Or does this image of Saturn’s moon, Hyperion, (click on the pic for a higher resolution version) make it look as though something exploded out of the Hyperion instead of the more normal big rock hits bigger rock and leaves dent thing?

Posted July 5, 2007 Comments(0)

In a review of Dalek, I Love You, a memoir by Dr Who fan Nick Griffith that should be appearing sometime soon in Vector I wondered whether the book represented a Nick Hornby moment – a time when a boyish hobby/obsession (in Hornby’s case football, in Griffith’s case wobbly sceneried tv science fiction) stumbled out of the musty bedroom of secretive geeky pleasure and into the sunlit uplands of general acceptance.

It seems I was not alone in my speculations that we might be on the verge of a different era in the perception of science fiction by the public and by critics.

Television science fiction is going through a bit of a renaissance – BSG is as good a space-based sf tv sho as has ever been broadcast, Heroes is entertaining and smart, Lost – at least in it’s early incarnation – felt startlingly different, and given the different structure and smaller audience of modern television, Dr Who is probably as popular as it has ever been.

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Posted June 30, 2007 Comments(4)

So Lyle Hopwood was kind enough to point out to me after I wrote this post about Apple, iTunes and their educational initiative that MIT provided lots of their courses online.

This got me wondering and wandering around the web, looking for places where I could find some brain candy - especially since intelligent, challenging and learned documentary television seems to be so totally out of fashion (have you seen what they’ve done to Horizon!).

And the good news is, there is stuff out there.

Fora TV
Perhaps the most technologically sophisticated and slickest of these sites, with a really wide-ranging scope and a pile of content drawn from recordings of think tank events and public discussions. Although the site claims to draw material from all over the world, there’s a pretty heavy US bias - which makes the politics and much of the arts stuff less interesting to me. Europeans (and Australians) might twitch to discover the three top stories in the “Europe” section were an address by Aussie PM John Howard, George Bush on “democracy and security”, and a thing on the Middle East. There’s plenty of meat in the science and health channel though.

RESEARCH CHANNEL
The Research Channel (with it’s UK equivalent) draws on academic sources to provide their material. There’s some great panel from the University of Southern California and Robert Lawrence Kuhn (I particularly enjoyed one with Marvin Minsky and Francis Fukyama) and another with David Brin, Octavia Butler & Michael Crichton on “Is Science Fiction Science”. Sadly the specifically British content isn’t as good - it’s much shorter and less wide ranging. Video quality on these sites is variable (and it’s never particularly high) but there’s content is intelligent. The better programmes are those that don’t try to be so slick.

UNIVERSITIES
As Lyle pointed out, there’s a broad range of material available at MIT’s site and other universities, such as Princeton, Cornell and Imperial College London also have material available to stream or download.

BBC
The BBC have a lot of archived radio stuff on their site. By far my favourite - and perhaps the best thing the BBC does - is Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Time” the Radio 4 panel discussion which can transform a dreary train journey and costs me a fortune in books about subjects I really didn’t think I was interested in. Unlike most BBC programmes, In Our Time has an extensive archive of programs covering an extraordinary very wide range of topics in science, religion, philosophy, history and culture and it remains the least dumbed down thing on television or radio. You can stream or download. Also good are the collected Reith lectures going back to 1999.

See, there can be more to the Internet than flame wars and pornography… now if only the Open University would transfer their old television programmes to the web!

Posted June 23, 2007 Comments(0)

Waiting for me on Saturday morning was the latest edition of Nemonymous. Number seven – “scriptus innominatus” – is a very handsome paperback book and I can’t wait to get to read the stories.

As far as I know, I’ve never met Des Lewis but his quirky online presence has always made me smile and I’ve admired Nemonymous both in concept and in execution ever since I first came across it. Des has produced a run of very beautifully produced magazines that look great and contain excellent stories that transcend the publication’s core conceit – that the stories are published “anonymously” with the authors only identified subsequently.

For a history of Nemonymous – and an insight into the truly unique nature of Nemonymous 6 – the planet’s finest collectable – check out the wikipedia page

This sort of brave, idiosyncratic, high quality publishing really does deserve the support of the whole sf community.

So go on, pop over to the Nemonymous website and get a copy.

I know the website looks complicated – actually it looks slightly mad, it’s a myspace page and it’s very confusing – but the quality of the publication bares no relationship to the quality of the website and ordering via PayPal is actually quite straightforward.

I recommend picking up the back editions of Nemonymous.

Des also sells his stuff via Ebay, click here.

Another interesting project that’s just landed on my door is the first Postcard from Hell – actually it was preview – the first issue is due soon. Postcards… is a neat little idea – a series of short-short stories mailed out over thirteen weeks in postcard sized format (actually it’s a double-length piece of paper folded over with the story printed inside with cover art and the “postcard” part on the outside). The little horror story that’s part of the first “issue” is “Dark Wine” by Paul Lewthwaite. It’s a little gothic for my taste and there are a few glitches (I’m pretty sure he meant the “screech of crones” rather than “cronies” for example) but the last paragraph’s a good ‘un. And this sort of thing should be encouraged. It’s clever publishing.

Posted June 18, 2007 Comments(3)

A better blogger than I, Paul Raven at Velcro City Tourist Board, has been involved in a discussion about fan-fiction with A R Yngve who slightly over-reacted to this article by cyber-princeling Cory Doctorow from the May issue of Locus.

My sympathies lie mostly with Doctorow on this. Like him, I got started on writing by appropriating the universe and characters created by another writer (though in my case it was Stan Lee and I was writing and drawing Spider-man and Ant-man and the guys). While I no longer make or read fan-fic I can see positives for both those who do write it (an outlet for creativity, a tool for binding them to a community) and those who originate the material (free publicity, the creation of a dedicated fanbase) and few, if any, drawbacks if the fan-fiction is restricted to a non-commercial basis.

As a writer who has had some short fiction published, I’m all for writers getting paid for their work. But I’m also keenly aware that the copyright laws as they now stand are ludicrous and serve only to make criminals of us all.

But I don’t really want to get into that argument.

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Posted May 29, 2007 Comments(1)

So, today we were discussing Facebook, the social networking site that all the cool kids use now that MySpace is (i) so like last week, and (ii) in the grip of the wickedest mogul in capitalism and driving everyone who tries to use it nuts with intrusive attempts at skimming money.

The more we talked about Facebook, the more remarkable I felt it was. It’s not the technology – which is neatly implemented, but already well matured. And it’s not the idea that it somehow represents a paradigm-shifting community – there are no communities online there are just collections of individuals passing through because in communities people have to live with the consequences of their actions, they can’t just walk away, pretend to be a twelve year old form Arkansas or shut it all down. An online community is as oxymoronic as a herd of cats.

No what struck me about Facebook was the way it turns the whole surveillance society argument on its head and illustrates a very interesting point about the writings of dead, French, bald philosopher Foucault.

But I’ll get to him in a minute.

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Posted May 24, 2007 Comments(4)

I have been, as the title says insanely busy. But here’s a long post that’s been gestating for a few days. Prolix? Me? Yup!

I’ve been lurking aroudn the argument started at Vecro City Tourist Board about fan fiction and I’ve got something I want to add to that, but I haven’t had time to write it yet. But it relates to my current train reading - Justina Robson’s Keep It Real.

My current bedtime reading is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Sixty Days and Counting. The Washington trilogy have been my favourite KSR reads ever - and that puts them somewhere in my favourite sf reads ever. A review will follow.

Posted May 24, 2007 Comments(0)