Core Dump

When I raised the idea of writing some more books with my agent, her first comment was, "you realize that 'Singularity Sky' probably won't be in print for two to three years? And 'Iron Sunrise' won't be out for a year after that? Ace have a backlog, and they've also got an option on your next SF novel." (An option clause means you've got to send the next SF novel to your existing publisher, who have to reject it or sit on it for an inordinate length of time before you're free can send it elsewhere.) "On the other hand, if you really want to write for a living, can you do something that isn't specifically SF, so we can sell without breach of contract? Like, say, a big fat fantasy series?"

This made me stop and think hard. The thing is, I've read a lot of extruded fantasy product in my time, and I don't much like it. Fantasy and Science Fiction are co-marketed in most bookstores, but this conceals the fact that they're actually radically different genres in outlook. Loosely speaking, if Science Fiction is often a literature of disruption (in which change is, if not good, at least embraced), Fantasy is frequently a literature of consolation: a warm feather-bed of social conservativism disguised as nostalgic escapism, a longing for feudal certainties. While there's nothing intrinsically wrong with Fantasy, the marketing mechanism applied to it tends to promote those aspects of it that I really don't like: the hordes of marching sub-Tolkien clones. (I'm with China Mieville on this.) And besides, Robert Jordan is still alive and selling.

Labels: books, SF

“Max Headroom” starred Matt Frewer as a reporter whose mind is downloaded into a computer to create a virtual clone who exists in the digital world. Amanda Pays, Jeffrey Tambor and W. Morgan Sheppard also star in the series, which ran for 14 episodes on Cinemax and ABC in 1987 and 1988. Set in the near future, “Max Headroom” depicted a world of television run amok.

Shout! Factory has a “Max Headroom” complete-series DVD set slated for August, according to a spokesperson. Episodes are being transferred from their original elements to provide the best quality, and Shout! Factory is planning a robust range of extras for the set. Bonus content may include the original U.K. telefilm 20 Minutes Into the Future, upon which the series is based, though nothing has been confirmed. Max Headroom also appeared in a series of Coca-Cola commercials in the 1980s, raising speculation such content may also be fodder for bonus material, but Shout! Factory said planning the extras is in the early stage.

Labels: movies and television, SF

Labels: books, SF

Labels: movies and television, photography, SF, video

t's easy as heck to lose people in the corners. Hyperfiction by its nature is sprawling--it rewards curiosity, investigation, peering into corners. (Reading dozens of blog comment threads for scraps of narrative, for example, is much easier at the beginning of a five-year narrative run than the end.)

It will help, in the future, to develop protocols for mapping hyperfictions (a sort of table of contents, perhaps, graphically represented in the form of a web? Shadow Unit has done this with a "suggested reading order" page on the wiki, but experience has revealed this to be helpful but not entirely adequate.).

On the other hand, some of the fun is the discovery, and the fan community delights in sharing their discoveries with each other, so we intentionally hide stuff in inobvious places. There's a balance to be struck between the fans who adore logic puzzles and the ones who just want to read a damned story, and accommodation must be made for both.

We do this with a BBS where (a) can show off their finds to (b).

Labels: SF, technical communication

"Everybody now who reads Dune reads it with David Lynch's images in mind," he said. "So we have to get away from that. It's not a remake of David Lynch's movie. We're doing a re-reading, a brand new approach on the book, a very true approach to the book, the original material. So we will have to deal with trying to erase the image that David Lynch did so we can propose our image.".

Labels: movies and television, SF

Labels: SF

Set in Thailand's future, the book follows scientist spies hunting good genomes in a world ruined by GMO diseases.

In the tradition of politically-minded hard SF writers like Iain M. Banks and Ian McDonald, Bacigalupi follows the interconnected stories of several people caught up in great social shifts. In the case of The Windup Girl, they're all caught in the genome industry's web: We have a covert "calorie man" called Anderson who tries to sniff out uncontaminated genomes for a Monsanto-esque multinational called AgriGen; a "yellow card" Chinese refugee named Hock Seng who is trying to climb to the top of the energy-generator black market in Thailand; Environment Ministry shock troops Jaidee and Kanya, whose job is to protect Thailand from contaminated genomes, foreign imports, and dirty energy; and the mysterious whore Emiko, a genetically-engineered "windup" person abandoned by her former owner in Thailand, where GMO people are illegal.

We follow these characters through every eschelon of Thai society, from backroom meetings between government officials to backroom performances at the strip club where Emiko is fetishistically degraded every night.

Labels: books, SF

Gaiman, who is forty-nine and English, with a pale face and a wild, corkscrewed mop of black-and-gray hair, is unusually prolific. In addition to horror, he writes fantasy, fairy tales, science fiction, and apocalyptic romps, in the form of novels, comics, picture books, short stories, poems, and screenplays. Now and then, he writes a song. Gaiman’s books are genre pieces that refuse to remain true to their genres, and his audience is broader than any purist’s: he defines his readership as “bipeds.” His mode is syncretic, with sources ranging from English folktales to glam rock and the Midrash, and enchantment is his major theme: life as we know it, only prone to visitations by Norse gods, trolls, Arthurian knights, and kindergarten-age zombies. “Neil’s writing is kind of fey in the best sense of the word,” the comic-book writer Alan Moore told me. “His best effects come out of people or characters or situations in the real world being starkly juxtaposed with this misty fantasy world.” The model for Gaiman’s eclecticism is G. K. Chesterton; his work, Gaiman says, “left me with an idea of London as this wonderful, mythical, magical place, which became the way I saw the world.” Chesterton’s career also serves as a warning. “He would have been a better writer if he’d written less,” Gaiman says. “There’s always that fear of writing too much if you’re a reasonably facile writer, and I’m a reasonably facile writer.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/25/100125fa_fact_goodyear?currentPage=1#ixzz0dTB43gKy

Labels: books, SF

Labels: movies and television, SF

Labels: movies and television, SF

Having a world unfold in one’s head is the fundamental SF experience. It’s a lot of what I read for. Delany has a long passage about how your brain expands while reading the sentence “The red sun is high, the blue low”—how it fills in doubled purple shadows on the planet of a binary star. I think it goes beyond that, beyond the physical into the delight of reading about people who come from other societies and have different expectations.

