Blog (page 34)

We love comics.

Comics break the rules of storytelling, invent new ones, and break them again – more often than almost any other media.

We are also fortunate to know – and occasionally enjoy the twisted guidance of – one of the best writers in comics and speculative fiction: Mr Warren Ellis.

Warren is actually to blame for coming up with the name BERG for us back in the summer of 2009, based on our shared love of Nigel Kneale.

So, we were thrilled when he said yes earlier this year to Jack’s proposal of working together on a storytelling project.

The result, coming in early 2011, is SVK.

What is SVK?
It’s going to be a very beautifully-printed object – a graphic novella, drawn by one of our very favourite artists – Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker – who Warren collaborated with on “Lazarus Churchyard” back in 1991. I think I’m right in saying it’s their first major collaboration since then…

We can’t tell you too much more just yet, as they are both currently hard at work on it, but Warren describes SVK as “Franz Kafka’s Bourne Identity”.

Brilliant.

It’s also a story about looking, and it’s an investigation into perception, storytelling and optical experimentation that inherits some of the curiosities behind previous work of the studio such as our Here & There maps of Manhattan.

For us – it’s also an investigation into new ways to get things out in the world, and as a result we’re talking about SVK now because we’re looking for people, brands and companies who would like to be in the SVK project…

Looking for advertisers
There are going to be a small number of opportunities to feature advertising – which will be as inventive as the story itself. We’re talking to people now, so that we can go to print with them in February 2011.

If you’re in advertising or marketing, and you’d like to talk more about it, email info@berglondon.com with “SVK” in the subject.

John Kestner’s Tableau is a nightstand that drops photos it “sees” in its Twitter feed into its drawer, to be discovered by its owner. It can also upload images of things placed into its drawer. Kestner describe it as an “anti-computer experience”:

The nightstand drawer becomes a natural interface to a complex computing task, which now fits into the flow of life.

Matt J found this site collecting logos from through the James Bond movies. The Bond films are a franchise fascinated with branding and status; it’s great to see the branding of the many fictional corporations and firms in the franchise juxtaposed like this.

This BMW cinema commercial – produced by Serviceplan Munich – uses the after-image of text flashed at a cinema audience to reveal text to them only when they close their eyes. It’s a high-powered version of the Image Fulgurator, although here, the image is left in your sight (temporarily) rather than your photograph (permanently).

I loved astronaut Douglas Wheelock’s photographs taken from the International Space Station. This one (above) is of the Bahamas, but whether facing earth or the stars, his pictures are beautiful.

One more to end on: the moon.

The iPad feels like a household device.

Sofa computing: passable from person-to-person, parent-to-child… And sharable as a ‘multiplayer magic table’ surface, as discussed here previously.

And yet, at time-of-writing, it’s a personal computer.

While parents of my acquaintance have found work-arounds, such as placing their children’s favourite apps on specific ‘pages’ of the homescreen, it’s a device bound to a MacBook or iMac, and an iTunes account – ultimately to an individual, not a small group.

While travelling last month, my wife and I managed to use the iPad as our shared device by basically signing-in and out of our Google accounts. Do-able but laborious.

Switch seems like a useful step in the direction of “non-personal computing”, allowing multiple user accounts for browsing, with a single password for each.

But I thought I’d quickly sketch something that built on the ‘magic-table’ mock-ups I’d been playing with back in the summer – looking enhancing the passable and sharable nature of the iPad as an object in and of the household.

It’s pretty simple, and not much of leap, frankly…

The ‘person-in-each-corner’ pattern can already be seen in iPad games such as Marble Mixer and Multipong, so this really just uses the corners of the device in tandem with the orientation sensors to select which of the – up to four* – different users wants to access their apps and settings on the device.

Activity notifications could be displayed alongside the names on the lockscreen so that you could quickly see at a glance if anything needed your attention.

And, if you wanted a little more privacy from the rest of your housemates or family, then just a standard iOS passcode dialog could be set.

That’s it really.

Just a quick sketch but something I wanted to get out of my head.

The individual nature of the UI and user-model of the iPad seems so at odds to me with its form-factor, the share-ability of its screen technology and it’s emergent context of use that I can imagine something (much more elegant) than this coming from Apple in the near-future.

