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Science Fiction

Sounds interesting.

Spanish-speaking writers are producing ambitious science fiction and fantasy. Let these books be your introduction.
By By Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Lavie Tidhar

Spanish is one of the world’s most-spoken languages, with a long, rich literary history extending all the way back to what many regard as the first modern novel, Miguel de Cervantes’s “Don Quixote.” With authors writing in Spanish from Madrid to Mexico City to Havana, what are we English speakers missing out on? And where do we start exploring?

Lavie: I recently got back from Celsius 232, a science fiction and fantasy festival in Asturias, Spain, which usually attracts hundreds of Spanish genre writers every year. This year, it felt somewhat apocalyptic, with compulsory face masks and authors signing books behind plastic screens while wearing gloves (and disinfecting them after each book). I did get to meet Sofía Rhei, a prolific novelist for both children and adults, who has one collection of stories in English, “Everything Is Made of Letters,” published by Aqueduct Press.

While Spain has a vibrant sci-fi and fantasy scene, it is only in recent years that there has been a push into the English-language market. Two fairly recent anthologies are “Terra Nova” and “Castles in Spain,” both edited by Mariano Villarreal. They showcase some of that talent, including the excellent Elia Barceló and Félix J. Palma, whose books in English translation include the internationally successful “The Map of Time.”

There’s also cyberpunk. Rodolfo Martínez’s “Cat’s Whirld” was translated by Steve Redwood and is considered Spain’s first cyberpunk novel, published in 1995. And Rosa Montero’s “Tears in Rain” is a hard-boiled tribute to “Blade Runner.” ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/ente...1ca840-f6c1-11ea-a275-1a2c2d36e1f1_story.html
 
New SF Dictionary.

The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction turns a century of neologisms (and neosemes!) into a redefinition of the genre.

... The game gets played between writer and reader, for sure, but also among writers, and between all the writers and all the readers. Some words get used again and again, becoming a meta-canonical corpus as allusive as classical haiku. It’s a game so complicated that it’d be nice to know the rules, maybe see the shape of the pieces. That’s where a lexicographical mad scientist named Jesse Sheidlower comes in. His creation, the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction came to life online this week—1,800 entries dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, with not only definitions but the earliest known uses, links to biographical information about the writers, and links to more than 1,600 scans of the original pages where the words appeared. It’s a wormhole into not just one alternate universe but a lexicographic multiverse, where time-traveling canons overlap in unexpected ways with each other and with whatever universe the reader happens to be sitting in. Cool concepts from your favorite movies turn out to precede those movies by decades; science fiction gets things right before science. It’s a trip, and it might just lead to some answers about what science fiction is and what it means. It’ll definitely start—and finish—some arguments.

NEARLY TWO CENTURIES before my WIRED colleagues Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson neologized the portmanteau “ crowdsourcing,” the Oxford English Dictionary started recruiting readers and users to mail in new words, their definitions, and their etymology and usage history. It’s how the OED got done.

For the first decade of the 21st century, Sheidlower ran a subset of that kind of project. An editor at large for the OED, he managed the Science Fiction Citations Project, a crowdsourced effort to collect words from science fiction and their histories, attempting to collate and contextualize the made-up terms and phrases that characterize and in some ways define the genre.

It was a success, and it even led to a book by one its website's moderators—Brave New Words. But by 2020, the Science Fiction Citations Project was mostly fallow—Sheidlower had left the OED years before, and the website Sheidlower set up to acquire and organize them was in an attenuated state of cryosuspension, living on a computer in his New York apartment. ...

https://www.wired.com/story/historical-dictionary-of-science-fiction/
 
Some old Climate Catastrophe SF.

How Early Sci-Fi Authors Imagined Climate Change

A century before the modern “cli-fi” genre, many authors envisioned unsettling worlds shaped by man-made climate chaos.

More than a century before melting polar ice caps, geoengineering schemes, and soaring greenhouse gas emissions became the norm, humans causing climate change was the stuff of science fiction.

For a few decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors from across ideologies and genres published stories that today would be called “cli-fi,” or climate fiction. French author Jules Verne, best known for popular adventure stories like Around the World in 80 Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, penned a novel in 1889 called Sans Dessus Dessous about capitalists intentionally heating the Arctic to extract coal reserves. Mark Twain included a subplot of selling warm climates in his 1892 novel The American Claimant. Recently, literary scholar Steve Asselin reexamined these and dozens of other early cli-fi stories, finding several disquieting themes relevant to how we think about modern-day climate change. ...

https://daily.jstor.org/how-early-sci-fi-authors-imagined-climate-change/
 
ramonmercado said:
Some old Climate Catastrophe SF.

How Early Sci-Fi Authors Imagined Climate Change

A century before the modern “cli-fi” genre, many authors envisioned unsettling worlds shaped by man-made climate chaos.

More than a century before melting polar ice caps, geoengineering schemes, and soaring greenhouse gas emissions became the norm, humans causing climate change was the stuff of science fiction.

For a few decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors from across ideologies and genres published stories that today would be called “cli-fi,” or climate fiction. French author Jules Verne, best known for popular adventure stories like Around the World in 80 Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, penned a novel in 1889 called Sans Dessus Dessous about capitalists intentionally heating the Arctic to extract coal reserves. Mark Twain included a subplot of selling warm climates in his 1892 novel The American Claimant. Recently, literary scholar Steve Asselin reexamined these and dozens of other early cli-fi stories, finding several disquieting themes relevant to how we think about modern-day climate change. ...

https://daily.jstor.org/how-early-sci-fi-authors-imagined-climate-change/
Click to expand...
Jules Verne was way ahead of his time. He writing always had a bit of foresight and truth to them. Particularly when one considers the fact these were all written >> a century ago
 
Some of these novels sound interesting.

8 New SciFi Noirs And Near-Future Dystopias That Portray a Bleak Future Modeled on a Harsh Present​

The future is bleak, whether you’re at the bottom of an underwater sea-scraper, in a spaceship headed to a distant galaxy, or just searching for plastic in the polluted rivers of Scrappalachia. More tech leads to more debt, and AI is as likely to compete with humans as to help them. The denizens of the future are buried in the trash of today, and doomed by the politics of yesterday and tomorrow. And yet, as is the surprisingly hopeful message behind any dystopian novel, life continues. Life will always continue. And sometimes, life even finds a way to thrive.

Chris McKinney, Midnight, Water City
(Soho)

Chris McKinney takes the future underwater in this Hawaiian noir, where the rich live in deep “seascapers” while the poor still dwell on the blighted surface in floating slums. In the year 2142, the world is at peace, having narrowly averted a catastrophe when a scientist destroyed an asteroid before it could destroy the earth. Now, that scientist is dead, and her former lover and bodyguard seizes one last chance at relevance by working to solve her murder, no matter who stands in his way. Delightfully creative and with plenty of realistic touches of the futuristic banal, Chris McKinney’s underwater noir is a startlingly original read.

