Santa Claus machine (n.) - Whimsical nickname for a self-fueling universal constructor; essentially, a machine that can create any object or structure desired by transmuting any materials already on hand. The term was coined by the late physicist and nuclear disarmament advocate Ted Taylor. Santa Claus machines are often seen as necessary components for the creation of megastructures, as the time and materials necessary to build Dyson Spheres or Niven Rings under direct human supervision and effort is astronomically impractical. (I once did some back-of-the-napkin math on what it would take for NASA to build a Death Star, and that's a pretty clear case for why we need Santa Claus and a legion of tireless robo-elves.)
Some allegory or equivalent of the Santa Claus machine is a long-held staple of speculative fiction. Star Trek's replicators are perhaps the most famous example, though the pharaohic chemical transmuter factories from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy also fit the bill, as do the semi-sentient household "makers" from Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's comic series Transmetropolitan. Self-directing Santa Claus machines are also fodder for sci-fi-horror, as they may be a precursor to a gray goo outbreak. In the right hands, Santa Claus machines could lead to a post-scarcity economy (cue the Whuffie references). Paradise or apocalypse, Santa Claus machines could bring about either.
Spam in a can (adj.) - Space program slang term for a passive occupant in a spacecraft, specifically a space capsule. The phrase is generally attributed to Chuck Yeagar, if only because he's shown describing the Mercury astronauts as "spam in a can" in the movie The Right Stuff, though there is ample evidence that multiple astronauts and NASA officials used the term liberally during the 1960s Space Race. The early Mercury astronauts, all trained military pilots, are known to have resisted being mere "spam in a can" with no active control of their vessels, thus forcing a level of human direction into early space vehicles.
Spam in a can is now typically used as a snarky criticism of the current level of manned spaceflight technology, as humans are still travelling as meat packed into primitive metal containers and shipped long distances. This falls under the sensawunda criticism of NASA -- particularly the space shuttle successor Project Constellation, which is described as "Apollo on steroids" -- in that we are still not creating or using the sci-fi-inspired tech that books and movies has promised us for decades. Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran rather deftly pointed out the spam-in-a-can disappointment factor with NASA in the graphic novel Orbiter, wherein an alien intelligence redesigns our "primitive" space shuttle into a true interplanetary exploration vehicle.
I bring it up because:Laika passed away 52 years ago on Tuesday. For those that don't know the name, Laika was the first living creature that humans sent into space. She was a Soviet space dog launched aboard Sputnik 2 on Nov. 3, 1957. She died from overheating a few hours after launch, thus making Laika the first spaceflight casualty. Her likeness is preserved in a statue at the cosmonaut training facility in Star City, Russia, as her nation's first space traveler. Telemetry from her mission proved that living beings could survive launch g-forces and weightlessness, thus proving that spam in a can was a viable manned spaceflight model.
I also mention the spam in a can principle as a corollary to Charles Stross's recent thought experiment blog post, How habitable is the Earth? Stross essentially argues that humans are explicitly designed for a particular fraction of Earth's environment that exists during a hyper-minute fraction of Earth's geological history, thus making human space exploration -- which removes us from this environment -- a terribly difficult and expensive undertaking. Karl Schroeder recently counter-argued (the point, not Stross) that most of these problems are surmountable if we get launch expenses down and can get the proper equipment -- all of which already exists -- into orbit cheaply. Which gets us back to the spam in a can criticism: Until the tech gets better, large-scale humans space exploration is a pipe dream.
Even though he promised not to berate the dying Big Three science fiction magazines, Warren Ellis just can't help himself--pointing out with bitter glee that the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had to cut its frequency in half to survive. Meanwhile, Analog and Asimov's dropped their per-issue word counts by 4000 apiece. Taken together, these are the latest death tremor of printed short-form sci-fi. Put another way, people won't be putting short-form sci-fi onto bundles of dead trees much longer.
There's a pretty decent argument to be made that the Internet is killing the midsize and smaller science fiction conventions of the world. Unless the convention is local--and sometimes not even then--why haul out to spend a weekend with 500 or so fans and maybe one sci-fi/fantasy author or artist when you can stalk 500 geek stars from the comfort of your RSS reader? The only cons worth going to now are those that have a critical mass of stars and attractions: Comic-Con, PAX, DragonCon, Origins, GenCon. Right?
Bullshit.
Yes, the Internet has made one of the primary reasons to attend cons disappear--once upon a time, the only way to connect to fellow fans and creators was in person at cons, but now you've got more geek friends in you World of Warcraft guild than you ever met at Mid-South or APolloCon. Except that chatting online and actually hanging out with people are still two very different experiences. And despite our reputations as introverted, girl-fearing basement trolls, geeks are social creatures, too, and crave real-life human contact. Mostly.
The problem with fandom in the Internet age is that most conventions refuse to adapt to Web 2.0. They work against the Internet, rather than with it. For example, I can conjure up a list of dream convention Guests of Honor--something I've done before-- strictly from my Twitter follow list. Social media makes reaching these people easier, not just because I can ping them in Twitter easier than I can penetrate their spam filters, but because by following them, I know how to approach them--what their interests are, what their preferences in terms of con attendance are, and a sense of their availability. Plus, I can appeal to their vanity by namedropping any of the recent projects they've pimped on Twitter. That's so much better than a blind e-mail.
And that's just one social media tool, making no mention of Facebook, Pownce, MySpace, or any other buzzword-compliant online community.
If I were to get any decent number of the people I tweet-stalk to attend my convention, they'd all Twitter and/or blog about it whilst attending, instantly creating a digital megaphone of free publicity for my con, which parlays into the next year's attendance and a desire for other guests either to officially attend or just hang out of their own accord. (This is especially true of the non-television and film folks, who tend to make more use of conventions as chances to promote their work.)