Of course, they may just want to sell us all one each…

When we first started discussing Havasu, I prepared some notes around the topic: prior art, interesting ideas about language we might like to include, interfaces that are more conversational than you might expect. I thought it might be worthwhile sharing that list – not only to show you what was going around my head whilst I was building Havasu, but also because I think it’s interesting. Here’s what I wrote.

Tom Carden – “Chatbots for to-do list management”

Friend-of-Berg Tom Carden wrote this four years ago, about a to-do list shaped like a push-pull stack, that’s addressed over IM. There’s only one bot, which every user talks to privately. But most important was this line:

“It’s a chatbot rather than a command line utility or a website because I want it to follow me home and I want it to be private and immediate.”

Private and immediate feels important.

Grice’s Maxims of Conversation

These are proposed by the philosopher Paul Grice, and are a fair dissection of what conversation looks like. They’re also great guidelines for UI. Consider the Maxim of Quantity:

• Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
• Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

The former is obvious, but the latter’s as important in conversational interfaces – by not offering up too much, you help restrict the types of information a user will return.

Matt W pointed out to me that the most important part of the maxims is the foundation they’re built upon – the Co-operative Principle, which he explained thus (again, on Interconnected, a few years ago):

“Participants assume that a speaker is being cooperative, and thus they make conversational implicatures about what is said”. What this means is that the bot must make maximum use of all that the user [interviewer?] has said, or at least make conversationally clear what’s understood and not.

The Jack Principles (PDF)

These have come up in conversation from time-to-time over the years. They’re the founding principles Jellyvision used when building videogame-cum-quiz-show You Don’t Know Jack.

The PDF is clear, concise, and right about many things. They feel a lot like Grice’s Maxims for interactive forms of media; very much required reading if you’re interested in conversational UI. I’d end up reproducing the whole thing if I’m not careful, so instead, one quotation about conversations, which Jeff Atwood cited in 2004:

in a conversation, you can’t unilaterally decide what gets discussed. The other person is not a machine. He can place his own limits on the conversation. He can steer the conversation in one direction, just as much as you can. The control of the conversation is shared.

Interactive Fiction

I’m a fan of Interactive Fiction – which is generally used to refer to what once might have been called “text adventures”.

Some IF games like to play games with the parser itself – the interface the player uses to interact with the game world.

Violet turns the parser into a character. It’s not just the interface that understands the player’s language; it’s an imagined version of the player character’s absent girlfriend, pleading with him to finish the thesis he promised he would. Failure in the game is responded to with polite disappointment; misunderstanding the player’s intention turns to sweet confusion. The parser doesn’t have a personality; it’s adopting a persona. It gives the parser a softer, more tolerant feeling than one that says “command not recognised” or “I can’t do that”.

(Violet, is, incidentally, my primary recommendation for anyone looking to try IF at the moment).

Lost Pig is a game about an orc, called Grunk, who has lost a pig. Grunk is somewhat stupid – he’s nowhere near as literate as the player. As such, you realise you’re “commanding” someone less intelligent than you, and are less surprised when they’re stupid or can’t understand. You also end up keeping your instructions much simpler. Again, an example of how the language/tone of the interface alters how users address it, without having to provide direct instructions on the sort of language necessary to communicate with it.

SNAP

SNAP appears in my existing information flows – in the original example we supplied, RSS. It politely observes the conventions of that space. Conversational UI should do this, too – if a UI is going to exist on Twitter, it should be well- behaved and follow the conversations of the space. So, in the case of a Twitter bot, it shouldn’t be high-traffic; it shouldn’t hold conversations in public that ought to be private.

BASAAP

By making a parser/client/bot that’s only as smart as it need to be, you don’t get the cognitive dissonance of something that looks smart but falls apart when you get your syntax wrong. (Compare, for instance, with Applescript or ELIZA). Good bots don’t pretend to be anything they’re not.

From this point I got thinking about BEAM robots, and specifically, the way that approach considers sensors.

So: if you know what appendages a bot has, you know what it’s capable of. And so, really, a chatbot shouldn’t pretend to have eyes and ears – or “see” or “hear” – because it doesn’t. It has a text parser; it has scrapers; it has rules. Finding a way to be honest in the parser without using inaccurate metaphors is important.

BASAAP also suggests lots of little, single purpose bots, acting together. Matt J and I chatted about this and discussed the idea of things that aren’t really things – Twitter lists, groupings of friends in Facebook or IM, to-do lists, calendars – gaining little, chatty, BASAAP AIs that represent them and act as conversational UIs to them

Interconnected, Feb 2002

Another take on many-small-bots, in an old post from Matt W’s blog:

“The user path has to be short… Instead of one bot, have several”.

