Gad to be Grey

Isn't it funny how society is?

It's almost as though there are solid rules behind the scenes, rules that make everything tick but which are so slippery you just can never grasp what they might be.

We know that society needs people who can do things, make things happen. They are the builders and designers, the engineers. Those people keep the electricity and the water flowing. They can bring enormous focus to bear on seemingly intractable problems and solve them by sheer muscle of thought alone.

They are our dreamers, our war criminals, and our finest artists and scientists. They deal with the world of imagination, pondering the impossible, gathering knowledge about the unknowable, just on the off chance that it might be useful one day.

They are the reason we have telephones and the internet and medicine, and they once took us to the moon. If ever our species is threatened with extinction they are likely to be both the cause of the threat and our best hope for survival.

Then there's the other, complementary demographic that acts in part as a support mechanism for the thinkers and do-ers. They clean up the mess when the dreamers forget that their dreaming comes at a cost. They are there at the forefront when war and idiocy claims lives and rips the fabric that holds us all together.

They care, where the dreamer does not, often sacrificing their own aspirations in support of some greater common good. They are healers rather than doctors, secretaries rather than directors.

I am of course, describing masculine and feminine stereotypes, recognising as I do that they are just that. Masculine traits can often appear in women, and feminine traits in men. Men are capable of caring, and women can sometimes build bridges.

But these stereotypes are actually quite useful when thinking not about the differences between men and women, but about how we function as a species. Clearly, the rules that we once imagined defined our gender roles have been all but universally broken. Even the physical restrictions of sexual biology have been transcended.

This really all boils down to a matter of survival, our current world reflecting a billion years of adaptation and evolution.

I once read an interview with an inmate of Glasgow's infamous Barlinnie Prison Special Unit. I forget the gentleman's name, and cannot find it now, but he was serving a life sentence for a brutal murder and was a contemporary of Jimmy Boyle.

He quite correctly pointed out that the kind of crime he committed would have been seen as an act of heroism in a different setting and historical era. He described himself as a butcher, which he was, but said that his blood lust (literally, the psychopathic need to kill) would have been greatly valued on the million battlefields of history.

He imagined himself as a great warrior, hacking and hewing lesser men with a gigantic blade, heedless of his own fate, impervious to pain. His heroes may have been the Berserker Vikings, driven to frenzy by the consumption of fly agaric mushrooms to the point where the only thing that made sense was to kill and kill until the point of exhaustion.

These days war is a much more hypocritical affair, at least as far as we more "civilised" people are concerned. We take great pains to demonstrate how honourable we are at the same time as water-boarding potentially innocent men and bombing women and children.

But the Barlinnie Butcher's point was that there must have been times when the survival of a community depended utterly on the ability of one or two crazy eyed individuals to enter the killing frenzy. So, our existence relied on there being people of that kind, or at least what we are today is in part defined by such people.

We must have needed musicians too, else why have them? And poets and bards, men and women who were able to remember and repeat stories, creating a orally founded culture that is all but gone in this age of digital record keeping. Who needs to remember anything these days?

Our traditions are ever changing. Our needs ever evolving. Just as the dog is no longer capable of being the wolf, humans have grown softer. We have adapted to weed out the brutal killers. We lock the psychopaths behind bars, or we medicate them to the point of subservience. Or we promote them to be captains of industry (where the damage they do can be to some extent ameliorated by the organs of bureaucracy).

Civilisation is not a veneer. The dog is much more than three solid meals removed from the ruthless carnivore of old. We humans have been changed and continue to be changed by our developing experience as hive creatures. As more and more of us choose (or are compelled) to live in cities, those of us who value individual freedom above the collective effort are slowly, slowly becoming less and less necessary for the survival of the species.

We still need our dreamers and do-ers, our carers and sharers, but the further on we go, the more we communicate, the more we live in one anothers' pockets, the less barbarous we become, the more homogenous we need to be.

