An interesting looking Kickstarter project. "The anthology will emphasize women's speculative fiction from the mid-1970s onward, looking to explore women's rights as well as gender/race/class/etc. from as many perspectives as possible. The contributors are not yet established so we hesitate to name names, but rights  to reprint stories from Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree Jr. would be sought in addition to a wealth of newer voices in the field. Ann and Jeff consider the anthology "to be an opportunity to contribute to the existing conversation about feminist speculative fiction, a conversation that has taken many forms over the years and has a long and established history." Funding covers the editors' fee, contributor fees/advances, book design, printing, as much advertising and promotion as possible. To help the project get off the ground the editors have agreed to take a small honorarium as their fee, with no share of royalties."

"Watching Rudy Ramirez in this film, you realize that the prototypical Mexican border crosser in American genre cinema is an alien hunter: a representative of American property chasing criminals, revolutionaries, or stolen property. And that what they are really seeking is not the completion of their missions, but their desire for freedom from the alienating confines of their own society. The Texans in the Western are always chasing a killer, or Comanches, or Pancho Villa, but, when they go over, it is also their own escape to freedom—sometimes the hedonistic freedom of Prohibition-era Juarez; sometimes the freedom to fully express primitive instincts of profound violence, as in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; sometimes even the freedom to try to create a better community… Of course, the reality of crossing over—either way—rarely works out that way. Causing one to ask: do you really need to cross the border to escape its confines? Might we find the liberated territory in our minds by more thoroughly interrogating the representational territory of the border? There are many entry points to the Interzone, and even more exits—sometimes through borders that disappear overnight."

The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms. “It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body. “Meeting an octopus,” writes Godfrey-Smith, “is like meeting an intelligent alien.”

"A freelance cartographer working primarily for companies in the fantasy and sci-fi role-playing game industry."

This website is full of excellent hand-drawn fantasy maps and tutorials for how they are made.

"One of the things that has frustrated me about science fiction is that technology pertaining to the smaller aspects of our lives is often neglected in favor of big giant rockets and exotic weaponry… One of the things that "the future," when we use that word as a metonymy for an idealized world in which machines solve all our problems, is supposed to do for us is give us time. Relieve us from work that is repetitive or unpleasant and allow us the sheer, simple hours in the day to do more. And yet by far the biggest time sink going is the need to clean our habitats, prepare food and clothing, and maintain our environments. For those who have always had the, dare I say, privilege of ignoring that work, you simply cannot imagine how much time it takes to do all that and then turn around and do it again, often multiple times a day if there are offspring at play… Fully automating this activity would free humanity on a scale that even the most awesome BFG can't even begin to contemplate."

"Think about an alternative racial history of the 1990s. It goes without saying that the 90s were a strange time: neoliberal triumphalism gave birth to a culture of political correctness and a reigning sensibility of diversity based on the simple belief we can all just get along. Yet, at every step of the way, it was accompanied by intense forms of division and surreal spectacles of discrimination of virtually every stripe imaginable." This seems to be somewhere between radical politics and science fiction. If only I lived in NYC.

"Although not a prolific genre by Hollywood standards, pre-perestroika Russian sci-fi offers a fascinating body of films – a fantastic voyage from early constructivist epics to post-apocalyptic dystopias, taking in prophetic moon explorations, space-race propaganda, atomic war allegories and existential art cinema. An ideologically charged genre, Soviet sci-fi can be read as charting the rise and fall of communism behind the iron curtain, with the wide-eyed optimism of space fantasies made in the early years giving way to damning post-Chernobyl nuclear nightmares as the Soviet bloc crumbled from within."

The aesthetics of the communist space program as an anticedent to crisis of meaning on the left.

"What post-capitalism needs is an imaginary that intersects the above justifications with a positive vision of the future that capitalism has failed to deliver. And part of this means rescuing the most lasting merits of the Soviet experiment. For while everyone can agree that the USSR had many failings, it remains the case that the artistic, architectural and technological development it stood for was in many cases a widely recognized concrete achievement. No one can deny the quality of their space programme. Even recently in London there has been two major exhibitions showcasing some of futurist ambitions of Soviet communism: Building the Revolution at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Red Skies season of Soviet science fiction at the British Film institute.  There is an element of aesthetics here as well as actual ambitions."

"The core of Safety Maps is simple: by following the instructions on the site, you can create a nice-looking map that shows a meeting point along with instructions or a personal message. The site then generates PDFs with versions of the map that you can print off in sizes ranging from business card to small poster. "We wanted to design map templates that would work well with the printers and paper people already had at home, and the contexts we imagined people using them in," says Kim. In this way, the service is resilient: it creates documents that can be printed in just about any environment."

"The number of SF authors being retrospectively rolled in to the literary canon seems to grow exponentially year on year… But which works of speculative fiction might challenge the Booker judges' perceptions of the genre? Already available for consideration is The Silent Land by Graham Joyce. Joyce has been stalking the boundary between literary and fantastic fiction for some years. His latest novel is an emotionally shattering exploration of the human need for love, focused through the lens of a contemporary ghost story. Jo Walton's new novel, Among Others, is as much a story about fantasy as a work of fantasy, and is already gathering the kind of awestruck praise that marks a breakout hit from an established but underappreciated author. And China Miéville must surely have a chance of consideration this year. Miéville's mission to reform SF continues in 2011 with Embassytown - but will actual aliens and spaceships be a wormhole too far for the Booker judges?"

