Posts Tagged ‘Science fiction’

Postmortem: What the hell was #futureJer?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My 3 month long exper­i­ment in 140 char­ac­ter fic­tion posts ended on Sunday.  You can read my ser­ial fic­tion #future­Jer on the Thaumatrope web­site here.  The premise was  pretty sim­ple: I attempted to imag­ine my life 2 years into the future if our econ­omy doesn’t get any bet­ter.  It’s fairly grim, but has a touch of hope to it too.  The cast were barely fic­tional ver­sions of my fam­ily and friends, and it takes place in rural Kansas.

The Genesis of a Twitter Serial

Back before I was actu­ally laid off, but knew the threat was loom­ing, I was expe­ri­enc­ing a lot of anx­i­ety.  On a whim, I decided to imag­ine how bad things could get to exter­nal­ize my fears, and I started twit­ter­ing this in the form of #future­Jer.  Within a cou­ple of days, Nathan Lilly, the edi­tor of Thaumatrope, direct mes­saged me and offered to pay me to do what I was already doing, at pro rates no less.  It was an easy deci­sion to make.

Postmortem

I never had any inten­tion of telling a story when I started out doing this, but once I was offered money, I had to give it an arc.  I intro­duced the ele­ments of the preg­nancy and the grow­ing vio­lence to develop the drama.  I was hap­pi­est about the project when I was sim­ply imag­in­ing our lives as essen­tially sub­sis­tence farmer/​hunters.  I find some­thing deeply com­pelling about a life with­out work, where you sim­ply grow your own food, main­tain your own home, and enjoy life.  I think we’re hard­wired more for the hunter/​gatherer or farmer life more than we are for work­ing in offices.

The tone prob­a­bly got even darker when I was actu­ally laid off at the end of January.  I sat down a few days later and wrote the entire month of February in an after­noon, plot­ting out the remain­der.  I sus­pect the final bit felt slightly more cohe­sive than the bits that led up to it.

Overall, it was an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment in writ­ing on the fly, and hope­fully I didn’t screw it up too much.  Also, I hope it doesn’t turn from fic­tion to real­ity, because I don’t actu­ally know how to build or repair wind tur­bines or cas­trate bulls, although I’m will­ing to learn if some­one wants to teach me!

Jason Stoddard is Wrong about Science Fiction

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Jason has a nice post up about the demands placed on sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers who write believ­able near-​​future SF today.  You should read it.  I think he’s wrong, but you should read it.*

I think focus­ing on the sci­ence aspects of sci­ence fic­tion is miss­ing the point.  Science fic­tion is fic­tion first, and only tan­gen­tially about sci­ence.  Some of my favorite SF tales arguably have zero sci­ence in them.  I’d even go so far as to say sci­ence fic­tion is just a genre of fic­tion with a set of tropes that some­times involve sci­ence, or the future, but doesn’t always, and doesn’t have to.  But let’s focus on the idea of near-​​future SF.  It’s a small sub­set of what’s writ­ten, but it is a subset.

Jason says:

To write fully believ­able, near future sci­ence fic­tion today, you almost need to be vora­cious anti­so­cial poly­math, deeply con­ver­sant in half a dozen tech­ni­cal fields, as well as famil­iar with ongo­ing social, eco­nomic, and envi­ron­men­tal change.

First of all, to have any kind off suc­cess­ful writ­ing career, you need to be some­what anti­so­cial because you rarely make enough money to do it full time, which means you use leisure time to do it, and often a lot of leisure time, which means you won’t be see­ing your friends much.  It’s a soli­tary pur­suit for the most part.  But that’s not what I wanted to say about that quote.  This is:

I take excep­tion to is the notion that you need to be deeply con­ver­sant in any­thing.  I think you just need to do research to the point where what you have to say doesn’t break the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief and I think that’s a long ways from being a poly­math.   You don’t need to be an expert on any­thing but people.

One of the appeals to a cer­tain kind of writer of SF is that they get to do research.  These writ­ers some­times have a ten­dency to inflict their research upon the reader whether it mat­ters or not.  As I get older, I care a lot less about the believ­abil­ity of the sci­ence in my sto­ries than I do about the actual story and the char­ac­ters.  I was recently read­ing a nice space opera by a friend of mine, and as I was dig­ging through info-​​term-​​dense para­graph after para­graph talk­ing about tech­nolo­gies under­ly­ing star­ship mechan­ics and such, I thought–I have been con­di­tioned to find this accept­able in a story, I kind of enjoy it because I am a big nerd, but I don’t think it makes the story any bet­ter.  Senswunda’s one thing–I dig that.  But I only care about the details so long as they relate to the core of the story, and a lot of times in this kind of SF, they don’t.  The Analog mafia might like that sort of thing, but I don’t.  I don’t need equa­tions in my fic­tion, and I rarely find that they improve it.

