Book Review – Seeds of Change

Editor: John Joseph Adams
Publisher: Prime Books
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: August 2008

For the anthology Seeds of Change, editor John Joseph Adams asked a number of authors to write about paradigm shifts. Stories about the moment where the way of thinking about a subject changes radically, where old ideas are left behind and a new way of looking at things takes root. A difficult concept, I imagine that more than one of the authors struggled with the meaning of this. Because of this theme, I will be looking at the stories in this collection more in terms of ideas and put less emphasis on the writing itself.

No doubt there are others who have looked at the concepts, but personally I am most familiar with paradigm shifts as put forward by the American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. His thinking about the process of scientific advance still haunts lecture rooms in universities all over the planet. It was not my strongest subject but I think I got the idea, more or less. In a nutshell, Kuhn proposed that when enough evidence that did not fit in the current way of scientific thinking surfaced, science would undergo a crisis and a new ideas would be proposed until a new paradigm had replaced the old one.

One of the most dramatic examples is of course the scientific discoveries that lead up to Einstein’s formulation of the theory of relativity, a completely new way of thinking about physics, that replaced the older Newtonian views. It is known however that Einstein’s theories do not explain everything. The search for a new theory that will combine general relativity and quantum mechanics is still on, a new paradigm in the making. This ongoing search in physics is something a number science fiction writers used in their books. One book that comes to mind is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Memory of Whiteness, a book in which this new paradigm, Holywelkin Physics as he calls in, is one of the driving forces of the story. I would love to see what Robinson could come up with with a theme like this.

The philosophy of Kuhn is not without it’s critics, especially in the social sciences reality is usually more complex than one paradigm could possibly encompass. It is an interesting view though, one that prompts scientists to think outside the box when they hit on something that doesn’t fit in their understanding of the field they are working in. It should also provide science fiction authors with material for some good stories. Some of the authors in the anthology pursue the more scientific approach to paradigm shifts. Adams does not limit them to science alone though. Some stories have a more cultural or political background. Keeping Adams’ theme in mind I must say that some stories succeeded better than others. But then, paradigms are a tricky a tricky subject, I sometimes have a hard time figuring out what the fundamental change is that the authors are trying to communicate.

The first story in the collection is The N-Word by Ted Kosmatka. As the title suggests this story deals with racism. In the near future cloning techniques have advanced far enough to make it possible to create clones of extinct species. The debate on the morality of cloning is still raging and most research has moved away from the US in order to escape the restrictions there. In Korea someone has managed to clone Neanderthals. An act that shocks the world. The clones are trying to find their place in the world but prejudice and racism make this very hard indeed.

Besides racism this story also deal with evolution in a way. Kosmatka uses some very recent scientific finds on Neanderthal physiology in his story that are far from proven. His point is well made though, humanity likes to see itself as the pinnacle of evolution. This may not be the case.The author manages to make the impact on society of the appearance of ours cousins very clear in this short story. I thought it was very well written, one of my favourites of the collection.

The Future by Degrees by Jay Lake takes on the first law of Thermodynamics, also know as the principle of the conservation of energy. Basically this principle states that hat the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant. Energy does not disappears. To give you one example of the consequences of this, take a look at the engine of a car. It releases chemical energy by oxidizing petrol. Part of this chemical energy is converted kinetic energy, into motion. The rest of it is released as heat. Heat is useless to the car. In fact an excess of heat will make sure you are not going anywhere. To get rid of it, the car has a radiator, a heat exchanger that discharges the heat to the air that flows past it. Heat is waste. But what if you could store this heat and release it at the moment of your choosing? This would increase the efficiency of the car’s engine tremendously. And that is only one application, the possibilities of such a technology are many.

The main character of the story works for a company who has found a way to story this excess heat very efficiently. He quickly finds out how much such an invention would be worth to some people. Including a price in blood.

In Drinking Problem K.D. Wentworth takes a look at recycling. Despite the realization that resources on the planet are finite, the developed world is still producing an awful lot of disposables. But now an act has been introduced to put a stop to that. The Semesco A2300 Smart Bottle will make sure you recycle whether you want to or not. And will fix your marriage while it is at it. This story is a bit over the top, it is very funny but it doesn’t seem to be describing a likely event. Environmental laws will be tightened without a doubt, I guess the author is telling us to not loose sight of other considerations?

Blake Charlton gives us another look at evolution in Endosymbiont. People tend to see it as a linear process. One species, or population I should say, evolving into the next. Many science fiction authors have tried to extrapolate on this and included the rise of artificial intelligence into their vision. Once AI realizes it does not need biological life, and in a way is superior to it, the temptation to get rid of biologicals must be present. In Endosymbiont this development is seen as a severe threat and laws are put into place to prevent artificial intelligence from becoming self aware.

