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Stanislaw Lem and His Push For Deeper Thinking



When discussing a literary genre over a length of time, it becomes apparent that such genre worlds are inherently insular: authors, inspired and encouraged by authors coming before them, work within genre conventions, often because such limits are self-imposed or placed on authors due to what a publisher reasonably thinks can sell. For a genre such as science fiction, where literally anything is possible, it seems absurd, thinking about it, but it's something that's frequently accepted without argument (or with little argument) throughout the genre's history. Some authors, however, buck that trend completely. An excellent example of this is Stanislaw Lem.

Stanislaw Lem was born on September 12th, 1921, in Lvov, Poland. He was an intelligent child, the son of a doctor and a housewife. Throughout his childhood, he was an avid reader, reading widely from a broad range of books in his father's personal library. By the time he reached high school, he was bilingual. He went to college at Lwow University, where he studied medicine. The onset of World War II interrupted his education, and he endured both the Soviet occupation of Lvov, and eventually, the capture of the city by German forces in 1941. During the war, he made due as a mechanic and welder. The conflict would have a huge impact on his career as a writer, according to literary critic Peter Swirski, exemplified by "his relentless return to the subjects of change, survival, the use of force, aggression, and military 'solutions' in so many of his mature writings." At some point in his youth, he read works by H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, both of which heavily influenced him and his writing.

Following the end of World War II, Lem and his family relocated to Kraków, Poland (Lvov is now in Ukraine), where he resumed his studies at Jagiellonian University. By this point, he had begun to write science fiction. His first story, "Człowiek z Marsa" ("The Man from Mars"), was published in Nowy Świat Przygód (New Adventure World magazine) in 1946, a first contact novel about the study of a crashed Martian, although Lem would later disparage it (along with a number of his earlier stories).

His first novel was Astronauci (The Astronauts), which was published in 1951. In it, a multinational expedition journeys to Venus, where they uncover the remains of an alien civilization, one that had wiped itself out in an arms race of its own. The novel is overtly utopian, and Lem later said about the book that "naiveté is present on all pages of this book. The hope that in the year 2000 the world would be wonderful is indeed very childish." In 1955, he published his next novel, Obłok Magellana (The Magellan Nebula). Like its predecessor, the book is a utopian work, about a group of explorers headed to Proxima Centauri to locate an intelligent alien civilization. Swirski notes that "These three early novels—Man from Mars, The Astronauts and The Magellan Nebula—present a different face of Stanislaw Lem, more utopian and optimistic, even if already hinting at a darker side of our human kind." This early phase of Lem's career is steeped in utopian overtones, heavily influenced by a proscribed vision of the confidence on the part of the Soviet Union.

In 1959, Lem published a new novel, Śledztwo (The Investigation), a science fiction mystery set in London. However, it was the publication of his next novel, Eden, later that year, that Lem's career began a new phase: one that shed the optimistic outlook of the future and turned far more pessimistic. In this novel, astronauts land on a distant planet, only to discover they've arrived in the middle of a blood bath: a systematic purge by an oppressive government is underway. Lem's book uses the book to comment on the control of information in a rigid society, one that controls its citizens—a stunning rebuke of oppressive regimes during the Cold War.

Lem's next novel, Powrót z gwiazd (Return from the Stars), was published in 1961, and examines how societies change over time and how human nature inherently shines through. This is apparent when an astronaut, Hal BreStanislaw Lemgg, returns from a 10 year mission in space, finding that over a century has passed at home on Earth. Society has completely changed: technology has allowed the world to eliminate violence and hatred, but at a price. Another novel appeared in 1961, Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie (Memoirs Found in a Bathtub).

At this time, Lem had only recently come to the attention of Western readers: His first work in English appeared in 1969 when he placed a translation of a story, "Are You There, Mr. Jones?" in a U.S. publication. The story had originally been published as "Czy pan istnieje, Mr. Johns?" in 1957, and was printed in Vision of Tomorrow 1 in August 1969.

While Lem had been putting together a strong backlog of novels, it was his 1961 novel Solaris for which he is best known. The novel followed an astronaut's arrival on a space station, with a crew of astronauts haunted by strange visitors. As the human crew worked to study the strange nature of Solaris, it gives few answers, but creates visitors from the crew's own memories, providing some dark insights into each member's own personality. In the novel, Kelvin has arrived, and shortly thereafter, is visited by a visitor of his own: Rheya, a lover who killed herself after the pair fought. Solaris largely focuses on the inability to comprehend an extraterrestrial intelligence, and the assumptions we bring with ourselves when we attempt to study the cosmos.

Lem, Franz Rottensteiner notes in a critical look at Solaris, is interested in the process in which the scientists are working to understand the planet, even as he "is not so much concerned with results as with processes and ways of thinking....In this respect, Lem is somewhat of an existentialist; in spite of a positive attitude toward science, he is well aware of the absurdity of existence." Faced with a vast alien intelligence that is completely incomprehensible, Lem essentially does something that no American author would have: Solaris isn't a problem to be solved or examined by the wit and intelligence of the astronauts. Solaris is a phenomenon that exists with its own set of logic, defying human examination because humans are examining it from their own set of rules and systems. It's incomprehensible on one level, completely alien on another.

Solaris reached English-speaking audiences with a translation that came from the French edition of the book, a translation which has long been characterized as a poor one. It wasn't until 2011 that a definitive Polish to English translation was published. Since the original publication, Solaris has been adapted for film three times: the first in 1968, directed by Boris Nirenburg for Soviet television, and the second in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky (who would go on to direct another adaptation of a Soviet-bloc science fiction novel, Roadside Picnic, by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky in 1979). The third adaptation came in 2002, with Steven Soderbergh at the helm.

Lem would continue to publish following Solaris's original release. Niezwyciężony (The Invincible) was published in 1964, Głos pana (His Master's Voice) in 1968 and Kongres futurologiczny (The Futurological Congress) in 1971.

Lem's fiction takes on a different direction from most of the science fiction being published at this point in time: Landon Brooks notes that "[Lem] presents the method of science as a philosophy of science—as 'critical doubt in action,' a process in which science 'throws up new questions for any problem solved.' " Indeed, Lem was highly critical of science fiction published in the United States, which he characterized as being light fare, geared toward mere entertainment and which failed to comprehend itself in any appreciable way.

Notably, in an article in Science Fiction Studies, he explains his issues with genre fiction as a whole: "If anyone is dissatisfied with SF in its role as an examiner of the future and of civilization, there is no way to make an analogous move from literary oversimplifications to full-fledged art, because there is no court of appeal from this genre. There would be no harm in this, save that American SF, exploiting its exceptional status, lays claim to occupy the pinnacles of art and thought." This makes sense, given that the rise of Lem's fiction didn't arise through the shared influences of the American genre, or even the underpinning cultural influences that informed it. In many ways, Lem was an alien in and of himself to the regular language of science fiction, and his viewpoint is a good way to recognize the limitations of the fiction emerging from the United States at this point in time. It's also a good reminder that science fiction existed outside of North America and the United Kingdom.Solaris-2

Lem's attitude toward American science fiction put him at odds with other professionals in the field. Thomas Disch called him smug, and noted that he was insufferable due to his own high regard of his works. Other authors went to further lengths: Philip K. Dick wrote a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding Lem: "What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group—Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not—to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas."

Brooks summed up Lem's attitude toward American science fiction: "Lem [refused] to think of himself as an SF writer and has written denunciation of SF—particularly American SF—so scathing that in 1976, individuals in the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) through a complicated and controversial series of events, rescinded his honorary membership, awarded only three years before." The formal word came from Jerry Pournelle: Lem's honorary membership was a miscommunication. "According to the SFWA by-laws then in force, honorary membership was intended not as an 'honor' but as a means to extend benefits of SFWA membership to individuals who would otherwise be ineligible, such as SF writers who had not published in the U.S." Lem, having published in the United States, was technically ineligible for "Honorary Status," and instead was offered a full membership, which he refused. While the affair seems to have been explained away as a bureaucratic problem, in reality, it was Lem's abrasiveness and attitude which was the motivation for his expulsion. This wasn't a universal opinion in the ranks of SFWA members: A number of members, including Ursula K. Le Guin, protested. Lem later claimed to harbor no ill-will toward members of the association, "but it would be a lie to say the whole incident has enlarged my respect for SF writers."

In spite of Philip K. Dick's attitude and letter to the FBI, Lem seems to have held his writing in high regard: According to Mike Ashley, "Lem believed that the New Wavers should have used Philip K. Dick as their 'guiding star' rather than, as he believed, Norman Spinrad, Samuel Delany or Michael Moorecock....In Lem's view, 'Until now the New Wave has succeeded well in making SF quite boring.' " Lem's issues with American science fiction derive mainly from where the genre seemed to pull most of its influences: the early 1900s, when fiction was written quickly and with an eye toward adventure, rather than toward deeper thinking. Lem's thoughts weren't unique; others throughout the New Wave began raising similar points. Science fiction needed to mature and not rely so closely on its past. For Lem, hailing from Poland, this was an easy task. For others in the U.S., the conventions were deeply entrenched.

Lem continued to publish, with his final novel, Fiasko (Fiasco), published in 1987, although he would publish three story collections in the 1990s and 2000s: Pożytek ze smoka i inne opowiadania (The Benefit of a Dragon and Other Stories) in 1993, Przekładaniec (Layer Cake) in 2000 and Lata czterdzieste / Dyktanda (Forties / Dictation) published in 2005. Lem passed away at the age of 84 on March 27th, 2006.

Lem has frequently been cited as one of the 20th century's most important and widely read science fiction authors, enjoying a very large audience in the USSR throughout his career. As a writer he was particularly interested in the impact of humanity's relationship with others, and what that relationship reflected on ourselves. Hailing from Eastern Europe, Lem's writing style developed outside of the confines of conventional science fiction, and as a result, his work is unique and deeply philosophical.




Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He can be found online at his site and on Twitter @andrewliptak.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/stanislaw-lem-and-his-push-deeper-thinking/

30 Years of William Gibson's Neuromancer






It's rare that a science fiction novel comes out of nowhere and upends the large part of a literary movement, but that's just what William Gibson did 30 years ago with his first novel, Neuromancer. The book depicted a dystopian future and codified a simmering movement within the genre: Cyberpunk. It's a claustrophobic, cynical and raw take on the future, and it became an instant hit, one that changed science fiction for years to come.

William Gibson was born on the March 17th, 1948, in South Carolina. His father died when he was 8, and with a move to Virginia, Gibson noted that "this experience of feeling abruptly exiled, to what seemed like the past, that began my relationship with science fiction." The death and move were traumatic for Gibson. His new life in Virginia was suffocating: "suddenly I was living in a vision of the past. There was television, but the world outside the window could have been the 1940s, the 1930s or even the 1900s." Early on, he watched science fiction television shows and eventually came across a "moldering stack of 1950s Galaxy Magazines," in the loft above an office supply store, which he took home in a brown paper bag. He began reading, coming across stories from authors such as Alfred Bester, Samuel R. Delany, Robert Heinlein, Fritz Lieber and Theodore Sturgeon. By his late teens, though, he had largely moved on from science fiction, becoming enraptured with the works of William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon. His mother died when he was 18. The Vietnam War raged on halfway across the world, and he made an effort to be as unappealing as possible to his local draft board, eventually moving to Toronto, Canada, before traveling throughout other parts of the world.

It was in the late 1970s that Gibson rekindled his interest in science fiction. He married and entered the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The couple had a son. He rediscovered Bester's novel The Stars My Destination and read it again, expecting a nostalgic trip, but instead found a brilliant novel: "[It] blew, as we used to say, my mind. I hadn't, I saw, actually been able to read it fully before. It had been too fast for me, too gloriously relentless, too brilliant...It was, I saw in my twenties, a book that had absolutely ignored everything that science fiction had been doing when it was written." Gibson became the primary caregiver for their son, writing during his down time. He soon took a class on science fiction literature run by a friend of his, Susan Wood, who encouraged him to write his own fiction. His first short story, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose," was written in lieu of a term paper, and with her editing and encouragement, he submitted it to Unearth magazine, who published in the summer of 1977. Still, Gibson was deeply disillusioned with the state of science fiction of the day—"so much of the genre was patently awful"—and he was disturbed by the conservative and centric views of most American authors from that time.

It was in his next story that Gibson began to make a mark. "Johnny Mnemonic" was published in ONeuromancer 2mni Magazine's May 1981 issue. Gary Westfahl noted in his recent survey of Gibson's work that its publication in "Omni, the genre's most prestigious venue, [was] a sign that insiders at least were identifying Gibson as a major new talent." The story introduced a dystopic, futuristic sprawl of cityscape with a language that was unlike anything else seen in science fiction. In it, Johnny is a data mule with a contract on his head, and he's eventually saved by a woman named Molly Millions. Another short story, "The Gernsback Continuum," came out of a rejected review, and was published in Universe 11, edited by Terry Carr. Another story, "The Belonging Kind," co-written with John Shirley, appeared in Shadows 4, edited by Charles L. Grant. His stories with Omni also continued: "Hinterlands" appeared in October 1981, but it was "Burning Chrome" in July 1982 that landed Gibson a nomination for a Nebula Award the following year. The story follows a pair of hackers infatuated with a girl, Rikki, stealing money to win her over. The story also coined the term "cyberspace."

Cyberspace was a new, although not original, concept in science fiction. Gibson had been struck by what he had seen in Vancouver: newfangled, dark arcades that captured the attention of their teenage patrons. "Even in this primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved; it seemed to me that they wanted to be inside the games, within the notational space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them." Gibson realized the importance of the coming computer revolution: Computers would arrive, and people would likely treat them like those teenagers were treating their games. It was a concept ripe with the anxieties of science fiction.

Around this time, Terry Carr had returned to Ace Books, where he started up a new science fiction novel series, the Ace Science Fiction Specials, with an emphasis on picking up debut novels from new talents. He approached Gibson with an offer, who promptly accepted: "I said 'Yes' almost without thinking, but then I was stuck with a project I wasn't sure I was ready for. In fact, I was terrified once I actually sat down and started to think about what it meant." To cope, he turned to the world that he had already begun to create in "Johnny Mnemonic" and "Burning Chrome." In it, a hacker named Case has been cut off from the global computer infrastructure known as The Matrix. Hired by a shadowy agent named Armitage and Molly Millions, he's tasked entering cyberspace to help link together two immensely powerful AIs.

The process of writing a novel was a terrifying one to Gibson: "Neuromancer is fueled by my terrible fear of losing the reader's attention. Once it hit me that I had to come up with something, to have a hook on every page, I looked at the stories I'd written up to that point and tried to figure out what had worked for me before." He pulled in Molly from "Johnny Mnemonic" and elements from "Burning Chrome." Gibson worked hard at the book: Much of it was written and re-written a number of times before he settled on his story and voice before narrowing in on the ending. Given a year, he took that and half again before the book was completed. In that time, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, an adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, was released: Gibson found himself "afraid to watch [the film] in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine." Later, Scott would note that Neuromancer and Blade Runner came from "basically the same list of ingredients."

In the meantime, Gibson published "Hippie Hat Brain Parasite" in the April 1983 issue of Modern Stories; "Red Star, Winter Orbit" in the July 1983 issue of Omni; and "New Rose Hotel" in Omni's July 1984 issue. In July 1984, Ace Books published Neuromancer as an original paperback. The book wBurning Chromeas an immediate hit, nominated for the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel and placing eighth in the Locus 1985 poll for best novel. It gathered steam and won the triple crown of science fiction awards: the Philip K. Dick, Nebula, and Hugo Awards in 1985.

Neuromancer was largely an antithesis of everything that science fiction had become throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It quickly became the centerpiece in a growing movement called Cyperpunk, which treated technology and its implications as part of the surrounding background of a story, rather than the focus. While Gibson's novel wasn't the origin point of the genre, it helped to codify many of the various elements into a single narrative. The stories wove in elements of globalized infrastructure, computer technology and a mixing of worldwide cultural influences. It was dark, cynical and postmodern.

Gibson continued to work in the world of The Sprawl, writing two additional novel. Neuromancer: Count Zero was published by Gollancz in 1986, and Mona Lisa Overdrive was published in 1988, both of which continued to play with a number of the themes introduced in the first book. A collection of his short fiction appeared in 1986, titled Burning Chrome, which contained several of his Sprawland cyberpunk stories.

It's hard to underestimate the huge impact left by Neuromancer: The book is ripe with ideas that have influence generations of authors and directors in three decades it's been in print. Movies such as The Matrix and Elysium and television shows such as Person of Interest have borrowed substantially from its themes, while the cyberpunk subgenre has continued to run forward as computers continue to occupy greater and greater parts of our lives. Even as it feels outdated (there are no cellphones, for example), the novel will undoubtedly continue to remain as relevant and as raw as it was in 1984.



Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He can be found online at his site and on Twitter @andrewliptak.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/30-years-william-gibsons-ineuromanceri/

July/August 2014 Cover Story

http://www.stainlesssteeldroppings.com/julyaugust-2014-cover-story#more-11310

    James L. Sutter on What Authors Owe Fans (Or: Maybe George R. R. Martin *Is* Your Bitch)



What Authors Owe Fans

by James L. Sutter

In 2009, Neil Gaiman posted the now-famous blog entry "Entitlement Issues...," in which he declared that "George R. R. Martin is not your bitch." This was in the context of a larger statement about fan entitlement and what authors of series owe their fans, of which I think the most pertinent part reads:


"You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you. No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading... When you see other people complaining that George R.R. Martin has been spotted doing something other than writing the book they are waiting for, explain to them, more politely than I did the first time, the simple and unanswerable truth: George R. R. Martin is not working for you."

In the rest of the post, Neil argues both that authors need downtime to let their brains recharge and-more interestingly-that the author-audience transaction is in fact complete as soon as a reader pays money for a book, regardless of whether it's part of a series. I don't want to put words in Mr. Gaiman's mouth, yet presumably if George Martin lost interest and simply never produced the last book of A Song of Ice and Fire (or pulled a Dark Tower and took 22 years to finish the series), Neil would say that's the artist's prerogative.

It's an argument that I embraced wholeheartedly when I first encountered it. My day job is in the pen-and-paper RPG industry, where fan entitlement can reach truly mythic proportions, and that idea that an artist-even a commercial artist-is responsible only for the art they feel like creating is deeply liberating. The fans yelling online about how your work would be better or faster if you weren't distracted by other projects-or, god forbid, a personal life-can safely be ignored, because you don't owe them anything. You wrote a book, they bought it, end of transaction.

That soothing philosophy lasted exactly as long as it took me to explain it to my non-author roommates. They then patiently explained to me that in fact there is a social contract in play. Because to them, when it comes to epic series with giant overarching storylines, a single book is not a complete product, any more than a single chapter, paragraph, or word is the complete product in a standalone novel. When they buy into a series, they believe they're purchasing the story, and whether a book is 100 pages long or 10,000, if the story is incomplete, it's no different than if you bought a novel and found the last three chapters had been left blank.

Obviously, this sort of logic doesn't apply to every series. If your books are all standalone but linked by recurring characters, then a single volume might well be said to be a self-contained unit. But if the true focus is the overarching story-if, like some fantasy epics, book breaks are little more than expanded chapter breaks-then by this new argument, readers aren't buying individual books, but rather purchasing the overarching storyline in installments. You can't say, "Well, you enjoyed the first three books, so you got your money's worth for those whether I finish the series or not." Series become an all-or-nothing game.

At this point, you may be thinking, "Well, caveat emptor. The artistic muse is fickle, and I never promised them a conclusion." And that would be a valid position, except for one thing:

We as authors can't afford a cautious audience.

As Neil himself points out, "The economics of scale for a writer mean that very few of us can afford to write 5,000 page books and then break them up and publish them annually once they are done." Which is exactly why we need the audience not just to purchase our series after they're complete, but to invest in us by purchasing each book as it comes out. We're asking for their trust, promising that if they buy the car now, we'll do our best to sell them wheels for it tomorrow.

That's a hard sell. Unlike The Wheel of Time, most book series that fail to reach their conclusion can't expect Brandon Sanderson to swoop in and save the day. (TV series are even worse, as those brave enough to have a story arc usually get canceled or change creators before reaching a satisfying end.) As a result, more and more fans are doing the sensible thing and waiting to see whether authors can finish their opuses before picking up the first books.

And we can't afford that. Because as every author knows, the number one reason series get canceled partway through is lack of sales on the early books. By waiting to see if a series resolves, we help ensure that it never gets the chance.

We can't simply blame the publishers, either. While it's easy to look at smash successes and assume that the series is a healthy art form, the truth is that for smaller publishers, series are extremely risky. And without reader buy-in on early books, they're doomed to failure.

It would seem, then, that arguments against entitlement and obligation cut both ways. If we as authors want to take a no-strings approach, then we can hardly turn around and beg readers to support the early books in our series. And if we instead want to ask people to be our patrons-to have the faith to invest both emotionally and financially in a series before it's complete-then we need to keep our side of the bargain and do our damnedest to see things through.

There are limits, of course. Every author works at a different pace. The trolls who insist that a vacation with your family is wasting valuable writing time are still trolls. And Neil makes a fine point that the same people who whine about how long a book takes to release are frequently the ones who complain if it feels rushed.

In the end, only we as the authors get to decide what it means to be acting in good faith. But to pretend that the social contract between author and reader doesn't exist at all is disingenuous. If we walk away or let a series languish, we can't blame the fans for feeling cheated. We're the one who sold them an incomplete product.

"When they buy into a series, they believe they're purchasing the story, and whether a book is 100 pages long or 10,000, if the story is incomplete, it's no different than if you bought a novel and found the last three chapters had been left blank."

Evo razloga zašto sam prestao da čitam "Songs of ice and fire" nakon prve duge pauze,  sažetog u jednu rečenicu. A zagrizao sam serijal toliko da sam dva toma pročitao sa kompa, tako što sam ih skinuo sa IRC-a, a onda manijakalno pratio najave... i odlaganja... i najave... i odlaganja, na njegovom sajtu. To je bilo doba CRT monitora, mislim da sam se ozračio za četiri života.

