Artificial Intelligence – Page 2

Housekeeping

By C. E. Stevens | 29th August 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Housekeeping
Lights in the sky is many things: it’s a vast sprawling meta-novel of ideas and scientific, philosophical, societal, economic and theological speculations; its a series of picaresques; it’s a postmodernist tribute to my sources and influences; it’s a romance, an adventure story, a coming of age novel; it’s a mystery story with the author as detective; it’s all these things and more…
It’s also now finished…
Perhaps I should qualify this; the main narrative is complete, on both on Earth and on Alpha 5, we now know what happens to all of the protagonists, and have a fair idea of what comes next. We have followed our characters (for the most part) from birth to death, and the central enigma behind the world of the series has been laid bare.
However there are a number of other stories within this vast concept (six novels, 2314 pages, and nearly seven hundred thousand words) referenced or alluded to in passing, that I feel deserve to be told, either in short story form, or in additional novels. I’ve already started this process and written a number of short stories, which I intend to collect together at some point, perhaps under the title Tales from the Collapse.
But one or two of these stories would appear to merit a longer treatment. An obvious candidate is the story of the original Marta, Miss da Guia, from her strange conception as part of the breeding programme undertaken by the Alpha Mission, through her unusual childhood in Sao Paulo, her short-lived media stardom, and her brutal and untimely death…
I’ve just remembered that I have title for this putative novel, ‘When You Wish upon a Star’, which plays with various layers of meaning; The Journey to the Stars undertaken by the Alpha Mission carries the hopes of millions marooned on an apparently-dying world, Miss da Guia is a media star worshipped by those millions, and she is following her own star…
Given that the title I have arrived at neatly pitches the novel, I think it’s now highly likely that I will write it.
The other candidate a further volume is the fate of Clara and all the other automatons unlucky enough to have remained on Earth after the departure of the Probe in 2048. The leftover girl hints at the likely fate of such entities towards the end of the novel; Clara has been rejected by her creator Dr Helen Choi, who now sees the robot as the product of her pursuit of false scientific gods, of literally being in error, in Christian terms. By definition Clara is thus demonic, and shares the fate of the Creature rejected by his creator, Victor Frankenstein, in Mary Shelley’s famous novel.
We have also been given a glimpse of the forces of reaction ranged against the Alpha Mission and all its works in the person of the ‘Mayor of Ibara City’, the formidable Ester Almeida, and we know things aren’t going to end well.
I often think that the dichotomy within the series between ‘the scientific vision’ as exemplified by the Alpha Mission, and ‘the spiritual vision’ personified by the Camposettas and their adherents (including eventually Dr Choi), is essentially a dramatisation of a battle that I’ve fought within myself my whole life. A struggle between a belief in science (and its delinquent offspring, technology), and a countervailing attachment to the natural world, primitive socialism, and a non-specific form of spirituality, most akin to Buddhism.
Seen in these terms, Lights in the sky becomes an actualization of this inner debate…
The Author August 2019

How will it all end?

By C. E. Stevens | 28th June 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

