SF
drorzel | November 16, 2008When I'm in the right mood, I'm a sucker for really awful sci-fi movies. For example, Saturday night I stayed up far too late to watch the end of the tv-movie version of The Andromeda Strain, based on the book by the prolific and recently deceased Luddite Fiction writer Michael Crichton. It's been twenty-plus years since I read the book, but I recall it being a whole lot better than this piece of garbage.
Crichton's original novel about a crack research team dealing with a disease of alien origin is remarkable for being somewhat understated. The action focusses on the scientists attempting to…
drorzel | November 15, 2008As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here:
This was the first time I've done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
I'm rocking the handset in this because of the aforementioned cell phone service problems, and because the whole thing was very hastily arranged, and I wasn't able to obtain a headset for the landline. If they ask me back again, I'm definitely getting one.
On the other hand, being tied to the handset did restrain…
drorzel | November 11, 2008In the recent discussion of Many-Worlds and making universes, Jonathan Vos Post asked what science fiction treatments of the idea I like. The answer is pretty much "none," because most SF treatments are distractingly bad.
For example, last night I finished Neal Stephenson's Anathem, a whopping huge brick of a book setting up an incredibly imaginative alternate Earth, with a detailed intellectual history paralleling our own. It's got all sorts of great stuff, but it lost me when it started talking about parallel worlds, because it munges together the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum…
drorzel | November 7, 2008If, like me, you have long thought that the world needs more thrillers based on quantum physics, the students and post-docs of the Ultrafast Group at Oxford have got a short film for you: The DiVincenzo Code, in six parts on YouTube.
It doesn't make any less sense than a Dan Brown novel, and the production is impressively good. Ian Walmsley's turn as the evil Dr. Eve is not to be missed, particularly part V where he does the Mad Scientist Dance.
(Via the Pontiff.)
drorzel | October 26, 2008I tagged Ethan Zuckerman's post abpout video "windows" to other places in a links dump recently. The idea is to put big video screens and cameras in fast-food restaurants around the world, and provide virtual "windows" into other restaurants in other countries. In talking about the idea, Ethan threw out a great aside:
(If I were Cory Doctorow, say, I'd write a short story about the idea rather than wondering how to build it, where a group of kids in Brazil befriend another group in China that they meet randomly over the monitor. The keep returning to the restaurant at pre-agreed times, hoping…
drorzel | August 27, 2008The New York Times, its finger squarely on the pulse of SF as always, has a very nice profile of Vernor Vinge. That last bit isn't sarcastic-- it's a good piece. The earlier snark is just because the focus is on a book that's a couple of years old already.
Of course, any Vinge piece will necessarily dwell on the "Singularity," which Jo Walton doesn't like. I'm not a huge fan of the idea myself, so it's nice to see that Jo's comments inspired Rudy Rucker to suggest some new and different ideas for SF stories.
Rucker's list, like his fiction, tends toward the "trippy," as the kids say, so not…
drorzel | August 22, 2008Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll has a good idea that I'm going to steal. Over at SF Signal, they asked a bunch of writers what they would change about SF. Ken Macleod (author and occasional blogger) wrote, in part:
It's just rare to see stories written about a future that the writer believes in and the reader can get excited about - let alone one they'd like to live in. What we need is a new intellectual engagement with the real possibilities, coupled with a new confidence in humanity's capacity to deal with them.
James challenges his readership of SF fans to design such a future, but…
drorzel | August 22, 2008Over at Tor.com, David Levine describes a really cool event he went to just before Worldcon: a crash course in modern astronomy for SF writers:
The idea behind Launch Pad is Gernsbackian: getting good science into popular fiction as a form of public education and outreach for NASA. SF writer and University of Wyoming astronomy professor Mike Brotherton managed to get a NASA grant to fund this workshop for five years, of which this was the second. All the attendees' expenses were paid, including transportation to and from Laramie, housing in college dorms, and most meals--though we had to pay…
drorzel | August 6, 2008I've been on a big Jim Butcher kick recently, re-reading most of the Dresden Files books. This is largely because holding a regular book is still uncomfortable with my bad thumb, and I have electronic copies of the Dresden books that I can read on my Palm (well, Kate's old Palm, which I just use as an ebook reader).
While in the bookstore yesterday looking for Karl Schroeder's new Virga book (which, alas, was not to be found), I was struck by the huge number of Dresden Files knock-offs on the shelves. Well, OK, they may not really be Dresden Files copies, but it seems like there are dozens of…
drorzel | July 30, 2008A colleague emailed me yesterday with the following question:
As I have mentioned the other day, [Prof. Firstname Lastname] of Comp. Sci. is putting together an exciting course "Can Computers Think?" (Intro to Comp. Sci.), and she hopes to use Sci Fi short stories (and movies, and TV series) to bring ethics into the course. If you have a minute, please let me know if you have any suggestions on the following topics:
Technology and Privacy
Sustainability
Ownership and intellectual property rights
Threats and possibilities of A.I.