Zato: Nevermore, Martine. Što je tuga, ako se uzme da je u pitanju čovjek koji je napisao "Sandkings" 

Quote from: BladeRunner on 23-09-2014, 11:21:20
A zagrizao sam serijal toliko da sam dva toma pročitao sa kompa, tako što sam ih skinuo sa IRC-a, a onda manijakalno pratio najave... i odlaganja... i najave... i odlaganja, na njegovom sajtu. To je bilo doba CRT monitora, mislim da sam se ozračio za četiri života. 

Joj!

Quote from: BladeRunner on 23-09-2014, 11:21:20

Zato: Nevermore, Martine. Što je tuga, ako se uzme da je u pitanju čovjek koji je napisao "Sandkings" 

same here.
A godinu dana nakon kraljeva izašao je Fevre Dream i to je bio poslednji komad Martinove proze nad kojim i danas mogu da nostalgičnu suzu otarem... 

Don't Diss Dystopias

Sci-fi's warning tales are as important as its optimistic stories.

By Ramez Naam




This piece is part of Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University. On Thursday, Oct. 2, Future Tense will host an event in Washington, D.C., on science fiction and public policy, inspired by the new anthology Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future. For more information on the event, visit the New America website; for more on Hieroglyph project, visit the website of ASU's Project Hieroglyph.


Sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson is worried about America. "We have lost our ability to get things done," he wrote in 2011, in a piece for the World Policy Institute. "We're suffering from a kind of 'innovation starvation.' " And part of the problem, he wrote, is science fiction. Where science fiction authors once dreamt of epic steps forward for humanity, now, "the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone."


Others have picked up where Stephenson left off. In an op-ed for Wired titled "Stop Writing Dystopian Sci-Fi—It's Making Us All Fear Technology," Michael Solana wrote, "Mankind is now destroyed with clockwork regularity. ... We have plague and we have zombies and we have zombie plague."






Well, Stephenson wants to do something about that. He's urged science-fiction writers to help reignite innovation in science, technology, and how they're used, and his mission helped create Hieroglyph, a new anthology of optimistic, aspirational science-fiction stories. The collection includes stories from Stephenson himself and some of the best science fiction writers in the business, several of whom also happen to be my friends. The thesis behind Hieroglyph, that one of the roles of science fiction is to dream bigger, to help us imagine positive outcomes for society—is one that I fundamentally agree with.


But in our enthusiasm for aspirational science fiction, let's not be so quick to dismiss the importance of dystopias.


Right now, the landscape of dystopias may be dominated by zombie tales and young adult novels with teen protagonists facing barely plausible totalitarian regimes. Yet there's a deeper tradition in science fiction of warning tales that have influenced our society—in positive ways—just as much as aspirational stories have.


Who doesn't know the broad outlines of George Orwell's 1984? Whether or not you've read the book, whether you've seen either of the film adaptations of the book, you know that it deals with state surveillance and state control of the media.


Orwell wasn't right about where society was in 1984. We haven't turned into that sort of surveillance society. But that may be, at least in small part, because of his book. The notion that ubiquitous surveillance and state manipulation of the media is evil is deeply engrained in us. And certainly, the geeks who make up the bulk of the computer and Web industry have largely absorbed that meme, and that's part of the reason they tend to angrily push back on things like NSA surveillance when it's uncovered.


1984 may be an example of a self-defeating prophecy. It was David Brin, one of the Hieroglyph authors, who first introduced me to the idea that a sufficiently powerful dystopia may influence society strongly enough to head off (or at least help head off) the world that it depicts. That alone is a compelling reason for society to create smart dystopias.


Other important dystopias are scattered throughout science fiction's past and its present.


Brave New World dealt with a kind of proto-genetic engineering of the unborn, through really, as many dystopias do, it dealt with totalitarianism. The 1997 film Gattaca updated Brave New World, bringing us to a future where genetic testing determined your job, your wealth, your status in life. And here I have a confession to make. I absolutely hated Gattaca. I left the theater shaking my head because the science in the film was just terrible. No genetic test will ever tell you how many heartbeats you have left. No genetic test will ever be more accurate in telling an employer how well you'll do at a job than your performance at a past job would be. The film was a gross exaggeration.


Why do I bring Gattaca up, then? Because it was effective. Genetic discrimination on the scale and pervasiveness that Gattaca depicted may have been an exaggeration, but there was a real risk that employers might discriminate against the unlucky carriers of particular genes, and the very high likelihood that insurance companies would raise rates or drop coverage for people who carried certain disease genes. But in 2008, heading off a Gattaca-esque future, Congress passed GINA, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which makes it illegal for employers or health insurers to base their decisions on your genes. And Gattaca, a film seen by millions, if not tens of millions, helped lay the groundwork for GINA.


Dystopian fiction has also helped us pass down important mores about the freedoms we find central, and helped rally people against injustice.


Fahrenheit 451 dealt with the fear of state censorship. That may seem quaint now, but consider its historical context: Written in an era of McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and blacklisting of anyone believed to have Communist sympathies, Ray Bradbury's incendiary dystopia wasn't really about the future—it was about the present he lived in. (And, ironically, Fahrenheit 451 has been censored or banned on at least three different occasions inside the United States since it was published.)


What of our present? We have our own share of warning tales, and for my money, they're among the most important pieces of science fiction being written. Pick up Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and Homeland and you find a warning tale, not of the far future, but of the barely-future, a warning about state surveillance, about overreach in the name of the War on Terror, about the abrogation of civil liberties, about the loss of privacy.


Or read Paolo Bacigalupi's Hugo- and Nebula-Award-winning The Windup Girl, a warning about climate change, the end of fossil fuels, corporate control of food, and corporate control of people.


These are powerful books, with powerful messages, about futures we want to avoid, some near, and some far. These are books I expect to last the test of time. More than that: We need these books. We need people being shaken out of complacency on real threats to society, just as much as we need them being inspired by compelling new possibilities for society. (Cory Doctorow, by the way, is another writer with a story in Hieroglyph, demonstrating that the very same writers can pen both warning tales and optimistic stories. Indeed, many warning tales, including Doctorow's, can also be inspirational and optimistic in the ways in which characters persevere or overcome.)


I'm an optimist. My own fiction, while it has its own dark warnings about pitfalls ahead, depicts the potential of science to improve society by networking human minds. More broadly, when I look at the world around us, I see that we've made it tremendously better over the ages, perhaps two steps forward, one step back, but better nonetheless. I expect the future to be brighter, not darker.


Yet if that's to happen, it will happen both because we have pole stars to aim for—the aspirational science fiction dreams that Neal Stephenson wants to bring more of into the world, and for which I applaud him—and because we have compelling warning tales that inform us of the pitfalls we need to avoid.


So by all means, pick up a copy of Hieroglyph. I have, and I'm loving it so far. And at the same time, let's keep those smart, thoughtful, prescient dystopias coming as well. The world needs both sides of that coin.



http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/09/neal_stephenson_hieroglyph_in_defense_of_dystopian_science_fiction.html

There were several amazing moments from last night's premiere of American Horror Story: Freak Show, from Sarah Paulson's amazing two-headed performance to Twisty's horrifying grin. But the one everyone's talking about is a Baz Luhrmann-esque cover of David Bowie's "Life on Mars"—performed, appropriately enough, by Elsa Mars (Jessica Lange).

EW has exclusive video of the number from the premiere below. It's worth watching over and over again, if only to see Lange pulled out on a wooden rocket.

http://insidetv.ew.com/2014/10/09/ahs-freak-show-jessica-lange-life-on-mars/

QuoteHigh Science and High Fantasy Walk Into a Bar...

by Alma Alexander

I have a science degree. Well, I have three, actually. I got my basic undergraduate BSc back in 1984, and then followed that up with what in South Africa at the time was a stepping-stone half-undergraduate and half-postgrad degree known as BSc (Hons.) In my Honours year, there were five of us – three young women, two young men, all eager-beaver young scientists all dewy fresh and enthusiastic. At our post-graduation-ceremony celebration, gathered together at the worst-kept secret at my University (a watering hole called Spanish Gardens...you might have heard about it...I used it as a setting for a novel I wrote back before the Mayans said the world would end...), the five of us were joined by one of our lecturers, himself a young postgrad, probably closer in age to us than he was to the elder echelon of the other academic staff at our department. On this occasion, he prophesied for us – he looked at each of the five of us and told us what our scientific futures would be. This one would go on to earn a PhD and end their lives in the halls of academe...this one would probably go into industry...this one this...this one that...and then he came to me.

He looked at me for a long time, and then said, "You...you are just misguided."

He had reason enough for that opinion, to be sure. I was a scribbler and dreamer even back then. I was keenly interested in the thing I was studying, to be sure – I went on to take a MSc in Molecular Biology and Microbiology – but I did not have quite the die-hard passion for it in order to climb higher and reach for that PhD (I did begin one. It ran into difficulties. A more deeply rooted, stubborn, dedicated, dyed-in-the-wool scientist might have found a way around all of them. I reached a point where I simply took the Universe at its word, and stopped trying to.) I got a good and decent degree, I learned a lot...and then I kind of categorically fulfilled the "you are misguided" prophecy by segueing sideways into first scientific writing and editing and then sailing full steam ahead into the deeper and far more fascinating waters of fiction, and fantasy.

(It would be years before my mother would stop carefully cutting out job ads which called for my actual education background and expertise and leaving them for me to find in strategic spots around the house...)

The years flew by. I wrote and published a dozen novels, not one of them touching on all the things I had sworn at and sweated over and learned about all living things. About the building blocks of life and how and why they worked. About the biochemistry and physiology of living things. And all this time all that simmered, slowly, quietly, on a back burner somewhere, waiting...until now.

I sat down to write a short story about Were-critters – I had this wildly fun idea about something called the Random Were, a particular type of Were-kind I hadn't seen anywhere else before, whose particular talent was to Turn into whatever the last warm-blooded thing they laid eyes on before the Turn came upon them at the traditional full moon rising.

The short story stopped being "short", in any sense, very quickly. And started being a lot more solid, a lot darker, a lot more sophisticated...and I heard once again a still small voice I had not been listening to for years now.

My long-gone youth, glittering with science, was speaking to me once again.

And so I set out to do what was flatly impossible. If Were had a "true" genetic basis, after all, they would probably already exist. That did not stop me, however, from sitting down and working out how it would all work if they did exist.

I was faced with the problem of a question of High Science in a head-on collision with High Fantasy. The crash was spectacular, the debris on the story road was fascinating, and putting everything back together again in a new and never before seen shape...was exhilarating.

And I kept on remembering my friend, my lecturer at University, and the 'misguided' label.

Because, it turns out, I wasn't misguided at all. It just so happened that my science took a little longer to become a really useful tool, and uniquely equipped me to write about a situation, and about characters, which would pulse with life because they were based on the Real ThingTM and because this world, the world I created for them, would (with a bit of poetic licence given that Were do not, in fact, as far as we know, walk among us) be absolutely realistic, be true, and would potentially be able to be understood and accepted in a way that would allow it to simply walk off the page and into a believable reality that my readers would very easily be able to imagine themselves into.

You'll have to get the books to find out exactly how the genetics of Were-kind work. But let me just say that I had an enormous amount of fun and satisfaction working them out, and it is my hope that anyone who reads these books will quite simply accept that these creatures are as real as you or me – they live – and it took me, and my words, and my science, to give them that life.

So, then. Misguided, and proud of the fact that somehow I still managed to find myself on the right road after all, even without paying all the attention that I should have done to the signposts at the crossroads of my life.

I sign myself off with all of my credentials, for once – this blog post, these books, this world, has been brought to you by Alma Alexander (MSc), Novelist.

I'll see you inside the Were Chronicles.

Alma Alexander's life so far has prepared her very well for her chosen career. She was born in a country which no longer exists on the maps, has lived and worked in seven countries on four continents (and in cyberspace!), has climbed mountains, dived in coral reefs, flown small planes, swum with dolphins, touched two-thousand-year-old tiles in a gate out of Babylon. She is a novelist, anthologist and short story writer who currently shares her life between the Pacific Northwest of the USA (where she lives with her husband and two cats) and the wonderful fantasy worlds of her own imagination. You can find out more about Alma on her website (www.AlmaAlexander.org), her Facebook page or her blog."

Quote'Am I being catfished?' An author confronts her number one online critic


When a bad review of her first novel appeared online, Kathleen Hale was warned not to respond. But she soon found herself wading in





In the months before my first novel came out, I was a charmless lunatic – the type that other lunatics cross the street to avoid. I fidgeted and talked to myself, rewriting passages of a book that had already gone to print. I remember when my editor handed me the final copy: I held the book in my hands for a millisecond before grabbing a pen and scribbling edits in the margins.

"No," she said firmly, taking the pen away. "Kathleen, you understand we can't make any more changes, right?"

"I was just kidding," I lied. Eventually she had to physically prise the book from my hands.

A lot of authors call this "the post-partum stage", as if the book is a baby they struggle to feel happy about. But for me, it felt more like one of my body parts was about to be showcased.

"Are you excited about your novel?" my mom asked, repeatedly, often in singsong.

"I'm scared," I said. Anxious and inexperienced, I began checking goodreads.com, a social reviewing site owned by Amazon. My publisher HarperTeen had sent advance copies of my book to bloggers and I wanted to see what they thought. Other authors warned me not to do this, but I didn't listen. Soon, my daily visits tallied somewhere between "slightly-more-than-is-attractive-to-admit-here" and "infinity".

For the most part, I found Goodreaders were awarding my novel one star or five stars, with nothing in between. "Well, it's a weird book," I reminded myself. "It's about a girl with PTSD teaming up with a veteran to fight crime." Mostly I was relieved they weren't all one-star reviews.

One day, while deleting and rewriting the same tweet over and over (my editors had urged me to build a "web presence"), a tiny avatar popped up on my screen. She was young, tanned and attractive, with dark hair and a bright smile. Her Twitter profile said she was a book blogger who tweeted nonstop between 6pm and midnight, usually about the TV show Gossip Girl. According to her blogger profile, she was a 10th-grade teacher, wife and mother of two. Her name was Blythe Harris. She had tweeted me saying she had some ideas for my next book.

"Cool, Blythe, thanks!" I replied. In an attempt to connect with readers, I'd been asking Twitter for ideas – "The weirdest thing you can think of!" – promising to try to incorporate them in the sequel.

Curious to see if Blythe had read my book, I clicked from her Twitter through her blog and her Goodreads page. She had given it one star. "Meh," I thought. I scrolled down her review.

"Fuck this," it said. "I think this book is awfully written and offensive; its execution in regards to all aspects is horrible and honestly, nonexistent."

Blythe went on to warn other readers that my characters were rape apologists and slut-shamers. She accused my book of mocking everything from domestic abuse to PTSD. "I can say with utmost certainty that this is one of the worst books I've read this year," she said, "maybe my life."

Other commenters joined in to say they'd been thinking of reading my book, but now wouldn't. Or they'd liked it, but could see where Blythe was coming from, and would reduce their ratings.

"Rape is brushed off as if it is nothing," Blythe explained to one commenter. "PTSD is referred to insensitively; domestic abuse is the punch line of a joke, as is mental illness."

"But there isn't rape in my book," I thought. I racked my brain, trying to see where I had gone wrong. I wished I could magically transform all the copies being printed with a quick swish of my little red pen. ("Not to make fun of PTSD, or anything," I might add to one character's comment. "Because that would be wrong.")

At the bottom of the page, Goodreads had issued the following directive (if you are signed in as an author, it appears after every bad review of a book you've written): "We really, really (really!) don't think you should comment on this review, even to thank the reviewer. If you think this review is against our Review Guidelines, please flag it to bring it to our attention. Keep in mind that if this is a review of the book, even one including factual errors, we generally will not remove it.

"If you still feel you must leave a comment, click 'Accept and Continue' below to proceed (but again, we don't recommend it)."

I would soon learn why.


***

After listening to me yammer on about the Goodreads review, my mother sent me a link to a website called stopthegrbullies.com, or STGRB. Blythe appeared on a page called Badly Behaving Goodreaders, an allusion to Badly Behaving Authors. BBAs, Athena Parker, a co-founder of STGRB, told me, are "usually authors who [have] unknowingly broken some 'rule'". Once an author is labelled a BBA, his or her book is unofficially blacklisted by the book-blogging community.

In my case, I became a BBA by writing about issues such as PTSD, sex and deer hunting without moralising on these topics. (Other authors have become BBAs for: doing nothing, tweeting their dislike of snarky reviews, supporting other BBAs.)

"Blythe was involved in an [online] attack on a 14-year-old girl back in May 2012," Parker said. The teenager had written a glowing review of a book Blythe hated, obliquely referencing Blythe's hatred for it: "Dear Haters," the review read. "Everyone has his or her own personal opinion, but expressing that through profanity is not the answer. Supposedly, this person is an English teacher at a middle school near where I lived... People can get hurt," the review concluded.

In response, Blythe rallied her followers. Adults began flooding the girl's thread, saying, among other things, "Fuck you."

It turned out that Parker and her co-founders were not the only ones to have run into trouble with Blythe. An editor friend encouraged me to get in touch with other authors she knew who had been negatively reviewed by her. Only one agreed to talk, under condition of anonymity.

I'll call her Patricia Winston.

"You know her, too?" I Gchatted Patricia.

She responded – "Omg" – and immediately took our conversation off the record.

"DO NOT ENGAGE," she implored me. "You'll make yourself look bad, and she'll ruin you."

***


Writing for a living means working in an industry where one's success or failure hinges on the subjective reactions of an audience. But, as Patricia implied, caring too much looks narcissistic. A standup comic can deal with a heckler in a crowded theatre, but online etiquette prohibits writers from responding to negativity in any way.

In the following weeks, Blythe's vitriol continued to create a ripple effect: every time someone admitted to having liked my book on Goodreads, they included a caveat that referenced her review. The ones who truly loathed it tweeted reviews at me. It got to the point where my mild-mannered mother (also checking on my book's status) wanted to run a background check on Blythe. "Who are these people?" she asked. She had accidentally followed one of my detractors on Twitter – "I didn't know the button!" she yelled down the phone – and was now having to deal with cyberbullying of her own. ("Fine, I'll get off the Twitter," she said. "But I really don't like these people.")

That same day, Blythe began tweeting in tandem with me, ridiculing everything I said. Confronting her would mean publicly acknowledging that I searched my name on Twitter, which is about as socially attractive as setting up a Google alert for your name (which I also did). So instead I ate a lot of candy and engaged in light stalking: I prowled Blythe's Instagram and Twitter, I read her reviews, considered photos of her baked goods and watched from a distance as she got on her soapbox – at one point bragging she was the only person she knew who used her real name and profession online. As my fascination mounted, and my self-loathing deepened, I reminded myself that there are worse things than rabid bloggers (cancer, for instance) and that people suffer greater degradations than becoming writers. But still, I wanted to respond.

Patricia warned me that this was exactly what Blythe was waiting for – and Athena Parker agreed: "[GR Bullies] actually bait authors online to get them to say something, anything, that can be taken out of context." The next step, she said, was for them to begin the "career-destroying" phase.

"Is this even real?" I Gchatted Patricia.

"YES THERE IS A CAREER-DESTROYING PHASE IT'S AWFUL. DO. NOT. ENGAGE. Omg did you put our convo back on the record?"

She went invisible.

***


Why do hecklers heckle? Recent studies have had dark things to say about abusive internet commenters – a University of Manitoba report suggested they share traits with child molesters and serial killers. The more I wondered about Blythe, the more I was reminded of something Sarah Silverman said in an article for Entertainment Weekly: "A guy once just yelled, 'Me!' in the middle of my set. It was amazing. This guy's heckle directly equalled its heartbreaking subtext – 'Me!'" Silverman, an avid fan of Howard Stern, went on to describe a poignant moment she remembers from listening to his radio show: one of the many callers who turns out to be an asshole is about to be hung up on when, just before the line goes dead, he blurts out, in a crazed, stuttering voice, "I exist!"

I had a feeling the motivation behind heckling, or trolling, was similar to why most people do anything – why I write, or why I was starting to treat typing my name into search boxes like it was a job. It occurred to me Blythe and I had this much in common: we were obsessed with being heard.

But empathy didn't untangle the knots in my stomach. I still wanted to talk to her, and my self-control was dwindling. One afternoon, good-naturedly drunk on bourbon and after watching Blythe tweet about her in-progress manuscript, I sub-tweeted that, while weird, derivative reviews could be irritating, it was a relief to remember that all bloggers were also aspiring authors.

My notifications feed exploded. Bloggers who'd been nice to me were hurt. Those who hated me now had an excuse to write long posts about what a bitch I was, making it clear that:

1) Reviews are for readers, not authors.

2) When authors engage with reviewers, it's abusive behaviour.

3) Mean-spirited or even inaccurate reviews are fair game so long as they focus on the book.

"Sorry," I pleaded on Twitter. "Didn't mean all bloggers, just the ones who talk shit then tweet about their in-progress manuscripts." I responded a few more times, digging myself deeper. For the rest of the afternoon, I fielded venom from teenagers and grown women, with a smattering of supportive private messages from bloggers who apologised for being too scared to show support publicly. I emailed an apology to a blogger who still liked me. After she posted it, people quieted down on Twitter, and my inbox quit sagging with unread mail. But the one-star reviews continued, and this time they all called me a BBA. My book had not even been published yet and already it felt like everybody hated it, and me.

***


A few nights later I called my friend Sarah, to talk while I got drunk and sort of watched TV. Opening a new internet window, I absent-mindedly returned to stalking Blythe Harris. Somehow, I had never Googled her before and now, when I did, there was nothing to be found – which was weird, considering she was a high school staff member. "Wait a sec," I mumbled, reaching for my bourbon.

"And then, I don't know, I sort of lost it," Sarah was saying. "I just sort of – poof – exploded..."

"Lost what?" I asked, distracted, thinking back through what I knew of Blythe – her endless photos and reviews complete with Gifs and links, which I now realised must have taken hours to write. The only non-generic photo on her Instagram was of a Pomeranian. It occurred to me that a wife and mother with papers to grade might not have a lot of time to tweet between 6pm and midnight. That said, I had a fiance, friends and a social life (if you can believe it), a lot of writing projects, and I still managed total recall of much of what Blythe had said online. I noticed that two of her profiles contradicted each other – one said 8th grade teacher, one said 10th grade – and that most of her former avatar photos had been of the Pomeranian.