It looks like the future will be painted in pleasing shades of grey - grey men and women, transgenderised to be more or less the same.

But should that worry us? Must we mourn the passing of the barbarous days of our youth, and remark wistfully on the blandly endless tundra that leads on to our ascension to something less fiery?

I don't think so. The future will be what it must be, and men and women and children will do what they need to do to survive. If it turns out that by smoothing away our rough edges, by becoming more like one another, the hive stands to thrive, then that's the way it will be.

Perhaps even the urge to long for the past will disappear as we are required more and more to consider what is coming rather than what has been. Will nature take us down such a cul-de-sac, sacrificing diversity for the sake of a deeper focus on the most likely path to success?

In truth I simply don't know, and I suspect there isn't anyone who does. Our viewpoint is limited, our experience of life and nature is subjective, and all the span of years that humans have existed is no more than an invisible wink of light in the eternal beige of the universe.

Korg DS-10 Synth for Nintendo DS

This little software synth for the DS is gathering huge plaudits everywhere, and many five star reviews on amazon here in the UK and in the USA. Whilst the features on offer are quite capable of allowing DS owning musicians to compose on the move, the sound quality of the DS simply cannot live up to the hype.

Let's not get carried away.

Details on the technical capabilities if the DS sound architecture are sketchy (which is another way of saying I can't find out!) but clearly what you are getting here is NOT pro grade sound quality (44.1kHz/16bit). If you plan to use the sounds generated by the DS-10 in anything serious (whether live or recorded) be prepared for some pleasant sounding lo-fi digital grunge. The filters are especially prone to sample limitation grittiness.

[And for the record, the MS-10 synthesiser had a single oscillator, whilst the DS-10 is built around two dual oscillator synths and has drums as well as analogue sequencers, effects and the Kaos pad. The MS-20 was the model that had two oscillators, and neither synth had any of the bells and whistles of the DS-10, so the DS-10 really should be called the "DS-20x2+".

But let's not get picky!]

Having worked closely over many years with an MS-20 back in the day I can tell you that the DS-10 neither sounds like it nor functions like it (although the graphics and semi-modular design are an obvious reference point). This new version stays in tune for a start, but it lacks the bite and presence that the original had, thanks to the sub-pro digital processing engine.

There's lots of fun to be had here, and for us old crusties a certain amount of shaking-of-head-and-stroking-of-chin type reminiscences. Undoubtedly, what has been achieved here is only just short of being a miracle, but I cannot help feeling that with just a little extra effort more might have been done to make this a seriously useful tool.

Although individual sequences can be linked together to make longer arrangements, each sequence is limited to 16 equal steps, so fancy 32nd trills and triplets aren't easy to achieve. Given that the modelling on offer is determinedly retro the decision to stick solidly with the original design of the analogue sequencers of the 1970's does limit the possibilities.

There is no means of exporting or synchronising the output with anything other than other DS-10s. Could some use not have been made of the Nintendo Wi-Fi connection to send MIDI information to a compatible PC host?

All that aside this is still a fantastic toy for serious musicians and a tool of sorts should the inevitable compromises be acceptable to you, and it does point the way towards the future of fully specified portable professional digital audio. If the DS can do this, what will tomorrow's "next gen" technology be capable of delivering?

Seeds of Earth - Book One of Humanity's Fire

[Review based on bound proof from Orbit]

Michael Cobley is slowly and surely becoming a name of consequence in the world of fantasy and science fiction. If his Shadowkings fantasy trilogy was a genre-busting boulder set against the flow of the river of drivel that passes for meaningful work in the realm of speculative and other-worldly fiction, then Seeds of Earth is the second buttress of what is beginning to look very much like the Hoover Dam.

Trilogies abound these days, simple economic realities dictating that an investment is more likely to pay off over three related works than three unrelated works. The idea is that readers of book one will be ensnared and go on to shell out the readies for books two and three.

So, Cobley's latest work is the beginning of yet another trilogy, but that's where significant comparisons with the norms of the form begin to break down.

