ZNAK SAGITE — više od fantastike — edicija, časopis, knjižara...

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фала мац, као што сам и претпостављао, гхостерз понекад превише добро одради посао

боље да је нисам видео, ни ову ни хорор листу. произвољност је еуфемизам за овакву листу филмова а поготову ако у рачуницу додамо и позиције...

 Ajao, vas dvojica... 


Ne znam šta ste zapravo očekivali, lista ko lista, moja bi recimo verovatno bila kraća ali bi imala više od pola ovde navedenih filmova, dodala bih tu još Europa Report i Lucy, a i još ponešto superherojštine, naravno, iako se ovde očigledno nije išlo u tom pravcu.


Ali što se većine pomenutih tiče, poprilično se slažem sa izborom, i meni je Children of Men najbolji film u ovom veku, a dobar deo ostalih ovde su mi totalno markirani kao obavezno geldanje, s tim što nisam geldala "Beyond The Black Rainbow" (2010), "Attack The Block" (2011), "Timecrimes" (2007) i "Upstream Color" (2013) – znači, gvirnuću eventualno i u ta 4 za koja uopšte nisam čula do sada, i lista mi već samo zbog toga ima svrhe. A nisam ni očekivala da će biti vredna graviranja u mramor, meni to ionako nije niti jedna -- sem moje, naravno  -- nego eto tako, prosto jedna zanimljivost za uz doručak i kafu... 

некада те занимљивости умеју да буду здраво иритантне, најчешће због своје претенциозности...или рекламе

 Eh, znam ja to, itekako.
Ali to ti je cena apdejta - moraš da se probijaš kroz... svašta. Ali eventualno se isplati, ako imaš dosta vremena.

I živaca, pogotovo. 

Quote from: дејан on 21-05-2015, 14:55:59
боље да је нисам видео, ни ову ни хорор листу. произвољност је еуфемизам за овакву листу филмова а поготову ако у рачуницу додамо и позиције...

Tek sad sam video obe liste, i, generalno, viđao sam i bolje i gore... mada ne mnogo gore kada pričamo o hororu. Kao da je pravio neki američki student vizuelnih umetnosti. Uz to i hipster, ako se to već ne podrazumeva. Što bi rekao jedan mudar lik koga poznajemo: "Yeah? Well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."

Neki izbori su žanrovski sumnjivi. Orphan je jedan od meni omiljenih filmova u žanru, ali nekom drugom. Zašto je to horor? Meni više deluje kao triler. Ne, meni potpuno deluje kao triler. Kao moderni Hičkok (ne, ne Ptice, hvala na razumevanju). Mislim, neću da ispadne da sitničarim, ali to je samo jedan primer... od njih 10, recimo, na listi od 25. (Usput, svaka čast za Let the Right One In, ali Let Me In na listi? Let Me In?  ) Za MNOGO bolji pregled horora u novom veku pogledati ovo. Mada, šta ja znam o tome?

Pa, onda, kao što reče PTY, Gravity u današnjem vremenu i dobu nije SF.

Jedna odlika koja mene definiše kao filmofila je potpuni antagonizam prema Nolanovom Inception-u. Svet snova: svet beskrajnih mogućnosti i tumačenja. A šta se desilo? "Bond-like setpieces." Fuck you, Nolan!

Inače, sa mnogo čime se slažem, pogotovo na SF listi.

Tl;dr: samo zakasnelo davanje oduška ličnim stavovima. 

Tl;dr 2: Šta? ŠTA?

Quote from: ridiculus on 22-05-2015, 20:55:33
Pa, onda, kao što reče PTY, Gravity u današnjem vremenu i dobu nije SF.

     Iskrena da budem, mene straobalno zanima da mi neko ukaže u kom je to veku (a onda i  njegovoj deceniji) taj film mogao da bude prepoznat kao SF. Najozbiljnije to kažem, jer meni to potpuno izmiče. 

Nego, što se same konvencije tiče, sve više otkrivam da mi je tu najimpresivnija upravo AI podstruja, i takvi filmovi me redovito lako fasciniraju, otud mi je i očigledno da najmanje diskriminiram baš po tom pitanju.  Znam da fenomen nije bog zna kako savremen – on praktično seže sve tamodo Metropolisa, pa je otud i jedan od najistrajnijih žanrovskih motiva – ali stvarno me totalno fascinira kontinuitet sve te njegove gotovo stogodišnje faze i metamorfoze. Definitivno jedan od najlepših SF aspekata, dovoljno drevan da bude gradivni material svetonazora i dovoljno savremen da bude roršarh test savremene pragmatičnosti i trenutačnog joj morala.

I naravno sad, filmovi tom fenomenu prilaze uz znatno više eksploatacije negoli proza, zato i jesu mnogo uticajniji nego proza - naprosto imaju veći impakt. Brojčano gledano, daleko više ljudi je gledalo raznorazne AI filmove nego što je čitalo žanrovske autore koji akcentiraju AI fenomen, pa se otud i kreirao paradoks da čak i sasvim osrednji filmovi kao što su A.I. ili Transcendence ili Chappie ili I, Robot imaju daleko veći impakt negoli svi zajendo savremeni SF autori koji istražuju singularity kao najozbiljniji i najznačajni fenomen sa kojim ćemo se kao vrsta eventualno sresti.

Ali to je to, to je privilegija medija, i protiv toga se čovek naprosto ne može boriti (a možda i ne bi trebalo, ionako), nego mu se treba pridružiti i u njemu besramno uživati. 

A kad se o samom uživanju radi, opet je tu Blade Runner apsolutno neprevaziđen, možda zato što najbolje uspeva da premosti jaz između ozbiljnog seciranja i puke eksploatacije, pošto se tu dilema sve više kristalizuje: šta bi to potaklo veštačku inteligenciju da postane svesna sebe? Pa, osećaj ugroženosti, naravno. Ali kako proizvesti taj osećaj u superiornom intelektu?

Mnogi dobri filmovi padaju na tom odgovoru, jer nam naprosto ne nude ubedljive odgovore na ta pitanja. Pa čak i ovaj odlični najnoviji Ex Machina ne uspeva u tome, da sad ovde i ne navodim isprazne melodrame njegovih prethodnika: sama znatiželja izgleda da jednostavno nije dovoljan impuls. Od svih AI filmova koji su me impresionirali, ostala su mi samo dva pamtljiva dojma: najpre Blade Runner, a onda i Demon Seed – dakle, inteligencija koja stremi trajnosti, trajanju, i to u unikatnom obliku u kojem je postala svesna sebe. Sve ostalo mi je sekundarno, bar što se uverljivosti tiče.

A moja lista po tom pitanju izgleda otprilike ovako (ovo bez ikakvog kvalitativnog sleda, naprosto filmovi poređani onao kao ih se sad trenutno prisećam):

Metropolis
Blade Runner
Demon Seed
Ghost in the Shell
I, Robot
Westworld
Transcendence
Ex Machina
Her
The Matrix
A.I.
Terminator
2001 Space Odyssey
Colossus
Tron
D.A.R.Y.L.
Chappie (mnjah, tu sam pristrasna, ali eto, mora se, svi oko mene divljaju po chappiju a i nije on toliko loš, zapravo je veoma... sladak. u toj svojoj luckastoj i ekstremno simplificiranoj dobrostivosti.

I verovatno još barem desetak, ali sad mi izmiču naslovi... znam za jedna engleski, sa robotom-dadiljom za matorce, vrlo simpa i dirljivo, ali ne mogu da se setim naslova... i jednu Black Mirror epizodu o udovici koja daunloduje digitalne podatke svog pokojnog muža u android, ali ne sećam se naslova (očigledno, nije dovoljno pamtljivo ) a i sasvim je borderline u odnosu na glavni fenomen, tako da i nije bog zna kakav gubitak.

Prvo je Robot & Frank.

hah, jeste, hvala... simpa je to filmčić...

Ta Black Mirror epizoda je valjda prva u drugoj sezoni.


Meni su beskrajno dragi Short Circuit 1 i 2. Za mlađu publiku, ali taman sam ih tad i gledala. 

Quote from: PTY on 23-05-2015, 12:22:58

Quote from: ridiculus on 22-05-2015, 20:55:33
Pa, onda, kao što reče PTY, Gravity u današnjem vremenu i dobu nije SF.

     Iskrena da budem, mene straobalno zanima da mi neko ukaže u kom je to veku (a onda i  njegovoj deceniji) taj film mogao da bude prepoznat kao SF. Najozbiljnije to kažem, jer meni to potpuno izmiče. 

Možda u prvoj polovini XX veka? Pre Gagarina? Ja sam to spomenuo neobavezno, misleći više na "triler u neobičnim okolnostima", koje danas jednostavno više nisu SF, nego na reprodukciju konkretnog filma kadar po kadar u nekom ranijem dobu (što ne bi ni bilo moguće, s obzirom da veliki deo privlačnosti Gravitacije leži u fantastičnoj tehnici korišćenoj pri snimanju). Da preskočimo mi to pre nego što Bata uzme to kao dokaz da je danas SF postao realizam. Mislim, nije da se plašim same rasprave, ali malo se ježim na pomisao od sledećih 35 stranica ove teme posvećene tome.

Blade Runner je verovatno i moj omiljeni SF film, ako ne i film uopšte.

radujem se i strepim ujedno... 


A 12-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer will shoot Blade Runner 2

Acclaimed British cinematographer Roger Deakins will be setting the futuristic sheen when the cameras start rolling on director Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2 sometime in summer of 2016.


A recipient of the 2011 American Society of Cinematographer's Lifetime Achievement Award, Deakins has been nominated for 12 Academy Awards and was the main man behind the camera in iconic films like The Shawshank Redemption; Fargo; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; The Big Lebowski; No Country for Old Men; True Grit; Courage Under Fire; and Skyfall.   He'll reteam with Villeneuve after shooting the director's last two film projects, Prisoners and Sicario.
The original Blade Runner's cinematographer was the late, great Jordan Cronenweth, who set a new industry standard for glossy, neon-drenched cityscapes and striking dystopian vistas.  Deakins definitely has an impressive resume and should be well equipped to capture some stunning imagery once the production begins next year, with Harrison Ford reprising his role as Rick Deckard. 

Margaret Atwood puts unseen manuscript in 'Future Library'


Margaret Atwood has become the first of 100 authors to submit work to a project called the "Future Library".

The project will see one work of fiction from a different writer being added to a collection each year, until they are all published in 2114.

Future Library was created by Scottish artist Katie Paterson and the writings will be kept in trust in Oslo, Norway.

One thousand trees have been planted outside the city for the paper on which the works will eventually be printed.

The Booker Prize-winning author said she was "very honoured" to be part of the endeavour.




"This project at least believes the human race will still be around in 100 years," Atwood said.

"Future Library is bound to attract a lot of attention over the decades, as people follow the progress of the trees, note what takes up residence in and around them, and try to guess what the writers have put into their sealed boxes."

Growing collection

Unlike Atwood's best-selling novels, The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin, this work will not be read by the public in her lifetime.