"No, lost it," Sarah said, "like, I went a little nuts and yelled at this stranger who was hitting on me. I can't remember the last time I yelled at anyone." In the ensuing silence, she waited as I rummaged in the kitchen for snacks. "Are you OK?" she asked.

"I'm fine," I lied, trying to open a bag of pretzels with my teeth. But my eyes felt funny, and the bourbon burbled like magma in my stomach.

Was Blythe Harris even real?

***


Over the next few months, my book came out, I got distracted by life and managed to stay off Goodreads. Then a book club wanted an interview, and suggested I pick a blogger to do it.

"Blythe Harris," I wrote back. I knew tons of nice bloggers, but I still longed to engage with Blythe directly.

The book club explained that it was common for authors to do "giveaways" in conjunction with the interview, and asked if I could sign some books. I agreed, and they forwarded me Blythe's address.

The exterior of the house that showed up on Google maps looked thousands of square feet too small for the interiors Blythe had posted on Instagram. According to the telephone directory and recent census reports, nobody named Blythe Harris lived there. The address belonged to someone I'll call Judy Donofrio who, according to an internet background check ($19), was 46 – not 27, as Blythe was – and worked as vice-president of a company that authorises disability claims.

It looked as if I had been taken in by someone using a fake identity. I Gchatted Patricia: "I think we've been catfished?"

Patricia asked how I could be sure Judy D wasn't merely renting to Blythe H? I had to admit it seemed unlikely that I might be right: why would someone who sells disability insurance pose as a teacher online?

"Well, there's only one way to find out," Sarah said, sending me a car rental link. "Go talk to her."

"DO NOT DO THIS," Patricia cautioned me.

"You don't want to talk to her?" I responded.

"NO STOP IT HOW DO YOU EVEN KNOW YOU'RE RIGHT?"

"I don't." I opened a new tab to book a car.

***


I planned my car rental for a few months down the line. I was procrastinating, hoping to untangle the mystery without face-to-face confrontation. I sent a message to Blythe through the book club, asking if we could do the interview via video chat. She vanished for a month, then told the club she'd been dealing with family issues and didn't see herself having the time to do a video chat.

I suggested we speak on the phone and Blythe countered by pulling out of the interview – she was about to go to Europe, she said, but told the book club she hoped I'd still address "the drama", a reference to my drunken tweets.

"Europe" seemed a vague destination for an adult planning a vacation. But a few nights later, lit only by the glow of my screen, I watched in real time as Blythe uploaded photos of Greece to Instagram. The Acropolis at night. An ocean view. A box of macaroons in an anonymous hand.

The images looked generic to me, the kind you can easily find on Google Images, but then Blythe posted a picture of herself sitting in a helicopter. The face matched the tanned Twitter photograph.

"Fuck," I said. What if she was real and had simply given the book club the wrong address?

Then Judy updated her Facebook profile with photographs of a vacation in Oyster Bay, New York. I clicked through and saw the holiday had started on the same day as Blythe Harris's.

***


As my car rental date approached, I thought it might be helpful to get some expert advice about meeting a catfish in person. So I telephoned Nev Schulman, subject of the 2010 hit Catfish, the documentary that coined the term. He now hosts and produces the MTV programme Catfish, in which he helps people confront their long-distance internet boyfriends, girlfriends and enemies – almost 100% of whom end up being fakes. Maybe, I thought, he could help me, too.

"Of all the catfish I've confronted, there was only one I didn't tell I was coming," Schulman said cagily, apparently shocked by my plan to go unannounced. Nonetheless, he had some tips: "This is a woman who is used to sitting behind her computer and saying whatever she wants with very little accountability. Even if she hears from people she criticises, she doesn't have to look them in the face. She doesn't know she hurt your feelings, and she doesn't really care."

"How did you know that she hurt my feelings?"

"Because you're going to her house."

He urged me to listen to whoever answered the door, and not to make our impromptu meeting about my "issues".

Schulman used the word "issues" so many times that I decided to get in touch with another kind of expert: a doctor. Former film-maker Michael Rich splits his time between teaching pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and lecturing on "Society, Human Development and Health" at Harvard's School of Public Health. He is also the director of the Centre on Media and Child Health at Boston Children's hospital, and runs a webpage called Ask the Mediatrician, where parents write in about concerns ranging from cyberbullying to catfishing. Given the adolescent nature of my problem, he proved an excellent source.

"The internet doesn't make you crazy," he said. "But you can make yourself crazy on the internet." The idea that I hadn't transformed was reassuring. Whatever we become online is an extension of our usual behaviour: I was still myself, just amplified unattractively.

I asked Rich about his catfished patients: how did they react in the months that followed their discovery? "Depression, anxiety. They tend to spend more time online rather than less." I self-consciously x'd out of my browser window, open to three Blythe Harris platforms. "They're hyper-vigilant, always checking their phone. Certainly substance abuse." I reconsidered the cocktails I'd planned for that evening. "The response is going to vary," he concluded, "but it will have a commonality of self-loathing and self-harm."

"Great," I said, double-checking Blythe's address.

***


I parked down the street from Judy's house. It looked like something from a storybook, complete with dormer windows and lush, colourful garden. It was only now occurring to me that I didn't really know what to say, and should probably have brought a present. I needed a white flag.

I searched my bag but all it contained besides notebooks and tampons was a tiny book I'd been given: Anna Quindlen's A Short Guide To A Happy Life. This seemed a little passive-aggressive, but I figured it was better than nothing.

Before I could change my mind, I walked briskly down the street toward the Mazda parked in Judy's driveway. A hooded sweatshirt with glittery pink lips across the chest lay on the passenger seat; in the back was a large folder full of what looked like insurance claims. I heard tyres on gravel and spun round to see a police van. For a second I thought I was going to be arrested, but it was passing by – just a drive through a quiet neighbourhood where the only thing suspicious was me.

I strolled to the front door. A dog barked and I thought of Blythe's Instagram Pomeranian. Was it the same one? The doorbell had been torn off, and up close the garden was overgrown. I started to feel hot and claustrophobic. The stupid happiness book grew sweaty in my hands. I couldn't decide whether to knock.

The curtains were drawn, but I could see a figure silhouetted in one window, looking at me.

The barking stopped.

I dropped the book on the step and walked away.

Over the course of an admittedly privileged life, I consider my visit to Judy's as a sort of personal rock bottom. In the weeks that followed, I felt certain the conclusion to the Blythe Harris mystery was simply "Kathleen Hale is crazy" – and to be fair, that is one deduction. But I soon found out that it was not the only one.

While pondering that version of this story, I continued to scroll through both Blythe and Judy's social media pages. And I saw something I had missed: Blythe had posted identical photos of Judy's dogs, even using their names – Bentley and Bailey – but saying they were hers.

I sent screenshots to Patricia. "It's the end of an era," she Gchatted me. Between the emoticons and the lower-case font, she was the calmest version of herself she'd been all year.

Instead of returning to Judy's house, which still felt like the biggest breach of decency I'd ever pulled, I decided to call her at work. Sarah and I rehearsed the conversation.

"What do I even say?" I kept asking.

"Just pretend to be a factchecker," she said.

"So now I'm catfishing her."

I called the number, expecting to get sent to an operator. But a human answered and when I asked for Judy, she put me through.

"This is Judy Donofrio," she said.

I spat out the line about needing to factcheck a piece. She seemed uncertain but agreed to answer some questions.

"Is this how to spell your name?" I asked, and spelled it.

"Next question," she snapped without answering.

"Do you live in Nassau County?"

"No." Her Facebook page and LinkedIn account said otherwise, and that's where her house was. She was lying, in other words, but I didn't push it.

I asked if she was vice-president of the company.

"I can't help you," she said. "Buh-bye..."

"DO YOU USE THE NAME BLYTHE HARRIS TO BOOK BLOG ONLINE?" I felt like the guy on the Howard Stern show, screaming, "I exist!"

She paused. "No," she said quietly.

She paused again, then asked, "Who's Blythe Harris?" Her tone had changed, as if suddenly she could talk for ever.

"She's a book blogger," I said, "and she's given your address."

"A book blog... Yeah, I don't know what that is."

"Oh."

We both mumbled about how weird it all was.

"She uses photos of your dogs," I said, feeling like the biggest creep in the world, but also that I might be talking to a slightly bigger creep. "I have it here," I said, pretending to consult notes, even though she couldn't see me, "that you have a Pomeranian, and another dog, and she uses photos that you posted."

She gasped. "I do have a Pomeranian."

"She uses your address," I repeated. "Do you have children who might be using a different name online?" I already knew she had two teenagers.

"Nope – I do, but they're not... They don't live there any more," she stammered.

"You know what?" she added. "I am Judy, but I don't know who this Blythe Harris is and why she's using my pictures or information." I could hear her lips smacking; unruffled, she had started eating. "Can you report her or something?"

"Unfortunately it's not a crime," I said. "It's called catfishing."

She didn't know what that meant, so I found myself defining catfishing for someone who was, presumably, catfishing me. (And who I was cross-catfishing.) "It happens a lot."

"A long time ago I used to get books," she said, her mouth full. "I just put 'Return to Sender'."

I told her that publishing houses were sending the books. I told her she might want to check out Blythe Harris's Instagram, as there were photos on it she would recognise. She didn't seem to care.

I asked how long it had been since she'd received books. "Like years ago," she said.

An hour after I got off the phone to Judy, Blythe Harris deleted her Twitter and set her Instagram to private. A contact at a publishing house confirmed that they'd been sending books to Judy's address all year, and as recently as two weeks ago.

***


"So," I asked Nev Schulman, after giving him my evidence. "Am I a good catfisherwoman?"

"Do you really need me to tell you that?" he asked. "What's interesting are the unanswered questions – like, why would she do this? That's something our show does. It gives people closure."

"Yeah," I agreed. On the one hand, I was satisfied that Blythe Harris was a catfish. But part of me still longed to hear Judy say, "I am Blythe" and to explain, and then to laugh about it with me so we could become friends through admittedly weird circumstances. The mystery didn't feel 100% solved.

"I'm tempted to tell you to call her back and tell her it's you, and that you lied to her," Schulman said. "Because, look, I'm curious to know about this chick, too – these people are really interesting, and the lives they lead and the characters they create, it takes a lot of brain power."

So I called Judy again and this time I told her who I was, and that I knew she was Blythe Harris.

She started yelling. She said she wasn't Blythe Harris and that she was going to call the police about "this Blythe Harris person".

I paused. "OK." I hadn't anticipated the shouting.

"The profile picture is not me," Judy cried, referring to Blythe's Twitter profile. "It's my friend Carla."

I gasped. "You know that person?"

"She stole [pictures of Carla] off my website from making my Facebook."

The way she spoke about the internet – "making my Facebook" – made doubt grow in my chest. Blythe's blog was nothing fancy, but it had obviously been generated by someone who knew her way around a basic html template.

"The Pomeranian is me," Judy said. "That picture isn't me."

She wouldn't give me Carla's last name, but I later found her through Judy's Facebook. Sure enough, Blythe Harris had dragged her Twitter profile picture from Carla's. And according to Judy, the only picture on Blythe's Instagram page that featured an actual person – the one of the woman in the helicopter – had also been repurposed from a Facebook album chronicling Carla's recent trip to Greece.

I asked Judy if she had told Carla about Blythe Harris. She hadn't: "I don't want to alarm her." Then she started yelling again.

"I'm not yelling at you," she yelled, and started to cry.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I feel like this is my fault," Judy sobbed.

"How is it your fault?" I wanted to know.

"Whatever," she whispered darkly. Her tone had shifted. "People are stupid," she added, her voice flat. "If you track their IP address, you can find them easily."

This seemed at odds with her earlier Facebook naivety, but I felt too suffocated to parse it all out. "OK," I said. "Feel better." When I gave her my name and number, there was no obvious reaction to my identity. "If you discover anything," I said, "or if there's anything you feel like you forgot to say, please let me know." Sweat trickled down my back. I knew, on some level, that I was speaking to Blythe Harris. But after all this time, and all this digging, I still couldn't prove it. Part of me wondered whether it even mattered any more.

"Sure," she said. "I'll Facebook message you."

After we hung up, she blocked me on Facebook. Then Blythe Harris reconnected her Twitter account and set it to private. But she was still following me, which meant I could send her a direct message. I wrote to her that I knew she was using other women's photos. I filled up three of the 140-character word limits, imploring her to contact me.

"I'm not trying to embarrass you," I wrote. Channelling Schulman, I emphasised that I just wanted to know more about her experience – to listen, and hear how she felt about all this. Blythe responded by unfollowing me; there could be no more direct messages.

I'm told Blythe still blogs and posts on Goodreads; Patricia tells me she still live tweets Gossip Girl. In some ways I'm grateful to Judy, or whoever is posing as Blythe, for making her Twitter and Instagram private, because it has helped me drop that obsessive part of my daily routine. Although, like anyone with a tendency for low-grade insanity, I occasionally grow nostalgic for the thing that makes me nuts.

Unlike iPhone messages or Facebook, Twitter doesn't confirm receipt of direct messages. Even so, I return now and then to our one-way conversation, wanting so badly for the time stamp at the bottom of my message to read "Seen".

Some names have been changed.


http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/18/am-i-being-catfished-an-author-confronts-her-number-one-online-critic

Quote
Isaac Asimov Mulls "How Do People Get New Ideas?"

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531911/isaac-asimov-mulls-how-do-people-get-new-ideas/


Note from Arthur Obermayer, friend of the author:

In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston. The company was an MIT spinoff that originally focused on the effects of nuclear weapons on aircraft structures. The company received a contract with the acronym GLIPAR (Guide Line Identification Program for Antimissile Research) from the Advanced Research Projects Agency to elicit the most creative approaches possible for a ballistic missile defense system. The government recognized that no matter how much was spent on improving and expanding current technology, it would remain inadequate. They wanted us and a few other contractors to think "out of the box."

When I first became involved in the project, I suggested that Isaac Asimov, who was a good friend of mine, would be an appropriate person to participate. He expressed his willingness and came to a few meetings. He eventually decided not to continue, because he did not want to have access to any secret classified information; it would limit his freedom of expression. Before he left, however, he wrote this essay on creativity as his single formal input. This essay was never published or used beyond our small group. When I recently rediscovered it while cleaning out some old files, I recognized that its contents are as broadly relevant today as when he wrote it. It describes not only the creative process and the nature of creative people but also the kind of environment that promotes creativity.




ON CREATIVITY

How do people get new ideas?

Presumably, the process of creativity, whatever it is, is essentially the same in all its branches and varieties, so that the evolution of a new art form, a new gadget, a new scientific principle, all involve common factors. We are most interested in the "creation" of a new scientific principle or a new application of an old one, but we can be general here.

One way of investigating the problem is to consider the great ideas of the past and see just how they were generated. Unfortunately, the method of generation is never clear even to the "generators" themselves.

But what if the same earth-shaking idea occurred to two men, simultaneously and independently? Perhaps, the common factors involved would be illuminating. Consider the theory of evolution by natural selection, independently created by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

There is a great deal in common there. Both traveled to far places, observing strange species of plants and animals and the manner in which they varied from place to place. Both were keenly interested in finding an explanation for this, and both failed until each happened to read Malthus's "Essay on Population."

Both then saw how the notion of overpopulation and weeding out (which Malthus had applied to human beings) would fit into the doctrine of evolution by natural selection (if applied to species generally).

Obviously, then, what is needed is not only people with a good background in a particular field, but also people capable of making a connection between item 1 and item 2 which might not ordinarily seem connected.

Undoubtedly in the first half of the 19th century, a great many naturalists had studied the manner in which species were differentiated among themselves. A great many people had read Malthus. Perhaps some both studied species and read Malthus. But what you needed was someone who studied species, read Malthus, and had the ability to make a cross-connection.

That is the crucial point that is the rare characteristic that must be found. Once the cross-connection is made, it becomes obvious. Thomas H. Huxley is supposed to have exclaimed after reading On the Origin of Species, "How stupid of me not to have thought of this."

But why didn't he think of it? The history of human thought would make it seem that there is difficulty in thinking of an idea even when all the facts are on the table. Making the cross-connection requires a certain daring. It must, for any cross-connection that does not require daring is performed at once by many and develops not as a "new idea," but as a mere "corollary of an old idea."

It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable. It seems the height of unreason to suppose the earth was round instead of flat, or that it moved instead of the sun, or that objects required a force to stop them when in motion, instead of a force to keep them moving, and so on.

A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.

Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)

Once you have the people you want, the next question is: Do you want to bring them together so that they may discuss the problem mutually, or should you inform each of the problem and allow them to work in isolation?

My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it. (The famous example of Kekule working out the structure of benzene in his sleep is well-known.)

The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.

Nevertheless, a meeting of such people may be desirable for reasons other than the act of creation itself.

No two people exactly duplicate each other's mental stores of items. One person may know A and not B, another may know B and not A, and either knowing A and B, both may get the idea—though not necessarily at once or even soon.

Furthermore, the information may not only be of individual items A and B, but even of combinations such as A-B, which in themselves are not significant. However, if one person mentions the unusual combination of A-B and another unusual combination A-C, it may well be that the combination A-B-C, which neither has thought of separately, may yield an answer.

It seems to me then that the purpose of cerebration sessions is not to think up new ideas but to educate the participants in facts and fact-combinations, in theories and vagrant thoughts.

But how to persuade creative people to do so? First and foremost, there must be ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness. The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome. The individuals must, therefore, have the feeling that the others won't object.

If a single individual present is unsympathetic to the foolishness that would be bound to go on at such a session, the others would freeze. The unsympathetic individual may be a gold mine of information, but the harm he does will more than compensate for that. It seems necessary to me, then, that all people at a session be willing to sound foolish and listen to others sound foolish.

If a single individual present has a much greater reputation than the others, or is more articulate, or has a distinctly more commanding personality, he may well take over the conference and reduce the rest to little more than passive obedience. The individual may himself be extremely useful, but he might as well be put to work solo, for he is neutralizing the rest.

The optimum number of the group would probably not be very high. I should guess that no more than five would be wanted. A larger group might have a larger total supply of information, but there would be the tension of waiting to speak, which can be very frustrating. It would probably be better to have a number of sessions at which the people attending would vary, rather than one session including them all. (This would involve a certain repetition, but even repetition is not in itself undesirable. It is not what people say at these conferences, but what they inspire in each other later on.)

For best purposes, there should be a feeling of informality. Joviality, the use of first names, joking, relaxed kidding are, I think, of the essence—not in themselves, but because they encourage a willingness to be involved in the folly of creativeness. For this purpose I think a meeting in someone's home or over a dinner table at some restaurant is perhaps more useful than one in a conference room.

Probably more inhibiting than anything else is a feeling of responsibility. The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren't paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues.

To feel guilty because one has not earned one's salary because one has not had a great idea is the surest way, it seems to me, of making it certain that no great idea will come in the next time either.

Yet your company is conducting this cerebration program on government money. To think of congressmen or the general public hearing about scientists fooling around, boondoggling, telling dirty jokes, perhaps, at government expense, is to break into a cold sweat. In fact, the average scientist has enough public conscience not to want to feel he is doing this even if no one finds out.

I would suggest that members at a cerebration session be given sinecure tasks to do—short reports to write, or summaries of their conclusions, or brief answers to suggested problems—and be paid for that; the payment being the fee that would ordinarily be paid for the cerebration session. The cerebration session would then be officially unpaid-for and that, too, would allow considerable relaxation.

I do not think that cerebration sessions can be left unguided. There must be someone in charge who plays a role equivalent to that of a psychoanalyst. A psychoanalyst, as I understand it, by asking the right questions (and except for that interfering as little as possible), gets the patient himself to discuss his past life in such a way as to elicit new understanding of it in his own eyes.

In the same way, a session-arbiter will have to sit there, stirring up the animals, asking the shrewd question, making the necessary comment, bringing them gently back to the point. Since the arbiter will not know which question is shrewd, which comment necessary, and what the point is, his will not be an easy job.

As for "gadgets" designed to elicit creativity, I think these should arise out of the bull sessions themselves. If thoroughly relaxed, free of responsibility, discussing something of interest, and being by nature unconventional, the participants themselves will create devices to stimulate discussion.

Published with permission of Asimov Holdings.

'The Terminator' 30th anniversary: How a throwaway film became a sci-fi classic



By Bruce Kirkland, QMI Agency


In 2008, the U.S. Library of Congress designated The Terminator as worthy of preservation in the National Film Registry. Only those films held to be "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" are deemed worthy. Both for itself and for its potent legacy, James Cameron's sci-fi thriller scores on all three criteria.

God, if I had only known that in advance in 1984. Stressed and overworked at The Toronto Sun, collaborating then with the founding entertainment editor, George Anthony, the two of us decided in our infinite "wisdom" to dismiss The Terminator and not even bother to see and review it when it opened on Oct. 26 that year. Big mistake!

Few people then had ever heard of Cameron, the Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based writer-director who created The Terminator franchise and made his official feature film directorial debut on the first one. Prior to The Terminator, Cameron had apprenticed in filmmaking by making miniature models and doing special effects, art direction and production design on B-movies. He finally got to direct on Piranha II: The Spawning in 1981, but only after the original director bailed out in a "creative differences" conflict. Not an auspicious beginning.

Most people, of course, had heard of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who plays the humanoid cyborg who time travels on a murder mission from 2029 to 1984 in the first movie. But few people really cared much for the Austrian bodybuilder. His Hollywood claim to fame was invested in his brawn, his awkward accent and two Conan the Barbarian movies. In short, The Terminator looked like a throwaway genre flick best left to video viewing at home.



Then it suddenly became a sensation in Canada and the U.S., leading the domestic box office race for two weeks running. Audiences knew something that most film critics did not and the cheapo (but great-looking) movie eventually grossed $78 million worldwide, a bloody fortune in that era. Especially given its modest $6.4 million production budget. And, yes, The Sun eventually reviewed The Terminator more than a week after it opened, sheepishly perhaps and with too much restraint even then.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. The Terminator is a watershed in science-fiction filmmaking. It is prescient in its core debate and storyline, as the computerized machines of the future try to usurp and then wipe out the humans who programmed artificial intelligence into them. In The Terminator, the cyborg society known as Skynet is waging war against the humans. Schwarzenegger's T-800 is sent back to 1984 to kill the mother of the resistance warrior, John Connor, who challenges them so effectively in that future world.

