Di Filippo: FarmEarth
Jul. 12th, 2011 07:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteIt’s probably a good thing that a Di Filippo story follows “The Bridge”, since he’s an author who always brings a smile and a wink to his work. But I’ve often criticized his work because it strikes what is, for me, an uncomfortable balance between humor and the serious issues he sometimes addresses; the result often falls uncomfortably between the two extremes, never quite satisfying either humor or seriousness. I deliberately let some time pass before embarking on “FarmEarth” simply to ensure that it wouldn’t strike me as inappropriately glib in juxtaposition with “The Bridge”. That turns out to have been a wise choice, since it let me assess “FarmEarth” more objectively on its own merits.
Crispian Tanjuatco is 13 years old at the time of the study, living in a near-future world where implants (auricular for sound and cellphone, “memtax” for visual and Web interface) are common and genemods (such as “kymes” = chimeric chimps, presumably with human DNA added to make them more intelligent and useful to us) are becoming ever more common. His half-brother Benno, for example, has had his brain “overclocked” (like many computer fans do with their CPUs), and while it makes him brilliant, it also gives him an autism-like affect during interpersonal interactions. Crispian’s family is a polyamorous “polybond”, with Darla as his egg-mom (egg donor?), Kiana as his mito-mom (host womb?), and Marcel as his “lone” father. Darla’s an osteo-engineer and a quant girl (i.e., someone who loves her numbers); for example, when Crispian bemoans the fact he’ll have to wait six more months until he’s ready to play FarmEarth, she points out that this is only 4% of his life thus far. Kiana works at the NASDAQ casino (a notion that had me snorting in mirth) as a hostess, and she’s good at her job: she sells more drinks than any other worker, and that takes more than just interesting cleavage. Marcel’s what we’d call a house-husband, who spends his day managing the family’s needs and “playing” FarmEarth in his spare time.
[Spoilers] So what exactly is FarmEarth? It’s Di Filippo’s pastiche of FarmVille (in case you’ve been living in a cave and haven’t heard of it: http://www.farmville.com/), and though it’s pitched as a game, it’s a serious attempt to reverse the impacts of more than a century of cumulative environmental damage. Kids are trained in all the rudiments of ecology (right down to the genetics and -omics of individual organisms) until they master these concepts well enough to join the FarmEarth community. At that point, they begin remotely managing Earth’s ecosystems by means of teleoperated effectors of various sorts. Beginners get the short end of the stick while they’re learning, and can only manipulate minor things like bacterial colonies that need human assistance to move to the next pollutant hotspot; specifically, beginners take on tasks that can’t cause much harm if you make a mistake. (“It was basically like spinning the composter at home: a useful duty that stunk.”) In contrast, experienced Master-level “farmers” get to play with more complex systems, from herds of large wild animals right up to large chunks of an ecosystem; for instance, when we meet Benno, he’s working to enhance the root systems of a forest that is serving as a sand-control barrier in Mali. As you might expect, the possibility for seriously screwing things up means that there are many rules and restrictions, which is precisely the kind of constraints you’d expect an overeducated, exceptionally bright group like Crispian and his friends to rebel against.
And rebel they do: they decide to hack the system so they can play free of those constraints. Their opportunity comes when Adán, the brother of Crispian’s friend Cheo, gets out of prison early for good behavior. Four years ago, he was imprisoned for misappropriation of FarmEarth resources (using his skills to grow drug crops instead of protecting the endangered animals he was responsible for), and this quite rightly raises a red flag for Crispian when Adán offers Cheo and his friends illicit Master-level access to FarmEarth in return for performing some unspecified work whose purpse he refuses to explain. Adán is associated with Los Braceros Últimos (perhaps “the ultimate workers” or “the strong arm of Gaia”?), a group that is frustrated with FarmEarth’s “slow but steady” approach to saving the world; they’d prefer faster and more radical interventions. But despite his reservations, Crispian bows to peer pressure (and the lure of a free ticket to Master level) and is drawn into the plan.
