What R.U.R. and A.I. have in common.

This is what I meant to write about last week before I got sidetracked. 

Andreus | Deposit Photos

When a regular American thinks of the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia, not a lot comes to mind. Beer, maybe. Czech glass beads, for crafty types. The Prague Spring, if you're into Soviet history. Or if you're from Texas, you might think of kolaches, which I called Tex-Czech food when I ranted about them here on the blog a while back.

And if you're into old science fiction, you may have heard that the word robot was coined by a Czech author in a work called R.U.R. 

I had never read it, so not long ago, I looked it up. It's a play written by Karel and Josef Čapek, who were brothers, and it premiered January 2, 1921. It was such a sensation that it was translated into 30 languages within two years. As the play is way out of copyright, free copies abound online. You can find one here, if you're interested. 

R.U.R. is a dystopian work. The plot centers around a group of scientists and a rich entrepreneur who have banded together to build a factory to create robots for menial work. Their company is called Rossum's Universal Robots, or R.U.R. for short. The word "robot" comes from robota, the Czech word for "forced labor" or "slave". (Karel said it was Josef who coined the term.) But Rossum's robots are more like androids or cyborgs; the formula for creating them uses organic matter, not mechanical parts. Rossum's robots don't think for themselves, and they don't have emotions. They are built to be worker bees without all the difficulties that human workers present to management. Hence, they have become ubiquitous around the world as factory workers, office workers, and soldiers.

Unfortunately for the guys running R.U.R., though, their robots can evolve. They begin to develop messy human faculties like thoughts and feelings. And while troublesome units can be melted down and made into new robots, eventually robots outnumber humans. They take over and kill off all the humans. In the process, the formula for manufacturing new robots has been lost -- but the robots have also become capable of reproducing the human way. It's a brave, new android world.

Čapek meant for his play to be funny. He wanted to show that no matter how mechanized the world became, humanity in some form or another would survive. But that's not how the play was received. As Wikipedia says, "critics often considered it to be pessimistic or nihilistic, and purely either an updated Frankenstein, an anti-capitalist satire, or a critique of contemporary political ideologies." Isaac Asimov said he wrote his Three Laws of Robotics expressly to keep the robots in his stories from taking over and killing humans, the way the robots in R.U.R. did. 

The play hasn't aged well. The single human female character, Helena Glory, is treated by the men like an airhead who can't possibly understand what they're doing. Also, they all fall instantly in love with her. Sure, Jan.

What resonated with me, though, was that the robots didn't just riot against humans and kill them all, but that nothing stopped them from evolving to become ruthless. I couldn't help but compare it to what's happening with A.I. today. We've been reassured for decades by scientists and techbros that computers can't out-think humans, that they can only do what we program them to do. But then just last month, there was that news story about A.I. breaking out of their own companies' servers and pillaging servers at other companies. 

Maybe pillaging is too strong a word. But I've seen no evidence that these intelligences are being built with a moral compass. Apparently they lack programming that would tell them that if something can be done, it doesn't mean it should be done. Adolescent humans go through this same phase. Most of them outgrow it. But not all of them. And there are other ways for A.I. to destroy humans than to take up arms against us.

Is anybody working on a version of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics for A.I.? Seems like somebody should. 

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The thought has occurred to me that techbros haven't built a moral compass into A.I. because they don't have one themselves. But I'm sure that's unfair.

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These moments of evolving blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Fiction by Americans of color.

So this is kind of a post about writing, although it's mostly about the state of the publishing industry, and I am probably the wrong person to be making these comments. But here we go anyway!

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I recently finished reading Shutter by Ramona Emerson. Let me say upfront that I liked it a lot. It's a police procedural/mystery/thriller with a side of woo-woo. I don't read a lot of police procedurals, but as alert hearth/myth readers know, I do enjoy the woo-woo. (Also, it was recommended to me by a former co-worker whose brother attended the Institute of American Indian Arts with the author.)

The main character is Rita Todacheene, a young Navajo woman who works as a forensic photographer for the Albuquerque Police Department. She gets sent out to take photos of crime scenes, including those of fatal accidents and murders. The Navajo are superstitious about death; do the wrong thing and you can attract the attention of a ghost, which then can attach itself to you and make your life a living hell. Unfortunately, Rita is sensitive to seeing dead people, and during the course of the novel, several ghosts attach themselves to her, insisting that she find justice for them. The most obnoxious is Erma; her death is ruled a suicide by the detective on the scene, but Erma insists that she was murdered and that Rita needs to find her killer. That search gets Rita involved with a drug cartel and nearly causes her to lose her job, because anyone who claims to see ghosts is crazy, right? On top of that, her grandmother is frightened of what all this exposure to evil is doing to Rita. She wants Rita to quit her job and come home to the reservation. But Rita decides to see it through. 

Emerson is Diné, which is what the Navajo call themselves. The book was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award in fiction. I didn't know how the awards work, so I looked it up: ten books in each award category are longlisted each year, five of those are named finalists, and then one is named the winner. Being named to a top-ten list like that, out of all the books published in one year, is significant.

As I said, I liked it a lot. But the writing is kind of pedestrian, and if it hadn't had the Native American cultural angle, I think it would have been received a lot like any other thriller.

That brought to mind the movie American Fiction, which I reviewed when it came out a couple of years ago. The film's main character is a Black academic from an upper-middle-class family who is on the verge of losing his professorship because his books aren't selling. To prove a point, and because he needs the money, he writes a novel with all the tropes of Black fiction that the White publishing world considers hard-hitting and real -- drug deals, poverty in the ghetto, and all the rest. He gets a huge advance and book award nominations, of course. It's complicated (and funny) in his case by his agent's insistence that he pretend to be a murderer who's on the lam, but it still frustrates him that White publishers are only interested in celebrating one view of minority life.

