L. E. Modesitt, Jr. wrote a long post on his blog on why he believes the singularity won't happen. [via SF Signal]According to Modesitt, it won't happen because such visions are based on technology, not on humanity and they're based on a western European/North American cultural chauvinism.He goes on to explain:
One of the simplest rules involved in implementing technology is that the speed and breadth of such implementation is inversely proportional to the cost and capital required to implement that technology. That's why we don't have personal helicopters, technically feasible as they are. It's also why, like it or not, there's no supersonic aircraft follow-on to the Concorde. It's also why iPods and cellphones are ubiquitous, as well as why there are many places in the third world where cellphones are usable, but where landlines are limited or non-existent.
Working on Apotheosis (going well, thank you for asking) I've found myself digging in my old notes for Hostile Takeover. And I found a little sketch I made of the character Flower, when I was figuring out what the Volerans looked like.Now I'm not a very good artist (I was a lot better before I decided to concentrate on writing some 20 years ago) but I thought it was a neat example of how sometimes a cover artist can actually tap into what the author was thinking. (Opposed to my prior post on book covers.)Here's my little sketch:And here's a detail of the cover of Profiteer, (one of my favorite book covers after the one for Dwarves) showing the same character:The cool thing, Jim Burns never saw the sketch I made, he was going off of my description in the book. That was pretty cool.I just wish he hadn't made Tetsami (a short Asian woman) look like a pissed of Sigourney Weaver.
There seems to be two main "movements" in science fiction (and I'm talking about science fiction, not the broader speculative fiction/fantasy etc.) at this point in time. Both were mentioned in the editorial in the October '07 issue of Asimov's. The first is the manifesto-wielding vanguard of Mundane SF that I've mentioned in an earlier post. The second movement has been called "New Space Opera," which has no manifesto I know of, or a website for that matter.The name "New Space Opera" seems to have come into currency with a 2003 edition of Locus (a role that an upcoming issue of Interzone seems to be planning to play for Mundane SF) and has not had a terribly clear definition, but my favorite one is by Paul McAuley from that same Locus issue.
There are neither empires nor rigid technocracies dominated by a single Big Idea in the new space opera; like cyberpunk, it's eclectic and pluralistic, and infused with the very twenty-first century sensibility that the center cannot hold, that technology-driven change is continuous and advancing on a thousand fronts, that some kind of posthuman singularity is approaching fast or may already have happened. Most of all, its stories contain a vertiginous sense of deep time; in the new space opera, the Galaxy is not an empty stage on which humans freely strut their stuff, but is instead a kind of junk yard littered with the ruins and abandoned wonders of earlier, more powerful races.
Following upon my post about the oft-predicted demise of the printed book, and my opinion that it ain't going to happen any time soon, I come across a blog post by Warren Ellis (via SF Signal) about the tumbling circulation figures of the major print SF magazines, a term that seems to be becoming an oxymoron. The figures have inspired reactions from John Scalzi and Cory Doctrow, and has provoked some hand-wringing about how these magazines can save themselves.Unlike printed books, it seems to me that printed magazines are being displaced by their electronic counterparts in a way that seems unlikely to happen to the book-length form. Why? Several reasons I think. First, unlike e-books, e-mags just require a web browser. No dedicated hardware or software. Second, it is easy to mirror the established economics of print mags (subscriptions and advertisements paying for content) on-line. Third, magazines are, like web-pages, blogs, forums &c., ephemera comprised of relatively small nuggets of information generally between one and ten thousand words. Lastly, on-line mags offer advantages over and above traditional print subscriptions, the major one being that if you subscribe to an on-line mag you get instant access to everything that magazine has ever printed-- not just 12 issues.My solution to the plight of F&SF, Analog and Asimov's would be simply to adopt an on-line subscription model in parallel with the print one.