How will it all end?
As usual I’m leaving it late to blog this month, possibly lulled into a false sense of security by managing to blog twice last month…
However we are getting to the crucial stage in the Lights in the sky series; the point when it all needs to pay off and the various hares I’ve set running needed to be hunted down…
The problem I face is that it’s all so complex…
There has been an ending to this series already (in the climax of the original trilogy, The Lost Colony), and I have to remain faithful to this but I can’t duplicate it. There needs to be a development of the narrative and development of the concept.
It is tempting to carry on regardless, just writing what comes into your head, and I often employ this approach, but this means that you miss out things (sometimes the bleedin’ obvious!), and so editing becomes important, add texture to the narrative, to correct mistakes and anachronisms, and to remain true to the overall concept.
And this necessitates lots of research…
So I’ve actually re-read the whole sextet this year, and because I can never just read the text, this had resulted in a complete re-edit of all six novels. I’m aided in this by a new feature helpfully introduced by Google, an enhanced spelling and grammar check (which I’m presuming is rather like Grammarly, but is free). This has proved invaluable and has pointed out lots of errors that my manual editing had managed to miss.
When you read bumpf from Agents and online luminaries offering advice (such as the ubiquitous Neil Gaiman), they always talk about the first and second edit (and presumably the third and the fourth…).
Well, I don’t work like that…
I don’t sit down one day and say to myself, ‘…today, I’m going to do the second edit of this or that novel’, my editing is constant. Every time I write a new section of whichever novel I’m working on, I review and edit the preceding chapters. Every time I re-read previous novels (and do this a lot!), I end up editing them.
I’ve nearly finished re-editing The leftover girl, and I rediscovered various speculations on the ethics of the Alpha Mission and the whole notion of maya, from the POV of Helen Choi, the architect of Mission AI, who at the end of her life now regrets the decisions she has made in her life, in the pursuit and what she now regards as false scientific gods, and now regards herself as being in error. In fact, she sees the whole notion of scientific progress (which underlies Western philosophy) as being ‘in error’ in religious terms (Helen is a Catholic), and an example of maya in philosophical terms, a concept she has imbibed from her late husband, Alex, who was a Buddhist in life.
This puts Helen in the same camp as Tata, albeit that they have reached this conclusion from completely different starting points (and by radically different routes).
This will inform the crucial last three chapters of the series, and currently the stakes are very high (getting higher), as I negotiate the last few miles in this epic adventure…
We’ll see how it all turns out…
The Author June 2019

A secondary world?

By C. E. Stevens | 10th May 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

A secondary world?

I viewed a rather ancient, but nevertheless interesting, documentary on JRR Tolkien on YouTube recently. The documentary was made well before Peter Jackson’s filming of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and concentrated on the books, with keynote contributions from Tolkien’s youngest son, Christopher…
Christopher Tolkien discussed his father’s concept of Middle Earth as a ‘secondary world’, that is to say an alternate reality that works by different rules, a notion that (amazingly) I was unfamiliar with; and the more he talked, the more it occurred to me that Lights in the sky, is in many regards, an example of this.
So I did some research on the concept and concluded that, although I’ve tended to think of myself as a writer of ‘realistic SF’, there are many of the elements of a secondary world in the series, particularly in the three novels set on Alpha 5. So without knowing it, I have (in some ways) been writing a work of high fantasy.
Now it’s important to keep a sense of proportion here. I have taken considerable care to make LITS as plausible and scientifically credible as possible, and what I have just said in no way invalidates any of that. But the series is many things not just one, and incorporates various literary tropes. At the end of the day it is also a work of the imagination.
Different books within the sextet are fantastic to a greater or lesser degree; After the Flood is definitely the volume with the most tenuous connexion to high fantasy, but both the books that feature Marta Camacho have long passages that dive headlong into the genre. In particular Ms Camacho’s journey down the Amazon River on her raft, following her departure from the riverboat Fitzcarraldo, which is deliberately presented in dreamlike terms.
But it’s the original trilogy that cleaves most closely to the idea of a secondary world. We have a series of novels that takes the form of a bildungsroman. The protagonist is a child when the action opens, but grows into adulthood, and comes into powers and skills beyond those of ordinary person back on Earth, although in my world these have a technological source. Marta Fernandes is also to all intents and purposes an orphan. The theme of good versus is central to the series, but the question of who is good? and who who is evil? is often indeterminate, and is left unresolved until the end of the series. This is where I mostly part company with most fantasy writers, as in my world relativism is part of the underlying philosophy. Thus the Alphanians are presented at different times (and in different ways) as both an apparent threat to the eventual triumph of good, and as its most effective proponents. The same can be said (to a lesser degree) about the Artificial Intelligence fronted by Nurse Six Gee.
The World of the series is revealed to be illusory, in the sense that the World is not as it appears to be, by a series paradigm shifts in the first three novels. A similar process is now taking place in the denouement of Maya, which I am currently writing. And at the end of the day there are beings within this cosmos whose powers are to all intents and purposes Godlike, and therefore (as far as the human actors are concerned) magical…
The Author May 2019

Saying goodbye

By C. E. Stevens | 4th May 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Saying goodbye

