Meeting of the Sydney Futurian Society: 17th December 1999.

This meeting was a little unusual, in that it actually resembled a meeting. This was partly due to the low turnout: in attendance were

• David Bofinger
• Peter Eisler
• John August
• Brian Walls
• Kevin Dillon
• Graham Stone
• Gary Dalrymple
• Ian Woolf

Ian Woolf, Saint of the Universal Life Church, Educator of the Masses (or at least those elements of the masses that listen to his radio program on 2SER) and Guardian of the Portable Tape Recorder, was late. The burden of record (by pen and paper) therefore fell on David Bofinger the Unbelieving and Barely Literate. Accordingly, the notes for this meeting are a little telegraphic and almost entirely fabricated.

John August spoke about his recent trip to a meeting of the Australian Space Research Institute in Canberra. ASRI is a high-end amateur rocketry organisation, based mostly on universities, which does rocketry experiments at Woomera. Common vehicles are Zuni rockets (the sort of weapon a helicopter gunship would shoot up Chechnya with), sometimes in multiple stage configurations. Grander plans include AUSROC 3, a 500 km sounding rocket, and AUSROC 4, a multi-stage AUSROC 3 configuration capable of launching a small satellite.

The most spectacular sight seems to have been a laser satellite tracking station established at the Mount Stromolo observatory outside Canberra. This consisted of a powerful laser stuck in a telescope: the idea is that the telescope directs the beam into a small region of the sky, then collects light from that small region. From John's description it didn't quite sound practical yet.

John had also been to New Zealand (he seems to be getting around). In New Zealand he visited Kevin Maclean and other members of the Stella Nova science fiction club. Stella Nova has, amongst other things, published a highly successful anthology of their own science fiction short stories called Millennium Nights, and John was present for the launch of its second printing. John promised to read the book so he could give the Futurians a report on Kiwi capabilities.

The writing of stories appears to be epidemic in Sydney as well.

• Gary Dalrymple brought a satirical work on bureaucracy at the Pearly Gates.
• David Bofinger asked for assistance in controlling the growth of his 3500 word fantasy, which had reached 7500 words in a week. Assuming geometric progression, he estimates it will be the length of War and Peace by mid-February.
• John August had an 1800 word SF piece called The Authority, his proposal to read it out was narrowly defeated along party lines.

Gary Dalrymple's plans for a "FreeCon" continue apace. He's been mailing out to high schools in the Parramatta area, with a view to running a convention about a hundred metres from Infinitas bookshop. He explained his reasoning with diagrams of the personality types of various kinds of science fiction fan. Gary is also organising SF talks for his colleagues on the staff of OTEN college.

Gary and John have been looking into nominating some Futurians and/or other Sydneysiders for the Down Under Fan Fund (DUFF). John tried to contact several Melbourne fans on the subject without success, but eventually got the necessary information from Janice Gelb, last year's DUFF traveller.

David Bofinger presented a few SF-related science articles.

• A discussion of the West Nile-like encephalitis that struck New York and its environs last year. This is real Andromeda Strain or Outbreak stuff.
• A successful interspecies birth. A fertilised embryo from a rare West African wildcat was implanted in a domestic cat and carried to term. This is Jurassic Park stuff.
• The discovery of life just above Lake Vostok, deep beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. This is a solar-energy-free ecosystem, driven by volcanic vents like the black smokers on the ocean floor. This has relevance to Europa and its ilk, i.e. 2076 stuff.
• The first observation of light from an extrasolar planet, by a group in Scotland. "Almost anything with interstellar travel" stuff.

The low turnout meant that everyone had plenty of time to talk and yet time for the topic of the meeting as well, a rarity at Futurian meetings. This was such a pleasant experience some members suggested killing other members of the club and disposing of them "by spontaneous combustion". The secretary was cautioned not to discuss this proposal, or put it up on the web, lest the victims be warned. With some regret planning for this operation was deferred (as it is in every meeting) in order to allow discussion of the topic.

