Karl Schroeder's Blog

I've got some really cool programming lined up for this year's Boskone, which will be happening February 12-14, 2021. To become part of it, head on over to https://boskone.org/.

The con has managed to pander to most of my obsessions this time around, so I'm looking forward to these panels. It's going to be great to be on these with old friends like Charlie Stross, Vandana Singh, Cory Doctorow, Toby Buckell, Allen Steele, Mark Olson and Walter Jon Williams. Check out the schedule, and I hope you can drop by!

 

Radical Economics in Speculative Fiction Format:
Panel

12 Feb 2021, Friday 15:30 - 16:30, Burroughs (Webinar) (Virtual Westin)

Currently scholars from around the world are calling out the inherent
injustice and destructive nature of endless economic growth. New economic
theories are coming up, from degrowth and agrowth to eco-anarchism and
eco-socialism. How does science fiction reflect these ongoing paradigm shifts
in our world? How may we take these real world ideas and play with them in
fiction?

S.B. Divya,
Karl Schroeder,
Vandana Singh,
Charles Stross

Into the Great Unknown: Migration as Plot Format:
Panel

12 Feb 2021, Friday 17:00 - 18:00, Griffin (Mtg Room) (Virtual Westin)

Floods. War. Famine. The 10 plagues of Egypt. Any number of calamities can
cause peoples to move en masse from their home and travel into the great
unknown in search of survival, safety, and security. Migration is depicted in
various ways from caravans to generation starships. What do we need to consider
when telling these stories? What can and / or should be left behind? How do we
handle exploration into the unknown? What part might a people's history, or
that of a character, play in the story?

Vandana Singh,
Tobias Buckell,
Carlos Hernandez (M) ,
Aliette de Bodard ,
Karl Schroeder

Reading: Cory Doctorow and Karl Schroeder Format:
Reading

12 Feb 2021, Friday 20:00 - 21:00, Indy D (Mtg Room) (Virtual Westin)

Karl Schroeder,
Cory Doctorow

 

Kaffeeklatsch: Karl Schroeder Format: Kaffeeklatsch

13 Feb 2021, Saturday 10:00 - 11:00, Indy B - Kaffee (Mtg Room) (Virtual
Westin)

You must signup to
participate in this session by clicking on the blue button to the right to
"Sign up and add it to your schedule." Space is limited to 25 people.

Karl Schroeder

Are We Ever Getting Off this Rock? Format: Panel

13 Feb 2021, Saturday 19:00 - 20:00, Harbor Ballroom (Webinar) (Virtual
Westin)

Could there be permanent settlement anywhere but Earth? What would it take
to create a colony elsewhere in our solar system? The three most important
factors in determining the desirability of a property are "location,
location, location." What are the hot properties in our neck of the woods?

 

Allen M. Steele,
Karl Schroeder,
Kenneth Schneyer (Johnson & Wales University), Mark Olson

Imagining the World of the Future Today Format: Panel

14 Feb 2021, Sunday 13:00 - 14:00, Marina Ballroom (Webinar) (Virtual
Westin)

It's typical in the science fictional future, for the human population to not
be jobless or homeless while robots take over work of all kinds or the Earth
(dystopic or post-apocalyptic futures excepted). How do we perceive the
evolution of human work? How do we avoid the parenthetical exceptions above?
Everything is on the table and the future is ours. 

Walter Jon Williams (Word Domination),
Alastair Reynolds ,
Linda D. Addison ,
Allen M. Steele (M),
Karl Schroeder

You can read the story for free on Slate. As a bonus, journalist Anna V. Smith has written a companion piece for the story, which is here.

"The Suicide of Our Troubles" is set in the same universe as my novel Stealing Worlds, and in fact happens at the same time and in the same city. I guess I'm not quite done talking about the personhood of natural systems, which is a theme I've been writing about for twenty years now.

I hope you enjoy the story, and if you do, pass on the link!