Because SF can’t take the world for granted, it’s had to develop techniques for doing it. There’s the simple infodump, which Neal Stephenson has raised to an artform in its own right. There are lots of forms of what I call incluing, scattering pieces of information seamlessly through the text to add up to a big picture. The reader has to remember them and connect them together. This is one of the things some people complain about as “too much hard work” and which I think is a high form of fun. SF is like a mystery where the world and the history of the world is what’s mysterious, and putting that all together in your mind is as interesting as the characters and the plot, if not more interesting. We talk about worldbuilding as something the writer does, but it’s also something the reader does, building the world from the clues. When you read that the clocks were striking thirteen, you think at first that something is terribly wrong before you work out that this is a world with twenty-four hour time—and something terribly wrong. Orwell economically sends a double signal with that.

Because there’s a lot of information to get across and you don’t want to stop the story more than you can help, we have techniques for doing it. We have signals for what you can take for granted, we have signals for what’s important. We’re used to seeing people’s names and placenames and product-names as information. We know what needs to be explained and what doesn’t. In exactly the same way as Trollope didn’t explain that a hansom cab was a horse-drawn vehicle for hire on the streets of London that would take you about the city but not out into the countryside, and Byatt doesn’t explain that the Northern Line is an underground railroad running north south through London and dug in the early twentieth century, SF characters casually hail pedicabs and ornithopters and tip when they get out.

Labels: SF

Labels: economics and finance, science, SF, society

Labels: books, SF, video

Labels: movies and television, SF

As we have seen with our own Jovian planets since the days of the twin Voyager space probes, gas giant worlds do have retinues of large and dynamic moons, some of which may be homes for simple organisms. There is no reason not to think that alien gas giants might have exotic companions as well, though whether they would be like the residents of Pandora is much too early to say.

On the subject of living on the moon of a gas giant planet: Note how huge Polyphemus looms in the skies of Pandora as we are witness to throughout the film. It is certainly a very awe-inspiring and aesthetically pleasing image, enhancing the alienness of the moon and its inhabitants. However, I would think that being so close to a gas giant would cause all sorts of geological turmoil, which in turn would greatly upset the balance of life on Pandora, perhaps even to keep it from becoming complex.

To use a real-world example, note how the closest of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, Io, is constantly pulled and churned about by the great mass of Jupiter and its fellow Galileans to the point where the moon is constantly spewing colorful sulfur across its uncratered surface. Despite the intense nature of Io’s environment, some scientists have speculated that the very geological processes that make Io such a violent place could bring about and support some kind of life, though probably nothing as complex as the creatures on Cameron’s alien moon.

Labels: movies and television, SF

Labels: movies and television, SF

Labels: movies and television, SF

Christmas: the season of goodwill towards all men—except for bank managers, credit scoring agencies, everyone who works in the greeting card business, and dodgy men in red suits who hang out in toy shops and scare small children by shouting “ho ho HO!” By the time I got out of hospital in September the Christmas seasonal displays were already going up in the shops: mistletoe and holly and metallized tinsel pushing out the last of summer’s tanning lotion and Hawaiian shirts.

I can’t say I’ve ever been big on the English Suburban Christmas. First you play join-the-dots with bank holidays and what’s left of your annual leave, to get as many consecutive days off work as possible. Then instead of doing something useful and constructive with it you gorge yourself into a turkey-addled stomach-bloating haze, drink too much cheap plonk, pick fights with the in-laws, and fall asleep on the sofa in front of the traditional family-friendly crap the BBC pumps out every December 25th in case the wee ones are watching. These days the little ’uns are all up in their rooms, playing Chicks v. Zombies 8.0 with the gore dialled to splashy-giblets-halfway-up-the-walls (only adults bother watching TV as a social activity these days) but has Auntie Beeb noticed? Oh no they haven’t! So it’s crap pantomimes and Mary Poppins and re-runs of The Two Ronnies for you, sonny, whether you like it or not. It’s like being trapped in 1974 forever—and you can forget about escaping onto the internet: everybody else has had the same idea, and the tubes are clogged.

Alternatively you can spend Christmas alone in the office, where at least it’s quiet once everyone else has gone home. You can get some work done, or read a book, or surreptitiously play Chicks v. Zombies 8.0 with the gore dialled down to suitable-for-adults. At least, that’s the way it’s suppose to work . . . except when it doesn’t, like now.

Labels: SF

Labels: movies and television, SF

MJ: Heath Ledger's character, Tony, shows Parnassus that ideas aren't enough; you have to sell them, too. Is that the part of moviemaking you find frustrating?

TG: No matter what I've done in the past, and no matter how much all the people who are in charge of the money say they love it, the new project is invariably not the thing they want to do.

MJ: It seems like you're always struggling to raise enough money.

