OK, hold everything – and take the three short minutes required to watch this video of a modular robot reassembling itself after being kicked apart:
There’s a hundred science fictional thoughts in my head right now – one of which is the twinge of guilt I felt when they kicked the thing in the first place.
What was the first thing that flashed into your head when you were watching that video? [Tip o’ the bowler to m1k3y the grinder – cheers, man!]
Wednesday 30th April sees the presentation ceremony for this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel published in 2007. Never short on controversy, this year’s shortlist has generated plenty of discussion and debate – no less for the novels that are missing from it than for those that are present.
It’s Futurismic‘s great privilege to feature this round-up review of the Clarke Award shortlist by noted science fiction novelist, critic and academic Adam Roberts. So settle down with a good big cup of coffee, let Professor Roberts walk you through the shortlist … and then place your bets on the winner in the comments!
The Shortlist:
There’s been a deal of pother about this year’s Clarke shortlist, more even than this often-controversial event usually generates. Surprise at the omission of a number of highly regarded titles – we might mention, say, McDonald’s Brasyl and Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union – fuelled bloggish mutterings about hidden agendas, panderings to Evil Mainstream Lit and a desire to generate Turner Award-style notoriety rather than simply to choose last year’s best SF novel.
The muttering boiled down to a sense that the Clarke judges were liable to corrupt the nation’s youth and ought all to drink hemlock without ado. The question, though. is a simple one: do these six titles constitute a list of the best sf novels published in the UK last year? Continue reading The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist 2008 – a Round-up Review
Over the weekend, the Nebula Awards Ceremony took place in Austin Texas. Hosted by the Science Fiction Writer’s Association of America (SFWA), the following excellent works from last year won the top prizes:
Novel: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – Chabon, Michael (HarperCollins, May07)
Novella: “Fountain of Age” – Kress, Nancy (Asimov’s, Jul07)
Novelette: “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” – Chiang, Ted (F&SF, Sep07)
Short Story: “Always” – Fowler, Karen Joy (Asimov’s, apr/may07)
Script: Pan’s Labyrinth – del Toro, Guillermo (Time/Warner, Jan07)
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Rowling, J. K. (Scholastic Press, Jul07)
Damon Knight Grand Master for 2008: Michael Moorcock
Personally I’m delighted to see Chabon and del Toro get recognised for their work. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a tremendously rich alternative history detailing a Jewish settlement in Sitka Alaska coming to the end of its 50 year lease.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and as the economic crunch digs in across the Western world we’ll probably see a rise in habits like urban mining. [image by HeyPaul]
Urban mining is a hip term grafted onto an un-hip task that’s been a major source of employment (and illness) in places like China for quite some time. It hinges on the idea that certain consumer electronic devices that are perceived to have no value as a working item thanks to obsolescence (hello, old cell-phone!) contain residual value in the form of the metals used in their construction. Urban mining is the process of digging the value out of dead technology.
If you’ve read some of my flash fiction pieces you’ll know that this is a subject that fascinates me, and I believe it will become a big component of any future economy, especially in developing nations.
What I find saddest of all is that the fancy “urban mining” moniker is a way of covering up the contempt we feel for a process that we already pay lip-service to – it’s just recycling, after all. The only difference is that the world’s poor can’t afford to not do it. [Via Posthuman Blues – cheers, Mac!]
Greetings, fiction fans – Friday means freebies!
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Before we get going with the linkage, it’s worth pointing out that Wednesday was the first anniversary of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. What that means in real terms is that there’s bucket-loads of extra free fiction from all manner of writers spattered all over the intarwebs, and it’s all collected in one convenient LiveJournal Community.
I’ve not checked it out yet (I kinda phear t3h LiveJournal, as I imagine it has the power to erode the last few precious hours of free time I have), but I think we can safely assume that’ll be a real rabbit-hole for fiction fans. Please report back if you find anything particularly good in there that deserves a link of its own!
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OK, so back to the usual suspects. It’s just the one from Manybooks.net this week:
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Nathan Lilly dropped me a note to remind us all that part 2 of A R Yngve‘s “A Man Called Mister Brown” is online at SpaceWesterns.com this week, along with some non-fictional stuff about BSG.
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Another new piece goes up over at Subterranean Online – “Your Collar” by Elizabeth Bear.
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I have stumbled upon (and added to the sidebar) another online fiction outlet called Lone Star Stories, which I discovered thanks to the effusive praise Jeremiah Tolbert had for “The Wreck of the Grampus” by Jeremy Adam Smith.
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There’s another teaser/deleted scene piece (which all seem to get filed under the excellent ‘WTF BBQ’ category) over at Shadow Unit:
“Lau was a Valley Girl, dammit. She could figure out how to use a simple gas grill.
And that was half the problem. She could figure out how to use a simple gas grill, and that was not what this was. This looked like the navigation panel on the Starship Enterprise, and not the Sulu-era one with the slider and a couple of nonfunctional push buttons in primary colors, either.”
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Small Beer Press have evidently developed a taste for this free Creative Commons downloads business. This week they’ve set free Maureen F McHugh‘s short story collection Mothers & Other Monsters:
“… in her luminous, long-awaited début collection, award-winning novelist Maureen F. McHugh wryly and delicately examines the impacts of social and technological shifts on families. Using beautiful, deceptively simple prose, she illuminates the relationship between parents and children and the expected and unexpected chasms that open between generations.”
Sounds good to me! That said, so does a small beer … it is Friday, after all!
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I got an email from a chap called Michael Roberts, who says:
“Back in January I wrote a little novelette which is probably not too publishable (or so I read; at 8743 words it’s really too long to put in a magazine). So I figured, why not put it online? And so I finally got off my figurative butt and did so. Now if I could only think of a good title …”
For future reference, Michael, there’s plenty of venues for fiction that length – so you’ll know for next time. If you go and read it, be sure to drop Michael a suggestion for his title!
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Which brings us round to the march of the Friday Flash Fictioneers!
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And that’s about your lot – I reckon the IPSTPD community should provide more than enough material to be going on with. So until next week, keep your eyes and ears peeled for more free fiction on the web, and drop us a line with your tips!
Have a great weekend, too.