Gaming and Sci-Fi

Gaming — the video variety, not the gambling kind — has made itself at home in our cultural consciousness. It's been settling in for awhile, probably for longer than I've been aware.

There have been, of course, the staggering, multi-billion dollar revenues that gaming companies rake in. But money is only so interesting. It's more interesting to me when relatively marginalized activities hit the mainstream.

One of my favorite podcasts, On the Media, ran — and a year later reprised — an hour-long look at the history, influence, culture, and future of videogaming. Toward the end was an interview with a game designer, Jane McGonigal, whose TED talk asks why the real world doesn't work more like an online game. Her project, as she puts it: "to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games." It's an interesting presentation, both for her optimistic argument and for the nervous laughter at many of the statistics she spashes on the screen. Is gaming mainstream now? Maybe. But not comfortably so.

I've just recently finished three science fiction narratives that tap into this zeitgeist to a meaningful extent. Since I didn't choose the books with this in mind —that is, I didn't set out to read a series of books dealing with gamers and gaming — it probably gives me a heightened, and perhaps false, impression that video games have become, for science fiction writers, important technologies worth exploring in depth. Nonetheless...

 I read Neil Stephenson's Reamde simply because I like Stephenson and I'd put his latest book on my Amazon wish list. Merry Christmas!

(A brief aside: In a lot of ways, I wish I'd put his previous book, Anathem, on that list; I think it would have been more interesting, since Reamde is more of a thriller than one of his usual "big idea" books. Fortunately, a Stephenson thriller is far better than most.)

At the heart of Reamde is a World of Warcraft-like game: one of the main characters is the owner and originator of the game, and the events of the narrative are kicked into gear through concrete interactions between gamers in their game world and their real world. I don't want to give away more than that; it's a romp, full of surprises, and certainly worth the many hours it takes to read (it's a long one, clocking in at 1000+ pages). My point: one of the main character's invented the game, and the novel takes place in and around that game.

I stumbled upon Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, through an Audible.com recommendation on one of the podcasts I listen to (apparently, the book is read, to the delight of many a geek, by Wil Wheaton). I put it on my Amazon wish list, too, and, voilà: it too appeared at Christmas.

Ready Player One is another romp — more fun but not as interesting as Reamde, in my view. In Cline's book, the founder of a video game — one that has become an almost Matrix-like escape for a devastated world--dies and leaves his unbelievably massive fortune to whoever can find an "Easter egg" buried somewhere in the game universe. And since the deceased designer was an '80s freak, the gameplay — and the book — is jam-packed with all kinds of 80s pop-culture references — games, of course, but also music, TV, and movies. Nothing of earth shattering importance, but a good ride.


From the recommendation of another podcast, I got ahold of Daniel Suarez's Daemon and its sequel, Freedom™. In this case, I had no idea what I was getting into, just that someone I respected liked the books and that they were sci fi. (I didn't even know, until I finished Daemon, that Freedom™ continued the story.) I was thus a bit surprised to find that these books also deal with the legacy of the founder of a video game empire--though in this case, the battle is not for an Easter egg of riches, but for — wait for it — the survival of the human race.

Of the three narratives, Suarez's is by far the most interesting. For one thing, if I were still in grad school research mode, the cross between  posthuman and ambiguous utopia would be right up my alley. But I think the judgment holds even without my special interest; like the other books, Daemon and Freedom™ have their share of romp, but it all serves a larger project of raising frightening questions about the world we, the readers, find ourselves in today.

And, while the story sometimes becomes a bit pedantic in its lectures about the causes of various economic woes, these lectures are always followed up by a satisfying massacre of the otherwise untouchable guilty parties.

I have a stack of papers waiting to be graded, so I don't have time to meditate on the way that videogaming has found itself at the heart of so much good (and popular) sci fi. It reminds me of the spate of jacked-into-the-net movies that came out in 1999 — The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and eXistenz... The question of how we would (or wouldn't) be able to tell the difference between a real and a virtual world seemed to become suddenly very important for awhile there...

Anyway: fun stuff.  I recommend all four books, even though I'm not really a gamer, and the 80s isn't really my decade.

(Another brief aside, though: If you haven't read Stephenson before, I'd recommend Snow Crash (second only to Gibson's Neuromancer as exemplar of cuperpunk) or Cryptonomicon (a unique mix of historical fiction, computer science, and thriller--and yes, I used the word unique. Because I think it is.)

Book Review: The Dark Side

Jane Mayer sums up her book on "The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals" with the opinion of Phillip Zelikow, a historian and lawyer who had been Executive Director of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission and then aide to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. His view:

In time, [Zelikow] predicted, the Bush Administration's descent into torture would be seen as akin to Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It happened, he believed, in much the same way, for many of the same reasons. As he put it, "Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools." (335)

The Dark Side describes this "descent into torture." It's a disturbing look at the way "zealots and fools" in the Bush Administration – folk like Cheney, Addington, and Rumsfeld, along with a slew of people seduced or bullied by their rhetoric (it's hard to say where Bush falls in this list – driving policy, or seduced by it) – created quasi-legal justifications for the use of torture against suspected terrorists – many, if not most, of whom were innocent, sometimes obviously so – and then subverted Congress's and the Supreme Court's attempts to reign in the abuses.