Bruce Sterling skips hysteria to drill down to the personal politics of Wikileaks: "In 1992 a brainy American hacker called Timothy May made up a sci-fi tinged idea that he called “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.” This exciting screed was all about anonymity, and encryption, and the Internet, and all about how wacky data-obsessed subversives could get up to all kinds of globalized mischief without any fear of repercussion from the blinkered authorities… As Tim blithely remarked to his fellow encryption enthusiasts, “The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely,” and then Tim started getting really interesting… It was the kind of farfetched but provocative issue that ought to be properly raised within a sci-fi public discourse."

"In the midst of all the bloody intrigue and visions, Herbert gave us a future that assured us were more than our machines and could even survive after rejecting them to some degree. This future was one where thought, drugs, fate, ecology, skill and, yes, religious mysticism continued to form a vital part of the human story, as they always have. Especially as skepticism grew about the impact of technophilia, Herbert offered a starkly different tale… The superpowers of its inhabitants come from perseverance and focus. For sci-fi, this was groundbreaking. And indeed, as it grew popular, Dune became one of the books not just of its genre, but of the larger culture of its time. Attempts to adapt it into other mediums could fill a whole book in their own right, but each seemed touched by the same strangeness that Herbert had channeled, while never quite managing to capture the core of his work. The novel almost seemed one of a kind, an epiphany nearly impossible to replicate."

"In both positive and negative senses, we are living in a version of the future that mid-20th century SF writers dreamed about. The digital world is thrilling. Could there be a more SF consumer product than the iPad? Meanwhile, unrepentant, unrestrained turbo-capitalism speeds us towards dystopian catastrophe… Warren Ellis takes the view: “Science fiction has other work to do, the work of showing us where we’re really living and who we really are.” The best SF can hope to offer now, he suggests, is a three-minute-warning siren. I’m with Ellis on this one, on balance, though warnings can be as hard to get right as prediction."

"The post-cold war neoliberal dominated political consensus is intrinsically inimical to the consideration of utopian ideals. Burkean conservativism tends to be skeptical of change, always asking first, "will it make things worse?"… To a conservative, the first priority is not to lose track of what's good about the past, lest the future be worse. But this viewpoint brings with it a cognitive bias towards the simplistic outlook that innovation is always bad. Which is why I think we badly need more utopian speculation. The consensus future we read about in the media and that we're driving towards is a roiling, turbulent fogbank beset by climate change, resource depletion, peak oil, mass extinction, collapse of the oceanic food chain, overpopulation, terrorism, foreigners who want to come here and steal our (women) jobs. It's not a nice place to be; if the past is another country, the consensus view of the future currently looks like a favela with raw sewage running in the streets."

"I have a lot of enthusiasm for the young AR industry, partly, because, I feel we have shrugged off virtual reality's fatal flaw - all that over the top expensive equipment we had to flog with it. My current interest is in social augmented experiences. This not a vision of a AR that requires AR goggles. Goggles may actually detract from the social augmented experience, by isolating the user. In his keynote at ARE2010, Bruce Sterling pointed out, "if you get the head mounted goggles, your gothic sister, virtual reality, is going to come out of her coffin."... Without doubt, social augmented experiences will underpin the most interesting and compelling possibilities of AR, and not not just in mobile augmented reality, but with marker based and projection AR. I would also like to see people continue to come up with unusual and quirky forms of AR like "."."

"This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now. The best science fiction has always known that, but it was a sort of cultural secret. When I began to write fiction I was fortunate to have been taught, as an undergraduate, that imaginary futures are always, regardless of what the authors might think, about the day in which they’re written. Orwell knew it, writing 1984, and I knew it writing Neuromancer... A book exists at the intersection of the author’s subconscious and the reader’s response. An author’s career exists in the same way. A writer worries away at a jumble of thoughts, building them into a device that communicates, but the writer doesn’t know what’s been communicated until it’s possible to see it communicated." — William Gibson

"By the time any product hits our soil it’s already fully-developed and ready to be abused by the imagination. Technology designed for vastly different societies invariably trickles down to our streets, re-sprayed, relabeled, and hacked to fit whatever market will take it. Whatever rules the creators imagined fly out of the window as freighters are crammed to bursting with the second-hand remains of their creations... Similarly, the Net’s architecture fails to reflect the reality on our continent as the expansion of cyberspace exceeds the reach of our road networks. How do you track someone who doesn’t have a social security number or a physical address? Someone who never really made it onto the Grid? It’s no surprise then that lawlessness is the rule on our end of the networks, ‘do what thou wilt’ the full extent of cyberregulation. This will remain the case as long as Africa continues to wear hand-me-down systems... a cyberpunk future for Africa seems all but inevitable."

Wow! "A team of designers have crafted a futuristic reuse concept for Melbourne’s ill-fated Southern Star Observation Wheel, envisaging the wheel as a tram depot in the sky for “flying steam powered punk trams”. Featuring wind turbine blades and solar panels, the sci-fi windmill would generate power for a fleet of flying trams, alleviating congestion in the city. The adventurous reuse proposal for the “heat-damaged and conceptually flawed” wheel, which closed 40 days after it opened in 2009 when cracks appeared in the frame, features landscaped platforms elevated above a newly-greened Docklands. The detailed visualisations were created by architectural photographer Peter Bennetts, multi-disciplinary design form Büro North and film and media production studio Squint Opera. Soren from Büro North says: “There are some serious ideas and questions amongst the madness. How to efficiently adapt, reuse and re-function outdated infrastructure as we move to a more sustainable future.”"