I left the majestic world of Alpha 5 once again, half an hour ago…
Perhaps I should explain; I have just finished the latest edit of the original Lights in the sky trilogy, and this gave me a chance to reassess my magnum opus. Each book has its strong points, its favourite moments, but I was reminded that the last volume, The Lost Colony, is the best of all. The last two chapters in particular are both gut-wrenching and unbelievably sad, as I say goodbye to the characters (both human and non-human) that I’ve lived with and loved. Of course, I will read these books again, but each time I return I will know that the story is complete, the lives of the characters have run their course, their entry on the slate of probability decided.
The reason for doing this edit was threefold: I had reached a natural pause in my writing of the last book in the series, Maya, secondly I knew that I would need to ensure that the ending of the series as a whole was consistent with the conclusion of the original trilogy, and this required me to re-read this (and re-reading naturally leads to re-editing!), and a third reason has emerged, I now realise that I will need to up my game if the series as a whole is to get the finale it deserves.
The appeal of the series is not merely emotional. The final chapters of the original trilogy contain a great of cosmological and philosophical speculation, and the task in finishing Maya is to be true to what has been revealed so far, and (if possible) build on these revelations. Each volume of the original series ends with a paradigm shift, where the nature of the world is shown to be at variance with what the protagonists (and the reader) had previously believed.
My challenge in finishing the series will be to pull off a similar trick at the close of the sextet as a whole. I know this will be difficult and so far the new paradigm has not emerged. But I have faith; in writing the series so far I have often felt the unseen hand on my shoulder guiding me towards the direction I need to go.
This is not intended to be a mystical explanation for the roots of my creativity, merely a restatement of the commonplace that a work of art (and this is especially true of an extended work of fiction) takes on a life of its own, and eventually starts to make its own demands.
I need now to listen and be in a position respond when these manifest themselves…
The Author May 2019

The midway point

By C Stevens | 5th April 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental eighteen: The midway point
I’m now roughly halfway through writing The Great Flood, having completed eleven chapters and one hundred and fifty pages. Following the convention I’ve established, each of my novels has twenty two chapters, although the actual length of each book has varied! Twenty two is the typical number of episodes in a season of US television drama (science fiction or otherwise), which is the source of the convention. All of my books are written in a format that would facilitate adaptation for this medium.

My general conclusion having reached this point is that I haven’t paid sufficient attention in my fictional future society to the virtual world and the tendency of a growing number of people to want to take refuge within it, pace Ready Player One and similar works. This is something I will need to address in part two of the book.

I have already identified which of the characters will be missing their virtual existence the most. Through her story I’ll explore the phenomenon, its seductions and its limitations, which (not unnaturally) have been brought home to her by the disaster.

At this point I would normally be banging on about the march of authoritarianism in modern politics, but I’ve decided to give it a rest for the moment. Of far more interest is the extremely partisan nature of modern identity politics, something which social media have exacerbated. This divides us as a species and is not good!

That social media is a two-edged sword is becoming more apparent by the day; as well dividing us into (mutually antagonistic!) tribes, it concedes far too much power and control over our lives to very rich men and they are usually men!) and unaccountable corporations! The Robber Barons of the late-nineteenth century would have envied the nabobs of Silicon Valley! Large tech corporations have gained (by a combination of stealth and flattery!) access to all of our lives and could use it against us, if they saw fit. They already exploit it for personal and corporate gain, something which has become apparent over the past few days!

Even more worrying is the extreme subjectivity inherent in social media’s hold over the dissemination of ‘news’ to huge numbers of people; this destabilises the very notion of objectivity, and thus of responsible independent journalism. That this is an existential threat to the notion of liberal democracy is also self-evident!

Rather naively, I had thought that future authoritarian regimes would make use of CGI (once it had become indistinguishable from real life!), and literally rewrite history! But the actual use of modern technology by authoritarian groups has been far more subtle.

These developments would appear to pose almost as much of a threat to our way of life (and possibly our continued existence as a species) as climate change, environmental degradation, and resource depletion, the threats I have previously identified and highlighted in my fictional world. My current novel needs to address this, and will do so in part two.

But it’s not just social media; the pioneers of our online world were by and large idealists, Tim Berners-Lee literally gave his idea of a world-wide web to all of us, free of charge, and this idealism is also reflected in things like Wikipedia and Linux! But the downside of all this had been the ready availability of so much information and free content! This has had profound economic, political, social, and psychological results, the consequences of which are only just beginning to become apparent!