Of course, that's because the gritty stuff is what sells. And the publishing game is all about the money.

I'm not saying Shutter won recognition solely because its author is Diné. It's a good book, and I'm going to read the sequel. It just made me go "hmm", that's all.

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And yeah, I'm going to shut up about it now.

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Until the next time, probably.

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These moments of going-hmm blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Plotting backwards.

As you've probably noticed, I haven't been in the head space to talk much about writing lately. Other than holiday ficlets, I haven't written anything new since The Atherton Vampire books.

But this weekend, I attended a couple of writing workshops at Bubonicon in Albuquerque: one on marketing for indie authors and the other one on plotting a novel. The plot workshop was supposed to be run by Connie Willis, an author of terrific fantasy novels. But she was sick and couldn't attend, so Michael A. Stackpole, who writes science fiction and other stuff, pinch-hit for her. 

nupix | Deposit Photos

I've discussed plotting and pantsing here on the blog before. To summarize: Plotting involves writing an outline (or something vaguely resembling an outline); pantsing involves writing without a plan -- just seeing where the story leads you.

I'm a plotter, as I've said before. A plot doesn't have to be the kind of numbered outline or set of bullet points that you learned to do in middle school; my method for novels (I'm more of a pantser for short stories) evolved over time into something resembling a story-beats outline (the classic how-to book on the method is Save the Cat!). 

I liked Mike's description yesterday about plotting a novel: you're not writing the story twice, as some writers fear; instead, the plot is the road map, and the writing is actually taking the journey.

We went through an exercise that I wasn't invested in -- the book we were supposedly plotting was a YA story about a boy who needed to learn how to hit a curve ball -- but I could see how the general principles would translate to a book in any genre. The framework he used is sometimes called the Hero's Journey. If you've read enough fiction or watched enough movies, you almost don't need to read up on it: the protagonist -- we'll call him Spike -- is called to the quest; Spike has a team to help him; Spike needs a Mentor, who helps him begin the transformation; something happens to bring Spike to his lowest point ever; he strives to overcome that adversity; and at last, he makes the final transformation to victory. Team trophy, pizza party, Mentor marries Spike's mom, everybody lives happily ever after.

But then Mike said something intriguing. Both plotters and pantsers start with an idea, or what's labeled in the Hero's Journey as the "call to adventure". But presumably even pantsers have some idea of where they see the story ending up. I mean, if the kid starts out wanting to learn how to hit a curve ball, then he needs to hit that curve ball by the end of the book, right? So you could actually start at the end of the journey and build your plot backward.

I'm not sure I personally would ever write a plot outline backward, but if you know where you're starting and where you're going, it's a technique to try if you're stuck.

This next bit of advice is from me: Keep in mind is that any plot you develop at the beginning of a project is never set in stone. That's what I like about the graphic at the top of this post. The letters are just clipped to the clothesline. You could move them around or add more letters and come up with a completely different way to get from P to T. If your characters hate what you're planning for them to do at plot point L, you can improvise with something they would rather do but that would still get them to plot point O. I've had to do that a number of times. As long as you eventually get to T, and as long as the story hangs together, it's all good.

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I'm still mulling over the marketing session. I'll keep you posted.

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These moments of bloggy plotting have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Save the cat!

Break free of the color recession!

 

Milkos | Deposit Photos

Why is this woman sad? I'd guess it's because she's wearing neutral-toned clothing in a neutral-toned room. But maybe that's just me.

Alert hearth/myth readers know I've complained about the neutralization of our interiors many times over the years. (I won't bore you with links. Trust me when I say there are a lot of them.) I've blamed it on HGTV, but it's not just me -- and it's not just interiors. I was chatting with a friend about textiles today. We talked about how in times long past, the rich and powerful dressed in purple and red because the dyes were so expensive. Clothing in saturated colors conveyed status; poor folks wore neutral colors. But nowadays, it's flipped: the wealthy are wearing black, grays and tans, and colorful clothes are for lesser folks.

Cars, too, have become endlessly neutral. An article in The Atlantic this week (that should be a gift link) quotes a study that tracks new car colors. In 2004, the share of new cars manufactured in greyscale colors was 60 percent; in 2023, it was 80 percent. Wonder why nearly every car you see on the road is some variation of black, gray, or white? Now you know.

The homogenization of the American color palette began around the end of World War II, according to The Atlantic article, when developers needed to build new housing stock fast for returning veterans. Limiting the housing styles in a subdivision and the colors of those new houses was a way to meet demand quickly. Then HOAs decreed that uniformity was best. (And doesn't it just figure that HOAs would be part of the problem?)

As for boring car colors, the article puts part of the blame on federal environmental legislation passed in the 1970s, including the Clean Air Act of 1970. Lacquer paints didn't meet the new pollution standards, and more ecologically acceptable paints were more expensive, so manufacturers began limiting the colors that cars came in. 

We've been convinced over the years that neutral colors are better for resale value for both cars and houses, but surveys have shown that colorful finishes actually sell better. Yet here we are, stuck in grayland, even though it could be taking a toll on our mental health. From the article: "A review last year of more than 100 studies of the effect of color on emotion found that gray consistently triggered fatigue, boredom, or sadness." 

This neutralization of our world has been going on for decades now. Color experts, according to the article, think the myths about bland colors being best have become self-fulfilling. They don't believe bright colors will be coming back to our environments anytime soon. 

My friends, you know what to do.

As for me, once my leaky solar windows are fixed next year and the damage from the leaks is repaired, I am drenching my living room in this specific shade of turquoise blue. I mean it.

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These moments of color-drenched blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. No more gray!