"The story anticipates the Positive Soundscapes research project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and comprising five British universities, which aims to convince architects and town planners to think beyond the traditional focus on reducing noise levels and to pay attention instead to ‘the many possibilities for creating positive environments in the soundscapes in which we live. People can completely change their perception of a sound once they have identified it. In the laboratory, many listeners prefer distant motorway noise to rushing water, until they are told what the sounds are. I have cited these examples of urban sound in Ballard because they represent the key components of a framework he uses to critique the psychological and perceptual dimensions that are saturated in the built environment, but that seem lacking in the discourse that generates architectural practice. In a sense, Ballard’s work is about nothing but the built environment."

"The idea of a "situated" technology suggests contemporaneity, a literal and figurative rooting in the present. And yet the exhibition's title deserves additional scrutiny—specifically, the calculated use of the word "toward"... Talk about the future can veer towards the sentimental and the nostalgic. Literary critic Frederic Jameson even admonished popular visions of the future, such as science fiction, as a kind of wasted futureology. He declared how science fiction's "deepest vocation is over and over again to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future." Despite this seemingly hopeless assessment, Jameson even recognized that science fiction is rooted in the interminable now, or, as Sigfried Giedion would put it, the "eternal present." And being rooted in the now is not a bad thing. Recall that some, if not all of the technologies in Toward the Sentient City are available in the here and now. Being rooted in the present at least gives us the hope of imagining our urban future."

I'm betting this author never read Stross, Reynolds or MacLeod. "Even as sci-fi powers its way to full spectrum dominance of the cultural battlefield, many readers and writers of speculative fiction are looking at the banners proclaiming Mission Accomplished... The literary tradition that has its roots in HG Wells and Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe and George MacDonald, that grew through the writing of Tolkien, Lieber, Howard, Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov, and branched into the modern genres of fantasy, horror and science fiction, may have reached its fruition. The modern mythology of speculative fiction that those writers shaped is now as familiar to modern audiences as their everyday lives. Alien civilisations, robot overlords, zombie uprisings, elven nations and starships have become a lingua franca for artists of all kinds to draw on, whether to create light-hearted entertainments or to use as metaphors to explore the darkest recesses of human psychology and society."

"Science fiction is THE literature of our times. We live in a world in which unprotected sex or excess sunlight can kill you dead. Estrogen-imitating chemicals in the environment are implicated in lower human sperm counts and an explosion of hermaphrodite frogs. Jellyfish populations are exploding in the world's oceans. Scientists have bred rats that glow in the dark, and have decoded the human genome like it's a computer manual in Korean. In two generations, the Internet has gone from an electronic bulletin board to an all-encompassing, global mindspace. All that, and an African-American is in the Oval Office... Any serious contemporary novel set in the present, without the wonders and horrors of science hovering in the narrative background, isn't "sci-fi" but "why-fi"... Real-world, modern life is best characterized as the weirdest hi-tech plot imaginable, in which people are both characters and authors: mini-Asimovs, collaborating on a massive, messy, first draft."

Jules Verne cuts your ubicomp. "The future is the data city but it won't be accepted by people as the city of the future. To a certain extent the city has always been a 'data city', the possibility for the exchange of information (and obviously goods and services) is what intitially permitted for fixed settlements. And yet the way that data is handled by the city's citizens changes all the time... My benchmark of futuristic thought is Jules Verne's novel Paris in the 20th Century. Considered too radical by his publisher in 1863, the book was locked away in a family vault for over a hundred years... In this remarkable story set in the year 1960 Verne envisages a city of glistening skyscrapers, each one air-conditioned. The streets are crammed with gas-powered cars, with rapid public transit covering the sub-terranean city. He foresees a worldwide 'telegraphic' communications network, a type of screen for viewing from a distance, elevators and an electronic, telephonic, document copier."

Kurt Vonnegut writes stylishly on stlye. "The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad's third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench... All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue."

Conceptual, bright green, SF architecture. Some of these are weird beyond practicality but others look quite useful. "The Dragonfly is a 128-floor vertical farm concept that will definitely get locavores drooling. Conceived by Vincent Callebaut Architectures, the building supports housing, offices, laboratories and and twenty-eight different agricultural fields. It completely sustains itself using solar-power, wind-power, and captured rain water."

The scifi city. "The city of the future increases its role as an actor in our lives, affecting our lives. This of course, is a recurrent theme in science-fiction and fantasy. In movies, it's hard to get past the paradigm-defining dystopic backdrop of the city in Bladerunner, or the fin-de-siècle late-capitalism cage of the nameless, anonymous, bounded city of the Matrix. Perhaps more resonant of the future described by Greenfield is the ever-changing stage-set of Alex Proyas' Dark City... Transmetropolitan's city binds together perfectly a number of future-city fiction's favourite themes: overwhelming size (reminiscent of the BAMA, or "Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis from William Gibson's "Sprawl" trilogy), patchworks of 'cultural reservations' (Stephenson's Snowcrash with it's three-ring-binder-governed, franchise-run-statelets) and a constant unrelenting future-shock as everyday as the weather... For which we can look to the comics-futrue-city grand-daddy of them all: Mega-City-1."