The phenomenal success of The Terminator also gave rise to Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgement Day, which is a technical marvel as well as a great genre piece. As the original film marks its 30th anniversary, the fifth film in the franchise series is set for release on July 1, 2015.

With Cameron declining an invitation to participate in the project, Terminator: Genisys will "reset" the entire story with Alan Taylor (Thor: The Dark World) as director and the team of Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier as screenwriters. Schwarzenegger is reprising his role as the Terminator T-800, albeit with his human tissue aged to accommodate his own post-political, 67-year-old, physical reality.



As the cyborg, Schwarzenegger famously promised: "I'll be back." He has been, again and again, but he could never guarantee his personal physiography would remain the same. Craters, ravines and weathering have changed his appearance since he first appeared in The Terminator hunting down Sarah Connor, the character Linda Hamilton played so memorably in both of Cameron's Terminator films. So Schwarzenegger's T-800 will age, too.

In addition to Terminator: Genisys — which wrapped up its principle shoot in San Francisco on Aug. 6, Paramount Pictures has announced it will be part of a trilogy. The sequels are now scheduled for May 19, 2017, and June 29, 2018.

Like the Library of Congress folks assured in 2008, it all started with The Terminator in 1984 — and the 30-year-old film does have an enduring cultural, historic and aesthetic significance.

Five things we want to see in 'Terminator: Genisys'

The fifth Terminator film, Terminator: Genisys, has wrapped up its principal shoot under director Alan Taylor, is now in post-production for editing and special effects, and will be released in theatres on July 1, 2015. Here are five things I want to see in the film, which is being positioned as a franchise "reset" by the filmmakers:

• Let Arnold Schwarzenegger's face and body age into his T-800 cyborg. The man is 67. Do not use the technology made famous in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that de-ages actors by removing wrinkles and other signs of reality. I can accept a ruined relic as the Terminator.

• Do not follow the same storyline James Cameron wrote for the original 1984 film. Dare to be different, even radically so. Cameron already perfected his vision in T2. We need something fresh. So the rumours of time-shifting between 1984 and 1991 are interesting, because that means T2 plot details are in play, including the metallic T-1000.

• Let the screenwriters — American Laeta Kalogridis (executive producer on Avatar) and Canadian Patrick Lussier (a Dracula specialist) — explain time travel in a logical way. Otherwise, my head will explode.

• There are also rumours about prequel scenes showing Sarah Connor as a girl with her parents. Do not let these sequences turn the new Terminator into a maudlin family melodrama. Sci-fi needs an edge, not sentimentality.

• Given the 30 years since The Terminator, give Skynet and the future shock elements of artificial intelligence a new millennium twist. Supposedly, the stylized spelling of Terminator: Genisys indicates the filmmakers are on that track, but we obviously need something more complex than wordplay.


http://www.torontosun.com/2014/10/16/the-terminator-30th-anniversary-how-a-throwaway-film-became-a-sci-fi-classic

...And the adaptation news keeps coming!

Deadline is reporting that Horrorstör, the unique supernatural mystery novel written by Grady Hendrix, is being adapted for television!

Horrorstör is a haunted house story of a different color. It's about the strange goings-on at the Ikea-like Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, Ohio...where employees arrive every morning to find the store trashed. The store cameras reveal nothing, so a small group of brave employees agree to work the night shift, when they encounter unspeakable horrors. Horrorstör is unique in that comes packaged in the form of a glossy mail order catalog, complete with product illustrations, a home delivery order form, and a map of Orsk's labyrinthine showroom.

The rights to Horrorstör have been acquired for development as a television series by The Jackal Group, a co-venture between Fox Networks Group and Gail Berman. Berman spearheaded the development of the successful Buffy The Vampire Slayer television series, another series that mixed horror and humor, as Horrorstör was obviously designed to do. That bodes well for any show that might develop from this.



http://deadline.com/2014/10/grady-hendrix-horrorstor-novel-tv-series-gail-berman-the-jackal-group-864211/

DeNardo na Kirkusu:

Quote
I'm far from being the trivia king of science fiction, but I like to think I know a thing or two about sci-fi that the average reader might not know. One of the great things about science fiction—aside from the obvious mind-expanding ideas—is that it's a literary genre with a long, rich history that's filled with interesting factoids. I'm continually learning new things about it: interesting facts about the stories, about the writers and about its place in our society. That's why, in addition to reading science fiction stories, I like to read about the genre itself.

Case in point: I was perusing Sci-Fi Chronicles: A Visual History of the Galaxy's Greatest Science Fiction, edited by Guy Haley. This is a stunning visual guide book about science-fiction books, films, television shows, and the people that make them. At 550-plus pages, it's jam-packed with interesting write-ups and photos of hundreds of science fiction properties. The book itself is organized in chronological order beginning with early science fiction and ending with modern sci-fi. Each section contains informative and detailed descriptions of books, films and television shows for that period. A handful of worlds even get a special timeline describing all the important events that take place in that universe. This is the kind of book that science fiction fans like myself drool over.

So there I am, perusing this excellent volume, and finding out that I am perhaps even less of a sci-fi trivia king than I thought.

Here are 10 things that I learned about science fiction from reading Sci-Fi Chronicles:




1. Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes Met Frankenstein

I have no excuse for not knowing this one, because it happened only three years ago. In 2001, Benedict Cumberbatch (who plays the most famous literary detective of all time, Sherlock Holmes, in the BBC production of Sherlock) and Johnny Lee Miller (who plays Sherlock Holmes in the American production of Elementary) together starred in a stage production of Frankenstein. The play was directed by Danny Boyle, the director behind the 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire (the first one is a zombie flick, the second one...not so much). During the play's run, Cumberbatch and Miller alternated the roles of Victor Frankenstein and his tortured creature.

2. Stranger in a Strange Land Inspired Its Own Religion

Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land is about a man named Valentine Michael Smith who was born and raised on Mars. The story concerns Smith's trip to Earth and his first-ever interaction with Earth culture. The book is considered one of the most popular science-fiction novels of all time. What surprised me was learning that in 1968, the book inspistranger strange landred a man to found a Neopagan religious organization modeled after the religion founded by Smith in the novel, the beliefs of which include polyamory, social libertarianism and non-mainstream family structures. (Bonus trivia learned while writing this article: In 2012, the U.S. Library of Congress named Stranger in a Strange Land as one of its 88 "Books that Shaped America." Who knew? Well, I mean besides the Library of Congress....)

3. Isaac Asimov Had a Star Trek Connection

I had already known that several science fiction writers—including Harlan Ellison, David Gerrold, Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon, Norman Spinrad, Robert Bloch and Jerome Bixby, among others—had written episodes of the original Star Trek series. What I didn't know until I read Sci-Fi Chronicleswas that renowned science-fiction author Isaac Asimov was given a screen credit on Star Trek: The Motion Picture as the science advisor for the 1979 film. He was apparently close friends with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.

4. Ronald Reagan Was a Fan of The Day The Earth Stood Still

The 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of my all-time favorite films. Based on the short story "Farewell to the Master" by Harry Bates, this classic sci-fi film is about the arrival of an alien and his powerful robot companion who arrive on Earth to give humanity a stern warning about its future. At least one world leader in real life took those messages to heart decades after the film was released. Ronald Reagan biographer Lou Cannon claims that then-President Ronald Reagan had the film at the forefront of his mind when he first met Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. Reagan referenced the film two years later in a speech he delivered before the United Nations.

5. Ray Bradbury's Career Was Launched by Truman Capote and Charles Addams

Ray Bradbury is widely considered to be one of the world's top writers. Would it surprise you to learn that another famous writer helped him get his start? It surprised me! Bradbury's first published short story ("Homecoming") was submitted in 1946 to Mademoiselle magazine and sat in the so-called "slush pile." It took the keen eyes of the magazine's young editorial assistant to pick it out of that pile. That editorial assistant was Truman Capote, who later went on to become a respected writer as well. "Homecoming" was a story inspired by the Addams Family, the creation of the famous cartoonist Charles Addams, who was a friend of Bradbury's. Addams himself illustrated Bradbury's story for the magazine publication.

6. Arthur C. Clarke Discovered Lost Treasure and Had a Dinosaur Named After Him

There are two bits of trivia I learned about Arthur C. Clarke, a writer perhaps most famous for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. Firstly, Clarke was an avid scuba diver and immigrated to Sri Lanka in 1956 to pursue that activity. Later that year, he discovered the underwater ruins of the ancient Hindu Koneswaram temple in Trincomalee. Secondly, Clarke has a species of dinosaur named after him. The dinosaur was discovered in the Australian seaside town of Inverloch and was named Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei.

7. Harlan Ellison Was Fired From Disney on His Very First Day

Harlan Ellison, one of the more outspoken and brutally honest writers in the science-fiction field, was once hired on at Disney studios as a writer. One his very first day, he joked about making a "porn Disney flick," even using the voice of Mickey Mouse to do so. Unbeknownst to Ellison at the time, Roy Disney and other studio heads were sitting at the next table. He found a pink slip on his desk later that day.

8. Ursula K. Le Guin Went to the Same High School as Philip K. Dick.

Science fiction Grand Master Ursula K. Le Guin names Philip K. Dick as one of her literary influences. It turns out that she and Dick were in the same high school class, although they did not know each other at the time. Small world!

9. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale Was Adapted for Film, Radio, Stage Play and BalletProxima

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is a classic of dystopian literature in which the theme of women in subjugation is explored. I already knew about the 1990 film adaptation...but was surprised to learn that there are four (count 'em) other adaptations: a BBC radio adaptation broadcast in 2000; an operatic adaptation that premiered the same year; a stage adaptation toured the U.K. in 2002; and a ballet adaptation jut one year ago in October 2013.

10. Stephen Baxter Applied to be a Cosmonaut

Stephen Baxter, a British author known for his realistic stories set in space (like next month's Proxima), once applied to become a cosmonaut. That was back in 1991, the year his first novel, Raft (part of his popular Xeelee future history), was published. He was trying out for the guest slot on the Soviet space station Mir, but "fell at an early hurdle."

Baxter wrote the Foreword for Sci-Fi Chronicles. I'm still digging through its treasures....

elem, kad vec imamo Tolko ljubitelja paralelnih, alternativnih i inih istorijskih varijanti, evo nesto i za njih:




Here's what Google, Twitter, Instagram, and other sites would have looked like in the 1980s

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/29/william-gibson-peripheral-interview_n_6062070.html

William Gibson is an author of speculative fiction, most notably his breakout debut novel, Neuromancer, which won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and The Philip K. Dick Award. According to fans, it accurately predicted the aesthetic and cultural influence of the Internet.

His latest novel, The Peripheral, was published this month. It follows a pair who realizes a side job they've been working -- playing a game that simulates guarding a building -- could actually involve murder. Featuring Gibson's signature cyberpunk setting, the story also explores PTSD and the detrimental impacts of capitalism.

Gibson spoke with HuffPost Books about the novel, the ever-growing fusion of our online and offline lives, and his fascination with Twitter:


The Peripheral deals with some themes your work commonly addresses -- a "game" is revealed to be much more than meets the eye. Why do you find that you are attracted to the idea of exposing big conspiracies?

"Exposing big conspiracies" might seem what it's about at a level of plot mechanics, but I find the world to be more complex and ambiguous than conspiracy theories can afford to allow for. The central appeal of conspiracy theories, I assume, is that they are simpler than reality, less ambivalent, hence comforting. So, while my plot may hold out the offer of revealing an imaginary conspiracy, whatever I may have to say about how the world may actually work won't be that, but will be embedded somewhere else, in some other way.

Would you say The Peripheral sheds light on your speculations for the future of the Internet?

It's an extension of my assumption that what we still call the Internet originally seemed like "another space" where we did certain things, but that that's come to be, increasingly, "the world." That it becomes the ground of everything, increasingly transparently. It seems to me that we all live today in a sort of partial condition of "Internetness," and daily less partially.


And would you say the book addresses the fine line between games and violence?

Or the increasingly fine line between existence and violence? One of my characters may suffer from PTSD as the result of something she experienced in a game, but I suspect that that's because she and her friends earn their livings playing on teams, for more affluent players. They feed their children that way, so can't afford not to play. So the question, then, is whether that's still "a game"?

What, in your opinion, are the biggest threats the Internet poses, say, 20 years down the road?

I feel less threatened by the Internet than by efforts to control it, generally.


Which contemporary speculative fiction writers do you admire?

Purely in terms of what it may be possible to do with the form, in ways I personally identify with most: David Mitchell, Nick Harkaway, Lauren Beukes, Ned Beauman, Cory Doctorow ... A full list would be very long indeed.

You tweet pretty frequently -- what do you enjoy about Twitter, and what bothers you about it? Are there any accounts you really enjoy?

It's like having a window open on a very crowded pedestrian thoroughfare. I love the sense of people and ideas passing. The demonstrations of very pure crowd dynamics can be unsettling, though. A shaming crowd, on Twitter, for instance, can feel like something out of Orwell.

You've said that you don't play close attention to computers themselves, but the way people behave around them. How are you able to continue to make that distinction today?

A lot less readily, actually! We are now surrounded by invisible computers. In cars, fridges, our pockets. It becomes difficult to find a human, in this landscape, who isn't in some sense using one.

Jared na blogu poziva na glasanje:

Goodreads Choice Awards!



First round is up!

Red Rising

The Goodreads Choice Awards are fun, in the way that popular votes are 80% predictable and 20% straight-up weirdness. GCA is further enweirdened by a crazy deadline (they start... now?!), a very American focus and the very fact that they are on GoodReads.

That said, as I am - for the first time in six years - not involved in an award of any type, I can give opinions! Freely!

So without further ado, my picks for the opening round:
•Fiction: Tigerman by Nick Harkaway.
•Mystery & Thriller: The Secret Place by Tana French
•Fantasy: City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett
•Science Fiction: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
•Horror: The Wolf in Winter by John Connolly
•Debut Goodreads Author: Pierce Brown
•Young Adult Fiction: Since You've Been Gone by Morgan Matson
•Young Adult SF/F: Red Rising by Pierce Brown

I haven't read enough in any of the other categories, although I may wind up throwing in some specious votes at the end. GoodReads is also so big that write-ins don't fare well, so I'm wound up with the traditional small party dilemma of supporting 'the one I want' vs 'the best of what I've got'.


A curious thing: with Tigerman, Bone Clocks, Station Eleven and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki in Fiction (not to mention Mr Mercedes and The Secret Place in Mystery), some of the best SF/F/H isn't in SF/F/H.

A nice thing: just looking at the titles on display here, across all categories, SF is in a much better place than it was last year. Not to take anything away from Ancillary Justice and what it achieved, but the competition is much stiffer for Sword. That's no bad thing - nice to have lots of good books to choose from.

A consistently frustrating thing: 10 of the 15 books on the Fantasy list are all mid-series. Not only does this make comparing like-for-like especially tricky, but it further encourages voting-the-author instead voting-the-book - already an issue with popular awards. I don't know a way around this, although it would be fun to try (originally my idea for the DLGA) dividing fantasy books into 'Starts', 'Series' and 'Standalones'.

And the 'did the award achieve its purpose' thing: did this award successfully introduce me to new books? Yes. I've actually bought three: Panic, The Impossible Knife of Memory and [cough] Romancing the Duke. I would probably try some of the Fantasy category as well, but I figured I might as well wait for the DGLA.

Anyway: the first round has started, everyone can vote, it is a silly amount of fun and you might find something new. So go play! And comments: who did you vote for, why, and what do you like/dislike about this particular award?

This week, Ursula K. Le Guin accepted the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 65th National Book Awards ceremony.

Congrats to Ms. Le Guin!

Hear her excellent, thought-provoking speech below...





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk

Transrealism: the first major literary movement of the 21st century?




It's not science fiction, it's not realism, but hovers in the unsettling zone in between. From Philip K Dick to Stephen King, Damien Walter takes a tour through transrealism, the emerging genre aiming to kill off 'consensus reality'



A Scanner Darkly is one of Philip K Dick's most famous but also most divisive novels. Written in 1973 but not published until 1977, it marks the boundary between PKD's mid-career novels that were clearly works of science fiction, including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and his late-career work that had arguably left that genre behind. Like VALIS and The Divine Invasion that followed it, A Scanner Darkly was two stories collided into one – a roughly science-fictional premise built around a mind-destroying drug, and a grittily realistic autobiographical depiction of PKD's time living among drug addicts.

It is also, in the thinking of writer, critic and mathematician Rudy Rucker, the first work of a literary movement he would name "transrealism" in his 1983 essay A Transrealist Manifesto. Three decades later, Rucker's essay has as much relevance to contemporary literature as ever. But while Rucker was writing at a time when science fiction and mainstream literature appeared starkly divided, today the two are increasingly hard to separate. It seems that here in the early 21st century, the literary movement Rucker called for is finally reaching its fruition.

Transrealism argues for an approach to writing novels routed first and foremost in reality. It rejects artificial constructs like plot and archetypal characters, in favour of real events and people, drawn directly from the author's experience. But through this realist tapestry, the author threads a singular, impossibly fantastic idea, often one drawn from the playbook of science fiction, fantasy and horror. So the transrealist author who creates a detailed and realistic depiction of American high-school life will then shatter it open with the discovery of an alien flying saucer that confers super-powers on an otherwise ordinary young man.

It's informative to list a few works that do not qualify as transrealism to understand Rucker's intent more fully. Popular fantasy or science fiction stories like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games lack a strong enough reality to be discussed as transrealism. Apparently realistic narratives that sometimes contain fantastic elements, like the high-tech gizmos of spy thrillers, also fail as transrealism because their plots and archetypal characters are very far from real. Transrealism aims for a very specific combination of the real and the fantastic, for a very specific purpose, that seems to have become tremendously relevant for contemporary readers.




The potential list of transrealist authors is both contentious and fascinating. Margaret Atwood for The Handmaid's Tale and her novels from Oryx and Crake onwards. Stephen King, when at his best describing the lives of blue-collar America shattered by supernatural horrors. Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, among other big names of American letters. Iain Banks in novels like Whit and The Bridge. JG Ballard, as one of many writers originating from the science-fiction genre to pioneer transrealist techniques. Martin Amis in Time's Arrow, among others.

This proliferation of the fantastic in contemporary fiction has at times been described as the "mainstreaming of science fiction". But sci-fi continues on much as it ever has, producing various escapist fantasies for readers who want time out from reality. And of course there's no shortage of purely realist novels populating Booker prize lists and elsewhere. Both sci-fi and realism provide a measure of comfort – one by showing us the escape hatch from mundane reality, the other by reassuring us the reality we really upon is fixed, stable and unchanging. Transrealism is meant to be uncomfortable, by telling us that our reality is at best constructed, at worst non-existent, and allowing us no escape from that realisation.

"Transrealism is a revolutionary art form. A major tool in mass thought-control is the myth of consensus reality. Hand in hand with this myth goes the notion of a 'normal person'." Rucker's formulation of transrealism as revolutionary becomes especially meaningful when compared to the uses transrealism is put to by the best of its practitioners. Atwood, Pynchon and Foster-Wallace all employed transrealist techniques to challenge the ways that "consensus reality" defined who was normal and who was not, from the political oppression of women to the spiritual death inflicted on us all by modern consumerism.

Today transrealism underpins much of the most radical and challenging work in contemporary literature. Colson Whitehead's intelligent dissection of the underpinnings of racism in The Intuitionist and his New York Times transrealist twist on the zombie-apocalypse novel, Zone One. Monica Byrne's hallucinatory road-trip across the future of the developing world and the lives of women caught between poverty and high-speed technological change in The Girl in the Road. Matt Haig's compulsive young adult novel The Humans, which invites the reader to see human life through alien eyes. Transrealism has 30 years of history behind it, but it's in the next 30 years that it may well define literature as we come to know it.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/oct/24/transrealism-first-major-literary-movement-21st-century

... I jos malo Gibsona, Gibsona nikad dosta




Earlier this year, William Gibson unleashed his latest novel, The Peripheral. For many, the author's return to the future, after 14 years spent writing about the present, was a welcome return. For Gibson, however, it looked as bleak as he'd left it in the 1990s.

Once upon a time (the mid-'80s to be exact), Gibson was the face of science fiction. His dystopian works warned of a near-future where computer technology was woven into our DNA—where a virtual datasphere played the dominant role in human interface. The genre was called cyberpunk.

In the pre-internet days, cyberpunk titillated readers with its underworld of hackers, anarchists and punks hell-bent on disrupting an autocracy of anonymous oppressors. Others, like Bruce Sterling and Neil Stevenson, followed Gibson's lead, releasing tomes that had critics and academics taking sci-fi seriously for the first time. Thirty years after they party-crashed the literary scene—with the internet now in roughly 75 percent of American homes, 40 percent worldwide—cyberpunk is largely forgotten. Many of their predictions, however, quietly came to pass.

Gibson first coined the term "cyberspace" in a 1982 short story titled "Burning Chrome." His landmark debut novel, Neuromancer (1984), further conceptualized the virtual network that Gibson described as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation." Author Jack Womack said Neuromancer was less about predicting the future and more about affecting its lexicon. Though Gibson once saw them as "fantasies of anxiety," today (like everyone), he's an avid internet user. In just the past month, he's tweeted nearly a thousand times.

Born near Myrtle Beach, N.C. in 1948, Gibson avoided the Vietnam War draft in 1967 by hopping a bus to Vancouver, where he had first brushes with the counterculture, hallucinogenic drugs and the work of William S. Burroughs. By the late '70s, Gibson fell under the spell of punk rock and science fiction, which he called a "derelict, but viable form."

At a sci-fi convention in 1981 in Denver, he met Sterling and another budding writer named Lewis Shiner. The trio appeared at Austin's Armadillo Con a year later, where they gave a panel on punk in science fiction. Shiner later noted the "movement solidified" there; Sterling dubbed Gibson's "Burning Chrome" "a classic one-two combination of lowlife and high-tech." Neuromancer dropped two years after, becoming the first book to win the Nebula, Hugo and Philip K. Dick awards—science fiction's top honors.

Publisher Lawrence Person called it the "archetypal cyberpunk work." Time listed it in their top 100 novels since 1923. The UK Guardian called Gibson "the most important novelist of the past two decades."

