From reason.tv, a video interview with Peter Bagge about his new graphic novel, Reset.
Author: Anders Monsen (Page 22 of 83)
This morning I read on Ken MacLeod’s Twitter that writer Iain Banks has terminal cancer and may only have a few months left to live. Unlike early Banks fans, I stumbled upon his books after first reading MacLeod’s fiction, not the other way around. In the late 1990s I picked up Feersum Endjinn and was simply blown away. His style is impeccable, his imagination visionary. Look to Windward, The Use of Weapons, Matter, Inversions, many more brilliant books. I’ve read only one of his non-sf books under Iain Banks, as they are next to impossible to find in the US. I expected he would continue to write for years to come, and the news he may be working on his last novel is distressing and depressing. Once again there is no fairness in the world.
A recent essay that Ilya Somin wrote for Prometheus about libertarianism and science fiction has been translated into French.
Contrast this io9 article with news that Flipboard just created 50 million magazine editors. Which is more exciting? Is it io9 with it nostalgia for a “world where what you read online comes to you in silos. Instead of a feed reader, you can get an app that organizes your app subscriptions on a nice digital bookshelf where they look just like a bunch of paper magazines in a bookstore” or the one about Flipboard allowing you to curate your own magazine, where “where each user tacks pieces of content into collections that other users can follow. Flipboard users with good taste and and lots of friends could suddenly become influential drivers of attention to news articles”? I’d go for the latter.
Scientists build a small-scale robotic ant society. Having recently read Daniel Suarez’ novel Kill Decision, the implications are almost scary.
Caught BellaMaine on KEXP Live Performance Podcast. Very nice music. Reminds me a bit of The Innocence Mission.
Amazing letter from 1981 written by Philip K. Dick predicting the impact of the movie version of his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Calling the movie “super-realism”, he raved about the movie to someone involved with it. Interesting, he also bemoaned the current staleness of the 1981 science fiction world, and that Blade Runner would breathe new life into science fiction. Which, probably is quite true, as it inspired the cyberpunks and so much other sf that followed.
Does Google Glass render privacy obsolete? The whole Glass issue reminds me of Charles Stross’s novel Accelerando. This may just be the beginning of a very interesting future.
Over at reason, Tom Jackson has a review of Cory Doctorow’s novel, Homeland. This novel is a sequel to Little Brother, and rife with current affairs in terms of computer, privacy, copyright, internet and other tech related matters. Jackson notes the protagonist]s occupation, which continues some of the main issues I found with the ending of Little Brother. Marcus Yallow, after being subjected to horrible persecution by government agents, still looked at reforming the system from within as an option. Yallow now “works for a politician, and he doesn’t give up on the democratic process, even after some difficult encounters with political reality.”
Interesting article at National Review, laying into sf movies and books with themes of the corporate as evil overload. Lists several books and movies with this theme, and then debunks the power of corporates. There is little coercive force behind corporations, but apologists of government force often splutter and come back with “but what about the evil influence of McDonalds or name-your-most-hated-company?” The power of the market is what they say they fear, but this really masks their distaste of popularity of things they don’t like.