Lincoln Michel, The Body Scout
(Orbit)

In Lincoln Michel’s tongue-in-cheek vision of the future, baseball teams are sponsored by genetic engineering companies and pump their players full of chemicals. Kobo, a former pro-player and now a scout for the Yankees, is deeply in debt after a lifetime of medical upgrades. When his brother, a star slugger for the Monsanto Mets, dies at the diamond in a spectacularly bloody manner, and Kobo gets fired from his scouting gig, the CEO of the Mets gives Kobo a chance to solve his brother’s murder and have his medical debt cleared. But the story behind the the slugger’s death is far more complicated than just a simple murder…The Body Scout will have you cheering for the Monsanto Mets even as you despair for the future.

Tade Thompson, Far From The Light of Heaven
(Orbit, release date: October 26)

Tade Thompson, known for the Rosewater trilogy and The Murders of Molly Southbourne, is quite possibly the most creative science fiction author around today, and Far From the Light of Heaven cements his reputation for stunning insights into the future and the human mind. In the distant future, a colonization ship docks in the Lagos sector, but some of the sleepers on board never awake, and an outside investigator is called in to find out what—or who—can be deemed responsible for the deaths.

...

https://crimereads.com/the-years-best-scifi-noir-so-far/
 
Ambassador Without Credentials by Sergei Snegov (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1977) Translated by Alex Miller.

Snegov was a Soviet period science fiction author beast known (mainly in Eastern Europe) for a space opera cycle called Humans As Gods published throughout much of the seventies and Eighties.

This however is a collection of short stories and one novella - the name of which forms the title of the collection. They all feature two brothers called Roy and Henry who are scientists whose job it is to investigate unusual deaths ,accidents or crimes which involve technology or something otherwise unexplainable. So the stories combine the detective genre with straight science - fiction (with the accent on the latter).

The setting is the earth of the 25th Century - a time of aircabs, domestic robots, interplanetary travel, a hinted at Asmovian world government and - something which features heavily in a lot of the tales - the ability to scan brainwaves and project people's thoughts and dreams onto screens and so on. Otherwise it is vague as to where we are - but Roy and Henry are not typical Russian names, not even as anglicised ones, as far as I know.

The tone is upbeat and generally optimistic (quite different from the sombre mood of much of the better known Boris And Arkady Strugatsky's fiction) and sometimes jocular. The filial affection between the two brother's is much in evidence and the crimes they investigate more often than not turn out to be the result of technology gone haywire than human malice.

This is what they call `hard` science-fiction, without any fantasy admixture, although the science involved is pretty Out There. Comparisons are hard but I am reminded of the multilayered wackiness of Brian Aldiss, more than anything.

It is the title story - `Ambassadors Without Credentials` -that is the real jewel in the crown of this collection. It deserves to be better known.

Roy is investigating the mysterious crash of a starship onto Mars involving his own brother, Henry, who is lying in a comatose state in a hospital on that planet. It transpires that the nature of the crash defies all the laws of known physics because the radioed warning to the ship was received instantaneously - ie faster than light -by the crew - and this had a bearing on their inability to respond effectively. Then we learn that Henry is dreaming dreams that involve highly advanced mathematical computations - ones of the kind that he could not have dreamt up himself.

The fast-paced twisty plot goes onto to involve an ancient highly advanced civilisation in peril and trying to communicate using faster-than light means of communication, alien pseudo-humans, a recorded dream made available as mass entertainment - but hiding an alien message, an invisibility suit and a monkey like alien that thrives on electricity...and so on. It ought to be ridiculous, but it works. As soon as I had finished it I knew I had to read it again.

I would go as far as to say that this is one of the best science-fiction stories I have read (!) I have only two caveats to this: some of the writing, particularly around the dialogue, seems a little clunky (although this could be the translation) And most of the stories are very homosocial - in that women barely appear in them.

I got my copy for a song at an expat second hand bookshop in Moscow. You might have to pay more.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2382862.Ambassador_Without_Credentials
 
South-East Asian SF.

The year was 2013 and I had just started on my writing journey when I managed to attend a lecture given by the award-winning writer Ken Liu in Singapore. During the Q&A I asked him “What would it take for Southeast Asian speculative fiction to be widely read?” His answer was both simple and very difficult: “Build more centers.”

Southeast Asia—that part of the world that’s south of China, southeast of the Indian subcontinent and northwest of Australia—is home to over 655 million people with hundreds of indigenous cultures and complex, diverse ethnicities, but its literature (speculative or otherwise) is still lesser-known to West-centric readers.

Thankfully, this is changing. During the last decade, authors and artists within the ten countries that make up Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, The Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor Leste, and Vietnam) have begun to champion and celebrate their own home-grown “literature of the Fantastic.” In cities like Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Singapore, speculative fiction works of all stripes routinely appear in local best-seller lists. There are now books full of ancient pontianaks and vicious manananggals, fin de siècle bioterrorist gardeners, and even sentient spaceships incubated in the wombs of courtly Dai Viet women. A new center of literature is developing.

These stories have now even crept into the consciousness of the West, with works like Disney’s (flawed but well-meaning) Raya and the Last Dragon and Netflix’s adaptation of the Filipino graphic novel Trese enjoying some measure of popularity. A number of the individual authors mentioned below have now also been published in the United States, London, and elsewhere.

Southeast Asian speculative fiction is simply the totality of all genre work in fantasy, horror, and science fiction (as well as their respective sub-genres) produced by writers in or from the region. It’s hard to speak of a single, uniquely Southeast Asian identity (or even a coherent Southeast Asian aesthetic, for that matter)—to me, this plurality that defies easy classification is a very good thing. Each writer’s worldview, rooted in their specific culture, creates a different universe for readers to explore and appreciate. It clearly demonstrates that not everyone shares the dominant and hegemonic Western, majority white, cis-gender, and individualistic culture that strangles everything else.


This is where I suggest you can begin your journey. ...

https://lithub.com/defying-classification-an-introduction-to-southeast-asian-speculative-fiction/
 
Emily St. John Mandel, her novels and experiences.

In “Sea of Tranquility,” the new novel by Emily St. John Mandel, an author named Olive Llewellyn goes on book tour, where she is subjected to terrible questions. Journalists lob inquiries about whether she prefers sex with or without handcuffs. Event attendees ask why her narrative strands don’t cohere. Strangers she meets on the road, in Ubers and fancy receptions, wonder why she’s racking up Marriott points instead of taking care of her daughter. Olive’s blockbuster novel, “Marienbad,” about a “scientifically implausible flu,” will soon be adapted into a film. Hence the tour, which Mandel narrates in dry, clipped fragments—the lingua franca of autofiction, and a flashing clue about what she’s up to.