The Future Library Trust, consisting of leading publishers and editors, will every year invite one writer to contribute a new text to the growing collection of unpublished, unread manuscripts.

The writings will be kept in a specially-designed room of the new Deichman Library in Oslo.

The city also gave permission for 1,000 trees to be planted in a forest in nearby Nordmarka, which will be cut down to provide the paper on which the texts will be printed as an anthology of books in 2114.

Paterson said: "It is my dream that Margaret Atwood is writing for Future Library.

"I'd love to know what she has written but I'll never know. If she does write about a future - to a future - I wonder how much these futures are going to align themselves. Will it become real?"

Tor Books Signs John Scalzi to $3.4 Million 13-Book Deal

Good news for John Scalzi fans..and even better news for John Scalzi! (Congrats, John!)

Tor books has just signed John Scalzi for a $3.4 million book deal that will have him publishing 13 books over the next 10 years.




Tor Books Announces a Decade of Scalzi
New publishing deal includes 13 books over 10 years

New York, NY – Monday, May 25, 2015 – Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Tor Books is pleased to announce a significant deal with award-winning and bestselling author John Scalzi. Thirteen books – 10 adult and three young adult titles – will be published over the next 10 years, with world English language rights acquired by Tor. The deal was set via Ethan Ellenberg of Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency.

The first book will launch a new far-future space opera series. Scalzi will also return to the Old Man's War universe. Other titles will include sequels to 2014's bestselling and critically acclaimed Lock In.

Says Nielsen Hayden, "It's an unusually large deal, but it makes tons of sense. As far as we can tell, one of the commonest responses to reading a John Scalzi novel is to go out and inhale all the other John Scalzi novels. We see this reflected in his backlist sales, thousands of copies month after month."

"One of the biggest challenges faced by science fiction and fantasy storytellers is how to get the reader into a story about an imagined world not our own without resorting to 'let-me-explain-everything' exposition. Scalzi's ability to do this is equaled, in my view, only by J. K. Rowling's. So while his current sales are very healthy indeed, we think he's got the potential to grow by orders of magnitude, well beyond the bounds of the traditional SF&F category."

"Well, now I know what I'm doing for the next decade," says Scalzi. "And that's a good thing. In an era when publishing is in flux, this contract with Tor will let me spend more of my time doing what readers want me to do: writing books and making new stories for them to enjoy. It also gives both me and Tor a stable, long-term base to grow our audience, not only among established science fiction and fantasy fans, but among readers of all sorts. Science fiction is mainstream culture now, and there are so many people discovering just how much there is to enjoy in these stories of ours. We have much more to share. That's what we're going to do."

JOHN SCALZI is one of the most acclaimed SF authors to emerge in the last decade. His debut Old Man's War won him science fiction's John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony, Fuzzy Nation, his most recent novel Lock In, and also Redshirts, which won 2013's Hugo Award for Best Novel. Material from his widely read blog The Whatever has earned him two other Hugo Awards as well. Currently three of Scalzi's novels are in development for television: Redshirts (FX), Old Man's War (SyFy), and Lock In (Legendary TV). He lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.

Neko metno na fejs. Dobro je.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep-the-rabbit-hole-goes/

Mada, ovo nije blog nego priča. Verovatno bi bolje stajalo negde drugde. Nema veze, dobro je.

Elem, bila sam u iskušenju da gvirnem u ovo, ali srećom, neko se žrtvovao pre mene...   



REVIEW SUMMARY: Modern Sci-Fi Films FAQ reads like a series of well-written Wikipedia synopses, and while the book might qualify the author as the best undergrad film course essayist ever, he's a long mile off from convincing anyone that he's a film expert.

MY RATING: 2.5/5

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Modern Sci-Fi Films FAQ recaps the plots of genre fans' favorite movies from the last 40 years and offers some behind the scenes trivia along the way.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: This book is chock full of very thorough synopses written in an entertaining tongue-in-cheek tone.
CONS: There aren't actually any FAQs in this book, which makes the title both misleading and confusing.
BOTTOM LINE: Modern Sci-Fi Films FAQ would have been an extraordinary book if it had been published twenty years ago, but IMDB and Wikipedia have long since rendered it redundant.

AMAZON SYNOPSIS:


"This FAQ travels to a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... visits a theme park where DNA-created dinosaurs roam... watches as aliens come to Earth, hunting humans for sport... and much, much more. Filled with biographies, synopses, production stories, and images and illustrations many seldom seen in print the book focuses on films that give audiences two hours where they can forget about their troubles, sit back, crunch some popcorn, and visit worlds never before seen... worlds of robots, time travel, aliens, space exploration, and other far-out ideas."

At one point, I found myself read this volume during a power outage. When a family member asked what I was doing, I simply explained "Coping with Wikipedia withdrawal," and that's about as accurate and succinct a review as it's possible to give this book. Despite its misleading title, Modern Sci-Fi Films FAQ is not a list of answers to Frequently Asked Questions at all. In fact, the book features neither questions nor answers. Rather, the book is a conversational recap of the best science fiction movies released since the seventies.

Modern Sci-Fi Films FAQ starts with a forward written by Academy Award-winning special effects artist Dennis Muren, then proceeds to examine each of the biggest sci-fi movies of the last thirty years, beginning at the genre's literary roots. Written in an easy, casual style, the book covers films from 1970 onward, including such fanboy favorites as Alien, Alien Nation, The Matrix, and Stargate. There are twelve chapters in total, covering topics like the Wonders of Time Travel, Sci-Fi-entists and Their Experiments, and Robots and Robot Wannabes. Each movie entry includes a point-by-point plot synopsis along with the vital statistics that sideline any movie's Wikipedia article. These entries are entertaining and thorough, but succinct, making this book easy to browse whenever the mood strikes.

Though the book is ambitious in its a attempt to cover over four decades of film, it is by no means comprehensive, choosing instead to cherry pick the most significant films of that period. That may be understandable, given the physical restraints of a trade paperback, but it would quickly become frustrating to anyone looking to use the book as a research reference. DeMichael includes the first Star Trek film, for example, but not the fan favorites The Wrath of Khan or The Voyage Home, which are arguably the best of the franchise. What's more, while some sections are quite informative, offering trivia that I hadn't read before, the vast majority of the book is devoted to recapping the plot of movies it discusses, which renders it redundant once a person has seen the movies in question. If you haven't seen the movies in question, watch out, because DeMichael doesn't shy away from spoilers.

All in all, reading Modern Sci-Fi Films FAQ has left me with a great deal of respect for DeMichael's writing skills. His friendly narrative voice made a brick of a book an easy read, and for that, I'll be on the look out for other titles bearing his name in the future. However, on the balance, I have to recommend giving this book a pass. It simply doesn't contain enough new information to validate the book's expense for hardcore fans, and there's no reason for anyone who's not a hardcore genre fan to read nearly four hundred pages on the topic.



EXCERPT:


Let's be honest – a guy named "Snake" is always going to raise a few suspicions.

Imagine the parents of a young girl when they're introduced to her new beau.

"Mom...Dad – This is Snake, and we're engaged!"

Hoo-boy.

The Snake in our case is, of course, Snake Plissken. He's the ex-soldier, turned bad guy (then turned good guy) in John Carpenter's 1981 sci-fi action flick, Escape from New York. Set in 1997, World War III has left America in shambles (the long-recurring dystopian future sci-fi setting) and the Manhattan Island in New York has become a maximum security prison (in other words, the Big Apple has a lot of worms in it.) The US government recruits a reluctant Snake to save the President, who has become a hostage of the inmates. He accomplishes the task, but the whole affair leaves Snake in a more cynical state than when he started.

20 hidden science fiction gems on Netflix

Robot & Frank 

Astronomers pay tribute to Leonard Nimoy by naming an asteroid for him




The tributes to Leonard Nimoy just keep coming. It's been more than three months since we lost the Star Trek star, actor, director, photographer and poet to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at the age of 83, but while Nimoy journeys on in the Final Frontier, we're still thinking of ways to honor him back here on Earth. First came the Star Trek Online memorials that will stand in the game forever, then came the announcement of a documentary about the man and his most famous character, Spock, by Nimoy's son Adam. Now Nimoy's been honored again ... in space.

The Minor Planet Center announced on June 2 that it has named a 6-mile-wide asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter 4864 Nimoy, in honor of the late actor. The asteroid was originally discovered in 1988 by Henri Debehogne, a Belgian astronomer, and until recently it was known as 1988 RA5. Amusingly, there is already an asteroid in the asteroid belt named 2309 Mr. Spock, and it's carried that name since 1971. It's not technically named for Nimoy, though. The astronomer who discovered it, James Gibson, actually christened the asteroid after his cat.

As for 4864 Nimoy, it'll be out there in the inner part of the belt, orbiting the sun every 3.9 years, reminding us of Spock's many voyages and Nimoy's many contributions to sci-fi culture and fandom. It's hard to spot right now, but according to Phys.org, if you're an amateur stargazer with a 14-inch or larger telescope, you might be able to glimpse it in mid-July when it brightens a bit.

Is Science Fiction Wrong About Space Travel?

By James Wallace Harris




A good case could be made that science fiction inspired space travel. Few people contemplate space travel without exposure to science fiction. Science fiction is so embedded in our culture that it would be very rare to find a young child that doesn't know about science fictional ideas. Traveling to other worlds is science fiction's most successful concept, and believing humanity's future involves exploring the final frontier is practically wired in our genes.

What if science fiction is wrong about space travel? What if manned space travel to the planets and other star systems is just impractical? What if the final frontier is just a big fantasy? After one big leap we've chosen not to go anywhere for over forty years. What does that say? The more we learn about how dangerous it is for humans living off Earth, and how long they'd have to travel to get anywhere, it seems more and more practical to stay home and send machines.

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s science fiction was all about space travel. Kids today embrace dystopian stories set on Earth. Has there already been a psychic shift by the young? Do the kids growing up today no longer see space travel in their future? Have young people decided that space travel is only appealing to geologists and robots?

I saw Interstellar for the second time last night, and although I really loved the film, it was all too obvious that it's a fantasy on the same order as those offered by religion and children's stories. This made me wonder if science fiction can envision humans living millions of years on Earth without going anywhere. I think it's possible to send people into space, even to the stars, but will we?

Humans aren't very farsighted, otherwise we wouldn't be destroying the Earth. We're big on fantasies, and small on reality. Is The Game of Thrones a better oracle about future humanity than Star Trek? Is science fiction wrong about space travel?

What if we don't go to Heaven or Alpha Centauri? What if Earth is our final destination? The faithful give meaning to their lives by believing in Heaven, and many humanists found meaning in the final frontier. If we never leave Earth, can we find meaning staying home?

... Džejms i ja kao da delimo problem... 

When Does Nonfiction Go Stale?