Next came Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), each set, like Neuromancer, in a megacity called "The Sprawl," where sky and weather are machine-controlled. An advanced computer network—dubbed the "matrix"—is available to all inhabitants, who spend each waking moment there.

"Johnny Mnemonic," a Gibson short from '81 also set inside the Sprawl, translated to the big-screen in '95. Starring Keanu Reeves as a cyber-trafficker who'd undergone surgery to install a data system in his head, the film was a critical and commercial flop. Similarities in cinematography and tone, however, were later detected in the 1999 megahit The Matrix (also starring Reeves), which Gibson called the "the ultimate cyberpunk artifact."

Narrative quotations in The Matrix also derived from Gibson's work. Laney, a character in the author's Idoru (1996), for instance, looks for patterns in the flow of data; protagonists in Count Zero have instructions (kung-fu, helicopter piloting) downloaded to their brains, and Neuromancer features artificial intelligences trying to free themselves from human control.

His influence quickly spread to music, where the first notably-cyberpunk album—Sigue Sigue Sputnik's Flaunt It (1986)—unleashed a sinister collage of pop slogans and gothic futurist soundscapes into the synthpop ferment. In the Gibson documentary No Maps for These Territories (1999), the author describes Neuromancer as "not a goth book, but kind of the same world that makes kids be goths."

One such kid was Trent Reznor, of middling Midwest synth acts like Slam Bamboo and Exotic Birds. In 1989, he embarked on a solo project under the moniker "Nine Inch Nails." The resulting Pretty Hate Machine, for all intents and purposes, ended the shiny '80s sound for good. Before it became landmark in alternative music history, Pretty Hate Machine was strictly cult. Critics bashed it. Yet a devoted core found in its pounding drum machines, aggressive synth textures and tortured human voicings a last connection in an otherwise depraved world.

Other Gibson-inflected works soon followed. Pop-punk Billy Idol's '93 comeback attempt—titled Cyberpunk—was rife with overly stylized technophobic anthems that went nowhere. UK dance-rockers Jesus Jones anointed their album Perverse (also '93) the "first made entirely on computers." (Doris Norton's Personal Computer album of 1984 had it beat, but who's counting?) If less than a masterpiece, Perverse pointed to the tech-driven DIY of a decade hence, where albums were recorded top-to-bottom on a computer, in a bedroom.

The biggest progenitors, however, of spatialized, abstract sound in the oncoming swarm of internet culture came from electronic dance music (EDM). Nascent '90s trends in Acid House, Jungle and Drum'n' Bass employed fractured samples and undulating breakbeats to convey what Gibson called the "incomprehensible present."

Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin) was a UK-by-way-of-Ireland artist whose drum'n bass recordings seemed less for rave parties and more for cerebral, alienated geeks sitting alone in a bedroom contemplating the new open platforms of real cyberspace, now dubbed the World Wide Web.

Aphex's Xylem Tube EP of '92 is one of the most unusual releases of the period. "Polynomial-C" begins ambient, but quickly goes dissonant, its stacked arpeggios a mind-trip that both exhilarates and traumatizes. "Tamphex" loops a sample from a tampon ad that feels hard-wired into our brains.

James's only true peer in this style was Autechre, a Manchester duo equally interested in things that don't exist. Autechre's name, like many of its song titles, is a made-up word referring, essentially, to itself. Similarly, Gibson, in Memory Palace (1992), asserts: "We've always been on our way to this new place that is no place really."

Never to be left in the cold, rock chameleon David Bowie responded to the tech explosion with Outside (1995), featuring Trent Reznor on a remix of the album's "The Heart's Filthy Lesson." Bowie,—with Outside's producer Brian Eno—had in fact already brushed up against one of the pioneers of cybernetics.

Anthony Stafford Beer was a Mancunian management theorist who'd been commissioned by the new communist government in Chile in 1972 to create a computer network (titled "Cybersyn"), made up of 500 telex computers to report variables in workforce conditions. Despite never working properly (not to mention a coup d'etat in '73 that overthrew the communists), Beer gained a passionate follower in Eno. The two men struck up a correspondence in '75, and soon, Eno collaborators like David Byrne of the Talking Heads and Bowie became acolytes too. (Bowie put Beer's Brain of the Firm on his list of favorite books.)

Beer, in a 1964 lecture, spoke of the arrival one day of a smart network of connected devices—a so-called Internet of Things. Little did he know the U.S. Pentagon and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had already commissioned such a project in '63. Essentially connecting the mainframes of university computers in the West, the original Internet sought to gather and protect information inside a virtual, computerized space in the event of a nuclear war. The internet, as it emerged in the 1990s, is its side effect.

As Gibson's star reached its pop culture apex around this time, the very Cold War that brought about the internet's creation was ending. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989; the Soviet Union collapsed two years later. Eighties rock band U2 were on hand in East Germany when the wall fell. There to reinvent themselves under the guiding hand of, you guessed it, Brian Eno, U2 would become the one rock band most closely associated with Gibson.

The author was tapped to appear in a televised documentary of U2's ZooTV tour, supporting Achtung Baby, their comeback album of 1991. (William Burroughs also appeared.) They returned the favor by contributing incidental music to Gibson's audio book version of Neuromancer in '94. Gibson also interviewed the band for Details magazine, wherein lead singer Bono reflected on fin-de-siecle celebrity, saying, "At first, when you're reading stories about your life in the media...you feel violated. Then you start to realize that the person they're describing has very little to do with you and is in fact much more interesting than you are."

The pervasiveness of multimedia became an obsession on U2's '93 album Zooropa, which opened with the phrase, "Vorsprung durch technik" (a '90s Audi ad slogan translating to: "A step ahead through technology.") The technophobic LP ended 10 songs later with "The Wanderer," starring country legend Johnny Cash as guest lead. The Man in Black's bellow of lines like "drifting through capitals of tin" hover ominously over a burbling synths that warn of rushing too quickly into the virtual—something he knows cannot be stopped.

By '95, Eno helped U2 disappear into a side project under the banner "The Passengers," where 14 imaginary film soundtracks turned the world's biggest rock act into its own virtual reality. As cyberpunk became the syntax of its age, nothing was sacred. Even Superman, that comic book champion of the All-American Way, was suddenly (and without warning) slapped with a cyberpunk makeover.

After a surprising death in a 1993 issue of the DC staple, Superman's writers scrambled for several years to continue the storyline. Then in '96, the brilliant idea formed to split the beloved superhero into two uncontrollable energy fields—Red Superman and Blue Superman. The techno-fied icon had to figure out how to unite his two zig-zagging energies to regain his powers and save the universe. It seemed a valid idea at the time, though by '98 no one quite knew how to work it, and with fan interest waning, DC dropped the cyberpunk Superman altogether, returning him to his traditional tights, cape and rubber boots.

By this time cyberpunk had pretty much faded anyway. Gibson's newest novels were set in the present, which he'd been so instrumental in projecting—at least aesthetically. The internet of Year-2000 had made a smooth transition from technological fear into everyday utility. Dystopianism and Y2K hysteria were replaced by a benign internet, roused in things like the Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks romantic comedy You've Got Mail (based on the signature AOL email slogan). A notable exception in the cyberpunk fadeout was Radiohead's OK Computer (1997).

The Essex band who'd hit in '93 with an alt-rock pastiche titled "Creep" had revamped their sound on 1995's full-length, The Bends. With lamentations on plasticity and prosthetics, The Bends hinted that our days living separate from machines were numbered. By OK Computer, humans and machines were fully hybridized.

Yet where Gibson's hard-boiled urchins of the techno-underworld sought a way out of the mind-control, Radiohead's self-loathing slackers on OK Computer are numbed to the point of regression. Police oversee karma, airbags routinely save lives, and slogans like "God loves his children" hang over a populace of "paranoid androids."

"Stay away from the future/Don't tell God your plans/It's all deranged/No control," sang Bowie two years earlier on "No Control" from Outside. U2's "Zooropa" too offered axiomatic simplicities like "Be all that you can be," "Eat to get slimmer" and "Fly the friendly skies." "Numb," from the same LP, negates the trend, with guitarist The Edge murmuring, "Don't move/Don't talk out of time/Don't think/Don't worry/Everything's just fine."

For OK Computer's "Fitter Happier," a computerized voice spits out dictums like, "Comfortable/Not drinking too much/Regular exercise at the gym...A pig in a cage/On antibiotics," which seemed lifted from a Gibson couplet in Idoru, which went: "Viciously lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry...lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide, on the outskirts of Topeka." The sensation was no longer one of a future world where computers dominate. It was the present.

Radiohead's 2000 album, Kid A, proved the final transformation from mopey guitar-rockers to techno-rock avatars. Where U2's disappearing act with the Passengers called for a name-change, Radiohead's Thom Yorke simply became the voice inside the machine. (He credited Aphex Twin with Kid A's inspiration.)

By this time, U2 had already turned their back on techno-rock experimentation. Where Kid A baffled critics and fans alike, 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind was hailed as U2's return to form. Bono became the love-him-or-hate-him mouthpiece of pop activism, lobbying government leaders and CEOs of mega-corporations to fund AIDS relief in Africa. Both acts, however, fell silent in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Gibson did not.

He called 9/11 an event "outside of culture." His book Pattern Recognition (2002) is possibly the first piece of post-9/11 fiction, which scholar Chris Vanderwees says was also the first conspiracy theory pertaining to the event. (Gibson's main character surfs the internet for footage and opinions suggestive of a unified narrative, finding none.) Not surprisingly, the book was largely ignored.

As the U.S. (and England) waged war on the Arab world, Americans at home became accustomed to high-alerts of new domestic terror threats. A secret war was also being waged on the public's privacy. Between 2000 and 2001, over a dozen internet privacy laws were introduced to Congress. In the aftermath of 9/11, however, all of them were abandoned, and in October '01, the Patriot Act passed. It greatly expanded the government's ability to surveil its citizenry.

In 2002, DARPA (the original creators of the internet) opened the Office of Information Awareness, with the intent of scanning and collecting every piece of personal data that comes across the web—the assertion being that, with enough data collected, the government could predict who might engage in nefarious crimes. Public outrage ensued; the program quickly shut down. Nothing, however, changed, except that businesses such as AT&T, Yahoo and Google now made the same information available to covert law enforcement operations, only through user agreements. 9/11, in essence, provided a license for governments to develop spying systems that affect us all.

Then, in 2007, an American G.I. in Iraq—an intelligence specialist named Bradley Manning—received an internal video of a US Apache helicopter shown committing collateral murder on a crowd of unarmed Iraqi civilians (including two children in a van). Manning burned a copy of the video (and other classified military files) onto a CD-ROM, telling suspicious onlookers that he was just listening to Lady Gaga. The material—the video, as well as 400,000+ internal memos (not all from Manning)—told the story of vast war crimes by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as plans to spy on countries throughout the world. Flowing from an internet site called WikiLeaks, it galvanized the anti-war movement at home and abroad.

The face of WikiLeaks—Julian Assange—became the first major hacker-celebrity in political activism. After being accused of rape in late 2010, Assange was granted political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Manning was charged in 2013 with 17 counts of espionage and theft and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

That June, a former CIA tech assistant named Eric Snowden leaked thousands of internal documents pointing to the National Security Agency's mass surveillance of US citizens through telecommunications and the internet. Former NSA analyst Russell Tice, in the days after the Bush Administration exited the White House, had already admitted they had access to, in his words, "everything." The candidate to replace Bush—Barack Obama—defended, on the campaign trail in '08, the necessity of wire-tapping and surveillance. The programs not only continued after he took office, they expanded.

The blame could be laid entirely at the feet of the government, if we didn't know that much of the legislation that has zapped personal privacy comes directly from lobbyists funded by the tech companies—the same ones selling us our phones and our computers, as well as the platforms where we enjoy music, film, literature and more.

Google, Twitter and Facebook, lauded as broadening the scope of human potential, in fact, built algorithms to drive us to predictable results. Cookies store information on individual user preferences. They have, in essence, created business models that are a dream come true for the CIAs, FBIs and NSAs of the world.

Facebook has nearly a billion users, with tons of personal data on each one, proving that plenty of individuals are willing to provide private information to get something that is free and fun. Simply put: We've allowed ourselves to be smitten. The computer is now miniaturized, or, as Bruce Sterling predicted, "adorable." Christopher Shin, the engineer of Cellebrite, a device that aids the U.S. government in collecting information from cellular users, contends that the iPhone holds more personal information than any other device on the market.

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote extensively during the 1950s of the "gaze," which he saw as a projection of power—not of a real person who wishes malevolently to deprive us of our independence, but the result of a pervasive struggle for self-mastery. Likewise, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg argued recently that sharing personal information in a new platform, like the internet, has evolved in quite normal, social ways. Post-structuralist Michel Foucault took it a step further during the 1960s, linking the gaze to forms of surveillance. For Foucault, the notion of seeing things while being watched may liberate some marginal elements, but it shatters sovereignty. We literally become blind to reality.

In the end, many of the same artists who warned of the dangers in taking the full technological plunge are now willing accomplices.

In 2007-08, both Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, leery of file-sharing in the past, gave away free downloads of their newest albums. Radiohead later decried the loss of artists' profits with the advent of streaming platforms like Spotify, but have yet to remove their music from it.

Last year, U2 offered its newest single, "Invisible," for free, with Bank of America promising to donate $1 to RED (Bono's foundation to fight AIDS) for each user download. This fall, the band took it one further and uploaded their newest album to every iTunes account without users having asked for it. All three acts have done soundtracking for Hollywood movies and Broadway musicals.

NIN's Trent Reznor soundtracked the Aaron Sorkin/David Fincher film The Social Network, a biopic of Facebook's Zuckerberg, who is portrayed as a self-serving pseudo-intellectual caught in an infringement case for stealing the social platform's original idea from a pair of jocular lugheads, to say nothing of his part in co-opting user privacy across the globe. The resolution of The Matrix series (the epically jump-the-shark film known as Revolutions) has Keanu Reeves' messianic Neo making peace with the machines. It seemed the mantra of our age.

Midway through Radiohead's "Let Down," from '97's OK Computer, the languid psychedelic ballad is suddenly bolstered by a flutter of computer blips and bleeps, which crescendo into a soaring Yorke vocal, where, after feeling "crushed like a bug in the ground," the singer croons of one day growing wings.

If one of the jobs of the artist is to watch those who watch us—to monitor the ways in which our liberties have been encroached upon—it is hard not to think, on some level, they've flown the coop. If we stop to ask how we got here, we may look back and find the signs embedded in cyberpunk literature of 20-30 years prior. We may then wonder how we might better have heeded its warnings. But it is too late. Privacy, under the current paradigm, is essentially dead. The question of how our media, and in particular, our artists uphold that paradigm going forward remains oblique.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/11/somebodys-watching-me-cyberpunk-30-years-on-and-th.html

Kupio danas "The Peripheral"...

Pametno uložen novac!  Ja ga 'čuvam' sad za odmor, Gibsona ne valja drugačije ni čitati.

Nego, da vidimo mi šta ostale baje kažu glede nasušnjeg nam futurizma:



5 Very Smart People Who Think Artificial Intelligence Could Bring the Apocalypse


'The end of the human race'

On the list of doomsday scenarios that could wipe out the human race, super-smart killer robots rate pretty high in the public consciousness. And in scientific circles, a growing number of artificial intelligence experts agree that humans will eventually create an artificial intelligence that can think beyond our own capacities. This moment, called the singularity, could create a utopia in which robots automate common forms of labor and humans relax amid bountiful resources. Or it could lead the artificial intelligence, or AI, to exterminate any creatures it views as competitors for control of the Earth—that would be us. Stephen Hawking has long seen the latter as more likely, and he made his thoughts known again in a recent interview with the BBC. Here are some comments by Hawking and other very smart people who agree that, yes, AI could be the downfall of humanity.

Stephen Hawking

"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," the world-renowned physicist told the BBC. "It would take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded." Hawking has been voicing this apocalyptic vision for a while. In a May column in response to Transcendence, the sci-fi movie about the singularity starring Johnny Depp, Hawking criticized researchers for not doing more to protect humans from the risks of AI. "If a superior alien civilisation sent us a message saying, 'We'll arrive in a few decades,' would we just reply, 'OK, call us when you get here—we'll leave the lights on'? Probably not—but this is more or less what is happening with AI," he wrote.


Elon Musk

Known for his businesses on the cutting edge of tech, such as Tesla and SpaceX, Musk is no fan of AI. At a conference at MIT in October, Musk likened improving artificial intelligence to "summoning the demon" and called it the human race's biggest existential threat. He's also tweeted that AI could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Musk called for the establishment of national or international regulations on the development of AI.


Nick Bostrom

The Swedish philosopher is the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, where he's spent a lot of time thinking about the potential outcomes of the singularity. In his new book Superintelligence, Bostrom argues that once machines surpass human intellect, they could mobilize and decide to eradicate humans extremely quickly using any number of strategies (deploying unseen pathogens, recruiting humans to their side or simple brute force). The world of the future would become ever more technologically advanced and complex, but we wouldn't be around to see it. "A society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit," he writes. "A Disneyland without children."


James Barrat

Barrat is a writer and documentarian who interviewed many AI researchers and philosophers for his new book, "Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era." He argues that intelligent beings are innately driven toward gathering resources and achieving goals, which would inevitably put a super-smart AI in competition with humans, the greatest resource hogs Earth has ever known. That means even a machine that was just supposed to play chess or fulfill other simple functions might get other ideas if it was smart enough. "Without meticulous, countervailing instructions, a self-aware, self-improving, goal-seeking system will go to lengths we'd deem ridiculous to fulfill its goals," he writes in the book.


Vernor Vinge

A mathematician and fiction writer, Vinge is thought to have coined the term "the singularity" to describe the inflection point when machines outsmart humans. He views the singularity as an inevitability, even if international rules emerge controlling the development of AI. "The competitive advantage—economic, military, even artistic—of every advance in automation is so compelling that passing laws, or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that someone else will get them first," he wrote in a 1993 essay. As for what happens when we hit the singularity? "The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility," he writes.


http://time.com/3614349/artificial-intelligence-singularity-stephen-hawking-elon-musk/

I još nešto za knjiške moljce:


After fighting all year with Amazon, Hachette partners with Gumroad to sell books directly to readers



crowdfunding-a-dang-book

While it lacks the sexiness of "Uber vs Lyft" or "Apple vs Samsung," few tech fights hold larger implications for the future of media than "Hachette vs Amazon."

The world's fourth largest book publisher and Jeff Bezos' Everything Store have been sparring all year long over the terms of their distribution deal. At various points during the battle, Amazon has played dirty — often at the expense of customers — removing pre-order buttons, increasing shipping times, and reducing discounts on Hachette books, which include titles by David Baldacci and Malcolm Gladwell. And although the two have finally reached a peace agreement, neither party is exactly popping champagne in celebration.

Today, amid this uneasy detente, Hachette has announced a partnership with a platform that couldn't be more different from Amazon: Gumroad.

Gumroad is a site that allows artists, musicians, and writers to sell their work directly to fans, bypassing the big distributors like iTunes and Amazon. The partnership takes advantage of Gumroad's integration with Twitter's new "Buy Now" button, which will allow fans to purchase books like Amanda Palmer's The Art of Asking and The Onion's The Onion Magazine: The Iconic Covers that Transformed an Undeserving World directly from those authors' tweets.

While Gumroad lacks the ubiquity and name recognition of Amazon or iTunes, it's beginning to attract more and more artists, both big-time and obscure, thanks to its creator-friendly platform. The company only keeps 5 percent of every purchase plus $0.25 per transaction, putting more money in artists' pockets. Not only that, but Gumroad also makes far more data available to creators than the larger distributors do, which is something artists like hip-hop/R&B star Ryan Leslie have found hugely valuable. And finally, the platform makes it easy for artists to sell unique packages to fans. For example, everyone who buys Palmer's book through Gumroad will also receive a signed photo and a page from her original manuscript, complete with notes from her author husband Neil Gaiman.

So how worried should iTunes and Amazon be of sites like Gumroad?

"I think with iTunes, Amazon, and these players, they've done amazing things at pioneering digital distribution at scale," says Ryan Delk, who does Growth for Gumroad and led this partnership. "[But] I don't think by any means that innovation in the digital distribution space is over."

While Gumroad is well-suited to small, unsigned artists, it's increasingly grabbing the attention of more established acts, like Eminem, Ryan Leslie, and now Hachette, which is arguably its most significant partnership yet. But as Gumroad strikes deals with more old media gatekeepers like record labels or publishers, what's to stop it from becoming like Spotify or Pandora — in other words, just another cog in an industry that constantly screws over creators?

Delk says Gumroad will be careful to choose partners that share its creator-first mentality — and Hachette has already proven its pro-artist bonafides by fighting one of the most powerful companies in the US to protect its authors' livelihoods.

"In all these industries whether it's music or publishing, [labels and publishers] all play a very vital role," Delk says. "Part of why we're looking at Hachette is that they're really really excited about helping their artists make more money."

Changing media distribution models on a large scale won't happen overnight. There are entrenched interests — both on the platform side with iTunes and Amazon and on the production with record labels and publishing companies — that won't back down easily. But by striking deals like the Hachette partnership, wherein platforms, publishers, and creators can collaborate on distribution and still all get paid a fair amount, Gumroad is slowly shaping the future of creative industries. And for the first time in many years, that future looks pretty bright.


http://pando.com/2014/12/08/after-fighting-all-year-with-amazon-hachette-partners-with-gumroad-to-sell-books-directly-to-readers/

iiii..... ovo!



Chemists fabricate novel rewritable paper





First developed in China in about the year A.D. 150, paper has many uses, the most common being for writing and printing upon. Indeed, the development and spread of civilization owes much to paper's use as writing material.


According to some surveys, 90 percent of all information in businesses today is retained on paper, even though the bulk of this printed paper is discarded after just one-time use.

Such waste of paper (and ink cartridges)—not to mention the accompanying environmental problems such as deforestation and chemical pollution to air, water and land—could be curtailed if the paper were "rewritable," that is, capable of being written on and erased multiple times.

Chemists at the University of California, Riverside have now fabricated in the lab just such novel rewritable paper, one that is based on the color switching property of commercial chemicals called redox dyes. The dye forms the imaging layer of the paper. Printing is achieved by using ultraviolet light to photobleach the dye, except the portions that constitute the text on the paper. The new rewritable paper can be erased and written on more than 20 times with no significant loss in contrast and resolution.