Several bots again. I like the idea that the bot is the “verb” – rather than choosing complicated instructions to tell one bot, you choose the appropriate bot for the task, and then tell it simple things. Choosing a bot narrows what you’re going to say.

If bots are to communicate with one another, could that be public too? Everyone should use the same messaging bus, human or machine. If I talk to them on Twitter, they should talk to one another on Twitter. Unless it can’t be avoided, but then they should at least talk about it. (“I sent JohnBot a package of binary data too big to put here.”)

Nonne and Num

This is a personal thing I always come back to, and here seems relevant to talking to bots in simple language. Nonne and num are words in Latin that appear in questions, and all they really do is indicate the expected answer. They are sometimes loosely translated as “surely”. For instance: “Surely you’re coming out with us on Friday night?” is a nonne question, and “surely you’re not going to eat that?” is a num question.

I like the idea that you can shape the language someone will use in an answer by the language you ask the question in. What are the equivalents in a conversational UI?

Packrati.us

Packrati.us is a nifty service – it watches your Twitter stream, and when you post any links, it automatically posts them to Delicious for you. So it’s not conversational like a chatbot, but it’s conversational like Lanyrd is – it’s a polite listener, eavesdropping, and being useful/busy in the background, but not overstepping its boundaries.

Moving a conversation between platforms

When I first wrote chatbots, more of my conversation happened on IM. Now, IM is reserved for more higher priority conversation; I tned to use Twitter for low-level, occasional banter, like sending URLs to friends. I like the idea that a conversation might move between platforms – an eavesdropping bot might work things out from my Twitter stream and trickle information back to me; but, if it needed something detailed, or urgent, or required information that could only really emerge in a conversation… an IM bot could take over the same conversation. And when it was done, the outcome and remaining announcements would flow back somewhere else.

This November, I made a robot. It’s called Havasu.

Havasu is a robot that helps you find out what films are on when, and then organise your friends to go. You talk to Havasu through instant messenger.

The purpose of the project was to be a material exploration into conversational interfaces. The Havasu project page explains more:

The goal of the project was to explore ways of interacting that aren’t menus or GUIs; manners of interaction more like dialogue, or polite listening, facilitated by agents or AIs that are could not really be called “smart”. It’s very much in line with the notions of “Fractional AI” and “BASAAP” that we are interested in.

I’ve written about material exploration before. The previous explorations I’ve conducted in code were all about large datasets – TV listings for Shownar, schools for Schooloscope.

Havasu isn’t an exploration of data, though: it’s an exploration of a type of UI. We were seeking to define the qualities that defined a type of interaction – what made an interface conversational. Was it the use and understanding of natural language? Was it the way a conversation flowed? Was it that it was conducted in a more casual manner than an interface that constantly demands your full attention? The easiest way to find out these answers was to build our own conversational UI.

Havasu was built in three weeks. Matt W and I agreed on a fairly simple set of goals for the project:

• it had to be a conversational interface
• about film screenings
• that could be released publicly

You can talk to Havasu yourself. It’s available to any Jabber-compatible instant messanging client (such as Google Talk) as havasu@bot.im. It’s very much not a complete product; it has some rough edges, to say the least.

The material exploration within Havasu wasn’t just writing the code to build the bot: it was interacting with that interface, seeing where it succeeded and failed, and using what we’d learned by both making Havasu and playing with it to determine what makes an interface conversational.

The conclusions we came to – and the suggestions for how the Havasu bot could be improved – are on the Havasu project page.

Pistil SF make customised blankets based on OpenStreetMap imagery. The custom maps can be centered around any latitude/longitude, and are available in a variety of custom colour schemes thanks to the Cloudmade styles. Freely available data turned into a beautiful, desirable product.

Andy spotted Mr Switch – a switch blanking plate designed by John Caswell, that injects character (and a little fella) into any light switch.

I loved James Bridle’s Romance Has Lived Too Long Upon This River. It’s a really abstract representation of the height of the Thames, manifesting as a single-serving webpage. It’s also a synecdoche for the whole river, perhaps even the city of London; a glanceable manifestation of nature, in a window on your computer, or on your tablet, or on your phone. James explains the technicalities – and the romance – over on his blog.

