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contents of this diary - contents special topics written about - topics First entry this page: this page: first entry Hugh Cook - his blog: latest entry |
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markets predict terrorism Ender's futures market Inspector Stremalon and the Torture Mungus milieu |
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(This story is part of my personal campaign against Good Taste, the dread slayer of potential.) The basic science fictional idea behind the story is that Inspector Stremalon, who lives and works in the city of Torture Mungus, decides to Poindexter a difficult case, the case in quesiton being (as the title indicates) that of the naked succubus sex slave murders. The public of the city of Torture Mungus will be able to invest speculatively, with payoffs for the killer's profession, location, social class, race and confessed motive. Will Poindextering the case crack the case? Well, that's not critical to Inspector Stremalon, who is primarily motivated (for reasons which will become clear as the story progresses) not to crack the case but, rather, to build a billiard table. That's the premise of my story, but there are plenty of other Poindexter stories waiting to be written. In fact, right now, in various locations on planet Earth, there are probably twenty thousand different SF writers hard at work on their individual science fictional permutations of Poindexter's bright idea. I hope to be one of the first to bring my version to the waiting world. Meantime, work on Bamboo Horses, my upcoming novel, continues, albeit slowly. I first started work on this in May, shortly after a trip to Kyoto, and it's going to be the first of my novels to have a distinctly Japanese flavor. Bamboo Horses is not set in Japan, because, after living in Japan continuously for only six years, I don't yet know enough about Japan to write a novel about it. (I would be more confident writing a novel about some country that I've never been to - a novel about Saddam Hussein's secret life as a werewolf, for example, or about coming of age in a Nazi cult commune in the high mountains near the border between Chile and Argentina.) Now that I think of it:- (Actually, we could recast Saddam as a high-powered executive living in California, change Uday into a murderous young female police officer called Udalina, and set things up so the life of the real werewolf goes unnoticed in a Los Angeles in which increasing numbers of people are falling victim to werewolf hallucinations caused by a bad batch of Waker Maker imported by North Korean agents of the alien invasion force ... so many stories, so little time ....)"It was a dog!" said Uday, waving his submachinegun around. "A big hairy dog! Or a wolf, maybe." Well, anyway. Setting aside both the original Saddam/werewolf idea and the Udalina permutation (Udalina could be an agent working for the organ smuggling conspiracy operated by the Andean Nazi death cult in league with the evil Swiss-based Council for Global Domination) let me say a few words about Bamboo Horses. This is a reasonably elegant piece of fiction (some sex but no werewolfs, and no Nazi death cult drug smugglers either) which is about (amongst other things) sex, sexual politics, married life, kidnapping, love, lust, betrayal, doubt, middle age, murder, another murder, yet one more murder, and accounting, and balancing the books, and downsizing, and economic survival in a deflationary economy. (COMING SOON!! - to YOU!! Middle-aged life in a deflationary economy - THE NOVEL!!!!) It is also (tangentially) about bamboo horses. Rather than being set in Nippon, Bamboo Horses is set in Nizon, which is not quite the same place, although certain points of similarity will probably be evident to a great many readers. At this stage the Bamboo Horses text runs to just over 40,000 words. I'm provisionally aiming for a length of about 80,000 words, which is about 250 pages (maybe more or maybe less, depending on how many words are put on a page.) I'm not planning to put this book online. Rather, the plan is to experiment with marketing it as a print-on-demand book. I had hoped to get it finished and in print this year, 2003, but at this writing it looks as if it probably won't be available until some time in 2004. Whether there's much of a market for stylistically elegant literary murder novels in the fantasy tradition I quite frankly don't know, but no doubt I will find out in due course. As for I have no idea how long this short story will take to complete, but I'd like to have it finished and online some time in August or September of this year, 2003. Section 57 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 August 02 Saturday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) The idea of using market gambling to predict terrorist acts may not be as nuts as the Luddites think. This from an expert, who described the "Pentagon-sponsored futures market in terrorism indicators" as "a good idea, killed by terrible public relations." So what make the expert think that the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) might be on to a good thing? The simple answer: this kind of stuff has worked elsewhere. Apparently the Iowa Electronics Market has been predicting election results for years, outperforming pre-election polls. This is not an isolated example. Similar markets have been organized to predict shifts in Federal Reserve monetary policy, the outcomes of political conventions and sales of consumer products. By Hal R. Varian, "an economics professor and dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley" - from an article, originally published in The New York Times, which appeared on page twelve of the International Herald Tribune (as published in Japan), 2003 August 1 Friday.If you go to the site then you find that it asks the question "Can markets predict the future?" For an answer, you can click on: The link is to a PDF document - a Portable Document Format document which can be read with Adobe Reader, available online as a free download. The document, from the College of Business Administration, University of Iowa, is dated November 2000. I'm surprised at how few traders have been involved:- "Vote share markets have ranged in size form [sic] a dozen or so active traders to more than 500." This surprises me because I would have thought such a sample of opinion to be far too small. How can a handful of traders outpredict all the people polled in pre-election polls? Skimming through the document, I found this:- "The market