The Weather Out There - Long Now
I really liked this short story.
Link tags: sci-fi
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The Gods of Logic, by Benjamín Labatut
Benjamín Labatut draws a line from the Vedas to George Boole and Claude Shannon onward to Geoffrey Hinton and Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad.
In the coming years, as people armed with AI continue making the world faster, stranger, and more chaotic, we should do all we can to prevent these systems from giving more and more power to the few who can build them.
75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time - What Is The Best Science Fiction Book Ever Written?
This is a damned fine list.
The 21 best science fiction books of all time – according to New Scientist writers | New Scientist
I’ve read 16 of these and some of the others are on my to-read list. It’s a pretty good selection, although the winking inclusion of God Emperor Of Dune by the SEO guy verges on trolling.
It’s OK to Say if You Went Back in Time and Killed Baby Hitler — Big Echo
Primer was a film about a start-up …and time travel. This is a short story about big tech …and time travel.
Muscular imagination
Robin Sloan on The Culture:
The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently articulate and defend their values. (Their enthusiasm for their own politics is considered annoying by most other civilizations.)
Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of “this is what we ought to do”, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale.
I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.
Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.
Tales Of The Algorithm – Terence Eden’s Blog
I’m really enjoying these sci-fi short stories that Terence is publishing on his site—one for every day of the month.
Stories | daverupert.com
Dave’s short’n’sweet sci-fi stories, collected in one place.
Erik Wernquist - Short Film: “One Revolution Per Minute”
Suppose you had a luxury spacecraft spinning at 1RPM to create 0.5g using centripetal force, as is often depicted in science fiction:
I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect - when it comes to the comfort of the experience - would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.
The Unreal Writer - by Joanne McNeil - All My Stars
Joanne McNeil on the retroactive pigeonholing of downright weird sci-fi writers like Philip K. Dick, JG Ballard and Octavia Butler:
The snobbery against science fiction in the past and today’s cartoon icons of some of its weirdest authors comes from the same root: an establishment that doesn’t know how to read or appreciate it.
And she absolutely nails the straitjacketed feeling I get from a lot of new sci-fi that’s laudable in its politics but lacking in other ways:
I suspect those authors are drawn to the genre for the thing that increasingly frustrates me about it: the way science fiction is mined for road maps and potential solutions in real situations of uncertainty and disaster. The way it’s “smart person” literature about systems with hyper-competent protagonists. I’m here for the losers. The losers are my people.
Imagining a Future with Surgically Inserted Earbuds and Whale Concerts – Rolling Stone
Annalee Newitz:
When we imagine future tech, we usually focus on the ways it could turn humans into robotic workers, easily manipulated by surveillance capitalism. And that’s not untrue. But in this story, I wanted to suggest that there is a more subversive possibility. Modifying our bodies with technology could bring us closer to the natural world.
The other side of egoism | A Working Library
Mandy takes a deep dive into the treatment of altruism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
What The Last of Us, Snowpiercer and ‘climate fiction’ get wrong - BBC Culture
I not only worry that “cli-fi” might not be an effective form of environmental expression – I have come to believe that the genre might be actively dangerous, stunting our cultural ability to imagine a future worth living in or fighting for.
Begging for Treats - blog.lmorchard.com
As flies/cats to wanton boys are we to the gods/Kardashev Type II civilisations—they play with us for their sport.
Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In - The New York Times
A profile of the life and work of the brilliant Octavia E. Butler.
Envisioning Our Shared Storm with Andrew Dana Hudson - Long Now
This observation feels spot-on to me:
The shift that I noticed, totally anecdotally, is literary writers are starting to write more dystopian climate futures and science fiction writers are starting to write about climate solutions.
The Future History of the Nuclear Renaissance With Isabelle Boemeke
I really like the format of this bit of journo-fiction. An interview from the future looking back at the turning point of today.
It probably helps that I’m into nuclearpunk just as much as solarpunk, so I approve this message.
Atomkraft? Ja, bitte!
Spotify – dConstruct 2022
If you were at dConstruct on Friday and you enjoyed the mood music during the breaks, this is what you were listening to.
The Art of Penguin Science Fiction
A century of sci-fi book covers.
Cardigan Sci-fi • Robin Rendle
Cardigans are not entirely necessary for a show or a film to fit within the Cardigan sci-fi subgenre (although they certainly help). It’s the lack of polish in the world, it’s the absence of technological fetishism in the science fiction itself. The science or the tools or the spaceships do not sit at the heart of Cardigan sci-fi — it’s all about the people that wear the cardigans instead.