What the hell is going on here? J. K. Rowling makes an aside about the backstory of one of her characters-- something that's not mentioned, or even evident in the text of the book-- and people start freaking out.Right now there are like 40+ comments on two separate posts on Whatever. There's nearly 150 comments on a post @ Making Light. It's making news at E!, Fox, Newsweek and the Washington Post.What really annoys me is this quote from the AP story with the equally annoying headline "Dumbledore’s outing gives text new meaning"
“Jo Rowling calling any Harry Potter character gay would make wonderful strides in tolerance toward homosexuality,” Melissa Anelli, webmaster of the fan site The Leaky Cauldron, told The Associated Press. “By dubbing someone so respected, so talented and so kind, as someone who just happens to be also homosexual, she’s reinforcing the idea that a person’s gayness is not something of which they should be ashamed.”
Well J. K. Rowling has confirmed that Dumbledore was gay, and you know something is very strange when the sexual preference of a fictional character is a major story on CNN. I'm just saying. . .I just hope things go well for the headmaster of Hogwarts. After all, we all know how badly things went for Tinky Winky when he was outed. I can only hope that we have grown a little more tolerant as a culture since then.
Well, predictably, there's a thread on Whateveresque (not to be confused with Whatever) that delves into the Doctrow/Le Guin mess in all its retarded glory, and does so in flametastic eloquence I couldn't even begin to match. . .
Haven't posted a clip here in a while. Here's one I found via the SFWA blog. (Irony again.) Here we have Walt Disney characters explaining the concept of fair use and copyright. Made by professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University. For added fun, count up how many of the characters are based on prior work.
Just a note that the blog will be undergoing sporadic, unannounced, and random formating changes as I play around with the layout.
Sometimes you come across news that so twisted in recursive levels of self-parody that you cannot even express an opinion on it, you just have to sit back and say, "gee that's f__ked up."Case in point, this series of events, the latest of which I found thanks to a post on the SF Site blog:The SFWA e-piracy committee overreaches in demanding a laundry-list of items taken off a website because of copyright violations. Some items turn out to be perfectly legit, including some work by Cory Doctrow released under a Creative Commons license. Can you say oops?Doctrow gets predictably medieval on SFWA's ass in an internet dust-up that essentially ends with SFWA throwing the current incarnation of the e-piracy committee under the bus.Then we find out that Doctrow reprints an essay by Ursula K Le Guin under the Creative Commons license. Problem? The essay wasn't printed under any such license, which means Doctrow was guilty of exactly the reverse of the mistake that SFWA had made.What this all means to me?A) IP law is broken. (But we knew that.)B) Everyone is capable of being stupid, and the current IP law facilitates such stupidity.
And now presenting cats, and a bag.Please make up your own joke.
According to The Guardian, ye olde brick-and-mortar bookstore is not long for this world. According to a survey at the Frankfurt Book fair [from SF Signal]:
Almost a quarter of the 1,324 industry professionals who took part in the survey predicted that the high street bookseller would no longer exist in 2057 while only 11% thought that the printed book would be obsolete.
Yes, our cute little kitten has a name now, Zoë. Here are two obligatory kitten pictures.
There is a movement afoot, complete with manifesto, called Mundane SF. You may or may not have heard of it, but it does seem to be gaining a little traction to the point that Interzone is doing a Mundane SF issue. If you're unfamiliar with the movement, there's a post on the Mundane SF blog that encapsulates Geoff Ryman's idea pretty well. In a nutshell, to quote from Mr. Ryan's post:
Being a Mundane boils down to avoiding old tropes and sticking more closely to what science calls facts. We believe that for most of us, the future is here on Earth.
Today there is no -- Faster than light travel Psi power Nanobot technology Extraterrestrial life Computer consciousness Materially profitable space travel Human immortality Brain downloading Teleportation Time travel-- And maybe there never will be!
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![[Book Cover]](http://www.sff.net/people/saswann/graphics/covers_thumbnail/rust.jpg)