No critic has waded into the “likability” marsh and left smelling better than when she arrived. But it’s worth noting that Olive, one of three protagonists in “Sea of Tranquility,” is immediately sympathetic: gracious, funny, and thoughtful about her work. She speaks in awed tones about connecting with those whom her words have touched—sometimes literally, as when a fan exposes her left shoulder to reveal, tattooed in “curly script,” a line from “Marienbad.” Yet Olive isn’t above a sort of gentle wryness, the subtext of which is, more or less, “Can you believe this shit?” She’s more interesting for her hints of prickly impatience, and her gratitude can feel as dutifully cultivated as her indignation is carefully curbed. On tour and beyond it, she seems to be wrestling with the fact of her art in the world: what power it can hold over people, and what claims they might make on her in return.

Behind “Sea of Tranquility”—a book about the consequences of writing a juggernaut book—looms “Station Eleven,” Mandel’s own juggernaut book, from 2014. Adapted by HBO last year, it’s the tale of a travelling Shakespeare troupe whose members are piecing themselves together after a world-annihilating flu. (The troupe’s tagline, “survival is insufficient,” could double as the novel’s.) The book sold more than one and a half million copies, and muddied the boundary between genre and literary fiction, sneaking a study of art—how it’s used, inherited, and remade over time—into a post-apocalyptic thriller. Wandering among texts, viewpoints, and possible trajectories, “Station Eleven” announced Mandel’s obsession with contingency, with who we might be if we weren’t ourselves. Scenes of stragglers in the new order alternated with glimpses of a lost past: dinner parties and air travel, the flash of a paparazzo’s camera. The book promised, or threatened, that near-total transformation can be surprisingly easy. ...

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-rewriting-of-emily-st-john-mandel
 
Aliya Whiteley Skyward Inn (Oxford: Solaris, 2021).

Aliya Whiteley, a British Sussex based author, seems to be the woman of the moment in S.F right now. She has been getting all manner of plaudits from big names in the scene, has won a host of awards and is being talked of in terms of being a new Ursula Le Guin.

Skyward Inn is the first of the four of her novels that I have read. It constitutes a dreamlike and downbeat science fantasy tale. It is set sometime in a fairly near future in the UK. In this future, mankind has discovered a portal to another planet inhabited by intelligent beings - called (for some reason) `The Kissing Gate`. The beings - the Qitan - are humanoids with bluish skin but otherwise are not much described. It seems that Earth has invaded their world without resistance as they are a peaceful people.

This situation has changed everything but there is a part of the UK - Sussex maybe - that has chosen to live a simple rural life untouched by the new technologies. They are called the Protectorate. Their life is one of farming and local parish meetings to determine local affairs. At the centre of the community is a tavern called `Skyward Inn` which sells a mysterious and heady brew produced by the Qitan.

The tale is narrated by Jem - an owner of the bar - who has a Quintan lover called Isley - but also we follow her malcontented teenage son who feels stiffed by his rural community. Then another Quintan turns up and this threatened to cause problems as does the arrival of a flesh eating contagion of some kind.... The story combines traditional science fiction with elements of horror, dark fantasy and Weird Fiction. For a while it seems to be going in a `aliens-as-metasphors-for-ethnic-minorities` direction - in the manner of the great Alien Nation franchise, but goes in a different direction.

In fact, the story feels shapeless and meandering but builds yup to a rather surprising climax. The writing is spare and poetic. Whiteley is an original talent but she puts me in mind of the darker end of Ray Bradbury, of Christopher Priest and even a little of some of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's material.

The book is not a page turner and is sombre and philosophical (being concerned with such issues as colonialism and free will versus collective action, etc) - in fact I put it aside at one point but am glad that I persevered with it. I may even try it again at some point. But if you are looking for the thrills and spills of S.F this isn't for you.

Here's what other punter's said:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52592203-skyward-inn
 
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Why economists should read SF.

Economists ought to read more science fiction. All that fun, futuristic stuff: phasers, lightsabers, replicants, intergalactic federations, extraterrestrial beings in hovercrafts.

Please don’t write in with the inevitable joke: “But economics is science fiction!”

One reason economists should read more science fiction is that sci-fi opens the mind to other ways the world could be. That’s valuable in general, but sci-fi is especially useful for economists, because it often delves into topics that occupy them, pushing those ideas to their logical extremes.

For example: What if money went away? What if corporations became more powerful than governments? How would we reorganize society if no one needed to work?

This isn’t idle speculation. Strange things happen far more often than we like to think. Reading sci-fi sensitizes us to the possibility of radical change. Society needs such sensitivity in economists, among others. The 9/11 commission wrote in Chapter 11 of its report that it is “crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.”

But sci-fi doesn’t just brace people for extreme change; it can also encourage them to bring it about. Science fiction is “a political resource, as it empowers the critic and the radical to see the present as amenable to conscious transformation,” William Davies, a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, wrote in a 2018 book that he edited, “Economic Science Fictions.” ...

My colleague Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate economist, is famous in sci-fi circles for a paper he wrote in 1978 as a struggling assistant professor, “The Theory of Interstellar Trade,” in which he considered how transporting goods close to the speed of light might affect interest rates on those goods. Throwing shade on others in his profession, Krugman wrote: “It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.” ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/07/opinion/economics-science-fiction.html
 
Robot Tales.

THE BEST ROBOTS IN SCIENCE FICTION​

"I love robots. They are science fiction’s oldest, most reliable friends..."​

NOVEMBER 8, 2022 BY LAVIE TIDHAR

My new novel, Neom, started off with the simple image of a robot and a rose. The robot goes to the market in the city of Neom and buys a flower. It then takes the rose into the desert and leaves it in the sand…

Why?

I wrote the rest of the book just to find out.

The truth is, I love robots. They are science fiction’s oldest, most reliable friends, though they have gone much out of fashion these days with their odd humanoid ways. Real robots build cars or fight wars. They don’t look like humans. Back in 2019 I visited a robotics lab in China and watched in fascination dragonfly robots and tapeworm robots and even a lobster robot. They didn’t look like people, though some are making androids even as we speak, and one, Sophia, was even granted Saudi citizenship in 2017. It’s a cool simulacra, though the rather unkind description of it as “a chatbot with a face” is not inaccurate. But still. Humanoid robots seem almost naïve, a piece of nostalgia from a long-vanished future.

