Quotulatiousness

June 29, 2012

Coming soon: The Apocalypse Codex by Charles Stross

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:21

His latest novel is number 4 in the “Laundry” series, as Bob Howard recovers from his injuries accumulated over the course of The Fuller Memorandum. It should be on sale in North America next week, and a couple of weeks after that in the UK and (I assume) other European markets.

If you want to order signed copies, right now your only option is Transreal Fiction in Edinburgh, who call me in to sign books. (I will normally sign anything you shove under my nose except a cheque, but I don’t have a signing tour scheduled for The Apocalypse Codex and this is a nose-to-the-grindstone working month for me.)

If you want to know which sales channel give the author most money, the order is: ideally an undiscounted hardback from a small retailer (like Transreal), followed by a discounted hardback from a big box store or Amazon or the undiscounted UK trade paperback, then an ebook, then a discounted trade paperback from a big box store … the book will be available as a mass market paperback or discounted ebook in July 2013, which makes the author even less money, but more than a remaindered copy or a pirate download or library loan.

Want a taster of the contents? Orbit, my UK publisher, are posting extracts over the next week, starting here … or you can look below the cut!

My connection to Charles is pretty obscure: we worked for the same company (in different countries) briefly, and I met him in that context for a few minutes (this was before his writing career had taken off). His political views and mine differ pretty substantially (he thinks libertarians are, at best, deluded), but he’s a very good writer and I’ve enjoyed reading everything of his I’ve encountered.

June 6, 2012

Cassy’s guide to naming spaceships

Filed under: Greece, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:13

You have to put a bit more thought into how you name your spaceships, people of the future!

Dear People of the Future,

Congratulations! If you’re reading this, you’ve just received a state-of-the-art spacecraft, and you’re probably about to take it on an extremely dangerous mission. Your journey may even concern the safety and continued survival of the human race.

But don’t worry! I’m betting your new ride is pretty sick. It’s probably got a warp drive and maybe a solar sail and lots of other technology I couldn’t even begin to understand.

At this point, you’re probably wondering: What should I name my spacecraft?

It’s good advice. Really. But I was surprised to find that there had been a USS Custer, a USS General Burnside, and even the USS Benedict Arnold.

H/T to John Turner for the link.

June 5, 2012

The US military’s SF research emporium

Filed under: Media, Military, Science, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:18

John Turner sent me a link to this amusing little survey of what the US military’s R&D organization is willing to admit they’re working on and how it might be helpful in case of an alien invasion:

As summer blockbuster season kicks into high gear, big-budget action movies like The Avengers, Battleship, and Prometheus remind us that there’s one thing that unites Americans: Our shared fear of an alien attack. They also remind us that when the invading space fleet arrives, humanity is not going to surrender without a fight to our intergalactic invaders. Instead, we will band together to fight off their incredibly advanced weaponry with our … well, with what, exactly? Are we really ready to battle our would-be alien overlords?

Luckily, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, as well as some of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, are dreaming up the weapons of the future today. With the help of everything from lasers on jets to hypersonic planes to invisibility cloaks, we just might be able to make the battle for Earth a fair fight. You may think we’re joking, but why else would NASA be uploading The Avengers to the International Space Station if not as a training manual? Here’s a look at some of the most space-worthy inventions being cooked up now.

An issue for any unmanned, armed vehicle (whether land, sea or air) is the security of communications from the controller to the vehicle. Recent use of such devices has almost always been in combat against relatively low-tech opponents who did not have jamming or hacking capabilities (although the UAV forced down in Iran may signal the end of the easy period for combat UAVs). Earlier discussions of benefits and drawbacks to unmanned fighters are here, here, and here.

May 15, 2012

The Singularity, ruined by lawyers

Filed under: Humour, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:26

Credit to Tom Scott. H/T to Michael O’Connor Clarke.

May 5, 2012

Why most SF (and SF-ish) movies suck

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:29

In a long post about the death of genre, Charles Stross explains why most science fiction movies are awful:

Well, the process has already begun (indeed, is well under way) in some other media: in film, for example, around 30% of the big budget movies to come out of Hollywood each year are recognizably science fiction. I mean, aliens: that’s a pretty obvious signifier, isn’t it? And Hollywood feels no need to market these movies as SF; they just are, big budget glossy special-effects beanfests featuring aliens. They’re grown-up, quite capable of finding their own audiences. But something is missing upstairs. They’re the sixty-foot-tall armoured cyborg idiot children of our genre. All fire and tantrums and no cerebral context whatsoever. There’s no internal genre dialog going on, and precious little introspection. (Yes, you can name exceptions like “GATACA”; the fact that you have to note the exceptions is itself a warning sign.)