Mayer's title comes from an appearance by Cheney on Meet the Press just a few days after 9/11 (Sept. 16, 2001, to be precise):

"We'll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will," Cheney explained.... "We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies – if we are going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in. And, uh , so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objective." (9-10)

I'm embarrassed to admit that in the immediate shadow of 9/11, I wouldn't have been too dismayed by such rhetoric. The "fear and anxiety" that Zelikow points to, and the sense of helplessness, made it easy to want a strong response, even one that dealt with the bad guys on their terms. But, like many, I (finally!) grew increasingly uncomfortable when bits and pieces of what this "dark side" comprised found its way into the press: the "black sites" (secret CIA prisons), "extraordinary rendition" (exporting suspects to countries know to use torture), Guantánamo and its lack of due process for "unlawful enemy combatants," and – of course – Abu Ghraib.

Even so, I had no clue about the breadth and depth of the Administration's disregard for the rule of law. The problem is that any one of these issues, though raising serious concern, could be dismissed as a mistake, maybe even a right-minded one. But Mayer's book brings all these issues together, building a narrative that demonstrates a concerted expansion and abuse of executive power that flouted international law – not to mention U.S. law and the Constitution that executive power is supposedly sworn to uphold.

Waterboarding offers a good case study for what I'm talking about here. There was lots of discussion – in Congress, in the press – about whether or not waterboarding should be considered torture. Some people decried the practice unequivocally; for example, though I'm not a fan, John McCain made his opposition perfectly clear, even while other Republican candidates waffled around him:

All I can say is that it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today [in Myanmar].... It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture." (171)

Others supported waterboarding, in theory and/or practice, arguing that – in carefully supervised conditions, or with a short enough duration, or with the right motives – it does not rise to the level of torture and should therefore be part of U.S. interrogators' arsenal.

Mayer's book, though, suggests that this focus on waterboarding actually served as a distraction. Alberto Mora – General Counsel of the Navy and, in fact, a strong Bush supporter – reviewed transcripts of one interrogation and concluded that the media "focused too narrowly" on allegations of torture, especially on waterboarding (the "sine qua non of criminality"). The problem, for Mora, is the notion of "state-sanctioned cruelty":

"If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationships of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America – even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles." (219)

Focusing attention on waterboarding drew attention away from larger, more important issues, both at a macro and a micro level. At the micro level, it drew attention away from the (appalling) laundry lists of sanctioned interrogation techniques, in which each item might pass muster, but in combination with others – often the practice – clearly crossed the line. (I must emphasize that each item might pass muster; many items in these lists are decried by human rights groups as being clearly examples of torture.) And at the macro level, it drew attention away from deeper human rights questions about whether we even want to be playing in the neighborhood of what Mora called "cruelty" – and not cruelty in an abstract, touchy-feely sense, but as a Constitutional issue of human rights.

As with the issue of waterboarding, it's easy to get lost in individual issues – losing sight of the forest, as the cliché goes, for the trees. Mayer's book brings the forest into focus, highlighting patterns that can only materialize when seen in relationship to a larger set of issues.

In the end, Mayer convinced me that historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is right:

When asked what he thought of President Bush's policy on torture, he peered over his glasses and paused [ah, purple prose!]. Schlesinger's The Imperial Presidency had described Richard Nixon as pushing the outer limits of presidential power.... With his trademark bow tie askew, Schlesinger considered, and finally said, "No position has done more damage to the American reputation in the world – ever." (9)

Book Review: The Disappeared

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's The Disappeared: A Retrieval Artist Novel is one of those science fiction books that I don't regret having read, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to others. Its heart is right: it sets up an interesting (and troubling) premise and drops the premise into a futuristic detective story. Unfortunately, the execution is a bit weak; Rusch just isn't that great a writer -- at least, she wasn't in 2002, when this novel was published. But The Disappeared is the first novel of a series, and I liked it enough to give the series a second try. Maybe she's improved.

It's probably not fair, either, that I listened to this book while still in the middle of Pynchon's latest. Anything read under such circumstance is bound to suffer.

The premise of Rusch's novel, as I said, is strong: multicultural tribunals and treaties among humans and at least 3 alien races have set up a situation where humans may be subject to (from the human perspective) extremely harsh penalties for (again, from the human perspective) minor or unintentional crimes. At its best, science fiction dramatizes ambiguous ethical situations just like this one. A great dramatization avoids preaching and keeps all sides of the ethical ambiguity fully in place -- a sci-fi version, I suppose, of Keats's negative capability. And for the most part, and through most of The Disappeared, Rusch succeeds.

In the end, though, the author seems to come down sqaurely on the side of the humans. Of course, it's hard to disagree, if only because we as readers are, on the whole, ourselves human.

But the ultimate erasure of ethical ambiguity isn't simply a matter of author/reader ethnocentrism. The real problem lies with a competing insistence on keeping the aliens alien. The reader gets the story of what "crimes" these humans-on-the-lam have committed, but it's all filtered through other humans. This isn't right, the main characters -- humans on the run from this harsh justice, or the two detectives suddenly faced with a rash of what might be called extradition orders -- continually conclude, and the only exposure we get to the aliens' perspective comes through translators who interpret not only the words but the motives of the aliens.

The insistence on the aliens' status as alien is admirable. I hate works that come to the conclusion that deep down we're all the same. But a side effect of this insistence is an inability to get beyond the ethocentrism that, at least in the case of this novel, is at the heart of the book's ethical exploration. In the end, as sci-fi is often accused of being, The Disappeared is a profoundly conservative book.