I also don’t like my SF to be pred­ica­tive.  I don’t like it to be real­is­tic, nec­es­sar­ily.  Neither does most of the world.  Your sci­ence fic­tion does not need to be well-​​researched, and you do not need to be an expert on quan­tum mechan­ics to write sci­ence fic­tion.  In fact, I would argue that the more con­ver­sant you are in these details, and the more you force into your novel or story, the smaller your audi­ence is.  Star Wars doesn’t trou­ble itself with the mechan­ics of FTL.  It’s pretty damned suc­cess­ful with audiences.

Jason con­cludes with a very nice zinger:

Otherwise, your fic­tion will soon read like that Golden Age lit, filled with space­ships manned by human cal­cu­la­tors and spin­ning reels of tape.

That’s the uni­ver­sal fail­ing of ALL near-​​future SF, no mat­ter how well researched it is.  They couldn’t get it right when tech­nol­ogy wasn’t accel­er­at­ing as fast in the 50s, and near-​​future SF writ­ers are prob­a­bly not get­ting it right now either with things clip­ping along faster.  So why bother?  Getting it “right” is not the point.  It shouldn’t be about any­thing the now through the lens of tools that SF has devel­oped.  You can say things about the future that you can’t say about the present. Projecting those com­ments onto the future gives you a lit­tle dis­tance to say those things.  That’s the pri­mary rea­son we set stuff in the future.  It might as well all be alter­nate his­tory, or alter­nate uni­verse sto­ries. The inclu­sion of alt his­tory in the SF greater genre just proves my point here.  You can’t write a What-​​If story with­out extrap­o­lat­ing from the present (or past).  It’s an exam­i­na­tion of what the truth really is through the fic­tion of what wasn’t or what could be (a depar­ture from the truth).

If you’re intim­i­dated by the accel­er­at­ing advance of the future, don’t let that stop you from writ­ing SF.  You don’t have to write it that way.  Personally, I take great enjoy­ment in throw­ing real­ity out the win­dow when I write my SF.    SF has only ever been about believ­abil­ity to a small sub­set of read­ers.  Believability in the con­text of tech, any­way.  It, like all lit­er­a­ture, does revolve around the believ­abil­ity of human action and emo­tion, how­ever.  Keep that in mind and you’ll write great fic­tion, and very few peo­ple will care about that other stuff. Nobody looks at the tech in 1984 and com­plains about it.

By now you should real­ize that I don’t really think Jason is wrong.  I just wrote that head­line to get your atten­tion so you could watch me hash out for myself what I think is impor­tant about sci­ence fic­tion.  Jason and every­one else who wants to can go about try­ing to mas­ter every field they want to include in their fic­tion, and try to make the near-​​future believ­able with mul­ti­ple points of advance­ment. I applaud it.  A not-​​small num­ber of peo­ple will read it and enjoy it, maybe includ­ing myself from time to time. They’ll almost cer­tainly get some­thing wrong and some  will bitch and moan about it too.  I just don’t find these kinds of sto­ries very mem­o­rable.  You might get lucky and nail some pre­dic­tion on the head and then become a foot­note in his­tory for hav­ing some fore­sight (see Arthur C. Clarke and the prediction/​invention of satel­lites. We know he did it, but I couldn’t tell you in what story).  But you don’t need it to write good stories.

My opin­ion and approach? Forget all of that.  The core of a story is time­less, and none of that really mat­ters.  Understand peo­ple before you under­stand quan­tum mechan­ics or net­work infra­struc­ture.  That’ll take you much fur­ther in fic­tion than any other knowl­edge set.  Senswunda exists inde­pen­dently of pre­dic­tion, and that is what mat­ters to me.  If that makes me more of a fan­tasy writer than a SF writer, then so be it.

So no, Jason Stoddard is not really wrong.  He’s just wrong for me.  You can make up your own mind about what you think.

Print or Electronic Short Fiction Magazines?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There’s some great con­ver­sa­tion going on over at the Tor site about mag­a­zine mod­els again.  John Klima is tack­ling the whole print vs. elec­tronic delimma.