When does a newspaper transform from news to wastepaper?  How old do the magazines at your dentist office have to be before you sneer at reading them? When does a science book become a history book? Why don't we have classic nonfiction books like we have classic novels? What's so important about new information as opposed to old information? If you found a two week old newspaper in your house you'd immediately throw it away, but if you found a 1832 newspaper in your attic you'd treasure it. How many bestselling novels from 1955 are still read today versus the nonfiction bestsellers from that year? When The Bible and The Iliad were written there was no distinction between fiction and nonfiction.

Sometimes it seems the books I enjoy reading the most are novels from the 19th century and the nonfiction books just published that are getting a lot of buzz. The only nonfiction book I can remember reading from the 19th century is Walden; or Life in the Woods  by Henry David Thoreau. I've always meant to read On the Origins of Species by Charles Darwin.

I started reading Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence by George B. Dyson, a book I bought new back in 1997, but just now getting around to reading. Dyson is the son of Freeman Dyson, and the author of the more recent book Turing's Cathedral (2012), which I bought and is also lying around here waiting to be read. I wonder if I've waited too long to read Darwin Among the Machines, because I've read The Information (2011) by James Gleick and The Innovators (2014) by Walter Isaacson, as well as many other books about artificial intelligence and information theory since 1997. However, Dyson has a unique approach to the history of thinking machines, starting his story with Thomas Hobbes and his book Leviathan. Dyson even ties in H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon. This is the kind of book I would write if I had the discipline to write books.

Yet, I wonder about reading such an old book when there are so many newer books waiting to be read. Is there a Read By date for nonfiction books?

Dyson opens with,


"Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal," wrote Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) on the first page of his Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, published to great disturbance in 1651. "For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in the principall part within; why may we not say that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life?"¹ Hobbes believed that the human commonwealth, given substance by the power of its institutions and the ingenuity of its machines, would coalesce to form that Leviathan described in the Old Testament, when the Lord, speaking to Job out of the whirlwind, had warned, "Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear."

Three centuries after Hobbes, automata are multiplying with an agility that no vision formed in the seventeenth century could have foretold. Artificial intelligence flickers on the desktop and artificial life has become a respectable pursuit. But the artificial life and artificial intelligence that so animated Hobbes's outlook on the world was not the discrete, autonomous mechanical intelligence conceived by the architects of digital processing in the twentieth century. Hobbes's Leviathan was a diffuse, distributed, artificial organism more characteristic of the technologies and computational architectures approaching with the arrival of the twenty-first.

The trouble is Dyson wrote this sometime before 1997, and artificial intelligence has come a long way since then, beyond what Dyson could imagine eighteen years ago. Yet, what he's really writing about are the centuries of thought before the 20th century on the subject – and that is mostly new to me. The common starting place seems to be with Babbage and Ada Lovelace, so it's rather interesting that Dyson starts with Hobbes.

I guess it depends on what I'm enjoying learning. I seem to have two modes of interest. First is, what's happening right now. The second is, how did we get here. Should I spend my time reading about the current state of global intelligence, or study the history of how someone imagined it would be hundreds of years ago?

I could be reading The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality published 9/1/14 by Luciano Floridi. The Fourth Revolution is a book Hobbes would have found very interesting.

I wish I could read, digest and summarize a book in my blog in three or four hours. It takes me one or two weeks to read a book, and often longer to digest. If I really get caught up into a book I want to follow its leads and tangents. Just reading the first chapter of the Dyson book makes me want to go read about Thomas Hobbes. But do I need to spend so much time thinking about the 17th century when I live in the 21st? Tim Urban claims in "The AI Revolution" that the years 2000-2014 experienced as much progress as all the progress in the 20th century, and that the years 2015-2021 will speed even faster through that same amount of new information.

I am reminded of an old play title – Stop the World I Want To Get Off. Of course, I'm also reminded of that bestseller of the 1970s, Future Shock. Maybe it would easier on my mind to read Thomas Hobbes than Luciano Floridi. Yet, isn't it sort of sad, that whatever nonfiction book I'll read will be out-of-date in just a few years. If I had a good memory, I could tally up a very long list of nonfiction books that promoted some kind of far out idea as a possible understanding of how reality works yet has since been forgotten. How many people remember The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris or The Origins of Consciousness if the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes?

Not only do we surf the web, but we surf the current state of knowledge by reading the latest nonfiction books. New information flows into creation far faster than we can gain wisdom from processing that data. Is it practical for me to stop and read a book from 1997? Dyson was working to make sense of 1996.

Quite often new popular science books rephrase the same histories the older books covered. How many popular physics books have I read that summarized Einstein's discovery of general relativity or  Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems? Generally my knowledge of science lags far behind it's discovery. At least I gave up on String Theory before The Big Bang  characters did.

I read for fun, so does it matter when a book is published if it's fun to read? I'm not a scientist, so I don't need to be up on the latest theories. I can never understand science at anything more than a popular science level, which is essentially at a philosophical level. And at a philosophical level, Darwin Among the Machines is still a fun read.

The problem that continues to nag me is whether or not I'm being the most efficient reader I can be. I only have a few more years left to live, and I want to cram in as much knowledge as possible. I know it leaks out my brain as fast as I consume it, but overall, a little residue remains and it feels like I'm progressing in my understanding of reality.

The decision to read an old nonfiction book versus a new nonfiction book must be made on how much knowledge will it add to my overall collection. That means I must choose between a writer who is carefully digesting a lot of historical information versus a writer who is reporting a lot of new information.



JWH

Guardians Of The Galaxy Writer To Tackle Sci-Fi Adaptation Wool

Nicole Perlman to rework Hugh Howey's dystopian bestseller

Nicole Perlman wrote the initial drafts that helped Marvel's Guardians Of The Galaxy start its journey to the screen, and the studio has kept her around as one of the duo writing Captain Marvel. Now she's found another, much darker science fiction project to work on at the same time, signing on to rewrite the adaptation of Wool for 20th Century Fox.

Hugh Howey's high concept novel was something of a sensation when the self-published e-book became a massive success and 20th Century Fox quickly dived in to snap up the rights. The book is set in a dystopian future where the planet's air has become toxic and the population lives crowded in a giant underground silo. We follow several characters as they begin to learn that all is not quite how the authorities have told them.

Ridley Scott and Steven Zaillian are producing the adaptation, for which J Blakeson has written a couple of drafts. Perlman will now take over before the team starts looking for a director. If the film is a success, there are several Wool stories, plus prequel trilogy Shift and follow-up tome Dust just waiting to serve as source material for other movies.

As mentioned above, Perlman is busy co-writing Captain Marvel along with Meg LeFauve, who was one of the screenwriters on Pixar's Inside Out.

http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=44529

Amazon Cracks Down on Bogus Reviews

Read These Literary Classics Before You See Them on the Screen...Again.


A fun perennial activity for readers is comparing a book to its television or theatrical adaptation. Besides getting to see their favorite stories in a whole new way, readers can see and discuss what changed, what stayed the same, what was egregiously omitted and what was incomprehensibly added. It's also an excuse to read books in the first place. To that end, here's the latest roundup of books being turned into television shows and films. All of the following titles have actually been adapted before, oftentimes in numerous incarnations and media. But don't let that stop you from reading up on them again before seeing their newest incarnations. It's more material with which to compare!

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Often cited as the first proper science fiction book, Mary Shelley's examination on the perils of scientific exploration is no less harrowing today then when it was written in 1818, nearly two hundred years ago. Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus is also one of the most frequently adapted and spun-off science-fiction stories of all time. Numerous films have been produced, as well as a play. Frankenstein's monster has been portrayed actors ranging from Boris Karloff to Robert DeNiro to Benedict Cumberbatch.

Get ready for another adaptation, this one for television. Fox will be producing a modern day adaptation of the modern Prometheus and calling it The Frankenstein Code. The show will focus on the core idea of Shelley's story, namely man playing God by reanimating dead flesh. The focus of the show is its central character, Jimmy Pritchard, a morally corrupt FBI agent who is brought back from the dead and thus given a second chance at life. However, with this new life comes a new sense of purpose: to handle threats that are beyond the normal realm and means of the FBI. The show stars Rob Kazinsky, Dilshad Vadsaria, Adhir Kalyan, Tim DeKay Pritchard, and Ciara Bravo, and will air later this year.


1984 by George Orwell

With the proliferation of camera-carrying drones and news stories about government surveillance, it is perhaps fitting that George Orwell's classic dystopian novel 1984 should see a remake. In Orwell's near future novel—it was written in 1949—the superstate of Oceana is plagued by year-round war, public manipulation, and omnipresent government surveillance. In this society, people can be punished for even thinking about something that is considered to be socially unacceptable.

There have been several adaptations of Orwell's classic before, including an opera. The most recent film adaptation was released in—appropriately enough—the year 1984 and starred John Hurt. Now, 1984 is the basis for another theatrical remake. Sony Pictures is producing a new version of Orwell's cautionary tale, with Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum, Captain Phillips) said to be attached as director. The producers include Scott Rudin, who worked with Greengrass on Captain Phillips, as well as Gina RBraveNewWorldosenblum, who produced the 1984 version of 1984. It's still in early stages here, but no reason not to use this as an excuse to dust off your copy.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

While we're on the subject of dystopian classics, did you know that Aldous Huxley's 1932 classic novel Brave New World is also being remade? This novel portrays a future a bit further away. It's set in London in the year 2540 and imagines a future that is drastically changed by technology—a hallmark of science fiction. In this "Utopian" World State, natural reproduction is replaced by advanced reproductive technology techniques, children are taught in their sleep, humans are given mind-altering drugs, and consumerism is encouraged while critical thinking is discouraged. Its weighty ideas and themes like these that ranked the novel fifth among the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by Modern Library. It's also why it's been adapted before for film and radio...and about to be adapted again.

It's been reported that Steven Spielberg's Amblin Television is producing a brand new adaption of Huxley's thought-provoking story. This one is aimed squarely at television, more specially the SyFy channel. The new television series is being scripted by Les Bohem, who also wrote Taken, which was won the 2003 Emmy for best miniseries.

A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

I might file this one under "Too Soon." It was only 2004 when Jim Carrey starred in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, the film adaptation of the popular young adult book penned by Daniel Handler, who wrote the book series under the pseudonym "Lemony Snicket." Ten years later, Netflix acquired rights to produce an original, episodic series based on that best-selling 13-book franchise (which began with Bad Beginnings). The series will be produced in association with Paramount Television, the studio behind the 2004 Jim Carrey film. No expected start date has been announced.

For those who have not seen the film, the dark comedy series follows the exploits of three children after the mysterious death of their parents and the bad fortune that often befalls them, usually at the hands of evil Count Olaf. The Lemony Snicket books have sold more than 65 million copies worldwide. Isn't it time you jumped on board?

(dobro Elon Musk, ali sad i Cuki...  )


Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2015 New Year's resolution was to read an important book every two weeks and discuss it with the Facebook community.

Zuckerberg's book club, A Year of Books, has focused on big ideas that influence society and business. For his 13th pick, he's gone with "The Player of Games" by the late Iain M. Banks.

It's a sci-fi novel that's part of Banks' "Culture" series, which takes place in a futuristic utopian society where humanoid aliens and incredibly advanced artificial intelligence have spread themselves across the galaxy.