TG: But everybody is. I just seem to have gotten the job of being the one who has to mouth off about how difficult it is all the time, and I’m really kind of bored with that job.

MJ: I suppose too much money is also a curse.

TG: Oh, yeah. The more money you have to work with, the more people you have to deal with that you probably don't want to be spending time dealing with. Munchausen and Brothers Grimm were both very big projects, and things get out of control; you're running an army, and it's harder to control the money. Invariably, what I'm trying to do is more ambitious than the budget, but we manage to do it somehow.

Labels: movies and television, SF

Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.). Nor was I finally dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my fucking paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I was not left without my jacket in the face of Ontario's first winter storm, after all buses and intercity shuttles had shut down for the night.

"In some other universe I am warm and content and not looking at spending two years in jail for the crime of having been punched in the face."

Labels: SF

Labels: SF

December 14, 1980. Having “had a sit back” (Ringo) after Eventually’s staggering success and taken time to concentrate on their own projects and personal lives, the Beatles make their first televised appearance as a group since the SNL reunion, appearing on The Muppet Show. (Lennon leaves New York for the first time in six months to do the gig, eventually spending the entire month of December in England.) The episode is the highest rated episode of The Muppet Show in the show’s history and the most watched television program of the entire year, beating even the news coverage of the 1980 American presidential election. The undisputed highlight of the episode is the “battle of the bands” between the Beatles and the Electric Mayhem (although Starr says his duet with Fozzie the Bear remains his personal favorite moment). Jim Henson would later say that the Beatles episode “rejuvenated” his joy in working on the show, which by that point he had begun to feel was growing stale: the show continues for another seven seasons.

January 7th, 1981. Lennon, Harrison and Starr attend the funeral of a New Yorker named Mark David Chapman, who committed suicide in mid-December and whose apartment, after the fact, was revealed to be a shrine to the Beatles. “I just felt, you know, responsible somehow, like he died because of us,” says Starr, although he refuses to articulate further on this point. Harrison agrees: “it’s amazing to think how great an impact we can have sometimes. You just want it so that you don’t have this kind of impact.” Lennon says nothing.

August 5th, 1981. The announcement of Neither Here Nor There, the new Beatles album, is less shocking than the announcement of Eventually – the previous announcement taught Beatles fans to “watch the signs” and rumours of Lennon and McCartney spending time in the studio have been swirling for months. The success of Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy had previously led some to wonder if the Beatles were once again finished; Lennon dismisses such talk soon after the press release, complaining that people “just don’t seem to understand” that the group has figured out how to continue working together without the self-destructive fights.

Labels: history, music, SF

TB: Science fiction writers are always complaining about the state of publishing. What do you think would be the proper role of science fiction in a proper publishing world? Would there be genres or categories at all?

KSR: I don’t know! That’s a real alternative history. If there were no genres or categories, people might be more open to trying new things. That would be good. I’d love to try it. But it’s not the world we have. Going forward from now, I guess I think every science fiction section in every bookstore should have a sign saying “Science Fiction—You Live Here, Why Not Read About It?” or “Science Fiction, the Most Real Part of This Store” or something like that. Something to remind people of reality, which is that we are all stuck in a big SF novel now, and there’s no escape; might as well accept it and dive in.

Labels: books, SF

• Lifetime Achievement: Ellen Asher & Jane Yolen

• Best Novel (tie): The Shadow Year, Jeffrey Ford (Morrow) & Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin; Knopf)

• Best Novella: "If Angels Fight", Richard Bowes (F&SF 2/08)

• Best Short Story: "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss", Kij Johnson (Asimov's 7/08)

• # Best Anthology: Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, Ekaterina Sedia, ed. (Senses Five Press)

• Best Collection: The Drowned Life, Jeffrey Ford (HarperPerennial)

• Best Artist: Shaun Tan

• Special Award - Professional: Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant (for Small Beer Press and Big Mouth House)

• Special Award - Non-Professional: Michael Walsh (for Howard Waldrop collections from Old Earth Books)

Labels: books, SF

Now and then I'm asked at cons why I don't write fiction of the respected sort. You know, he is a professor and she is a professor and they are having adulterous affairs, and they are almost overcome with guilt and angst, and there is no God, and scientific progress doesn't enter into it, and just about everybody in the world is upper middle class.

When that happens, I ask the questioner abut Martin du Gard. Have you read him? Have you heard of him? Invariably the answers are no and no. Then I explain that Martin du Gard won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year H. P. Lovecraft died.

Labels: books, SF

Wired.com: You come at science convincingly from the direction of fiction, and you’re pretty precise about your work, which you maintain is speculative fiction rather than sci-fi.

Margaret Atwood: I like exact labeling. Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see. We can do the lineage: Sci-fi descends from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds; speculative fiction descends from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Out of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea came Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, out of which came We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, then George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ray Bradbury’s Fahreneheit 451 was speculative fiction, while The Martian Chronicles was not.

Labels: books, SF

To give you a very small example: bullets. The characters come into the ship with a certain number of bullets. It is very difficult for them to get any more of them. So I count the scenes where bullets are used and I send notes that say “now, you know you have that many fewer bullets now, right?” The point is not just to be OCD anal (although there is value in that in this case), but to remind everyone that realism is something we’re looking for, and the choices we make now will have an influence later. So what the producers and writers have to do is to decide whether they want to spend their bullets now, or find some other, non-bullet-related way to solve a particular problem. Sometimes you need a bullet, sometimes you don’t.