I am not sure it is possible to write introspective, complex SF as a screen medium. The natural length of a feature movie is around 120 minutes; the traditional movie script runs at one page per minute, with 250 words per page — that buys you, in literary terms, a novella. Add in the expectations of studio executives and the dumbing-down effects of editing by committee you end up with huge pressure to make the script commercial rather than complex. Some director/scriptwriters have the clout to get what they want: but then you end up, as often as now, with George Lucas. Nor is there much scope for a dialog in which directors build on someone else’s ideas. So a large chunk of cinematic SF is stuck, spinning its wheels, mistaking ever better special effects and ever bigger first weekend box-office draws for progress.

April 24, 2012

An excerpt from John Scalzi’s latest novel, Redshirts

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:15

John Scalzi felt some sympathy for the poor lads and lasses who wear the Redshirt … the ones who only show up for the first few minutes of the show and die gruesomely, leaving the heroes to carry on. His latest novel is a bit of payback for all the members of the “away teams” who never came back.


Click the image to see the first five chapters at the Tor.com website

March 25, 2012

Time Capsule: Red Mike’s review of Starship Troopers

Filed under: Humour, Media, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:51

Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers is still one of my all-time favourite science fiction books. For that reason alone, I avoided going to see Verhoeven’s film “adaptation”. To more than make up for that, here’s a great review of the film … by that, I mean the review is great, not the film:

We start off with a news report from the surface of the planet Klendathu, the bugs’ home world, where you will instantaneously flash on that Korean-war era song,

    “Hear the sound of runnin’ feet
    It’s the old First Cav in full retreat
    They’re haulin’ ass,
    Not savin’ gas,
    They’ll soon be gone.”

Things are bad and getting worse, as a mob of Mobile Infantry types mill about, getting in each others’ lines of fire, screaming things like “Run for your life!” or words to that effect. It isn’t until later in the film that you discover that milling about is the only formation they practice regularly, and aimless running is their chief tactical mode.

[. . .]

Our heroes head to the surface, where they mill about some more. The concepts of formation, organization, and command and control appear to have been lost. They top a rise and stand in dumb amazement, one thumb in their mouth and one in their ass playing switch, as they see giant bugs expand with gas, then lift tail toward the sky and blast a blue-white fart of anti-spaceship gas up to where the fleet is in orbit.

Our guys stand shoulder to shoulder, firing at the mass of bugs, using a set of tactics that hasn’t worked well since Gettysburg. Actually, the guys at Gettysburg were a bit better better equipped for what they were doing, since they had artillery (a concept that has been lost, apparently) and weapons with an accurate range of over eight feet. Other lost concepts that would have proved Really Helpful here include close air support, mortars, air-dropped mines, barbed wire, fire, maneuver, cover, concealment, objectives, and useful orders. (I mean, “Kill everything that has more than two legs” is really neat, but “Go to coordinates XXYY, and set up a perimeter. Your covered arc runs from AA through CC. You’ll be linking up with Unit Name on your left and Other Unit Name on your right. Hold the position until you’re relieved by Unit Name. At that time go to YYZZ and await further orders” would have actually been helpful.) Nor, for that matter, do we have armored fighting vehicles, heavy machineguns, shoulder-launched missiles, or other stuff (a spray can of Raid?) that might have come in handy.

[. . .]

We go bug hunting again. And after an engagement that proves that a British Square from Waterloo would have done better than the MI at fighting bugs, we win anyway. We have a party! Dizzy and Johnny finally get it on. (I have to comment that I really liked the Special Effects in this film. Especially Dizzy’s left special effect and her right special effect. Carmen has even bigger special effects, but she never whips her shirt off so it’s hard to be sure.)

March 17, 2012

Schiaparelli’s ambiguous word choice and the lasting obsession with Mars

Filed under: Books, History, Italy, Media, Science, Space — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

Scott Van Wynsberghe reviews the hold that fictitious Mars has held on the imagination since “canals” were observed:

Mars, the most obsessed-about extraterrestrial body in the universe, has come our way again. On March 9, Hollywood unveiled John Carter, the first film adaptation of a famous series of Martian adventures written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, better known as the creator of the jungle hero Tarzan. Burroughs’s Martian yarns act as a portal to 135 years of cultural history that really is out of this world.

The bizarre story of humanity’s modern entanglement with the Red Planet began in 1877, when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported the existence of “canali” on the Martian surface. In Italian, that word can mean both “channels,” which are natural formations, and “canals,” which are not. According to science writer John Noble Wilford, that ambiguity was never cleared up.

[. . .]

Caught between science fiction and the supernatural, actual scientists were in trouble. French astronomer Camille Flammarion, for example, alternately wrote about Mars and reincarnation (1889) and Mars and science (1892). In 1900, the inventor Nikola Tesla announced that he had monitored transmissions from either Mars or Venus, but he was jeered (biographer Margaret Cheney thinks he was just detecting natural electromagnetic patterns in space). In 1921, radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi thought he had received a signal from Mars, but that, too, went nowhere. The biggest offender, however, was American astronomer Percival Lowell.