Since I know the Profilactic guys (name-dropping!), I could probably arrange for a credential-neutral signup system that let participants in any online community connect. More to the point, I'd invite the Profilactic team, along with geek-centric Web 2.0 people like Jake McKee (he's got serious Lego street cred). If PenguinCon can combine sci-fi and Linux, why can't my local ConGlomeration combine sci-fi and Web 2.0? Why not let the artists and the engineers comingle, to everyone's entertainment and benefit?
Cost is the general answer, of course. The Convention Committee pays for airfare, room, and a meal per diem to guests, and in the case of those that require it, an appearance fee and/or accomodations for the guest's family. Thus, most cons can only afford two or three guests, so attaining critical mass of several really cool guests means many of the celebs must pay to bring themselves, which means the con needs to be big enough for it to be worth their while to attend as a promotional expense, which is a chicken-and-the-egg problem.
Except I seem to recall that physical attendance is no longer a barrier to participation in the Web 2.0 age. Yes, I know this contradicts the "actually hang out with people" angle of my earlier statement, but what if you could do big-screen multiparty video-conferencing at our Convention 2.0, with panel sessions involving a mix of live and online attendees, Jedi Council-style? Maybe I can't afford to bring Charles Stross to the states, but if I can get him on a panel discussing space opera sci-fi with, say, John Scalzi physically in the room, that's worth signing up for, right? Or maybe having Internet-friends (with each other, not with me) Warren Ellis and Wil Wheaton discuss music and comics and blogging, with only Wil in the room? Who wouldn't want to get in on that? And if we made the conference virtually accessible, so you could buy a cheap online pass to the virtual sessions, wouldn't folks buy a few of those. We could also archive the recorded panels for free distiribution after the con is over, pimping out the coolness as a viral advert for next year's party.
This is just me spitballing, of course. The video conference expense and tech resources may end up costing as much as a couple of guests, but if those resources got us ten big-name panelists instead of two, and those panelists had an online presence that pimped us to the masses for free, isn't that a net gain? Besides, I'd love to finally meet the guys from SFSignal, or put a voice to Rich Lovatt after conversing with him on and off for a while now.
But most of all, as a guy who loves to read literature about the future, it would be nice if my fandom finally starting embrcing the futuristic tech of the present. If sci-fi conventions want a future, they're going to have to.
So last week I got canned from a job of seven years and seven days. Came as quite a bit of a shock, since my ego hadn't really prepared me for losing what was on many levels a dream job, where I got to write trivia questions, blog about science fiction, dream up Web site features, analyze interesting data, moderate a forum, and basically solve problems all day in an office with sanctioned video game systems, free decaf tea, a scandalously casual dress code, and cube mates who kicked ass and took names. Yes, there were such jobs hidden in the bowels of CNet, if you knew where to look.
I was not happy to be let go. And today it finally occurred to me that I've also--in betwixt feeling sorry for myself--accidentally kind of screwed Diesel Sweeties. I was about to expand my geekish blog franchise into video (something I was really looking forward to) and the good R. Stevens--creator of Diesel Sweeties--was all lined up to to donate some of his mega-awesome t-shirts as my on-camera wardrobe (for you see, one of the unwritten rules of video is never wear the same shirt twice).
Mr. Stevens kicked in with these two ubercool shirts just to get the ball rolling--and then I got downsized with extreme prejudice before nary a video was filmed.
Now, Mr. Stevens will scarcely feel the pinch of this setback--he's hobnobbing with Warren Ellis, so I'm barely a blip on his radar screen--but I still feel like a heel for not living up to my promises. Yes, I just got a career smackdown, and I'm worried about offending a webcomic artist whom I've never personally met.
What's really strange about all this is that R. Stevens and Warren Ellis have been top of mind of late, and not just for the t-shirt scamming. Ellis, Bastard Tyrant of the Intarweebs, and Thane of Comicdom (it's a MacBeth reference; look it up), recently spoke about why he doesn't get all gooey in the pants over the chance to, say, write Batman or The X-men:
Or, if you like: you can only paint someone else's house for so long before you start thinking that it might be nice to own your own house one day.
I'm okay with painting other people's houses for short periods, because I'm good at it and it pays well and on nice days it's fun. But I never ever confuse painting a house for owning that house. And if I spent every waking hour painting other people's houses, I wouldn't be able to build houses of my own.
I spent the last seven years painting somebody else's house, and all that work just got taken from me and dismissed as part of a corporate cost-cutting measure. I was work-for-hire, to use a publishing term, and I never thought that I actually owned anything I wrote, but it all was identified pretty directly with me personally, and when I was let go, they decided to just stop doing the column and the blog that I had toiled to build to success.
Put another way: My work was meaningless, so far as my employers were concerned. That's a bitter pill, since I spent so much of my time and passion building those things. Guess I had to learn the hard way. Time to paint my own house or, in this case, start my own blog. You're reading the inaugural post of that new beginning.
Do I expect to make money at this blog? Probably not, or at least not much. Certainly not enough to live on. I'll need another day job, as John Scalzi advises, but that day job won't be about building a personal brand around me--unless I own the brand.
It's time for me to get serious about my long-dormant writing career. My buddy Ian "Lizard" Harac just got a novel deal, and I can't let him have all the fun. I'll post some of my practice fiction here, maybe even toss out a trivia question or two, and basically try to be interesting enough that my old contacts at SFSignal feel the urge to link to me again. I invite all of you along for the ride.
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