Personally, I think if you can do print, do it.  But elec­tronic edi­tions should be a given. It costs maybe an hour of your time to take your files and con­vert them into the pop­u­lar for­mats.  There are web­sites that do it for you. If any­one wants to know about those, I’ll dig up the links.

Cory Doctorow has talked about this in the past, and I agree with him.  Sell a nor­mal sub­scrip­tion for print, but those peo­ple get a free elec­tronic ver­sion as well.  The elec­tronic ver­sion sup­ports the print ver­sion.  It’s eas­ier to search, and, hon­estly, eas­ier to share, which at the size we’re talk­ing about?  People pirat­ing your sto­ries around is a good thing.  Anything that makes it eas­ier for peo­ple to spread the word about your pub­li­ca­tion is a plus.

Also, sell a cheaper straight elec­tronic ver­sion.  If some­one really wants to just get a PRC file every month, then let them.  But I think you’ll find that the elec­tronic ver­sion is a sell­ing point of the print ver­sion.  I can’t guar­an­tee it will increase sales, but I think it’s the best of both worlds.  It’s your choco­late in my peanut but­ter, my peanut but­ter in your choco­late.  Mmmm!

I’d be ecsta­tic if every book I bought came with an elec­tronic ver­sion so that I can search it after­wards, or even bet­ter, while I’m wait­ing for the book to arrive via Amazon.  In fact, yes­ter­day, I ordered some web appli­ca­tion design texts and after I placed my order, Amazon tried to sell me a $15 e-​​book copy of one of the books so I could start read­ing right away.  That’s great–only I sure as hell ain’t going to pay another $15 for a $50 book for that promise (and prob­a­bly find that it is full of DRM that pre­vents me from really using it).

There are things I can do so much bet­ter on a com­puter or e-​​reader than I can do with a book.  But paper is still eas­ier to read until we see e-​​ink really take off (the Kindle is appar­ently cool, but I’ve never seen one in the wild).    The two for­mats are com­pli­men­tary, and I’d really like to see some­one try out the model I’ve out­lined above.  I’d sub­scribe, any­way, and I cur­rently sub­scribe to no mag­a­zines (although that’s a fac­tor more of my recent unem­ploy­ment than it is any prob­lem with the magazines).

Are you pub­lish­ing a print zine and giv­ing away e-​​copies to your sub­scribers for archiv­ing and easy index­ing?  Let me know in the comments.

Available for Order: Seeds of Change

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The lat­est anthol­ogy edited by John Joseph Adams, Seeds of Change, is avail­able for pre-​​order on Amazon now.    The table of con­tents includes Ken Macleod, Tobias S. Buckell, Jay Lake, and many more fine writ­ers.  It also includes my story, “Arties Aren’t Stupid,” one of my per­sonal favorites.

The ori­gin for this story came from read­ing about mad gar­den­ers in Britain cre­at­ing liv­ing graf­fiti with blendered moss and spray bot­tles.  I won­dered what would hap­pen if such peo­ple had in their hands some­thing a bit more pow­er­ful than a blender, and the story spun off of that concept.

I hope you’ll order a copy, if not for me, than for those other fine writ­ers.   I’ve read the anthol­ogy, and I thor­oughly enjoyed it.

The Mainstreaming of Science Fiction on TV?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert
Lost (TV series)Image via Wikipedia

The ABC series Lost is, quite pos­si­bly, the most broadly suc­cess­ful sci­ence fic­tion tele­vi­sion show yet. While rat­ings have been on a decline in this, the fourth sea­son, the season’s pre­miere pulled in 16.07 mil­lion view­ers. Now, these are Nielsen num­bers, which I con­sider sus­pect at best, but it shows that the show is very pop­u­lar, and almost cer­tainly not just with tra­di­tional SF fans (those num­bers can­not be accounted for purely by fans). Current episodes have dealt openly with sci­ence fic­tion tropes (which I will not name exactly to avoid spoil­ers). You could argue about the true clas­si­fi­ca­tion of the show, but it most cer­tainly falls into sci­ence fic­tion, as well as maybe a cou­ple of other genres.

When the show first started, fans knew some­thing was unusual, but that was a bit sub­tle. Dozens of peo­ple had sur­vived a hor­rific plane crash, land­ing on a strange island. Compasses don’t work. There’s a weird radio trans­mis­sion. And there’s a mon­ster in the jun­gle that nobody can see.