The plan turns out to be tunneling with “molebots”, mining machines that could be operated easily enough by artificial intelligence—if not for an unfortunate incident when some AI demolition machines were hacked and used to destroy a VIP’s home, leading to a legislated ban on the use of AI for FarmEarth and other systems. The destination of the tunnels is concealed by Los Braceros, for good reason as it turns out: when Benno discovers what Crispian is up to (presumably Master-level players have better monitoring tools and more skill at using them than most other players), he forces his half-brother out of the system. Crispian resents his brother, and resists, but Benno has been indulging in martial arts sims for many hours, and easily defeats and immobilizes his younger brother. Benno reveals that the Los Braceros plan is to release the pent up lava beneath an Icelandic volcano in a single massive outburst, creating what is called a “Pinatubo Event”, named after the 1991 Philippines eruption that filled the air with ash and other stuff that reflected enough sunlight to significantly cool the planet. It’s a risky proposition at best, and likely (as in the case of the real Pinatubo) to produce only short-term benefits; more importantly, the plan shows a flagrant disregard for the Icelanders who would be killed by the eruption. Benno quickly pulls in his mother, Zoysia; both are such experts at FarmEarth that they have “God-level” access to the system’s controls when they need it, and they quickly and nastily shut down the Los Braceros operation.
It’s probably too optimistic to project polybonds as the social norm, particularly given how increasingly reactionary (not less) societies tends to become as the world becomes a scarier place or descends into outright crisis, but given that this is SF, it’s fair to project what we’d like to see happen in the hope that maybe it will inspire our readers to make it happen. (Worked for the space program, right?) It’s also utopian to assume that anything as powerful as FarmEarth wouldn’t be aggressively exploited by organized crime or by national espionage agencies, respectively for profit or to take down international rivals. We’ve already begun seeing organized efforts by (for example) China to hack into American government systems, and although we haven’t seen the Russian Mafiya clean out any major banks, it’s only a matter of time. The one truism in the war between computer security professionals and crackers is that the crackers always find a way in eventually. That’s germane to the story because there would be awfully tight controls on Master-level user accounts to prevent such abuses. Presumably, this is how Benno discovers what Crispian is doing.
One of the biggest problems I have with Di Filippo’s writing is the excessively high idea density. It’s not the ideas per se that cause the problem, since we always have lots of fun exploring them with him; rather, the problem is that he often can’t resist the urge to make them explicit so that we, as readers, will understand the source of the science or technical knowledge that gave rise to the ideas. Sometimes this (mostly) works, as in the following example: “Instantly we were out of augie overlays and into full virt.” (That is, Crispian is describing the shift from augmented reality, with a heads-up display adding information to what he can see with his own eyes, to a fully-immersive virtual environment displayed exclusively inside his head.) Too often, this leads to awkward infodumps, as when Crispian describes the living sponge the kids are using as a hackysack, and it can also lead to overdescription using terms that real people would never use outside of an engineering conference: the Coke machine is described as a “solar-butane fridge” and the “faintly flickering OLED” of Crispian’s memtax is another example. This is precisely the kind of thing everyone in the story world already knows and therefore would never explain to anyyone else... “as you know, Paul.” *G* After all, when was the last time you told your Mom or yourself that you were testing beta release 1.7 of Windows 9 running in a virtual machine on the second core of your Core i7 processor? (Okay, maybe as an SF reader you do talk to your mom this way. *G*)
A lesser problem is a recurring theme in the stories I’ve read, namely that the primary female protagonist seems always to be gorgeous and well-endowed while also being brilliant. It’s laudable that Di Filippo is willing to treat beautiful women as highly intelligent until proven otherwise, but I’d be more comfortable with this if (i) he wore this less overtly on his sleeve and (ii) an occasional example of his really intelligent women wasn’t so pneumatically enhanced. The goal is laudable, but somehow it comes off as forced.
Many of my criticisms of Di Filippo’s approach amount to differences in personal taste, and should not be taken as condemnation. He has a unique style that is not without its pleasures, even if it’s not always to my taste. The teen characters in the story are reasonably convincing and his description of their group interactions doubly so. The pleasantly multi-ethnic group of protagonists is also a nice change from the status quo. The notion of an older person running a gang of early-teen hackers might seem unlikely, but it turns out to be very realistic. (When I was in university, an online friend in Toronto suddenly disappeared; years later, I learned that she’d been arrested for organizing exactly this kind of hacker gang.) Di Filippo also tells an interesting tale, clearly and economically written, and the idea density makes it great fun for your inner geek. His satirical poke at the NASDAQ casino is funny precisely because of how true it is. Still, despite these virtues, I always seem to leave a Di Filippo story feeling vaguely unsatisfied. That’s too bad, because there’s much here to like.