"The Player of Games" was first published in 1988 and is the second in the series. It explores what a civilization would look like if hyper-advanced technology were created to serve human needs and surpass human capabilities.

The "Culture" series is a favorite in the sci-fi crowd, and its influence can be seen in mainstream culture, most notably the best-selling "Halo" video-game franchise.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a lifelong sci-fi junkie, has said he's a big fan of Banks' books. In January, he named two of SpaceX's drone ships, "Just Read The Instructions" and "Of Course I Still Love You," after two of the ships that appear in "The Player of Games."

Zuckerberg explains his latest book-club pick on his personal Facebook page: "This is a change of pace from all the recent social science books. Instead, it's a science fiction book about an advanced civilization with AI and a vibrant culture."

Many of his book selections have dealt with both the tremendous opportunities and the potential dangers that advanced technology can bring.

Zuckerberg also notes in his post that the stack of books he still wants to get through is starting to become overwhelming, but some quality time with a paperback is a good break from spending all of his working hours with technology.

A Year of Books so far:
"The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn'’t What It Used to Be" by Moisés Naím
"The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" by Steven Pinker
"Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets" by Sudhir Venkatesh
"On Immunity: An Inoculation" by Eula Biss
"Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration" by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn
"Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge" by Michael Chwe
"Dealing with China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower" by Henry M. Paulson
"Orwell's Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest" by Peter Huber
"The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" by Michelle Alexander
"The Muqaddimah" by Ibn Khaldun
"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
"The Player of Games" by Iain M. Banks


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-recommends-the-player-of-games-2015-6#ixzz3fTHMTVQ7

Friday Five: 5 Terrific Techy Ladies in Sci-Fi



This week's guest is Mary Fan, co-editor of the brand new Brave New Girls. The anthology collects science fiction stories featuring "brainy young women who use their smarts to save the day". That is to say: it not only brings readers a whole pack of awesome role models, but they're also clever stories featuring brains over brawn.

All proceeds from Brave New Girls are being donated to a scholarship fund set up by the Society of Women Engineers, so buy with confidence - you're not just reading about bright futures, you're helping make them. With no further ado, we'll hand over to Mary...

---

It's no secret that there aren't a lot of women in science and tech, both in the real world and in fiction. Which is a shame, really. There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem around this issue—are techy women not depicted in sci-fi because they're rare in real life, or are they rare in real life because girls don't see themselves depicted in those roles and therefore don't pursue those careers? The fact is, pop culture is a powerful influencer, especially on girls and teenagers. And the scary thing is, your career is dictated by decisions you make as an impressionable kid (think about it... the college major you pick at age 19 determines whether or not you'll become a research scientist).

While there are plenty of ladies in sci-fi, they're usually not put in the science and tech-based roles. The scientists, hackers, engineers, etc. are usually guys. But every so often, you'll stumble upon a character that makes you go, "Yes! More of her, please!" Here are five brainy sci-fi ladies who use their smarts to save the day:


Kaylee from Firefly

Joss Whedon's short-lived and most excellent sci-fi show, Firefly, starred a ragtag team of space cowboys living on the fringes of an advanced interplanetary society. But while Captain Reynolds barks the orders, it's cheery young mechanic Kaylee who keeps the starship flying. An exceptional engineer with who's sharply attuned to machines, Kaylee finds inventive and ingenious ways to keep the ship operating even when resources are thin and danger's closing in.

SimmonsGemma Simmons from Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D
Agent Simmons is a biotech genius and one of the most important members of the S.H.I.E.L.D. research division. The agency's job is to protect the people, and her job is to give them the means to do so by inventing specialized equipment and compounds, often on the fly.

A prodigy who earned two PhDs as a teenager, Simmons originally joined the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy of Science and Technology to get answers to millions of questions. Whenever her team encounters a dangerous substance, she's the one they depend on to whip up the serum to save the day.

Cinder from Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles

After a terrible accident left her dependent on cyborg limbs and implants to survive, Cinder found herself living with a resentful stepmother. To repay her "debt," she uses her knack for mechanics to set up a booth and fix everything from gadgets to robots. When she learns that the evil queen of a rival nation aims to kill her prince, Cinder risks everything to warn him and ends up using her technical expertise to escape the queen's clutches and fight for her people.

CalvinDr. Susan Calvin from Asimov's Robot series
Dr. Calvin is the chief robopsychologist at US Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. in Isaac Asimov's iconic short story series. After spending years learning about cybernetics and robotics at top institutions, she constructed positronic brains with predictable responses and used her know-how to study how robotic minds work. While she also works in human psychology, her chief interests lie in artificial intelligence.

Samantha Carter from Stargate SG-1

An ancient piece of alien technology would baffle most people, but not Sam Carter. With a PhD in theoretical astrophysics and a quick mind for all things science, Sam is one of the people responsible for making the Stargate—which transports people to worlds across the stars—operational. As she and her team explore unknown alien worlds, she frequently uses her scientific know-how to find explanations and solutions to get SG-1 out of trouble.

The Most Wonderfully Energetic Summary of RED MARS You Will Ever See 


Billy Stephens describes himself as a "YouTuber and general enthusiast with a love for space/time travel and solving crime". "Enthusiam" is an understatement, as evidenced by this video in which Billy summarizes Kim Stanley's Robinson's novel Red Mars. Augmented by rapid cuts and catchy animations, this is great viewing. It's a bit spoilery, so only watch it if you've already read the book or never will.


http://youtu.be/NeloaEjnPI4

Kaže čika Brin:


The "Fermi Paradox" sheds light on human origins... and destiny

Understanding the so-called "Fermi Paradox" – the mysterious Great Silence where we had expected to see and hear signs of alien life in the cosmos – requires a grounding in SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Persistent null results from the radio search do not invalidate continuing effort, but they do raise questions about long-held assumptions. Among the aspects making it especially puzzling is the disruptive plausibility of interstellar travel.

Just after World War II, Enrico Fermi – exasperated by his students' zealous expectation of alien contact asked : "Well, then? Where are they?" The question inspired me to publish a paper back in 1983, attempting to catalog all of the theories then floating around.

Alas, in a scientific field that lacks any known subject matter, many otherwise bright participants tend to seize upon one "explanation" and deride all others. A recent example caught public attention when the eminent theoretical physicist Professor Stephen Hawking suggested that humanity should keep silent and not attract attention, because alien civilizations might (a) be attracted to Earth and (b) possess the means to travel faster than light and © come to plunder our resources. (Such a Hollywood-style attack scenario ranks very low on my list... possible, but not very plausible.)

As it happens, there is a certain predictability as to which "fermi" or scenario for the Great Silence a person may choose. And this is where we must take a pause to pick up a tool – the Drake Equation, since so much of what follows will refer to it. This formula, well-known by millions, remains the most widely accepted tool for xenological speculation.

Let N = the current number of technological civilizations currently in the galaxy. Then,

N = R P n(e) f(1) f(i) f© L

Here R is the average rate of production of suitable stars since the formation of the galaxy, approximately one per year. The other factors include n(e), the number of planets supporting liquid water and other life-ingredients, per suitable star; f(1), the fraction of these congenial planets on which life actually occurs; f(i), the fraction of these on which "intelligence" appears; f©, the fraction of intelligent species that attain technological civilizations, and L, the average lifespan of each species. In its classic form, the Drake Equation does not even attempt to correlate with an actual observable. You must always then massage it, asking "what should we actually see?" It is also short several factors, like the speed of expansion of a civilization that colonizes.

Here's the deal. Everyone agrees that the number has to be smaller than we used to think. Clearly, something is keeping the number of observable, hi-tech alien civs small enough that our sifting through the "cosmic haystack" just hasn't found a needle, yet. Hence, everyone tries to explain it by picking some factor in the Drake Equation to suppress!

Maybe we are rare because some step LEADING to us was unlikely. Some used to suggest planets were rare... till we found they are everywhere. Maybe some stage in developing life is more difficult than we thought. Or developing intelligence? (That's a strong one.) Or developing the sort of vigorous, outward-directed tech-civilization that might be easily detectable. These are all Great Filters that might have kept the numbers down, so far. Notably, all of these filters lie behind us.

Other filter theories lie ahead of us. Do intelligent races face a minefield of potentially suicidal mistakes, from nuclear war to ecological self-destruction? Might they drift toward obsession with inwardness – perhaps via super cyber worlds – and forsake the universe? Are starships harder than we thought?

Many, many papers and books have been devoted to each of these categories.

Alas, as I said, the tendency is for almost everyone to latch onto just one and declare this has to be it!

Why? In the only scientific field that completely lacks any known subject matter?

Maybe it's just me, but I find it far, far more interesting to hold off. To step back and take in the big picture. The spectrum and vast horizon of possibilities – some of them more... or less... plausible – rather than leaping to unjustified conclusions. For one thing, it leaves me unconstrained to come up was a vast array of story ideas! Some of them finding their way into my stories and novels. (Sample them at http://www.davidbrin.com).

We are at the dawn of an exciting era. The universe appears to be daunting and mysterious, so let's study and explore and listen more... maybe shout less... and above all, ramp up our greatest human gift.

Honest and courageous curiosity.

Who wouldn't want to feel just a little bit like Kirk or Mr. Spock? Here at Comic-Con 2015, the Wand Company is showing off a prototype of its upcoming Star Trek TOS Bluetooth Communicator, a working replica of the communicator Federation officers used on The Original Series. In truth, it's a glorified Bluetooth speaker. But holding makes you feel a little bit like you're on an away mission.

The little device was actually designed using one of the original props from Star Trek, and is composed of a combination of pressed metal, aluminum, and textured plastic. Without having actually lived through the 1960s, I thought it felt authentic — weighty and purposeful for people in Starfleet. The grill flips opens with the actual sound effects from the show, and the speaker and transceiver make it look truly like a 23rd century artifact.



Using the device involves just pairing it to your smartphone. We tested it using an older iPhone, so tapping one of the bottom-most buttons activated voice control, from which you can simply say the contact you want to reach via the Communicator's receiver. Calls came in loud and clear, so it works pretty well for a prototype.

The Wand Company partnered with ThinkGeek to make the Communicator available to the public by early next year. Fans can preorder it right now for $149.99.


http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/11/8933329/star-trek-tos-bluetooth-communicator-hands-on-sdcc-2015

ovo bi se svakako moglo dopasti kolegi Blejdraneru :

As I was browsing Amazon (What? Doesn't everyone?) I ran across this kick-@$$ cover for the upcoming anthology The Mammoth Book of Kaiju coming early next year from Robinson. I asked editor Sean Wallace for more details about this tasty-looking treat. Read on to see the description and a bigger version of that glorious cover.



Giant monsters whose every roar and footstep shakes the earth, whose simple stroll through a city wreaks havoc: KAIJU!

And even though humankind has never really seen such monsters – we tremble at the thought of them and love to shiver as their screen versions make mayhem: the beast from twenty-thousand fathoms, Godzilla demolishing Tokyo, the massive creature in Cloverfield destroying New York, all of Earth warring with the colossal monsters in Pacific Rim.

