All posts by Tom James

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Steampunk musings

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steam_crownAn interesting comment on the popularity of the clanking, clinker-creating subgenre of Science Fiction known as Steampunk:

Whether you’re reading and identifying with Girl Genius or making yourself a pair of functioning telescopic brass goggles, the fact is that when you have to get your hands or brain dirty puzzling out how stuff works, you can’t be blasé about technological miracles — you’re forced to realize what miracles we’ve actually wrought.

This is cheerful stuff, and very much inkeeping with this comment from Cory Doctorow‘s recent book, Little Brother:

“Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they can lighten your work — if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.“

We must continue to comprehend and understand our technology, lest we become a slave to it.

[via Beyond the Beyond][image from Angelrays on flickr]

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Interventions in SF

Ace SF writer Ken MacLeod points to a compelling essay on intervention (as in “liberal intervention“) at The Cedar Lounge Revolution:

I guess anyone with even a glancing interest in science fiction might have noticed that contemporary issues are beginning to appear within the pages of recently published books. Sometimes these are clearly linked into near history.

Some familiar names as well as some authors I’m not familiar with – good stuff.

[via The Early Days of a Better Nation]

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Cheaper to meter

meteringKevin Kelly has written a typically intriguing post on ubiquitous metering: what if everything were measured, monitored, recorded, and indexed?

Imagine a world were any set of historical data was available to you. Everyone has their own favorite data stream from history they would love to have. Such a trove would transform our lives. For that reason, monitoring everything will become commonplace. Cheaply metering data, in fact, is what propels the free economy. Metering is a type of attention. Products and services will be given away in exchange for the meta data about their use. Data about the free is now more valuable than the free thing itself.

This is an interesting idea, very much in the vein of Charles Stross’ brilliant The Beginning of History.

I suppose a Panopticon of sorts is fairly inevitable. Hopefully the transition to a world where everything is recorded all the time will be well-handled, and won’t be used for authoritarian or nefarious purposes.

It’ll be a massive change, perhaps one of the biggest social changes ever.

[from Kevin Kelly’s blog][image from Unhindered by Talent on flickr]

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Eoin Colfer to write Hitchhiker’s book

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a_galaxyIrish young-adult SF author Eoin Colfer has been given permission to write the sixth book in the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, from The Register:

Colfer, 43, admitted: “My first reaction was semi-outrage that anyone should be allowed to tamper with this incredible series. But on reflection I realised that this is a wonderful opportunity to work with characters I have loved since childhood and give them something of my own voice while holding on to the spirit of Douglas Adams.”

Um. I quite liked the Artemis Fowl series, it’ll be interesting to see what Colfer makes of HGttG.

The only person I’d really trust with a new HGttG novel is Terry Pratchett, but that would mean fewer Discworld books, which would be a bad thing.

Still, Colfer seems to have the right attitude, I hope he does well.

[story from The Register][image from pingnews.com on flickr]

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DARPA interested in Casimir effect

golden_ballsThe Casimir effect occasionally shows up in SF has a way of holding wormholes open, or providing antigravity, or travelling in time.

Sort of a bit like a “flux capacitor.”

However unlike flux capacitors, it seems though that real life scientists at DARPA are also interested in it though, having issued a request for proposals:

The goal of this program is to develop new methods to control and manipulate attractive and repulsive forces at surfaces based on engineering of the Casimir Force. One could leverage this ability to control phenomena such as adhesion in nanodevices, drag on vehicles and many other interactions of interest…

Quite interesting.

Could DARPA be trundling towards creating something as revolutionary as the Internet?

Only time will tell.

[story from The Register][image from Mike Schmid on flickr]