Labels: movies and television, SF

As far as writing The Surrogates, again when I was in grad school, we read a book called The Cyber Gypsies, which was a non-fiction book where a guy had spent a lot of time with people addicted to online games, and these people in the book had become so identified with the personas on their computers that they'd lose their jobs or get divorced or any number of things because they were devoting so much of their time to maintaining that persona that they were neglecting the basic steps of living. It was an idea that stuck with me, this basic human desire to be someone other than who we actually are. It just clicked for me in 2002: What if there was a technology that would allow you to create a persona that, instead of being bound in a machine or have a virtual reality situation, what if the technology was reversed and the machine would go out into the world and do all the things you need to do to live for you? You could be that persona all the time and still maintain all your responsibilities.

Labels: books, movies and television, SF

So how, in the end, to sum up District 9? On one level, the complaints I've listed here seem almost petty when one considers what the standard of storytelling and political commentary is in most effect-laden science fiction films. The simple fact that it didn't use a genocide as a means of developing a main character puts District 9 leagues ahead of Star Trek, which in turn makes it the most sophisticated and morally complex film to come out of this year's blockbuster season (not that that's not a sad commentary in itself). On the other hand, the very fact that District 9 aspires to something beyond the Star Trek-Transformers 2 axis means that it should be judged by harsher standards, and by those it is quite wanting--I haven't even touched on the film's treatment of race within humans, though I was appalled by its depiction of the Nigerian characters, a nameless mass of mobsters, pimps and cannibals. Once again, I find myself uncertain about the film--is it more laudable, or more regrettable? I hope that District 9 and its success are an indication that other filmmakers are going to make science fiction films with loftier goals than the ones we've become accustomed to, but I also hope that they are more successful than Neill Blomkamp at achieving them.

Labels: movies and television, SF

Labels: movies and television, SF

The chair of this year's Booker judges, James Naughtie, admitted that Robinson "may well have a point", but suggested that "perhaps his arrows could be directed even more towards publishers than to judges".

"There has always been a debate about whether the prize is sufficiently sensitive to all the forms of contemporary writing. He may well have a point," he said. "We judge books that are submitted. The fact is that the science fiction component this year was very, very thin. If it is the best contemporary fiction in this country then most publishers haven't yet tumbled to the fact."

He said that judges had, collectively, been "disappointed at the way 'the new' was represented" in this year's submissions, but said that "the idea that historical fiction is fusty is absurd". "Our shortlist speaks to us about things around us, from whenever and wherever the books are set," he said.

Labels: books, SF

Now, I travel. A lot. I want portable computing.

I've tried Netbooks. The problem with netbooks is this: they suck. Many of them have keyboards designed by folks for whom western European languages are not their first, or even second, script. I am sick and tired of keyboards where the right shift key is buried among the arrow keys, so that half the time you try and type a W or A you end up inserting a lowercase letter on the line above. I am sick and tired of keyboards too small to type on, or with missing characters. Welcome to netbook land!

If the keyboards are good (and HP have got them right), the screen resolution is low. And if they get the screen right as well, you end up battling with an asthmatic, gutless processor. The Intel Atom family CPUs have just about no cache, and they deliver piss-poor performance. The icing on the cake for me was installing OS X on an Asus Eee 1000 with an SSD. Two minutes to boot! Welcome back to the 1980s and the world of floppy disks.

Labels: computing, SF, technology

Labels: books, If I had a million dollars, SF

To get to the money shot: transhumanism is going to influence the next century because, unless we are very unlucky indeed, the biotechnology, nanotechnology, and telecommunications industries are going to deliver goods that combine to fundamentally change the human condition. We've seen the tip of the iceberg so far: news stories like this would have been fodder for an SF story twenty or thirty years ago, and this video (playing pong! Using transcranial brain interfaces!) probably still is. But don't be deceived: we're entering strange territory.

And what particularly exercises me is the possibility that if we can alter the parameters of the human condition, we can arbitrarily define some people as being better than others — and can make them so.

Not all transhumanists have good intentions. Earlier I went on for a while about Italy, home of the Modernist movement in art and birthplace of Fascism. Italy's currently in the grip of a wave of racism and neofascist vigilantism, presided over by an allegedly racist media mogul with a near-monopoly on broadcast media in that country.

So it's probably not surprising that Italy is the source of a new political meme that I hadn't heard of before this week: overhumanism:

Italian overhumanism is heavily influenced by the "Nouvelle Droite", a fringe political movement that emerged from the French neofascist microcosm in the late '70s/early '80s, and which attempted to bring far-right ideas into the mainstream by discarding the trappings of historical Fascism in order to convey a similar message in a less unpalatable form. In common with the Nouvelle Droite, it borrows heavily from the extreme left (anti-americanism, anti-clericalism, opposition to globalisation), and has adopted neopaganism as a religious stance. While affirming the importance of science in modern life, this hybrid offspring of neofascism also maintains more traditional far-right positions such as elitism, antiegalitarianism and an interest in ethnic identity that crosses into differentialist racism.

Did you get that? The fascists have noticed transhumanism, and decided that they like it.

Labels: politics, SF

Labels: movies and television, SF

Labels: movies and television, SF

Cinematical: How difficult or easy was it to juggle the film's thematic elements and still maintain the sense of a compelling story?