• Alien Invasions
• H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds doesn't strictly qualify, since civilisation survives (mostly). But it's such a notable early example of a description of such a collapse in progress that it has to be mentioned.
• Somebody's The Reliberation of Earth(?), where earth is devastated by two competing alien fleets' battles over it.
• Niven and Pournelle's Footfall is notable partly because the aliens' reluctance to risk collapsing civilisation. Harry Turtledove used a similar idea in his Worldwar polyology (?).
• John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes.
• Warfare
• The historical collapse of the Ostrogothic state in sixth century Italy, opposed by L. Sprague de Camp's hero in Lest Darkness Fall.
• David Brin's The Postman, where a series of conflicts bring down or threaten civilisation:
  • a major nuclear war;
  • the "hypersurvivalist plague"; and
  • the invasion of the Williamette valley by survivalist refugees from Northern California.
• Possibly, Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, though this may have been a hostile artificial intelligence.
• John Wyndham's Consider Her Ways(?) and The Chrysalids.
• Plague
• The historical destruction of the New World civilisations in the sixteenth century. This is an aspect of various alternate history novels, notably Frederick Saberhagen's The Mask of the Sun.
• To stretch the category even further, the principal threat in Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy works something like a disease from the point of view of a society fighting it.
• John Wyndham's The Triffids, sort of.
• Social Change
• A story where ancient decadent aliens induce social collapse to clear out humans from a galaxy they see as still theirs.
• Greg Egan's Orbits(?), sort of.
• Damon Knight's A is for Anything, where universal abundance leads to anarchy.
• During the meeting Ian Woolf told us about a new method for selecting the sex of a baby. Grahame Stone's first reaction was "we're doomed", so I think the discussion belongs here.
• Technological Disaster
• Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi: the agent is a military doomsday nanotech weapon called mataglap, after a Malay word for going besser. (Literally, "dark eye".)
• A story in which an engineered algae escapes into the Earth's oceans, completely taking them over. Initially set in northern Queensland.
• "Hardly seems worth it for eighteen minutes". If you've read the story you may remember, if you haven't I won't spoil it.
• Pollution
• John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, in fact, most things from his anti-human period.
• Greegory Benford's Timescape.
• Climatic or Tectonic Change
• Kevin Costner's Waterworld.
• A story where the Earth is powerful, tries a tectonic experiment, ruins the continental structure, goes bankrupt, gets bought by aliens who hate humans and eventually invaded by them. Partly set in Rome ("Roum").
• Stories about Atlantis, of which there are about a million.
• Who Knows?
• The collapse of the Western Roman Empire, described in Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, has long been a subject for debate. Some ideas are:
  • the greater sophistication of its barbarian enemies;
  • christianity (Gibbon's theory);
  • lead in the drinking water; and
  • too many lark's tongues.
• The Mad Max series, surely one of the least described collapses in fiction. The collapse progresses from societal decay through anarchy to perverse bandit civilisations. While war seems to have been a factor according to the explanatory flashback scenes, the footage is from the bombing of Berlin and the Normandy landings, both in the second world war.
  • If this is intended to suggest that the fall of civilisation will be traced by future historians to the admittedly barbaric period of 1944-45 then it's an interesting take.
  • If the director just couldn't be bothered to shoot his own footage or find less memorable clips then I'll plead deconstructivism and claim his opinion is irrelevant.
• Most badly thought out cyberpunk.
• Competing Intelligences
• Gunther Grass' Die Rättin, where rats become intelligent.
• Greg Bear's Blood Music, both from the point of view of humanity and of one colony of the intelligent microbes.
• James Cameron's Terminator series, where the agent is a military artificial intelligence. A near miss of this kind is War Games.
• Possibly, Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, though this may have been warfare.
• Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. There's another cause on this page
• John Wyndham's The Triffids, arguably.
• Astronomical Events
• Anything about the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary extinction event, that killed the dinosaurs amongst others.
• Somebody's A Pale of Air, Isaac Asimov's Nemesis and the film When Worlds Collide, all involving the close passage of a very massive body through the solar system.
• Various impact stories, such as Lucifer's Hammer or Deep Impact.
• Transcendence
• Most works by Vernor Vinge have something to do with this. Cultures become more and more advanced, evolve faster and faster, and finally evolve into something that isn't there any more.
• Iain Banks' Culture series.
• Poul Anderson's Brainwave, where superintelligent humans are no longer interested in or able to tolerate doing the boring jobs that are necessary.

A quote to close:

"America is unique in having skipped straight from barbarism to decadence without the usual intervention of civilisation."

(misquoted from memory)

Next week: I remember we decided on something and I wrote it down but I seem to have lost it.

I welcome feedback at David.Bofinger@dsto.defenceSpamProofing.gov.au (delete the spamproofing).