How Fast Are You?

Another audio story I really liked recently was “The Things” by Peter Watts, as heard on the Clarkesworld Magazine podcast. It’s the story of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), told from the perspective of the shape-shifting, infectious alien. I don’t want to say much more about it, but if you haven’t seen movie in a while, watch it, then follow it up¹ with this story.

Mr. Watts is a biologist by trade, and his writing is always grounded in hard science, complete with exhaustive bibliographies. His stories are also pretty damned dark, which I love. I first discovered him through his Rifters series, Starfish, Maelstrom, and Behemoth, all of which are available online, are really dark, and chock full of good sciencey stuff.

His most recent novel, Blindsight, is also available online, and really baked my noodle². It’s an absolutely fascinating exploration on the nature of intelligence and self-awareness, and how the two are, to a certain extent, mutually exclusive. If you’re interested in cognition at all, it’s well worth your time. Plus, it’s got a space vampire.

Finally, Mr. Watts is also the fellow who produced the amazing dead-pan presentation “Vampire Domestication: Taming Yesterday’s Nightmares for a Better Tomorrow” which he first presented at a con in 2005. Again, if you’re interested in science, biology and/or vampires, well worth your time.

More audio fiction reviews to come, methinks.

I’ve been listening to a lot of short fiction audio stories lately¹, and I’d like to share one in particular with you: PodCastle’s recording of “Biographical Notes to ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-planes’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum” by Benjamin Rosenbaum. That’s not a typo, by the way; the author’s name is in the title itself, which will make sense when you hear the story.

This story first appeared in All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, and it’s a real treat. I love stories that have alternate history, airships, swashed buckles, world-as-myth, and a wicked sense of humor. This story has all of that, plus well-informed philosophical musings on the nature of writing, imagination, causality, and our perceptions thereof.

Go listen to it on PodCastle, or you can read it for free online.

This weekend, machine project — our favorite gallery/hackspace — is traveling through space and time!

Friday, March 6th, 8pm. An evening of fiction, poetry, film and mechanical oddities with scifi author Mark von Schlegell (visiting from Germany, and author of VENUSIA and the upcoming MERCURY STATION), Claire Phillips (BLACKMARKET BABIES) and Anthony McCann (FATHER OF NOISE, MOONGARDEN, Machine Poet Laureate, you know — Anthony). Curated by Annie O’Malley.
-> More info here.

Saturday March 7th, 8pm. A talk on the rise and fall of civilizations, untold wealth, extraordinary events, our momentous future and what these have to do with materials innovations.
-> More info here.

Sunday, March 8th, 1pm. Dorkbot! (time traveler’s courtesy note: remember, it’s Daylight Savings Time the night before.)
-> More info here.

Sunday, March 8th, 8pm. A rousing sing-a-long where audience members will learn a unique, alternative musical language and by the end of the night become a choir, singing traditional hymns from the 19th century — all voices are welcome, a willingness to sing is the only requirement.
-> More info here.

With any luck, I’ll get to go to at least two of these. It’s anyone’s guess which though. See you there?

There’s been a bit of discontent voiced by Star Trek trufans about JJ Abrams refresh of the ST universe¹, especially the redesigned Enterprise. Quoth The Underwire:

Some fans weren’t pleased with the retooled ship and, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Abrams said: “The key is to appreciate that there are purists and fans of Star Trek who are going to be very vocal if they see things that aren’t what they want. But I can’t make this movie for readers of Nacelles Monthly who are only concerned with what the ship’s engines look like.”

While Abrams may wish to reconsider antagonizing the core fan group for his new movie months before it hits theaters, Trekkers Anthony Pascale, Tobias Richter and Thorsten Wulff teamed to design a cover for the magazine Abrams hopes you’ll never read.

Nicely played, Gents.

Here’s a new trailer Sleep Dealer, an independent SF film from first time feature director Alex Rivera which won the Feature Film and Screenwriting awards at Sundance last year. Here’s how the filmmakers describe the movie:

Sleep Dealer is our tomorrow today, a corporation-controlled, militarized near future where the United States has successfully closed its borders. Escaping from his home in Mexico, Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Peña) arrives in Tijuana, “City of the Future,” where he meets Luz (Leonor Varela), who sells her recorded memories on the Internet. A strange and complex relationship is set in motion between Memo and Luz, who wants to obtain his memories to sell to an anonymous client.

I don’t know much more about it, but the trailer intrigues me: (continue reading…)

The Sci-Fi Channel has a new promo campaign. Let’s take a look at the three posters that Saatchi & Saatchi came up with, shall we?

