#scifi (28 links)
- Rethinking space opera antipope.org
Thoughts on space opera from Charlie Stross, touching on work from Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Ursula le Guin and Lois McMaster Bujold.
The romantic impulse renders space opera antithetical to solarpunk. A fictional setting composed entirely of wild individualists isn't going to end up as some sort of libertarian utopia, it's going to be a cat ranch: meanwhile someone needs to stay behind and tend the home fires, someone has to mind the grain silos on that "small farming planet", someone else needs to manage the shipyard that repairs the interstellar freighter.
Gibson imagined cyberspace as a space of corporate dominance from the start; Silicon Valley built the open internet first, then converged on his dystopia anyway. The difference is that, in Neuromancer, that convergence was the disaster to be resisted. They turned his warning into a product roadmap.
Via linkmachinego.
- Blood Incantation - The Stargate youtube.com
The Stargate presents the saga of a mysterious artifact and its victims in a hallucinatory synthesis of science fiction and folk horror, where mind bending imagery and unsettling atmospheres converge in a surreal tale of primeval blood magic, interdimensional travel and grotesque otherworldly technology beginning in the Dark Ages and journeying into voids of deep space.
I wouldn't have imagined that I'd spend the first month of 2025 watching 20 minute long progressive death metal videos but I have no regrets.
- Neal Stephenson's Most Stunning Prediction - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
About a year ago, I worked with a start-up that makes AI characters in video games. I found it rewarding and fascinating because of the hallucinations: I could see how new patterns emerged from the soup of inputs being fed to it. The same thing that I consider to be a feature is a bug in most applications.
Via Popular.
- Remembering Iain Banks: a prolific, terrific talent eurogamer.net
I was just thinking about Iain Banks, but then really that happens most months.
Via ryudozen.
American SF from the 1950s to the 1990s contains all the raw ingredients of what has been identified as the Californian ideology (evangelized through the de-facto house magazine, WIRED). It's rooted in uncritical technological boosterism and the desire to get rich quick. Libertarianism and it's even more obnoxious sibling Objectivism provide a fig-leaf of philosophical legitimacy for cutting social programs and advocating the most ruthless variety of dog-eat-dog politics. Longtermism advocates overlooking the homeless person on the sidewalk in front of you in favour of maximizing good outcomes from charitable giving in the far future. And it gels neatly with the Extropian and Transhumanist agendas of colonizing space, achieving immortality, abolishing death, and bringing about the resurrection (without reference to god). These are all far more fun to contemplate than near-term environmental collapse and starving poor people. Finally, there's accelerationism: the right wing's version of Trotskyism, the idea that we need to bring on a cultural crisis as fast as possible in order to tear down the old and build a new post-apocalyptic future.
- Cyberpunk came true. So what's next? noahpinion.substack.com
- My sci-fi novel recommendations - Noahpinion noahpinion.substack.com
( This is the text of a keynote talk I just delivered at the IT Futures conference held by the University of Edinburgh Informatics centre today. NB: Some typos…
- An Interview with Nick Harkaway: Algorithmic Futures, Literary Fractals, and Mimetic Immortality lareviewofbooks.org
AS WE BARREL into an uncertain future, it feels like everything is spinning out of control. Governments around the world are locked in self-destructive…
- The Kefahuchi Tract trilogy: A future without nostalgia newstatesman.com
The Kefahuchi Tract trilogy – Light, Nova Swing, Empty Space M John Harrison All published by Gollancz, £8.99 A place where all the broken rules of the universe…
- Gene Wolfe: A Science Fiction Legend on the Future-Altering Technologies We Forgot to Invent | The Polymath Project thepolymathproject.com
Gene Wolfe: A Science Fiction Legend on the Future-Altering Technologies We Forgot to Invent You probably haven’t heard of Gene Wolfe. That’s too bad, because…
- Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks sciphijournal.org
Many years ago, a friend of mine who knows about these sorts of things handed me a book and said “Here, you have to read this.” It was a copy of Iain M. Banks’s…
- What Blade Runner is about, and the Narcissist Creator Razor ( 1 Sep., 2017, at Interconnected) interconnected.org
Everyone has a pet theory about Blade Runner, and I want to tell you mine. Spoiler: Blade Runner is about Blade Runner. Or rather, it's about creating Blade…
Last week, we learned that science fiction author William Gibson changed his next novel , Agency , after the outcome of last November’s election. We caught up…
- Playtime is over - Charlie's Diary antipope.org
So I've had a week now for the outcome of last Tuesday's US election to sink in, and I've been doing some thinking and some research, and my conclusion is that…
Movie screens are thundering with futuristic stories this year, from the final installment of The Hunger Games to The Martian . Both films started as books —…
- Updating a classic - Charlie's Diary antipope.org
In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services —the predecessor of the post-war CIA—was concerned with sabotage directed against enemies of the US military. Among…
- Ghost in the Shell, over two decades old, remains our most challenging film about technology newstatesman.com
Japanese animated films and anime series are weird. But the release of the classic Ghost in the Shell over 20 years ago drove the genre both upwards by reaching…
If Pattern Recognition was about the immediate psychic aftermath of 9-11, and Spook Country about the deep end of the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq, I could say that Zero History is about the global financial crisis as some sort of nodal event, but that must be true of any 2010 novel with ambitions on the 2010 zeitgeist. But all three of these novels are also about that dawning recognition that the future, be it capital-T Tomorrow or just tomorrow, Friday, just means more stuff, however peculiar and unexpected. A new quotidian. Somebody’s future, somebody else’s past.
- Rossignol » Thrilling Wonder Stories rossignol.cream.org
Via tomtaylor.