Yes, there are big spaceships. Yes, there are weird aliens. Yes, there are space-operatic-epic-aeon-spanning themes in abundance, but these are given a fresh breath of life in this author's hands, because for all the grandeur and scale of the backdrop, it is in the minutiae of the details that the reader will find most pleasure.

It's the way the world is created as a tapestry of tiny pearls of beauty that makes the work connect, rather than the overblown and impersonal scope of galaxy straddling empires blasting one another with planet killing machines. This is not so much about visceral excitement as it is about being in the moment.

The intricacies of grand scale galactic politics are sketched with just enough intricacy to engage, but not enough to smother the reader. The cast of bizarre but functional bit players of all morphological configurations provides the kind of living backdrop that makes the locations come alive - the forests of Segrana and Darien are deep and dark; the space stations and mining ships bristle with cultural and technical references; the human colony is a living, breathing world of mountains, air machines and towns and lakes.

The characters are lightly drawn, often passive, which is where Cobley's Dam really begins to alter the flow. Standard western narrative dictates that the characters should be proactive, doers rather than watchers, that the story should move solely and only through them.

This is essentially a requirement of the visual medium that drives almost all modern narrative thinking. We need to SEE rather than be told, and since everyone these days writes with the visual medium very much in mind (oh, Star Wars what have you done to us?) what you inevitably get is the same tired old protagonist/antagonist, peril/rescue, white hat/black hat plot progression. But Cobley is daring here to set those conventions aside, to use the space to create a narrative of an entirely more comprehensible sort.

Where a conventional author would place the smoking gun in the hands of Character Number One, and have him pursued by Character Number Two, Cobley puts the gun in the bushes and has Character Number Two discover the abandoned weapon along with the impression made in the vegetation by the prone body of Character Number One as he took the shot. So, our attention is focussed not so much on the plot (who shot who or why, although of course that is still there) but on the essential gut wrenching alien-ness of the place where all this is happening.

Cobley's characters are caught up in events rather than being at their core, so the usual kind of vapid discussion of motivation can be left to one side to make room for the artistry of a more original and painstaking creation. Perhaps the best compliment I could make at this point would be to suggest that it would be exceedingly difficult to imagine Seeds of Earth as a Hollywood movie.

Thank God!

As a consequence of Cobley's apparent distrust of the conventions of modern narrative this may not be a book that everyone "gets". But it will appeal greatly to those who have grown tired of the endless cues of villains and heroes who have been playing out the same battles now for half a century or more. It's time there was something different, some better means of exploring the grand themes of being human.

At its best science fiction lets us test our humanity against the fantastically plausible, to imagine how we would survive in circumstances that could only exist on the edges of imagination. Cobley takes us to that edge with apparent ease, and shows us not what we expect, but what we don't expect.

He shows us people who are not for the most part world shakers, but who are swept along with the tide (just as any of us would be). The flawed nature of humanity, and its potential for transcendence, is revealed through the very real experiences of people very much like us.

The grand themes are there, the narrative is kept flowing, but the strength of this work, the insight that Cobley brings, is that heroes are boring, that characters who grab the narrative by the scruff of the neck and move it along by force of will make the story all about them. Cobley takes the familiar hierarchical structure of modern story telling (primary character, supporting characters, background colour, overarching plot) and flattens it to bring all of the elements into equal focus, allowing us to see things from an entirely new and refreshing perspective.

This deserves to be the beginning of something special, a resurgence of literature over plot, of imagination over screenplay. It's an enjoyable, original, beautifully written story, and I can't wait for the series to continue.

The Mystery Of The Mystery Is The Mystery Of the Mystery

Science abhors a vacuum more than nature does. There are two types of vacuum in science - lack of knowledge, and the limits of human understanding.