In 1895, Lowell released the first of a series of books proclaiming that Mars was inhabited. The canali, he said, really were canals, supporting a civilization struggling to survive on a dying globe. Although rightly scorned by other astronomers, Lowell was a superb writer and a frequent lecturer — Robert Goddard, the father of American rocketry, heard him speak — so his message spread. (And, in a way, it is still spreading: Think of that recent, much-debunked conspiracy theory about a giant, sculpted face on the Martian surface.)

March 11, 2012

Conflicting reviews of John Carter

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

First up, Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly Books), who wasn’t impressed with the new movie:

Well, I was disappointed. Here are a few reasons:

1. The character of John Carter was all wrong — brutish and stupid, far from the chivalrous Virginia gentleman of the books. They abandoned the unabashed romanticism of Burroughs in favor of a modern anti-hero whose tortured path to falling in love with Dejah Thoris, a Princess of Mars, was completely unconvincing.

I wonder at this failure to grasp the simplicity of emotion that suffused the golden age of science-fiction. George Lucas nailed it perfectly in the first Star Wars trilogy. Nobility of purpose, idealism, the pure romance of a boy (or girl) who hasn’t yet experienced the complications of the real thing, adventure and the chance to make a big difference against impossible odds: these are the motivations of the genre.

2. Too much spectacle, not enough attention to character and story. And what spectacle there was was undistinguished. There was a certain steampunk grandiosity to the way they did the flying ships of Barsoom that I liked, and there were some stretches of Lake Powell as the River Iss that I found visually compelling.

On the other hand, ESR went in expecting to be disappointed and instead quite enjoyed the movie:

I’ve read all of the Barsoom novels the movie was based on, but they’re not important in the furniture of my imagination in the way that (say) Robert Heinlein’s books are. They’re very primitive pulp fiction which I sought out mainly because of their historical importance as precursors of later and more interesting work. Still, they are not without a certain rude, innocent charm. The heroes are heroic, the villains villainous, the women are beautiful, dying Mars is a backdrop suffused with barbaric splendor, and the prose is muscular and vigorous.

This translation to movie form retains those virtues quite a bit more faithfully than one might have expected. In doing so it reminded me very much of the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Junior (see my review, A no-shit Sherlock). I didn’t get the powerful sense Sherlock Holmes gave me of the lead actors caring passionately about the source material, but the writers of John Carter certainly cared as much. A surprising amount of Burrough’s Barsoomian mythology and language made it into the movie. The barbarian Green Martians are rendered with gratifying unsentimentality, and the sense of Barsoom as an ancient planet with time-deep history and ancient mysteries is well conveyed.

If you’re me, reading the Barsoom novels is also an entertaining exercise in in origin-spotting tropes that would recur in later planetary romances and space operas clear down to the present day. The designers and writers of John Carter are alive to this; there are a number of points at which the movie visually quotes the Star Wars franchise in a funny, underlined way that reminds us that Barsoom was actually the ur-source for many of the cliches that Star Wars mined so successfully.

February 21, 2012

UK Catholic sex-ed includes materials plagiarized from John Norman’s Gor series

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:33

Really, it’s another of those stories that are “so weird that it’s too good to verify“:

As The Guardian reports today, Catholic faith schools in Lancashire have been handing out copies of a booklet called “Pure Manhood: How to become the man God wants you to be”, written by an American fundamentalist preacher. The booklet includes statements like this: “the homosexual act is disordered, much like contraceptive sex between heterosexuals. Both acts are directed against God’s natural purpose for sex — babies and bonding.” It also insists that, “scientifically speaking, safe sex is a joke”.

[. . .]

Weird ideas about sex, however, are not the only strange things in the booklet. All sorts of aspects of macho-ness are explored, including the need for real men to kill animals to prove their virility. There is a particularly bizarre passage about how to kill a wolf by sacrificing a goat. I won’t go into the gory details. The important point is that, as this blog post reveals, that piece of text was lifted from the book Beasts of Gor by John Norman.

February 12, 2012

Interested in early SF pulps?

Filed under: History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

You can now read the full text, including pictures and ads, of the first six issues of Amazing Stories online:

The Pulp Magazines Project has just posted the first several issues of Amazing Stories. Read the classic pulp magazine edited by Hugo Gernsback in all its scanned-in glory, with stories by H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Murray Leinster and more.

January 13, 2012

Continuators: heroes or villains?

