Category: Articles

The Quantum Thief — Hannu Rajaniemi

Posted on by Neal Asher

In a way this was more like a fast tour of the post singularity world rather than a story set in it. I’ve been reading science and science fiction for a very long time, but I often felt the need to hold up a finger and say, ‘Hang on Hannu, if you could explain –’ … but no, he’s gone like a tour guide on speed. The ideas hit you like cars in a motorway pile-up giving you no time to deal with them, absorb them. And, of course, while the ideas are hitting you like that you’re not properly processing the plot and can fail to engage with it. My feeling is that before he leapt through the next q-dot membrane to begin his next adventure in some gaming virtuality he needed an editor to catch hold of his collar and force him to stop and smell the roses, even if those roses were laced with an optogenetic virus.

Now for the however… This was all very enjoyable, bubbling with fascinating technology and its resultant life-styles, and a book that really does feel like a glimpse into a post Vingean singularity world. I found myself caught up in the author’s enthusiasm with it all and by the end of it wondered if someone has slipped amphetamines into the printer’s ink. For me it is a book I would like to read again, but with the Internet running so I can track down and nail all that glorious weirdness. And in the end, just like with the previous book I reviewed here, the answers to the questions are mostly ‘yes’.   

The Lost Fleet 'Dauntless' — Jack Campbell

Posted on by Neal Asher

There’s a whiff of antiquity about this book that reminds me of E.E. Doc Smith and other books I read at about the same time I read the Skylark series. This feels like WWII but with space ships and could easily have been written in the 50s. I felt momentary cringes at the name of the character ‘Black Jack Geary’ at the use of ‘hell lances’ and ‘grape shot’ and at crewmen being called ‘sailors’. The technology felt daft, as if the electronics aboard the ships might have employed thermionic valves, as if the corridors were full of steam pipes and the gunners were hand-loading shells. I half expected someone to pull out a slide rule at some point to calculate vectors.

 
However…

Why shouldn’t a beam weapon be called a ‘hell-lance’ and why shouldn’t ‘grape shot’ fired at relativistic speeds be perfectly acceptable? How different is the former to a maser or particle beam, and how different is the latter to rail-gun missiles? And why shouldn’t the kind of command structures seen in our navies be used? Such arguments I tried on myself as I devoured this book. What retired naval officer John G Hemry (his real name) has done here is combine his experience of military service with an obvious (and probably dated) love of science fiction.

To sum up: all of the above is true, but in reviewing a book I have to ask some very simple questions. Did I care about the characters? Did I want to know what happened next? Did I enjoy reading this book? Was it a good read? Will I buy the next book in the series?

The answer to all these questions is ‘yes’, and this book must be included in that long list called ‘guilty pleasures’.   

Go Completely Digital?

Posted on by Neal Asher

Here’s an email I recently received. Perhaps those visiting here would like to address some of his points? I do have some answers, but let’s see what others have got to say….

You should put a section on your blog so people can raise questions without resorting to emailing.

This is a question that’s been annoying me for a while. I grew up with books and with tapes, then CD’s then crappy windows media player and now all my music’s on a 300Gb hard drive as well as every important (and unimportant) photo from my life.

I feel good that all my music’s accessible this way and I’ve binned, or sold all my old CD’s. That was easy.

I also threw all my books prior to 5 years ago away, which at the time seemed good but now is a niggling regret. Mainly because my daughter has just started reading ravenously and a lot of the stuff I had she’d love (she got into fantasy via Harry Potter!)

Should we throw away books in favour of digital text? I’d love to think this is progress but most of the writing I’ve discovered is through browsing bookshops. I buy books from Amazon from time to time
but I don’t ever discover anything via that. Discovery’s are always made in bookshops, be it from a cover or a few first pages etc… I have never found that from a web based system.

I bought a beautifully bound and illustrated edition of “the secret garden” for my daughter as well as a new edition of Philip Pullman’s “Northern lights” Which I know she’ll enjoy (she’s 7 I can’t subject
her to the wonders of masada yet)

A year ago I had this conversation with my partner while considering buying an e-reader. She was horrified that I’d consider sending our books the way of our CD’s and at the time I thought that was
ridiculous however now I’m wondering how people will find new fiction without bookshops? I’m happy that I can access medical journals for work instantly and without wasting tons of paper a year plus emissions related to moving articles to me only 5% of which I want to keep and I don’t know how I’d work without Zotero to catalogue my articles now but I just can’t get comfortable with the loss of bookshops.