Ubiquitous, self-aware, location-based, console-free gaming. "Futurologists and science fiction writers have long been predicting the role of technology, either speculatively in futurological texts, or simply as entertainment in science fiction films, books, and comics. But they've only recently begun to take videogames seriously as a major part of our future. And they are a major part: driven in equal parts by technological progress and cultural expressions. Games are a hybrid thing: a fusion of art and science. As both disciplines push onward, so they push games ahead of them. And further ahead of these are the people who deal in the future. Writers, designers, prophets... "We haven't quite gotten our heads around the idea of having devices on our person that always know where we are," says Stross. "This is less obviously gaming related, until you start thinking about augmented reality, or live-action roleplay. You can play games in the real world without having arranged to meet."

On fascist transhumanism: "The whole of our constructed weltanschaung of modernity and enlightenment values and democracy rests on the fundamental axiom that existing human lives are of equivalent value... As long as we're only dealing with Humanity 1.0, it's hard to argue on empirical grounds that one human is intrinsically worth more than another. If we run into alien intelligences, or create artificial ones, we will be dealing with beings that may force us to reevaluate that basic axiom of the enlightenment project. But otherwise we've got nothing to fear ... except possibly the products of a political ideology that explicitly rejects the assumption of equality of opportunity. We saw such ideologies at play before: indeed, one of them warped the middle of the 20th century in a ghastly, unforgettable manner. And now there's a new one that might, if it flourishes, evolve into the 21st century equivalent of Nazism... "Hello. We're from the ReMastered race, and we're here to help you.""

On crossing the boundary between real and imagined architectures: "At Thrilling Wonder Stories... I watched conceptual designer Viktor Antonov explain how he had created a science-fictionalized Paris... Antonov approached the problem by altering just a few parameters in the standard architectural model. For instance, Antonov had noticed a few fundamental details about how the mid-nineteenth century neo-classical core of Paris had been constructed: big street-level floors, smaller attic spaces, complex chimney stacks. By increasing the emphasis on the lower floors, and stretching them out—and by emphasizing the height and complexity of the chimneys—Antonov was able to create a thematically consistent science fiction Paris. Simply by altering a few basic architectural parameters, he said, you were able to fictionalize the city, whilst at the same time retaining its fundamental identity. His designs were still recognizably—even mathematically—Parisian, but they were also otherworldly."

The field of depth photography is awesome. "Peter Root sees science fiction cities and fantasy planets where most of us see staple stacks and scrap metal. He even manages to integrate his surroundings in strange and unique ways, such as the drainage hole and rust spot of his bathtub (shown as a distant city center lit up far behind the staple skyscraper above). Like a talented tilt-shift photographer, this artist also captures his subjects up close to convey a sense of depth and size – one would almost believe this staple city could be a real skyline somewhere. Using other scrap metal pieces, Root has also crafted far more complex mechanical cities with jutting spires, raised walkways and gathering spaces for the invisible public in the center of it all... Whether you take them in from afar as purely sculptural objects or lean in close to see them as tiny cities, the work of Peter Root is captivating as both a set of abstract miniature sculptures or seen as recycled metal structures."

On writing, architecture and ideas. "The overwhelming majority of buildings that look great on architecture blogs, or on computer screens at the office, are then constructed out of materials that age so terribly that, within a decade, the very structures that were meant to look like tomorrow actually look like sad reminders of yesterday... Part of this, I think, is a much larger issue in architecture today, which is that architects far too often build what is appropriate for them, within the contexts of their own intellectual development and building careers, and not within what might actually be best for a site, or a city, or a civilization. Which means that you and I get to live inside evidence of architects working something out for themselves. And by the time their buildings are thoroughly rain-stained, and the paint has started flaking, they’ll have moved on to something else. We’re stuck dealing with the leftovers, paying exorbitant maintenance fees on someone else’s dream."

This looks great. "Krugman: 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."

"The impulse to the fantastic is central to human consciousness, in that we can and constantly do imagine things that aren’t really there. More than that (and what distinguishes us from tool-using animals), we can imagine things that can’t possibly be there. We can imagine the impossible. Now, within that you have to distinguish the “never-possible” and the “might-be-possible-sometime.”... I maintain that there’s no such hard distinction and that the differences between the “never-” and the “not-yet-possible” are less important than their shared “impossibleness.” That’s not to say in some dippy hippy way that everything is possible, but that there’s no obvious line between what is and what isn’t. In fact, that underlines many of the most tenacious political fights around us—the neo-liberal claim that There is No Alternative is all about trying to draw the line of the “never-possible” at a place which strips humans of any meaningful transformative agency." This. Guy. Fuck!

Without a doubt, one of the greatest book-to-film adaptations I've ever seen: "Tarkovsky's rendition of the story struck Lem as a misinterpretation of the highest order. The movie, so intently, unflinchingly focused on irresolvable inner struggle, is certainly unlike other experiences available in the sci-fi mainstream, but that's all to its advantage over the rest of the sci-fi mainstream. Recent theatrical releases in the genre challenge their audiences to recall their details mere hours after the screening; Solaris challenges its audience to the equally insurmountable task of forgetting a single scene as long as they live... Solaris, like so many pictures to emerge from the late-stage Soviet Union, simply couldn't help but stand as an indirect rebuke to its increasingly hypocritical and illogical place of origin. But as a critique of wrongheadedly programmatic Communist thought is only one of many ways to process the movie."

