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Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow collaborated on a short story entitled "Jury Service," which has been serialized on SciFi.com. The whole story is up now. Fun reading for geeks. Not entirely deep, though; I'd kind of have to classify it as what eluki bes shahar calls phatic text.

I.e., it's very comforting fiction. To a certain class of extropian geek, reading this is like drinking a glass of warm milk. The story is in service of the extrapolation: Huw is secondary to the cool transhuman technology. I am, alas, not compelled by Huw -- I'm compelled by what happened to him.

This is not a bad thing per se. Science fiction (as does most genre literature) has always had an element of the phatic to it; it's part of the outsider culture that revels in the knowledge of difference. There's a body of knowledge to science fiction reading, in that fans can be expected to know what a hyperdrive does (or what cyberspace is) without a lot of explanation. Elements of that shared body of knowledge serve as phatic signifiers, letting the reader know that he or she is in a familiar place.

Some books also progress beyond that, adding new elements to the vocabulary. Larry Niven invented the flash crowd. Daniel Keyes gave us the concept of enhanced intelligence. H. G. Wells gave us the Moon. There's an importance balance; the comfort of existing elements provides a base on which to build the new. Phatic text is a necessity, in fact.

The interesting thing about "Jury Service" is that it's extropian phatic text. It's not at all clear to me that the extropian concepts inherent in the story are really part of the common memes of science fiction just yet; I think Doctorow and Stross are changing that with this and other similar stories. See also, of course, the father of extropian SF Neal Stephenson. I suppose, come to think of it, that Vernor Vinge is the grandfather. Bruce Sterling is the dirty old uncle, and any metaphor which resorts to a dirty old uncle should probably be put out of its misery around now.

Is this just cyberpunk? No. It differs from cyberpunk in that cyberpunk was not a product of technologically savvy authors. The stuff I'm talking about is informed by the cyber, and has not a whole lot of punk in it. The story of how Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter is legend, and it says a lot about the differences between the cyberpunk ethos and the extropian ethos.

Sterling reinvented himself as a tech-savvy writer pretty early on, mind you, but I'd argue that this really was a reinvention. Note that the top ten nonfiction book list in Cheap Trick #4 is more interested in social sciences than in geek cred.

So, yeah; phatic text, but perhaps not phatic in the usual ways. I'll have to think more on this.

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According to the Washington Post, the CIA is torturing prisoners in Afghanistan. The best quote from the article: "'If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job,' said one official who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists." Fun stuff. Reportedly, the CIA has also turned prisoners over to various countries for interrogation, including Syria. Last time I looked, Syria was not near the top of our friendly powers list.

I believe that these tactics have made it easier to carry out operations against Al Qaeda. No question at all. Information is power.

I also believe that these tactics are flat out wrong, because I think that sometimes we must sacrifice efficiency for the sake of our values. Or, if you like, for the sake of those human rights so casually dismissed above.

Bill Whittle wrote a piece on gun control, which many conservative bloggers linked to with great relish. It is burdened with a great deal of irrelevant anti-European sentiment, which I find ignorant and superficial. I could write an entire post on the ways in which his snideness about France trivializes the substantial and noble risks taken by the French resistance during World War II.

However, he said one thing in particular which I think is exceedingly relevant here. Those who would defend the use of torture in our conflict with Al Qaeda would do well to aconsider it, and how it relates to the matter of torture, rather than simply waving it off with some comment about how much more efficient this strategy is. He's talking about the dangers of totalitarianism here: "Try and understand this about Americans like myself and others who can look such horrors in the eye: We are not going out like that. Get it? We'll put up with handgun murders if we have to, but we are not going down that road."

That's a reasonable statement. Yes, handgun ownership may result in deaths. He's thought about that and he thinks it's worth the price. Freedom is worth some sacrifice.

Now consider that in relation to torture. Is it worth giving up our ideals in order to keep ourselves a little safer? Is safety more important than knowing that we are not the kind of country who tortures other human beings?

You can have a pretty serious argument about that. I know what my answer is. Yours may be different, and I don't think that disagreement here is insane or unwise. It's just different priorities. The important thing is not to pretend that there's no possible debate, and that the tradeoff is inevitable. This is not a question to be handwaved.