Charlton’s character is a young girl fighting against cancer. The believes the medication is playing tricks on her memory but slowly she starts to realize things are not what they seem. She is not in a hospital. Her neural patterns are stored in a computer. What happened to her body and why is she not allowed to realize she not in a hospital? The answers to these questions are disturbing. This is probably the best story in the collection. It combines a very interesting theory on the evolution of mitochondria, the power plant of our cells, and ideas on a synthesis of human and artificial intelligence into a beautiful story.

A Dance Called Armageddon by Ken MacLeod strikes me as a do-you-remember-where-you-were-when-you-heard-the-news story. In this case the main character is in a pub and the news is shocking in a way. A great war that has been going on for over a decade is about to be decided and it looks like the US and the UK are on the loosing side. Which is quite a dramatic turn of events, right now I don’t think anybody believes the US could loose a war fought by conventional means. The story is very much focussed on how the main character experiences these events. The author gives us a few hints but the background of the conflict remain unclear. A shame, for a science fiction story, it seems like an interesting course of events to follow.

Arties Aren’t Stupid by Jeremiah Tolbert is a story I found very hard to pin down. It follows a group of “Arties”, a group of juvenile graffiti artists in a world where their art is quite ruthlessly suppressed. In true teenage style they see the world around them as a number of sides. The Arties, the brainiacs, the Elderfolk, the Thicknecks. They mistrust anybody not on their side. Looking for a way to make a more lasting impression on the world through their art, they team up with the brianiacs and a blend of art and science takes hold.

Like the first story of the collection, prejudice plays an important part in Faceless in Gethsemane by Mark Budz. The story is about a woman who decides to undergo a procedure that shuts down a part of her brain that helps to recognize faces. This way, she reasons, she will be free of prejudice brought on by someone’s appearance, skin colour and so on. She tries to translate this new view on the world into her art because words to explain how she experiences it often fail. Not everybody is pleased by her decision however. By making someone appear indistinct you also take away part of their personality.

A very interesting story. The author puts forth arguments for the procedure but also makes a powerful case for the usefulness of stereotypes. Can we really do without our preconceptions? The woman in this story thinks we can, and intends to show the world . The paradigm has not shifted in this story yet though.

Spider the Artist by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu focusses on the social and environmental drama currently going on in the Niger delta. The region is rich in oil and natural gas and the environmental problems associated with in are tremendous. On top of that most of the wealth gained by exporting oil remains well outside the reach of the local population. In this story oil companies have stated to guard their pipelines with “spiders”, a sentinel robot controlled by an artificial intelligence to prevent the locals breaching them to steal fuel. They are said to be programmed to do as little damage as possible but they kill many people none the less. Getting close to the pipelines is very dangerous indeed.

The main character in the story does so anyway, to get away from her abusive husband. The only peace she can find is by playing her father’s guitar in her back yard, which is dangerously close to a pipeline. One day a spider does appear, but instead of being hostile it seems to be attracted to the music. The artificial intelligence is reaching beyond it’s programming. She realizes these spiders are a lot more dangerous than people assume. It’s a beautifully written story, from a sheer emotional impact probably the best in the collection. I do feel it skirts the them of the anthology a bit though. The experience changes the main character and the artificial intelligence profoundly but doesn’t really explore the wider impact of this encounter.

The last story in the collection is Resistance by Tobias S. Buckell. It is the only story set in space and deals with a space station taken over by an intelligence known as Pan. The station used to be a perfect democracy, with every inhabitant voting on every decision taken. The people found this inconvenient however, due to the sheer number of decisions needed to run the station. They left most of the votes to an program that simulated their voting behaviour with a large degree of confidence, leaving the people only to look at the big decisions or the ones the program can’t accurately predict. By extrapolating their voting behaviour the program concludes that most inhabitants would have the program cast all votes for them, take all decisions. In effect placing it in control of the stations. Thus Pan is born. A perfect tyrant, coming to power by the will of the people and perfectly taking into account all inhabitants’ desires. Even those who oppose it.

Buckell means to show us the importance of voting and what can happen if you let others decide for you. The dilemma the main character, a member of the resistance against Pan, faces in the story is very interesting. Will he remove the leader that, unconsciously, is desired by most inhabitants to replace it by the former imperfect democracy that ruled the station? I thought the story over the top at first but by the time Buckell reaches the conclusion he will have given the reader an awful lot to think about.

Some of the authors in this collection stretch paradigm shifts a bit further than I would have but all things considered there are some very good short stories in this anthology. Without exception these stories will provide the reader with a lot of food for though. So much in fact, that it took me a full week to work though these nine stories, needing a break after most of them to think about what I had just read. It makes this anthology a bit less accessible than the other anthologies Adams recently edited. Maybe that explains why it hasn’t been getting quite as much attention as The Living Dead and Wastelands. Undeserved in my opinion, this anthology contains quality stories. It is not one of those effortless reads, this book demands your full attention. Paying attention is absolutely worth the effort though. I think I enjoyed Seeds of Change even more than reading the outstanding Wastelands anthology.

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