"This rewritable paper does not require additional inks for printing, making it both economically and environmentally viable," said Yadong Yin, a professor of chemistry, whose lab led the research. "It represents an attractive alternative to regular paper in meeting the increasing global needs for sustainability and environmental conservation."


The rewritable paper is essentially rewritable media in the form of glass or plastic film to which letters and patterns can be repeatedly printed, retained for days, and then erased by simple heating.

The paper comes in three primary colors: blue, red and green, produced by using the commercial redox dyes methylene blue, neutral red and acid green, respectively. Included in the dye are titania nanocrystals (these serve as catalysts) and the thickening agent hydrogen cellulose (HEC). The combination of the dye, catalysts and HEC lends high reversibility and repeatability to the film.

During the writing phase, ultraviolet light reduces the dye to its colorless state. During the erasing phase, re-oxidation of the reduced dye recovers the original color; that is, the imaging material recovers its original color by reacting with ambient oxygen. Heating at 115 C can speed up the reaction so that the erasing process is often completed in less than 10 minutes.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-12-chemists-fabricate-rewritable-paper.html#jCp

Thousands of Einstein Documents Are Now a Click Away



http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/science/huge-trove-of-albert-einstein-documents-becomes-available-online.html


I, kao offsipn toga:



Einstein's letter defending Marie Curie shows just how long trolls have been slut-shaming women

In 1911, nearly a decade after winning a Nobel Prize for her pioneering work on radiation, Marie Curie received a letter from Albert Einstein in which he urged her not to be beaten down by people who would, today, be called trolls.

The letter is among the thousand of Einstein's documents released last week — which are being called "the Dead Sea Scrolls of physics" — and it begins by Einstein asking Curie "not [to] laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say."

"But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you," he continued, "that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling."

The treatment to which Einstein referred included the fact that the French Academy of Sciences denied her application for a seat, possibly because of rumors that she was Jewish — or because she was having an affair with a married man, the physicist Paul Langevin.

"I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble," Einstein wrote, "whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism!"

"Anyone who does not number among these reptiles," he said of her critics, "is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact."

Einstein concluded that "f the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don't read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptiles for whom it has been fabricated."

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/einsteins-letter-to-marie-curie-shows-just-how-long-trolls-have-been-shaming-women/

THE SPECULATOR

The Three-Body Problem
By CIXIN LIU

Posted by Paul Di Filippo ×   December 10, 2014




The roots of modern science fiction in China — brilliantly synopsized in the pages of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction — are to be found deep in the early decades of the twentieth century, much like those of the genre in the USA. The mode continues to attract a large Chinese readership, as exemplified by the existence of the magazine Science Fiction World, the planet's most widely read SF publication. But of course, with historically minimal foreign commercial and intellectual contacts, either one-way or two-way, and shifting ideological banners, Chinese writers and readers came to explore radically different story spaces and themes, moods, and attitudes than their Gernsbackian brethren.

Unfortunately, due to the exclusionary rigors of the foreign marketplace and the lack of a cadre of crack translators, English-language readers have been generally cut off from this parallel world. Even veteran American fans would be hard-pressed to cite famous or representative works of Chinese SF, as opposed to recognizing French, German, Japanese, or Russian authors.

But welcome cracks in the dam are appearing, most notably with the publication in English of The Three-Body Problem, the first in a trilogy by Cixin Liu, ably translated by the award-winning American SF writer Ken Liu. And given the fact that filmmakers currently have in development five projects based on various works by Cixin Liu, this could be a watershed moment for Chinese SF in general.

The novel opens in the midst of China's Cultural Revolution, with a family tragedy in progress. A scientist deemed a counter-revolutionary is denounced at a show trial by his brainwashed wife, then murdered in front of a crowd that includes his young daughter, Ye Wenjie. It is Ye Wenjie, richly adumbrated, who will occupy much of the novel's center. We follow her through her maturation and her gradual involvement in a secret Chinese research program at a place called Red Coast Base. The exact transcendental and dangerous nature of this program is parceled out to the reader in measured fashion, in a series of flashbacks interspersed throughout what we might dub the realtime narrative, set in the present. But Ye Wenjie will figure in that contemporary telling as well, as an elderly woman, still pivotal to events.

But the main plot concerns a nanotechnologist named Wang Miao during the present era. Alarmed by a rash of suicides among scientists, by some disturbing anti-science cultural trends, and by certain hallucinatory incidents personally experienced, Wang Miao begins to conduct some investigations into the source of these allied phenomena. Part of his research consists of logging into the full-sensory online VR environment known as "Three Body." This place — "game" hardly describes the software — presents itself as an utterly strange alien world whose astrophysical setup involves arduously Darwinian Stable and Chaotic periods for its planets and their flora and fauna. Playing the role of visitor, Wang Miao gradually assimilates the bizarre realities of "Trisolaris."






Aiding Wang Miao in the practical aspects of following clues and interviewing and confronting suspects is a cop named Shi Qiang, also called Da Shi. Amid all the high-flown intellectual conundrums and catastrophes, Da Shi provides the grounded, common-man perspective, and he threatens to steal every scene in which he appears. His droll, gruff language and refusal to be cowed by any existential threats offer a thread of hope and humor against the grimness of what eventually materializes: a situation in which the game proves to be a partial manifestation of a conspiracy of the most wide-reaching — indeed cosmic — significance imaginable.

The ultimate experience of reading Cixin Liu's novel is both parallel to the experience of reading similar English-language books and utterly lateral to those familiar frissons. In his afterword, Liu speaks of growing up on American SF, so it is hardly surprising that there would be similarities. But his native upbringing, embedded in the alternate reality that is China, ensures that his writing will also offer many uniquely foreign attitudes and thrills.

Considering the familiar aspects, we find appealing echoes of Lovecraft, for a start. Wang Miao's quest follows a path evocative of the investigations of The Call of Cthulhu. One might also fruitfully recall Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites. Mixed in with this is a Pynchonian vibe, with Wang Miao as a kind of Tyrone Slothrop figure. In this sense, Liu's book stands in a cousinly relation to such contemporary outings as David Shafer's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. And I'd adduce certain parallels between the outré seasons of Trisolaris and the equally exigent celestial circumstances of life on Brian Aldiss's Helliconia. All of this is updated, in a sense, by Cixin Liu's fascination with the odder features of quantum physics, theories that spark similar excitement in the writer's Western counterparts.

So much for touchstones in The Three-Body Problem that conjure up examples of Western SF. But to see where Liu's book reads distinctly like the product of another culture — a pleasing and desirable effect that the deft translator Ken Liu, in his notes, speaks of seeking to preserve and convey — we need to look at relevant Western SF whose effects are not duplicated here. I'm thinking of classic alien invasion novels such as Footfall by Niven and Pournelle, or The Killing Star by Zebrowski and Pellegrino. These books are, to simplify their essences, rational and practical invasions, Wellsian in other words. Liu's more existential and soul-twisting tale in part resembles the more multivalent and nebulous work of Haruki Murakami, with elements of the Strugatsky brothers in such works Definitely Maybe. The inner and outer journeys conducted by Wang Miao and Ye Wenjie are almost Jungian. Perhaps the nearest instance in Western SF is something like Philip K. Dick's VALIS.

And then there is an almost indefinable gravitas present in this book — and in much of non-Western SF — which is hard to pinpoint. But I think it is indeed quantifiable, especially in the opening section dealing with the Cultural Revolution, and in the way the characters define their individual freedoms balanced against societal duties. Having lived through such annealing times, writers from these cultures possess a certain outlook that incorporates the transience of life and the lack of sociopolitical stability and which Americans and UK citizens don't share. This distinctive disjunction was best captured in Philip Roth's famous observation from his 1986 interview in The Paris Review:

When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters. This isn't to say I wished to change places. I didn't envy their persecution and the way in which it heightens their social importance. I didn't even envy them their seemingly more valuable and serious themes. The trivialization, in the West, of much that's deadly serious in the East is itself a subject, one requiring considerable imaginative ingenuity to transform into compelling fiction.


Finally, I sense a bit of pre-modern Chinese literature fabulistic tactics here, Dream of the Red Chamber intricate cunningness, in the way the flashbacks intermingle with the realtime narrative, and in the story-within-a-story section devoted to the life of a fellow named Wei Cheng.

Ultimately, the welcoming commonality of this thought-provoking, heartfelt tale, its universality, outweighs the piquant flavorings that might seem exotic to Westerners. We emerge from the book happily affirming Cixin Liu's assertion in his afterword: "Science fiction is a literature that belongs to all humankind."

Holden Scoula's wonderful "Save the story" series, superbly translated and published in English by our beloved Pushkin Press, is a thing of beauty. Not only that the entire series is so beautifully illustrated but it also, in most cases, manages to capture all the brilliance and importance of these, sadly nowadays never read, classics of literature. Final part in the series has just been released and brings us Melania G. Mazzucco's retelling of Shakespeare's classic play "King Lear".

King Lear instinctively feels like an obvious choice for "Save the Story". It is a tale of morality which, when succinctly distilled, delivers a lesson about the importance to scratch under the surface. If you remember, King Lear has three daughters, one of which, when asked how much she loves him, tells the truth. The other two lie to his face and King Lear decided to punish the one telling the truth by disowning her. At the same time, the remaining two daughters, Regan and Goneril each receive half of his Kingdom. But quickly tables are turned and daughters show they true face but then it's too late for sad King who disappointed becomes nothing but a shadow of his previous self. As it often the case with Shakespeare, only King's Fool realizes from the start how things really stand. Despite being discarded, youngest daughter Cordelia still holds candle for King and the war for the throne is soon brewing.

"King Lear" has always been one of my favourite Shakespeare's plays due to its depth and tragic ending and in her retelling Mazzucco's has done it justice despite for some bizarre reason completely overhauling the final set pieces. Mazzucco has decided to tell the tale from Edgar's point of perspective and it's a refreshing and curiously uplifting take on things. In general, the entire story is delivered cleanly and somehow even manages to capture some of more subtle nuances that grace the original. When you add wonderful illustrations by Emanuela Orciari to the mix, the result is a book that should be your choice if you have to pick just a single "Save the Story" volume. It'll inspire the reader to find out more about both Shakespeare and the whole series and that's all that you can hope for. And what's best, due to the nature of its ending, Shakespeare's play will still feel fresh.

http://upcoming4.me/news/book-news/review-the-story-of-king-lear-by-melania-g-mazzucco

Read Them Now, Watch Them Later: Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Adaptation Watch (January 2015 Edition)

By John DeNardo on January 7, 2015








I meni nepoznate:

Honor Harrington by David Weber

Speaking of military science fiction, one of the most popular military sci-fi series is David Weber's Honor Harrington series, named after its principal protagonist, Honor Harrington, who is a smart, genetically-engineered officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy. The series, which has been described as "Horatio Hornblower in space," depicts Honor's advancement through the military ranks and eventually the halls of politics and diplomacy. The series starts with On Basilisk Station and it takes place 2,000 years in the future when hyperspace travel allows humanity to colonize deep space.

So what medium is Honor Harrington best adapted to? Apparently all of them! Evergreen Studios announced that it is adapting Weber's popular series to film, comic book, digital game, webisode, and television series formats. The collective title of the project is Tales of Honor. I don't think you'll be able to miss this one if you tried.


https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/read-them-now-watch-them-later-Jan-2015/

Kad već teramo čiku KSRa da silno štuca...  ... evo i nešto njegovo ultra zanimljivo:


Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change

2011: Issue 35/36.
Kim Stanley Robinson gives an account of his utopian novels.
 

I came to utopia by accident, having painted myself into a corner with an idea for a trilogy: three science fiction novels consisting of an after-the-fall novel, a dystopia and a utopia, all set in the same place, and about the same distance into the future. The idea came to me in 1972, and I didn't know how to write a novel then, so the plan needed brooding on. Some sixteen years later, the time came for the utopia. I had written the after-the-fall novel, The Wild Shore, and the dystopia, The Gold Coast. The utopia was the only one left.

By that time many aspects of it had been determined by the previous two books. I needed it to be in Orange County, California; I needed it to be fifty years in the future; and I needed to include the old man who had also been a character in the other two stories, so that he would have three lives, each radically different — this was the triptych's way of illustrating the way our individual lives are greatly influenced by the history we live in.

Through the previous sixteen years I had read all kinds of utopian literature. What emerged as most important for my novel was the utopian non-fiction of the 1970s, books which I think were a manifestation of the hippie generation growing up, beginning to have kids and trying to plan how to live the ideals of the revolutionary sixties. These books made quite a bookshelf: The Integral Urban House, Progress as if Survival Mattered, Small is Beautiful, Muddling Toward Frugality, Appropriate Technology and so on. They are still worth reading, but they were all unaware of the coming Reagan/Thatcher counter-revolution, which would render them largely irrelevant in the following decade. It would be nice to have a publishing series that reprinted them all, for they would still be full of interesting ideas, even if their technologies have been sometimes superseded. They would make a portrait of the hopes of that era similar to the portrait created by the era's science fiction; the two literatures would be complementary.

These non-fiction utopian writers, plus alternative economists like Hazel Henderson and Herman Daly, were the main influences on my third California volume, Pacific Edge. These influences were not particularly radical politically, but they did outline ideas that I thought could be realistically postulated for a US culture only fifty years off. Despite their help, I found it an extremely uneasy experience to write a utopian novel, and when I was done with it I sent it out into the world with a sigh of relief, thinking, 'I'll never do that again'. I couldn't quite articulate the source of my unease, but it felt like some kind of category error.

Then my friend Terry Bisson was talking to me about the book, and he asked me, 'How did your utopia come about, Stan? What's the history that explains it?' Well, I had made gestures towards an explanation in the book's italicized sections; I had even written an italicized section in which Tom Barnard suggested ten or twelve different ways his internal utopia could come about, as a way of admitting how hard it was to imagine such a history. I had cut that section, but as I began to rehearse my various historical explanations to Terry, he shook his head. 'But Stan,' he said, 'there are guns under the table'.



At that point the Mars Trilogy began in my head. I was struck by the truth of Terry's remark, and in fact it makes for one of the better chapter titles in Red Mars. I thought: 'OK, granted there are guns under the table. Utopia is not going to come easily. We therefore have to try the story again elsewhere, invent a utopian history, maybe give it 200 years to develop rather than fifty, and tell the whole thing explicitly'. So one of the many motivations for the Mars Trilogy was to somehow fix the previous book, which of course is not really possible. And yet I find I often write in order to explain or correct unsatisfactory things in novels I've finished.

The Mars novels therefore described three revolutions, because I felt that in Pacific Edge I had dodged the necessity of revolution, however broadly conceived. And yet I was not comfortable with the idea of re-invoking the violent revolutions of theeighteenth and twentieth centuries; they didn't seem appropriate to Mars, or to our current world either. The classic revolutions had often been failures, in the sense of causing such violent backlashes that they made more problems than they solved, principally by institutionalizing violence. I also felt very uncomfortable about being a first-world person stating that revolutions were necessary in third-world countries, when first-world weapons systems would then be used against them. Revolution itself needed to be reconceptualized, I felt; and indeed in the various velvet revolutions of 1989 I had just seen different models for rapid change in the social order. These new images for revolution became one of the central preoccupations of the Mars novels. We're still stuck with this problem, of course, because we still need a revolution or two.

While writing the Mars Trilogy, or maybe before, I began to think of science as another name for the utopian way, or what Williams called the long revolution. This was partly because I was married to a scientist and watching science in action, up close, and it was partly from thinking about it. We tend to take science at its own self-evaluation, and we're not used to thinking that utopia might already be partly here, a process that we struggle for or against. But to me the idea of science as a utopian coming-into-being has seemed both true and useful, suggestive of both further stories and action in the world.

So if science itself was to be my utopian way, and Antarctica was famously called 'the continent for science', then maybe that was the place on Earth that was already the most utopian space. It was worth having a look; besides I like wilderness, mountains, glaciers and so on, and Antarctica is nothing but those things. Because of my Mars books, the US National Science Foundation was willing to send me south as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers' Program. Thus Antarctica eventually came out as a step along my way: I wanted to show what a continent run by scientists for scientists is actually like. That book was a lot of fun to research. As far as you can tell when you're there, the continent runs using a non-monetary economic system, where food, clothing, shelter and fuel are all provided by the community; and at the same time you get to do what you want in terms of your project. It was a limited version of utopia, but interesting as a kind of laboratory experiment, a brief experience of how it might feel to live in a different social order. It was not exactly Orwell in Barcelona, but exhilarating in a different way. And it was very useful in my attempt to combine utopian and wilderness thinking, also to bring all these things closer to home than Mars.

Then came The Years of Rice and Salt, which at first I thought of as a break from utopia. But when I was trying to imagine a world history with Europe taken out of the picture by a very fatal Black Death, I quickly discovered what I felt was a problem. I didn't want to make that alternative world worse than the one we're in, because that would be racist and unwarranted. I didn't want to make it better than our world, because that would be reflexively politically correct, and also unwarranted. But I couldn't make it equal to our world either, because that would be boring — pointless in narrative terms. So my alternative history couldn't be worse, it couldn't be better, and it couldn't be equal. My options seemed kind of limited. But what came to me as my solution was simply the idea of the future, and of utopia again. In the novel, at the equivalent of our year 2002 (the book's date of publication), my alternative world would be, I decided, roughly equivalent in its goodness to our own, reached by its different history; but it would then continue past our moment some seventy years into the future, and we would then see them finally make a good job of things. This gave the novel a utopian ending that I hoped would exist as a challenge to our world: could we, starting from roughly the same position, do as well as this fictional world without Europe? This late utopian element got me past the better/worse/same conundrum, and added a little sting to the book's tail.

At this point it felt like I had developed a kind of habit. But it was not the time to try to break it. In the previous years I had spent a fair amount of time at the National Science Foundation in Washington DC, and it seemed to me more than ever that this institution, and science more generally, represented a kind of proto-utopian space. I felt that the scientific method, and scientific institutions in our world, were under-theorized utopian attempts to change the world, made by people who would rather not think about politics, yet would very much like to do some good. These impressions led me to the trilogy I call Science in the Capital. I wanted to imagine the first step toward utopia, starting in our world now. If we could make a bridge across the Great Trench to utopia, what would be the first footing? I wanted to think about how utopia might start from our current conditions; to describe, in effect, the start of a scientific revolution. Not the Scientific Revolution of the early modern period, but rather a new revolution, enacted by scientists in the world we live in now.

I had also come to feel that many people, and especially many of my leftist colleagues, thought of science as merely the instrument of power — as the most active and effective wing of capitalism. This now struck me as wrong. To me it seemed that we actually exist in a situation that can better be described as 'science versus capitalism': a world in which smaller progressive concepts such as environmentalism, environmental justice, social justice, democracy itself — all these were going to be defeated together, unless they were aligned with the one great power that might yet still successfully oppose a completely capitalist future, which was science. I was thinking with a very broad brush at this point, almost mythologically you might say, but it struck me as an interesting story to tell, a new story with some possible analytic value. So I wrote the Science in the Capital trilogy with these thoughts in mind.

Having written that book, describing science as a crucial utopian force, I began to ask myself: but what is science? And how did it start? That led me to Galileo, as some kind of 'first scientist', and thus eventually to my most recent novel, Galileo's Dream (2009). It is not a utopian novel, I am relieved to say, but it is a novel about science and history, and their interaction; and it is a science fiction novel.

So that's my account of this aspect of my career; how, despite my uneasiness concerning utopia as a literary genre, I have nevertheless been writing them for a long time. I am one of the very few serial offenders, you might say, at least in modern times. It has been a source of stress to me, I admit, for there is no doubt in my mind that a 'utopian novel' is a strange project, a bastard form — an amalgam of two genres which are in many respects not at all compatible. It's like saying, 'Let's make a new genre — we'll throw together architectural blueprints and soap operas'. That's obviously a bad idea. And yet there it is: that absurd hybrid is the utopian novel.

But the problem really is even worse than that. It involves a version of David Hume's 'is–ought problem': there is the world as it is, and the world as it ought to be. It is difficult to see how they connect, which is Hume's concern; but the novel, it seems at first glance, is about the world as it is. So if you want above all to write good novels, then what is should be the subject matter; it's a matter of fidelity to the real. So realism becomes the default preferred form for the novel. And it's the novel that matters to me; I don't care about utopia per se — it's literature that I love, and the novel in particular. So for a long time I experienced the utopian imperative that I somehow put on myself as a burden, because I felt the reason we read novels, indeed the reason we love all art, is that it gives us the real. I knew this was philosophically difficult territory, but my love of literature had to do with a sense of recognition — the moment of reading when you say, 'Yes that's right; that's the way the world is; this book has illuminated the real'. To hold a mirror up to nature, as Hamlet says to the players. That's what art seems to be for.



Instead of this recognition of what is, the utopian novel hopes to create a vision of the way things ought to be. It's a profound shift of focus, which has often created in me the feeling of working across the grain of my hopes. It has taken a lot of years of worrying about this to pull apart the notion of what realism might be — to understand that there is never a mirror — to see that the moment you start to write sentences, you're portraying something that ought to be. All novels are utopian in this respect: they propose that life means something. And meaning itself is a utopian wish. So, if the novel is about what life means, and if it concerns itself with individuals in their society, then whether that society is portrayed as better, worse or the same as ours is not the important point. All portrayed societies are stylized and hypothetical, a projection of the writer's wishes and ideology. Seen in that way, a utopian novel is only a tiny bit less realistic than the most naturalistic realist novel out there. Or put it in reverse: a realistic novel is a kind of utopia in disguise.



Or so I have tried to reassure myself. However, I must say that when I read the part of Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future (2005) that speaks of the impossibility of imagining utopia,[ii] I found the notion comforting. 'Ah ha!' I cried. 'I was trying to do something impossible!' It explained a lot.



Ultimately, however, I think this notion that we cannot imagine utopia is mistaken. We can imagine utopia; it's as easy as pie. The constraints are very slack, and our imaginations strong. We are quite capable of taking the present situation, and all history too, and ringing every possible physical and logical change in our ideas to make something new; and some of these newly invented systems could be declared viable, even though radically different from the current moment. It's not quite like imaging a new colour or a tenth dimension. It has more to do with justice, a very archaic primate concept, a concept that predates humanity itself. A better political order, even a truly good political order? No problem!



