It’s well known that one of the best ways to get someone to do something is to tell them that they shouldn’t do it. In the case of author Zoe Ferraris, the thing she was told she shouldn’t do is write about a particular character — one whose origins are outside the usual experience of her audience. Two books on, this character is alive and well, so there. Here’s Ferraris to tell you about the character, the world he lives in, and why she keeps on with him in her newest novel, City of Veils.

ZOE FERRARIS:

City of Veils comes from a big idea and a small one.

In Jeddah, my ex-husband once brought me to a jacket bazaar. Yes, there was a whole market devoted to outwear in the hottest country in the world. Furs, pea coats, leather, you name it. He wanted to buy a “Columbo coat” – a Peter Falk trench coat – and set off to solve mysteries. He was bored. But I was electrified. It occurred to me that there were no Muslim investigators in crime fiction, and I thought that it might be fun to write one.

That was the small idea.

City of Veils started out as a serial killer novel back in the early 00s. (I go with the Brits and call them the naughties.) I set an American serial killer loose in Saudi Arabia. He was happily killing people but mostly chasing down one American woman whose husband had conveniently abandoned her in the one country on earth where she couldn’t fend for herself, being a woman and an American and someone not very good at wearing a veil. I sent the novel to an agent who said that the story of the American woman was great, but that my little subplot about “that Arab investigator” needed to be ejected into space.

I was so aggrieved at being told what to eject that I went out and wrote a whole book about my Arab investigator, Nayir Sharqi, which turned into my first novel, Finding Nouf.

I guess I’m still aggrieved, because City of Veils is basically that original story, minus the serial killer. We have an American woman abandoned by her husband. We have a brutal murder in which her husband may have been involved. We have a chase through the desert. And most importantly, we have a sandstorm. But still, that Arab investigator persists in taking up most of the book!

I arrived in Saudi Arabia with the notion that women were deeply, darkly oppressed by a conspiracy of ignorant, cruel, patronizing men. Then I started meeting my ex-husband’s friends, basically a bunch of twenty-something guys who wanted nothing more extravagant than to find a decent Friday-night date in a country where they weren’t allowed to talk to women outside their family. What’s a man to do? Turns out that in courtship, gender segregation is just as difficult for men as it is for women.

Nayir’s problem is even bigger than that. He has no experience with women. So when he finally gets to talk to one (putting his religious convictions aside), he tries his damndest not to mess it up, because he’s fairly certain that it would take no effort at all to mess everything up. I really want him to have love, I really do. But the problem is big enough that it’s going to take more than two books to solve it.

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City of Veils: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel. Visit Zoe Ferraris’ Blog. Follow her on Twitter.

We all love our tech — heck, I’m still swooning over that Droid X phone I bought a couple of weeks ago — but do we love our tech the way we love a partner, or a parent, or a child, or even a pet? The answer to this is, probably not, and if we do, there’s probably something a little bit off with us. But as Ted Chaing explains, by way of explaining his latest novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects, if we ever expect to get artificial intelligence that matches our own intelligence, a little love — real love — might be the thing we need to give to our tech.

TED CHIANG:

People routinely attempt to describe the human brain’s capabilities in terms of instructions per second, and then use that as a guidepost for predicting when computers when be as smart as people.  I think this makes about as much sense as judging the brain by the amount of heat it generates.  Imagine if someone were to say, “when we have a computer that runs as hot as a human brain, we will have a computer as smart as a human brain.” We’d laugh at such a claim, but people make similar claims about processing speed and for some reason they get taken seriously.

It’s been over a decade since we built a computer that could defeat the best human chess players, yet we’re nowhere near building a robot that can walk into your kitchen and cook you some scrambled eggs.  It turns out that, unlike chess, navigating the real world is not a problem that can be solved by simply using faster processors and more memory.  There’s more and more evidence that if we want an AI to have common sense, it will have to develop it in the same ways that children do: by imitating others, by trying different things and seeing what works, and most of all by accruing experience.  This means that creating a useful AI won’t just be a matter of programming, although some amazing advances in software will definitely be required; it will also involve many years of training. And the more useful you want it to be, the longer the training will take.

But surely the training can be accelerated somehow, can’t it?  I don’t believe so, or at least not easily.  This seems related to the misconception that a faster computer is a smarter one, but with humans it’s easier to see that speed is not the same thing as intelligence.  Suppose you had a digital simulation of Paris Hilton’s brain; no matter how fast a computer you run her on, she’s never going to understand differential equations.  By the same token, if you run a child at twice normal speed, all you’d get is a child whose attention span has been cut in half, and how useful is that?

But surely the AI will be able to learn faster because it won’t be hampered by emotions, right?  On the contrary, I think creating software that feels emotions will be a necessary step towards creating software that actually thinks, in much the same way that brains capable of emotion are an evolutionary predecessor to brains capable of thought.  But even if it’s possible to separate thinking from feeling, there may be other reasons to give AIs emotions.  Human beings are social animals, and the success of virtual pets like Tamagotchis demonstrates that we respond to things that appear to need care and affection.  And if an AI takes years to train, a good way to get a human to invest that kind of time is to create an emotional bond between the two.

And that’s what I was really interested in writing about: the kind of emotional relationship might develop between humans and AIs.  I don’t mean the affection that people feel for their iPhones or their scrupulously maintained classic cars, because those machines have no desires of their own.  It’s only when the other party in the relationship has independent desires that you can really gauge how deep a relationship is.  Some pet owners ignore their pets whenever they become inconvenient; some parents do as little for their children as they can get away with; some lovers break up with each other the first time they have a big argument.  In all of those cases, the people are unwilling to put effort into the relationship.  Having a real relationship, whether with a pet or a child or a lover, requires that you be willing to balance someone else’s wants and needs with your own.

