Think Galactic- Blindsight

For July's Think Galactic discussion, we talked about "Blindsight" (2006) by Peter Watts.

This book is awesome (says I) and this discussion was awesome (so say we all). So much so, in fact, that it's been a psychic block clogging up my Positron posting schedule, because I despair of trying to flesh out everything my notes record us saying without it turning into a book-length meditation. SO, without further ado, mostly unvarnished notes:

Ideas in Different Blood: Cognitive Diversity in SF/F

Two things about our world particularly stuck in their minds. One was the extraordinary degree to which problems of lifting and carrying things absorbed our energy. The other was the fact that we only had one kind of hnau: they thought this must have far-reaching effects in the narrowing of sympathies and even of thought.

'Your thought must be at the mercy of your blood,' said the old sorn. 'For you cannot compare it with thought that floats on different blood.'

-C.S. Lewis, "Out of the Silent Planet" (1938)

After considerable delay, I am very pleased to offer reading copies from "Ideas in Different Blood", the panel held at Wiscon 39:

"Silence and Bright Flashing Lights: A Brief Look at Irrationality in Earthsea and Valis" by John Lodder

"Right in Other Ways: Hierarchical vs. Radiant Intelligence Models" by Jake Casella

"Neurominorities in Science Fiction" by Jason M. Robertson

This panel was so much fun! I'm really glad that Wiscon is such a great environment for independent scholarship, and hoping to organize another panel next year.

Please note that these are presentation drafts and not necessarily final versions, and are the respective authors' intellectual property. If you'd like to use the work in any fashion, please contact Positron and we'll get you in touch with the authors.

Neurominorities in Science Fiction

Jason M. Robertson

Statement of Autistic Self-Advocacy

I am autistic. Until this most recent year of my life, I was unaware of this. In this year and possibly before, I suffered a number of ischemic strokes. In the wake of these I became depressed--a post-stroke depression as it is called--and had increasing difficulty with my job duties at the University of Chicago Library. In the wake of these events I saw Dr. Maureen Lacy for neuropsychiatric evaluation. Along with triggering my psychiatrist’s suspicions (dual-degreed Dr. Judith Badner MD/PhD) that I was on the autism spectrum. As it was, I evaluated as on the spectrum. Dr. Lacy was the qualified tester who evaluated me.

So, please, as a first order of business: if you experience a sensation much like a Novocaine injection encompassing some portion of your body wonder if you are having an ischemic stroke: as I also have a family history with multiple sclerosis from my mother, I did not approach it that way. I should have.

I write this as someone who has not made an enormous mark in life, but likes to think he has finally overcome most cultural prejudices I was born into. I am aware of my white privilege, my heterosexual privilege, my cisgender privilege, my monolingual privilege, my generally able-bodied privilege. But I am different from a presumptive majority of you in that I have autism spectrum disorder. And so, I present this paper as a neurominority myself, recently discovered. Nothing about us, without us.

The Primary Texts

This paper looks at three major texts: Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon; Distress by Greg Egan and Blindsight by Peter Watts. Two of the three titles feature central protagonists who are classic neurominorities: autistics. The third, Blindsight focuses more on hypothetical engineered neurominorities while connecting some of the attributes of its other characters to actual autistic splinter skills. Echopraxia, the sequel to Blindsight, may also have some minor spoilers. While my initial encounters with all of these were in dead tree editions, I am taking the ebook editions as the canonical copies, notable for the updated 2013 edition of Distress.

Right in Other Ways: Hierarchical vs. Radiant Intelligence Models

Jake Casella

Other intelligences are what made me fall in love with science fiction—really different, new, unusual creatures and characters. These different kinds of thinking beings—superhumans, robots, aliens—are a central feature in a lot of SF/F. What I'm hoping to show today is two ways of thinking about that intelligence. I'm going to call the one way the “Chained” model, after the Great Chain of Being, and the other way the “Radiant” model, which has a more diverse and pluralistic approach. The “Chained” model intersects with Cartesian Dualism, so we'll look at that as well—both tend to disembody intelligence, with some unfortunate consequences.

As a kind of framing thought here, I like looking at science fiction and these ideas as a two-way street. On the one hand, these ideas are pulled from elsewhere in society. But on the other hand, fleshing out abstract ideas in stories gives them a lot of weight in society, more than they might have had as dry theory. That's great when it makes difficult concepts comprehensible, or scary new ideas less so—but it's troublesome when it allows problematic ideas to live past their expiration date.

Silence and Bright Flashing Lights: A Brief Look at Irrationality in Earthsea and VALIS

John Lodder

At least one version of my paper starts with a joke that if Aristotle secretly wrote science fiction and fantasy as well as philosophy, and the scholastics recovered it and translated it along with De Anima and the Nicomachean Ethics and everything else, would we still have the same persistent notion today of humans as the distinctly rational animals despite the ancient and fantastical stories of space aliens and talking dragons, of intelligences human and otherwise?

Chi-SF: Distress

It's always a bit of a mystery to me why Greg Egan isn't more known to SF enthusiasts. He's consistently written work that combines the massive scope and radical reimagining of the very hardest science fiction, the technology-drenched energy and occasional body-horror of the cyberpunks, and a sometimes brutal incorporation of modern cognitive science. Despite the brilliance of his writing, his work has been sometimes hard to find. That situation might be improving, as Night Shade Books is reprinting them for US audiences (see Patrick Lohier's Boing Boing article for more on that deal, and more on how Egan is awesome).

So, it was with some delight that I heard that the Chicago Speculative Fiction Community had selected Egan's 1995 novel "Distress". "Distress" is a near-future story, told from the perspective of a journalist--a kind of science documentarian, really. Burnt out from a project covering some horrific weirdness, Andrew Worth opts to report on a physics conference--which rapidly turns into a story about the Theory of Everything and the fate of all humanity/the universe. The main plot idea is big, heady, and maybe ultimately pretty silly, but it's packed into a world rich in other fascinating ideas--particularly on gender, neurodiversity, and rationality/belief.  There may be SPOILERS BELOW: