Futurismic

Personal Information is a new serial sci-fi webcomic from Sarah “Does Not Equal” Ennals.

Personal Information is a new serial sci-fi webcomic from Sarah “Does Not Equal” Ennals.

io9 picked out an interesting quote the other day; here’s Jacob Wiseman of genre small press Tachyon Books talking to The Rumpus about the fragmentary market for science fiction publishing:

You’ve got all these smaller groups in the field that are no longer able to really talk to each other, so there’s less of a central conversation… You can’t just stick a rocketship on the cover of a book and expect it to sell. That’ll work for the Hard SF readership, but that’s not going to sell thousands of copies. In the 1960s there were only 150 or so books published each year, so it was really possible for a dedicated fan to read 50 to 100 of them. Now, Locus lists something like 2,500 books published in the genre annually. No one can read that much.

Futurismic is quite obviously ‘part of the problem’ here, if you care to see it as a problem (and if you concede that the ’smaller groups can’t talk to each other’)… and I must confess that I don’t. Indeed, I’ve compared the fragmentation and expansion of sf to the proliferation of rock music subgenres many times before; it may not make things easy for publishers to make money (which is not a good thing) but it produces a panoply of diverse iterations from a basic cultural idea… which is great for the end user because it means that there’s more likely to be something that really flicks your switches (though it may be more difficult to discover than the latest big-name thriller).

If you read Futurismic, I presume you have an interest in what might be described as ‘non-classic’ sf – but do you think the proliferation of subgenres have weakened the core appeal of the genre, or have they just distributed it more widely through multiple cultural structures? [image by yours truly]

Either it’s a slow week over at New Scientist, or they decided to throw us science fictional types a bone… either way, we’ll point out their top ten list of science fiction gadgets and devices that are nearing reality*.

As such lists do, it includes the gloriously impractical (e.g. the long-fabled jetpack) alongside a couple of genuinely useful items (like a universal audio translator and an artificial gill for breathing under water).

It’s a shame there aren’t more things like reliable sources of drinkable water, effective renewable energy generators and cures for diseases… but that’s us science fiction geeks for you, always with our head in the clouds. If you could pick any sf-nal technology to make a reality, what would it be?

* It would appear, possibly unsurprisingly, that the New Scientist definition of ‘reality’ is one that includes you having a lot of money.

Via Irene Gallo at Tor.com (who, as Tor’s art director, surely knows exactly what the hell she is talking about), here’s some more awesome near-future science fictional artwork from a contributor to the ConceptArt forums who goes by the name of Razer:

The guy has a knack with the gritty street-level stuff as well as the large-scale vision, and the thread where Razer posted these has literally dozens of other images from our cyberpunk tomorrows right out into outer space, all of which are pretty bloody impressive – to this fumble-fingered non-artist, at least.

I’m getting more and more tempted to do some sort of regular art slot here at Futurismic… what think you, readers?