On Sept. 22, the gracious people at Polyplexus are hosting me for a 90 minute discussion about our planetary crisis and potential solutions to it that involve systems thinking--and, potentially, a turning-away from the linear, mechanistic industrial culture we currently have.

Go register on Eventbrite or Polyplexus.com to join the session. The session will be moderated by Laura Anne Edwards, NASA Datanaut and TED Resident.

The super-cool hackers over at queeriouslabs.net have coded an experiment based on one of my stories!

Back in 2014 I published "Degrees of Freedom," in the farsighted short story anthology Hieroglyph (which was edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer). The story is about indigenous rights, self-government, and new technologies for governance, and man did it have legs! It's still being taught at a couple of universities and garnered interest from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among other entities.

Now, the adventurous hackers over at queeriouslabs.net have built a test version of it! You can try it for free over at the We Get It website.

In the story, wegetit.com is a popular site that's used as a kind of funnel to feed discussions into policy-generating forums. You can have conversations about any subject on wegetit, but one of the things it does is expect you to define your terms. In other words, when I used the word "liberal" in this post, what do I mean by it? When you use it in your reply, what do you mean? The theory is that the permanent rolling meltdown of understanding we see in social media is largely the result of people misunderstanding what each other mean by very basic words. I say something I think is innocuous, you get triggered by it because a word I understand one way is read by you in an entirely different way. And it goes back and forth, amplifying mistrust and enmity.

Wegetit tries to dampen out this feedback system by guaranteeing that people understand what each other mean, not just read what each other say. This first version is very bare-bones, but that's how systems are developed. You can just give it a whirl and see where it leads you. I'm playing with it and having a great time.

Thankis, queeriouslabs!

The one-day (but heavy-hitting!) ReCONVene SF convention takes place this weekend. I'll be joining the above authors for the following panel:

 

Saturday, August 15, 2020

The AI Amongst Us Format: Panel

15 Aug 2020, Saturday 13:00 - 13:50, Earthseed Room (Online Convention (via
Zoom))

AIs are here, slipping through our everyday world, crunching numbers,
sorting data, and learning their field of study at an exponential rate.
However, general artificial intelligence still remains a distant digital dream.
Has AI failed us or have we failed AI? Has innovation stalled? What can
researchers learn from science fiction regarding sentient AI systems? What
grains of innovation inspiration remain untested within the pages of novels and
will increased computing power help bridge that uncanny gap?

(As you can imagine, I have a few ideas about this...)

 

This year's Worldcon is virtual, so you can easily attend! Zip on over to the CoNZealand website to get registered and attend any or all of the events below. Particularly of note for me this year, you can come to my reading, attend my Kaffeeklatsch, or join the discussion on my idea of "thalience."

Future
Laws

 Format:
Panel

29 Jul 2020,
Wednesday 10:00 - 10:50, Programme Room 1 (Webinar) (Programming)

Law changes when
the world changes. When you can duplicate a person, who owns the house? Which
one is married to the spouse? How do you define property when physical objects
are almost worthless but computing power is in short supply? Is it ethical to
genetically "correct" autism in the womb? We're going to have to
decide.

 

Future
Economics

 Format:
Panel

29 Jul 2020,
Wednesday 13:00 - 13:50, Programme Room 4 (Webinar) (Programming)

Will we ever fully
disentangle from the physical? Blockchains, crytocurrency, differently organic
sentinence. Will economic concepts of supply, demand, money, resources hold up?
Evolve? Or be completely different?  And what might they look like?

Kaffeeklatsch:
Karl Schroeder

Format:
Kaffeeklatsch

31 Jul 2020, Friday
13:00 - 13:50, Kaffeklatch and Literary Beer Room (Programming)

Would you like the
chance to video chat with nine other fans and a writer? Grab your favorite
beverage and sign up for a spot!