Of course there is a problem, and that's the getting from here to there. But let me come back to that later. First let's briefly contemplate some of the utopian descriptions and blueprints out there today. Take the work of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, for example, their 'Participatory Economics', which they also call 'parecon' in a neologism worse than any science-fiction writer's. Despite that tone deafness, it's an interesting system: a non-capitalist co-operative society in which people band together in small collectives, and then, instead of buying and selling things like a company, they fill out lots of requisition forms, somewhat in the style of a Chinese work unit or even a soviet. You fill out a form for what your group is going to make that year, you fill out a form for what your group is going to need that year to make what it will make, and so on. It resembles the situation Francis Spufford describes in his novel Red Plenty (2010), in which Soviet cyberneticists in the 1950s and '60s and '70s desperately attempt to invent computers powerful enough to run the Soviet economy in top-down, non-market fashion, before the system collapses — something they never managed. Now, with much more computing power than it would actually take to run such a non-market society, the idea is there to be contemplated again. Possibly such a society would feel a bit like Antarctica does now under the National Science Foundation. When I tried to imagine the continuous form-filling required, I confess I began to think, 'Well maybe money isn't so bad after all'. Possibly it would not be a very appealing utopia to live in, but we don't know; and in any case it's fully worked out, an alternative system that with modern supercomputers could very possibly work. Maybe the computers could even fill out the forms. An algorithmic artificial intelligence economy; it's worth considering.



The problem, however, with this and all other utopian alternatives, is that we can't imagine how we might get there. We can't imagine the bridge over the Great Trench, given the world we're in, and the massively entrenched power of the institutions that shape our lives — and the guns that are still there under the table. Indeed right on the table. The bridge itself is what we can't imagine — and maybe that's what Jameson means: but then it's not utopia we can't imagine, but history. Future history, the history yet to come. And that makes sense. History has been so implausible that there's no reason to suspect that we will ever be able to accurately prophesy or describe the history that will come next.



Therefore the main project of all science fiction — that of imagining future histories — is impossible. Imagining a positive history which gets us to a better state is perhaps even more impossible, but in any case very difficult, and now more than ever, now that it's clear we are entering an era of climate change and population overshoot which will impose radical physical stresses on both human and natural systems. This aspect of things now refuses to be kept out of the picture. Climate change is inevitable — we're already in it — and because we're caught in technological and cultural path dependency, we can't easily get back out of it. The example of the ocean liner that can't be turned around in less than ten miles is actually a very simple metaphor for the kinds of path dependency we are caught in; the infrastructures we build have lifetimes that last decades, sometimes centuries, and changing them necessarily takes time. We're probably not going to be able to cap the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at less than 450 parts per million, and 560 parts per million is quite possible. At that point we will be living on a quite different planet, in a significantly damaged biosphere, with its life-support systems so harmed that human existence will be substantially threatened. It has become a case of utopia or catastrophe, and utopia has gone from being a somewhat minor literary problem to a necessary survival strategy.



Climate Change and the Necessity of the Utopian Project



So let's shift gears now, and consider utopia not as my literary problem but a shared social vision, with this extra burden laid on it: not just that the present is bad, but that the future will inevitably be worse in environmental terms. In fact it is worth discussing first this question: is it even possible at this point to avoid a catastrophic crash of human and natural systems? Or are we already in a kind of Wile E. Coyote moment, that moment when he's chasing the roadrunner and goes over the cliff, and looks at the audience, legs spinning, to only then discover he's out there in space, though gravity has not yet caught him? Are we indulging in a fantasy if we imagine that we could recover from this path we are on, if we were to do something?



Well, this is the kind of question that is worth asking the scientists who study these problems in a quantitative ecological sense, analysing it as a problem in global energy flows. The Socolow wedge diagrams out of Princeton suggest that yes, it is still possible for us to ratchet back from the edge of catastrophe by decarbonizing quite rapidly, which means applying every single method contemplated as soon and as fully as possible. We're about at the moment where we're leaving the cliff's edge, but that's better than running the numbers and finding you're already out in space.



There are well-articulated plans to get back to solid ground coming from many places, including Lester Brown and his Worldwatch Institute; their 'Plan B 3.0'[iii] is a fairly detailed plan of action. Indeed many government agencies and NGOs and institutions around the world are busy articulating these plans, and it's reassuring to think that we're not living in an utter fantasy of salvation. Practical plans have been proposed, and there really still are grounds for hope. But we have to act.



So the question of history returns. How do we act on what we know? The time has come when we have to solve this puzzle, because the future, from where we look at it now, is different than past futures. Before we just had to keep on trying to do our best, and we would be OK. Things seemed to slowly get better, for some people in some places anyway; in any case, we would keep trying things, and probably muddle through. This is no longer the case. Now the future is a kind of attenuating peninsula; as we move out on it, one side drops off to catastrophe; the other side, nowhere near as steep, moves down into various kinds of utopian futures. In other words, we have come to a moment of utopia or catastrophe; there is no middle ground, mediocrity will no longer succeed. So utopia is no longer a nice idea, but a survival necessity. This is a big change. We need to take action to start history on a path onto the side of the peninsula representing one kind of better future or another; the details of it don't matter, survival without catastrophe is what matters. In essence the seven billion people we have, and the nine to ten billion people we're likely to have, exist at the tip of an entire improvised complex of prostheses, which is our technology considered as one big system. We live out at the end of this towering complex, and it has to work successfully for us to survive; we are far past the natural carrying capacity of the planet in terms of our numbers. There is something amazing about the human capacity to walk this tightrope over the abyss without paralysing fear. We're good at ignoring dangers; but now, on the attenuating peninsula, on the crazy tower of prostheses — however you envision it, it is a real historical moment of great danger, and we need to push hard for utopia as survival, because failure now is simply unacceptable to our descendants, if we have any.



When thinking about this situation, this moment that simply has to change, those of us in the developed world, the privileged world, tend very naturally to ask: even if we do survive — to accomplish that — will it be bad for us? Will we be unhappy? Will we lose our privileges? As Jameson observes at one point in his long essay on utopia, people are anti-utopian not necessarily because they're political reactionaries, but because utopia might change them utterly.[iv] And such a profound change is a fearful thing, almost like reincarnation: if you come back as someone else you're not really you, so in fact you haven't come back at all. Utopia would be as pointless as heaven, if you were no longer you. And you are your habits, or so it usually feels. So what would happen to prosperous first-worlders in a utopia of survival, where everyone had an equal share of the Earth's 'natural capital'? For it's very commonly said, by quite mathematically sophisticated people, that if we tried to spread human and natural wealth equally over the entire seven billion of us, then everyone would be poor.



This too is an interesting question to run the numbers on. The Swiss, being prosperous and practical, have already started to run those numbers: one result of that inquiry is the 2000 Watt Society. Their notion is that if the total amount of energy available to humans right now were equally distributed among the entire seven billion of us, each person would have the use of about 2,000 watts.[v] It isn't a lot of energy, but it's not negligible either. Some Swiss have decided to run an experiment living on that much, and now there are people in Basel and Zurich trying it. The Swiss have some local advantages in this experiment: they live in a small country in Europe, a continent with an amazingly rich infrastructure, built partly with the spoils of their colonialist plundering of the rest of the world. You can therefore live on 2,000 watts in Europe and be quite comfortable. There's public transport, there are efficient small apartments, and so on. While this living experiment doesn't give all the answers, it is nonetheless suggestive. It looks like a huge amount of our energy burn right now is pure waste in terms of improving the quality of our lives, assuming that quality is conceived in terms of health, happiness and sustainability. Much that is burned is simply wasted. Right now the average Swiss citizen uses 5,000 watts, Europe as a whole averages 6,000 watts, America 12,000, China 1,500, India 1,000 and Bangladesh about 300. You get a sense of the range. And right now we live in an extremely dirty and inefficient technology, a kind of global Stalinist Cheylabinsk-56. What has been invented and designed already to replace this crude old tech would by itself make an immense improvement in energy efficiency and carbon burn, and more could come after that. The realizable goal is a carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative civilization. This swapping out of our energy technology is part of the necessary work of the twenty-first century, but it can also mean full employment, population stabilization, and eventually more watts for everybody equally.



This vision of an overarching social project makes it possible to say more to young people in the first world than, 'Sorry, we torched the world and now you have to live like saints and suffer'. That's not a great message to take to the young, and also it's not correct. We in the hyperconsuming first world are actually experiencing our extra carbon burn as more of a burden than an enhancement. It measurably degrades our physical and mental health; it cocoons us in crap — we're not fully there in the world. So we need to burn less carbon for ourselves as well as our home; it's not a matter of puritan renunciation, but rather becoming more clever and healthy. There is a comfortable way forward for all, in other words, if comfort is conceived of as a sense of achievement. There's a utopian spark in that thought, a spur to action.



I wrote a bit about this notion in the Science in the Capital Trilogy — that a decarbonized life might bring us more alive than we are now in our thick, dirty technoshell. I have sometimes called this utopian vision 'the Palaeolithic plus good dental care', hoping to suggest that since we're still genetically the same creatures we were 100,000 years ago, we could become again those same animals, living fulfilled and complex existences, without capitalist hyperconsumption — but with the best parts of modern technology conserved, to reduce suffering and thus increase happiness. What the human sciences are telling us now is that the closer you live to a Palaeolithic lifestyle — with good dental care — the better off you are. This is another utopian thought, coming straight out of the latest scientific findings: we are happiest when we are healthiest, and we are healthiest when we live a life that engages us in the physical world in a rather low-carbon-burn way. Walking around outdoors a lot, talking, the occasional dash or tumble, making a meal together, and so on. These low-carbon activities are often felt as the best part of the day, and that's no coincidence.



This description can be given to young people in particular as a possible life project worth doing. Young first-world secular citizens exist in a crisis of meaning: they know life needs to be about more than hyperconsumption, but what that 'more' might be is not clear. Meaning has never been priced and thus it is confusing. This existential crisis is very real; we need meaning to go forward, and yet capitalist society doesn't provide it. Now, at the beginning of the climate-change era, the start of the Anthropocene, that meaning is simply evident in the world — really it's forced on us by the situation — we have to decarbonize, which means changing everything, which means utopia, all for survival and for our descendants. This is a life project with a sense of accomplishment in it. With the idea that you could do things smarter and thereby have more fun, capitalism as it stands now begins to look not only morally obese, but also unskilful, even a little bit stupid.



The project, for all of us alive today, then breaks down into practical reformist strategies, like supporting social democracy and the various green political movements, while keeping more radical further goals in mind. And when people bring up geo-engineering, one can say, 'Yes, we're doing that already by accident, and really the smartest geo-engineering we have is swift de-carbonization'. One can promote a notion Jameson has mentioned once or twice, that of full employment. Full employment would get needed work done, and it is also a paradigm buster for capitalism, which needs unemployment to get 'wage pressure', meaning fear in more and more workers. So we have structural unemployment; yet just by asserting that everybody deserves a job as a human right, the system is challenged. Full employment also suggests the idea of a living wage, therefore poverty reduction, which is in itself a powerful climate-change technology. This needs to be insisted on, to make sure that climate change action doesn't somehow become a merely technological question, with the implication of some kind of silver bullet solution out there that will allow everything else to go on as it's going now. That's not going to happen. So changes that dismantle some of the fundamental injustice of capitalism while helping the climate situation are a stranded double good.



Always in this, supporting science is a necessary part of the project. It isn't the same as supporting capitalism, as some critics seem to assume. We need to de-strand those two, and recognize that science is our ability to increase our ability to understand the world, and then to manipulate it for our collective good.



While I support science as the best name for our species' life-support system, I also recognize that many scientists are like the character Beaker in The Muppets, geeking their way through life, their education deep but narrow, making them often naively unphilosophical, to the point where they think that what they do is straightforward and non-political. It's the humanities' job to disabuse them of that mistaken notion, by way of fully supportive lessons in history, philosophy, political theory, rhetoric and literature. The humanities need to educate the sciences rather than attack them; this education is not an option, if you want to be aware of how the human world works.



The humanities' stereotypical attack on scientists looks like this: take the Monopoly game figure of the Capitalist, with his top hat and round belly, and imagine that he pays Beaker from The Muppets to invent a gun, and then he seizes the gun and puts it to Beaker's head and says: 'Make me more guns and make me more toys'. Beaker's eyes are round as he complies. Those of us in the humanities, watching this scene and imagining we're somehow not already implicated, say, 'Damn it Beaker, I see you're part of the problem. You even invented the atom bomb!' And Beaker whispers to us, 'There's a gun to my head. And there's a gun on you, too. Can't you see it? Why are you blaming me?'



Yet we do; we go on blaming science for something that is not the scientists' problem but rather our general problem as citizens. Scientists need both our support and our ability to give them a political education, pointing out their own potentiality, their embodiment of a utopian effort that has continued for centuries now. The various components of the scientific method, and the structure of scientific institutions, are simultaneously both a method for discovering nature and a utopian political program. But who knows this; who admits this; who works with this knowledge?



I think it helps to think of this large social project, which we must now accept as ours, in terms of the concept of scaffolding. James Griesemer of Univeristy of California Davis shared with me his notion of the human generations' efforts as each building a scaffold for further work by descendants, who work at some kind of higher level. It has been about 400 generations since the end of the last Ice Age, so we can put ourselves in that long succession, and imagine that our generation is building a scaffold on the shoulders of the many generations that came before. A coral reef isn't a bad analogy either: you build your level; you can't leap to heaven — if you try you will crash back down, maybe even crash a few scaffolding levels below you. So here, facing climate change, proposing utopia as in effect the only solution that will work, we still need to think of the project as a transgenerational thing that will take generations to accomplish. We can't panic, nor can we give up just because we can't do it all in our lifetimes. We face an ecological emergency; but even here, all we can do is work on our present reality, and build what we can. I'm aware that I'm arguing conservatively here, but I'm arguing for reforms so numerous and systemic that ultimately they will add up to revolution — to post-capitalism, to utopia — but some generations down the line. We can't imagine the details of how this will happen, but the general outlines of the project are clear enough from here to make a start. And the necessity is clear. Hopefully, we'll get there as fast as we can, and meanwhile we can throw ourselves into our moment of the project.



Let me finish by quoting from Voltaire, the somewhat ominous but ultimately practical final sentence of Candide: 'Keep a garden'.


http://arena.org.au/remarks-on-utopia-in-the-age-of-climate-change/

SpaceX releases dramatic pictures and video of failed Falcon 9 landing

Musk described the attempted rocket landing last weekend as "close, but no cigar" — but this assessment doesn't really do these images justice. The 14-story-tall Falcon 9 rocket is seen hitting the deck of the barge at a 45-degree angle as the four stabilizing fins lose hydraulic power. The engines then fire in an attempt to restore balance but it's too late and the rocket smashes into the deck of the ship. The four images tweeted by Musk can be seen below, who cheerfully sums up the situation: "Full RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly) event. Ship is fine minor repairs. Exciting day!"

Musk has blamed the crash on the rocket's stabilizing fins running out of hydraulic fuel right before landing, but this is a relatively minor hurdle for SpaceX's engineers. Simply getting the rocket to the barge — a 300 feet by 100 feet target — was a big challenge and we can see that the company definitely managed that.

If the stabilizing fins work as intended in the future, then Musk might certainly achieve his historic goal: creating multi-use rockets that will make spaceflight dramatically cheaper. "Reusability is the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the next level," Musk said in October during a talk at MIT. Despite the explosion, these image show just how close SpaceX is.


http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/16/7555633/falcon-9-barge-landing-images-released

... A ovo je za Miću, da mu ulepša dan 




10 strange and beautiful horse breeds

Adaptation Watch:





Haikasoru is reporting that Sayuri Ueda's short science fiction story "The Street of Fruiting Bodies" is being adapted into a feature film by Viz Productions. The screenplay will be written by Sam Hamm, the screenwriter of 1989's Batman film.

Ueda's short story originally appeared in Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan, a themed anthology containing fiction about Japan. "The Street of Fruiting Bodies" depicts the sudden spread of a mysterious and lethal species of hallucinogenic mushrooms that offers its victims visions of deceased loved ones. The infection hints at the possibility of an afterlife, or at least a new kind of existence that's beyond human comprehension.

We'll see if this "killer virus" story proves to be as enjoyable on film as it sounds. For its part, Viz has already had some success with the Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt film Edge of Tomorrow, which was based on the Viz Media book All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka.




The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Emily St. John Mandel's New York Times best-seller, and mainstreamy post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven has been optioned for TV and film rights by Producer Scott Steindorff in a six-figure deal. Steindorff and Dylan Russell will produce.

Station Eleven is aboout a band of musicians and actors who travel the post-apocalyptic landscape of the Great Lakes region twenty years after a devastating virus has killed off 99% of the world's population. The focus of the non-linear narrative is around a small group of characters, to the point where the book reads more like an interesting character study. (See my review. For once, I seem to be ahead of the adaptation curve!)

Casting has not yet started.





Deadline is reporting the production company Additional Dialogue has acquired the rights to develop Lauren Beukes' supernatural suspense novel Broken Monsters as a television drama series. Scott Aversano and Tom Gormican will serve as executive producers. Not much more is known at this point about the production.

The story of Broken Monsters is about a Detroit detective named Gabriella Versado who investigates a series of bizarre murders. It turns out a demented criminal mastermind is experimenting with human taxidermy...or perhaps there is some supernatural element involved.

Here's the book description:


Detective Gabriella Versado has seen a lot of bodies. But this one is unique even by Detroit's standards: half boy, half deer, somehow fused together. As stranger and more disturbing bodies are discovered, how can the city hold on to a reality that is already tearing at its seams?

If you're Detective Versado's geeky teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you're desperate freelance journalist Jonno, you do whatever it takes to get the exclusive on a horrific story. If you're Thomas Keen, known on the street as TK, you'll do what you can to keep your homeless family safe–and find the monster who is possessed by the dream of violently remaking the world.

If Lauren Beukes's internationally bestselling The Shining Girls was a time-jumping thrill ride through the past, her Broken Monsters is a genre-redefining thriller about broken cities, broken dreams, and broken people trying to put themselves back together again.

Hvala, hvala.


BTW, Akhal-teke konji su najlepši konji na svetu. Lepši čak i od mojih engleskih punokrvnih grla.


Pozdrav
M.

da, prelepi su to konji, ali ujedno su mi i nekako porcelanski krhki u toj lepoti... ne znam zašto, ali meni srce zaigra kad je at skroz robustan, ko ovo ciganče sa moje fotke... 

Krv nije voda... Evo ti ga hrvatski posavac... Stamen... 

Akhal-teke je lepši.    Vilinski lep.

The Hugo Wars: How Sci-fi's Most Prestigious Awards Became a Political Battleground



Few walks of life are today immune to the spectre of political intolerance. At universities, speaker disinvitations and censorship campaigns are at an all-time high. In technology, there are purges of chief executives with the wrong political views and executives who make the wrong sort of joke. In the world of video games, petitions are launched against "offensive" titles, and progressive journalists wage smear campaigns against conservative developers.

It may not, therefore, surprise you to learn that similar occurrences are taking place in the science-fiction and fantasy (SFF) community, too. Previously a world renowned for the breadth of its perspectives, SFF increasingly bears the familiar hallmarks of an ideological battleground.

The story begins, as ever, with a small group of social justice-minded community elites who sought to establish themselves as the arbiters of social mores. This group would decide who deserved a presence in SFF and who deserved to be ostracised.

Their victims are littered across the SFF community. In 2013, the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) were targeted by a shirtstorm-like cyber-mob of digital puritans after one of their cover editions was deemed to be "too sexual." The controversy did not die down until two of its most respected writers, Mike Resnick and Barry Malzburg, were dismissed from the publication. This occurred despite a vigorous counter-campaign by liberal members of the sci-fi community, including twelve Nebula award winners and three former presidents of the SFWA.

Unfortunately, the current crop of elite figures in the SFF community have become either apologists or out-and-out cheerleaders for intolerance and censorship. Redshirts author John Scalzi, a close friend of  anti-anonymity crusader Wil Wheaton – was head of the SFWA at the time of the controversy and quickly caved in to activist pressure. This was unsurprising, given that he shared many of their identitarian views.

But Scalzi is, if anything, merely the moderate ally of a far more radical group of community elites. He hasn't gone nearly as far as former SFWA Vice President Mary Kowal, who handles political disagreement by telling her opponents to "shut the fuck up" and quit the SFWA. Or former Hugo nominee Nora Jemisin, who says that political tolerance "disturbs" her. Or, indeed, the prolific fantasy author Jim C. Hines, who believes that people who satirize religion and political ideologies (a very particular religion, and a very particular ideology, of course) should be thrown out of mainstream SFF magazines.

Most of these people are small fry compared to the true big beasts of the SFF world, like Neil Gaiman, George R.R. Martin, or J.K. Rowling. But through a mix of obsessive politicking in institutions like the SFWA and the familiar whipping up of social-justice outrage mobs online, they have been able to exert disproportionate influence.

Today, no one is safe. Right-wingers like Theodore Beale face ostracization over accusations of racism (Beale is himself Native American), while even progressives or independent authors like Bryan Thomas Schmidt are denounced as "cultural appropriators"; in Schmidt's case, because he prepared an anthology of nonwestern sci-fi stories. Peak absurdity was achieved in 2014 when Jonathan Ross was forced to cancel his appearance at the Hugo Awards after the SJWs of SFF whipped themselves into a panic-fuelled rage over fears that Ross might – might! – make a fat joke. Even the New Statesman, which sometimes reads like an extension of Tumblr, came out and condemned the "self-appointed gatekeepers" of SFF.

But while the examples of manufactured grievance may be absurd, few members of the SFF community are laughing. New York Times bestselling author Larry Correia told us that SFF is currently in the grip of a "systematic campaign to slander anybody who doesn't toe their line," which is breeding a culture of fear and self-censorship. "Most authors aren't making that much money, so they are terrified of being slandered and losing business," he says. The only exceptions are a "handful of people like me who are either big enough not to give a crap, or too obstinate to shut up."

After years on the back foot, that obstinate handful are preparing to fight back.

