Quotulatiousness

December 26, 2011

The Tough Guide to Fantasy Cities

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:20

Charles Stross linked to this guide, suggesting that it is worth reading:

Introduction
If you are not attracted by the promise of an extended trek over rough terrain, with little access to hot showers or decent restaurants, the classic Tour of Fantasyland is probably not for you.

That is why the Management now offers separate Fantasy City Tours, available to tour groups as well as single individuals. The cities on offer have been carefully selected: they are relatively modern, if not downright futuristic, and offer seasoned travellers the comforts they have come to expect. You will not encounter any rustic taverns, bards, or bowls of stew on these tours! Instead, expect nightclubs, rock singers, and lots of gourmet coffee.

In the Toughpick section, you will find details on the people, places and things you are likely to encounter in your chosen Fantasy City. Please note that while you will not encounter all of them, you will inevitably encounter some of them before the conclusion of your Tour, and it is best to be prepared.

As always, we have carefully marked certain words as Official Management Terms. You are advised to commit these to memory, as you will certainly encounter them everywhere in your Tour.

[. . .]

Civic Pride
When you visit a Tainted City, you will likely encounter a large variety of refugees, wanderers, outlaws, and criminals. Occasionally, if you are very lucky, you may even meet some honest Workers.

Given the nightmarish and unhealthy environment, you may be tempted to ask a few of these people why they choose to stay in a city that is chock-full of Zombies or Mysterious Blight. Do not bother. They will not be able to produce a reason, at least not one that makes sense to you; you may recall the ancient anecdote about the man who cleaned up after the elephants in the circus.

Demons
Demons are often almost indistinguishable from mere humans. This goes especially for male demons, who for some reason greatly outnumber female demons in Undead Cities.

Watch out for strange eyes (ebony OMT, fathomless OMT, unearthly blue OMT), a cruel mouth, and a general tendency towards boorish sarcasm. Admittedly nine tenths of the men you are likely to meet in Undead Cities will fit this description, so it does not really narrow things down much.

[. . .]

Goggles
They do nothing. However, they look cool. In a Steam-driven City, you will find these indispensable if you wish to look like a native.

November 28, 2011

Charles Stross on worldbuilding for SF stories

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Media, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:46

This is the sort of thing that more science fiction authors should take into account before they write, but not enough seem to do:

So here are some rules of thumb I use, tending towards an increasingly narrow focus. (Sorry if you were expecting me to address the broader uses of confabulation as a fictional tool; this is very much a set of practical guidelines rather than an examination of the theory behind the activity.)

1. Humans are interested in reading fiction about humans.

Constraint #1 on any work of fiction is that it needs to provide an environment in which recognizable human protagonists can exist. If they’re not human (e.g. “Diaspora”, by Greg Egan; “Saturn’s Children”, by me) you need to provide some sort of continuity with the human and give the reader reasons to feel concerned for them. Or you can go for the “they’re not human, don’t look human, and they have no connection with us”, but what you get is either borderline-unreadable at best, or suffers from human-mind-in-a-giant-land-snail-body syndrome (which risks demolishing the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief).

So I’m going to focus on providing a human environment …

2. In general, High Fantasy steals its dress from pre-modern history; Urban Fantasy buys off-the-shelf in TK-Maxx: and Science Fiction goes for that bold futurist look.

Which is to say, if you’re going to write a trilogy with a young soldier on the rise and a throne and an evil emperor, you can do a lot worse than plunder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire for your social background. Note, however, that you’ll do a lot better if you read some social history texts rather than believing what you see in the movies.

That last bit is especially good advice, as the more you know about cultures other than the one you were raised in, the better you can understand why things are different. Ancient Babylonians were not just Englishmen with funny clothes. Classic Greece, for all that it provided a lot of the underpinnings of our western culture, was functionally very different from life as we know it now.

October 10, 2011

Cory Doctorow reviews Terry Pratchett’s Snuff

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:06

For my taste, any Terry Pratchett book is an automatic “buy”, but in case you are not in that category, Cory Doctorow has a short review of the upcoming release:

Snuff, Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld novel is an absolute treat, as per usual. It’s a Sam Vimes book (there are many recurring characters in the Discworld series, whose life stories intermingle, braid and diverge — Sam Vimes is an ex-alcoholic police chief who has married into nobility) and that means that it’s going to be a story about class, about law, and about justice, and the fact that Pratchett can make a serious discourse on these subjects both funny and gripping and never trivial is as neat a summary of why we love him as much as we do.

In Snuff, Sam Vimes finds himself dragged off to the countryside for a first-in-his-life holiday, and of course, the holiday only lasts about ten seconds before Vimes is embroiled in local politics, which means local crime. The genteel countryside may be sleepy and backwards, but it is also seething with secrets, with privilege for the gentry, with class resentments, and with racism.