Genre's curse. "If you chose A. E. van Vogt, say, or John Varley, you would go on your way to the usual [science fiction] thrills with no idea that you had just missed out on encountering one of American literature’s most distinctive and undervalued voices. That’s how Jack Vance’s fans see it, anyway... Dan Simmons, described discovering Vance as “a revelation for me, like coming to Proust or Henry James. Suddenly you’re in the deep end of the pool. He gives you glimpses of entire worlds with just perfectly turned language. If he’d been born south of the border, he’d be up for a Nobel Prize.” Michael Chabon, told me: “Jack Vance is the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel don’t get the credit they deserve. If ‘The Last Castle’ or ‘The Dragon Masters’ had the name Italo Calvino on it, or just a foreign name, it would be received as a profound meditation, but because he’s Jack Vance and published in Amazing Whatever, there’s this insurmountable barrier.”"

Science fiction and the space race. "Let’s be honest, science fiction writers are much like stock market forecasters. When their predictions come true, everyone listens. Yet when the prognostications fall flat, their audience disappears. The space race was that rare moment when these writers seemed to be on the mark... The two most powerful nations on the planet were focused on getting off the planet. The scribblers who had been dreaming about just this state of affairs looked like sages. Successful predictions about the moon date back at least to Jules Verne and his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon. Here Verne correctly anticipated that the United States would be the country to launch the first lunar mission, and also pinpointed that Florida would make the best launch site. He guessed the right crew size—three astronauts—and also came very close to the truth in his descriptions of the dimensions of the space capsule and the duration of the voyage to the moon."

io9 posts some wonderful imaginings of sea based city-states; scifi architecture, post-sea-rise, concept art. "Seasteading, a term derived from combining "sea" and "homesteading", is a general term given to the notion of either converting existing structures, such as old boats or disused oil rigs, or custom-building new ones to allow people to live in the middle of the ocean. Generally, this also includes the interrelated goal of establishing a sovereign state on the open seas, away from any existing governmental structures on dry land. Patri Friedman and Wayne Gramlich - whose 1998 article "Seasteading – Homesteading on the High Seas" is generally given credit for popularizing the term - founded the Seasteading Institute in 2008 in order to better organize the seasteading effort. Perhaps the most famous - and, to some extent, the only - example of successful seasteading is the microstate of Sealand, which started life as the World War II sea fort HM Fort Roughs."

Things of the internet. ""There's hardly any engineering. Almost all of this is mash-up tinkering. It's like the Burroughs cut-up method applied to objects. These guys are assembling hardware in the same crowd-pleasing spaghetti at the wall approach that Web 2.0 web designers use in assembling features and applications."... It's not that every invention has been invented, but we sure have a lot of basic parts just hanging around, waiting to be configured. Pick up a $200 FPGA chip-toaster and you can burn your own microchips. Drag and drop some code-objects around and you can generate some software to run on it. None of this will be as efficient or effective as a bespoke solution, but it's all close enough for rock-n-roll... The formerly rare occurrence of technology jumping off the page and into the world are about to become a lot more common. When readers download or mail-order off-the-shelf components and instructions for integrating them, it is simple to turn fiction into reality."

China Miéville on London. That zoo of a city: "It is the triumph of a lack of planning - both for good and bad. It's chaos - and whether you say that with a gasp of despair or glee or both is up to you. Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can't quite make sense of, though we know it's there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it's a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me."

Bruce Sterling bandies around a lot of ideas in this concise, and on the surface, simple post. "It bothers me to use clumsy circumlocutions like “unfinished ruins” or “partially built, yet abandoned structures” or “stillborn highrises” for a phenomenon that is so common and so obvious to billions of urban people, so henceforth I am going to call them "squelettes.” They don’t have to be Brazilian, French, or 80 stories tall, either. The thing I find most intriguing and modern about the squelette is the concept of living in a structure that never made it as a structure... The idea of living in *abandoned prototypes* or giant failed larval husks is very contemporary, very New Depression. Very “Favela Chic.”... “Yeah man, his girlfriend was a squat chick from a squelette! She used to show up in clothes that were partially sewn together. We used to get together to eat partially cooked hotdogs, and we’d read from unpublished Portuguese translations of JG Ballard novels.”"

Funny. Weird. Wonderful? A seminar on science fiction architecture. I missed this by only a few days, arriving in London the following week. "I attended a symposium called Thrilling Wonder Stories. It was a series of talks arranged by Liam Young and Geoff Manaugh, and attended by a whole bunch of people from a range of disciplines. (I was listed on the billing, but didn’t actually have a presentation and contributed little of interest. Not that my tiny mind was needed, because there was a colossal array of speaking talent in attendance.)... Lunch was weird: a side room full of speakers eating roasted vegetables and creme caramel, discussing the importance of JG Ballard. “Do you have to be dead to be taken seriously?” asked one of the speakers. Visions of undead lich-architects taking the podium. What do architecture commentators talk about when confined to lunch? Tombs, death, other writers."