I don’t know if humans will ever have that kind of relationship with AIs, but I feel like this is an area that’s been largely overlooked in science fiction.  I’ve read a lot of stories in which people argue that AIs deserve legal rights, but in focusing on the big philosophical question, there’s a mundane reality that these stories gloss over.  It’s a bit like how movies show separated lovers overcoming tremendous obstacles to be reunited: that’s wonderfully romantic, but it’s not the whole story when it comes to love; over the long term, love also means working through money problems and picking dirty laundry off the floor.  So while achieving legal rights for AIs would clearly be a major milestone, another stage that I think is just as important – and indeed, probably a prerequisite for initiating a legal battle – is for people to put real effort into their individual relationships with AIs.

And even if we don’t care about them having legal rights, there’s still good reason to treat AIs with respect.  Think about the pets of neglectful owners, or the lovers who have never stayed with someone longer than a month; are they the pets or lovers you would choose?  Think about the kind of people that bad parenting produces; are those the people you want to have as your friends or your employees?  No matter what roles we assign AIs, I suspect they will do a better job if, at some point during their development, there were people who cared about them.

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The Lifecycle of Software Objects: Amazon (more stock on the way)|Subterranean Press

Read a recent interview of Ted Chiang at Boing Boing.

Hey, you know what’s really scary? Kat Richardson does — and what she thinks is scary forms the basis of her popular “Greywalker” series of paranormal novels, of which Labyrinth is the latest installment. While Richardson’s heroine Harper Blaine explores the thin grey line between fantasy and reality, Richardson herself is here to explore what in us makes so many of us believe in what we can’t see or explain — and what that belief says about us.

KAT RICHARDSON:

What I wanted to do with the whole Greywalker series was explore the idea that we make our own  nightmares. All the books have relied on the idea what the human mind brings forth is more powerful and dreadful than anything outside ourselves—we are potentially the worst monsters—while that same power of imagination and will offers the only hope of regaining control or improving our lives. The titular Grey of the series title—the thin realm of magic between the normal and the paranormal—is  infinitely manipulable by human belief, manifesting in our world as magic, monsters, and horrors usually recognized by only a few normal people. The heroine has the ability to see and manipulate parts of that world to do her job as a private investigator to the ghostly and undead. The newest book wraps up a lot of long-developing issues which rely heavily on these themes.

So, I write about ghosts and monsters and a private investigator who does not sleep with them. I’ve never allowed the protagonist, Harper Blaine, to literally embrace the bizarre, even when she comes to accept it as a part of her life. Her role as a detective is fixing the breakages between the normal and the paranormal; it would be inappropriate for her to become personally attached to one side or the other. Separation with understanding is not only a challenge for Harper, but an opportunity for me to show that essential conflict while the she finds answers to her clients’ freakish problems.

I have always liked stories of the strange and unexplained, shiver-inducing ghost stories told by campfires, and weird science. I’m kind of a weird-physics groupie at heart, too. So I mixed all that stuff together in my writer sandbox to create the world and characters of the Grey. I like to find strange stories and odd bits of real history and see what I can make of them, because that’s my idea of fun. Then I take the reality that is stranger than fiction and drop it on my heroine like a load of bricks. If I can, I like to throw in a social issue or two, like homelessness or racism. But I’m not interested in hitting the reader over the head with any of my themes; I want the the tougher concepts to percolate in quietly. If I write an entertaining story, the reader can swallow the hard parts easily and, if I did a good job, they will think about those issues later.

I usually start a new book with two ideas: a character development goal and a creepy story I want to explore. I build the plot like a mosaic, taking bits of real history, myth, legend, and current fact to form the picture on the surface and use the character development needs, continuing cast, and social issues as the mortar that holds the story together while the reader watches the story-picture develop. I try to have a solid outline when I start, but that’s just a roadmap, not the journey. If I find some really cool fact or monster I can use, I’ll throw that in, too. Because writing should be fun for the writer as well as the reader: this job doesn’t pay well enough to hate.

Why did I choose to tell my stories this way? Well, I consider myself essentially lazy: I’d rather use the real world and real history, or stories other people have been telling each other for millennia as the pieces of my mosaic than have to make it all up myself (because that’s really hard, God-like work), which was another reason the idea of things just out of sight, and history that lingers appealed to me. I do sometimes wish history and reality weren’t so slippery in the research phase. Once in a while I just can’t find the piece I need and I have to make things up. Luckily for me, fact is often stranger than fiction. And library chairs are more comfortable than I remembered. But the premise that people are the worst monsters has continued to be—sadly—a fertile ground for stories.

When I started on this series, I thought I’d like to write a detective novel about a PI with ghosts for clients. That’s all I wanted. But as I worked on it, I discovered that the “why” of the situation was as interesting to me as the “what.” I wondered why a ghost or a vampire might need a detective and how the world is affected—haunted—by catastrophic or horrifying events. What residue is left behind, intangible but effecting us whenever we think of the event? Why do some places or people make us uncomfortable for no reason we can pin down?

Why, in the face of science, do we cling to belief in the numinous and how are we not simply overwhelmed by our complex and contradictory world? Is there something just out of our sight that explains it all? I kept coming back to the idea that there is a lot we don’t examine. That we define ourselves and redefine our world at a manageable size and let the rest go. It’s when we’re forced to confront “the rest” that we rise to the occasion or fail. And if that “rest” was the manifestation of our own collective fears, hopes, and beliefs that might explain a lot….

So, that was my “big idea:” rise or fall, face the strange or hide our eyes, it is our own minds that make a situation a nightmare or an adventure.

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Labyrinth: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit Richardson’s LiveJournal and her group blog. Follow her on Twitter.