October 1, 2011

The inspirational power of science fiction

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

Neal Stephenson on the ability of science fiction to inspire:

In early 2011, I participated in a conference called Future Tense, where I lamented the decline of the manned space program, then pivoted to energy, indicating that the real issue isn’t about rockets. It’s our far broader inability as a society to execute on the big stuff. I had, through some kind of blind luck, struck a nerve. The audience at Future Tense was more confident than I that science fiction [SF] had relevance — even utility — in addressing the problem. I heard two theories as to why:

1. The Inspiration Theory. SF inspires people to choose science and engineering as careers. This much is undoubtedly true, and somewhat obvious.

2. The Hieroglyph Theory. Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place. A good SF universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace. As Jim Karkanias of Microsoft Research puts it, such icons serve as hieroglyphs — simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees.

Researchers and engineers have found themselves concentrating on more and more narrowly focused topics as science and technology have become more complex. A large technology company or lab might employ hundreds or thousands of persons, each of whom can address only a thin slice of the overall problem. Communication among them can become a mare’s nest of email threads and Powerpoints. The fondness that many such people have for SF reflects, in part, the usefulness of an over-arching narrative that supplies them and their colleagues with a shared vision. Coordinating their efforts through a command-and-control management system is a little like trying to run a modern economy out of a Politburo. Letting them work toward an agreed-on goal is something more like a free and largely self-coordinated market of ideas.

September 30, 2011

Another science fiction device may be on the way to reality

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

Ever read some of those late-60s or early-70s SF stories that assumed that computers that ran using non-binary logic would replace the binary logic machines of the day? Welcome to the future:

In 2007, Hewlett-Packard’s labs demonstrated the first memristor recognized as such. A portmanteau of “memory” and “resistor,” “memristance” was the theoretical fourth circuit variable first described in 1971. While HP stock will probably not yield the sort of profits we’re looking for here, it will help generate them indirectly.

Because of its unique properties, memristors will enable far more powerful circuitry. Unlike transistor-based circuits that form the core of modern electronics, memristive circuits retain their state after losing power. Theoretically, you could power on a memristor-based computer and have all the data in memory that it had when you powered off. Memristor memory could replace hard drives and transistor-based RAM.

Memristors, however, can do more than act as memory. They can replace existing processing components. This means that much more functionality can be implemented in a single component. Instead of busing data back and forth between separate memory and processing locations on a circuit board, memristors do it all. Data, then, are available for processing with shorter wait times. Memristors reduce total hardware size, cost and energy consumption. Yet memristors can multitask in other ways, opening up a whole range of exciting possibilities.

September 26, 2011

Gorram purplebelly censors

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

A Mal Reynolds poster falls victim to academic censorship:

Dateline: Wisconsin. At the University of Wisconsin-Stout, theater professor James Miller put up a poster on his door with an image of Nathan Fillon in the character of Captain Malcolm Reynolds with one of Mal’s better lines: “You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.”

In a better world, nothing would happen — except perhaps Firefly fans would geek out and people who roll their eyes at geek culture references would roll their eyes.

But this is modern America. In modern America, the Browncoats are people who like to use vigorous figurative language to speak their mind, and they are often outnumbered and outgunned by the Alliance, made up of silly, professionally frightened moral and intellectual weaklings who see expressions of dissent (particularly dissent rendered in vivid figurative terms) as upsetting and potentially all terroristy.

So naturally the campus police at University of Wisconsin-Stout went all Mrs.-Grundy-With-A-Gun-And-A-Badge on Professor Miller. They threatened Prof. Miller with criminal charges for disorderly conduct, taking a page from the cops at Sam Houston state. They also took the poster down. The redoubtable FIRE has the story and has sent the necessary letter asking the University to grow the fuck up and pull its shit together. (That might be kind of a paraphrase by me.)

August 29, 2011

Freedom, Science Fiction and the Singularity: A conversation with author Vernor Vinge

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:12

August 15, 2011

Terry Pratchett’s views on assisted suicide

Filed under: Books, Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

Terry Pratchett is considering the option of assisted suicide as his own early-onset Alzheimer’s is starting to degrade his ability to write:

“I believe everyone should have a good death,” he tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.”

Pratchett has become an advocate for legalized assisted suicide in Britain, making him one of many voices in a global debate. Many oppose the practice for religious reasons or because they fear a slippery slope to involuntary euthanasia; but Pratchett has turned the legalization of assisted suicide into something of a personal crusade.

“I prefer not to use the word ‘suicide’ because suicide is an irrational thing whereas I think that for some people asking for an assisted death is a very rational thing,” he says. “People who I have met who have opted for it are very rational in their thinking. And indeed so are their families, quite often, because they know they are in the grip of a terrible disease for which there is no cure and they do not want to spend any more time than necessary in the jaws of the beast.”