Blomkamp: Well if you have a clear enough idea in your mind [and] if you can boil the essence of what the film is down in your mind to, even if it's an emotion that's in me or something I can relate to on a very basic level, because a lot of how I operate is all based on instinct. It's like I can't verbalize a lot of it, it just has to feel right, which I guess is how directors all sort of operate. So when you're going about the action sequences and the flow of the story, like when I was writing it with Terri [Tatchell], I kind of made sure that whatever that natural feeling that felt like I was getting to the essence of what this film was meant to be, if I felt that in the way that I was approaching the action, it meant that whatever the core ideas are, of which I have some in my head, it meant that I was getting close to it. And, if you just do action for the sake of action, and you don't reinforce what the basic emotional core of the film is, then it's meaningless. So at the end, it's really a story of redemption, and hopefully it should be about the guy who made wrong decisions in his life and been an indirect racist, is laying waste to this group that has been oppressing another group for a whole bunch of years. So hopefully it works on an emotional level first.

Labels: movies and television, SF

PK: And yet, let me press on. What I kind of expected. Let me show my age here. What you came out believing if you went to the New York’s World Fair in 1964 was that we were going to have this enormously enhanced mastery of the physical universe. That we were going to have undersea cities and supersonic transports everywhere. And there hasn’t been that kind of dramatic change. It’s not just that airplanes are no faster. My favorite test, which shows something about me, is the kitchen. If you walked into a kitchen from the 1950’s it would look a little pokey, but you’d know what to do. It wouldn’t be that difficult. If someone from the 1950’s walked into a kitchen from 1909 they’d be pretty unhappy – they might just be able to manage. If someone from 1909 went to one from 1859, you would actually be hopeless. The big change was really between 1840 and the 1920’s, in terms of what the physical nature of modern life is like. There’s been nothing like that since. So we can do fancy information searches in a way that no one envisioned 30 years ago – as one of my colleagues at the Times, Gail Collins, likes to say all the time where are the flying cars?

CS: Yeah, where is my food pill, where are my jetpacks. Actually, flying cars are really bad idea, if I can just go off on a tangent. Your flying car is great, what about your neighbors flying car when his 15 year old son gets into it and tries to impress his girlfriend in it. Normal cars have a simple failure mode; they stop moving, hopefully at the side of a road. Flying cars, if they have a failure mode, they stop moving and then they move very rapidly straight down.

Labels: economics and finance, SF

Labels: SF

Labels: movies and television, SF

Labels: movies and television, SF

Labels: SF

Ever since Scott announced his intentions to make an Alien prequel, speculation has abounded as to whether Scott himself would return to the director's chair. Word was the commercial director (and Scott's daughter's current beau) Carl Erik Rinsch might take the reigns, but that Fox refused to greenlight the project without Scott as director. Variety now reports that Scott has agreed to direct his first Alien movie in 30 years, with Jon Spaiht attached to write the script.

Spaiht isn't a household name yet, but his philosophical science fiction romance Passengers made the 2007 Black List of best unproduced scripts. He's also scripting The Darkest Hour, a film described as "Independence Day in Moscow," for 9 producer and Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov, as well as a feature for Disney titled Children of Mars. Reportedly, Spaiht delivered a prequel pitch that wowed Scott and the studio.

Labels: movies and television, SF

Science fiction author Adam Roberts is cross with science fiction fans. The line-up for this year's Hugo awards – selected and voted for by readers – isn't very good, he says, and he's not pleased.

"What do these lists say about SF to the multitude in the world - to the people who don't know any better? It says that SF is old-fashioned, an aesthetically, stylistically and formally small-c conservative thing. It says that SF fans do not like works that are too challenging, or unnerving; that they prefer to stay inside their comfort zone," Roberts writes, before going on to criticise the five-strong shortlist for this year's best novel award.

Labels: books, SF

PROS: Stross tosses around imaginative concepts with comfortable regularity.
CONS: His affinity for politics and economics weighed down some of the stories.
BOTTOM LINE: This is good representative sampling of Stross' fiction; a must-have for any Stross fan and a fine introduction for the uninitiated

Labels: books, SF

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

As examples, the scientists pointed to a number of technologies as diverse as experimental medical systems that interact with patients to simulate empathy, and computer worms and viruses that defy extermination and could thus be said to have reached a “cockroach” stage of machine intelligence.

Labels: computing, SF, technology

My entire life I have known that men landed on the moon. This was not a moment I held my breath for, or dreamed of, or imagined only in books or films or art. It happened long before I was born and has never been anything but a fact. It’s so distant that to me, it’s science fiction. Yet more than any single event in scientific history, a moment that I was not even alive for is still the most inspiring goddamn thing I’ve ever known. Every time I look at those images I am moved by the breadth of human ingenuity. All my cynicism is replaced by a belief that with passion, hard work, and perseverance, we can overcome any barrier—even the ones we didn’t know we had set for ourselves. We can achieve any measure of greatness. We can become our fiction and make our dreams something tangible, attainable.

We can touch the sky.

Nothing in my own lifetime has ever filled me with that kind of hope or inspiration—nothing but science fiction.

With that in mind, I’ve asked authors, artists, critics, and fans in the science fiction community to send me their stories of what they were doing when the LEM landed on the lunar surface, and to tell me how it informed their relationship with science fiction. What you’ll be seeing throughout today on Tor.com are personal glimpses of a moment in history.

Labels: history, SF, space

Labels: SF

Battlestar Galactica attracted a lot of fans and a lot of kudos during its run, and engendered this sub blog about it. Here, in my final post on the ending, I present the case that its final hour was the worst ending in the history of science fiction on the screen. This is a condemnation of course, but also praise, because my message is not simply that the ending was poor, but that the show rose so high that it was able to fall so very far. I mean it was the most disappointing ending ever.

(There are, of course, major spoilers in this essay.)