If I wanted to sum up all of the above in one pithy phrase I would say that irrationality has become a contagion and it spreads via the internet!

Stephen Clare April 2018

Blog entry supplemental thirteen: The rise of unreason

By C Stevens | 24th October 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Back in the late 80’s, in more innocent times, I wrote a song based on a common minor key blues progression called The Rise of Unreason; this charted the rise of Christian fundamentalism and the religious right in America, and elsewhere. Over the years I have revised and added to this song, both lyrically and musically, in response to changing times; but after 9/11 it acquired a new resonance and urgency as Islamic Fundamentalism cast a growing shadow over both the West and the Muslim world.

The song is now in its fifth or sixth iteration, and has never seemed more relevant…

But, I think we’ve gone beyond the relatively well thought out irrationality of the religious fundamentalists (which at least has some basis in belief, scripture, and ideology, however extreme and archaic!), to something deeper.

The rise of narcissistic populists in the political sphere seems to have coincided with (or maybe unleashed!) a more general outbreak of irrational behaviour on the part of ordinary people not linked to any particular belief system. Everybody seems to be angry, but why should this be so at this point in our history?

Outbreaks of delusional behaviour are not new, and characterised much of the Mediaeval period, persisting into the early Modern Age. But the Enlightenment and the triumph of rational economic systems was supposed to have put paid to them. So what’s happening to bring them back to the fore?

Well, there are a number of suspects…

It’s worth revisiting Clarke’s dictum that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ and apply it to our own societies. Technological change has been so rapid and so remarkable in recent years, that ordinary people are being left behind; marveling at what their new handheld devices can do, but not understanding the science that lies behind the tech. Not so long ago any reasonably well-read lay person could be expected to comprehend in broad terms the technological and scientific principles that underpin his or her civilisation; this is no longer the case! And irrationality has a habit of rushing in to fill such lacunae in our understanding…

And then there are the various existential threats our civilisation now confronts…

Some of the more improbable; the asteroid strike or the erupting supervolcano, are essentially beyond our current power to mitigate, and thus not worth considering, but others are clear and present dangers. Climate change, resource depletion, pollution and the potential impact of AI on employment are all things that human activity is responsible for, but rather than address the issues, large sections of the populace seem to want to deny they are happening altogether, or slip into a kind of helpless apathy.

Reaching for the irrational belief system is a symptom of all this…

Demagogues and despots have always known the emotional appeal of the irrational when times are tough and the solutions demanding and difficult, hence the election of right wing populists.

In our cultural life the appeal of the supernatural and of the superhero is strong at the moment; fantasy worlds to visit and fantasy heroes to rescue us.

Fundamentalist religion, I’ve mentioned, but there is also the growing popularity of pseudoscience, which rather than offering solutions re-frames the threat in mythic terms; the oft-promised arrival of Nibiru functions almost like a giant metaphor for the real dangers that we face. The next global extinction event has already started according to many scientists, and there’s plenty of evidence to support this view. The old chestnut of finding a new home for the human race has leapt off the pages of science fiction and into popular discourse, something I have referenced in previous blogs.

So what’s all this got to with your SF saga, I hear you ask?

Well, Lights in the sky anticipates the coming ecological cataclysm, but I’m thinking that my fictional doom is (in the best traditions of British SF), a rather cosy catastrophe! By the end of the series Gaia and her allies have staged a successful counterattack, and the biosphere is recovering nicely.

In the real world ‘the civilisation of the world as we know it’ would appear to be coming sooner than expected, and the cavalry doesn’t appear to be about to ride to the rescue…

C.E. Stevens October 2017

Blog entry twenty five: …one door closes?

By C Stevens | 29th September 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

I’ve finished Lights in the sky…maybe…

As usual, I can’t go more than a couple of weeks without writing something, so I found myself writing a short story!

