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Writers and thinkers: contribute to The Future We Deserve

Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m supposed to have gone already. But before I head for the airport, I have a quick message for writer/thinker/futurist types in the audience from my good friend Vinay Gupta. Take it away, Vinay:

The Future We Deserve

Vinay Gupta is looking for contributors for a new collaborative futures project, The Future We Deserve. The deadline is one week from now, the brief is fully open for any short (500 word!) essays on the topic, and all essays are Creative Commons licensed.

The goal of the book is to kickstart a new conversation about our personal and collective role in creating the future. You can read the open submissions queue, and sign up to write at the Collaboratory.

Go join in!

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What’s the Beef? On Faith and Food

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Just what is the relationship between faith and food? Nearly every major religion (and quite a few minor ones) have dietary restrictions of one sort or another – though they’re never the same!

Jews don’t eat pork or seafood. Muslims don’t eat pork either (and don’t drink alcohol), while Hindus don’t eat beef. Christians, it seems, will eat anything (including the body of the Christ) but otherwise frown on cannibalism, while traditional Melanesian practices don’t. And everyone knows Scientologists won’t eat thetans.

Here’s a handy list, courtesy of CNN.

Does the path to true enlightenment lie in the right meal? Could a new religion be founded on a secret teaching of sacred recipes? Is God living in my stomach?

I ask myself these sort of questions all the time. Why is bacon the Jewish Kryptonite? Why did David Blaine hang from a crane inside a glass box without food and water for forty days at London Bridge, and why did people have barbecues directly below?

Someone I know in Vanuatu once met a cannibal at a party.

“What does human flesh taste like?” she asked.

“Chicken,” he said. (I’m not, in fact, making this story up).

Why does everything taste like chicken?

It’s not like I have the answers. Are some foods holier than others? Are some foods evil? Is Nigella Lawson conclusive proof that there is a God?

And what do atheists eat? What do aliens taste like?

I suspect that, one day, we’ll go to the stars. We’ll find alien planets, and land on them and, most likely, we’ll eat what we find.

Remember when Arthur C. Clarke predicted the satellite? Well, pay attention now. I am going to make a science fictional prediction.

Lavie’s Law (formulated September 7th, in the very science fictional year 2010, at around 11am): Aliens taste like chicken.

Lavie Tidhar is the author of The Bookman (Angry Robot Books) and follow-ups Camera Obscura and Night Music, both forthcoming from the same publisher. His latest book, novella Cloud Permutations, is just out from PS Publishing in the UK. His story In Pacmandu is this month’s featured fiction on Futurismic.

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Please welcome our esteemed guests!

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OK, so, let’s cut to the point here: yours truly is going on holiday for a week, starting tomorrow. And we’re talking a proper holiday, as in a period of time devoid of the usual demands of one’s working day, and – more specifically in my case – a period of time during which I won’t be connected to the internet*. Like, at all**.

But fear not, faithful followers of Futurismic – for I have drafted in some friends to mind the place while I’m away, and to discuss interesting things with you. Who are these people, exactly? Well, I’m glad you asked…

  • Gareth L Powell has actually guested here before, and was a regular link-out fixture back in the days when a bunch of us were still rocking the Friday Flash Fiction movement. Gareth has just recently sold his second novel to Solaris Books, and is in the process of finishing it. He’s also a good friend, a fiercely dedicated writer and a very very nice guy. His mutant power is the ability to discern stress fracture points in Victorian-era railway bridges from a surprisingly large distance away.
  • Aliette de Bodard‘s first novel, Servant of the Underworld – a kind of mystery-fantasy mash-up set in an alternate timeline where the Aztecs are still a major power – was published this year by Angry Robot, with sequels to come. Aliette is half French and half Vietnamese, a self-identified tech-geek and computer obsessive, and very very smart. Few are the novelists who get published in what is effectively their third language, after all! Her mutant power is the ability to transmute base metals into pre-doped semiconductor wafers just by looking at them.
  • Lavie Tidhar probably needs little introduction; it seems you can’t so much as turn a corner on the intertubes these days without bumping into a new short story of his (including this month’s offering right here at Futurismic, no less). Seemingly in constant motion across the entire surface of the planet, Lavie somehow finds time to maintain the World SF news blog as well as writing his own work and editing anthologies, and I’m very grateful he’s agreed to spend some of whatever precious little time he has left on posting stuff here in my absence. His mutant power is the ability to cram seven extra hours into the space usually occupied by twenty-four… or to unfailingly locate chilled beer in extremely remote locations. Possibly both.

I don’t know exactly what my guests are going to talk about, because I’ve pretty much told them to talk about whatever they fancy, provided there’s some connection – however tenuous! – to Futurismic‘s usual “near-future speculation” remit. The posting density will probably be thinner than usual because – unlike my sad hermit self – these wonderful people have real lives to attend to as well. Even so, I think you’ll enjoy having a few fresh voices on the mic while I’m away!

So please extend a welcome to my esteemed guests, and be sure to comment on their posts; I’m very grateful to Gareth, Aliette and Lavie for stepping in to help me, and I hope you will be, too.

Now, I need to do some packing… 🙂

[ * Yes, I’m really looking forward to it. The last twelve months have not exactly panned out the way I thought they were going to, to say the least, and a chance to step off the merry-go-round for a few moments and collect my thoughts is much needed. The prospect of sitting in warm sunshine and reading for pure pleasure is also rather appealing. ]

[ ** Well, I might tweet once or twice, but that’s pretty much it. The regulatory bodies may have capped cellphone roaming charges for data in Europe, but they’re still pretty terrifying… and that’s all the excuse I need for a week-long digital media fast. Time to make some serious inroads on the old To-Be-Read stack… 🙂 ]

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What exactly is a cyborg?

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

The word cyborg makes for a great example of rapid semantic drift; in the fifty years since it was coined, its definition has both broadened and narrowed, depending on who is using it, and to what ends. As an early salvo in the 50 Posts about Cyborgs series (as mentioned a few days ago), Tim Maly takes it back to basics:

I want to present you with a different vision of cyborgs, one that derives in part from the work of feminist theorist Donna Haraway, author of A Cyborg Manifesto.

In it, she argues that we are all and have always been cyborgs, hybrid entities that combine biology, culture, and technology into a single blurry unit. Haraway wants to move away from the essentialist narratives of gender, race, and politics but in doing so, she ends up taking the rest of us along with her.

There has never been a moment when we did not integrate with tools.

(Rather reminiscent of of Timothy Taylor’s theory of the artificial ape, no?)

Our tools define and shape us, they tell us who we are. We use them to extend our literal selves out into the world. When you get into an accident, you say “she hit me” not “her car hit me” and not “her car hit my car”.

We are embraced and enveloped by the technosphere and even if we try to escape and smash the system, we find we are part of it.

50 Posts About Cyborgs is going to be a really interesting collection of work… things will be quiet(ish) here at Futurismic for the next week and a bit, so you might want to head on over there to bolster your daily diet of geeky brainfoods.

But why are things going to be quiet(ish) here? Fear not! The next post will explain it all… 🙂

Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001