I know I risk becoming the focus of the wrath of every true scientist who reads this, and I know they will take great joy in pointing out every little flaw in my arguments, seeking to render them impotent under the utterly objective laser light of the scientific method, but it seems to me that science cannot abide and is incapable of encompassing a limit to what can be known or understood. As far as I can tell, this is where much of the popular dissatisfaction with science comes from, and it is perhaps aptly illustrated by the way that science promotes some of its more outlandish conclusions.

The paradox that I enjoy most, and the one I think is most illustrative of the limitation of the scientific method, is how the role of the observer is revealed when examining quantum entanglement. The paradox arises because quantum theory shows how the fact of observation changes the state of what is observed.

As far as I can tell, it goes like this.

You can't see light. You can detect the impact of photons on your retina, which creates signals that your brain can interpret, but paradoxically light itself is invisible. You don't see photons travelling from place to place from a distance the way you can see a stream of traffic on a highway, you only see photons when they hit your eye, or know about them when an instrument you have created captures them.

The act of detecting or seeing a photon destroys the photon, and it's the same for any particle or bundle of energy or wave front. Regardless of the behaviour of the little bundle of space time, detecting it destroys it.

So, what happens when those little invisible bundles interact? Let's say that two of them do have an interaction, and let's say that they interact in some knowable way by means of a behaviour that can later be measured. We might refer to the behaviour as "spin" - always bearing in mind that in the weird world of the particle "spin" isn’t anything we'd easily be able to translate into something we'd recognise in our classical Newtonian world .

Since we are dealing with quanta whose properties are known, we can say that we know the total "spin" state that must exist between both particles. In effect, we can call this total spin state "zero", and we know that one of the particles will have a spin state of "up" and the other will have a spin state of "down", but we don't know which is which, because we cannot see these quanta from a distance. The idea is that if we measure the spin state of one of the particles we instantly know the spin state of the other regardless of how far apart they are.

It's this supposed instantaneous transmission of the state of knowing that causes problems. If nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, then how is such information relayed instantaneously?

I don't know why at this point I always imagine a blind man chopping oranges. I imagine that he has a device that chops oranges more or less in half, but being blind he cannot tell exactly how the orange has been chopped. Is each half exactly the same size? He has to weigh them to find out.

But what if he only has one half? If all oranges were the same, then by measuring the half he has he would be able to determine the weight of the other, regardless of its location. The un-weighed half might be headed out past Alpha Centauri at the speed of light, but that would not prevent the blind man from knowing instantaneously what it weighed once he had weighed the half he had to hand.

But where does the idea of instantaneous transmission come from? Why do some physicists insist that when dealing with particles the instantaneous transmission of information at faster than light speeds is a real phenomenon? It seems crazy to extrapolate a law of the universe from simple lack of knowing, but that is to misunderstand how science works and what scientists are actually saying here.

Firstly, as I said at the start science abhors a vacuum. There is no room in scientific thinking for lack of knowing.

Take the example of the oranges and the blind man. A scientist would quite rightly point out that the blind man was an exception, that most orange choppers would be sighted. He'd also point out that oranges are not all the same, so that no determination about one half could be made from an examination of the other, and that the whole point is that in the quantum world we are dealing not with metaphors but the way things really are.

When examining particles we are not blind where others see, it is a fundamental property of these particles that they cannot be observed remotely. It isn't that we are dysfunctional, it is that no consciousness (no matter how sophisticated) could observe a particle and leave it unchanged. In every instances observation changes the particle.

It is this state of unknowing that causes the problem. Science cannot deal with it. It's as if by peeling away the layers of the onion scientists arrive at the ultimate mystery of things, a point beyond which they cannot pass, and they simply refuse to accept it, manufacturing all kinds of unnecessary additional theories to explain what is fundamentally inexplicable.

Most objections to the ideas unleashed by quantum entanglement point out that the faster than light element is neither here nor there, and that such mythological constructs as quantum computers and teleportation devices cannot rely upon it since they require a classical means of expression to be made real.