Other SF shows have ended very badly, to be sure. This is particularly true of TV SF. Indeed, it is in the nature of TV SF to end badly. First of all, it’s written in episodic form. Most great endings are planned from the start. TV endings rarely are. To make things worse, TV shows are usually ended when the show is in the middle of a decline. They are often the result of a cancellation, or sometimes a producer who realizes a cancellation is imminent. Quite frequently, the decline that led to cancellation can be the result of a creative failure on the show — either the original visionaries have gone, or they are burned out. In such situations, a poor ending is to be expected.

Sadly, I’m hard pressed to think of a TV SF series that had a truly great ending. That’s the sort of ending you might find in a great book or movie, the ending that caps the work perfectly, which solidifies things in a cohesive whole. Great endings will sometimes finally make sense out of everything, or reveal a surprise that, in retrospect, should have been obvious all along. I’m convinced that many of the world’s best endings came about when the writer actually worked out the ending first, then then wrote a story leading to that ending.

There have been endings that were better than the show. Star Trek: Voyager sunk to dreadful depths in the middle of its run, and its average ending was thus a step up. Among good SF/Fantasy shows, Quantum Leap, Buffy and the Prisoner stand out as having had decent endings. Babylon V’s endings (plural) were good but, just as I praise Battlestar Galactica (BSG) by saying its ending sucked, Babylon V’s endings were not up to the high quality of the show. (What is commonly believed to be B5’s original planned ending, written before the show began, might well have made the grade.)
Ron Moore’s goals

To understand the fall of BSG, one must examine it both in terms of more general goals for good SF, and the stated goals of the head writer and executive producer, Ronald D. Moore. The ending failed by both my standards (which you may or may not care about) but also his.

Moore began the journey by laying out a manifesto of how he wanted to change TV SF. He wrote an essay about Naturalistic Science Fiction where he outlined some great goals and promises, which I will summarize here, in a slightly different order

* Avoiding SF clichés like time travel, mind control, god-like powers, and technobabble.
* Keeping the science real.
* Strong, real characters, avoiding the stereotypes of older TV SF. The show should be about them, not the hardware.
* A new visual and editing style unlike what has come before, with a focus on realism.

Over time he expanded, modified and sometimes intentionally broke these rules. He allowed the ships to make sound in space after vowing they would not. He eschewed aliens in general. He increased his focus on characters, saying that his mantra in concluding the show was “it’s the characters, stupid.”

Labels: movies and television, SF

They lost me before the action even started, with the prologue in the form of an advertisement for a company that has discovered and now solely controls a form of cheap energy involving cold fusion. But the only thing you can use for this fusion is 'He3," a molecule found only on -- get this -- the dark side of the moon. Because of course the sub-lunar composition is different on the farside than the Earth side. Then, the evil corporation (of course) that controls this resource sets us a harvesting operation for He3, manned by ONLY one person.

Labels: movies and television, SF

Although 'Children Of Earth' experienced the occasional lull during its five days, the decision to screen the series over consecutive nights was a masterstroke. Seen in isolation, some episodes were stronger than others, but as a whole this latest incarnation of Torchwood has been a massive success. Excellent supporting turns by the likes of Capaldi, Paul Copley (Timothy/Clem), Cush Jumbo (Lois) and Liz May Brice (Johnson) squeezed every bit of depth out of their characters, while Barrowman, Eve Myles, Gareth David-Lloyd (Lanto) and Kai Owen guided us through the adventure with panache and verve.

Director Euros Lyn was consistently brilliant as he dealt with five of the most compelling hours of British science fiction since the similarly themed Quatermass. Actually, referring to the show as 'science fiction' almost does it a disservice, as if it's being dumped into some niche category. It's simply great television. Fact.

Update:

Torchwood needs to come back from this shocking, disturbing, grand, insane story with something maybe a bit more pedestrian. It needs to be a regular television show again, showing us from time to time how Captain Jack helps get a cat out of a metaphorical tree. So if I were Russell T. Davies, I'd push for a regular 13-episode series next year — it can end with some kind of massive world-shattering climax, but it can also have room for episodes where there's a sex monster or Captain John has dangerous underwear or Cardiff is nearly sucked into a null dimension, or whatever. Stories that can sustain themselves for 45 minutes, but wouldn't justify five hours.

The bottom line: You can't raise the stakes again after a story like this one. If you do, you'll start dealing in stakes that are so huge, they're unimaginable. Torchwood will probably never be as good as it's been these past five days — although I'm desperately hoping to be proved wrong about that — but it can still be way better than its first two seasons, if it builds on the brilliance of "Children Of Earth." I just don't think the way to build on "Children Of Earth" is with more "Children Of Earth."

Labels: movies and television, SF

Singularity science fiction follows a Moore's Law of the future, where science improves our lives exponentially over time. Eventually human life is so radically transformed that it's unrecognizable to those of us living in the relatively crappy present.

But now we're starting to see the bleeding edges of a backlash against this kind of "everybody disappears" singularity where the human future is unimaginably awesome. Partly this backlash is coming from history-obsessed authors like Jo Walton and Robert Charles Wilson. Wilson's novel Julian Comstock imagines a 22nd century United States sapped of its energy resources and returned to 19th Century levels of technology.

But this trend is also coming from post-apocalyptic TV series like Jericho and the upcoming Day One, where people must learn to live without their Moore's Law-driven technologies.

