Futurismic

Science writer Quinn Norton tests a new sense, that of always knowing what direction North is via an ankle-attached bracelet that indicates true north using vibrations from eight internal buzzers:

The Northpaw is based on the Feelspace, a project organized by the Cognitive Psychology department of Universität Osnabrück in Germany. The principle is simple and elegant. The buzzers signal north to the wearer. The wearer gets used to it, often forgetting it’s there. They just start getting a better idea of where they are through a kind of subconscious dead reckoning.

Quinn has written about similar direction-sensing enabling technologies before.

I recall something like this in Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett. PTerry gifts his elves with “poise” – the ability always to know where they are.

[via Slashdot, from h+ Magazine][image from ★lex on flickr]

Here’s a bit of sensawunda for your Saturday. Spend ten minutes and think about the size of universe, starting at the home base of our own Sun and moving on out into mind-boggling infinities…

Most of this stuff will be familiar to Futurismic readers, I imagine, but the images are good, and I still get that sf-nal kick from being reminded of the incredible and momentary insignificance of our own existence. [via MetaFilter]

Everyone looks for something a little different from their fiction fix, science fiction readers included. But science fiction is also a special case, because it has been traditionally tied to the “sense of wonder” – that gosh-wow feeling engendered by reading about something previously inconceivable. Indeed, sensawunda used to be described by some writers and critics (whether correctly or not) as the core differential between science fiction and ‘regular’ fiction. [image uploaded by Jim Linwood]

But is that still the case? For example, the Mundane SF manifesto would appear to argue against sensawunda’s necessity and relevance to modern readers. And here’s Nancy Kress musing on the Somalian pirates’ tanker hijack:

Maybe the world has gotten too grubby and jaded for “awe.” Or I have. At any rate, a “sense of wonder” is no longer what I look for in fiction, including SF. I don’t want to be dazzled by things I never thought of before, even though often that seems to be what SF values. I want to be emotionally moved, involved at a visceral level with the characters and the situation, not with novelty or landscapes or gadgets or derring-do.

Speaking personally, I’ve no objection to sensawunda in my science fiction, but the older I get and the more I read (fiction or otherwise) the more my tastes seem to align with Nancy’s – I want stories about people first and foremost. Sensawunda is an extra – a side-dish, if you like, or a piquant sauce.

What about you lot? Has reality and endless CGI movies jaded you, too, or do starships and rayguns still flick your switches?