outperformed polls in 9 of 15 cases according to both measures (election eve closing prices and last week average prices.) Across all elections, the average poll error was 1.93% while the average market error was 1.49% and 1.58% by the two measures." The interesting point, of course, is that the traders are self-selected, whereas the people polled in pre-election polls are not. Amongst other things, the PDF document cites the work of Forsythe, Nelson, Neumann and Wright (1992) who "discuss the relationship between polls and market prices" and who conclude that "while pre-election polls are obvious sources of information for market traders, market prices do not follow poll results. If anything, market prices predict changes in polls." If you want to extrapolate the science fictional potential of this, the PDF document looks like a good place to start. .... having got this far, I decided I was done with DARPA, and started some recreational browsing, clicking through to Salam Pax .... things are not good in Iraq, and if you click through to Salam's site then he will enlarge on that theme. However, what caught my attention was his note that GOD is a fan of his site. GOD turns out to be William Gibson of www.williamgibsonbooks.com. I clicked my way through from Salam's site to a comment by Gibson on Salam ("I'm a total fan. Tells it like he sees it, and sees it like I can't.") And just below that I found an entry by Gibson posted Tuesday, July 29, 2003 at 12:00 P.M. saying "ENDER'S FUTURES MARKET TERMINATED." |
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The American science fiction writer Orson Scott Card wrote a famous SF novel (a novel famous in SF circles, at any rate) called Ender's Game. This novel features a character called Ender, a boy who is so good at playing wargames that his wargame moves can be copied by adults and used to achieve military success in the real world. In effect, the games that Ender is playing are modeling real world outcomes. By writing "ENDER'S FUTURES MARKET TERMINATED," Gibson is indicating that Poindexter's idea reminds him of Ender. (Only, instead of a war game being used to predict the real world, in the case of Poindexter's proposal we have a market.) |
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Gibson quotes Wolfowitz as saying that, while the Defense Department was supposed to be imaginative, "it sounds like maybe they got too imaginative" in the case of the online futures market plan.
and then click on "blog" ... this takes you through to a blog archive ... looking at what Gibson has written on DARPA I find him saying that:- "If I'd made this up in a work of fiction, I'd expect to hear the suspension groaning, under your disbelief". But does that mean that he likes the idea or doesn't like it? Or what? It's a bit cryptic. And what does he mean by this comment:- "DARPA. Those boys are *deep*"..." Sorry, but this god is too cryptic for me. I'm going to click away now and find some other shrine to propitiate. Followup note dated 2003 August 11 Monday:- Poindexter's idea has been criticized on the grounds that terrorists could, theoretically, make big bucks by playing the market. However, as Hal R. Varian made clear in only small sums of money would have been in play ... while I'm not a fan of either Poindexter or his DARPA spy shop, I really do think that the idea of a futures market in terrorist acts was at least worth trying, and I'm of the opinion that Poindexter got subjected to the intellectual equivalent of a lynching. Section 57 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 August 03 Sunday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Powered into the writing this weekend, using a fan to keep the computer cool. The cicadas started up about a week ago, and now the rainy season has come to an end and it is rapidly getting seriously hot. This weekend, I succeeded in writing which I have labelled as "an Inspector Stremalon story." I had hardly started on this story when it became clear to me that Inspector Stremalon and the Torture Mungus milieu are potentially good for a lot more than one story. At the end of "The Naked Succubus Sex Slave Murders," in fact, there's an obvious continuation. Inspector Stremalon is left in a fix: he works for the police force of the city of Krantankertus, the Iron City which is the Seat of Order in Torture Mungus, and it is a job requirement that he kill seven people a year (no more and no less) and, so far, he has killed nobody. One of the key elements of a good short story is a clock - a deadline. So the next story is obvious. With the clock ticking toward the deadline, Inspector Stremalon has to kill seven people (exactly). If he fails, then the dreaded Internal Affairs department will nail him for dereliction of duty. I've already found a preliminary title for this follow-up story, the preliminary title being "The Sex Candle Quarter." I hope for the story (when it ultimately gets written) to be another determined blow against the rule of good taste, but I'm not sure how long it will take before it is finished. Note: if you're not prepared to start into something which has a title like then you could try something not quite so weird (but still weird):- |
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"Uh huh," said Perry. He had a very clear memory of having been put to death by lethal injection for the murder of his wife. In fact, Perry had not killed his beloved Daphne, nor did he know who had. But he was fairly sure that he himself was dead. "So this is ....?" Where? Heaven, possibly. Emerald greens stretching away forever. Little lakes of limpidly clear water. Here and there, occasional buildings looking clean and bright in the sunlight. But his conscience was not clear enough for heaven. He had done some pretty ugly things in his time. Hell, then? Hell - no, he couldn't really see it. For a start, he had been genuinely repentant for his major sins. And, besides, as a fairly traditional, conservative guy, he couldn't square this endless golf course with any possible vision of hell. "Limbo, then," he decided. Limbo was for - for what? Was for the indifferent. Those too limply indecisive to be either good or bad. Those who had sleepwalked through life. But that didn't fit his own case, surely. Purgatory, then. The place where you atoned through suffering before going on to heaven. But suffering required - well, racks and whips and burning coals, that kind of stuff. "It's the opening credits," said Perry, deciding. "The movie will start shortly, right?" |
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