Labels: SF, society, technology

Wilson discusses his latest novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, which is the most fun novel you'll ever read about the collapse of Western civilization and the end of religious freedom and democracy in America. It's an adventure story about the son of pious snake-handling parents in a small town, who leaves home in the company of the nephew of the President of the United States, and goes off to war and New York. The novel has adventure and romance and comedy and sea voyages and rooftop foot-chases and leaping from building to building. It's great fun.

I also talked to Wilson about his 24-year career, past books including Darwinia and Spin, his writing process and favorite tools, and how working for a Canadian civil rights education was great education for a writer.

Labels: podcasts, SF

Pablo from Tor has the details on a cool new promo they're doing to promote my next book, Makers, which'll be published in the fall (HarperCollins UK will publish it in the UK, Australia, NZ, and other parts of the commonwealth). Makers tells the story of a group of hardware hackers who fall in with microfinancing venture capitalists and reinvent the American economy after a total economic collapse, and who find themselves swimming with sharks, fighting with gangsters, and leading a band of global techno-revolutionaries. The first 50,000 words of Makers were serialized on Salon some years ago under the title Themepunks.

Labels: books, SF

As the United States celebrates its Independence Day, it's worth considering just how easily it could have never happened at all. Here now is a rundown of alternate history stories and essays where the American Revolution turned out very differently.

Compared to the Civil War or World War II, the American Revolution has, for whatever reason, been largely neglected by alternate history writers. While books like Bring the Jubilee and The Man in the High Castle stand as iconic works that imagine Confederate and Nazi victories respectively, there is no such defining work detailing the particulars of the British maintaining control of their wayward colonies. Still, there are a number of more obscure short stories and essays (plus a couple of novels) that do consider just such a scenario, and they generally take one of the four following forms...

Labels: history, SF

Labels: books, SF

Labels: books, SF

That thoughtful approach pays off, making Moon a movie that stands up to repeated viewing. Despite its relatively low budget (Jones says Moon cost $5 million to produce), this indie gem delivers plenty of gorgeous special effects (more than 450 FX shots during the 33-day production, according to the director).

Cinematographer Gary Shaw’s exterior shots rely heavily on old-school models for aesthetic as well as financial reasons, Jones said. When Sam patrols the heavily shadowed surface of the moon in a rover created by the same U.K. model makers that crafted Alien’s spaceship Nostromo, the Earth — giant, blue and beautiful — floats on the horizon almost like a colorized outtake from the Apollo 11 mission.

With no giant explosions, no monstrous aliens and no shortage of nods to cerebral sci-fi classics, Moon delivers a stirring, character-driven story about a profoundly isolated blue-collar guy in a bad situation. Rockwell’s intensely introspective performance imbues this somber little movie with sci-fi beauty that’s more than skin deep.

Labels: movies and television, SF

Could you take a minute and explain what The Sunless Countries is about?

The Sunless Countries is a gothic adventure set in my world Virga. I wanted to evoke a kind of gaslight, 19th-century feel of cobblestone streets and strange monsters lurking in the shadows, but do it in Virga, which is a world with no gravity where people build giant wheel-shaped towns that they live in. Leal Hieronyma Maspeth is an historian living in such a wheel; she’s watching the slow collapse of civil society in her country due to the political ascendency of a religious cult, when her life and that of everybody else is interrupted by the arrival of a monster from Outside. All sorts of plans are hatched to deal with it, but only Leal has the historical perspective and rational outlook to know what will work. So she is forced to act on her own.

Labels: SF

I may be prejudiced, of course, but it seems to me that if more people read science fiction — real science fiction, not the Hollywood tripe — the world would be a better place.

When I say “real science fiction,” I mean stories based solidly on known scientific facts. The writer is free to extrapolate from the known and project into the future, of course. The writer is free to invent anything he or she wants to — as long as nobody can prove that it’s wrong.

Thus science-fiction stories can deal with flights to the stars, or human immortality, a world government, settlements on other worlds. All of these things are possibilities of the future.

In the past, science-fiction writers have written about computers, robots, space flight, nuclear power, organ transplants, prosthetic limbs, brain stimulators, climate change, overpopulation and a myriad of other ideas and possibilities — usually several decades before they became actualities.

If our political leaders had been reading science fiction, we might have been spared the Cold War, the energy crises, the failures of public education and many of the other problems that now seem intractable because we were not prepared to deal with them when they arose.

Labels: politics, SF, society

Labels: books, SF

Peak oil has left the world a churchy, early-industrial shambles in Robert Charles Wilson's new novel Julian Comstock. An engaging cross between post-apocalyptic series Jericho and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, it may be the best science fiction novel of the year so far.

Wilson has won the Hugo award, and written half a dozen other novels, but has yet to achieve a great deal of name recognition among SF readers. I think Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America is likely to change that. Ostensibly a tale of the brave wartime deeds and eventual presidency of Julian Comstock, written by his close friend Adam Hazzard, the novel is far more than that. It's a sprawling, gorgeous meditation on the inexplicable ways that history mutates culture, from its religious institutions to its pop culture.

This setup also allows for a variety of depictions of faith in Julian Comstock. Adam Hazzard's father, for instance, is a minister in the Church of Signs, a snake-handling Pentecostal denomination that is tolerated but not fully approved by the Dominion. Julian's mentor Sam Godwin is a closet Jew who knows little of his tradition beyond a few snippets of Hebrew prayers—his situation is similar to that of Spanish Jews during the Inquisition. And toward the end of the novel Julian befriends (and likely falls in love with, though it's not stated explicitly) the founder of the very liberal Church of the Apostles Etc., which bears more than a passing similarity to Unitarianism. (Its main doctrine: "God is Conscience; have no other/Love your neighbor as your brother").