Neom is set in a futuristic city on the coast of the Red Sea, a city dreamed up by a Saudi prince and marketed in the real world even as I type this, though it doesn’t yet exist. I thought it was a cool idea, though, and in my world it’s old, and filled with humans and robots, and the robots are old. Some of them did serve in the bad old wars and now haunt the desert. Others just try to get by. And since I love the history of science fiction, which is to say, the books I love to read, I put in a variety of robots, from a nod to the terrifying android in Alfred Bester’s “Fondly Fahrenheit” to the human-mimicking war robots of Philip K. Dick’s “Second Variety” to the stoic robots of Asimov and Simak.
Robots have been with us since Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. in 1921. They have kept us faithful company. It’s what they do. And they are still around. Here, then, are some of my favourite old and new stories about robots.
ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

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second-variety-204x300.jpeg

Second Variety by Philip K. Dick (1953)
As we go through Neom we find out that my robot (who is never named) had a group of companions during the long-ago war. One of them is, of course, a Tasso, from PKD’s classic story about a war in which humanoid robots infiltrate the human population only to blow themselves up. They come in several models, including the David (a young boy) and a Wounded Soldier, but there are rumours of a new, improved model…

City-210x300.jpg

City by Clifford Simak (1952)
If there is one specific type of robot I love above all else it’s the Simakian one. Stoic, patient, calm. Sometimes searching for God on a remote planet, as they did in Project Pope. Those robots gave rise to the Way of Robot religion featured in Central Station and a little in Neom, for in this extended universe there is indeed a Vatican of the Robot on Mars, and a Robo-Pope, who is even making an appearance in a small animated show I’ve recently finished making, called Mars Machines… But this is not about that.

Jenkins, the robot butler of the Webster family in the mosaic stories that make up Simak’s masterpiece, City, is probably my favourite. He is always there, always hoping for the best, for people to be better, even when there are no more people left and the dogs have taken over, only to learn to make weapons themselves… The talking jackal Anubis in Neom is of course a descendant of Simak’s dogs, while the recluses in the desert are called Websters – for reasons no one seems to remember anymore. ...

https://crimereads.com/the-best-robots-in-science-fiction/
 
An interview with Cory Doctrow about Tech monopolies, Cyber Punk. Computers and Science Fiction.

I first spoke with Cory Doctorow two years ago. I was trying to get a handle on the sci-fi genre known as cyberpunk, most famously associated with the work of William Gibson. (It also served as the inspiration for a recent video game, Cyberpunk 2077, which had a famously tumultuous rollout.) Doctorow, who is often described as a post-cyberpunk writer, is both a theorist-practitioner of science fiction and a vigorous commentator on technology and policymaking; his answers to my questions were long, thoughtful, and full of examples. And so, after that first talk, I made plans to speak with him again, not for research purposes but as the basis for the interview below.

Doctorow, who is fifty-one, grew up in Toronto, the descendant of Jewish immigrants from what are now Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Before becoming a novelist, he co-founded a free-software company, served as a co-editor of the blog Boing Boing, and spent several years working for the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. Our first conversation, in late 2020, took place just after he had published the novel “Attack Surface,” part of his Little Brother series; it dramatizes the moral conflict of cybersecurity insiders who try to strike a balance between keeping their jobs and following their consciences.

The second time we spoke, Doctorow told me that he had eight books in production. “I’m the kind of person who deals with anxiety by working instead of by being unable to work,” he explained, when I asked how he was handling the ongoing pandemic. Among those eight books were “Chokepoint Capitalism,” co-written with the law professor Rebecca Giblin and published this past September, and “Red Team Blues,” a novel set in the world of cryptocurrency, which will come out in April. In the course of two interviews, Doctorow discussed the right and wrong lessons that one can learn from science fiction, the real dangers of artificial intelligence, and the comeuppance of Big Tech, among other topics. Those conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

I wanted to talk to you about cyberpunk because you’ve written eloquently about its historical and cultural underpinnings. Has your conception of what the genre is and what it can be shifted over the years?

Certainly. I mean, my first encounters with it were short stories in Asimov’s and OMNI. As a kid born in 1971, who was thirteen when “Neuromancer” came out, it was just dazzling, right? I quite side with Gibson on this: he says, although people called it dystopian, it was actually optimistic—because he wrote in the mid-eighties about worlds where there had only been limited nuclear exchanges and the human race still continued! I was involved with the anti-nuclear-proliferation movement from my earliest years—my parents were political organizers—and I was moderately convinced that there was a good chance that we would all be radioactive ash by the time my eighteenth rolled around.

I am identified with a group of writers who are loosely called post-cyberpunk. And I think one of the defining features of us is the idea that computers are dealt with as things in the world and not as metaphors. The writer who probably best epitomizes that shift is Neal Stephenson, who starts off very much as a techno-metaphorist—even though he’s a computer-industry professional, or has a background in the computer industry—and then becomes increasingly techno-realist in his approach, sometimes even excruciatingly.

Do you think the genre has a new salience now that Big Tech companies are no longer commonly treated as innocuous engines of innovation?

The comeuppance of Big Tech has two major sides. There’s the side that says Facebook invented a mind-control ray to sell you fidget spinners, and then Robert Mercer stole it and made your uncle racist with it, and now we don’t have free will anymore because of Big Data. And those people, I think, are giving cyberpunk real salience, because that is a cyberpunk science-fiction plot, not a thing that happens in the world. Everyone who’s ever claimed to have a mind-control ray turned out to be a liar or deluded.

The other side is, Look at these completely ordinary mediocre monopolists, doing what monopolists have done since the days of the Dutch East India Company, with the same sociopathy, the same cheating, the same ruthlessness—we should do unto them as we did unto the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and so on. And that strain of techlash, I think, rightly views the cyberpunk motifs as fiction that has been mistaken for reality, the same way Elon Musk mistakes the fairy tales about unitary inventors—who, in their lab, create a faster-than-light machine or whatever—for a thing that actually happens in the world, as opposed to a kind of juvenile fantasy, and then declares himself to be Iron Man.

Cyberpunk was a radical literature. And, if you’re going to radicalize people, you have to engage with computers as they are so that people understand that you’re not making up a fairy tale but reflecting on their actual lived experience about things that can happen, do happen, and could be better.

In the eighties, in its metaphor stage, cyberpunk got people to realize how intimate technology had become in their lives. But you don’t think we need metaphors so much anymore?

I’ve been at this for long enough that I had to explain to people that I wasn’t speaking metaphorically when I said that they were headed for a moment in which there would be a computer in their body, and their body would be in a computer—by which I meant their car. And, if you remove the computer, the car ceases to be a car. And that they would have things like pacemakers and artificial pancreases, and just all manner of implants. I have a friend with Parkinson’s who now has a wire in his brain that’s controlled by a computer.

We think of computers as being a thing that sits on your desk and that you use to do your taxes. And then we think of it as a rectangle in your pocket that you use to distract yourself. Eventually we’re just going to think of a computer as being, like, a physics, right? The rules by which we make infrastructure will be our computer capabilities and policies.