Pratchett says that’s why he’s considering assisted death — even though his diagnosis could make it hard to recognize the right time to go.

“[It’s] always a problem for someone with Alzheimer’s,” he says. “Regrettably, quite a few people go earlier than they might need to, to make certain that they are totally coherent when they are asked various questions and fill in the various forms that they have to fill in.”

August 11, 2011

NPR’s top 100 SF and Fantasy titles

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:22

They’ve tallied more than 60,000 votes from their fans on top science fiction and fantasy books. The rankings are a bit odd, in that they include votes for groups of books as well as votes for individual books from various series.

Given the voters were self-selected from among those who either listen to NPR or were directed to the voting by people who do, there were a few surprises in the results, like finding Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers clocking in at #31 and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress at #34 (Stranger In A Strange Land at #17 was less surprising).

There were a few books I’ve never even heard of, like The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss at #18 and The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson at #43.

I think it’s a pretty fair list overall, although I’d quibble about some of the individual rankings. On a quick count, I’ve read 16 of the top 20 (but only 50 of the entire list).

August 9, 2011

Fish. Barrel. Bang

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:16

If you’ve never seen these god-awful science fiction book covers, you’ll quickly understand why this website will have a long, long list of candidates for mockery:

Kelly Comments: Considering that later editions have an absolutely gorgeous cover by Michael Whelan, I’m always a bit horrified to see the travesty on my own copy of the book. It looks like a poster for some kind of low-budget 70s bondage. My poor eyes!

H/T to Lois McMaster Bujold, who said “SF covers more dire than my own. Some of these even make me feel better . . .”

August 7, 2011

The Guild, appearing in a Munchkin game near you

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:52

The Daily Illuminator had an interesting pre-announcement today:

As the delightful Felicia Day mentioned in her panel at San Diego Comic-Con, The Guild will have its very own Munchkin expansion next spring. We’re keeping the details under wraps for the moment, but you may want to watch The Guild‘s fifth season — airing now in a variety of places. Just sayin’.

(Also watch Felicia in Eureka on SyFy — not just for her rocket scientist character Dr. Holly Martin, but because Eureka is one of the geekiest shows on TV right now.)

You can see the entire panel on YouTube.* The Munchkin announcement is around the 6:00 mark . . . and if you were in that audience, thank you for the huge response!

July 26, 2011

Oh, Amazon, you temptress

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 17:19

I just noticed that the latest L. Neil Smith novel is available, so I clicked the Amazon.com link to find out more about it. While vampire stuff is pretty far out of my normal fiction reading tastes, this one sounds interesting enough to add it to my list: Sweeter Than Wine. The review by Rex F. May captures my normal disdain for the genre rather well:

I don’t like vampire novels. I don’t even like vampire stories. Never did. They lack verisimilitude if vampires have to bite people frequently, and the people they bite turn into vampires, why aren’t we all vampires by now? And what’s the deal with sunlight? And the garlic and the wooden stake? That all sounds like superstition. So to me, vampires belong in the realm of fantasy, not in science fiction at all, and, for the most part, I don’t enjoy fantasy very much. Now, there are some exceptions I like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld vampires, because the story is humorous, like all his stuff. But most vampire stories are dead serious, with all kinds of gothic, fifteen-year-old-girl orientation Twilight is nothing new, just a continuation of the old pattern. Same old same old rape fantasies porn for teeny-boppers.

Since it makes little sense to order a single book from Amazon, due to shipping costs, I clicked the Recommendations list to see what else is new, interesting, or Amazon’s algorithms consider might be appealing to me. Of the fifteen offerings on the first page, twelve of them are by Steven Brust. As I recently started reading his Vlad Taltos series, that kinda makes sense, but 12/15ths?

Page two of the recommendations were also heavily weighted to match a recent purchase, but this time the recommendations included The Iliad, The Odessey, Plato’s Republic, and works by Saint Augustine, Aristophanes, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Epictetus. The seed book for that seems to have been Peloponnesian War by Thucidides.

Page three appears to be an attempt to patch between the first two pages — Xenophon and several SF books by David Weber, John Ringo, George R.R. Martin, David Drake, and Tom Kratman.

July 22, 2011

On the Silver Anniversary of the publication of the Vorkosigan saga

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:09

The members of the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list were delighted to present a special present to Lois on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first book in the series:

A Reader’s Companion to A Civil Campaign (PDF)

As John Lennard, co-editor of ARCACC wrote:

Ladies, Gentlemen, and all other persons, cats, dogs, squirrels, elephants, and butterbugs.

Yestermonth the Vorkosigan Saga turned 25 glorious years old. Yes, despite their own convictions on these matters, and relative fictional aliveness or otherwise, Aral, Cordelia, Konstantin Bothari, Barrayar itself, and even Miles (dating from a twinkle in Lois’s and Cordelia’s eyes) have hit their quarter-century. It also means that Lois has been putting up with our readerly burbles and spats for longer than seems possible.

