Science fiction stalwart Ben Bova has a column at Bonita News where he rails against what he sees as a rising tide of moronitude that threatens to drown the human race itself. I have some sympathy with what he’s saying, but I very much doubt that getting more people to read science fiction would make a difference. [SF Signal]

Never let it be said that genre fiction is a staid and unchanging backwater of literature. Andrew Wheeler of the SF Book Club rounds up three newly-birthed (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) literary manifestos that have shambled in from the wilds of the blogosphere. Of course, clockpunk doesn’t have a manifesto as such, but you can bet that now BoingBoing have pointed it out, we’ll be hearing a lot more about it.

Regular readers of Futurismic will know the name of Jason Stoddard as one of our more popular fiction writers. He recently had a story called ‘Fermi Packet’ published in Talebones Magazine, about an alien invasion of a post-singularity human civilisation, and featuring a digital composite of Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds as its main character. “That’s a great story,” I told him, “you should release it as a free download to the blogosphere at large.” And what do you know, that’s exactly what he did. So go download and read ‘Fermi Packet’, some top-grade geek science fiction.

Well, according to most scientists, at least – and the ones that disagree say time travel is ‘impractical’, which when you look at their calculations may be somewhat of an understatement. But hey, we can still do time travel in fiction, which has got to be the most comfortable method. [Tobias Buckell]

There’s no aspect of life that electronics manufacturers think isn’t worth selling us enhancements for – witness a patent for using wireless devices to set personal goals for exercise, or to add some wager spice to one-on-one competition. Whatever happened to ‘last one to the bar buys the beers’?