Tag Archives: science fiction

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Charlie Stross on signing tour of the US

charlesstross_cthulhu Futurismic readers based in the US should be pleased to hear that hyper-prolific British science fiction writer Charlie Stross is being whisked off for a promotional tour of the States by Ace Books. The dates:

Tuesday, October 9th

12am – Amazon.com Fishbowl session at Amazon’s Union Station Offices in Seattle.

7pm – a public reading (and signing) at University Bookstore at the Science Fiction Museum (325 5th Avenue North, Seattle).

Wednesday, October 10th

2pm – reading and signing at Google in Kirkland. (NB: Google staff only, sadly.)

Thursday, October 11th

7:30pm – reading and signing at Powell’s City of Books (1005 W. Burnside Street, Portland).

Friday, October 12th

1pm – reading and signing at Google in Mountain View.

7pm – another reading and signing at Borders at 400 Post Street, San Francisco.

There are also plenty of radio and magazine interviews in between, apparently, so you should be able to catch the man in action somehow, wherever you may live. And I recommend you do so – I’ve had the privilege of seeing Stross speak a number of times, and in addition to being a fine writer he’s as sharp as a tack, and a very funny man indeed. [Image ganked from the (now sadly defunct) Table of Malcontents blog]

[tags]science fiction, authors, Charlie Stross, tour[/tags]
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UC-Santa Cruz to put novelist Robert Heinlein’s archive online

heinlein.jpg

According to the San Jose Mercury News, the entire contents of the Robert Heinlein archive will be placed online thanks to an partnership between the University of California-Santa Cruz and the Heinlein Prize Trust. The archive, which has been housed in the UC-Santa Cruz Library’s Special Collections, was recently scanned to preserve them digitally. Eventually all of Heinlein’s work, including manuscripts and notes, will be put online. More information can be found at the Heinlein Prize Trust.

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The Brain from Planet X

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The Brain from Planet X CD cover In my initial post, did I not threaten you with promise you the occasional post combining my love of SF and musical theatre?

Behold (and listen to excerpts from) The Brain from Planet X. It is, indeed, an SF (well, sci-fi) musical! It invaded Los Angeles last year, and now it’s invading New York.

Read about the creator’s, um, brainwave, here.

(Via BroadwayWorld.)

UPDATE: Also playing at the New York Musical Theatre Festival: a musical version of the 1980s SF flick The Last Starfighter!

[tags]science fiction, music, musical theatre[/tags]

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Is science fiction still a distinct genre?

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Promotional build for Neal Stepheson's Snow Crash in Second LifeVia a number of places (though I saw it at Posthuman Blues first) comes a post at Mondolithic Studios which asks (rhetorically) whether science fiction is still a distinct genre. To quote:

I think what confuses some people is the fact that Science Fiction isn’t really a distinct genre unto itself anymore. It’s mutated into dozens of sub-genres and movements, liberally exchanged genetic material with Fantasy and social satirism and burrowed into the internet in the form of hundreds of thousands of scifi and fantasy-oriented blogs, galleries, fanzines, vlogs, podcasts and short story webzines.

Given that you read Futurismic (which is a paying market for fiction, and will continue to be one just as soon as we can get the site aesthetics fixed up so as to present the stories the way they deserve), it’s an easy to assume that you’re in alignment with that opinion. But maybe not – what do you think? Is there still a definable body to science fiction, or is it more of a conceptual bundle that various forms of entertainment partake of in varying degrees? [Image by Hiro Sheridan]