I like the concept, but the execution is just cartoony enough to feel like pandering. Maybe it’s just me, but I disapprove.

Via Laughing Squid > I Believe in Advertising.

Who’s coming back to TV with all new pansexual scifi action?

Why yes, I do watch too much television. What’s it to you?

Joss Whedon continues to tease his trufans with vague promises of more Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. But at what cost?

So … what kind of Dr. Horrible? DVDs? A movie? “Puppets,” Whedon says, with tongue in cheek. “Shadow puppets is the latest idea. … Beyond the fact that I’m excited about pursuing that story and that world, I love the fact that, you know, you can make something and just put it up without, you know, without having to reshoot the whole thing. Tra la!” (That last bit was an oblique reference to Fox, which got Whedon to dump his initial pilot for Dollhouse.)

via SCI FI Wire: Huzzah! Whedon promises there will be more Dr. Horrible!.

Charlie Stross went on vacation recently, read some pulpy books, and when he got back, posted a bit about the state of the SF and horror genres, and what their respective best-sellers say about the state of the reading public.

For starters, the strange rebirth of the horror field is quite illuminating. We used to know what horror was about — it was about Killer Whelks menacing a quiet English seaside town, from which a strong-jawed but quiet fellow and a not-totally-pathetic female lead might eventually hope to escape with the aid of a stout two-by-four and a lot of whelkish squelching after trials, tribulations, and gruesome scenes of seafood-induced cannibalism. Then Stephen King came along and transcended, becoming a mini-genre of his own. Attempts were made to replicate the phenomenon, but instead the bottom dropped out of the market.

The new horror isn’t about whelks, killer or otherwise: it’s about vampires, werewolves, and middle America. With police and detectives. Hell, you could even call it cop/vampire slash and have done with it, except that you’d be missing out on the tedious Manichean dualist drivel into which all these series eventually descend (unless they end up as soft porn instead — a very lucrative market, as Laurel Hamilton and her imitators have discovered — call it the fang-fucker subgenre). For the sad fact is, there seems to be some kind of law about contemporary American horror getting into furry sex by volume three then suffering a fit of remorse and going all god-bothering and Jesus-fondling by volume six. It must be all the crosses and holy water they need to fend off the blood sucking fiends, I suppose, but the endless re-hashing of tired old religious-sexual neuroses is getting to be a stereotype of the genre, and it’s not healthy. Horror isn’t about being born-again: it’s about bloody screaming catharsis, not a warm security blanket of belief that blocks out all menaces. But in the new horror, if the bloodsuckers are remotely sympathetic the story turns into some kind of supernatural redemption epic, and if they’re not, the protagonist eventually goes all googly-eyed and born-again.

What an interesting &mdash and frankly, sad &mdash point. And I can’t say I disagree with him. But what do you expect from American culture? We use sex to sell everything, then tell people that sex is a sin against God and nature.

He also draws some conclusions from the rise of the alternate history sub-genre of SF:

Probably the fastest-growing sub-genre in the swamp is alternate history. I’ve been known to dabble in it myself, I hasten to admit: it can be fun and educational, a desert topping and a floor wax. But mostly floor wax these days, I find, because a lot of authors who should know better are turning to it in a mad collective ostrich-head-burying exercise rather than engaging with the world as it is.

Yeah, that’s pretty much dead on. Americans don’t want to think about the here-and-now, ’cause it sucks. Between Dubya, bombs in our Gatorade and our iPods, a costly and perhaps illegal war, constant reminders of the “threat” of terrorism, the NSA spying on our fellow citizens, oil dependency, poverty, pending thermonuclear war with Iraq, pending war with/between everyone in the middle east, the end of the world as predicted by the Aztec calendar or whatever, etc., etc., ad nauseam, people want to escape. Fans of alt-history must find a great deal of solace in a revised world similar to our own. It doesn’t require a lot of thinking or the absorption of new ideas, just a different flavor of today. How nice. No wonder it sells so well.

But all is not lost.

Oh, there are exceptions. Vernor Vinge is swimming strongly against the flow in “Rainbows End”, where he envisages a future just a couple of decades hence where the machines dance. Peter Watts is doing stuff with the genre that just shouldn’t be possible (evolutionary biology, exobiology, and vampires in spaaaaaace — all done with a deft touch of plausibility and a refreshingly pleasant dose of bleakly nihilistic existential despair). And there are a few others.

In closing, let me point you to one of the others: Chris Nakashima-Brown. He’s got links to a bunch of his short-stories on the intertubes and in print, one of my favorites being Welcome Back Qatar. Good, smart, reality-based stuff.