This is called (at the moment) Italian Dreams and it takes place in Venice… Now this is a Venice of the imagination, but I have visited the real place, but the last time was twenty years ago, at least…

This is my second short story (the other one, The North Gate being set in Devon!), and it may go out under my other imprimatur, Stephen Clare…except, the tale, anticipating as it does ecological disaster, could be fitted into the Lights in the sky universe…

I haven’t decided, but I know there’s a trap here! Good writers have in the past succumbed to trying to shoehorn everything they write into one Grand Design (Isaac Asimov is the example that springs to mind), so I may keep this one separate…

Anyway, it’s good to write something that is unarguably mainstream fiction…

The main source material for the story is a recurring dream I had for many years, but I also make use of the (ample) pre-existing sources contained in film and literature concerned with the place…

But LITS is not going without a fight! I’ve conceived a series of short stories (provisionally called Tales from the Collapse), that will fill in the some the gaps left by the main narrative, and relate the histories of many of the minor characters…

First up (assuming Italian Dreams stays separate), is a short story that could well become a novella about Helen Choi’s creation, Clara, the first of the self-aware AI units…

C.E. Stevens September 2017

Blog entry supplemental eleven: farewell Brian Aldiss

By C Stevens | 29th August 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Rather presumptuously, about two years ago I contacted the great man via his website suggesting that he might be able to help me, and directing him to the Lights in the sky opener, serialised on this website. I acknowledged my debt to him and the role Billion Year Spree played in my autodidactic study of imaginative literature, leading eventually to my writing it!

Whether he ever got to read the message I don’t know, but somehow I doubt it, assuming it to have been intercepted by one of the gatekeepers supervising his website, but I never received an answer…

Like a lot of SF fans of my generation I came to Brian Aldiss through the short story collection Space, Time and Nathaniel, before moving on, to The Dark Light Years, Cryptozoic, and eventually Hothouse! Aldiss was clearly a better writer (in purely literary terms), than my other favourite of the period, Philip K Dick (as he would prove with the incomparable Helliconia Trilogy), but stylistically he now seems to belong to another age. The films made from his stories weren’t that successful and are now never shown (with sole exception of A.I., made from his short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long), and fit much less well with the anxiety-ridden postmodernist world we find ourselves in , a milieu that Dick inhabits perfectly, and appeared to anticipate!

His SF scholarship tried (unsuccessfully) to force the literary world to take the form seriously, but in vain, and Billion (later Trillion) Year Spree’s only real fault is that it contains no appreciation of his own work!

R.I.P. then, Brian…

C.E. Stevens August 2017

Blog entry twenty two: O brave new world

By C Stevens | 28th December 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

O brave new world is the suitably emotional climax to volume one, and is now available on this website. I make no apologies for pulling out all the stops on this one! The title is (of course) taken from Miranda’s speech in The Tempest, and was adapted by Aldous Huxley as the title of his famous novel.
In full the couplet reads ‘O brave new world, That has such people in’t!’
In the same way that Shakespeare’s ingenue marvels at the strange new visitors to her father’s island without being aware of the secrets they are concealing, the Children on Alpha 5 have hitherto marvelled at their world without comprehending its darker side…
The chapter marks the start of their disillusionment…
The title is doubly pertinent given the parallels between the eugenics practised in Huxley’s book, and the peculiar circumstances of the Children’s conception!
And at the end of volume one the world is remade, in a way that could not have been foreseen when the novel opened…
The shock and sorrow the crew feel after their friend Sal’s death is palpable to me, and I hope it comes over as forcefully to the reader; I have also tried to put across the new and unwelcome awareness of their own mortality that our little band all feel, as well as dramatising the sheer banality of what we experience in grief and loss…
Significantly it as Jorja who makes the overtures to Marta in the immediate aftermath, not the other way ’round. They have a mutual interest, the welfare of their friend, but it is the younger girl who has maturity, sensitivity and understanding to realise what is needed. This marks a change in Jorja, she’s growing up and making a conscious effort to become a better person, in the aftermath of her experience in the Barrier Range.
Marta, on the other hand, raises another nagging doubt about the benevolent intentions of the Nurses in their conversation on the way back to the Dome, although this is not immediately followed up.
Both girls find their new intimacy awkward, but grief makes strange bedfellows!
There are also further indications of Alphanian sentience (and, for the first time, possible benevolence) in their actions at the crash site, although Han, typically, is sceptical!
A few days later, we have a heartbreaking scene when Priya finally articulates her loss to Marta, together with her feelings of guilt that she wasn’t there to save him!
With the funeral coming up Jorja and Marta have to take charge and more or less shanghai Priya, forcing her to attend Sal’s funeral.
I’m also proud of this scene; both visually (where I reference the Lon Chaney film version of Phantom of the Opera), and for its dialogue.
Nurse Gee stage manages the event, and is of course, in her element! We learn that Salvatore was a practising Roman Catholic, and Marta’s observation as she views his corpse is based on personal experience.
Marta then makes a great speech where she articulates not just the grief our community feels, but also their collective hopes and fears in the troubling new world they find themselves in.
There are of course shades of Romeo and Juliet in Priya’s last goodbye to her love…
Time moves on; we join Marta and Jorge in a discussion which moves beyond the personal into metaphysics, as our heroine explains fully for the first time her new understanding of the world. This takes in predestination, the true meaning of her vision of the Midgard Serpent, and an overt reference to the ‘lights in the sky!’
Later they put their ‘modest proposal’ to Nurse Gee, and are surprised to find she is in full agreement with their plans. Later Marta is cynical about the reasons for Gee’s new enlightened viewpoint; the main narrative closes with Nurse Gee’s ringing declaration that signals a new chapter in the life of the Mission.
But we end with the vision Marta experiences when she links again with the Alphane sentience, foreshadowing some of what is to come later on…
So there we have it, book one closes, but plenty more to come…