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

“What’s a continuator?” I pretend to hear you ask. Those are the folks who pick up the fallen pen of other (almost always greater) authors to write endings for unfinished works:

There’s a long list of great authors who have left work unfinished, often because of illness or death. Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, to name but a few. An industry has grown up around them, of so-called “continuators” — writers eager to finish the stories that they began.

There have been a number of continuations of Austen’s Sanditon, including efforts by Juliette Shapiro and Reginald Hill, author of the Dalziel and Pascoe series. Austen had only got 11 chapters in when she stopped, enough to establish the characters, but leaving the continuators plenty of room for manoeuvre.

But why would a writer choose to finish the work of another author, rather than create original work? Surely that leads to pastiche?

It’s dangerous territory, suggests Prof John Mullan, who is currently writing a book on Austen. “What we expect when we read the work of Austen, or Dickens, or Laurence Sterne, is a particular voice, and that’s terribly difficult to bring off.”

It’s a risky strategy for an author, but perhaps it speaks to a profound need in all of us. The literary critic Frank Kermode wrote in his book Sense of an Ending about our deep-rooted need to be rewarded with conclusions.

John Sutherland, emeritus professor at University College London, agrees. “Kermode famously observed that when we hear a clock go tick tick tick, what we hear is tick tock tick tock, because we like beginnings and endings. We’re hardwired, like lemmings going over a cliff.”

My experiences with continuators has been quite mixed. I’ve never been able to read anything by Spider Robinson since he “finished” a novel from Robert A. Heinlein’s very early period. I hated it so much that it actually diminished my admiration for Heinlein’s entire body of work (I eventually recovered). On the other hand, I quite enjoyed Great King’s War which was a sequel to H. Beam Piper’s Kalvan of Otherwhen. John F. Carr and Roland J. Green did an excellent job of writing in the same voice as Piper and took his characters in believable directions.

January 12, 2012

New $10m X Prize for a “medical tricorder”

Filed under: Health, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:51

Get your Vulcan ears out for the next X Prize:

The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize has challenged researchers to build a tool capable of capturing “key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases”.

It needs to be light enough for would-be Dr McCoys to carry — a maximum weight of 5lb (2.2kg).

The prize was launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

[. . .]

The award organisers hope the huge prize may inspire a present-day engineer to figure out the sci-fi gadget’s secret, and “make 23rd Century science fiction a 21st Century medical reality”.

“I’m probably the first guy who’s here in Vegas who would be happy to lose $10m,” said X Prize Foundation chairman Peter Diamandis.

While the tricorder is obviously the stuff of science fiction, other X Prizes have become science fact.

In 2004, the Ansari X Prize for a privately funded reusable spacecraft was awarded to the team behind SpaceShipOne.

Update, 3 February: I’d forgotten about ESR’s post from a while back that — in many ways — we already have tricorders:

But in an entertaining inversion, one device of the future actually works on smartphones now. Because I thought it would be funny, I searched for “tricorder” in the Android market. For those of you who have been living in a hole since 1965, a tricorder is a fictional gadget from the Star Trek universe, an all-purpose sensor package carried by planetary survey parties. I expected a geek joke, a fancy mock-up with mildly impressive visuals and no actual function. I was utterly gobsmacked to discover instead that I had an arguably real tricorder in my hand.

Consider. My Nexus One includes a GPS, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a magnetometer. That is, sensors for location, magnetic field, gravitational fields, and acoustic energy. Hook a bit of visualization and spectral analysis to these sensors, and bugger me with a chainsaw if you don’t have a tricorder. A quad- or quintcorder, actually.

And these sensors are already completely stock on smartphones because sensor electronics is like any other kind; amortized over a large enough production run, their incremental cost approaches epsilon because most of their content is actually design information (cue the shade of Bucky Fuller talking about ephemeralization). Which in turn points at the fundamental reason the smartphone is Eater-of-Gadgets; because, as the tricorder app deftly illustrates, the sum of a computer and a bunch of sensors costing epsilon is so synergistically powerful that it can emulate not just real single-purpose gadgets but gadgets that previously existed only as science fiction!

January 5, 2012

Firefly MMO may rise from the dead

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

There’s still hope, Browncoat gamers:

While Multiverse, the development platform that was supposed to be the driving force for possible Buffy and Firefly MMOs, suffered a studio shutdown, the source code lives — and has been snatched up by the newly formed Multiverse Foundation. Fortunately for those who were holding out hope for an online version of Joss Whedon’s scifi western, it looks as though this new company wants to pick up where the previous team left off.

Don’t let your hopes soar too high: this is still very far from being a complete product (and the organization’s website is still in deep lorem ipsum marination). It is, however, a sign that there’s still enough life in the fan community for the Joss Whedon properties that it appears viable for someone to take this on.

December 31, 2011

Don’t mess with Firefly (or the right to free speech)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

« Newer PostsOlder Posts »

Powered by WordPress