Sci-fi never really touches this, writers always just seem to accept that all information is always permanently available at minimal cost to anyone who want’s it but never get into how people might access fiction or even look for it? The only time I’ve heard mention of libraries properly is Ian Banks in “The Algebraist” where the dwellers keep vast uncatalogued libraries stretching back millennia and
further.
Is the future just a library of information where fiction is controlled only by corporations such as Apple and Amazon who “Recommend” the fiction they know you’d like (scary). Or is it vast
quantities of fiction churned out by anyone who feels they can be an author dumped into a huge repository where no one can discover anything of quality? Either way it looks pretty shit for my children or grandchildren.

Sci-fi seems to be comfortable with future tech but lacks depth in social problems. Do you think someone should try writing from that angle?

Kind regards

Marcus

Jain Tech on the Way

Posted on by Neal Asher

I love it when a rush of articles like this appear on TheNext Big Future. Here we have a microscopic engine:

“We’ve developed the world’s smallest steam engine, or to be more precise the smallest Stirling engine, and found that the machine really does perform work,”

Here we have further efforts at miniaturization using carbon nano-tubes:

Three dimensional integration is a hot field within electronics since it offers a new way to package components densely and thus build tiny, well-functioning units. When stacking chips vertically, the most effective way to interconnect them is with electrical interconnects that go through the chip (instead of being wired together at the edges) – what are known as through-silicon vias.

Here we have nano-springs:

In order to exploit the particular material properties that appear at the nanoscale, it is first necessary to fabricate materials with nanoscale structures in a controlled and repeatable fashion. Reliable methods for the fabrication of simple shapes such as nanorods, nanocubes and nanotubes are now available, but more complex shapes still pose a challenge. Sungho Park and co-workers from Sungkyunkwan University in Korea have now reported a promising method for the synthesis of palladium nanosprings.

Quantum entangled photons:

Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei in collaboration with colleagues in Germany and Austria have now demonstrated a system that allows photons to be entangled and stored in a manner suitable for quantum computing.

And photonic chips for quantum processors:

A multi-purpose optical chip which generates, manipulates and measures entanglement and mixture – two quantum phenomena which are essential driving forces for tomorrow’s quantum computers – has been developed by researchers from the University of Bristol’s Centre for Quantum Photonics. This work represents an important step forward in the race to develop a quantum computer.

Of course with steady developments like this we might end up with some sort of self-replicating technology that grows like a plant, or a fungal mycelia…

Out in the Wilderness!

Posted on by Neal Asher

Apparently David Cameron has cast us into isolation and the icy wilderness outside Europe, if you swallow whole the propaganda belched up by the BBC. As someone noted, on one blog I was reading, this is the kind of isolation of the one passenger who failed to board the Titanic on its maiden voyage. Of course the piles and piles of bullshit here are high and ripe. First off, Britain is not the one out of twenty-seven as the BBC would have us believe. And as far as I can gather (I’m no expert) he said ‘no’ at a meeting to discuss having a meeting to work out some way of promoting stability. There was, in fact, no treaty to veto but a draft treaty. If you want more detail, check here.

However, one wonders why sticking a financial transactions tax in there which will screw money out of Britain’s economy has to be part of the deal. Could it possibly be a further power grab that actually has no effect on the vast amount of money countries owe and how, economically, they are rapidly heading down the toilet? Could it be a little bit of payback for Britain’s failure to kowtow to Brussels and join the Euro? Could it also be Merkel, Sarkozy and crew looking for someone to blame –Britain – when it all goes tits-up as it inevitably will?

Nice to note the BBC telling outright lies too. How the financial sector is just an insignificant part of Britain’s economy when it actually accounts for 10% of national income. Meanwhile the reporters all looked like they wanted to be wearing black arm bands as they promoted doom and gloom about Britain not going ‘Baaa!’ with the rest of the sheep. They then delayed for as long as possible before letting Cameron put his side of, ‘We’re not in the Euro, these changes are against our national interest, so I said no, okay?’ Of course I’ve no doubt that later that ‘no’ will become a sort of ‘no’ and eventually slide into being a ‘yes’ because Cameron is as big a europhile prick as most chiselling politicians.

Update:
Incidentally, what are these sanctions they’re talking about for profligate governments? It hardly seems logical to financially penalize a government that’s overspent: Hey, I find you guilty of shooting yourself in the foot. I am, therefore, going to punish you by shooting you in the other foot.