SCIENCE TIME: EMOTIV

The internet has just informed me that, in the imminent future, I will be able to put on a helmet which will read my mind and use the data it gathers to enhance my ability to interact with immersive virtual environments. We are now living in a world where direct mind-machine interface is possible without any kind of invasive surgeries or bulky scientific equipment.

This is a prospect which excites me a fair bit more than it worries me. Considering that we can now build heads-up displays that fit inside contact lenses, I was wondering when someone would come up with a good user interface device for such. It appears we have to wait no longer than March 2008 for such devices to be in the hands of game developers, which means that if the wiimote is any indication, the Mobb will be hacking them and using them to control their fresh-built lego robot arms by May at the latest. Whether these arms will be capable of doing anything more nuanced than flailing when the users are happy remains to be seen.

The (clearly-anime-inspired) look of the device may need some work, but as I never travel anywhere without a hat already (and I ask you: what gentleman does?), I suspect that a slightly redesigned version of the hardware can be integrated into my normal streetwear.

It should be noted that this is not a Gibsonian device that allows one to 'jack in to the Net'. It allows our minds to interact with machinespace, not machinespace to interact with our minds. And while the press coverage for the device does promise many things, it sounds like the state of the technology is likely only about as progressed as reading emotions and maybe (I hope) responding to certain kinds of broad, easily interpreted mental cues. The website doesn't have too much in the way of concrete details. However, I think that even the possibility of, say, an MP3 player that changes your playlist based on your moods, or a character in a game that knows when you're smiling at them is more than enough to label this an outbreak of the future.

It's important to remember, as we wrap ourselves in the clothes of old empires and study the instability of our own, that there are new things under the sun. Incredible things are being created every day. I am tempted to say, as I suspect every generation has been tempted, that there has never been a time in human history more exciting, dangerous or filled with possibility, than right now, this moment, this place.

Way to be, Planet Earth. Keep it up.

Interstitial

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to what is, with any luck, not at all a terrible idea. My name is Zach, and I hope to be one of your hosts for the foreseeable future. There are many things to be done and said, but I vanish off the face of the internet for the weekend in a few scant hours, so let me be brief, now, so that I can be longwinded later.

There are three of us here.

We are here to write, and support each other in our writing efforts.

We are here to write with as much talent and skill as we can muster.

We will write about whatever strikes our fancy, and we will do so in whatever fashion we wish. There may, and probably will, be theme weeks.

Right now, the theme is saying hello.

Hello.

And now, so that you don't feel like this was a complete and total waste of your time, let me talk to you a bit about William Gibson's Virtual Light, which I finished today as part of my ongoing effort to read his books in the least chronological order possible, providing you started with Neuromancer. (And didn't we all?)

As briefly as I can, because I can certainly use whatever sleep I can get:

The central image of Gibson's Virtual Light is not the augmented-reality eyewear that the title references--sunglasses which manipulate your optic nerves electromagnetically, allowing you to see things that aren't there at the native resolution of your brain, without any light striking your eyeballs: literal virtual light--but the abandoned and then repurposed San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which gives its name not to the book, but to the entire trilogy.

A trilogy I read in reverse order, and with other books of Gibson's mixed in between.

This is an approach that worked surprisingly well.

All Tomorrow's Parties hooked me with the richness and the weirdness of its language, the strange structure of its narrative, the way it seemed to twist and turn and cavort, and how little of the character's pasts were explained, and how little that mattered. I always knew enough to keep reading, feeling like I was assembling a puzzle.

When I got to the end, I found myself wondering about the beginning.

Idoru was next, and in it I found characters I thought I knew and characters I thought I didn't, and another winding tale where the protagonists came at a situation from all sides, met once, and spun off again in different directions, sometimes together, sometimes not. And the details of the vision and the immense skill of the writing drew me in deeper, but I was never sure which books belonged together.

So I read more Gibson, over the course of most of a year, picking up books and devouring them as I found them. But it wasn't until today that I finished Virtual Light, and traced the threads back as far as the author intended them to go, and caught a glimpse of the shape of the whole.

The bridge at the heart of the books is not so much an edifice as a space, a gap, an opportunity.
An interstice, to borrow the man's own terms. The world of the bridge is an interstitial community, as the book is a story that exists in the spaces between worldshattering events, and the characters are people between, always coming or going but never seeming to arrive.

A space outside of normal society, where a new society has been created. Characters that have been displaced from the normal context of their lives, moving in the spaces between other people's worlds, and changing.

In the spaces between monoliths, life flourishes.

Welcome aboard.