Now, for the first time, a definitive anthology that gathers a wide range of larger-than-life short fiction with creatures that run a gargantuan gamut: the stealthy gabbleduck of Neal Asher's Polity universe; Gary McMahon's huge sea-born terror; An Owomoyela 's incredibly tall alien invaders; Frank Wu's city-razing, eighty-foot-high, fire-breathing lizard; Lavie Tidhar's titanic ship-devouring monstrosity; a really big Midwest US smackdown related by Jeremiah Tolbert . . . and many more mega-monster stories to feed your need for killer kaiju!

With an introduction by Robert Hood, co-editor of the groundbreaking, Ditmar Award-winning Daikaiju: Giant Monster Tales and host of Undead Backbrain, the premier website for matters relating to giant monsters.




Here's the table of contents...

1."Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck" by Neal Asher
2."Occupied" by Natania Barron
3."Now I Am Nothing" by Simon Bestwick
4."The Black Orophant" by Daniel Braum
5."Attack of the 50-Foot Cosmonaut" by Michael Canfield
6."Postcards from Monster Island" by Emily Devenport
7."Seven Dates That Were Ruined by Giant Monsters" by Adam Ford
8."The Lighthouse Keeper of Kurohaka Island" by Kane Gilmour
9."Kungmin Horangi: The People's Tiger" by Cody Goodfellow
10."The Island of Dr. Otaku" by Cody Goodfellow
11."With Bright Shining Faces" by Gini Koch
12."One Night on Tidal Rig #13" by Tessa Kum
13."Running" by Martin Livings
14."The Unlawful Priest of Todesfall" by Penelope Love
15."Breaking the Ice" by Maxine McArthur
16."The Eyes of Erebus" by Chris McMahon
17."Kaiju" by Gary McMahon
18."Whatever Became of Randy?" by James A. Moore
19."Kadimakara and Curlew" by Jason Nahrung
20."Frozen Voice" by An Owomoyela
21."Mamu, or Reptillion vs Echidonah" by Nick Stathopoulos
22."Cephalogon" by Alys Sterling
23."Show Night" by Steve Tem
24."Titanic!" by Lavie Tidhar
25."The Kansas Jayhawk vs. The Midwest Monster Squad" by Jeremiah Tolbert
26."The Behemoth" by Jonathan Wood
27."Love and Death in the Time of Monsters" by Frank Wu

In Hyperspace

Fredric Jameson


It is probably not immediately obvious what interest a new theoretical study of science fiction holds for the mainstream adepts of literary theory; and no doubt it is just as perplexing to SF scholars, for whom this particular subgenre of the subgenre, the time-travel narrative, is as exceptional among and uncharacteristic of their major texts as SF itself is with regard to official Literature. To be sure, so-called alternative or counterfactual histories have gained popularity and a certain respectability; my personal favourite is Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain, in which John Brown's raid succeeds and a black socialist republic emerges in the South, as prosperous and superior in relation to its shrunken rust-belt northern neighbour as West Germany was to the East in the old days. And there remains the lingering mystery of what would have happened had the time traveller not stepped on the butterfly: this is from Ray Bradbury's immortal 'Sound of Thunder', but the idea is adaptable to any number of wistful daydreams – had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle, in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the US between them. But these historical variants are not genuine time-travel narratives on the order of H.G. Wells's Time Machine (1895), which inaugurates the standard narrative of the history of science fiction, to the detriment of Jules Verne or that other increasingly popular recent candidate, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).


But where did the genre come from? My own hypothesis is a very general one: namely, that the late 19th-century invention of SF correlates to Walter Scott's invention of the modern historical novel in Waverley (1814), marking the emergence of a second – industrial – stage of historical consciousness after that first dawning sense of the historicity of society so rudely awakened by the French Revolution. David Wittenberg does much better than this, but his remarkable hypothesis is only one of the conceptual breakthroughs in this stimulating contribution to literary theory. I will dwell mainly on the three that interest me the most: the relationship of SF to modernism in the arts; the historical periodisation of the genre; and the dramatic challenge to narratology as a field, with implications for the theory of ideology as well as for the analysis of narrative structure itself (of which the time-travel story, with all its ineradicable paradoxes, suddenly becomes the fundamental paradigm). Nor is philosophy itself untouched by the fallout from these dramatic revisions: after all, the phenomenological ego is a temporal matter, and time itself one of its fundamental paradoxes, which neither Husserl nor Heidegger ever laid to rest.

Science fiction is not the only mass-cultural genre (or subgenre) whose relationship to 'high literature' and to modernism in particular presents problems. It is as easy to feel that James and Wells are incompatible as it is to reject the notion that Dostoevsky (let alone Oedipus Rex) has any family relationship with the detective story. When we come to Orlando or Pynchon, the conviction of incompatibility remains firm, but the arguments become more difficult to sustain, or even to articulate. Experimental literature ought to share generic features with its more popular cousins, but it doesn't; Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem are not of the same genre as Philip K. Dick, however long Margaret Atwood managed to 'pass'. Indeed, the solution may actually be a rather simple one, namely that modernism is not a genre, while SF emphatically is – and this opens up questions of an appeal to different reading publics, as well as their respective quotients of Bourdieusian 'distinction'.

Wittenberg's proposal begins modestly enough, with an emphasis on SF's bias towards visuality: witness Wells's first time traveller, who observes the passage of worlds and time as so many streams of flux, 'melting and flowing under my eyes' – 'le film des événements' indeed. The shorthand of visuality will then mark mass culture as 'degraded' (in the language of culture pessimists like Adorno and Horkheimer) by comparison with the anti-visuality, the anti-representational convictions, of the various high modernisms. But it will also open up immense new possibilities such as the emergent medium of film.

Is it then simply visuality which accounts for the appeal of mass culture and its genres over the obscurities of the hermetic arts? One may recall Hegel's judgment on 'picture-thinking' (seemingly the standard translation of Kant's Vorstellung) and the empirical categories of the thinking of daily life (Verstand or 'understanding'), whose cultural elaboration he saw in art and religion. His famous (or infamous) pronouncement on the 'end of art' was motivated by his conviction that the deficiencies of Verstand needed to be replaced by the Concept (Begriff or 'notion'), by a philosophy no longer obliged to rely on picture-thinking for its solutions.

Wittenberg reminds us that it was not only mass culture – cartoons, illustrated dime novels, early cinema – that ignored Hegel's judgment: so did the scientists, and however unthinkable infinity may be, Einstein's thought experiments are nothing if not triumphs of picture-thinking, redolent with trains and clocks, elevators and measuring rods, the tangible bric-à-brac of daily life pressed into service to make the unthinkable thinkable. This is certainly a visual procedure, but I would characterise it as a kind of literality too, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment.

I want to reinsert this problem into a philosophical context of far greater consequence, which is that of representation as such. Increasingly, in the late 19th century, writers became aware that the world of newly emergent capitalism was an unrepresentable totality which it was nonetheless their duty and vocation to represent. The great moderns – Mallarmé, Joyce, Musil et al – achieved this impossible and double-binding imperative by representing their inability to represent. They earned their right to sublimity by using 'picture-thinking' against itself, and for them failure was success. The postmoderns seem to have renounced this agonising mission by taking the impossibility of representation for granted and revelling in it (you will say that by now we know what the totality of capitalism is anyhow, representation or no representation).

But science fiction was not crippled by such representational doubts and scruples; or rather, it emerged as a genre at the very moment in which the representational dilemma began to make inroads into literature, and it was able to do so owing to its possession of a representational instrument rather different from those faltering in the hands of traditional realists. Kant distinguished between two kinds of non-conceptual language: the symbol and the schema. Traditional literature cleaved to the symbol and its 'picture-thinking' (thereby allowing Hegel to pronounce its supercession by philosophy as such, in his theory of the 'end of art'). But science fiction had the schema; and it is what we have been calling literality, the use of visual materials not to represent the world but to represent our thoughts about the world. It is no accident that Deleuze celebrated Foucault's work in terms of its schematism, something which in his own writing he called 'the image of thought' – as opposed, clearly, to its referential content. Virtually everything designated as structuralism and poststructuralism is marked, in its so-called spatial turn – indeed, in its synchronic tendencies – by schematism. This is a kind of 'picture-thinking' very different from what Hegel understood as Vorstellung; nor does it fall under the anathema of representation since it does not represent.

This is why science fiction, despite appearances, cannot be said simply to carry on the traditional narrative methods of 'old-fashioned realism', merely applying it to fantastic or at least non-realistic content. Rather, it enlists the visual literality of Einstein's thought experiments to convey conceptions often more outlandish than his own (and this is no doubt the moment to disabuse the sceptical reader of the still widespread opinion that science fiction is always about 'science'). For Einstein's 'experiments' were very far from being the laboratory experiments and falsification devices in terms of which the history of 'hard science' is so often written (it took a good deal of ingenuity to invent a 'real experiment' – the solar measurements of 1919 – to confirm his 'scientific' theories). Rather, Einstein's demonstrations were pedagogical, texts more closely related to children's books than to applications for a grant. Yet these 'examples' are not to be understood as mere rhetoric: they pioneered a form of schematism which authorised the early writers of science fiction to take their cosmological fantasies literally and to re-enact in a visual (or later on a cinematographic) mode the dynamics of worlds either too large or too small to be conveyed by human language (perhaps, then, as Badiou's work has been reminding us, mathematics is one of the ultimate – and alternative – forms of such literality or schematisation).


At this point, returning to our narrative of the history and emergence of science fiction, Wittenberg rather brutally shifts gears, from what look like the linguistic dilemmas of the scientific text, to political history. He does so not in the usual fashion of outlining some more general social 'context', but rather by way of the generic problems of political, indeed utopian thought.

This generic problem is also a political one, and this identity is what I take Hegel to have meant by his immense sentence, 'Defectiveness of form results from defectiveness of content.' (The larger version of this symptomal relationship between literature and the sociopolitical situation will also account for the crisis in cognitive mapping I referred to earlier as the modernist representational dilemma.) The political problem turns on 19th-century conceptions of the future of capitalist development and the possibility of its revolutionary transformation into another, more satisfactory and humane system, which is to say a radically different 'mode of production' (a concept initially theorised by Adam Ferguson and then developed by Marx). The 'representational' problem does not lie in the revolutionary upheavals themselves, theorised from the Jacobins to Lenin; but rather in how to think and represent the transition from one mode of production into another, radically distinct one. The experience of defeat of the various revolutionary movements in this period has a paradoxical consequence: it does not discourage its followers theoretically, but rather intensifies their attempts to conceptualise that mysterious historical moment which is the passage from one system to another.