Still, I sup­pose, many audi­ence mem­bers dis­in­clined to like SF could make the case for the show being in the thriller/​mystery genre. And it did have a heavy human, more dra­matic ele­ment in the form of each episode’s character-​​centric back story arcs. It wasn’t until late sea­son 2 that things really began to take a turn for the spec­u­la­tive. And even then, it was sub­tle, just a few ele­ments. But as the show has pro­gressed, it’s become clear that the entire foun­da­tion of what the show is about is sci­ence fic­tion (or at least sci­ence fantasy).

But as each sea­son has gone on, it has been increas­ingly impos­si­ble for even the most deter­mined to deny that Lost is, at its roots, a sci­ence fic­tion show. You could call the tech­niques they used to grab their audi­ence bait-​​and-​​switch, because the show cre­ators intro­duced the heavy spec­u­la­tive ele­ments slowly. I’d also call it the frog in a pot of boil­ing water accli­ma­tion method.

My coworker, the Lost fan

An anec­dote: I have a coworker who hates sci­ence fic­tion. In his words, he likes “real things.” He despises super­hero movies, and pretty much every­thing a SF fan loves. Early on, the show cre­ators of Lost said in an inter­view that every­thing pre­sented on the show had a ground­ing in real sci­ence (some­thing that at this point is highly debat­able). Still– my coworker clung to this state­ment like it was a life pre­server. It allowed him to keep watch­ing the show no mat­ter how fan­tas­tic things got, because it was still some­how “real.” At this point in the fourth sea­son, he’s pissed off, because he real­izes that state­ment was total bull­shit. But he’s still watch­ing, and still hooked.

The rea­son? A good mys­tery is com­pelling no mat­ter what other genre tropes you add to the stew of your story. The char­ac­ters, after 3 com­plete sea­sons, are sym­pa­thetic and well-​​known. All the foun­da­tions of a good story are there, to the point that, despite my coworker hat­ing every­thing there is to hate about sci­ence fic­tion, he is still a huge fan of the show.

This is a good exam­ple of how genre is becom­ing the main­stream. For those fans who would like to see the genre remain dis­tinct and sep­a­rate, I think this turn of events is going to be a mas­sive dis­ap­point­ment. Reviewing the past events of the show, it almost looks as if the show cre­ators delib­er­ately plot­ted out their intro­duc­tion of SF tropes to cre­ate the frog in a pot of boil­ing water effect.

What’s espe­cially fan­tas­tic in my mind is that Lost hasn’t given us SF-​​lite. It slowly intro­duced the ele­ments, yes, but they are not watered down to be more palat­able. We have full-​​fledged weird­ness here. This is a show that Charles Fort would watch and clap his hands with glee.

The poten­tial for new fans

By the time Lost com­pletes its arc, there is going to be a whole new audi­ence primed to accept our stranger ideas. New TV shows will come along to take advan­tage of this, but maybe, just maybe, SF pub­lish­ers can lure some of them in too. Frankly, you could do worse than adding even 1% of Lost’s fan­base to your read­er­ship. You could do a hell of a lot worse.

I’m sure there are down­sides to the main­stream­ing of SF tropes. It makes us feel less spe­cial and unique, maybe. But as a work­ing cre­ative, I will just have to swal­low my pride on that one. With this kind of poten­tial for fans out there, it gives me hope that we could actu­ally make a good liv­ing telling genre sto­ries, and not just the ones mar­keted to an aging, increas­ingly con­ser­v­a­tive SF fanbase.

But then, maybe I’m all wrong

But then, the decline in rat­ings that Lost is suf­fer­ing right now might be an indi­ca­tor that the broader audi­ence of Lost has been alien­ated by the spec­u­la­tive aspects of the show. For the week of May 4, the show didn’t even break the top 20. There may be many rea­sons why this show is falling in the rat­ings. And even if it is pop­u­lar by genre show stan­dards, it pales in com­par­i­son to real­ity shows involv­ing danc­ing and singing.

Related arti­cles

The Coming Online SF/​F Renaissance

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Tor Will Make a Big Splash

A few years ago, we were all upset when SCIFICTION was dropped by the SciFi Channel. The genre lost its best pay­ing mar­ket, and arguably the high­est qual­ity pub­li­ca­tion, online or in print. Its depar­ture from the scene left a hole that many have tried to fill, to vary­ing degrees of suc­cess. But the world has changed sig­nif­i­cantly since then.