Sad Puppies

To the outside world, the Hugo Awards are known as the most prestigious honor that a sci-fi or fantasy creator can achieve. However, inside the community they are widely seen as a popularity contest dominated by cliques and super-fandoms. This can be seen most clearly in the dominance of Doctor Who in the TV award categories. The show's enormous fanbase has garnered 26 Hugo nominations in the last nine years. Episodes from the show triumphed in every year between 2006 and 2012, save one.

The Hugos have an advantage, though: they are difficult for a single group to dominate if others rise to challenge them. All one has to do to vote in the awards is pay a small membership fee to the World Science Fiction Convention. For the few who are brave enough to defend artistic freedom openly, the Hugos are a good place to make a stand.

That is precisely what is now happening. Ahead of 2013's Hugo Awards, Larry Correia began making public blog posts about his nominations, inviting his readers to discuss and agree on a shared list of Hugo nominations, and vote collectively. The idea was to draw attention to authors and creators who were suffering from an undeserved lack of attention due to the political climate in sci-fi. The "Sad Puppies" slate was born.

(The original idea was to call it the "Sad Puppies Think of the Children Campaign" – a dig at those who take their social crusades too seriously.)

What began as a discussion among bloggers has turned into an annual event. Last year's Sad Puppies slate was extraordinarily successful, with seven out of Correia's twelve nominations making it to the final stage of the Hugos. Among the successful nominations was The Last Witchking, a novelette by Theodore Beale, also known as Vox Day – a writer whose radical right-wing views had put him at the top of the sci-fi SJWs' hit list. The fact that an author like Beale could receive a Hugo nomination was proof that SJW domination of sci-fi was not as complete as the elites would have liked.

In addition to humiliating the activists, the slate also triggered significant debate. Even John Scalzi, the privilege-checking SFWA President discussed above, was forced to admit that works of science fiction and fantasy ought to be judged on their quality, not on the politics of their authors. This greatly upset some of Scalzi's more radical supporters, who openly called for exclusion on the basis of political belief. The debate also spread beyond sci-fi to the pages of The Huffington Post and USA Today.

Stirring up debate was, of course, precisely the point of Sad Puppies. As well as ensuring that quality works of fiction made it past the cliques at places like SFWA and Tor.com to be considered by the fans themselves, the Sad Puppies slate also forced radicals to show their true colours. Those who supported political ostracism were outed as a tiny but vocal minority. As Correia explained on his blog, the slate managed to expose the "thought police" of the community before votes had even been cast.

This year, the Sad Puppies slate returns once more, championed by Hugo and Nebula-nominee Brad R. Torgerson. Although run by conservative authors, it includes many authors and creators who are left-wing, liberal, or non-politically aligned. In this way, the slate hopes to protect what radical activists want to eliminate: diversity of opinion and political tolerance.

The battle continues

The debate generated by the Sad Puppies slate could not have come at a timelier moment. Although the radicals are in the minority, they have proven as disruptive to sci-fi as they have been to universities, secularism, and video gaming.

Character assassinations, doxing, and abuse campaigns from radical activists happen all the time, with little to no condemnation from the self-proclaimed opponents of "online harassment." Activists urge conference-goers to avoid "unsafe" authors like Correia, in an echo of the excuses used by 'Stepford Students' to bar speakers from campus on the grounds of preserving "safe spaces"–an argument that has come under increasing fire from liberals and conservatives alike.

(The world of sci-fi even has its very own Shanley Kane. Last autumn's controversy du jour was the outing of a notorious online abuser known as "Requires Hate," a social justice activist who relentlessly abused anyone who got on her wrong side – regardless of their politics.)

Indeed, the reaction to the Sad Puppies slate proved that anyone can be a target in the new environment. When the slate was chosen, several authors came under attack simply for being recommended on it. In other words, the radical activists of sci-fi are no longer a threat just to right-wingers.

Even if social-justice radicals were only a threat to right-wingers, that would still be a problem in need of a solution. The breadth of perspectives accommodated by sci-fi has historically been one of its greatest strengths, allowing it to reach ever-wider audiences throughout the decades. The great dystopian writers of the early-to-mid twentieth-century included socialists like George Orwell, liberals like Aldous Huxley, and of course the objectivist libertarian Ayn Rand.

In the postwar period, conservatives like Robert Heinlein and liberals like Isaac Asimov were both among the leading figures of science fiction. Political tolerance, an idea loathed by radical activists, has ever been the norm in the community, and it has thrived because of it.




Wherever they emerge, social-justice warriors claim to be champions of diversity. But they always reveal themselves to be relentlessly hostile to it: they applaud people of different genders, races, and cultures just so long as those people all think the same way. Theirs is a diversity of the trivial; a diversity of skin-deep, ephemeral affiliations.

The diversity that writers like Correia and Torgerson have set out to protect is different. It is a diversity of perspectives, of creative styles, and, yes, of politics. It is the kind of diversity that authoritarians hate, but it is the only kind of diversity that matters.

Why Original Science Fiction is Dead

(Anthony Stokes on the death of original science fiction...)


Jupiter Ascending has arrived and is pretty much been the bust we all thought it would be. Needless to say I doubt it will even come close to breaking even, and I'm not shedding a single tear for the Wachowski siblings who should have learned better after their past six or so movies. It seems now like original science fiction is a graveyard where no movies perform as well as expected, and I believe I know the reason why:

Because most of the recent releases have sucked, or they aren't even original to begin with. Save for Edge of Tomorrow and Gravity, most of the original science fiction releases over the past few years have been pretty bad, or just macramés of other science fiction movies.

I point to my first example – Pacific Rim. I don't care what anybody says – this movie is awful. It's got terrible pacing, horrible dialogue, the characters are dull, and it somehow turned Charlie Hunnam, the second-best television actor after Bryan Cranston, into a charisma-less dud. It only succeeds in giving fanboys giant robots fighting aliens, something they've already seen.  And the worst part is it was poorly filmed action of  robots fighting aliens.  Instead of watching Pacific Rim watch Edge of Tomorrow, which actually has a story , characters, plot, etc.

Then we have the other example of what I like to call "psuedo" science fiction; movies that are good and technically original, like Inception and The Matrix, but redundant as they're almost the same movie. The movie that came closest to being true science fiction, while also having somewhat of an identity, was Prometheus, but that also dropped the ball.

My favorite science fiction movies of the last couple years are The World's End and Moon, two modest films that use their sci-fi to tell human stories – as opposed to The Wachowskis and Zack Snyder (once again redundant since they're virtually the same filmmakers), who use science fiction to showcase their special effects.


Nothing would make me happier than for these genre directors to make something small and intimate built around science fiction. All the movies we grew up watching used to tell real human stories, (i.e. Back to the Future and The Terminator), as opposed to just throwing things onto the screen, with budgets that somehow keep getting bigger and bigger.

Seriously, how many more times is Warner Bros. going to keep giving the Wachowskis money? Until that time is over, I fear that the sci-fi genre will continue to take a beating, whilst squeezing in a gem every one in a while between the indulgence and the rehash.

What's your take on the state of original sci-fi? Let us know your thoughts...



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Anthony Stokes is a blogger and independent filmmaker.
http://www.flickeringmyth.com/2015/02/why-original-science-fiction-is-dead.html

Best Science Fiction (and Sci Fi) films (and movies) of 2014.

Well, there has been the usual debate as to our informal consideration for better or worse and what follows is a very unscientific selection. We have as customary a varied mix (sci fi, SF, mundane SF, fantasy, juvenile SF and horror) for you, so there should be something in our, best of science fiction films 2014, selection for everyone seeking a DVD for the weekend. The below listing is in alphabetical order:-

           Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. A growing nation of genetically evolved apes led by Caesar is threatened by a band of human survivors of the devastating virus unleashed a decade earlier. They reach a fragile peace, but it proves short-lived, as both sides are brought to the brink of a war that will determine who will emerge as Earth's dominant species... This second in the second re-boot of the 'Planet of the Apes' franchise may well appeal to Hugo Award nominators and if it is not on this year's short-list then you can be your bottom dollar that it will be on the long list.  Trailer here.
           Debug A Canadian SF horror offering.  Six young computer hackers sent to work on a derelict space freighter, are forced to match wits with a vengeful artificial intelligence that would kill to be human... This is a worthy film that aspires to be more than its low budget and it almost makes it, which in turn means that you may want to check it out.  Trailer here.
           The Giver. In a seemingly perfect community, without war, pain, suffering, differences or choice, a young boy is chosen to learn from an elderly man about the true pain and pleasure of the 'real' world.  The cast includes Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep and is based on Lois Lowry's 1993, juvenile SF novel, so it should appeal to a The Hunger Games and Maze Runner liking teen audience.  Trailer here.
           The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies will be a firm favourite with fantasy fans and indeed did very well at the box office (see below film sub-section) and so is a likely contender for a Hugo Award.  Trailer here.
           I Origins. A molecular biologist and his laboratory partner uncover evidence that may fundamentally change society as we know it.   Trailer here.
           Lucy. A woman, accidentally caught in a dark deal is mentally altered, turning the tables on her captors and transforms into a merciless warrior evolved beyond human logic... Cast includes Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman and Min-sik Choi.  The DVD will be out this season (see below).  This is our action pic of the year.  Trailer here.
           The Perfect 46. A geneticist creates a website that pairs an individual with their ideal genetic partner for children. This is firmly rooted in genuine science and so was arguably the best mundane SF fiction film of last year!  Trailer here.
           Predestination. The life of a time-travelling Temporal Agent. On his final assignment, he must pursue the one criminal that has eluded him throughout time. This technically came out last year (2014) and was shown at a number of film fests. However lucky for us it has a general release early this year both here (Great Britain) and N. America.  Trailer here.
           The Quiet Hour. An offering from the British Isles.  Humans are few and far between since Earth was invaded by unseen extraterrestrial machines that harvest the planet's natural resources and relentlessly kill its inhabitants. In a remote part of the countryside, where starved humans have become as dangerous as the alien machines hovering in the sky, a feisty 19 year old girl, Sarah Connolly, sets out on a desperate attempt to fight back a group of bandits and defend her parents' farm, their remaining livestock, and the solar panels that keep them safe from extraterrestrials. If she doesn't succeed, she will lose her only source of food and shelter; but if she resists, she and her helpless blind sibling will be killed. And if the mysterious intruder dressed like a soldier who claims he can help them turns out to be a liar, then the enemy may already be in the house. 
           These Final Hours. It is the end of the world in one hemisphere and the catastrophe is spreading to the rest of the planet. A self-obsessed young man makes his way to the party-to-end-all-parties on the last day on Earth but ends up saving the life of a little girl searching for her father... This did well on the Fantastic Fimls Festivals circuit in the latter half of 2013 and early in 2014. It has had a general theatre release in Australia in 2014, but has not had much profile elsewhere.  Trailer here.
           Time Lapse. Three friends discover their neighbour's mysterious machine that takes pictures 24hrs into the future and conspire to use it for personal gain, until disturbing and dangerous images begin to develop...  This is an indie film and a directorial debut for Bradley King. As here he is unencumbered by big Hollywood studio producers' constraints, we get a genuine reflection of this director's abilities: He is one to watch.  This was possibly the best time travel film of the year.  Trailer here.
           Under the Skin. A female drives a van through the roads and streets of Scotland seducing lonely men but is she what she seems to be..?  This teaser does not do this 'contact' film justice. It was extremely well received on the Fantastic Film Fest circuit in 2013 but only got a general release last year (2014). It is a British-US-Swiss SF art-house offering with a basic premise (only) based on Michel Faber's novel.  Trailer here.
           Young Ones. Post-apocalyptic film set a century or so in the future. Climate change has shifted the vegetation belts and so some formerly lush areas have become arid facing chronic water shortages making life tough for the locals...  Trailer here.
           See also Congress below in our video clip tips section. It was inspired by a Stanislaw Lem story.
           And finally, we did not include Snowpiercer in the above as we previously included it in our other worthies of the 2013/4 year as the DVD had already been out back then. But it is a notable film.


http://www.concatenation.org/news/news1~15.html#majornews

Adaptation Watch: Paramount Pictures Wants to Film Alfred Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION


Good news for classic science fiction fans: Paramount Pictures is currently in talks to acquire feature film rights for the Alfred Bester's novel The Stars My Destination.

The Stars My Destination is a science fiction classic that was originally serialized in the pages of Galaxy Magazine in late 1956 under the title "Tiger! Tiger!" — a reference to both the tattoo worn my its main protagonist, Gully Foyle, and the William Blake poem "The Tyger", the first stanza of which prefaces the book.

The story of The Stars My Destination follows Gulliver "Gully Foyle on his quest for revenge against the people who left him stranded and alone on a derelict spaceship. In that regard, the story can be seen as a futuristic retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, although Bester said the premise was inspired by a National Geographic article he read about a shipwrecked man ignored by passing ships for fear of it being a trap. In his story, Bester fleshes out an intriguing futuristic society where "jaunting", a means of personal teleportation via mental control, is possible. That has some interesting implications of life in such a society — impacts which Bester does a great job depicting.

It's obviously too early to see any stars attached to the project, but that doesn't make the news any less exciting for fans of the book, like myself.

[hat-tip Paul Di Filippo]

I još jedna najava za adaptaciju oldiz-gudiz sf-a:


Good news for Heinlein fans!


The Hollywood Reporter says Bryan Singer will be adapting Robert A. Heinlein's Classic SF book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for Twentieth Century Fox. The project appears to not be relying on name recognition. It's being called Uprising, obviously to reflect the plot of the book, which is about a lunar colony that revolts against the Earth. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress won the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel in 1967 and was nominated for the 1966 Nebula award.

This is not the first adaptation of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In fact, it's happened twice before — once by Dreamworks and once by Phoenix Pictures — but neither prject was completed and the rights expired, reverting them back to the Heinlein estate. If completed, this will add to the list of Heinlein stories that have been adapted to other media...a list that includes the 1953 film Project Moonbase, the 1994 TV mini-series Red Planet, the 1994 film The Puppet Masters, and the 1997 film Starship Troopers.

Zvezdana četvorka blog se vrlo lepo oprostio od Nimoja:

Live long and prosper, everyone. Live long and prosper.


http://www.stellarfour.com/2015/02/leonard-nimoys-best-and-funniest.html

As the bleak winter pummels us with ice and illness, John E. O. Stevens, Fred Kiesche and Jeff Patterson muster the strength and lucidity to write February off as a loss and trudge forward in search of the mythical Springtime.

First, they discuss the death of Leonard Nimoy, and his impact on SF and Fandom.

Then they turn to the subject of Thomas M. Disch, whose works broke genre conventions on an almost industrial scale. The gentlemen recall their introductions to the author's work (including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry), and his legacy in SF.

There follows a litany of culture consumed, and some talk about whooshing doors, online shrieking, and myopic definitions of "fan."

Total run time: 1 hour 42 minutes.


Download Epsiode #19 of The Three Hoarsemen!

Listen to Leonard Nimoy Reading Ray Bradbury


Here's Leonard Nimoy reading four short fiction stories by Ray Bradbury:
◾"There Will Come Soft Rains"
◾"Usher II" from "The Martian Chronicles"
◾"The Veldt"
◾"Marionettes Inc."

These were recorded back in an age when mankind was restricted to audio recorded on pressed pieces of grooved plastic called "record albums". (Look it up, kids!) The first two recording appeared on the album The Martian Chronicles. The other two appeared on The Illustrated Man.


Leonard Nimoy reads Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" from "The Martian Chronicles"

  "Fuck You, Legolas" by Daniel Polansky



I have a terrible secret. Chthonic and furtive, one I have kept hidden lo these long last years, one which I have not dared to whisper even alone and on a moonless night. One which I have only through thousands of hours of sessions with mental health professionals have I finally become capable of admitting to the world.

My name is Daniel Polansky, and I hate elves.

Hate them. Can't stand them. Dislike them all around—be they wild, high, frost, dark, fire or sky, if they've go pointy ears and a shitty attitude, I don't like them. Never liked them, in fact. Back when I was prone to walking around with sheets of paper elaborately detailing the characteristics of imaginary heroes, said heroes were never elves. They were half-Orc Paladins, they were undead cowboys, on one occasion they were a sort of humanoid dragon with guns for hands, but they were never, ever elves.

The kid at the bar next to you who sniffs unattractively when he discovers the chicken is not free range is an elf. An elf stole my high-school girlfriend just before prom, wearing a bomber jacket and shades even though it was evening. Elves always have perfect hair, even if they've just been killing something with a knife, which they inevitably do in some dance-like fashion which bares no resemblance to violence as it actually takes place. Elves think they're so fucking special, living for a thousand years, and communing with nature, and feeling superior. At best, they're all cheap superheroics, faster and stronger and tougher than everyone else. At worst they're bastions of the most exhausting sort of pseudo-philosophical gibberish, environmental studies majors with long bows, and behind every oration about the importance of preserving the forest is visible the smug, smirking, self-satisfied face of the author. (See also: Avatar)


I dislike elves so much, in fact, that I went ahead and wrote a book about them.

How did that happen, exactly? Really, I'm not 100% sure. Every book I've ever written remains kind of a mystery to me, you just wake up in the morning and hash around on your computer and then go to a coffee shop and hash around a bit more and then at some point your editor is sending you ARC copies of your book and you go, oh, shit, this hasn't been an elaborate hallucination at all, people are actually planning on reading this. And then you break out into a cold sweat and start looking frantically around for a drink.

Where were we? Elves, right. Going back to Tolkien, interspecies harmony has been used as a a rather too-obvious metaphor for interracial harmony—if Legolas and Gimli can set aside their differences, the elves and dwarfs and the men of the West gathering together to stand proud against the Eye of Sauron, then surely the least you can do is not walk across the street and smack a dude for being of a different phenotype. Every proper party includes a half dozen different-sized hominids, and maybe some sort of lizard man, and can't we all just get along?

A falsehood is no more true for its sweet sound. Here in the west we generally manage to stumble through the day without engaging in race war, but this is the product of a happy historical bubble in which we live, one which is dissimilar to the vast sweep of human history, and indeed of much of the world even as it currently exists. In Serbia they tell you things about Albanians which would make you very much not want to visit Albania, and in Albania they say very similar things of the Serbs. A man in Namibia once told me that his black worker needed to be smacked once every three months or so, just to keep him in line. At a cocktail party in Taipei, a pretty pre-school teacher pulled at my Jewfro, then smiled and without obvious evidence of ill-will informed me that my thick coiffure was evidence of my race's close kinship with the great apes. Speaking historically, what would seem to be very minor racial variations (Medes to Persian, Croat to Bosnian, Protestant Irish to Catholic) have been the source of the most terrible and savage violence.

And, of course, the distinctions between races, however neatly they are observed, are vastly minor compared to what would occur between two opposing species. Mankind, whatever his skin color or kink of hair,  is obviously and objectively, not so very different at all. We look essentially the same, we're roughly similar in ability, we can breed successfully, we live a comparable length of time, we hold lovers tight to our breasts and laugh at the children we produce. How much more severe, how much crueler, would be our behavior if these divisions were not troughs but chasms? If you lived fifty times longer than the person next to you, and you were smarter than they were, and physically tougher, the heir of an objectively superior civilization—would you suppose that person your brother? Would you suppose that person your equal? If your house cat could speak, would you allow it full political agency?

No, the truth is, Elves are of no interest to me. People, by contrast, I find endlessly fascinating, if often contemptible and almost inevitably depressing. Those Above is not a book about Elves—not really. It's a book about people. What happens to our cherished notions of equality, of justice and morality,  in a world in which we are not the dominant species? How would the existence of other intelligent life, by the standards of high fantasy a relatively modest supposition, effect essentially anthropocentric notion of morality?

Those Above is out now—if you like elves, there are elves in it (more or less). And if you don't like elves, well—bad things happen to them. Along with everyone else, for that matter.

http://www.pornokitsch.com/2015/03/fuck-you-legolas-by-daniel-polansky.html#more

Quote from: PTY on 09-03-2015, 08:10:02
Speaking historically, what would seem to be very minor racial variations (Medes to Persian, Croat to Bosnian, Protestant Irish to Catholic) have been the source of the most terrible and savage violence.

I eto kako nešto što je počelo kao relativno zanimljiva premisa za pristup vilenjacima (iako ni blizu toliko originalna koliko ovaj lik veruje, štaviše, originalni folklorni pristup vilenjacima upravo je taj strah i zaziranje od potpune i najčešće zlonamerne a nadmoćne različitosti) stigne do ove rečenice i razbije se u tisuću komada  Mislim, evo, otpisaću "rasne razlike između Hrvata i Bosanaca" na totalnu neupućenost, ali rasne varijacije između protestanata i katolika? Protestanata i katolika? Bože, daj mi snage 

Erm... ja sam to razumela ne kao 'rasne razlike' nego 'varijacije unutar rase'...

Hoću da kažem, razumela sam to kao ideju koju je Hajnlajn onako eugenički ponudio u Metuzalemovoj deci: kad se unutar rasno čiste populacije pravi neka vrst genetskog elitizma, kod Hajnlajna baziranog na dugovečnosti.

Čak i ako tako shvatimo nema smisla, nisu u pitanju unutar-rasne varijacije nego verske razlike, majku mu   Sve što on navodi svodi se na "rasu", evo sad sam opet najpažljivije pročitala ta dva pasusa i sve što pominje jeste "rat rasa", "različiti fenotipi", "srodnost rase x sa majmunima"...
Ne da ja sad mislim kako verska i etnička netolerancija predstavljaju nešto bolje ili manje ukorenjeno od klot rasizma samo da ih treba razlikovati i ne podvoditi pod isti termin.

I ta diferencijacija bi u nekom potencijalnom subverzivnom fenteziju mogla da bude vrlo zanimljiva za odnose među likovima, npr. vilenjaci i ljudi se uzajamno kolju, ali i vilenjaci se međusobno trvu jer se jedni klanjaju htonskim a drugi solarnim božanstvima... oh wait, pa već je i Tolkin imao takve izlete




Sad vidim i tvoj drugi post: taj eugenički pristup koji pominješ svakako bi bio suptilna varijacija rasizma, sproveden u praksi, samo - eto - Irci protestanti i Irci katolici ne razlikuju se ni po čemu, genetski gledano, i nikakvih rasnih varijacija između njih nema. Samo verske razlike (sasvim dovoljne za klanje, jelte).