Crispian Tanjuatco is 13 years old at the time of the study, living in a near-future world where implants (auricular for sound and cellphone, “memtax” for visual and Web interface) are common and genemods (such as “kymes” = chimeric chimps, presumably with human DNA added to make them more intelligent and useful to us) are becoming ever more common. His half-brother Benno, for example, has had his brain “overclocked” (like many computer fans do with their CPUs), and while it makes him brilliant, it also gives him an autism-like affect during interpersonal interactions. Crispian’s family is a polyamorous “polybond”, with Darla as his egg-mom (egg donor?), Kiana as his mito-mom (host womb?), and Marcel as his “lone” father. Darla’s an osteo-engineer and a quant girl (i.e., someone who loves her numbers); for example, when Crispian bemoans the fact he’ll have to wait six more months until he’s ready to play FarmEarth, she points out that this is only 4% of his life thus far. Kiana works at the NASDAQ casino (a notion that had me snorting in mirth) as a hostess, and she’s good at her job: she sells more drinks than any other worker, and that takes more than just interesting cleavage. Marcel’s what we’d call a house-husband, who spends his day managing the family’s needs and “playing” FarmEarth in his spare time.
[Spoilers] So what exactly is FarmEarth? It’s Di Filippo’s pastiche of FarmVille (in case you’ve been living in a cave and haven’t heard of it: http://www.farmville.com/), and though it’s pitched as a game, it’s a serious attempt to reverse the impacts of more than a century of cumulative environmental damage. Kids are trained in all the rudiments of ecology (right down to the genetics and -omics of individual organisms) until they master these concepts well enough to join the FarmEarth community. At that point, they begin remotely managing Earth’s ecosystems by means of teleoperated effectors of various sorts. Beginners get the short end of the stick while they’re learning, and can only manipulate minor things like bacterial colonies that need human assistance to move to the next pollutant hotspot; specifically, beginners take on tasks that can’t cause much harm if you make a mistake. (“It was basically like spinning the composter at home: a useful duty that stunk.”) In contrast, experienced Master-level “farmers” get to play with more complex systems, from herds of large wild animals right up to large chunks of an ecosystem; for instance, when we meet Benno, he’s working to enhance the root systems of a forest that is serving as a sand-control barrier in Mali. As you might expect, the possibility for seriously screwing things up means that there are many rules and restrictions, which is precisely the kind of constraints you’d expect an overeducated, exceptionally bright group like Crispian and his friends to rebel against.
And rebel they do: they decide to hack the system so they can play free of those constraints. Their opportunity comes when Adán, the brother of Crispian’s friend Cheo, gets out of prison early for good behavior. Four years ago, he was imprisoned for misappropriation of FarmEarth resources (using his skills to grow drug crops instead of protecting the endangered animals he was responsible for), and this quite rightly raises a red flag for Crispian when Adán offers Cheo and his friends illicit Master-level access to FarmEarth in return for performing some unspecified work whose purpse he refuses to explain. Adán is associated with Los Braceros Últimos (perhaps “the ultimate workers” or “the strong arm of Gaia”?), a group that is frustrated with FarmEarth’s “slow but steady” approach to saving the world; they’d prefer faster and more radical interventions. But despite his reservations, Crispian bows to peer pressure (and the lure of a free ticket to Master level) and is drawn into the plan.