Reading:
Karl Schroeder

Format:
Reading

 2 Aug 2020, Sunday 09:30 - 09:55, Reading Room
2 (Programming)

 

The
Day After Tomorrow: Near Future SF

 

Format:
Panel

 2 Aug 2020, Sunday 11:00 - 11:50, Programme
Room 3 (Webinar) (Programming)

 

What are the
challenges of SF set in the near future? What are good examples?

Thalience
and Sentience

 2 Aug 2020, Sunday 13:00 - 13:50, Programme
Room 4 (Webinar) (Programming)

Thalience and
sentience. Is there really a difference? How do we tease it out?

 

About eight years ago, I sat down with Nikola to talk about all things Singularity--or, as it turned out, all the reasons I thought the Technological Singularity is an idea whose time has passed. Now, in spring 2020, we got to talk again, and we had a lot to catch up on. 

What might be most interesting about this interview, which ranges across many topics, is that we did it just pre-COVID-19. The disease was out and ravaging China and Iran, but it hadn't really established a presence in Canada yet. Nonetheless, what I wanted to talk about with Nikola was how we can remain optimistic when humanity's options and power seem increasingly constrained. The context of the discussion was global warming, but the ideas apply equally well to the pandemic.  Head on over to the Singularity Weblog, and hear for yourself.

Check out the Locus Annual Year's Best list, which covers science fiction and fantasy novels, novellas, and short stories, as well as horror and other genre fiction. The reviewers and critics at Locus generally pick 25 or so titles in each category, which considering the number of books and stories published every year, puts you in pretty rarified company if you make it.  I'm proud that all my books have made the list, and deeply proud that Stealing Worlds is in such good company this time. 

We'll be discussing "Technology optimism and pessimism" at this year's Silicon Flatirons conference in Boulder, Colorado. Here's who I'll be speaking with:

Keynote Panel: A Conversation About the Future
The Honorable Phil Weiser ? Moderator
Attorney
General, State of Colorado; Founder and Executive Fellow, Silicon
Flatirons; Adjunct Professor, University of Colorado Law SchoolCasey Fiesler ? Panelist
Assistant Professor, Information Science, University of Colorado BoulderPatty Limerick ? Panelist
Faculty Director and Chair of the Board, Center of the American West, University of Colorado BoulderKarl Schroeder ? Panelist
Futurist and Author

Here's what I'll be up to--a particularly fun set of panels this year!

Reading: Karl Schroeder

Format: Reading

 14 Feb 2020, Friday 20:30 - 20:55

 Your Generation Ship Has Landed! Now What?

 14 Feb 2020, Friday 21:00 - 21:50

Our behemoth of a spaceship has been in transit since the days of our
many-times-great grandparents. We've finally reached an Earth-like planet and
are ready to go. What will our panel (of appointed/anointed/hereditary/elected?)
leaders suggest doing first? Have they forgotten something important? Watch the
panel map out our future and that of the human race on this, our new home. Then
suggest your own ideas.

 100 Years From Now?

 15 Feb 2020, Saturday 12:00 - 12:50

 The world as we know it has changed dramatically in the last 100 years. How
about the next 100? What might everyday life be like a century from now?
What technological marvels will the near future bring? What social changes will
take place? How about natural and human-made disasters? Overall ? where will we
be, and how will we get there? Is the Singularity coming? "Day
Million"? Or will our grandchildren herd sheep and shiver in the dark?

Futuristic Societies in Science Fiction

 15 Feb 2020, Saturday 14:00 - 14:50

 Creatures that are part human and part machine. Sentient alien species.
People living on ships and across time itself. The future is full of people. So
what does it mean to be a person in the future? How might futuristic societies
evolve based upon their surroundings and histories? How can we escape the
perils and pitfalls of contemporary social norms in order to create societies
that feel completely fresh and new?

Kaffeeklatsch: Karl Schroeder

 15 Feb 2020, Saturday 16:00 - 16:50

 Autographing

 15 Feb 2020, Saturday 17:00 - 17:50