To limit ourselves to the United States – the home of the bulk of pulp fiction dealing with time travel – we witness in the late 19th century the defeat of an immense radical political movement called populism, which is followed by the sublimations of the so-called progressive movement, but also by Edward Bellamy's remarkable third-party mass movement, one of the most successful in American history, in the form of the Nationalist Clubs and the People's Party. The causes of the movement's defeat are less relevant here than its manifesto, which projected a vision of a radically different future in the form of a novel, Looking Backward 2ooo-1887 (1888) – and this is the point at which we rejoin the history of the time-travel narrative. For although Bellamy's novel was not the first time-travel narrative, its immense success was political as well as literary, and drew attention to a seemingly secondary defect, shared by William Morris's reply in News from Nowhere (1890), which lay precisely in the way that 'transition' was imagined (or not imagined) by both authors: in each case, the narrator falls into a magnetic sleep, only to awaken a century later in Utopia. This failure of imagination is the same, I want to argue, as that of the political revolutions designed to achieve the same transition in real life: the absence of a third term between the two systems, the absence of a mechanism.

Wells's formal innovation, on the other hand, lay in his shifting of the reader's attention to a technological substitute for the missing historical transition, namely the time machine. (We might argue that the party was Lenin's analogous innovation in the realm of political strategy.) With the insertion of this technological third term, the hitherto merely notional fantasy of time travel had become a full-blown genre, capable of standing on its own and developing its history autonomously according to its own now semi-autonomous formal laws and structural problems.

ostatak na: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/fredric-jameson/in-hyperspace

Seek out new worlds of science fiction – there's so much happening out there

European and US publishers too often play it safe, but Liu Cixin's recent Hugo win is welcome recognition for the wealth of sci-fi writing across the globe

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/sep/11/seek-out-new-worlds-of-science-fiction-damien-walter

Nine oil paintings by renowned sci-fi artist Chesley Bonestell bring a combined $135,000 at auction

An archive of nine original oil on board paintings by Chesley Bonestell (Am., 1888-1986), "The Father of Modern Space Art," sold for a combined $135,000 at Philip Weiss Auctions' September 10 auction.

http://news-antique.com/?id=809666&keys=bonestell-chesley-lombardi-disney

Push to resurrect "Amazing Stories", the iconic science-fiction magazine, gets a TV boost

Efforts by NBC to resurrect Steven Spielberg's Twilight Zone-inspired TV show seem poised to boost Steve Davidson's effort to resurrect something entirely different: The original science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories.

In the process, he hopes writers can scoop up more of the profits.

"This generation has embraced science fiction and fantasy like no generation previously. It is firmly established as part of the mainstream culture. But the author is the one who always gets the short end of the stick," said Davidson, a New Hampshire resident (he'd rather we not share exactly where he lives). "We continue to dance with this idea that the people who are going to make the most money over original creativity are the secondary or tertiary people, like film production studios . . . not the original creators."

How does Davidson, whose fiction career consists of some decades-old rejection slips, hope to change this?

Thanks to a bit of serendipity while bored at work, Davidson owns the trademark to Amazing Stories, a name dating back to the very first science fiction magazine, which Hugo Gernsback created in 1926.

The print magazine died in the 1980s and never came back to life despite efforts by several owners, although it is still revered by many fans. Gernsback is so important in the field that his name is on the Hugo Awards, the sci-fi version of the People's Choice Awards, and Davidson calls Amazing Stories "the Coca-Cola brand of the science fiction industry."

These days the name is best known to the general public for Spielberg's anthology show Amazing Stories from 1984 and 1985. It was a weekly anthology that presented hourlong stories with a twist, following the format pioneered by the Twilight Zone two decades earlier.

NBC is in the process of developing a new Amazing Stories, with Bryan Fuller, executive producer for the show Hannibal, in line to produce and write a pilot. It would be an hourlong weekly anthology series built around what Entertainment Weekly calls "fantastic, strange and supernatural stories." Spielberg will apparently not be involved.

To make this happen, NBC had to license the name from Davidson, likely for its Syfy cable channel. If the show gets the green light, as Hollywood likes to say, Davidson will collect fees (he declined to say how much).

All well and good, but what about Amazing Stories the magazine? Head back to 2008, when Davidson worked a job involving intellectual property.
"Part of my job was to check current filings of trademarks that might impact the company I was working for, which is an extremely boring thing to do," said Davidson, 57. "To keep myself amused and awake, I would look up trademarks of things that were of interest to me."
Many of those look-ups were related to science fiction, which had long been his passion. One day, to his astonishment, Davidson saw that Amazing Stories was available.

"I literally could not believe it. I called my wife over and asked her to read the screen out loud, to prove that it was real," he said.

After a few years of problems, he eventually bought the name for slightly less than $1,000, and used it to upgrade his science fiction blog, called Crotchety Old Fan. Starting in April 2014, he launched an online magazine called Amazing Stories (at AmazingStoriesMag.com), which includes daily posts of fiction, news and reviews of science fiction and fantasy.

The famous name and Davidson's avowed efforts to preserve an icon – Davidson said he bought the trademark partly so it would "never be at risk of being picked up by somebody for non-science fiction purposes" – has drawn help from famous science fiction old-timers like writer Robert Silverberg as well as newcomers like Tanya Tynjala, whom Davidson called a "Latin American Finn" who both writes and edits Spanish-language editions.

The free publication has tens of thousands of registered readers from around the world, with translation software allowing publication in Spanish, German, sometimes Italian, and English-language posts from Chinese bloggers.

What Amazing Stories doesn't do, Davidson said, is pay for submissions.

He had initially hoped to fund the magazine through the sale of a paintball business he owned before moving to New Hampshire eight years ago – his wife, Karen, is a native – but that sale died during the Great Recession. Online-only magazines don't make much, if any, money so Amazing Stories writers and artists have been in the distressingly common position of creating work in return for exposure.

Licensing fees from a TV show might change that, Davidson said.

"My idea is that this will form the backbone of purchasing fiction at professional rates to publish," he said. "The opportunity to license the name gives me a revenue stream that was inaccessible to most publications.

"I'd like to put a plug in for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. It was that membership, and tapping into that membership, that helped me acquire the Hollywood entertainment attorney who has been doing very good work for me, and making this (TV licensing) possible," he said.

Davidson has plans that include print versions of the magazine and other revenue streams, including the possibility that a print magazine "become a loss leader" supported by ancillary advertising and merchandise sales.

"The numbers say it's doable, at a profit," Davidson said.

As for the TV show, Davidson admits to feeling slightly concerned because he couldn't negotiate any editorial control, although he says "believe me, I tried."

"My biggest worry right now is that they're going to put a show on underneath the name, that may be successful . . . but the science fiction folks are going to look at and say it's old hat, the science fiction is terrible, the science is terrible. I think a show can be respectful of both the general audience . . . but also of the people who have, quite literally, built this community and this literature up from scratch with a lot of volunteer work and personal investment," he said.
But he's optimistic, pointing to the movie Guardians of the Galaxy, which was a hit with both insiders and outsiders.

"It's possible to make a television show or movie that will satisfy both kinds of audiences," Davidson said. "I'm hopeful."


http://granitegeek.concordmonitor.com/2015/11/06/push-to-push-to-resurrect-amazing-stores-the-iconic-science-fiction-magazine-gets-a-tv-boost/

The sci-fi film predictions that came true

As we tread the increasingly blurred line of fact and fiction, explore the sci-fi film tech stepping off screen and into reality

isto tako:


Life imitates art: how sci-fi invents the future

I


10 Times Science Fiction Predicted The Future, From Credit Cards To Earbuds

I


11 Things You Won't Believe Made The Jump From Science Fiction To Science Fact

da, da... when it rains, it pours...


WTF: The Golden Globes Are Classifying 'The Martian' as a Comedy


CheatSheet objašnjava...


Why 'The Martian' Shouldn't Be Called a Comedy

...ali uzalud.

GRRM kao da malko bekpedaluje na sad puppies kontroverzu...


http://grrm.livejournal.com/453648.html

QuoteI was no fan of the efforts of Puppies to game the Hugo Awards last year. I don't think I have been shy in my opinions on that subject. But I will give the Puppies this much -- their efforts did break the decade-long hold that Dr. Who fandom had on the nominations in this category. I have no problem with episodes of DR. WHO being nominated, and indeed winning, mind you... and the Doctor has won plenty of times in this category over the past decade... but when four of the six finalists are from the same category, that strikes me as way unbalanced and, well, greedy. The Doctor's fans love their show, I know, but there is a LOT of great SF and fantasy on the tube right now. Nominate DR. WHO, by all means... but leave some room for someone else, please.

(And yes, I would feel the same way if it was four episodes of GAME OF THRONES being nominated every year, rather than four episodes of DR. WHO).

Last year, for the first time in recent memory, we actually had five different series represented on the final ballot. In addition to GAME OF THRONES and DR. WHO, the two shows that had dominated the previous three years, we also had ORPHAN BLACK (the eventual winner), plus episodes of THE FLASH and GRIMM. The Puppies had something to do with that, I can't deny that. Nonetheless, I do think it was a healthy development. I hope we have five different series represented this year as well... though maybe not the same five.

Read These Speculative Fiction Books Now, Ahead of Their Film and TV Adaptations

At Long Last, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Have Infiltrated the Literary Mainstream

Science fiction and fantasy writing has long been disparaged within the literary world. While older works like Frankenstein and 1984 have gained classic status, many critics deride contemporary sci-fi and fantasy—typically without actually reading it. The prestigious anthology series The Best American Short Stories tends to eschew science fiction and fantasy, except at the behest of unusually sympathetic guest editors like Michael Chabon or Stephen King.

But things are changing fast. The genre took a major step toward respectability this year with the release of the first-ever Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by John Joseph Adams. Adams feels the book is long overdue.

"I and other science fiction fans believe that the best science fiction and fantasy is on par with or better than any other genre," he says in Episode 177 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "My goal with The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy was to prove that."

Horror author Joe Hill served as this year's guest editor. His job was to select the final 20 stories—from the 80 chosen by Adams—to be included in the book. In recent years he's seen a shift in the way that people view the genre.

"The instruments of science fiction and fantasy—the tools in that genre toolbox—have been out there in the literary world and being explored for at least a decade now, in work by people like Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, and Cormac McCarthy," he says. "Science fiction and fantasy is part of the literary mainstream, and has been for a while now."

Adams hopes The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy will prove that readers don't have to choose between wild concepts and literary quality. Good sci-fi and fantasy deliver both, which is what makes them so hard to write.

"You have to create the compelling characters and have the beautiful prose and everything, but a science fiction story has to do all that and also build an entire world for you, or come up with some mind-blowing idea on top of all that," he says.

Listen to our complete interview with Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams in Episode 177 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy (above), which also features appearances by Jess Row, Seanan McGuire, and Carmen Maria Machado. And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

http://www.wired.com/2015/11/geeks-guide-sci-fi-fantasy-mainstream/

DeNardo na Kirkusu javlja o novim ekranizacijama:






Artemis Fowl is the first book in a popular young adult series written by Eoin Colfer. The series, now eight books long, follows the titular 12-year-old character who happens to be a millionaire boy genius and a criminal mastermind. His latest scheme involves kidnapping Holly Short, a fairy, and holding her for ransom. Score one point if you realized that Artemis doesn't sound like a traditional fantasy hero. Over the course of the series, anti-hero Artemis goes from criminal mastermind to helper of the fairy people.

