Science Fiction
cevans | May 7, 2012Last week, I wrote a piece for Motherboard about an android version of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The story of the android is truly surreal, stranger than even Dick's flipped-out fiction, and I recommend you pop over to Motherboard and mainline it for yourselves. For the piece, I interviewed the lead programmer on the first version of the PKD Android, Dr. Andrew Olney. Aside from bringing science fiction legends back from the dead, Olney is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis and Associate Director of the same university's…
jdupuis | May 4, 2012This seems like a fun one for May the Fourth: Jedis disappointed with new "energy-saving" lightsabers
Jedi knights have expressed anger at plans to phase out traditional lightsabers in favour of new, more environmentally-friendly models.
'These new lightsabers are rubbish,' complained Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. 'They take ages to light up and when they do you can barely see anything with them.'
*snip*
'I refuse to switch to these new low energy sabers,' said a typically petulant Luke Skywalker. 'By the time they've reached full brightness you may have already had your hand chopped off by a…
jdupuis | March 23, 2012I've always been a big comics and graphic novel fan. In particular in my youth I was a huge superhero fan.
So this one was just a natural for me. Especially since one of the heroes that is profiled was one of my youthful favourites: The Incredible Hulk!
6 superheroes who got their powers from being lousy scientists
The Incredible Hulk
His Origin: Bruce Banner runs onto a gamma bomb testing facility to save a trespassing teen. He shoves the teen into a ditch, but gets hit with the full powers of radiation.
Note in the pic above that it says Banner was miles from the detonation of the bomb.…
jdupuis | February 10, 2012Ok, so none of these realizations has actually ruined science fiction for me, but they are pretty funny nevertheless.
4 Realizations That Will Ruin Science Fiction for You
#4. Sci-fi Needs a Straight Man Like a Laurel and Hardy Routine
The bulk of the workload in writing science fiction/fantasy is creating your whole world from scratch. It's a hell of a lot of fun, but it also has some unique problems. Characters, by being from this world you've just hand-built, are naturally going to be referring to places and objects and sometimes even speaking in a language that is completely foreign to…
jdupuis | December 2, 2011Sure, John Scalzi doesn't need any link love from me.
On the other hand, sometimes he just hits one right out of the park.
Apparently the other day he stumbled upon a Lord of the Rings trilogy showing on TV. And he had a web-enabled machine of some sort handy. And he had Twitter open.
Hilarity ensued. Of the highest order. Lord of the Tweets it is!
Here's a samplling, but please do drop by Scalzi's blog and check out his complete rundown of tweets.
OSHA clearly has no jurisdiction in Moria.
I am suddenly aware of just how little difference there is between Orlando Bloom's Legolas and…
jdupuis | October 14, 2011The science fiction news site blastr has a very entertaining series going for the month of October, 31 Days of Halloween.
As you would imagine, every day this month they are featuring a post about Halloween. And fortunately the topics range from the bizarre to the ridiculous all the way to the barely safe for work.
Here's a sampling:
33 scary stories you can read RIGHT NOW from great horror writers
Vader, Spock, Spidey and 26 other sci-fi icons as rotting zombies
18 LEGO creations so unnerving they could give you nightmares
Zombies and vampires rule in 14 horrific Halloween board games
What…
jdupuis | October 8, 2011Inspired by John Scalzi, I thought I'd poll all my readers out there and see what you are reading this weekend.
Books, magazines, blogs, whatever.
I'm reading Ross Macdonald's Meet Me at the Morgue for fiction, Gotham Central Book 1: In the Line of Duty by Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark in the graphic novel category and since I'm leading a book club session on it in a couple of weeks, I'm planning on spending a fair bit of time wth Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Magazine-wise, I'll be taking a look at the most recent issue of The New York Review of Science…
jdupuis | September 26, 2011My 2011 summer reading was pretty meagre this year. For various reasons too boring to go into here, there wasn't much actually much vacation for me this summer. I think I'll probably have a better December/Christmas reading list than summer. Such is life.
Anyways, what I did read was pretty good, so let's get to it.
Bradbury, Ray and Ron Wimberly. Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes: The Authorized Adaptation. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011. 144pp. ISBN-13: 978-0809087464
Bradbury, Ray and Dennis Calero. Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles: The Authorized Adaptation. New York…
jdupuis | August 19, 2011All week I've been planning to feature Tor.com's Noir Week series here today. Somehow it's fitting that my slightly dark mood right now is matched by the subject matter of the Friday Fun.
From the introductory post:
Welcome to Noir Week at Tor.com! Join us as we escape from the sweltering dog days of summer into the cool, shadowy underworld of back alleys, jazz joints, hardboiled hooligans and tough-talking femme fatales; a world filled with violence, glamour, and intrigue, where the color scheme is black and white and the rules are anything but....
