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The stone canal

oil_rigJo Walton has a review of Ken MacLeod‘s The Sky Road over at Tor, looking at it as a standalone novel rather than the culmination of the Fall Revolution series:

The thing I never really appreciated, reading it as the culmination of the series, is the way in which Clovis’s story is shaped like fantasy. The woman comes to him through the fair, she is beautiful and perilous, she is something more than she seems, and they fall in love and she takes him into a world of enchantment.

I re-read this book for the third time recently and definitely agree with Jo’s conclusion that it works as a standalone novel, as well as an excellent choice as a introductory science fiction book.

[via Ken MacLeod][image from ccgd on flickr]

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Digital books are already here

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Amazon Kindle ebook reader screen-saverThe last few years or so has seen plenty of talk in publishing circles to the effect that the era of the digital book is imminent, but no one seems willing to accept that it’s already here.

The folk at Pan Macmillan’s Digitalist blog, however, have decided that the digital fiction future has already arrived, and that it’s time for publishers to stop sitting on their thumbs over electronic content delivery:

Beyond even games we already have the outlines of digital fiction. Projects like Inanimate Alice, the story games and ARGs, narrativised blogs and twittered fiction. All the tools and standards are now roughly in place. A wave of innovation has most likely come to a close as the “social media boom” hits the skids. We have been innovation addicts, slavishly jumping on each new trend, application and concept, moving without thinking. The dust is now settling and the landscape for digital fiction and digital books is clear.

To recap, digital books/fiction looks like this:

  • ebooks and ebook derivatives
  • “writerly” computer games
  • stories told used existing forms of social media (blogs etc)

They close with a right hook to the jaw:

Let’s not wait for the future anymore; it arrived in about 2006.

Zing! Perhaps the current tough times will be the eye of the needle that the camel of publishing has to slim down and wise up to pass through… I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. [image by tvol]

Blasphemous Geometries

To a Delightful Weekend in the Country: the New Generation of British SF

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This month in Blasphemous Geometries, Jonathan McCalmont takes a look at the new generation of British science fiction writers.

They can be hard to spot – for one thing, they’re not explicitly marketed as such. And furthermore, instead of describing futures defined by ever-increasing complexity, they seem preoccupied with the very British pursuit of “getting away from it all”.

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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In the November 2003 issue of Science Fiction Studies, Roger Luckhurst wrote an article entitled “Cultural Governance, New Labour and the British SF Boom”. In the article, he describes the emergence of a new generation of British SF authors in the context of a series of cultural shifts that neatly coincided with the election of New Labour in 1997. With the once glorious political force that was New Labour now consuming itself in flames of incompetence, cowardice, corruption and authoritarianism, it seems an appropriate time to look ahead to the next cycle of boom and bust in British Science Fiction; to a generation of authors intent upon leaving it all behind. Continue reading To a Delightful Weekend in the Country: the New Generation of British SF →

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Recession-proof industries: gold-farming

World of Warcraft gold vaultWhile meatspace endures lay-offs and plummeting valuations, it seems that there’s still plenty of life left in the virtual currencies business – an MMO gold-farming site has just been snapped up for US$10 million. [image by fernashes]

Gold-farming is an interesting business phenomenon for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that it deals in completely intangible goods. But it’s also out on the edge of legality when you consider the exploitative methods used to accrue the gold and items that are traded, and for most MMOs it’s against the rules to trade in in-world items beyond the game’s confines.

But it’s even more interesting to see the gold-farming market riding high while the real-world markets are tumbling, because it implies the two systems are connected but separate. Perhaps in the near-future people will be able to ride out the rough times by shifting their work into the virtual domains?

If we have any economists in the audience, I’d really welcome your input on this story; the interaction between real and virtual economies is as fascinating as it is baffling to me.

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Personal fabber for US$15k plus materials

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Following on from yesterday’s post about fabbing your own military hardware, you may be wondering exactly how much of a dent the cutting edge of consumer level 3D-printing technology would put in your pocketbook.

The answer? A personal fabber will cost you just a shade under US$15,000, though the actual printing materials are extra.

uPrint 3d printer/fabber

Ain’t a lot of money when you think about what it can do, is it? Certainly cheap enough that a reasonably organised criminal syndicate or terror organisation would consider it small change… [via Bruce Sterling; image courtesy Dimension Printing]

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