TTA Press – publishers of long-running UK science fiction magazine Interzone – have stepped into the podcast arena with the launch of Transmissions From Beyond.
Transmissions From Beyond will republish stories from the TTA stable of magazines, Interzone included, in audio format for you to listen to for free. The first selection includes the excellent Tim Akers story “The Algorithm” – well worth stuffing onto your MP3 player for next week’s commute.
Wishing you were hobnobbing with the great and the good of science fiction at Denvention this weekend? Yeah, me too.
But the wonderful world of the blogosphere means you can experience it at a few removes… among the many people blogging from the scene is Futurismic‘s very own Edward Willett, so pop on over to Hassenpfeffer to see what he’s been up to.
He’s got a photoset going on Flickr, too – I guess missing out on the mammoth queues is one plus point to being stuck at home:
Of course, it’s quite possible to find experiencing Worldcons through the medium of blogging to be rather dull and tedious… your mileage may vary. 😉
[Image courtesy Edward Willett – all rights reserved]
J K Rowling might be interested to see that suing people who make derivative works based on your own creations isn’t necessarily the best option. YA author Stephanie Myers Meyer took the opposite approach by encouraging her fans to produce a Lexicon of her Twilight Vampire books, and as a result has engendered a hard core of people who evangelise the books on her behalf. [via TechDirt]
Word-of-mouth is the best form of marketing there is, so they say – and getting someone else to do the hard work for you seems like a smart move in a networked world. As I’ve mentioned before, I think the importance of fan-fic in building an author’s career is set to increase over time, and it is in author attitudes to fan-created works that we’ll start seeing the split between writers who have embraced the internet and those who cling to the old paradigms of print.
One of the biggest cultural gaps between me as a teenager in the nineties and my parents was our understanding of how music worked as a diverse cultural landscape. To them, the Top 40 charts told you what was best, what was universally popular. To me, the same chart was a pretty good guide to what a certain demographic thought was best – a deluded demographic that certainly didn’t include me. Ah, the arrogance of youth… [image by Jono Rotten]
And this was long before ripping and burning, iTunes, Napster and MySpace, of course. So little wonder, then, that you can count the number of people who find the old-fashioned chart run-downs relevant on the fingers of one hand. Stepping into the void are IBM and the BBC, with a plan to make music stats more detailed, accurate and interesting to individuals with different tastes. Take it away, TechDirt:
Rather than assuming there’s just one single chart to rule them all, the system lets you create custom lists for a better understanding of more niche-targeted music. So, say, if you wanted to know who’s hot on YouTube and Last.fm in the indie and punk worlds among US listeners between the ages of 20 and 30, you can create just that list. Or, as per Will’s suggestion, you could find out what female Emo fans between the age of 15 and 20 are talking about on Bebo — and get that list.
Technologically this is just another web2.0 data mash-up, but I think it’s interesting from a cultural point of view because it derails the still-common complaint that the world is developing into a homogeneous monoculture, and demonstrates that narrowcast media like the internet encourages diversity rather than suppressing it.
Of course, you could argue that the tribal nature of music fandom is symptomatic of a Balkanisation of culture, in much the same way as genre fiction fandom… in which case we should probably go to a gig together and have a very drunken argument about it. 😉
“The future is not a story to entertain you” says Michael Anissimov, back from a long blogging break. He’s tired of people viewing the future through the lens of science fiction, which he sees as being a “baked in” cultural response:
If I were in charge of a futurist seminar, one of the first things I would probably do is discourage anyone from mentioning any fictional story whatsoever. I do believe that fiction does have something to teach us about future possibilities, but the bias towards interesting stories is so overwhelmingly strong that most casual thinking about the future is thoroughly contaminated by it. No narrative can predict the future, because the future is a blur of uncertainties from our perspective, and will only appear like a narrative in retrospect.
I think I can see where Anissimov going with this, but history has demonstrated time and time again that the more you bludgeon people with reasonable rational thinking about what’s to come, the more they screw their fingers into their ears and sing “la-la-la”.
Stories and metaphor may be flawed methods of considering a non-fictional future, but they’re pretty much the only way you can get ordinary people with busy lives to think beyond the next financial year – and I’d contend a flawed method that reaches many people is better than a perfect one that reaches a few hundred.
In other words – don’t blame the tool for the mistakes of the workmen.