For example, the idea that communications might take place at faster than light speeds requires one set of entangled particles to be removed physically from its counterpart at classical velocities as part of the communication mechanism, thereby negating the benefit of any instantaneous transmission.

It is not the act of measurement that creates the instantaneous transmission of data from one location to the other, it is the state of knowing that does it. I have no problem accepting that knowledge can travel at faster than light speeds, since knowledge is a theoretical-philosophical construct arising out of the functioning of intelligence. I wonder if it's only an illusion that wisdom moves at glacial speed?

As the great Taoist teachings tell us "That which is seen is not the un-seeable, that which is known is not the un-knowable."

My assumption is that there is a limit to what can be known, and I believe we find it at the quantum level. The fact is that it is the act of observation, the enquiry leading to measurement, that makes the difference. Which puts the observer right at the centre of things, leading inevitably to the breakdown of the scientific method, which relies utterly on dispassionate objectivity removed from what is being observed.

I also believe that we find the limits of what can be known on the cosmological scale in the form of black holes, where the fabric of space and time warps into dimensional states that spiral into infinity, defying our mathematics. We find it too when we contemplate the big bang.

There are limits to what a human being can know, and to me these examples look like not just limitations on human understanding but limits on what can be known from the point of view of any being existing within a universe like ours.

Nothing we can imagine could escape a black hole or be sent into it to return and report back. Nothing we could build would be able to detect a particle and leave it intact and unchanged. Regardless of how big our telescopes get we will never look back beyond the big bang.

Maybe God can do these things, if he could be bothered. Maybe that's how he does what he does without leaving fingerprints behind. Maybe a miracle is just a shifting of the quantum state of whole bunch of particles. Maybe time and space are all one thing to God and he can intervene in the past, the present and the future all at once without us ever being aware of it.

Maybe he exists, maybe he doesn't. Maybe our brains are hard wired at the quantum level to use faith to access God. Maybe a prayer really is like a telephone call to the great beyond.

That's a whole lotta maybes!

I believe there is at least some evidence that what is going on in the universe and beyond is utterly inexplicable, and that there is no difference between the copper atom that makes your eye blue and the copper atom that transmits the electron that carries the data that illuminates the screen where you are reading these words.

All copper atoms that have ever existed anywhere are essentially the same, and whilst I wouldn't go so far as Rupert Sheldrake does with pushing his ideas of morphic resonance firmly into the classical and human realms, I'd support those ideas to the same degree as did physicist David Bohm, who had the startling intuition that understanding the universe was only possible when the whole was contemplated rather than the parts. [I love his ideas on the folded universe model.]

That there is a real connection between all things seems so obvious that I wonder why the fact isn't universally accepted. Perhaps it makes exploitation easier if you can somehow convince people that the surface differences between us (black skin/white skin, Judeo-Christian thinking/Islamic thinking, being rich/being poor) are in any real sense meaningful.

Perhaps there is a failure of science to accept the mystery in things. Will science ever reach the point where such an acceptance becomes part of the theory of everything? It seems to me that such a theory must incorporate the mystery, otherwise it will forever be merely a theory of almost everything.

Oh No, Not Another Shoot-'Em-Up

There is no chance in this world that I will ever be asked to design a computer game, but I'd love to get the opportunity. There have been many times in my life when I have lived and breathed games. I'm going through one of those times right now.

It all started a few weeks ago when I suddenly realised that the Xbox 360 console was now so cheap that if I traded in all my other old consoles and games I'd probably have enough to get one. Since then I have got myself the console, a 20gb hard disk, an extra controller, a VGA switching box to let me put the output through my PC monitor, and a whole bunch of (mostly) cheap games.

I've never been a fan of console first person shooters (FPS). The control mechanism just never seems to work the way it should, especially compared to the trusty old mouse/keyboard combo on the PC (my most consistent gaming platform), so it came as something of a shock when I found myself absolutely loving Halo 3, one of the most successful shooting games of all time. I found the use of the joypad to be no trouble at all.