This week, we're making the most of our…
jdupuis | July 15, 2011The world of fantasy genre fiction is finally happy this week. An incredibly long-awaited event has finally taken place.
George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons, fifth book in the epic A Song of Ice and Fire series has finally been published.
With over five years since the last one, with much grumbling from the fans, the wait is over.
And people seem...underwhelmed.
The first three were amazing classics of the fantasy genre. I loved them, the way they combined fantasy tropes with a strong dose of reality. They were violent and brutal, just the way the world of political machinations…
jdupuis | June 19, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Follies of Science: 20th Century Visions of Our Fantastic Future, is from April 26, 2007.
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I don't have to much to say of a deep or profound nature to say about this book. It's one of those "Whatever…
drorzel | May 25, 2011If I ever decided to abandon any pretense of integrity or credibility, and just shoot for making a bazillion dollars peddling quantum hokum, the particular brand of quantum philosophy I would peddle has already been laid out, in Robert Charles Wilson's Divided by Infinity. In the story, the narrator is given a copy of a "crank book" by Carl G. Soziere, titled You will Never Die, which makes an argument that is essentially a variant of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics:
And the argument was seductive. Shorn of the babble about Planck radii and Prigogine complexity and the…
jdupuis | April 29, 2011On Tor.com over the last couple of years, Kate Nepveu has been taking us through a chapter-by-chapter re-read of The Lord of the Rings. In each post she would give a brief summary of the action as well as some commentary.
It's been a great project and it's just come to an end in the last week or so. I've really enjoyed following along with the posts, although I have to admit not with the re-read. Last time I re-read the books was timed with the release of each of the films.
There's an index of all the relevant posts here.
And a little bit from the very first post, way back in December 2008…
jdupuis | December 23, 2010Although it is perilously close to way too late, but you do have time to rush down to an actual, honest-to-goodness bookstore (or perhaps get an ebook from an estore) and maybe pick up one of these titanic suggestions from Ethan Gilsdorf on Tor.com. All great stuff for the geek in your life.
Hint, hint.
Anyways, here's what Gilsdorg suggests with his descriptions at the original post:
My Best Friend is a Wookiee: One Boy's Journey to Find His Place in the Galaxy by Tony Pacitti
Android Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters
We, Robot: Skywalker's Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots…
jdupuis | December 21, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. The list is a compilation of selections from all the different BB editors. I'm also only selecting 2010 books from their lists.
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel
Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky
The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely
Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python by Al Sweigart
Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks by Ben Goldacre
Where Good Ideas Come From: The…
illconsidered | November 12, 2010More entertaining than informative, greenman's latest Crock of the Week surveys the history of climate change in the movies!
Gotta dust off those old Mad Max VHS tapes again...
jdupuis | October 31, 2010Canadian horror/dark fantasy writer Kelley Armstrong has a nice list of 10 favourite horror novels in a recent issue of the Globe and Mail.
Here it is:
The Shining by Stephen King
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
The Turn of The Screw by Henry James
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The Hellbound Heart: A Novel by Clive Barker
Let Me In by John Ajvide Lindqvist
Relic by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson
Misery by Stephen King
Armstrong talks about the entries in the original article.
I've read…
jdupuis | October 29, 2010A second Halloween-related post, with the happy day coming up this weekend. My "give a scary book" post came on Monday.
Anyways, a recent post on Horrornews.net really resonated with me: Growing up as a horror fan. Mostly because I too grew up a huge horror fan, mostly watching cheesy old Hammer films on tv, the Dracula and Frankenstein ones having particularly strong memories for me. To this day, I'm a huge fan of some of their main actors such as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Island of Terror is non-Hammer film that I have vivid memories of watching when I was a kid -- as is…
jdupuis | September 24, 2010I'm a life-long fan of science fiction, mostly as a reader but occasionally as a book reviewer. Way back, when dinosaurs walked the earth, I even took a couple of science fiction literature classes.
And, as readers of this blog well know, I love nothing better than a good list of books.
So combining all those passions is a big win for me.
Take a look at this, from io9, A syllabus and book list for novice students of science fiction literature.
I'll list the books here, but please head over to the io9 post for the rationales for chosing each book.
WHAT THIS LIST IS AND ISN'T
There are a few…
jdupuis | August 24, 2010I'm just finishing four weeks of vacation, a nice break from the regular routine. No, I don't get the whole summer off because I work at a university. I do get four weeks of vacation every year and when you work at a university it just makes sense to take it all in the summer.
Anyways, we didn't really go anywhere this year, for a variety of reasons. And hence, no summer blogging break, only perhaps a tendency to slightly lighter, summery blogging topics. And since we didn't spend much time at a secluded cottage with nothing to do but read, well, I didn't quite read as much as in previous…