Engineering fiction.

On science fiction.

Science fiction is really just normal fiction - the same kinds of protagonist, the same drama and the same suspense. Only its wrapped around, and is in turn wrapped around by, a veneer of 'science'. That 'science' is a plot device used by the author as an excuse to make the impossible but beautiful things he wants to write about sound plausible. In that sense its actually all fantasy fiction. Only they use 'science' instead of magic and technobabble instead of spells to let amazing things happen. But good science fiction (hard sci-fi as some call it) takes that all one step further. It takes science and technology and uses it to create a possible universe. An extraordinary universe, but a plausible one none-the-less .And that makes it immeasurably more wonderful.

Btw, here is a quote from the (now unfortunately deceased) grand old man of sci-fi, Arthur C Clarke himself:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

So, with that out of the way, lets have a look at what makes good sci-fi shall we?

Good sci-fi needs a good story. That's the real matter that pervades it. But that isn't what I'm going to talk about. The stuff of drama isn't my forte. The stuff of science, the science of building things in particular, however is. So we shall simply skip this topic and head on the the universe building. And that starts with the concept of setting.

In a sci-fi setting is everything. The setting of a science fiction story is the set of rules, technology (this comes under 'rules' to an extent), worlds, cultural artifacts and other things that define the universe the protagonists dwell in/ the author explores. In conventional fiction setting is largely defined in the readers mind. The beach is like any beach, the island, the city, the town and the desert are all concepts familiar to normal people and so the author merely has to add specific detail to those templates.

But in sci-fi the setting is so much more. The author is free to build and create ships and planets and phenomenon which are far beyond mundane knowledge. And that setting, the universe that affects the beings in it, is paramount! For it is the fabric upon which the story is built. But how do you build that setting? You might envision an alien planet for example. A planet where amazing things happen. But how do you define those things and make them tangible. There is a thin line between good science and fantasy-science (Star Trek sits firmly upon the fantasy side of things. As do most space operas) and a firm understanding of the rules of your universe are essential to building good, serious, science fiction.

What this means is that you have to explore and understand the technology you will introduce and use in your universe. And not just the technology. The way various beings react, the way some strange phenomenon behaves and the limitations and capabilities of everything. These rules lay the foundation of your universe. That transporters will not work through shields (Star Trek) or that lasguns and shields interacting lead to horrible explosions (Dune) are examples of rules. They form a framework for the story to exist in. Rule systems let readers know the limits and capabilities of things that they ordinarily wouldn't be expected to know (often, since you made them up just for this story). This lets them experience suspense, understand actions and generally loose themselves in the worlds you have created and the story you have woven for them. Of course, rules needn't be spelled out explicitly at the beginning of the book. And they needn't be exactness incarnate either. But you must communicate them through elements of your story.

The rules in good science fiction necessarily derive from real science. Note that point and note it well. Humans have evolved to intuitively understand the laws of physics and most readers of science fiction have a fair understanding of the popular versions of the latest in theoretical and practical science. This means that any nonsense in your work will stick out like a sore thumb to the bulk of your readers. You therefore generally take real world science and extrapolate from its implications. You obviously might have to bend rules and extrapolate things beyond their domains to keep your story intact but the rules that govern the 'impossible' in your universe must be as solid and unshakable as possible.

And here is where the crux of it all lies. Science is largely known. We have already discovered the vast majority of possible things and those things we don't really know can either be guessed at with fair accuracy (from a science fiction author's perspective, not a particle physicist's) or don't matter much as they are the stuff of detail.

That fact, that 'new science' is a mostly dead end* (again, from a sci-fi author's perspective), is the reason a good science fiction author's intellect is important. For it now lies upon him to develop extraordinary ideas and concepts from those facts that science gives us. In effect, he is not the author of science fiction, for the science has been largely defined for him, but of engineering fiction. And it is in that task, the forging of amazing things from a cauldron of bland laws, that the greats truly shine.

*My opinion only. And I might well be suffering from the same hubris that led 19'th century scientists say that they had discovered all that there was to be discovered.

PS: There is a really nice series of podcasts called 'writing excuses' that dwells in detail upon several of the ideas I have presented here. Two – one on sci-fi genre and another on magic rule systems stand out. Do look it up.

Faster Stronger - what the exoskeleton is really about.