Bill Gibson was going to arcades in Toronto and seeing kids thrust their chests at the video games while they pumped quarters into them and thought, What world are they trying to enter when they play these games? And he coined the term cyberspace. The thing that cyberspace gets us, as a metaphor, is the sense that our technology policy is going to be the framework in which our infrastructure, and thus our lives, emerge. And that enormity is difficult for people to grasp. ...

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/t...ts-you-to-know-what-computers-can-and-cant-do
 
ramonmercado said:
Robot Tales.

THE BEST ROBOTS IN SCIENCE FICTION​

"I love robots. They are science fiction’s oldest, most reliable friends..."​

NOVEMBER 8, 2022 BY LAVIE TIDHAR

My new novel, Neom, started off with the simple image of a robot and a rose. The robot goes to the market in the city of Neom and buys a flower. It then takes the rose into the desert and leaves it in the sand…

Why?

I wrote the rest of the book just to find out.

The truth is, I love robots. They are science fiction’s oldest, most reliable friends, though they have gone much out of fashion these days with their odd humanoid ways. Real robots build cars or fight wars. They don’t look like humans. Back in 2019 I visited a robotics lab in China and watched in fascination dragonfly robots and tapeworm robots and even a lobster robot. They didn’t look like people, though some are making androids even as we speak, and one, Sophia, was even granted Saudi citizenship in 2017. It’s a cool simulacra, though the rather unkind description of it as “a chatbot with a face” is not inaccurate. But still. Humanoid robots seem almost naïve, a piece of nostalgia from a long-vanished future.

Neom is set in a futuristic city on the coast of the Red Sea, a city dreamed up by a Saudi prince and marketed in the real world even as I type this, though it doesn’t yet exist. I thought it was a cool idea, though, and in my world it’s old, and filled with humans and robots, and the robots are old. Some of them did serve in the bad old wars and now haunt the desert. Others just try to get by. And since I love the history of science fiction, which is to say, the books I love to read, I put in a variety of robots, from a nod to the terrifying android in Alfred Bester’s “Fondly Fahrenheit” to the human-mimicking war robots of Philip K. Dick’s “Second Variety” to the stoic robots of Asimov and Simak.
Robots have been with us since Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. in 1921. They have kept us faithful company. It’s what they do. And they are still around. Here, then, are some of my favourite old and new stories about robots.
ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

​
second-variety-204x300.jpeg

Second Variety by Philip K. Dick (1953)
As we go through Neom we find out that my robot (who is never named) had a group of companions during the long-ago war. One of them is, of course, a Tasso, from PKD’s classic story about a war in which humanoid robots infiltrate the human population only to blow themselves up. They come in several models, including the David (a young boy) and a Wounded Soldier, but there are rumours of a new, improved model…

City-210x300.jpg

City by Clifford Simak (1952)
If there is one specific type of robot I love above all else it’s the Simakian one. Stoic, patient, calm. Sometimes searching for God on a remote planet, as they did in Project Pope. Those robots gave rise to the Way of Robot religion featured in Central Station and a little in Neom, for in this extended universe there is indeed a Vatican of the Robot on Mars, and a Robo-Pope, who is even making an appearance in a small animated show I’ve recently finished making, called Mars Machines… But this is not about that.

Jenkins, the robot butler of the Webster family in the mosaic stories that make up Simak’s masterpiece, City, is probably my favourite. He is always there, always hoping for the best, for people to be better, even when there are no more people left and the dogs have taken over, only to learn to make weapons themselves… The talking jackal Anubis in Neom is of course a descendant of Simak’s dogs, while the recluses in the desert are called Websters – for reasons no one seems to remember anymore. ...

https://crimereads.com/the-best-robots-in-science-fiction/
Click to expand...

Hmmm ..... coincidence?

cliff.png
cliff2.png
 
What you cant see, to the left of that picture, is that the little old lady next door has a 14ft lapdog and he's spoiling for a fight with their Labrador...
 
How the Ways of War are influenced by Science Fiction.

From high-tech fighting machines to supercomputers and killer robots, science fiction has a lot to say about war.

You might be surprised to learn that some governments (including the UK and France) are now turning their attention to these fantastical stories as a way to think about possible futures and try and ward off any potential threats.

For many years now, science fiction writers have made prophesies about futuristic technologies that have later become a reality. In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke famously predicted the internet. And in 1983, Isaac Asimov predicted that modern life would become impossible without computers.

This has made governments take note. Not only can science fiction help us imagine a future shaped by new technologies, but it can also help us learn lessons about potential threats.

There are many issues that science fiction engages with, which will no doubt be feeding into defense research around warfare and ways to mitigate risk. While we can never predict the future completely, we can only hope that our leaders and decision-makers learn lessons alluded to in science fiction, so that we may avoid the dystopia that some science fiction suggests.

Here are four issues from science fiction that governments may be considering. ...

https://www.sciencealert.com/scienc...conduct-war-and-we-might-not-like-the-results
 
ramonmercado said:
For many years now, science fiction writers have made prophesies about futuristic technologies that have later become a reality. In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke famously predicted the internet. And in 1983, Isaac Asimov predicted that modern life would become impossible without computers.
Click to expand...

The 1962 novel "The Gutenberg Galaxy" by Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, gave us a remarkably accurate prediction of the Internet and may have just pipped Arthur C Clarke to the notion.

McLuhan's novel describes human advancement over 4 broad ages - the Oral tribe culture, Manuscript culture, Gutenberg galaxy and the Electronic age. The latter contains the term global village, to refer to mass communication across the entire world. He even coined the term "surfing" for perusing a large body of electronic documents or knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gutenberg_Galaxy
 
Last edited:
ramonmercado said:
New short story collection by Ted Chiang.

In his new collection, “Exhalation” (Knopf), his second, Chiang again presents elaborate thought experiments in narrative modes that initially seem familiar. Contemporary issues relating to bioethics, virtual reality, free will and determinism, time travel, and the uses of robotic forms of A.I. are addressed in plain, forthright prose. If Chiang’s stories can strike us as riddles, concerned with asking rather than with answering difficult questions, there is little ambiguity about his language. When an entire story is metaphorical, focussed on a single surreal image, it’s helpful that individual sentences possess the windowpane transparency that George Orwell advocated as a prose ideal.

