Robert J. Sawyer, a Canadian science fiction author, gave a fascinating talk at Google’s Waterloo office. He discusses how the world wide web might gain consciousness, the subject of his latest trilogy. The talk touches on several topics related to theories of consciousness, and is worth watching.
I would also recommend picking up his latest novel, Wake, the first book in the WWW (Wake, Watch, Wonder) trilogy. I’ve read the book and the trilogy is off to a great start. I will definitely be picking up the other books when they come out.
Here are the winners for this year’s Hugo Awards. There are links to some of the nominated and winning stories, including the winner for best short story, “Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear.
Great retrospective looking back at Clarke’s most influential works.
But relatively little space has been devoted to Clarke’s writing—the notable exception being the essays of his collaborator and friend, Gregory Benford, an astrophysicist and author of many science fiction novels including Timescape, the Galactic Center Saga, and Beyond the Fall of Night (a collaboration with Clarke).
In many of Clarke’s obituaries, there is a subtext (occasionally text) suggesting that while his way of seeing the future was extraordinary, his writing was perhaps not very good. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though he wasn’t known for vivid character portraits, his prose was always elegant, and its style precisely suited to his purposes: prompting readers to think and to wonder.
The New York Times has an article commemorating the life of science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who just passed away.
The author of almost 100 books, Mr. Clarke was an ardent promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. It was a vision served most vividly by “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the classic 1968 science-fiction film he created with the director Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same title that he wrote as part of the project.
His work was also prophetic: his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight.
Other early advocates of a space program argued that it would pay for itself by jump-starting new technology. Mr. Clarke set his sights higher. Borrowing a phrase from William James, he suggested that exploring the solar system could serve as the “moral equivalent of war,” giving an outlet to energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear holocaust.
This is a pretty funny piece of fiction on what could happen when nearly anybody can time-travel and change history.
At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.
At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?
Wired’s Game|Life blog has just finished a series of articles on Futurama. Check them out for another look behind the scenes.
This week on Game|Life, Wired magazine senior editor Chris Baker took us through the crazy videogame-obsessed brains of the creators of Futurama, the geekiest show on television.
In case you missed any of the in-depth reports on how Futurama and games have and will continue to intersect, here is the complete set of links. Please waste your entire Friday reading them! I will.
Wired has a great series of articles on the new season of Futurama, and the story behind it.
Cohen has another reason to be happy. The segment he’s watching is from Futurama, the show that he codeveloped back in 1999 with Simpsons creator Matt Groening. (Cohen wrote and produced some of the animated sitcom’s most popular episodes.) With that pedigree, Futurama seemed like a can’t-fail proposition, but it was canceled five years ago. This footage, however, is new: Futurama is back in production, and the unexpected return is as curious as the story of its abrupt cancellation.
This is a great list of some excellent science fiction authors of this decade.
We are blessed so far this decade with an amazing crop of new science fiction novelists.
Writing in a variety of styles, this crew is arguably more insightful, more interesting, higher intensity, and bolder than many (but not all!) of their predecessors — and in my view revitalizing the genre at a time when more new technologies that will radically reshape all our lives are incubating and percolating than ever before.
So, taking nothing away from authors like David Brin who have long been established and continue to produce top-notch work, here are my nominations for the top 10 new science fiction novelists of — more or less — the decade, plus one bonus.
Hard science-fiction author Charles Stross has laid out his argument for why space colonization is basically impossible.
And I don’t want to spend much time talking about the unspoken ideological underpinnings of the urge to space colonization, other than to point out that they’re there, that the case for space colonization isn’t usually presented as an economic enterprise so much as a quasi-religious one. “We can’t afford to keep all our eggs in one basket” isn’t so much a justification as an appeal to sentimentality, for in the hypothetical case of a planet-trashing catastrophe, we (who currently inhabit the surface of the Earth) are dead anyway. The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern.
Historically, crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of indigenous inhabitants by disease has been a cost-effective proposition. But the scale factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive.
This site has some pretty sweet paper craft PDFs you can download and assemble, including this incredible AT-AT. I know what I’m doing for the next little while.