What is an exoskeleton really? No, not the type arthropods have....

It is a robotic suit of sorts. A framework, a skeleton if you will, that goes around a human and is attached to him mechanically. It is designed to move with the human, to inhibit his movement as little as possible. And it has actuators of its own - motors, artificial muscles or anything else will do. And here is the interesting part: It acts in concert with the human inside it. Its actuators push and pull and move the skeleton, and the human within, in the same way the human wants to move... The result? Increased strength, speed and endurance. A human with a mind and a body that is completely normal but with physical capabilities well into the extraordinary. A marriage of human intelligence, adaptability and dexterity to the cold calculating power and strength of steel machine.

That's the premise at any rate. If you want more wiki is always at hand: linky

Making one that really works, however, is quite the challenge. Why? Pull your engineer hat on and think that over:

You need to have a steel suit that is really strong, it should be capable of allowing fairly free motion. Thats medieval Knight right there (and contrary to popular belief, even full plate suites were not very restrictive at all). Now strip away the cosmetic parts and the parts that are there for protection and not structural integrity. Done? Good. Now replace the materials with something modern - stronger and lighter that whatever it was those smiths of old wrought their creations out of. Easy enough... but it starts getting harder now. Now, you have to re-tool the system to allow maximum flexibility while insuring the complete and total safety of the wearer. At no point should a stray signal somewhere cause a chain of events that could hurt the user. And that has to be built in to the mechanical structure itself. Now take that system and push it to the limits of its structural design. Use every fancy tool in your arsenal to strip weight without sacrificing strength. Now, attach a set of motors (or whatever) at every joint. Motors that are geared to be fast enough while providing enough force to meet its requirements. They have to be light, efficient, safe and placed perfectly. Attach straps, pads, make sure the joints are perfect and so on and so forth and voila! You have just completed the first tiny step towards making something like this work!

Now come the tricky bits, the ones I work on: Making it all work. In essence, making a lump of joints, steel and actuator walk run and throw like the man strapped into it. i.e. The sensing and control schemes.

I will not bore you with the details of how that works (There are publications and papers plenty for that purpose). What I will tell you is what the control system needs to do:

It needs to sense that the man intends to do (a fraction of a second before he intends to do so if it can be helped). Sense exactly which joint he intends to flex, to what extent, with what strength and with what speed. And then compute what all the many motors and joints need to do to firstly not restrict his motion and secondly (and this is the crux of it all) to aid him by enhancing his speed and strength while he performs that motion.

It is a difficult, difficult task. Even more so when the problems we face in a real world are glimpsed at!

So whats the point of it all you might ask? Why take the trouble? Sure, it might help soldiers survive, workers heft titanic weights, the elderly and the infirm move like the rest of us and make the jobs that firefighters and rescue workers do easier and safer... but is the trouble really worth it? We do fine as we are don't we?

In response to that I shall tell you a little tale. A tale about an animal:

The animal we talk about was born a few hundred thousand years ago. Perhaps a million, but not very much longer than that. It was different. Different from all that had ever come before it in the three billion years his decedents would trace his ancestry through time. Monsters had preceded him. And agile, beautiful creatures too. But he was different from them all. He was the first of us.

We have, since our roots in sub-Saharan Africa, spread out and conquered a world. We dominate it. We are its masters in many, many ways. It is our home and we have made it ours. And how have we done so? Not by strength, not by speed and endurance. Not by any physical attribute of ourselves but by the power of the mind within us. We have made ourselves strong and deadly by the weapons we forge. We have made ourselves faster by the vehicles we make. We have built citadels to stand in for the Armour nature denied us. We bridge the skies and the oceans and the lands of all Earth like no other animal. We are, in our entirety, the strongest, fastest, toughest and most powerful of all the beings that have ever called Terra 'home'.

That is what this is all about. The exoskeleton is just one more step towards us becoming better. One closer to ourselves, our very persons, than any before.

On wonder...

This one is dedicated to Neil Gaiman*. A man who's writing can ignite the fires of wonder and awe in even the coldest, dampest and most dead of human minds.