The new collection starts with “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a quirkily original exploration of time travel set in a mythical, ancient Baghdad and told as if it were a tale out of “The Arabian Nights.” Here, Chiang imagines time travel as a “gate” through which one steps into another dimension to confront a past or future self without having the ability to affect anything in that dimension. A series of linked tales-within-the-tale show that the goal of the time traveller must be insight, not intervention. “Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully,” our narrator explains. “My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything. . . . Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.” In an appendix to the collection, headed “Story Notes,” Chiang says that “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” was inspired by the physicist Kip Thorne, who speculated that one might be able to create a time machine that obeyed Einstein’s theory of relativity. The setting in a Muslim civilization had seemed appropriate to Chiang “because acceptance of fate is one of the basic articles of faith in Islam.” That interplay between cutting-edge theory and age-old tradition is a regular feature of Chiang’s imagination. ...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/...de103&cndid=38161694&esrc=&utm_term=TNY_Daily
Click to expand...

An interview with Ted Chiang.

Ted Chiang, author of the most prestigious science fiction of our time (that’s four Hugo awards, four Nebula awards, and one feature film adaptation spread across a measly, by sci-fi standards, oeuvre of a dozen and a half short stories over three decades) understands this human impulse. In Chiang’s fiction, characters across all kinds of universes grapple with the limits of our kind as they claw toward transcendence via automatons and alien languages. In fiction and in life, we humans like to think we can see it coming.

Lately, Chiang has been thinking about this current reality: Via viral essays for The New Yorker, he’s been wading into this year’s public discourse to explain ChatGPT and generative AI in terms any smartphone-wielder can actually process. For a species forever at odds with our own imaginative powers, the sci-fi author has become the most lucid voice in the room—a credit as much to that compact Chiangian prose as much as it is to the utter chaos of the 2023 technological landscape.

Some time in between Marc Andreessen blogging about how AI will save the world and the release of the new Black Mirror season, Chiang and I sat down over Zoom to discuss our current moment in tech and the metaphors we use to make sense of it all.

This conversation has been condensed and edited.

Vanity Fair: In terms of cultural touchstones, what were your earliest influences?


Ted Chiang: When I was maybe 11, I started reading Isaac Asimov—his science fiction and his popular science writing. Reading both gave me a very clear sense of the difference between the two. When I was younger, say in fourth grade, I had been really into books about sea serpents and Bigfoot and ancient astronauts. What I didn’t realize was the mixture of fact and fiction that is involved in those topics, so when I started reading Asimov, it clarified for me the nature of my interest. Because, yeah, there’s cool stuff in science, and there’s really cool stuff in speculating about science, but in coming up with your fictional scenarios inspired by science, you should be very clear about which one you’re engaged with at any point.

You started writing and submitting short stories in high school. Do you still recall the first one you sent out? ...

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2023/06/ted-chiang-on-how-to-best-think-about-about-ai
 
The Radium Age Of Science Fiction.

How Scientific and Technological Breakthroughs Created a New Kind of Fiction​

Joshua Glenn Chronicles the Development of Sci-Fi in the Early 20th Century​

During the early twentieth century, the world’s scientists were wonderstruck by the revelation that the spontaneous disintegration of atoms (previously assumed to be indivisible and unchangeable) produces powerfully energetic “radio-active” emissions. Time, space, substance, our understanding of reality itself were called into question. “The man of science must have been sleepy indeed,” as the author of The Education of Henry Adams would recall, “who did not jump from his chair like a scared dog when, in 1898, Mme. Curie threw on his desk the metaphysical bomb she called radium.”

What Frederick Soddy, the English radiochemist whose lectures would inspire H. G. Wells to predict the atomic bomb, described as the “ultra-potentialities” of radioactive elements seemed limitless. Throughout the nineteen-aughts and -tens, scientists and snake-oil salesmen alike would ascribe to radium—and radiation in general—vitalizing, even life-giving powers. By the 1920s, then, the Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin and the English biologist J. B. S. Haldane could independently propose that radiation, acting upon our planet’s inorganic compounds billions of years ago, had produced a primordial “soup” from which emerged life.

Science fiction, too, emerged during the genre’s 1900–1935 Radium Age from out of a hot dilute soup of sorts, this one composed of outré genres of literature—from occult mysteries and paranormal thrillers to Yukon adventures and Symbolist poetry—acted upon by the energy of new scientific and technological theories and breakthroughs.
*
George C. Wallis first began writing scientific romances—a trilogy set in Atlantis, for example, as well as a riposte to Wells’s The War of the Worlds in which Martians rescue Earth from meteors—during the late Victorian era. He’d continue writing sf right up into the genre’s so-called Golden Age; his final novel would appear in 1948, a prolific half a century later. ...

https://lithub.com/how-scientific-and-technological-breakthroughs-created-a-new-kind-of-fiction/
 

ON THE RISE, AND FALL, AND UNCONTAINABLE REBELLION OF CYBERPUNK​

"Cyberpunk is not about technological supremacy. In fact, the reverse is true: cyberpunk is about the perseverance of humanity."​

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023 BY JARED SHURIN
... The biblical story of Legion is an iconic one, perhaps the most well-known exorcism in Western culture. It is also, perhaps, the perfect metaphor for cyberpunk. It is literature unchained, naked, and raving . . . but only briefly. Depending on which expert source you read, this day of demons lasted a decade or a few short years—or, according to some, it died even before it was born. The pigs went straight into the sea. Order restored.

There’s no question that cyberpunk had a shockingly brief existence as a cohesive entity. Born out of science fiction’s new wave, literary postmodernism, and a perfect storm of external factors (Reaganism, cheap transistors, networked computing, and MTV), the genre cohered as a tangible, fungible thing in the early 1980s, most famously exemplified by the aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and the themes of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). The term cyberpunk itself, as coined by Bruce Bethke, came into being in 1983. The neologism captured the zeitgeist: the potential of, and simultaneous disillusionment with, techno-capitalism on steroids.

Cyberpunk was born of the punk ethos. A genre that, in many ways, existed against a mainstream cultural and literary tradition, rather than for anything definable or substantive in its own right. This is, at least, an argument posited by those who believe the genre peaked—and died—with Bruce Sterling’s superb anthology Mirrorshades (1986). Accepted as the definitive presentation of cyberpunk, Sterling had pressed a Heisenbergian self-destruct button. Once it was a defined quality, cyberpunk could no longer continue in that form.

Although this is a romantic theory (and cyberpunk is a romantic pursuit, despite—or perhaps because of—the leather and chrome), it is not one to which I personally subscribe. While collecting for this volume, I found that the engine of the genre was still spinning away, producing inventive and disruptive interpretations of the core cyberpunk themes through to the start of the next decade. These include novels and collections such as Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988), Misha’s Prayers of Steel (1988), Richard Kadrey’s Metrophage (1988),

Lisa Mason’s Arachne (1990), and Richard Paul Russo’s Destroying Angel (1992); as well as movies, television programs, and games such as Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987), the Max Headroom series (1985), FASA’s Shadowrun (1989), and Bullfrog’s Syndicate (1993). Meaningful social commentary was still being produced as well: Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for instance, as well as the cypherpunks and even the first steampunks. ...