[Fanfare. Extraordinary and prolonged fireworks spelling out an enormous THANK YOU, LOIS draw admiring oohs and aahs from all present.]

And by way of a less ephemeral thank-you to Lois for thus entertaining, challenging, amusing, delighting, instructing, and generally vivifying us all, I the Birthday Tixie hereby present to her on behalf of everyone who has been, is, or will be a member of this List, A Reader’s Companion to A Civil Campaign. This work of scholarly erudition and critical acumen has been compiled by many members, that they and the hordes of future Bujold readers may better understand the art, craft, wisdom, allusion, quotation, generic engineering, neologisms, and incomparable one-liners that make a Vorkosiverse novel an endless delight ; and it is presented with warm and fuzzy feelings of gratitude laced with admiration, awe, and a beverage of choice now held high in approbation.

Lois, legentes te salutant!

July 20, 2011

Heinlein’s influence on the evolution of the libertarian movement

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

In a post to correct an assertion by SF author David Brin, Eric S. Raymond shows just how influential the writings of Robert Heinlein were to the early libertarian movement:

Robert Heinlein was a complex man whose views evolved greatly over time. The Heinlein of 1942, who put into the mouth of one of his characters the line “Naturally food is free! What kind of people do you take us for?” was only five years on from having been enchanted by social credit theory, which underpins his “lost” novel For Us, The Living; in later years he was so embarrassed by this enthusiasm that he allowed that manuscript to molder in a drawer somewhere, and it was only published after his death.

Between 1942 and 1966 Heinlein’s politics evolved from New Deal left-liberalism towards what after 1971 would come to be called libertarianism. But that way of putting it is actually misleading, because Heinlein did not merely approach libertarianism, he played a significant part in defining it. His 1966 novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress was formative of the movement, with the “rational anarchist” Bernardo de la Paz becoming a role model for later libertarians. By 1978, we have direct evidence (from an interview in Samuel Edward Konkin’s New Libertarian magazine, among other sources) that Heinlein self-identified as a libertarian and regretted his earlier statism.

But if Heinlein’s overall politics changed considerably and wandered down some odd byways during his lifetime, his uncompromising support of civilian firearms rights was a constant on display throughout his life. Brin observes that was already true in 1942, but attempts to attribute this position to John W. Campbell. Multiple lines of evidence refute this claim.

[. . .]

(When time has given us perspective to write really good cultural histories of the 20th century, Heinlein is going to look implausibly gigantic. His achievements didn’t stop with co-inventing science fiction and all its consequences, framing post-1960s libertarianism, energizing the firearms-rights movement, or even merely inspiring me to become the kind of person who not only could write The Cathedral and the Bazaar but had to. No. Heinlein also invented much of the zeitgeist of the 1960s counterculture through his novel Stranger In A Strange Land; it has been aptly noted that he was the only human being ever to become a culture hero both to the hippies of Woodstock and the U.S. Marine Corps. I am told that to this day most Marine noncoms carry a well-thumbed copy of Starship Troopers in their rucksacks.)

July 12, 2011

Dealing with irritations: two varieties

Filed under: Books, Education, Media, Randomness, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 14:38

First up, Charles Stross is questioned about his “credentials” by a budding scholar:

From: numpty#@gmail.com

     Hello, I’m citing your work for a debate article I’m using about space colonization and how it is improbable. I do need credentials however, and I’ve yet to find them online. If you could reply with your credentials that’d be great.

     (I assume he’s talking about this; it’s all over the internet, triggered a firestorm, and I keep getting gimme emails from content farms asking to reprint it.)

From: me

     I’m a novelist, not an academic. If you want credentials, go look me up in wikipedia.

From: numpty#@gmail.com

     Your time is clearly very valuable, as you would rather argue with me over this than simply take a minute or two to state your credentials. Furthermore, I have no need to know the extent of your writings, I simply need to know if you are indeed certified to be considered a credible source on the topic. For instance, if your credible knowledge is on the topic of slaads and borrowing from George R. R. Martin, you are not considered a credible source on space colonization. So let me just ask you this, why should I believe your article has any rational basis, when for all I know now is your true expertise lies in the githyanki.

And in another instance, Dark Water Muse has to deal with a clueless telephone solicitation:

I had the privilege today of being phoned by fraudsters phishing for access to my computer. This is the second time I’ve received this type of call and I’ve used the same response in both cases. Try it, it’s fun.

[The phone rings. callee answers the phone.]

Callee: Hello?

[several seconds pass before the background noises of a busy call centre can be heard]

Caller [affected by a thick South Asian accent]: Hello?

Callee: Hello??

Caller: can I speak to Mr…uhhh…Goon…please?

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress