Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001
There’s a book called Zero History coming out soon, written by some guy called William Gibson…
Kinda surprised that the first place I saw this was at Wired… but then the Bigend trilogy (of which this is the third instalment) has rather conspicuously not been marketed as (or should that be to?) science fiction. Maybe the publishers figure all us geeks are gonna buy it anyway?
They may have a point. 
Martin Magnusson got bored of waiting for the cyberpunk future we were promised in the mid-eighties, so he decided to build his own wearable cyberdeck rig. The version pictured [ganked from this Wired article] is a little crude, perhaps (I quite like the did-it-myself workbench aesthetic of exposed cables, personally, though it’d be a nightmare in a combat situation)), but he’s also managed to scrunch the bulk of it down into a little CD-case-shoulder-bag number for the more style-conscious geek-about-town.
In case you’re wondering about battery life (which was my first question), Magnusson reckons he gets three hours of juice from four AA batteries, which is better than I’d have expected, though still not too awesome. Time to look at harvesting waste energy from the body, Mister Magnusson?
Regular readers will be aware that I’m a Rudy Rucker fan, and hence will understand how stoked I am that his Ware Tetralogy – heretofore hard to find in decent condition – is being republished as a single (immense) volume. It’s now sat on my wishlist, awaiting a moment when I have the money spare to buy a copy… but until then, there’s a free-to-download PDF version of the Ware Tetralogy available on Rucker’s website. There are commercial ebook versions in the pipeline, apparently, so that download may not be there forever – scoop it up now, and feel the gnarl!
(That said, the PDF and RTF versions are Creative Commons licensed, so they can be passed around with impunity. Send one to a friend!)
One of the best things about publishing new stories is seeing writers take old ideas and remake them afresh. A few months ago, we had Sandra McDonald remixing the post-apocalypse trope, and now Eric Gregory updates the urban vampire for a nanotech-infested near future in the favelas of the Global South.
“Miguel and the Viatura” mashes up religion, poverty, exploitative corporations and transcendant technology, but remains at its heart a powerful story of character, of a younger brother led astray. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have.
“We’re close,” said Joaõ. “Keep your eyes open.”
It was hard enough to watch the road. Foot traffic was heavy, and police in hardsuits patrolled the walks, faceless behind their faceplates. The air was usually fine in Pinheiros District, but Joaõ had insisted they both wear masks, and Miguel’s eyepieces fogged constantly. “Are we late?” he asked. The only thing worse than crossing the city to see his father would be doing it for no reason at all. If they missed him, Miguel would punch something.
Preferably Joaõ. Continue reading “NEW FICTION: MIGUEL AND THE VIATURA by Eric Gregory”
Some heavy but fascinating reading over at h+ Magazine, in the form of James Kent’s round-up of where we are with technologies for interfacing the human brain with technological hardware, and where we’re going with it. The big take-away point for me is that the more fidelity you want from the interface, the more invasive the interface needs to be, though that might change as the technology advances.
And here’s your slice of sf-nal thinking from the conclusion:
While the primary purpose of neural interface research is putatively therapeutic, the functional potentials and ethical concerns of neural porting are problems looming in the future. Right now these are hypothetical concerns, but if a single-access embedded neurode procedure could be perfected and automated and performed at a local clinic in two hours for around a thousand dollars, and it was covered by insurance, the temptation for cosmetic and personal use of such a procedure becomes clear. Neural interfaces can be abused, obviously, and can be hacked into to enslave and torture minds, or drive people intentionally insane, or turn them into sleeper assassins or mindless consumers. Security is an inherent problem of any extensible exo-cortical system that must be addressed early in the engineering and testing stages, or anyone with an exo-cortical input would be ripe for exploitation. Sensory discrimination is an ongoing problem in any media environment, so individual channel selection, manual override, and the ability to shut down device input should be an integral part of any embedded system.
Probably not a system you want Microsoft writing the OS for, then…