Just got back from the book signing for Rollback, Sawyer’s latest novel, here in Calgary. Not only is he a brilliant hard sci-fi writer, but he is also very charismatic and friendly in person, as well as a great public speaker with lots of interesting ideas. He really puts a lot of thought into the moral and societal implications of new technologies in his books. He also happens to be Canadian. I can’t wait to read his latest book.
This is an amusing piece that claims that the destruction of the Death Star may have been part of a massive conspiracy!
Presented here are some of the results of my soul-searching regarding this painful event. Like many citizens, I have many questions that I would like answered: was the mighty Imperial government really too incompetent to prevent a handful of untrained nerf-herders from destroying one of their most prized assets? Or are they hiding something from us? Who was really behind the attack? Why did they want the Death Star destroyed? No matter what the answers, we have a problem.
Here’s a brief interview with Futurama co-creator David X. Cohen on the upcoming, new season of Futurama.
It’s the good news everyone has been waiting for! A new season of “Futurama”—the brilliant, animated sci-fi comedy from “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening and executive producer David X. Cohen—is finally being produced for a 2008 release.
It’s still not determined whether the new episodes will debut on Comedy Central or DVD, but we’re too excited to care! We pinned down Cohen to get the skinny on what we can expect when “Futurama” reawakens from its cryo-sleep.
Well this has been around for a while but somebody just posted it to reddit. If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing what truly terrible writing is like…enjoy!
The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked climes of the baren land which dominates large portions of the Norgolian empire. Age worn hoof prints smothered by the sifting sands of time shone dully against the dust splattered crust of earth. The tireless sun cast its parching rays of incandescense from overhead, half way through its daily revolution. Small rodents scampered about, occupying themselves in the daily accomplishments of their dismal lives. Dust sprayed over three heaving mounts in blinding clouds, while they bore the burdonsome cargoes of their struggling overseers.
“Prepare to embrace your creators in the stygian haunts of hell, barbarian”, gasped the first soldier.
“Only after you have kissed the fleeting stead of death, wretch!” returned Grignr.
When Katey Sagal visited The Late Late Show the other day, she told Craig that the show is coming back to Comedy Central in 2008 for at least 13 episodes (I was watching that appearance, too. Must have slept through that part). Don Kaplan of the New York Post confirmed this; his sources told him that all the primary voice actors signed new deals this week. Also according to the article, FOX may have the option to air the new episodes, but probably won’t. The new episodes will also come out on DVD after they air.
This article goes into quite a bit of detail and determines how much power the Death Star would have had in order to destroy a planet.
So if we can’t use melting energy or vaporization energy, how do we determine the energy requirement to destroy a planet? The answer, in one word, is gravity. If you wish to destroy a planet, you must scatter its mass so quickly that the forces of gravity cannot reverse the expansion process. In other words, you must accelerate the planet’s entire mass to escape velocity. Another way of saying this is that you must bring the planet’s gravitational potential energy state up to zero. The concepts of gravititational potential energy and escape velocity are both discussed in the science page. Using those concepts, the energy requirement for blasting a planet apart can be calculated.
A spinoff of the excellent series, Battlestar Galactica, is planned. I can’t wait!
“Caprica” will be set more than 50 years prior to the events of “Battlestar Galactica” and focus on the lives of two families — the Adamas (ancestors of future Galactica commander William) and the Graystones. Humankind’s Twelve Colonies are at peace and on the verge of a technological breakthrough: the first Cylon.
This is an interesting article that helps fill in some of the holes in the Matrix trilogy’s story.
There were four versions of the Matrix. V1 was designed by the Architect. It was a masterpiece of simplicity and beauty which collapsed nearly immediately. Why? It was boring. The humans living in it probably rebelled against their situation and within the logic of the simulation itself destroyed the environment in which they lived. The simulation failed when its internal logic required a catastrophic die-off of humans, eventually limiting at zero. Before that could happen, the Architect shut the simulation down, temporarily put all the humans into a coma, and tried again.