The plan turns out to be tunneling with “molebots”, mining machines that could be operated easily enough by artificial intelligence—if not for an unfortunate incident when some AI demolition machines were hacked and used to destroy a VIP’s home, leading to a legislated ban on the use of AI for FarmEarth and other systems. The destination of the tunnels is concealed by Los Braceros, for good reason as it turns out: when Benno discovers what Crispian is up to (presumably Master-level players have better monitoring tools and more skill at using them than most other players), he forces his half-brother out of the system. Crispian resents his brother, and resists, but Benno has been indulging in martial arts sims for many hours, and easily defeats and immobilizes his younger brother. Benno reveals that the Los Braceros plan is to release the pent up lava beneath an Icelandic volcano in a single massive outburst, creating what is called a “Pinatubo Event”, named after the 1991 Philippines eruption that filled the air with ash and other stuff that reflected enough sunlight to significantly cool the planet. It’s a risky proposition at best, and likely (as in the case of the real Pinatubo) to produce only short-term benefits; more importantly, the plan shows a flagrant disregard for the Icelanders who would be killed by the eruption. Benno quickly pulls in his mother, Zoysia; both are such experts at FarmEarth that they have “God-level” access to the system’s controls when they need it, and they quickly and nastily shut down the Los Braceros operation.
It’s probably too optimistic to project polybonds as the social norm, particularly given how increasingly reactionary (not less) societies tends to become as the world becomes a scarier place or descends into outright crisis, but given that this is SF, it’s fair to project what we’d like to see happen in the hope that maybe it will inspire our readers to make it happen. (Worked for the space program, right?) It’s also utopian to assume that anything as powerful as FarmEarth wouldn’t be aggressively exploited by organized crime or by national espionage agencies, respectively for profit or to take down international rivals. We’ve already begun seeing organized efforts by (for example) China to hack into American government systems, and although we haven’t seen the Russian Mafiya clean out any major banks, it’s only a matter of time. The one truism in the war between computer security professionals and crackers is that the crackers always find a way in eventually. That’s germane to the story because there would be awfully tight controls on Master-level user accounts to prevent such abuses. Presumably, this is how Benno discovers what Crispian is doing.
One of the biggest problems I have with Di Filippo’s writing is the excessively high idea density. It’s not the ideas per se that cause the problem, since we always have lots of fun exploring them with him; rather, the problem is that he often can’t resist the urge to make them explicit so that we, as readers, will understand the source of the science or technical knowledge that gave rise to the ideas. Sometimes this (mostly) works, as in the following example: “Instantly we were out of augie overlays and into full virt.” (That is, Crispian is describing the shift from augmented reality, with a heads-up display adding information to what he can see with his own eyes, to a fully-immersive virtual environment displayed exclusively inside his head.) Too often, this leads to awkward infodumps, as when Crispian describes the living sponge the kids are using as a hackysack, and it can also lead to overdescription using terms that real people would never use outside of an engineering conference: the Coke machine is described as a “solar-butane fridge” and the “faintly flickering OLED” of Crispian’s memtax is another example. This is precisely the kind of thing everyone in the story world already knows and therefore would never explain to anyyone else... “as you know, Paul.” *G* After all, when was the last time you told your Mom or yourself that you were testing beta release 1.7 of Windows 9 running in a virtual machine on the second core of your Core i7 processor? (Okay, maybe as an SF reader you do talk to your mom this way. *G*)
A lesser problem is a recurring theme in the stories I’ve read, namely that the primary female protagonist seems always to be gorgeous and well-endowed while also being brilliant. It’s laudable that Di Filippo is willing to treat beautiful women as highly intelligent until proven otherwise, but I’d be more comfortable with this if (i) he wore this less overtly on his sleeve and (ii) an occasional example of his really intelligent women wasn’t so pneumatically enhanced. The goal is laudable, but somehow it comes off as forced.
Many of my criticisms of Di Filippo’s approach amount to differences in personal taste, and should not be taken as condemnation. He has a unique style that is not without its pleasures, even if it’s not always to my taste. The teen characters in the story are reasonably convincing and his description of their group interactions doubly so. The pleasantly multi-ethnic group of protagonists is also a nice change from the status quo. The notion of an older person running a gang of early-teen hackers might seem unlikely, but it turns out to be very realistic. (When I was in university, an online friend in Toronto suddenly disappeared; years later, I learned that she’d been arrested for organizing exactly this kind of hacker gang.) Di Filippo also tells an interesting tale, clearly and economically written, and the idea density makes it great fun for your inner geek. His satirical poke at the NASDAQ casino is funny precisely because of how true it is. Still, despite these virtues, I always seem to leave a Di Filippo story feeling vaguely unsatisfied. That’s too bad, because there’s much here to like.