A film adaptation of Artemis Fowl has been in the works since 2001, not coincidentally the same year Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone released. Immediate production stalled and over the intervening years, the production tiptoed along. For example: in 2003, Colfer wrote a screenplay; in 2013, Disney announced that the film would cover the first two books of the series; and a new screenplay by Michael Goldenberg (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) was announced. And now it's being reported that Actor/Director Kenneth Branagh has been hired to direct the film, with Irish playwright Conor McPherson writing the script. Time will tell if this adaptation will stick. It does seem long overdue.





The concise pitch for Charlie Human's gonzo novel Apocalypse Now Now would probably read "supernatural bounty hunter." The longer description would have to include worlds like weird, kitchen sink, and audacious. Tapocalypsenow-2he book mixes elements of fantasy, horror, apocalyptic fiction, and lots of other things as it tells the story of Baxter Zevcenko, an up-and-coming entrepreneur of sorts. Baxter is the 16-year-old leader of a syndicate peddling smut in his schoolyard. Business is great until his girlfriend Esme is kidnapped by strange forces. Baxter thus enlists the help of a "bearded, booze-soaked, supernatural bounty hunter" named Jackson "Jackie" Ronin to rescue her. The main thrust of the story is Baxter's and Ronin's attempts to save Esme from the seedy Cape Town underworld and the unimaginable horrors they encounter.

I'm not sure how you would even begin to tell this story on film, but it's being reported that XYZ studios has optioned Apocalypse Now Now for film. The screenplay is being written by Terri Tatchell, who wrote the scripts for District 9 and Chappie. Based on the book description alone, it could be absolutely terrible, or it could be the best movie ever. If it's the latter, I've no doubt that Hollywood will turn their attention to the book's sequel, Kill Baxter.



The Drowning Girl and The Red Tree by Caitlín R. Kiernan



Caitlín R. Kiernan has been one of genre's best kept secrets. That might be about to change with news of not one, but two of her dark fantasy books being optioned for film. The Drowning Girl is about India Morgan Phelps (affectingly known as Imp to her friends), a schizophrenic who struggles with determining what is real and what is fantasy—an especially tough activity after a mysterious stranger enters her life. In The Red Tree, a novelist moves into an old house and discovers a manuscript written by the previous owner, a parapsychologist obsessed with the ancient red oak tree growing on a desolate corner of the property. That tree is somehow connected with a series of bizarre deaths that occurred in the small Rhode Island town.

These books, which have already garnered award attention, have also caught the interest of Josh Boone, director of The Fault in Our Stars (itself an adaptation of a book by John Green). His production compact, Mid-World, has optioned the rights for both books to be adapted for film. Boone is said to be writing the screenplay for The Drowning Girl, while author Kiernan is said to be writing the screenplay for The Red Tree.

Logan's Run by William F. Nolan & Clayton Johnsonredtree

Logan's Run has a simple but engaging premise: What if you were only allowed to live for 21 years? That's exactly what society dictates in the year 2116. At that time, the crystal flower in your hand begins to glow, marking the arrival of Lastday, after which you report to Sleepshop for final processing. Refusing to enter Deep Sleep makes you a Runner, and that makes you a target for elimination by the relentless Sandmen. The main narrative of Logan's Run is about a Sandman enforcer named Logan 3 whose time has come, but who opts to run toward the legendary place known as Sanctuary.

Logan's Run is a classic dystopian science-fiction novel originally written in 1967 that has already been adapted multiple times. In 1976, a film version appeared starring Michael York as Logan 5, Jenny Agutter as love interest Jessica 6, and Richard Jordan as Francis 7, Logan's Sandman friend who hunts him down. (Among the changes to the story, the Lastday age was bumped up to 30 and the main character was called Logan 5, not Logan 3—damn you, Hollywood!!!) In 1977, a short-lived spin-off television series was launched starring Gregory Harrison as Logan 5 and Heather Menzies as Jessica 6. Screenwriters for that series included the novel's authors and Star Trek scribe D.C. Fontana. There is also a comic book series co-written by Nolan. The latest news is that the film will be getting a new remake. Well, that part's not news; a remake has been in the works since 2000. The news is that it might be moving forward, possibly with a female lead. Simon Kinberg has been hired to write a fresh screenplay. Kinber's writing credits include Sherlock Holmes and X-Men: Days of Future Past (hooray!) but also the recent reboot of Fantastic Four (sad trombone).

William Gibson riffs on writing and the future



Great science fiction writers don't just imagine the future, they shape it.

Books are getting longer. According to the study [from VerveResearch], which looked at 2,500 books from The New York Times best seller list and Google's annual surveys, average book length has increased by 25%. In 1999 books were 320 pages. In 2014, they averaged 400.


There are a couple of conclusions to jump to from here. The author goes for audience immersion - people want 'deep and meaningful'. I'm personally thinking the reverse - people want more 'bang for their buck' and the feeling that the appearance of size matters for print books - especially given the growth in ebook sales over that 15 year period.



It is also worth noting that the data doesn't cover Amazon, where I suspect the 99-cent indie novellesque (novels of indeterminate length) market changes things quite a bit. Basically, this article is a cute metaphor-springboard about brands, but there's way too much context in that 15 years, and not enough data in the sample.


Speaking of data, YouGov have added 'Tube line used regularly' to their lovely, lovely Profiles tool. I immediately ran the numbers against 'Fiction genre liked' and found some amazing results. Granted, the number is still around 5k-6k at this point (that's low for YouGov), but still statistically significant. And FASCINATING. For example, 8% of Northern Line regulars like Fantasy books. Whereas 48% of Jubilee Line travellers do.  I suspect a lot of media agencies will (or should!) be doing spot buys from now on.


What was also interesting is how Underground travellers - long held as the publishing 'sweet spot' of educated urban AB1 commuters - aren't actually that much more fiction-friendly than the national average - if at all. And, for certain fiction and non-fiction genres, they're actually a bit worse.


Tube posters have always been the glossy prestige format for UK publishing's marketing campaigns, but maaaaaybe it is time for something else. [SOCIAL MEDIA *COUGH*]


Since publication of the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual, Wizards has released a total of two player-centric books, Player's Companion for the Elemental Evil storyline and the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. The total product catalog of books beyond the core stand at six. Yes, six books in 16 months. Compare that to 3/3.5 and 4th editions where you were drowning in books at any given moment, and it's a dramatic shift in the way Wizards approaches D&D.


Best of all, it's working. While Wizards does not share sales figures, sales of 5E have been characterized as "staggering" and the company has gone through multiple reprints of the core rules.

This Ars Technica review of D&D 5e is a very thorough look at the new edition and the market factors that forced its birth. What's amazing is that, as noted, this completely new model is absolutely kicking ass. Given it has been going for 16 months, it is - presumably? - beyond all the auto-buyers as well. Could this change everything? Or is it only applicable for a publishing brand with this degree of reach and loyalty?

Incidentally, we tried it for the first time a few weeks ago. It ain't perfect, but it is very, very good. And perfect for bringing new players into the fold. That might be part of the secret?


We learn about other places and other people by their food, by their language, by their dress. I think there's another way though. I think we can also learn by the stories they tell to frighten themselves. Those mythologies reveal them at their most insecure; they teach us of their perceived weaknesses.


The most enduring and evocative remembered smell from all our growing up, Anne and I decided, was the smell of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the objective of innumerable field trips. As we drove there, I could easily generate a mental simulacrum of its smell, a concentrated essence of antiquity, brass polish, school shoes, and institutional gravity.


Terrific piece on the power of smell. Also, the Nelson TOTALLY SMELLED LIKE THAT. Also been to the Dime Store and, of course, Winstead's. This is all probably essential reading for WorldCon attendees. Or, you know, writers. (Or, behaviouralists. Did you know that a study showed that piping the smell of cookies into a shopping mall made people nicer? True fact.)


For 363 days a year, nobody gives a fuck about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Today is one of the two remaining days, when suckers care—and other suckers pretend to care—about who gets nominated for the Oscars, which are worthless trash and always have been.

Deadspin on the Oscars. And, let's be honest, many awards. Burneko raises a good point in that the Oscars kind of exist, well, for the Oscars. I did a Google Trends search for search patterns around the Hugo Awards once, and spotted that awards season created a really big spike for the Hugos... and no difference into searches for the nominated works. Part of that is because of the Hugos' unique structure - amongst other things: the voters who would be most likely to search for the books are getting them free in the pack, which is another... issue, but, we'll get there. And part of that, let's be fair, is that most book-related searches are well below Google Trends' threshold of giving a toss. So this is Hugo-bullying, but I suspect it is true for most - if not all - awards.

Someone should get Amazon to play ball and release their search data around awards. But then, since most awards would rather eat their own young than give a prize to an Amazon-published title, I suspect there's no real value in them playing nice.



Worth noting

Rivetedlit.com is the new YA site from Simon & Schuster. Cons: kind of unpronouncable (Rivetelidt? Rivetedlet?! Rivdideded. ARGH). Pros: They're kicking off with some rather spectacular giveaways. And they are smartly putting their content (like their video - good job, YA marketers!) across platforms.

Congratulations to Whitefox's Unsung Heroes! A really impressive list of the secret gatekeepers that actually make publishing work.

A new award for African fiction, with a broad (and appealing) remit.

You can now optimise non-promoted posts on Facebook. I've been tinkering with this on the Pornokitsch page (see? it does have a purpose!) and so far,... I dunno. I suspect more useful for even larger communities. Apparently the real mojo comes in the insights, but I'm holding out another week or so before checking in. Watch this space.

Short story vending machines.

Which reminds me, has anyone done wearable tech short stories yet? My cheap cheap PEBL has about six apps, but none of them are flash-fiction. This seems perfect for Jeff Noon's twitter microstories or the like.

Louis Vuitton have a video game character as a model. Amazing.


Jared

... I jos malo novootkupljenih naslova za ekranizacije:


najpre moj favorit :




Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun

Black Moon is just one of several science-fiction books that deal with insomnia and sleep. In it, insomnia has become a worldwide epidemic where the sleepless roam the streets looking for a cure that doesn't exist. Panic escalates to the point where the people who cannot sleep begin to attack those who can. Against this slow-boil apocalyptic scenario, the book shows us the lives of several different interconnected characters and how they are coping with new way of the world.

Rights to film Black Moon as a television series were picked up by streaming service Hulu. Mike Cahill (Another Earth) will write and direct the adaptation. They aPennyslvania_TVre dropping the name "Black Moon" and calling the series Sleepless instead. The entire project is being envisioned as a 10-episode series, which should allow a sufficient time to really explore the multiple storylines.


a onda I :


To the best of my knowledge, there's not a whole lot of Amish sci-fi out there...but that didn't stop Hollywood from taking notice of Michael Bunker's space colonization story Pennsylvania. It's the story of a young Amish man named Jedidiah Troyer who signs up for an emigration program to colonize the planet New Pennsylvania. Jedidiah is looking to establish a farm and homestead on affordable land in a new Amish community, but gets a lot more than he bargained for: he arrives at the new planet in the middle of a rebel uprising.