Some of these are pretty obvious-- "Technology and Privacy"…
drorzel | July 11, 2008Tobias Buckell brought the whole sordid racist rejection letter episode to my attention a couple of days ago. This has apparently decided to become the "Violet Blue" episode for this week, and today, Toby dredges through the sewers of the Asimov's forums to find a few real gems of sexist and racist filth. I hadn't previously been aware that Asimov's hosted forums, and I can't say that this has inspired me to sign up.
Toby does make one important comment, though:
I know this stuff feels tiring, but there are a lot of cool people out there in the blogosphere who are just as annoyed by this.…
drorzel | June 9, 2008Reading Final Theory last night reminded me of something Patrick Nielsen Hayden said on a con panel once. The question was raised of why thriller-ish science fiction books don't do as well as thrillers with a thin SF gloss-- basically, "Why doesn't Greg Bear sell as many books as Michael Crichton?"
Patrick noted that there's a very different attitude toward the products of science in the two genres. In thrillers, he said, the plot is set in motion by the unleashing of some scientific discovery, and the plot is resolved by destroying or covering up that discovery. In genre science fiction, on…
drorzel | May 6, 2008Speaking of YA literature (as I was, briefly, in the previous post), I would be remiss if I didn't note that Cory Doctorow has put up a Little Brother section on his web site, promoting his new book. As with all of his books, it's available for free download, so if you'd like to read it but don't want to pay for it sight unseen, you can check it out.
You may or may not remember, but I enthusiastically reviewed it back in March (I got an ARC at Boskone):
Little Brother is Cory Doctorow's bid for a place on this year's list of banned books. It's a book that not only encourages kids to hack…
drorzel | May 6, 2008The latest book by Iain M. Banks proudly proclaims itself to be a Culture novel-- part of a loosely connected series of novels and stories about humans living in a vast and utopian galactic civilization-- which makes its opening in a castles-and-kings milieu somewhat surprising. Well, all right, technically it opens with a prologue in which a woman called Djan Seriy Anaplian and her drone companion Turminder Xuss disrupt a medieval-level army with very little effort (she's an agent of the somewhat disreputable Special Circumstances, the group within the Culture that meddles in the affairs of…
drorzel | April 29, 2008Via Swans on Tea, a new article on the arxiv reports the possible discovery of a new stable element:
What they did was fire one thorium nucleus after another through a mass spectrometer to see how heavy each was. Thorium has an atomic number of 90 and occurs mainly in two isotopes with atomic weights of 230 and 232. All these showed up in the measurements along with a various molecular oxides and hydrides that form for technical reasons.
But something else showed up too. An element with a weight of 292 and an atomic number of around 122. That's an extraordinary claim and quite rightly the…
drorzel | April 10, 2008I'm not sure whether he's making some kind of obscure point, or just trolling, but John Scalzi gave a recent installment of his "Big Idea" series over to the witterings of "Vox Day," talking about his book The Irrational Atheist. Curse you, Scalzi, for getting me to even look at that.
And it's not just me-- John undoubtedly has readers who had never encountered Mr. "Day" before. Don't you know that exposing innocent people to "Vox Day" has been classified as a war crime, and earnes you ten thousand years in Purgatory?
Anyway, having spent a bunch of time recently complaining about a lack of…
drorzel | March 21, 2008The Hugo Award nominees for this year have been released. The category I care most about is Best Novel, where we have:
The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, Fourth Estate)Brasyl by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor; Analog Oct. 2006-Jan/Feb. 2007)The Last Colony by John Scalzi (Tor)Halting State by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit)
Does Robert J. Sawyer have secret mind control powers, or something? The Chabon is a fantastic book, Scalzi's book is the best thing he's written, the Stross is very good and he's a buzz-worthy author, and I've…
drorzel | March 19, 2008As approximately six billion other blogs have noted, Arthur C. Clarke is dead. His obit in the Times runs to three pages, which is a good indicator of just how long and distinguished his life was.
My initial reaction is similar to Matt McIrvin's: it feels like the passing of an age. Bradbury and Pohl are of the same generation, but they don't feel like the same sort of writers as Clarke and Asimov and Heinlein, the ruling triumvirate of old-school SF.
I was never a huge fan of his fiction-- I went through Asimov and Heinlein phases, back in the day, but didn't get as deeply into Clarke. I'm…
drorzel | March 18, 2008Joshua Palmatier, whose first two books I enjoyed, and probably ought to booklog, has organized the "Plot Synopsis Project," in which a bunch of published SF authors post copies of the plot synopses they sent with their successful novel pitches, and talk about the writing process. Most of them have lists of the participants posted, but here's a link to Tobias Buckell's post because he has just the list, independent of his plot summary, so you don't need to worry about accidentally reading spoilers.
This is a terrific idea, as the plot synopsis thing is one of the more mysterious and…
drorzel | March 2, 2008Little Brother is Cory Doctorow's bid for a place on this year's list of banned books. It's a book that not only encourages kids to hack computers, commit vandalism, and thwart law enforcement, it gives them detailed instructions on the best ways to do those things. It even comes with two afterwords and a bibliography pointing them to even more resources on how best to subvert the political order.
If-- oh, who am I kidding, when Little Brother is challenged and banned from school libraries, it will richly deserve it.
And when that happens, you should go buy five copies and hand them out to…