Chris Burden’s Metropolis 2 is a kinetic sculpture: 1200 toy cars racing around a colossal series of tracks. Brilliant. The noise sounds deafening. (via Kottke).

The noise of Metropolis II reminded me of this delightful marble run around a the edges of a room. I particularly like the way deftly curved lengths of wood are used to slow the marbles. It embraces momentum, rather than artificially killing it.

Several of us have been admiring Spacelog this week. It’s a really lovely representation of the space missions it covers, taking original radio chatter and mapping it to not only mission personnel, but also the phases of the mission itself. It’s another kind of macroscope: the many small actions of the vast teams at NASA, distilled into a few hours of spaceflight, and explained through careful representation of that data.

I mentioned the John’s Phone on the studio mailing list last week. We ended up getting one to look at in the studio; it arrived this week, and I spent some time exploring it.

The John’s Phone is a simple mobile phone made by Dutch design firm John Doe. The phone came about as an attempt to take the ultra-simplicity of their From The Supermarket to a mobile phone. To quote their blogpost on the subject:

We’ve always wondered why most affordable phone looks so dull and boring. All cell phones are great high-tech product we like to use every day. Why not spend more time in designing. It’s the things we don’t see that are the most essential to creating a great design. A great design is a present. Why not make yourself happy with a present everyday in your pocket.

It’s a really immediate product: the entire front face is devoted to the keypad and physical interface. The top of the phone has an LCD display, positioned much like an old-fashioned pager; the side of the phone, which you can just see in the pictures above, has a rocker switch for volume, a SIM card slot, a switch for the ringer volume, and a power switch.

The phone makes its intention clear: the immediacy of use and that interface is more important to it than any screen or display-based interaction. It’s all about phone calls and phone numbers.

The John’s Phone is almost exactly the same size as an iPhone 4 – but its keypad takes up as much space as the touch screen does on the iPhone. The touchscreen has become a focal point of the design of smartphones, the hardware being designed around that bright rectangle. The John’s Phone is equally designed around its interface (or, at least, the “input” element of that interface) – it just happens to be a physical keypad.

There are delightful, surprising touches. There’s a biro hidden down the side, where you might expect a stylus on an old touchscreen phone. You can use it to write in the addressbook hidden in the back of the phone.

But that paper addressbook sums up some of the problems with a phone this simple. Is that simplicity for the purpose of simplification, or to support an aesthetic of simplicity?

The website for the phone claims that it’s “the world’s simplest cellphone“. That’s true – if you agree with their idea of what a cellphone is.

For instance, if you believe text messaging to be a fundamental feature of a cellphone, then the John’s Phone doesn’t even live up to your expectations of what a mobile phone is. But if all you want your mobile phone to do nothing but send and receive calls – which is true of many phone owners – then it really is a simple, satisfying expression of that goal. Satisfaction with the device comes down to what your expectations – or requirements of it – are when you first pick it up.

That aesthetic of simplicity is at times complicated by the technology the phone runs on. Whilst John Doe promote the paper addressbook as the best way to store your phone numbers, reading the manual reveals that there is a ten-number memory built into the phone.

How do you put numbers into that memory? By typing **1*01234567890# (to put “01234 567890″ into slot “1”).

Doesn’t that, as an interface, feel totally at odds with the aesthetic the physical device is cultivating?

(Of course, “reading the manual” seems like an activity also at odds with a device already so explicit in its physical form; had I not done so, I’d have been perfectly happy not knowing about that feature.)

At first, the character-design on the “hello” and “goodbye” buttons seems at odds with the restrained, minimal physical exterior.

As you use the phone, though, you’ll get to see a lot more of that character. He’s called Fony, and he appears throughout the phone’s operation. He’ll wave hello and goodbye to you when you turn the phone on and off.

When the phone’s asleep, you might see him tucked up in bed.

When you charge the phone, he gets electrocuted from time to time (which seems curel to a character I’d imagine I was supposed to be sympathetic towards).

I can appreciate the care and attention in the realisation of Fony. He’s charming and never intrusive on the phone’s screen, often explaining what the phone’s currently doing through his appearance (rather than through text, which there’s very little space for). John Doe say (in their explanation of his design) that “Fony makes John’s a friendly phone“. I think he’s part of that friendliness – but not nearly as much as the much more immediate friendliness of the clear, simply designed hardware.