Charlie Stross waxes on the future of gaming from the perspectives of technological progress, social change, and the user. "I don't want to predict what we end up with in 2020 in terms of raw processing power; I'm chicken, and besides, I'm not a semiconductor designer. But while I'd be surprised if we didn't get an order of magnitude more performance out of our CPUs between now and then — maybe two — and an order of magnitude lower power consumption — I don't expect to see the performance improvements of the 1990s or early 2000s ever again. The steep part of the sigmoid growth curve is already behind us. Now that I've depressed you, let's look away from the hardware for a minute... Let's consider the consequences of ubiquitous terabit per second wireless data. The quiet game-changing process underneath the radar is going to be the collision between the development of new user interfaces and the build-out of wireless technologies."

A nice piece of science fiction urban environmentalism. As BLDGBLOG points out, it’s a shame London will likely be under water not long after 2041. "I stumbled on a poster produced by EDAW for an exhibition last summer called "If I could design London I would...,"... "Many of London's streets now incorporate new watercourses: in residential areas, these channels have become the focus for activities from canoeing to waterside promenading. In Kentish Town the Fleet River has become London's first floating market. The impact this has had on London's economy and status as a tourist destination is immense. As many other UK and European cities are struggling to manage the annual temperature fluctuations, water shortage and flooding, Londoners have been sheltered from the worst effects of climate change. The success of the scheme has inspired other UK and world cities to follow London's example.""

Michael Moorcock reflects on JG Ballard. "I knew him casually in the late fifties and we became close friends from about 1960 on when we attended a conference of sf writers and, together with Barry Bayley, became very disappointed with what we regarded as the boring and rather commercial interests of our fellow writers. We discovered that we had a common interest in using the conventions of sf to write a kind of fiction which addressed what we perceived as the specific experience of post-war life, which the conventions of the modernist social novel singularly failed to address. We did not have much of an interest, except incidentally, in improving the sf genre as such, but of putting certain sf tropes to our own uses. In this, we were inspired by the work of William Burroughs to whom I introduced him in the early 60s."

This feels like a character straight out of 'Mozart in Mirrorshades': "I don’t want to trivialize the difficult complexities of the Tibetan diaspora by saying things like “this guy is cooler than we’ll ever be!” But - just this once, forgive me - this guy is cooler than we’ll ever be. I mean, look at him. He will hack your system, friends. With his mind. This arresting National Geographic image of a Tibetan nomad on the Riotclitshave photo blog prompted me to search around for more information and images on Tibetan nomads. I found an incredible series of black and white portraits from 2001 taken by Daniel Miller, a story about the Tibetan nomads’ adoption of motorcycles on the NYT (tinyurl.com/jrs29), and a great image gallery on BBC (tinyurl.com/c33egd)."

RIP. "Across four decades, fifteen novels and several dozen short stories, Ballard has established himself as one of  the most singular -- and single-minded -- visionaries of twentieth-century literature. Pursuing his acknowledged obsessions, Ballard tells the stories of lonely, neurotic male protagonists, mesmerized by a threatening environment which they understand as powerful and fertile, gradually slides into a blissful dementia, convinced that union with the hostile landscape will bring psychological or spiritual fulfillment, even at the cost of self-obliteration. Ballard's settings vary from the lush forests of equatorial Africa to irradiated atolls in the South Pacific to the barren motorways of suburban London, but all his landscapes are really interiors. The automobile junkyards, drained seas, abandoned resorts and overgrown airfields are projections, emblematic fields of psychic desolation where images of media celebrities and nuclear explosions have replaced human emotion."

An article, reflecting on design through the lenses of science fiction and science fact: "When you trace the knots that link science, fact and fiction you see the fascinating crosstalk between and amongst ideas and their materialization. In the tracing you see the simultaneous knowledge-making activities, speculating and pondering and realizing that things are made only by force of the imagination. In the midst of the tangle, one begins to see that fact and fiction are productively indistinguishable. Design is about the future in a way similar to science fiction. It probes imaginatively and materializes ideas, the way science fiction materializes ideas, oftentimes through stories. What are the ways that all of these things — these canonical ways of making and remaking and imagining the world — can come together in a productive way, without hiding the details and without worrying about the nonsense of strict disciplinary boundaries?"

Another interesting looking podcast via BB: "This week on Mur Lafferty's "I Should Be Writing" podcast, a smashing interview of science fiction great Kim Stanley Robinson, conducted by science fiction great James Patrick Kelly. Jim and Stan talk in depth about writing instruction and the Clarion workshops, with which they're both involved (as am I). Jim was the most influential instructor I had the year I attended Clarion." - Cory Doctorow

I have always held Fermi's paradox as something of a validation of the ineffectiveness of manned space flight. If it holds, this study will nudge me slightly from my current view: "Reginald Smith of the self-established Bouchet-Franklin Institute in Rochester, New York state, says that something is missing from Fermi's calculations: how far a signal from an advanced civilization can travel before it becomes too faint to hear. Factoring that in, he finds that: “Assuming the average communicating civilization has a lifetime of 1,000 years, ten times longer than Earth has been broadcasting, and has a signal horizon of 1,000 light-years, you need a minimum of over 300 communicating civilization in the galactic neighborhood to reach a minimum density.”"

This great little re-imagining is classic Neil Gaiman. Read at your own peril.

In the introduction to the scifi/fantasy subsection of '100 novels everyone must read' The Guardian quotes J G Ballard: "Fiction works through metamorphosis: in every era authors explore the concerns of their times by mapping them on to invented worlds, whether they be political dystopias, fabulous kingdoms or supernatural dimensions. JG Ballard, the writer who brought SF into the mainstream, has remarked that "Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century." Ballard's visions of "inner space", Orwell, Huxley and Atwood's totalitarian nightmares, Kafka's uneasy bureaucracies, Gibson's cutting-edge cool - all are examples of a literature at the forefront of the collective imagination."