Brian Francis Slattery: In essays, reviews, and popular conversation about science fiction as a genre, one of the constant questions is to what extent science fiction attempts to predict the future and to what extent it seeks to comment on the present day. This has always struck me as a silly question to ask of the entire genre, but a good one to ask of individual books. With Julian Comstock, how much are you in the prediction business and how much are you in the social commentary business?

Robert Charles Wilson: I don’t believe science fiction is about prediction, except in the sense that we try occasionally try to explore some obvious contingency like nuclear warfare or space travel. What interested me in writing Julian wasn’t the particular minutiae of change (about which I’m as ignorant as anyone), but an attempt to represent a realistic degree of change.

I mean, how bizarre would contemporary headlines look to Herman Melville or Harriet Beecher Stowe? Air war over Afghanistan, a black Democratic president, gay marriage: this stuff would never have been considered “plausible” prediction, back in the day. And yet here we are. And that’s how it works. The future is contingent, deeply and intrinsically unknowable. Much of the background stuff in Julian Comstock that seems kind of off the wall—the U.S. battling the Dutch for possession of Labrador—is there to represent the changes that are both inevitable and not linearly predictable.

Labels: books, SF

The trick to Star Trek, for me, was that it stayed focused, and chose carefully. Appreciating that JJ Abrams had a sizeable budget at his disposal, there was still little doubt in my mind that it was all up there on screen as I walked out at the end. The last time I think I'd seen such concentrated focus on wringing the most out of an effects budget for the benefit of the film itself was with Danny Boyle's underrated Sunshine, and I long now for other blockbuster directors to pick up some of the lessons that Star Trek has clearly demonstrated.

Because special effects exist to enhance a story, not be the story. They're there to add a dose of magic to what happens on screen, rather than become the primary focus of it. In Star Trek, the battle around Vulcan is the standout example for me, but even something like the drilling sequences worked a treat, and whenever JJ cut to a wide shot of the Enterprise travelling through space, I bought it every time. It actually mattered.

Labels: movies and television, SF

Labels: movies and television, SF

Labels: movies and television, SF

Labels: movies and television, SF

Labels: funny, movies and television, SF

When it premieres, Flash Forward will feature a lot of familiar faces, both in front of and behind the cameras; Joseph Fiennes, Pirates of the Carribean's Jack Davenport and Star Trek's John Cho lead the cast, while the showrunners are Green Lantern and Amazing Spider-Man's Marc Guggenheim and The Dark Knight and Blade's David Goyer (who co-wrote the pilot with former Star Trek franchise chief Brannon Braga). Even before the official order, the show was widely assumed to be a definite go considering that ABC has already been running teaser trailers for it during the last two episodes of Lost; those teasers are now being pointed to by some as a sign that the show will either be paired with the island drama or, more likely, be in its Wednesday timeslot before Lost's January 2010 return.

Labels: movies and television, SF

Unlike Roger Zelazny I don’t leave a glass of milk and a plate of cookies out by the door; unlike Harlan Ellison I don’t use a mail order supplier in Poughkeepsie. (Or is it the other way around?) I don’t invent invent neat new ideas at all. Instead, I trip over them—because they’re lying around in heaps. The trick is to pick several up at the same time and smush them together until some of them stick to each other—creating something new and interesting.

Generating ideas isn’t some mystical talent that you have to be born with: it’s a skill you can develop. The first step is to throw your net far and wide, and see what comes back to you. I spend a couple of hours every day skimming news sources (most of them on the web, this century): everything from the daily newspapers and New Scientist to The Register by way of places like Hacker News and Slashdot and BoingBoing and then to more recondite islands in the sea of blogspace.

But grabbing tidbits from the zeitgeist is only the first step. The second step is to try to fit them together in new and interesting patterns. This is free-form brainstorming, and it’s something I tend to do at the pub, when I’m not busy drinking beer. Pubs are, disturbingly, where I hatch most of my best idea-sculptures: possibly it’s something to do with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol, or maybe it’s just having company to yack at.

Labels: SF

SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

* Matter, Iain M. Banks (Orbit UK)
* City at the End of Time, Greg Bear (Gollancz, Del Rey)
* Marsbound, Joe Haldeman (Ace)
* Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Atlantic UK, Morrow)
* Saturn's Children, Charles Stross (Orbit, Ace)

FANTASY NOVEL

* The Shadow Year, Jeffrey Ford (Morrow)
* Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt)
* The Bell at Sealey Head, Patricia A. McKillip (Ace)
* The Dragons of Babel, Michael Swanwick (Tor)
* An Evil Guest, Gene Wolfe (Tor)

Labels: SF

Best Novel: Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin
Best Novella: "The Spacetime Pool" by Catherine Asaro
Best Novelette: "Pride and Prometheus" by John Kessel
Best Short Story: "Trophy Wives" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Script: WALL-E Screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Original story by Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter

Labels: SF

For 30 years J.G. Ballard had many readers in many lands. For them, everything he published was news. But after Steven Spielberg based a good though not incandescent film on his autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), Ballard became publicly newsworthy over large parts of the world that his words had never reached directly.

He became a sage and prophet, whose visions of the cost of living in the modern world were an integral part of our understanding of the shape of things to come. At least one English dictionary has accepted "Ballardian" as a term descriptive of the landscape of the late 20th century: bleak, rusted out, choked with Ozymandian relics of the space age now past, dystopian – a landscape which surreally embodies the psychopathologies of modern humanity.

Labels: books, movies and television, SF