Today, nearly every pub­lisher, large or small, has some sort of online com­po­nent. No longer is dig­i­tal con­tent being largely ignored, as it was when I first came onto the scene in 2001. Baen, Prime Books, Small Beer Press, Tor, just to name a few that have recently or reg­u­larly released con­tent online for free. Tor’s com­ing social networking/​publishing site might be the final piece of the puz­zle that ties the SF/​F com­mu­nity together under one roof (depend­ing on the extent of their social net­work­ing tools). I eagerly await the chance to beta test their site.

SCIFICTION and Strange Horizons stood mostly unop­posed for a very long time. Smaller, respectable mar­kets flour­ished, but none of us had the audi­ences of these two pub­li­ca­tions. Baen came onto the scene, and shook things up, but I don’t know much about them because their model of the sub­scriber wall keeps me out. Tor is going to bring in the exist­ing online audi­ence, and I think they have the clout and sta­ble of authors to bring even more read­ers to online short fiction.

Tor’s entrance onto this stage is going to ele­vate everyone’s game. With a new giant player on the scene, the smaller pub­lish­ers are going to be work­ing harder to inno­vate, harder to stand out. We’ll see even more exper­i­men­ta­tion. We started out with the online fic­tion itself as the exper­i­ment. Tor’s entrance proves that experiment’s cen­tral the­sis. People will and do read fic­tion online, and in great num­bers. What’re more, I believe it val­i­dates the model of the short fic­tion as adver­tise­ment for long form pub­lish­ers. Prime Books, Clarkesworld, and Subterranean have pio­neered this.

I can’t help but think that we have Cory Doctorow to thank for much of this. I’m sure many peo­ple released books online for free before him, but did many who had tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing con­tracts release their books online in con­junc­tion with the print release? It’s almost cer­tainly his influ­ence that has led Tor to devel­op­ing their com­ing site–I’m sure oth­ers, such as Patrick Nielsen Hayden and semi-​​anonymous Tor employ­ees at who I do not know are ulti­mately respon­si­ble for the project, and I don’t want to min­i­mize what they are doing. But Cory blazed the path. That path is turn­ing into a paved road. Soon, it may be a highway.

Who Falls Behind?

I like the fic­tion in Asimov’s and F&SF very much, but they are begin­ning to look a bit like large warm-​​blooded bird ances­tors prone to mas­sive extinc­tion by meteor impact. F&SF has made some strides in the online world, with it’s free fic­tion and blog, but the fic­tion is mostly pretty old, prac­ti­cally ancient in online terms, and their pre­sen­ta­tion leaves much to be desired.

Asimov’s web pres­ence has not changed sig­nif­i­cantly since I first vis­ited their web­site. It’s a mess, frankly. It’s great that you can buy it for the near-​​mythic Kindle, and they’ve been avail­able in var­i­ous e-​​formats for a long time via Fictionwise. But they have utterly failed to take advan­tage of the web as a medium. And no, I do not count their sep­tic forums. I haven’t paid much atten­tion to Analog, but I sus­pect they’re in a sim­i­lar place, being owned by the same publisher.

What Next?

Who will make the next inno­va­tions in pub­lish­ing? I think it will still be the small, fleet-​​footed pub­li­ca­tions like Futurismic, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, and so on. Podcasting, once the sole domain of EscapePod, now has sev­eral other major play­ers on the field, even exclud­ing the var­i­ous EscapePod spin­offs. And remem­ber, their num­ber of lis­ten­ers out­weighs the read­er­ship of any print mag­a­zine out there. I also think that their lis­ten­ers are not the same peo­ple as the sub­scribers of mag­a­zines. It’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent audi­ence, and ignor­ing the pod­cast audi­ence would be like throw­ing money away at this point. I pre­dict more will offer pod­cast­ing sup­ple­ments to their web pres­ences. Small pub­lish­ers will begin to inves­ti­gate devel­op­ing for the mobile web, and this may call for a dif­fer­ent type of fic­tion, some­thing shorter and leaner. The use of mul­ti­me­dia and art­work is going to grow. A sim­ple site like the Fortean Bureau looks like an Amish buggy com­pared to the hot rods we’ll be see­ing in the next cou­ple of years. I don’t know about you, but I’m very opti­mistic and excited about the things that are to come. We may not get paid much in the short fic­tion world, but there are more and more oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­nect with audi­ences. And for read­ers, there’s never been so many options for your read­ing expe­ri­ence (which presents its own set of prob­lems).