This was surprising, and it has opened up a whole slew of similar games for my consideration. I'm looking forward to The Darkness, Time Shift and Perfect Dark Zero, amongst others.

But I must admit that slaughtering unrelenting waves of virtual aliens does eventually begin to pale, no matter how well designed the game is, and there were times in Halo 3 where the pace really began to tell. In the end I adopted a strategy of "only shoot when necessary", which left large parts of some levels filled with confused and aimless baddies, denied their one chance of glory.

Halo 3 allows these canon fodder a degree of personality usually lacking in such games. I guess Half Life 2 raised the bar here, and made it possible to add a little narrative depth to even the cardboard cut-out bad guys. They call the player character "demon", which makes perfect sense considering that from their point of view the player has destroyed entire worlds of their brethren.

But I couldn't help but wonder if there might be another way of doing things.

A few days ago I started playing Tomb Raider Underworld, a very different kind of game, sometimes disparagingly referred to by hard core gamers as " a walk-about-'em-up". Would it were so!

Here we are exploring ruins, but for some reason we have to kill Krakens and tigers and even gun toting hoodlums, a part of the game play that completely destroys the wander-about-gawping-at-the-scenery awesomeness of the main part of the game.

I've been playing Tomb Raider since the first game came out in 1996. Ridiculously primitive by modern standards, that game set in motion a whole genre of uber-platform games that continues today not only with Lara Croft but with that Prince of Persia guy and the Drake's Fortune fella over on the fading PS3.

I started thinking about the Half Life series, and I realised that my favourite moments were when non-player characters reacted to the Gordon Freeman character I played based on his previous actions in the game. So, I would fight my way through hordes of enemies and arrive at the next safe zone, where the other characters in the game would "oooh" and "awwww" about my various heroic exploits. How rewarding it was when the beautiful polygon generated lady of the piece fluttered her eyes at me beguilingly. Did I suddenly want to destroy my enemies utterly to save here lovingly rendered ass? You betcha!

So, there's a real power emerging here in what we now call "computer games" that has something to do with player created narrative. Oblivion does it too, and the Fable games make a brave stab.

Then it suddenly hit me. The best bits of these games are those where the character doesn't actually do anything, but where the created world reacts to the character.

So, that got me thinking of a new kind of game where the character doesn't do a single thing. No shooting, no leaping from ledge to ledge, no pulling levers or talking endlessly to get clues as to what to do next.

Then I thought about the character that might drive such a game, and what he or she would have to be in order to have the game world revolve around them. A President? A rock star?

Like a bolt from the blue, it came to me. The game would be called -

PROPHET OF SILENCE

You're a prophet. You turn up, stuff happens. You NEVER speak. The whole game world knows what and who you are, and all you have to do is trigger the story elements by wandering around from amazingly awesome location to amazingly awesome location. The story unfolds without you having to take direct action.

(This would probably have to be the kind of "realistic" open ended world that the likes of Oblivion has, with day and night cycles and weather patterns.)

Let's say you turn up at a village. Arrive at night and a sympathiser who works during the day hides you in his cellar. Turn up during daylight hours (when he's not available) and you trigger a riot. The circumstance of your arrival triggers a different experience, which then has a knock on effect in the game.

Of course, the whole thing would have to be scripted. The feeling of riding the narrative would be entirely illusory, but the way it unfolded would be unique for every player. I'd imagine there would be something like fifty story "nodes" each with at least two outcomes, making for potentially thousands of individual completion routes, and satisfactory multiple endings (oft quoted as the long sought Holy Grail of gaming).

I think this kind of open ended yet tailored experience will only be possible when player action is removed. If the player never directly affects the world then the design doesn't have to account for all the ways the player might interact.

So, like millions of fan-boys the world over, I think I'd make a pretty good games designer. If you are a developer and want to sign me up on the spot I'd ask that you negotiate terms with the imaginary manager who manages my imaginary music career.

[Can an imaginary manager manage an imaginary menagerie? Say it fast.]