Why would a Big Book be given over to something that lived, thrived, and died in such a short period of time? Because, in this case, the pigs took the long way round.

Cyberpunk’s manifestation in a single and singular form was indeed brief. But it left quite an impression. A lingering dissatisfaction that being well-dressed and well-behaved is a bit, well, dull. The realization that chains aren’t the nicest things to wear. A dawning awareness that there are a lot of extremely valid reasons to run around and scream (clothing optional). People understood that the world itself was not in its right mind, and maybe the demons had the right idea. ...

Since cyberpunk is posited in this collection as the speculative examination of technology on human affairs, The Big Book of Cyberpunk is structured to examine the genre along the dimensions upon which those affairs exist: self, society, culture, and challenge. These sections also nod to McLuhan’s concept of the “global village”—a world in which media and technology has made the pace and the scale of human affairs instantaneous and global. This global village, for better or for worse, is a world that McLuhan envisioned, that cyberpunk speculated upon, and in which we now live.

From the introduction to THE BIG BOOK OF CYBERPUNK, edited and introduced by Jared Shurin. Copyright © 2023 by Jared Shurin. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Vintage Books. All rights reserved.
https://crimereads.com/cyberpunk/
 
Get More SF Books For School Libraries.

Science fiction can lead people to be more cautious about the potential consequences of innovations. It can help people think critically about the ethics of science. Researchers have also found that sci-fi serves as a positive influence on how people view science. Science fiction scholar Istvan Csicsery-Ronay calls this "science-fictional habits of mind."

Scientists and engineers have reported that their childhood encounters with science fiction framed their thinking about the sciences. Thinking critically about science and technology is an important part of education in STEM—or science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Complicated content?​

Despite the potential benefits of an early introduction to science fiction, my own research on science fiction for readers under age 12 has revealed that librarians and teachers in elementary schools treat science fiction as a genre that works best for certain cases, like reluctant readers or kids who like what they called "weird," "freaky" or "funky" books.

Of the 59 elementary teachers and librarians whom I surveyed, almost a quarter of them identified themselves as science fiction fans, and nearly all of them expressed that science fiction is just as valuable as any other genre. Nevertheless, most of them indicated that while they recommend science fiction books to individual readers, they do not choose science fiction for activities or group readings.

The teachers and librarians explained that they saw two related problems with science fiction for their youngest readers: low availability and complicated content.

Why sci-fi books are scarce in schools​

Several respondents said that there simply are not as many science fiction books available for elementary school students. To investigate further, I counted the number of science fiction books available in 10 randomly selected elementary school libraries from across the United States. Only 3% of the books in each library were science fiction. The rest of the books were: 49% nonfiction, 25% fantasy, 19% realistic fiction and 5% historical fiction. While historical fiction also seems to be in low supply, science fiction stands out as the smallest group. ...

https://phys.org/news/2023-09-sci-f...&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter
 
ramonmercado said:
Get More SF Books For School Libraries.

Science fiction can lead people to be more cautious about the potential consequences of innovations. It can help people think critically about the ethics of science. Researchers have also found that sci-fi serves as a positive influence on how people view science. Science fiction scholar Istvan Csicsery-Ronay calls this "science-fictional habits of mind."

Scientists and engineers have reported that their childhood encounters with science fiction framed their thinking about the sciences. Thinking critically about science and technology is an important part of education in STEM—or science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Complicated content?​

Despite the potential benefits of an early introduction to science fiction, my own research on science fiction for readers under age 12 has revealed that librarians and teachers in elementary schools treat science fiction as a genre that works best for certain cases, like reluctant readers or kids who like what they called "weird," "freaky" or "funky" books.

Of the 59 elementary teachers and librarians whom I surveyed, almost a quarter of them identified themselves as science fiction fans, and nearly all of them expressed that science fiction is just as valuable as any other genre. Nevertheless, most of them indicated that while they recommend science fiction books to individual readers, they do not choose science fiction for activities or group readings.

The teachers and librarians explained that they saw two related problems with science fiction for their youngest readers: low availability and complicated content.

Why sci-fi books are scarce in schools​

Several respondents said that there simply are not as many science fiction books available for elementary school students. To investigate further, I counted the number of science fiction books available in 10 randomly selected elementary school libraries from across the United States. Only 3% of the books in each library were science fiction. The rest of the books were: 49% nonfiction, 25% fantasy, 19% realistic fiction and 5% historical fiction. While historical fiction also seems to be in low supply, science fiction stands out as the smallest group. ...

https://phys.org/news/2023-09-sci-f...&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter
Click to expand...
When I was at school, the English teachers had a generally snobby attitude about SF.
I even had a bit of a 'discussion' with one who was closed-minded. One teacher did give it a bit of a chance and let us read a couple of SF books. I liked him for this, even though he was a generally unpopular teacher.
I guess this anti-SF attitude persists even today.
 
ramonmercado said:

ON THE RISE, AND FALL, AND UNCONTAINABLE REBELLION OF CYBERPUNK​

"Cyberpunk is not about technological supremacy. In fact, the reverse is true: cyberpunk is about the perseverance of humanity."​

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023 BY JARED SHURIN
... The biblical story of Legion is an iconic one, perhaps the most well-known exorcism in Western culture. It is also, perhaps, the perfect metaphor for cyberpunk. It is literature unchained, naked, and raving . . . but only briefly. Depending on which expert source you read, this day of demons lasted a decade or a few short years—or, according to some, it died even before it was born. The pigs went straight into the sea. Order restored.

There’s no question that cyberpunk had a shockingly brief existence as a cohesive entity. Born out of science fiction’s new wave, literary postmodernism, and a perfect storm of external factors (Reaganism, cheap transistors, networked computing, and MTV), the genre cohered as a tangible, fungible thing in the early 1980s, most famously exemplified by the aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and the themes of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). The term cyberpunk itself, as coined by Bruce Bethke, came into being in 1983. The neologism captured the zeitgeist: the potential of, and simultaneous disillusionment with, techno-capitalism on steroids.

Cyberpunk was born of the punk ethos. A genre that, in many ways, existed against a mainstream cultural and literary tradition, rather than for anything definable or substantive in its own right. This is, at least, an argument posited by those who believe the genre peaked—and died—with Bruce Sterling’s superb anthology Mirrorshades (1986). Accepted as the definitive presentation of cyberpunk, Sterling had pressed a Heisenbergian self-destruct button. Once it was a defined quality, cyberpunk could no longer continue in that form.