Wonder, in the sense of it being a state of the mind, is an interesting, interesting thing. Lets try to define it shall we? How about 'A state of the mind, sometimes overtly felt, sometimes sublimely that is one part awe, another amazement, a third excitement and so on and so forth.' If you haven't seen where I am getting at by now (I am truly sorry) I shall spell it out:

Wonder is one of those things we 'just know'. We can't define it because it is one of those things that we use to define other things. A sort of geometrical point for states of the mind. But this is all besides the point. You know what wonder is because you just do. And if you don't, well, you have my deepest sympathies.

Now, I'd like to get back to Gaiman. Gaiman was [and is :) ] the author of 'the sandman' a comic series published under DC's Vertigo trademark. It's about dream. Dream being not simply a state of the mind, but an actual, thinking, being who embodies all the things that constitute dream. A sort of anthropomorphic personification of possibility. He is the shaper of things, the sandman, the prince of stories, he is dream. His siblings are, in order of age, Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium and they are the endless- they are an expression of the poles upon which our minds define everything.

Gaiman's brilliance was in his characterization. And that is brilliance I can scarcely do justice to in an essay of any length - I honestly beg you, take the time and read his works**. They are, in my opinion, the greatest work of fiction ever given form and substance. And how fitting that the character that series revolves around is fiction itself. It was simply the stuff wonder is made of.

And that brings us back to wonder: What is 'wonder'? Wonder is a state of the mind beyond simple definition. It is the driving force behind dream, it is that pole about which our desire to do and make and create and understand is built!

And that force is what drives me. That is my pathetic excuse for living***. I wonder. I wonder about the stars and I dream of the day they will be ours. I dream of the day we will stand on our Earth, look up and be able to say: "Look! There is Orion, there is Andromeda. We have been there. I can go there if I so will.They are ours. They are mine; for we have reached out and taken them."

I wonder. And I desire. I desire be one of the multitudes who has done his share in bringing us to that dream of mine. I want to be one of the millions of shoulders, some great, some small but all significant, upon whom that future rests.

Harshad.

*Neil Gaiman

** The sandman

*** Read my previous post- To live or not to live - that isn't really a question.

To live or not to live - that isn't really a question.

"What is it that drives YOU?"

"Why do you bother taking that next step?"

"Why don't you just sit down, loose the will to live and die?"

These are questions that hold meaning beyond the ordinary realm of the mundane* (I shall come back to the whole concept of mundane a little later) life and it would do you some good if you took the time to sit down and actually think about them.

Now, the most common answer is that you just don't want to cease, that you do things because you 'must' and because, well, because. But really, these answers are really just questions with regression built in: "Why 'must' you?"

I mean, consider this for a moment: The milky way contains a hundred billion stars and at least as many planets. The known universe contains a hundred billion galaxies. Thats 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. You are a lump of biological matter, weighing between 40 (eat some food damnit!) and 200 kilograms (Though, I admit, if you are near the end of that scale you do gain cosmic significance) on the third planet from a completely normal, ordinary, sun. Nothing you do or don't do will make any difference to the universe at large. And really, whats the point of making a difference in the first place?

The reason for this 'must', this (on the surface) unreasonable, illogical and rather silly desire is simple enough: We 'must' because we 'must'. Hold on, that isn't as idiotic as it sounds. The complete(-ish) argument goes like this: If we didn't want to live and do things (heh!) we wouldn't try as hard. People who didn't try as hard wouldn't, for example, run quite as fast when being chased by a pack of Smilodon***. And thus, they were much less likely to survive. The people who did survive would have been the one who wanted to live more and so would their children. Take that mechanism and give it three billion years and presto: we have us.

What does that mean? Simply: WE really really want to live and, as a derivative of that mechanism, do things that sound 'meaningful'. And are like that because it is a mostly universal feature of life**. Do note that meaningful is highly subjective - look at Marlyn Manson as an example..........

So, that brings us back to the first question: "Why do you live?". Which , as we have seen (or I have, at any rate...) is really:

"What feeble delusion of grandeur do you use to justify your desire to live and do whatever it is you do?"

*A note: Mundane supposedly comes from the latin 'Mundus', which means 'of the world'. It is a sad, sad thing that a word for the world (as a metaphor for reality) has come to mean 'boring'.

**Err, another note: 'to live' is really speaking, in biological terms: 'to let my genes survive'. What that means is that an idiot who kills himself for love (like several species of spider, except that spiders are interesting) does nothing that goes against my lil pet theory. :)

***And another: Smilodon was a pack hunting, lion sized, prehistoric cat.