored and left things to run in the background, then maybe came home after school and they'd accidentally run it forward a thousand years. It'd be all magic an miracles, if someone got the cheat codes, or the player took an interest.
And if there's way (way way way) more simulated universes than there are physical ones, then logically there's way (way way way way way) more universes where magic and so forth would in fact work.
... this doesn't really get me anywhere, but there you go, it's a thought.
So does lack of magic suggest we are in fact in a nice solid real universe?
Not so much, because different playing styles, maybe uninstalling cheat codes after the dev phase. (Which would also explain the difference in the universe in the age of miracles.)
Of course then you have to wonder what the simulation would be for. And, like, in Sims you can get lots of shinies if you fulfil your lifetime wish? Are there any shiny menus to unlock? Or is it something way more serious and philosophical going on, and noticing that the simulation exists is going to piss off the people making the simulation?
It's the old problem with Descartes Demon, except sort of the other way around. I mean, you can start with knowing there's a physical universe out there somwhere and still not know if you're in it, on account of you also know that simulations exist and are getting much cooler.
If it's just more mathematically logical to think you're in a simulation... it's kind of like woah like big time, but then you can't do much about it so you pretty much have to act just like you know for sure it isn't a simulation.
Because either way other people are almost certainly as real as you are.
You just don't know how real that is.
... okay, I need to hang up laundry and think about something actually useful.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-18 12:07 am (UTC)Have you read Karina Sumner-Smith's Towers Trilogy? They're classified as YA urban fantasy, although the world is more technology powered by magic, and quite good, I think. Gail Carriger and Mary Robinette Kowal are steampunk fantasy and Regency fantasy, respectively, and with good strong female protagonists. Naomi Novik's Temeraire series is Napoleonic wars with dragons.
Ann Leckie certainly wrote about spaceships, didn't she? I do love the Ancillary trilogy.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-18 07:11 pm (UTC)Haven't read Sumner-Smith, Carriger or Kowal, have read Temeraire but wouldn't have called it SF.
Ancillary books = win.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-18 04:33 pm (UTC)I mean, I don't like all of Sheri Tepper's stuff, but there's a decent amount of it. James Tiptree, Jr. (whom I have read) and Andre Norton (whom I have not) were women with masculine pen names. Diana Wynne Jones and Diane Duane are pretty big, obviously. Um.
Some books I haven't finished, too. But yeah, women write SF, what are you talking about? [Edit: I just saw a mention of Margaret Atwood elsewhere on my flist and surely she counts.]
Well, I suppose it is a minority of SF I have read, but the idea that women aren't writing SF seems incredibly weird to me.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-18 07:09 pm (UTC)Diane Duane SF is tie ins, far as I know.
Diana Wynne Jones wrote Tale of Time City and Hexwood that are SF if you look sideways but mostly a lot of Fantasy.
Russ and Tepper and Atwood I've not (much) read, I don't think I've got Tiptree or more than one Norton. And masculine pen names at the library would fools me.
Octavia Butler. Think I've read but not owned? Or read short not long?
I get frustrated sometimes. So much easier to find blokes writing about blokes.