Although this is a romantic theory (and cyberpunk is a romantic pursuit, despite—or perhaps because of—the leather and chrome), it is not one to which I personally subscribe. While collecting for this volume, I found that the engine of the genre was still spinning away, producing inventive and disruptive interpretations of the core cyberpunk themes through to the start of the next decade. These include novels and collections such as Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988), Misha’s Prayers of Steel (1988), Richard Kadrey’s Metrophage (1988),

Lisa Mason’s Arachne (1990), and Richard Paul Russo’s Destroying Angel (1992); as well as movies, television programs, and games such as Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987), the Max Headroom series (1985), FASA’s Shadowrun (1989), and Bullfrog’s Syndicate (1993). Meaningful social commentary was still being produced as well: Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for instance, as well as the cypherpunks and even the first steampunks. ...

Why would a Big Book be given over to something that lived, thrived, and died in such a short period of time? Because, in this case, the pigs took the long way round.

Cyberpunk’s manifestation in a single and singular form was indeed brief. But it left quite an impression. A lingering dissatisfaction that being well-dressed and well-behaved is a bit, well, dull. The realization that chains aren’t the nicest things to wear. A dawning awareness that there are a lot of extremely valid reasons to run around and scream (clothing optional). People understood that the world itself was not in its right mind, and maybe the demons had the right idea. ...

Since cyberpunk is posited in this collection as the speculative examination of technology on human affairs, The Big Book of Cyberpunk is structured to examine the genre along the dimensions upon which those affairs exist: self, society, culture, and challenge. These sections also nod to McLuhan’s concept of the “global village”—a world in which media and technology has made the pace and the scale of human affairs instantaneous and global. This global village, for better or for worse, is a world that McLuhan envisioned, that cyberpunk speculated upon, and in which we now live.

From the introduction to THE BIG BOOK OF CYBERPUNK, edited and introduced by Jared Shurin. Copyright © 2023 by Jared Shurin. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Vintage Books. All rights reserved.
https://crimereads.com/cyberpunk/
Click to expand...

Now read/download Mirrorshades free!

Free online and ebook edition of Mirrorshades, as edited by Bruce Sterling.
Converted by Rudy Rucker, posted September 2022, revised November 2023.
Note that the book is not public domain, nor is it Creative Commons.
All rights are reserved by the authors.​

Read Mirrorshades as an Ebook​

* EPUB File (For most ebook readers)
* MOBI File (Old format for Kindle)

You may need to try the download several times,
as the server may be busy...downloading the files to other users.
.Note that even if you have a Kindle, you probably want to get the EPUB,
as Amazon can convert that into a Kindle book for you.
See my Transreal Books FAQ for details about reading the files.

https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/
​

Read Mirrorshades As a Web Page​

PREFACE
THE GERNSBACK CONTINUUM by William Gibson
SNAKE EYES by Tom Maddox
ROCK ON by Pat Cadigan
TALES OF HOUDINI by Rudy Rucker
400 BOYS by Marc Laidlaw
SOLSTICE by James Patrick Kelly
PETRA by Greg Bear
TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US by Lewis Shiner
FREEZONE by John Shirley (Two Versions)
STONE LIVES by Paul Di Filippo
RED STAR, WINTER ORBIT by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson
MOZART IN MIRRORSHADES by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner

https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/HTML/
 
Free to read online.

The Canadian Miracle
by Cory Doctorow

A contentious election and radicalized locals interfere with Canadian recovery workers’ efforts at the site of a catastrophic flood in near-future Mississippi.

This story is set in the same future as The Lost Cause, Cory Doctorow’s new novel, available everywhere on November 14, 2023.

https://www.tor.com/2023/11/01/the-canadian-miracle-cory-doctorow/
 
Best SF/F, Horror etc of 2023.

Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2023​

It’s been a very good year for reading. The book releases in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, young adult, and beyond took us to faraway kingdoms, beyond the stars, into haunted houses, and even back in time—and we are so lucky to get to read them all. Our reviewers each picked their top contenders for the best books of the year, which feature spooky trips across the American West, swoony romantic entanglements, brutal dystopian futures, new gods, old gods, A.I.s, and family curses. We’ve got magic, mystery, adventure, and much more.
Below, Tor.com’s regular book reviewers talk about notable titles they read in 2023—leave your own additions in the comments!
Reviewers-Choice-2023-Armstrong-2.png


2023, for me at least, was the year of reading books that center around some sinister and/or supernatural happenings around an old film. There’s Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate, of course, which is deservedly on many “best of” lists because of its strongly developed protagonists and its harrowing portrayal of a Nazi occultist looking to live forever via a presumably destroyed film. But then there’s also The Star and the Strange Moon by Constance Sayers and The Devil’s Playground by Craig Russell, two books that feature mysterious films that may or may not be cursed. And while the structure of these two is superficially similar—both unfold over two separate timelines—The Devil’s Playground veers into our thriller/horror territory while The Star and the Strange Moon is more fantastical, and with a much happier ending.
On the epic fantasy front, perhaps the book I was most excited about was The Fragile Threads of Power by V.E. Schwab. I’m a big fan of the first trilogy set in the overlapping Londons, and the first book in her new series met my high expectations. I can’t wait for the next installment. I also read the entire Savage Rebellion trilogy by Matt Wallace this year, with the third book, Savage Crowns, arriving in the summer. The series includes some phenomenal characters in addition to the one that graces the cover of each book in the series, and has an engagingly crafted world. ...

https://www.tor.com/2023/12/13/tor-com-reviewers-choice-the-best-books-of-2023/
 
Some good reading here.

All of Tor.com’s Original Short Fiction Published in 2023​

We have so much to celebrate as we look back on 2023!

In July, Tor.com marked its 15th anniversary, having published more than 600 original stories from authors around the world while exploring the universe (as Stubby is wont to do) of speculative fiction, from dark fantasy to space opera, from horror to dystopia, from folk tales to alternate history.

This year, we added 31 original stories—at turns haunting, hilarious, moving, chilling, and thought-provoking—to our considerable collection, publishing 19 short stories and 12 novelettes.

We are tremendously proud of—and grateful for—our talented authors, illustrators, and editors, who brought us so many incredible stories this year. We hope you will nominate your favorites for the Hugos, Nebulas, Stokers and other upcoming awards that honor outstanding works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror—but most of all, we hope you’ve enjoyed reading these stories as much as we have!

https://www.tor.com/2023/12/18/all-of-tor-coms-original-short-fiction-published-in-2023/
 
Short story, this one is SF

ORIGINAL FICTION SCIENCE FICTION
Instar
Searching for her daughter, a woman confronts the man she believes stole the child...and the strange truth behind local legends.
BY KAREN HEULER. PUBLISHED ON FEBRUARY 7, 2024. ILLUSTRATED BY SARAH JARRETT
https://reactormag.com/instar-karen-heuler/
 
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