Recycled: Fiddler On the Roof is Science Fiction

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I didn’t have a chance to write a good post today, so here’s some recy­cled con­tent from last year:

Nobody believes me when I tell them that I think Fiddler on the Roof is the best sci­ence fic­tion musi­cal tragi­com­edy ever.

Fiddler on the Roof, at its core, is about a slightly old-​​fashioned man expe­ri­enc­ing future shock. In a time of great cul­tural change, Tevye’s ways, the old ways, are repeat­edly assaulted. First, his daugh­ter Tzeitel refuses her arranged mar­riage and begs to be allowed to marry the poor tai­lor that she loves. And Tevye relents! He over­comes his cul­ture shock, his fear of the new, and real­izes that things won’t be so bad this way. Then, his sec­ond daugh­ter rebels, ask­ing for only his bless­ing for her wed­ding, not his per­mis­sion, and again, he relents! One again, he over­comes the cul­tural bonds of tra­di­tion, mov­ing for­ward with the times. As a mod­ern viewer, I felt such pride for the human race, that he could see through the old things and allow pas­sion to bloom.

Then, the tragic turn. Tevye’s third daugh­ter has fallen in love with a non-​​Jewish Russian, and asks to marry him, but Tevye can­not allow this. He has found the line that he can­not cross. He becomes a vic­tim of future shock and it destroys him. He can­not speak with this daugh­ter again, and you can see that the man is absolutely dev­as­tated by his deci­sion, and yet still he remains firm. This moment… “on the other hand… on the other hand…” there is no other hand! It was one of the most mov­ing scenes of any musi­cal for me. Rationality loses in the end, but I think the moral, from this per­spec­tive, is just that, per­haps we can­not force change too quickly with­out break­ing the things that we wish to pre­serve through soci­etal upheaval.

It’s not that long ago that mar­ry­ing for love seemed like an out­landish con­cept, even a spec­u­la­tive one. Fiddler on the Roof may not have been writ­ten as a SF story, but it does what a great sci­ence fic­tion story does; it deals with the inter­sec­tion of peo­ple and ideas; in this case, the tra­di­tional man of Tevye, and the idea that tra­di­tion not need hold in oppo­si­tion of love. It needs no robots or rocket ships. The future does not always come in the form of tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments.

Fermi’s Paradox and the Great Filter

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The inter­est­ing astro-​​related blog Centauri Dreams had a post the other day dis­cussing one of my pet top­ics, Fermi’s Paradox. The lat­est dis­cus­sion and solu­tion to be offered comes from Robin Hanson by way of Nick Bostrom, and the idea is being referred to as the “Great Filter.” This is kind of a meta con­cept, an idea con­cern­ing prob­a­bil­ity: we see no advanced life in the uni­verse, so there must be some fil­ter event that destroys/​eliminates intel­li­gent life. Here is Bostrom’s explanation:

The fil­ter con­sists of one or more evo­lu­tion­ary tran­si­tions or steps that must be tra­versed at great odds in order for an Earth-​​like planet to pro­duce a civ­i­liza­tion capa­ble of explor­ing dis­tant solar systems.

So is this fil­ter event in our rel­a­tive past, or our rel­a­tive future?  Have we already passed through it, or is it yet to come?   Bostrom believes that the Great Silence is a good thing, and means that we’re past the fil­ter event.  If we find com­plex life, then we should be con­cerned that the event is yet to come.

As a SF writer, this stuff is a gold mine.  I’ve read quite a few nov­els and short sto­ries that dance with the Paradox.  It’s a very impor­tant ques­tion, and it really lights a match in the boiler beneath my imagination.

For instance, I was won­der­ing this morn­ing, while think­ing about the Great Filter, if the rea­son behind the silence out there might some­how be a result of the fun­da­men­tals of quan­tum mechan­ics, of which I have very lit­tle under­stand­ing of, so you’ll have to for­give me if I man­gle something.

It’s obser­va­tional bias that I keep turn­ing over in my mind.  The idea that we change the results of an exper­i­ment just by observ­ing them.  Is it pos­si­ble that once one “observer” species evolves, it’s very exis­tence is the fil­ter that pre­vents other life from evolv­ing? Our obser­va­tion changes the uni­verse?  I don’t feel like I can explain this idea. I need to read up on quan­tum mechan­ics and its impli­ca­tions to develop this line of thought further.