MemeMachineGo!

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing and other fame, gave this interview:

A lot of Canadian expatriates such as yourself are doing wonderfully creative and innovative things in terms of new media and the Internet. Do you have any explanations or insights here? Is there something in the water north of the border?

Yes, we are taking over. We will eventually own the entire world.

Actually, Bruce Sterling thinks there is something unique about the Canadian perspective. In the introduction he wrote for my new short story collection "A Place So Foreign and Eight More" that is coming out in March, Bruce points out that being Canadian gives you a built-in window to the creepiest kind of alien of all, which is the alien that is almost just like you but is completely different.

I don't if you saw it, but there was a story titled "The Uncanny Valley" that went around the blogging universe in October. According to this bit of research on human perception and cognition, people of all cultures respond very positively to humanoid artifacts, so long as they aren't all that humanoid. So, Mickey Mouse or other sort of furry objects or certain robots are ok. But, that kind of warm response decreases sharply as the object becomes more humanoid. Then there is a point at which an object becomes too humanoid. If it looks a lot like a human but it isn't quite a human, then people react to that with complete revulsion: think of zombies

or of the cenotaphs in
target="_blank">Clive Barker's Hellraiser. So, the creepiest alien
of all is the thing that you can recognize as being you, but isn't you.

I agree with Bruce. I think Canadians have this built-in point of view
on America. Because you guys talk like us, you look like us, you listen
to the same music as we do. Your culture is a lot like ours. But you are
different in a lot of really strange ways. I don't think it is a
coincidence that
target="_blank">Marshall McLuhan came out of Canada. I think that
that was an almost inevitable occurrence. Because it takes being at 30
degrees off true to really see something clearly. It is hard to see
something clearly when you are in the belly of it.

I meant at the time to link to the Uncanny Valley article, but never did.

Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori is not exactly a household name — but, for the speculative fiction community at least, he could prove to be an important one. The reason why can be summed up in a simple, strangely elegant phrase that translates into English as “the uncanny valley”.

Though originally intended to provide an insight into human psychological reaction to robotic design, the concept expressed by this phrase is equally applicable to interactions with nearly any nonhuman entity. Stated simply, the idea is that if one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human “look” . . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete.

(I anticipated all this in the mid-'80's in a story called "Anthropomorphophobe" which was overall even worse than its title.)

(Via The Adventures of Accordionguy in the 21st Century)