Tag Archives: science fiction

Fiction

NEW FICTION: IS THIS YOUR DAY TO JOIN THE REVOLUTION? by Genevieve Valentine

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If you asked me for three words to describe this month’s Futurismic fiction offering, I’d give you “short, sharp and timely”. Genevieve Valentine wastes no words in revitalising (and spoofing) the classic sf dystopias in this brisk story of an all-too-plausible tomorrow. “Is This Your Day To Join The Revolution?” Read on and find out…

Is This Your Day To Join the Revolution?

by Genevieve Valentine

When Liz left her building, Disease Control workers were standing on the corners, handing out pills and little paper cups of Coke.

“Do you need one?” the old lady asked, holding up a handful of paper masks stamped with ads for Lavender Fields Sterile-Milled Soap. Liz pulled out the one she kept in her bag, and the lady smiled.

The TV in her subway car showed “What You Can Do on a Date.” The young man and woman went to the fair twice – once where he screwed everything up, and again where he helped her into the Ferris Wheel and handed her a paper mask before he put on his own.

The movie closed with swelling music and a reminder in cursive: ARE YOU DUE FOR A DATE? CHECK WITH YOUR DOCTOR. Continue reading NEW FICTION: IS THIS YOUR DAY TO JOIN THE REVOLUTION? by Genevieve Valentine →

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Tobias Buckell on marine conservation and his next novel

I like to keep an eye on what former members of the Futurismic family are getting up to. Back when I joined the crew, one of my fellow bloggers was Tobias Buckell; nowadays he’s too busy with writing novels to contribute here, and bravo to him for that – it’s always nice to see good people getting along in the world.

Toby has just been interviewed by marine conservation site The Reef Tank, and in amongst talking about his connection to the oceans – he grew up aboard a boat in the Caribbean – he drops some hints about his next novel project:

My next novel is called Arctic Rising. For a while now in short fiction I’ve written a few stories that play around with the consequences of failed cities, ecological disaster, global warming, and so on. I’ve never thought of myself as well informed enough to write about these topics, but looking around I see very little fiction engaging these concepts. It comes back to that background awareness I have, I’ve never thought I knew as much as I actually do. Before the hurricane season of 1995, when we lost our boat, divers were talking in the boating community about how much warmer the water was deep below the surface than normal. We figured that might mean a rough storm season, and we were right. One near hurricane and two hurricanes all in a near row.

So I’ve started writing some stories about what happens when the polar ice cap opens up to become a regular ocean as it melts, with shipping traffic and nations jockeying for resources up there. And all that thinking about that with my fellow writers Paolo Bacigalupi and Karl Schroeder convinced me my next book should be about this sort of stuff that’s thirty or so years down the road.

That’s one to watch out for – I’ll be interested to see how Toby’s novel-length work comes out with a near-future setting instead of space-opera scope. If you ever want to run any exclusive excerpts, Toby, you know who to email, right? 😉

Today's Tomorrows

3D Printing: a world of design

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This topic started brewing in my head at Worldcon in Montreal, as I sat in on a panel on 3D printing by Tom Easton. 3D printing isn’t new to me, and the speed at which it’s advancing shouldn’t have been a surprise. However, it did shock me a bit. I found myself dreaming of 3D printers for a few days. After all, I could already buy one. Continue reading 3D Printing: a world of design →

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Scriths and legends: hidden portals a possibility

hiddenResearchers in Hong Kong are developing technologies that could one day lead to hidden portals [1]:

In the research paper, the researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Fudan University in Shanghai describe the concept of a “a gateway that can block electromagnetic waves but that allows the passage of other entities”
…
The gateway, which is now much closer to reality, uses transformation optics and an amplified scattering effect from an arrangement of ferrite materials called single-crystal yttrium-iron-garnet that force light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation in complicated directions to create a hidden portal.

Previous attempts at an electromagnetic gateway were hindered by their narrow bandwidth, only capturing a small range of visible light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. This new configuration of metamaterials however can be manipulated to have optimum permittivity and permeability – able to insulate the electromagnetic field that encounters it with an appropriate magnetic reaction.

Whilst I’m not entirely sure how this metamaterial in supposed to behave, or what is meant by “other entities” in this context, such a substance has overtones of the Ringworld construction material described in Larry Niven‘s Ringworld series, which IIRC was impermeable to 40% of neutrino emissions, and under the application of a particular instrument would allow people to walk through it.

[1]: The article is somewhat vague on how exactly this portal will work in reality, but I gather that it works either like a perfected “holographic mirror” that you can walk through, or else simply a glass-like sheet that can become reflective when required to. In any case

[from h+ Magazine][image from fdecomite on flickr]

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Wintermute vs. Rachel Rosen

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aiHere is a fine exploration of the differences and similarities in the use of artificial intelligences in Philip K. Dick and William Gibson’s writing:

Turing, whose purpose is to prevent AIs from developing too far, mirror the bounty hunters in Androids — the sole purpose of each is to control and destroy rogue intelligences, although in both novels their roles are shown from very different perspectives. In Neuromancer Turing are genuinely afraid of AIs: “You have no care for your species,” one Turing agent says to Case, “for thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons”.

Both Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Neuromancer portray artificial intelligences as lacking in empathy, but in different ways and for different reasons.

But would a human equivalent AI necessarily be lacking in empathy? Are humans as empathetic as we’d like to believe?

[via this tweet from SciFi Rules][image from agroni on flickr]