Blog entry twenty one: Making amends

By C Stevens | 15th December 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

Making amends is very much the morning after the night before, when the consequences of Marta’s actions come home to roost. I misquote Genesis 1:1 in the opening passage (substituting world for Earth. as we are on another planet!).
Marta comments that the greyness she thought confined to her dreams has now penetrated everywhere; it has become actual, and has now invaded her waking hours! This is a reference (obviously) to the ‘…grey plain on which…[she]…walked forever…’ from Sleeping Beauty, and the imagery will probably be familiar to readers of the works of Philip K Dick.
The following day she observes, ‘…Now everything was sharp and painful…’ (in contrast to the peace she felt during her suicide attempt), ‘…[and] the world felt raw pitiless and unforgiving…’
I owe a debt here to the writers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, specifically the scene in Season six when Buffy tells Spike of the struggle she faces just to keep on living after being returned from Paradise. This is not to suggest that Marta’s actions were justified, or that she was necessarily bound for a better place, merely that she sought release from a life she found intolerable…
Our heroine is left to her own devices for a day and half after waking from her coma; Nurse Gee comes to see her but merely informs her that she has been sedated and must sleep, the nursemaid tending to her does not (and maybe cannot speak!). The implication is that Marta is being made to confront her actions (and perhaps repent!).
When people do finally come to see her her their reactions are very different…
Priya is angry, and the scene where she castigates her friend for her selfishness and her thoughtlessness (and ask her why she doesn’t want to live!), still makes me cry…
Nurse Gee is next; as befits a machine she is not judgemental or emotional, in fact she is impressed by Marta’s insight, perception and initiative in solving another piece of the puzzle that is the Children’s origins!.
This is not the reaction that Marta was expecting, but gives me as author the opportunity to provide more background and furnish explanations for what has transpired, by putting this in the mouths of the main characters…
Jorge is next, and he’s scared because he thinks he’s lost her! But when he realises that he hasn’t, that she does now want to live, then their relationship begins to return to familiar patterns and they begin to speculate; this time on the nature of the Alphanian intelligence. This again is a device for putting across what could be indigestible information in a natural way; they are scientists after all, and one of the main ways they relate is through science!
Finally Nurse Amber appears with the twins, and she reproves Marta for her selfishness and stupidity, reminding her (like Priya) that she is now a mother and has a responsibility to her children. As Marta ruefully observes,
‘…my conscience is machine, who’d have thought it…!’
When we reach the coda, time has passed and things have returned to normal; Priya is proposing that they have ceremony, a formal recognition of the unions between all the couples, and is seeking Marta’s support for this!
But the chapter ends on a darker note, setting up a cliffhanger for chapter 22…

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