from bipedal dinosaurs. Since there’s no trace of humanoid dinosaurs in the fossil record, they must have been taken
off
Earth, which gets us an uplift scenario. That was where the squids came in: the only invertebrates that show potential for intelligence are the cephalopods, so squids were a goodcandidate for uplift too. And that gave us an explanation of the cigar-shaped motherships, which were so common in the early 1950s and are now so sadly rare: they have to be that size to make room for the aquaria for giant squids to live in. And they have flashing lights on the outside because cephalopods communicate by changing the colour patterns on their skin.
See? It all makes sense!
You are an actual working scientist. Is that what drew you to SF, or did it happen the other way?
I’m not an actual working scientist. Here’s the real story: It was SF that drew me to science, or at any rate made me want to be a scientist. Because I was no good at math, I chose the least mathematical science, biology, and specialised in zoology, and within that in vertebrate zoology. This was such a useless specialty that I was the only one in my class who took it.
In choosing my postgraduate work, I made the mistake of thinking I could at least make use of my high-school applied mechanics, and chose a project on the response of bones to mechanical loading. After a year and a half of my slow and intermittent research progress, my supervisors said they couldn’t justify my funding. But they kindly continued to supervise my research, which I struggled on with in my spare time for years, and eventually got an M.Phil. degree and my name on a published paper out of. By this time I had a job as a programmer, and my wife and two young children were in my graduation photo.
One of your characters (Elizabeth, in the
Engines of Light
trilogy) asserts, “It is possible to learn from the past.” You don’t really believe that, do you?
Of course I do. “History is the trade secret of science fiction”—that quote’s attributed to me, but I think I got it from Asimov. History is also the trade secret of politics. Successful politicians left and right read lots of it and learn from it. Heck, just reading Macaulay’s
History of England
is a political education, and not just for those who share Macaulay’s politics: it’s centrally about a revolution, after all.
In your work, intelligence is widespread in the universe, but it’s mostly not biological. Huh? Aren’t you a biologist?
Well, not quite, as I’ve explained; and in fact the widespread intelligences in the
Engines of Light
books
are
biological. They’re dominant because they actively prevent non-biological intelligence from coming into existence. That’s the only way you could have such a scenario, because non-biological intelligence is so obviously better adapted to space.
Think about it. Which is likely to happen faster: the evolution by natural selection of a species with superhuman intelligence, or the development of machines that can think faster than us? My bet would be on the machines. Even if you bring in genetic engineering, all that gets you is a given higher level of intelligence, which you can only improve by further genetic engineering. With artificial intelligence, you can in principle get improvedperformance just by increasing the clock speed or adding hardware, and beyond that you can upgrade the software or make it self-upgrading. That raises the prospect of runaway intelligence increase, which leaves biological mechanisms and reproduction in the dust.
This is of course Vernor Vinge’s Singularity thesis, which—if human-equivalent AI is possible at all, and perhaps even if it’s not—has an awful logic to it.
Flying saucers: do they come from Outer Space or Genre History?
Disc-shaped flying machines, and spindly humanoids with big bald heads, were imagined and illustrated in SF magazines in the 1930s, so in that sense they do come from genre history. The
off
Earth, which gets us an uplift scenario. That was where the squids came in: the only invertebrates that show potential for intelligence are the cephalopods, so squids were a goodcandidate for uplift too. And that gave us an explanation of the cigar-shaped motherships, which were so common in the early 1950s and are now so sadly rare: they have to be that size to make room for the aquaria for giant squids to live in. And they have flashing lights on the outside because cephalopods communicate by changing the colour patterns on their skin.
See? It all makes sense!
You are an actual working scientist. Is that what drew you to SF, or did it happen the other way?
I’m not an actual working scientist. Here’s the real story: It was SF that drew me to science, or at any rate made me want to be a scientist. Because I was no good at math, I chose the least mathematical science, biology, and specialised in zoology, and within that in vertebrate zoology. This was such a useless specialty that I was the only one in my class who took it.
In choosing my postgraduate work, I made the mistake of thinking I could at least make use of my high-school applied mechanics, and chose a project on the response of bones to mechanical loading. After a year and a half of my slow and intermittent research progress, my supervisors said they couldn’t justify my funding. But they kindly continued to supervise my research, which I struggled on with in my spare time for years, and eventually got an M.Phil. degree and my name on a published paper out of. By this time I had a job as a programmer, and my wife and two young children were in my graduation photo.
One of your characters (Elizabeth, in the
Engines of Light
trilogy) asserts, “It is possible to learn from the past.” You don’t really believe that, do you?
Of course I do. “History is the trade secret of science fiction”—that quote’s attributed to me, but I think I got it from Asimov. History is also the trade secret of politics. Successful politicians left and right read lots of it and learn from it. Heck, just reading Macaulay’s
History of England
is a political education, and not just for those who share Macaulay’s politics: it’s centrally about a revolution, after all.
In your work, intelligence is widespread in the universe, but it’s mostly not biological. Huh? Aren’t you a biologist?
Well, not quite, as I’ve explained; and in fact the widespread intelligences in the
Engines of Light
books
are
biological. They’re dominant because they actively prevent non-biological intelligence from coming into existence. That’s the only way you could have such a scenario, because non-biological intelligence is so obviously better adapted to space.
Think about it. Which is likely to happen faster: the evolution by natural selection of a species with superhuman intelligence, or the development of machines that can think faster than us? My bet would be on the machines. Even if you bring in genetic engineering, all that gets you is a given higher level of intelligence, which you can only improve by further genetic engineering. With artificial intelligence, you can in principle get improvedperformance just by increasing the clock speed or adding hardware, and beyond that you can upgrade the software or make it self-upgrading. That raises the prospect of runaway intelligence increase, which leaves biological mechanisms and reproduction in the dust.
This is of course Vernor Vinge’s Singularity thesis, which—if human-equivalent AI is possible at all, and perhaps even if it’s not—has an awful logic to it.
Flying saucers: do they come from Outer Space or Genre History?
Disc-shaped flying machines, and spindly humanoids with big bald heads, were imagined and illustrated in SF magazines in the 1930s, so in that sense they do come from genre history. The
Similar Books