This calls forth a slew of science fiction distopias: "A team of Japanese scientists have created a device that enables the processing and imaging of thoughts and dreams as experienced in the brain to appear on a computer screen. While researchers have so far only created technology that can reproduce simple images from the brain, the discovery paves the way for the ability to unlock people's dreams and other brain processes."

One of the best things about Torchwood is its gender bending and bisexuality. I'd love to see The Doctor go the same way, but I dunno, somehow I don't see it happening: "Dr Who, as a character, has metamorphosised through the years, as he has physically - from the old professor through to the more modern young energetic. I think it would work - but I think she would need a male assistant to balance it - one of, potentially, the same status as the doctor, just different expertise." - Juliette James

Spider Robinson reads John Varley's The Persistence of Vision": "This story pulls off one of science fiction's best tricks: exploring the fundamental question of whether disasters demand that you bug out, heading for the hills to wait out the disaster, or bug in, grabbing your go-bag and heading for your neighbors' to see how you can help." - Cory Doctorow

The StarShipSofa's Engine Room opens her doors to one of the hottest SF/Fantasy writers out there: Richard K Morgan!

In this great interview, Douglas Hofstadter, author of 'Godel, Escher, Bach', and the upcoming 'I Am A Strange Loop' talks about artificial intelligence, creativity as a means of perpetuating the illusory soul and science fiction. He also gives a pretty neat criticism of tranhumanism: "In any case, the vision that Kurzweil offers (and other very smart people offer it too, such as Hans Moravec, Vernor Vinge, perhaps Marvin Minsky, and many others — usually people who strike me as being overgrown teen-age sci-fi addicts, I have to say) is repugnant to me. On the surface it may sound very idealistic and utopian, but deep down I find it extremely selfish and greedy. “Me, me, me!” is how it sounds to me — “I want to live forever!” But who knows? I don't even like thinking about this nutty technology-glorifying scenario, now usually called “The Singularity” (also called by some “The Rapture of the Nerds” — a great phrase!) — it just gives me the creeps. Sorry!"

I don't align myself with transhumanism too strongly for the reasons Dale Carrico outlines in this blog post. The movement is pretty well summed up by the neologisms 'rapture of the nerds' and 'nerdgasm': "The great works of medicine, education, artistic expression, and the helping professions are all of them already devoted to the work of ameliorating the vulnerabilities, diseases, humiliations, and ramifying ignorances human animals are so prone to. You certainly don't need to join a Robot Cult to participate in any of these enterprises, and, I fear, the specific contributions of the brave boys of the futurological congress is mostly just to indulge in snide or hysterical wish fulfillment fantasies and then pout and stamp when grownups point out that far from making them scientific geniuses out to save the planet this tends instead to make them silly bores endlessly wasting time and confusing the issues at hand."

More research into the Vingian contact-lens-as-platform-for-alternate-living. The article authors only skim the surface of the potential this has to change our mode of existence: "Researchers hope that the lenses, once completed, will allow users to zoom in on distant objects and see useful facts. Future applications might allow drivers and pilots to see their direction and speed projected across their view or to surf the Web without a monitor. The circuit components would be powered by integrated solar cells and a wireless radio-frequency receiver."

Another lost post. This one, straight out of scifi: "Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside. This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it's extremely promising. There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle's speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see." Not to mention a Vinge or Gibson media overlay. Checkout the image at: http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/rel/6553_rel.jpg

"Answering the question about how transhumanism has changed — there's actually a lot more emphasis now on caution and responsibility. If you attend a conference or get hooked into the inside discourse, you hear more from scientists and engineers and less from dreamers and theoreticians (which is not quite as much fun, mind you) and so you might actually here people saying: "this one really isn't possible." And you have transhumanists leading "The Lifeboat Foundation," which monitors existential risks and sponsors programs to protect against those risks." - RU Sirius

I very suddenly found myself writing The Mundane Manifesto, based on some of the things the guys (and they were guys) had said.  Both about old tropes driving out the new, and also an avoidance of the coming crunch in terms of oil, global warming, overpopulation, and development economics.  Julian Todd and Trent Walters were particular inspirations.  For example, I believe it was Julian that said that FTL gave the impression it would be easy to find and settle beautiful new Earths… which encouraged us to think we could burn through this planet and be immortal.  So Mundanity partly came out of impatience with bad science, or with tropes that gave us the SF dream for free.  Also it was impatience with the moral role SF was starting to play… as an irrelevant dream of a future that was unlikely to happen.  The worry is that SF now sometimes actively prevents us imagining the future.

Urban fantasy is a tale of magic or the supernatural set in the industrialized world of the present, the future, or on other planets. It blurs the line between what is rational and irrational, scientific and metaphysical. Just the way those lines are often blurred in real life... It opens up a place in fiction where creators can speculate about more than the next iteration of our scientific world, more than the future of our technologies. They can speculate about where art and philosophy might lead us. Or wonder about the ineffable, irreducible forces that go into making up a distinct historical moment that changes the direction of civilization forever.