It’s important to factor the price of the product into any discussion of it. The John’s Phone costs €70 – about £50. That puts it in line with fairly cheap pay-as-you-go phones. (And: the John’s Phone is sold unlocked from any carrier, so that’s £50 without any carrier-subsidy).

Price changes the the relationship to a product. At £150, this would be a premium product designed for a wealthy few as a provocative statement – but likely a “second phone”.

At the current price, it’s a much more relevant purchase for a wider audience. If that price were even lower, new – and larger – audiences become available.

It’s only fair, in the end, to criticise the John’s Phone in light of that initial quotation from John Doe, which serves as a kind of design brief:

A great design is a present. Why not make yourself happy with a present everyday in your pocket.

A device that makes you happy; a device that is a delight every time you pick it up. By those criteria, the John’s Phone is clearly a success. Everyone who’s seen ours wants to pick it up and take a look; everyone who picks it up smiles, and plays with it, explores its secrets; everyone wants to answer the question “is it really a phone”?

Yes, it is. And it’s not just an ultra-simple phone; it’s an affordable ultra-simple phone, that you can buy right now. All credit to John Doe for taking their vision of what a mobile phone could be, and making it real, at the right price.

So we made a film with Dentsu London called Making Future Magic: light painting with the iPad. “Making Future Magic” is Dentsu London’s big creative statement.

The film was crazy popular, a million views in 2 weeks, and played out on national TV.

It showed a novel technique mixing light painting and stop animation. And it’s beautiful to watch!

More than the film…

If you’re a fan, you can get the music from iTunes (and read the liner notes).

Or you can buy the print-on-demand book, which collects the best still images, and adds behind-the-scenes photos.

Now if you want to get involved, meet Penki! Penki is an iPhone app to help you create the same light painting you saw in the film. There’s a Penki Flickr group so you can share photos. Or you can use it in your personal projects.

Beyond these, there are two other films: Media Surfaces: Incidental Media and Media Surfaces: the Journey. Where the light painting film communicates a brand through technique and aesthetics, these are video sketches that put forward concepts as discussion points.

And there’s been a lot of really good discussion.

What’s going on here?

A communication film. Music and a book for fans to purchase. An iPhone app to do it yourself, and a place to socialise. Two video sketches, and a broad discussion.

What I think we’re doing is designing media.

It’s not like the old days where you just had TV or radio or newspaper, and you were stuck in a “broadcast” world or a “visual” world or whatever.

Now every element of this Making Future Magic project contributes to a brand space which has been designed to be a beautiful spectacle but also inviting to fans and people who want to join in, with a sprinkling of conversation starter.

Instead of thinking about a film, what we’re really thinking about is the relationship between Dentsu London and its audience/friends/coinhabitants-of-the-world!

And given that relationship, we consider what artefacts can we drop in and what media we can use to build the relationship, create a conduit for conversation, and demonstrate Dentsu London’s very particular brand of Making Future Magic.

We create content and create media all at once.

Mix and match! It feels like cooking up a potion. Designing media.

We’ve been closely following the progress on reverse-engineering Microsoft’s Kinect in the studio. My favourite example so far is Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille’s prototype of a hand-puppet. A lot of the early demos of the Open Kinect drivers have, understandably, been very technical in their focus, and not always that attractive visually. I love the hand-puppet because it’s both: not only does it demonstrate skeleton-tracking from the camera-data, but it’s also completely charming.

Matt W pointed out the similarity between the Kinect hand puppet demo and Philip Worthington’s Shadow Monsters. Worthington’s project – from his 2005 RCA show – turns the shadows of people standing in front of it into appendages of monsters. It’s delightful to watch, as teeth and eyes emerge from shadows on the wall.

9eyes is a blog capturing striking images from Google’s Street View camera cars. Some are beautiful; some stark. Some are surprising; some are funny. It’s remarkable not to see how much of the world Google has covered – but to see how much of the world is covered in roads, from which it can be photographed.

Via This Isn’t Happiness comes this beautiful piece of product design: the Sony TR-1825 from 1970. Sliding the radio open reveals its speaker.

Mercury

In 2057, the Sun is dying, and the Earth is freezing. So the ship Icarus 2 goes on a mission to reignite it with a massive bomb. This is the movie Sunshine, and if you get a chance to see it, watch it on a big screen. The crew themselves watch the Sun close-up, awestruck, from a view-port the exact dimensions of a movie screen, so the Sun fills your picture too and you spend half the film bathing in powerful yellow light. Like some kind of church.

