If you write short fiction with an eye to getting published, you’re probably hungry for advice on how to make your manuscript survive the slush-pile process. So give thanks to Doug Cohen, fiction editor for Realms of Fantasy Magazine, for sharing this insightful essay where he looks at the openings of genuine slush-pile survivor stories, and analyzes what it was about them that saved them from the default rejection note. Of course, not all parts of the writing process are quite so easily explained – witness Jim van Pelt talking about where story ideas come from. [Cross-posted to VCTB]
Robots play drums and perform heart ops
Pretty soon we won’t have to do anything for ourselves. Well, OK, that’s an exaggeration, but the list of tasks that robots can now perform as well as a human grows longer by the week. At the more mundane end of the scale (except in cultural terms, perhaps) Yaskawa Electric have fixed up one of their Motoman industrial robots to play taiko drums at a Japanese festival. Arguably more beneficial to the well-being of our species is the Sensei robotic arm at London’s St Mary’s Hospital, which is performing joystick-controlled heart surgery – with developers confident that a fully automated version is not far off.
Iranians accost GPS-equipped spy-squirrels?
The news out of the Middle East just gets weirder by the day – often with an animal flavour to it, so it seems. Less than a fortnight after the British military had to deny deploying a crack team of attack badgers into Basra, the Iranian government has announced that they have captured a number of squirrels with GPS and other spying kit embedded in their bodies. I’m very skeptical as to how true this story will turn out to be, but it’s still one hell of a headline. [Image by Ogwen]
“The Decaying Corpse of Genre Ficiton”
Ruth Franklin’s review of Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” starts off with a statement calculated to raise the ire of speculative fiction readers:
Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.
Ursula K. LeGuin wrote a delightful response that begins:
Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly… but who?
The illustration accompanying this entry is cropped from the original drawn by bellatrys inspired by the LeGuin piece. There’s already a chapbook (pdf link).
Overall, Franklin’s review is not as dismissive as the opening sentence implies, but instead reflects what I think of as a profound ignorance of thoughtful, entertaining work being done in genre fiction. Her ignorance is captured best in the inverse of a complement she pays to Chabon’s book, calling it “a ‘what if?’ story for adults.” For adults — as if anything published in genre fiction is written for children. Why do you think the literary establishment is so ignorant of genre? [mefi]
BBC Discovers the DARPA Grand Challenge
Despite the snide tone of my title, BBC’s article on the present and future of self-driving cars is an interesting overview of developments since the last running of the Grand Challenge, and a hint at what the world might look like after these cars go mainstream. I wonder if any of the contestants are using evolutionary computing techniques?