In film and literature, such surrealistic fantasy typically occurs at the outer edge of experimentalism, but early video games depended on symbols for the simple reason that the technological limitations of the time made realism impossible. Mario, for instance, wore a porkpie hat not for aesthetic reasons but because hair was too difficult to render. Bleszinski retains affection for many older games, but he says, “If you go back and play the majority of old games, they really aren’t very good.” He suspects that what made them seem so good at the time was the imaginative involvement of players: “You wanted to believe, you wanted to fill in the gaps.”

New transhumanist webzine edited by none other that RU Sirius. First issue features Aubrey deGrey, Charles Stross and Warren Ellis.

What, then, might realistically be achieved by interactions between brains and machines? Do the advances from the first EEG experiment to brain-controlled arms and cursors suggest an inevitable, deterministic progression, if not toward a Kurzweilian singularity, then perhaps toward the possibility of inputting at least some high-level cognitive information into the brain?

Stealth science fiction is nothing new. Creators have been churning out scifi for decades and calling it "adventure" or "suspense" or "slipstream" or "speculative" or "magic realism" — anything to get their stuff shelved in "fiction" or "drama" rather than "nerdville." Something about science fiction remains grubby and unappetizing to the mainstream. Maybe that's because it's the one branch of science that rarely makes money, and never results in a lucrative patent. Or maybe that's because it's associated with troops of socially awkward people who would rather play war games than actually go to war. Whatever the cause, we know the result. If you want to make pop science fiction, you'd better call it something else.

Here's a funny thing. Skip across the tracks to the world of crime fiction for a while, and you don't see this shit going on. You don't get this gnawing, mutilative thread of self-hatred, this bulemic purging of whole sub-genres or readership sub-sections as somehow unworthy. A quick trawl through a couple of dozen crime writer websites and messageboards reveals no agendas or dogme-style utterances, no towering rages or griping about how the genre's going to shit these days, how there's all this generic pap being published, how this strain of crime writing is so much more valid than this other strain, how maybe we shouldn't even be reading or writing crime fiction at all, how we need to Get Back to Basics, or Rip it Up and Start Again, or any other misbegotten Year Zero bullshit.

Cory visits his favorite comic book store in all the world -- Secret Headquarters, in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles. With shop owner Dave Pifer, he walks us through some of the graphic novels and comics he loves, everything from manga to zine howto manuals to Jodorowsky to Warren Ellis. Cory is particularly fond (as are all of us at BBtv) of the shop's awesome simultaneous tribute to Stan Lee and the Sex Pistols in this t-shirt, "God Save Stan Lee."

A spime is a users group first, and a physical object second. I know that this sounds insanely complex, because it is. The reason this is necessary is a simple one. The reason is the passage of time. Entropy requires no maintenance. Artifacts, Machines, Products, Gizmos, they all die. The material objects that we human beings use and make, they wear out, get consumed, and get thrown away. Unfortunately, this process is reaching limits and is doing us serious harm. We're getting permeated by trash.

By blurring the boundary between body and machine, as well as nature and culture, the concept of cyborg offers insights into the ‘networks that enable bodies to function in the modern city’ and how we might understand wider processes of urbanisation.

But what is more worrying—and more real—is the idea that such planetary engineering may be needed to make the Earth itself habitable by humanity, and that it may be needed in the near future. Reality has a way of trumping art, and human-induced climate change is very real indeed. So real that some people are asking whether science fiction should now be converted into science fact.

There are truths you can only tell by being playful with words, or by delving into intentional murkiness. The best literary fiction is both clever and heart-throttling, making you confront the "boredom, the horror and the glory" of life by forcing you to see more clearly, or more murkily, than you're accustomed to seeing. The best science fiction, by contrast, is about exploring brilliant ideas, thought experiments, possible futures or just escapist fun. And there's nothing wrong with that.

New York Review Of Books contributor Geoffrey O'Brien and the New School's Robert Polito argued that literary authors have always mixed up genres, going back to James Joyce, and they at least implied that genre fiction is only worthwhile as a source of material for literary authors to mine. Oh well.

The artists use laser light to scan the surfaces of nucleating and dissipating soap bubble clusters. Unlike ordinary light, the laser's hyper-focused beam is capable of crawling through the micro and nano structures within a bubble's skin. When aimed at specific angles, this penetrating light generates a live, large-scale projection of normally invisible ionic streams as well as mind-boggling phenomena of non-linear optics recently discovered at the Lebedev Physics Institute. Without the use of a microscope or any other magnifying devices, the laser itself permits the tremendous leap in scale. Bubble behaviors viewed in such close proximity evoke the dynamics of living cells (whose emergence and survival was made possible through analogous membrane formation).

The vision of steampunk: the aesthetic of a time-traveling fantasy world that embraces music, film, design and fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines.

A study in Nature today shows results gathered from the two Voyager space probes... reveal that the heliosphere isn't a sphere — it's more of an egg shape.

The sort of kids who were interested in the hard sciences stopped going into aerospace engineering and grew up to become UNIX sysadmins. And most of the older SF writers haven’t noticed this change in their new readership intake and aren’t writing for

Often one artist gets lifted above the rest, his principal works exalted for qualities that other works of the same kind seem not to possess. And it has happened to science fiction, where the anointed author is Philip K. Dick.

The plan was to write "intensely literary fiction that was equally steeped in genre," but Chabon soon found that his classmates were completely befuddled and unwilling to critique the stories he was submitting.