On the way, they slingshot past – and watch – Mercury, and this sequence is accompanied by one of the best tracks on the remarkable soundtrack (Paul Murphy/Underworld).

Venus

Earth is crazy over-populated and an effort to colonise Venus has begun. But nobody wants to go, because Venus is a terrible place to live. The Space Merchants (Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth) is about an executive at the advertising agency with the account to sell Venus as an idea.

This is against the back-drop of a world gone totally consumerist. A terrorist organisation named ‘the Consies’ fights against the status quo. I wrote about this on my personal blog in 2007.

Earth

Most people die in some kind of unknown pandemic. Ish Williams lives, and Earth Abides (George Stewart) tells of the next 80 years, from the scrabble to survive, the re-use of the useless artefacts of civilisation, and the early days of fragile rebuilding. The story goes into great detail, and is utterly convincing. In the third section, our main character is elderly and frail, and the narrative comes at you as a patchy, foggy lucidity, as is as excellent a meditation on old age as I’ve read anywhere, sci-fi or otherwise.

Mars

The first words on Mars are spoken by John Boone: “Well, here we are.” He later joins the First Hundred, the groups that colonises Mars in 2026. Over the following decades, terraforming begins, other colonists arrive, John travels, and cities are built. In 2056, he makes a speech at Nicosia, a new city, and is murdered.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars tells the story of 200 years of future history. It is a trilogy about friendships, science and nature and people and the social negotiation between and of all of them, terraforming, politics and constitutions, space elevators, and the solar system.

Jupiter

Jupiter is the destination of the spaceship Discovery in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I fell in love at a young age with the infinity of Jupiter and the artificial intelligence, HAL. Stanley Kubrick spoke about HAL in this 1969 interview:

One of the things we were trying to convey in this part of the film is the reality of a world populated — as ours soon will be — by machine entities who have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings, and who have the same emotional potentialities in their personalities as human beings. We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures.

(Kubrick interview via kottke.)

Jupiter also features in Ken Macleod’s books. I’ll repeat what I said in week 279:

There’s a bit in Ken Macleod’s sci-fi quartet, the Fall Revolution series, where Dave Reid’s company “Mutual Protection” are in orbit around Jupiter, building a massive, complex structure to instantiate a wormhole to the edge of the universe. It takes several years. To build it they have whole populations of uploaded human consciousnesses that occupy and run construction robots (uploaded minds are easier than writing artificial intelligences). They call these robot clusters macros.

Saturn

Before the planets formed, the solar system was the accretion disc, a vast spinning disc of trillions of asteroids and planetoids. Here lived the space spiders, and I’ll quote from the book:

On plains of web as broad as continents, palaces of silken thread arose. On silken parachutes the spiders’ young went soaring outwards on the solar wind to colonise clumps of lonely stone still further from the Sun. Spider musicians stretched harps of web across the sky, and filled the aether with their music. Spider artists caught sunlight in great discs of web, and broke it into rainbows.

Beautiful. That was a billion years ago. Now the spiders live in a much reduced accretion disc: Saturn’s rings. Philip Reeve’s book is sci-fi meets steampunk meets Victorian adventure yarn: Larklight.

Uranus

There’s not much that springs to mind for me about Uranus, other than it moves around the Sun by rolling, like a ball, rather than spinning like all the other planets.

Neptune

In 2 billion years, Neptune is the home of the 18th species of humankind. Humanity’s history has been one of alternating triumph and tragic almost-extinction (Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon.) Each species is human in a different way: with music at their heart, or artificial giant brains, or born to live in the air, or squat like crabs.

The 18th human has dozens of sexes, six legs, and an eye in the top of its head which – when they link together in planetwide telepathic communion – lets them see far into space like a single large area telescope.

Also Neptune is my favourite colour blue, and it has all kind of magical resonances for me which you can read about in the final slides of my presentation, Escalante.

The talk ends like this:

Blue is a good colour. It’s the colour of Neptune, of course; it’s the colour of the future of humanity. It is the colour of deep seas and of Cherenkov radiation. When we finally move on from Earth in the late 24th century and take over the solar system, our city-sized generation ships will take off into clear blue skies just like this.

And so on.

(Here are two previous talks of mine about sci-fi: Sci-fi I like (2006); and A science fictional tour of the solar system (2008).)