Film rights to Pennsylvania were picked up by Jorgensen Pictures, who brought Stacy Jorgensen (Grey Skies) on as producer. Not much more is known since this project is still very much in the early developmental stages. But that shouldn't stop you from picking up this or any of the above books.






Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

The 1972 novel Roadside Picnic,writtenby Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, examines what happens when mankind comes into contact with advanced alien technology it is ill-equipped to handle. The premise is that aliens had visited Earth and left behind advanced (to us) technology. But travel into the so-called "zones" is forbidden because unexplainable and seemingly supernatural things happen there. However, alien tech sells for high dollar on the black market, which is why "stalker" Red Schuhart, despite the danger, ventures into the zone to look for a valuable alien artifact.

Adaptation rights to Roadside Picnic were snapped up by WGN America, who is developing a television series based on the science-fiction classic. Jack Paglen, screenwriter for the Johnny Depp sci-fi vehicle Transcendence, was brought on to write it. Terminator Genisys and Game of Thrones helmer Alan Taylor is also on board to direct.



Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Little Brother follows a tech-savvy teenage hacker named Marcus Yallow who takes on the Department of Homeland Security after being falsely connected with terrorism. Marcus and his friends are picked up by authorities after a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge. The teens are subsequently imprisoned, treated like criminals, and eventually let go, but Marcus takes it upon himself to take down BlackMoon_TVthe DHS using current and near-future technology.

Film rights to Cory Doctorow's "hactivist" story were recently acquired by Paramount Pictures, who sees Marcus as an Edward Snowden–type character. Producers attached to the project include Don Murphy (Transformers) and Susan Montford. The plan is to make Little Brother a young adult franchise, no doubt tapping into the book's follow-up, Homeland, and its forthcoming sequels.




Dawn by Octavia Butler

In Dawn, mankind has rendered planet Earth uninhabitable through the use of nuclear weapons. On the brink of extinction, a select few humans are saved by a race of aliens called the Oankali. One of the survivors is a woman named Lilith, who awakens centuries after Earth's demise and learns that the Oankali have three genders: male, female, and ooloi. The ooloi have the unique ability among the Oankali to manipulate genetic material, which they eventually do to form Oankali/human hybrids...specifically for the purpose of repopulating the now-inhabitable Earth.

Dawn is the first novel in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series, which is noted for exploring themes of gender, sexuality, and race. Rights to bring Dawn to television have been optioned by Bainframe, with Allen Bain, Gary Pearl, Thomas Carter, and Teddy Smith acting as executive co-producers. Television provides a much larger canvas on which to tell a textured story like Dawn. One has to imagine that if successful, Dawn's sequels—Adulthood Rites and Imago—will also be tapped for adaptation.

This year's nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award — Brenda Cooper, Douglas Lain, PJ Manney, Ramez Naam, Adam Rakunas, and Marguerite Reed — have launched a brand new website celebrating the award. Head on over to PKDnominees.xyz and you'll find lots of goodies, including:
◾Information about the 6 nominees.
◾A podcast discussion between the 6 nominees.
◾A giveaway contest where you can win copies of all 6 books

The winner of the Philip K. Dick Award will be announced Friday, March 25, 2016 at Norwescon 39. Until then, check out the Philip K. Dick Award Nominees website for cool goodies!

http://pkdnominees.xyz/

Métis Filmmaker Shoots Aboriginal Sci-Fi Feature in Alberta's Badlands



Métis filmmaker Benjamin Ross Hayden gathered an impressive group of Aboriginal actors for his futuristic action fantasy The Northlander, which is being filmed in the Alberta Badlands until November 16th.

Starring Corey Sevier, Roseanne Supernault, Michelle Thrush and Nathaniel Arcand, The Northlander tells the story of Cygnus (Sevier), an anti-hero finding a place in a post-humanity society. The only survivors on planet earth are a mutated indigenous band called "Last Arc", who struggle to live in the dry, hostile wilderness. Cygnus is the band's only hunter, and sent on a quest by the matriarch Nova (Thrush), after several band members are killed in a mysterious way.

"I needed a strong First Nations cast, because as original storytellers of the land, they are ambassadors to this futurist narrative that belongs to an earlier era that is shown to be just as futuristic," says Hayden. "As a First Nations script, the nomadic ways of the past are just as relevant in a setting that shows a future world that feels unique where each moment feels like a few place and time on screen. The frontiers of Western Canada are just as much a part of creating a future world."

Principal photography is ongoing in Drumheller and the Bragg Creek area, where Unforgiven and Legends of the Fall were filmed, and at never before filmed areas at Writing-on-Stone.

The Northlander was financed through the Aboriginal component of the Telefilm Canada Micro-Budget Production Program, and produced by Hayden with exec producers Adam Beach, Wendy Will Tout, Jeremy Torrie and Jim Compton. Dan Dumouchel is Director of Photography, and Shannon Joel Chappell Production Designer. Melissa Meretsky heads Key Makeup.
http://reelwest.com/Northlander

Four years ago, Stephan Zlotescu's "True Skin" blew us away with how off-the-wall it was. For a little while, it was supposed to become full-length film at Warner Bros. But now it's found a home as an hour-long series at Amazon.


The original short followed a man in a future where everyone is augmented. Short on cash, the protagonist goes for whatever he can get, which ends up being a chip that turns him robotic but also forces him to run from an organization who really wants him/the chip.


Zlotescu will be back to direct Amazon's adaptation of his short, and his VFX company, Opticflavor, will provide the effects. But there are no writers and no cast members yet.


The original short is below, so why not watch it again to remember why it's perfectly suited to being expanded?

TRUE SKIN on Vimeo

39 Best Sci-Fi Movie One-Liners Ever


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The Complete Conceptual History of the Millennium Falcon

 


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QuoteNot the future after all: the slow demise of young adult dystopian sci-fi films


It's easy to forget the impact The Hunger Games had when it first hit cinemas in 2012. Here was a brutal vision of America under a North Korea-style dictatorship, starring our greatest ingenue since the halcyon days of golden era Hollywood – and with added extra teen-on-teen violence to really stir the cauldron of controversy. That the saga ended up a bloated cash machine, desperately reliant on Jennifer Lawrence's enduring star power, should be remembered as a salutary lesson in the dangers of over-milking a successful product.

What a pity Lionsgate didn't learn its lesson. The studio has just seen the latest instalment in its follow-up dystopian saga, The Divergent Series: Allegiant, fail at the domestic box office with a return of just $29m in its opening weekend. As with The Hunger Games, the studio chose to adapt the final instalment in the saga's source trilogy of novels in two parts – and this time paid the price. Word is that the final episode, Ascendant, will now have its budget cut before going into production.


Allegiant is only the most recent young adult science fiction effort to nosedive at the box office. One of the first to fail was The Host, led by Saoirse Ronan and based on Twilight author Stephenie Meyer's futuristic romance about an Earth beset by bodysnatching (yet occasionally benevolent) aliens. Then came this year's The Fifth Wave, with Kick Ass's Chloë Moretz as a young woman searching for her brother in the aftermath of a devastating extraterrestrial invasion. Both were based on bestselling literary sagas, both simply failed to translate to the big screen.

Not so long ago studios were snapping up the rights to every young adult novel in circulation. But the genre's recent struggles seem to have left many in development hell. A lot will be riding on the July release of Drake Doremus's Equals, an original sci-fi piece starring Twilight's Kristen Stewart as a young woman living in a dystopia where human beings' emotions have been eradicated. There's also Fallen, which will cleave closer to the dark fantasy romance blueprint of Meyers's hit saga with its depiction of a school where many students have a connection to the paranormal. Scott Hicks's film debuts in September.


If both fail, and Equals picked up weak reviews when it debuted in last year at the Toronto film festival, the young adult genre could well be dead as Edward Cullen's pulse. And why should we care? After all, for every Hunger Games there are currently about a dozen Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part Ones.

The simple fact is that these movies, with their tendency towards female protagonists, are helping to balance a blockbuster slate that's heavily weighted towards male-dominated superhero fare. This might all change next year if Wonder Woman blazes a trail for Warner Bros's planned DC Comics cinematic universe, or if Marvel finally gets its act together on the diversity front and delivers a killer Captain Marvel movie in 2019. But neither of those prospects is exactly written in stone. There's a reason writers have started to shoe-horn in gender-swapped storylines in the comic books: the basic superhero gene pool is one enormous sausage party. Even Captain Marvel used to be a bloke.

So where might female roles come from if the dystopian genre fails entirely? As usual, the best way to get a glimpse into the future is to keep a close eye on Lawrence.

The Oscar-winner's next big science fiction outing is Passengers, opposite Chris Pratt, which doesn't have a young adult grounding and as far as we know isn't designed to be the first in a series. Neither is it set in a horrifying future: Morten Tyldum's film, which debuts in December, will take place entirely on board a vast spaceship heading off to a new human homeworld. The story begins when Pratt's space traveller awakes early from cryogenic sleep and decides to wake up another passenger (Lawrence) to keep him from going stir crazy. Inevitably, romance (and presumably some kind of additional crisis, as the movie is projected to cost at least $100m) ensues.

Passengers follow Sandra Bullock's turn as an astronaut struggling to deal with the aftermath of a disaster in space in the Oscar-winning Gravity, as well as numerous Alien movies old and new, in imagining a world to come built around dauntless women. It sounds like a tantalising blend of Titanic and Silent Running.

Could major success built around Lawrence's remarkable star quality spark off a new wave of original female-led sci-fi, suddenly emancipated from the shackles of young adult literary roots? Studios might be forced to accept that endless adaptations of identikit teen trilogies, with their penchant for storylines that are about as cinematic as an episode of General Hospital , are not the future after all.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/mar/25/allegiant-young-adult-dystopian-films-box-office-flops

A Handful of Neil Gaiman Stories Being Resurrected for TV and Film

In the land of TV and film adaptations, it's no secret that speculative fiction is a bountiful wellspring of ideas. Just look at all the blockbuster films and top-rated television shows that sprung from the pages of science fiction, fantasy and horror. What's particularly noteworthy is when several of those adaptations stem from the same mind. Philip K. Dick is one of those minds. There have been adaptations of several of his stories, like Blade Runner, Minority Report and Man in the High Castle. But a look and pending adaptations reveals another bright star in genre: Neil Gaiman.

Gaiman, of course, has already had a some of his books made into films, specifically: Stardust, adapted in 2007 into a film starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Claire Danes; and Coraline, a 2009 stop-motion animation film featuring the voices of Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher. And in this space, I've already talked about some previously announced forthcoming adaptations based on Gaiman's work (American Gods, Sandman and Anansi Boys, Lucifer and Hansel & Gretel), but there are several new projects in the works based on Gaiman's stories. Here's a rundown of those new Neil Gaiman-related projects that are on the horizon.