Be sure to attend the launch event for our anthology, 2034: Writing Rochester's Futures on Saturday, 31 July 2010. See http://r-spec.org/content/2034-launch-event for more information.
On Friday, 30 July 2010, at 1pm, Alicia Henn and Craig DeLancey join Jack Garner on 1370 Connection to discuss the 2034 anthology and its launch, the next anthology, and the group overall. Check out http://r-spec.org/content/r-spec-radio for more.
The skills of these authors in delivering so much, so entertainingly! Coping with sheer tsunamis of information seems to have become a potent aspect of human life, to the extent that it rivals coping with society, coping with pain, or coping with oneself. Characters in a story must often spend time (and in suspense) distinguishing a lethal figure from a confusing ground, turning infodumping into an increasingly powerful plot tool.
Great list, great examples, broad reach.
We live in the era when information overwhelms us, and finding our way through it is a journey worth the tale.
Alas, "Melvin" is not "Rudy." A lot of the original content got entered by Melvin, or rather, by the person logged-in as Melvin at the time. Sometimes things still show up as 'Melvin' when they should be someone else, just because that person doesn't have an account on the website.
As for "Mai", I'll let David answer that for himself ;-).
It's also easy to envision a nightmare scenario where the bacterium runs rampant and solidifies sandy soils all over the place.
Who can say what effect that would have on existing plant and insect ecosystems?
We've seen analogous changes before that have had devastating consequences. Kudzu, for example, or any of the several species of carp introduced to North America for aquaculture. The scale here is much greater, though. We've reached a point in our technological development where, because the actions are on such a vast scale, our mistakes also cost radically more than they did in the past.
Good work! Your post/article is an excellent example of why I keep comming back to read your excellent quality content that is forever updated. Thank you!
On Dune, no: Got right through it the first time. The stuff that bugs me about it did not bug me at all at the time. I wasn't a very ecological thinker as an 11 year old.
But there are many other books I've had that experience with, and some of them are among my favorite books.
Little, Big I had to start three times before I got into it, and now I think it's easily one of my very most favorite novels. Same with Watership Down. Only one false-start on Reservation Blues, though.
I haven't been keeping up on my reading. When do I ever? Trying to write, instead... I've read Little Brother (ripping yarn, wot!), but not likely to get to any of the other Novel picks.
I've seen WALL-E and Dark Knight twice each (I love the way the Nolans deal with moral ambiguity in their films, and Ledger was brilliant, but I have to go with WALL-E). I enjoyed "Mars: A Traveller's Guide", and didn't so much enjoy "Tomb Wife" because it just never quite came together for me.
I didn't get through Dune until my third try. There's just something about it. On the third try, I whipped through it. I guess my head wasn't ready the first two times. Anyone else have something like this experience?
This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, so thank you Aharen. I ask others to hold off until I have a chance to post articles/posts devoted to each author except where there are other cross-genre authors in the list that I have not included in both fantasy and science fiction. Also, please note that I have not yet subdivided either broader category by sub-genre or age group, and that I've lumped horror in with fantasy. I will break out horror for sure, as well as young adult oriented works. My categorizations are hardly final - I regard this as a recursive process that, with the help of our members and visitors, will eventually resemble opinions in the greater community and that will probably expand to have pages for the broader sub-genres of speculative fiction (fantasy, horror, science fiction). <cliche>Time will tell.</cliche>
Much of the categorization will take advantage of the new tag system we have courtesy of Eric's upgrade of our site to the latest version of the engine. Thanks, again, Eric! :-)
I will second "Contact." It's barely science fiction as we know it, but it's an excellent book for communicating to a non-SF reader the awe that draws most of us to SF.
My grandfather asked me what science fiction book he should read to get acquainted with the genre, and I gave him "Contact." If I'd given him "Dune," he'd have put it down in frustration twenty pages in.
C J Cherryh spans both Sci Fi and Fantasy. It's character driven fiction at its best, and no one does political intrigue better than Cherryh. She understands exactly what drives humanity, both on a personal and group basis. Most of her stories also have great plots with lots of twists and turns. Some people may find her long introspective passages boring, and few of her books are quick reads. Most of her Sci Fi titles contain limited tech descriptions carefully woven into the story and not a lot of the gee whiz factor. Slight more hard sci fi would be Downbelow Station and Cyteen, both of which won Hugos. Her latest, Regenesis, just came out and is a continuation of that story line. (I just started reading it).
Other personal favorites are Hammerfall, the first in the gene war series, the Faded Sun trilogy, and her first series, the Morgaine novels, starting with Gate of Ivrel ( All of these latter novels are soft sci fi, with some fantasy elements.) A theme she frequently explores is the adaptability of man, both on a personal and species basis, and how that may be our greatest survival trait. The effects of extended lifespans on the psyche come up a lot, too. With something like 60 novels to her credit, there's a lot to choose from, and most of them are still readily available via the net or libraries.
I've seen parts of two movies in the last year in which orbital energy beam platforms were used to alter weather/climate. In one, there was some kind of superhurricane and, just as Bova's heroes would have wanted, the heroes use an orbital maser or laser to alter the behavior of the storm. In another, Earth is plummeted into an ice age from a cometary/asteroid impact and an orbital weapons platform is used to literally heat things up a bit.
It makes me think of an old Ben Bova "juvenile", called The Weather-Makers, wherein noble studly scientist-heroes casually discussed using military satellites to "squirt a few lasers" at hurricans to make them go away.
Their biggest problems weren't with the weather, but rather with Big Bad Government Bureaucrats who wouldn't get out of their way and let them squirt lasers at cloud formations, damnit!
Recent Stories is really the only way into the blogs in the current information architecture, so I wanted to be sure we got it back post-haste. I've cleaned up the presentation a little, too.
We may have to live with the centered text in the editor for a while, though -- it's an easy but time-consuming fix.
Either you already fixed it, or it's behaving differently for others, because I have the recent stories/posts block in my view of the page. It looks good and is working properly. Thanks, again, Eric!
It's a whole-number version upgrade, so some things will be different. Including having a working WYSIWYG editor, a little later today. (TinyMCE just never worked right on this site; we'll now be using FCKEditor, which I've had good luck with on sites I build for work.)
I'll have a summary document in a few days. First I need to try to get the Amazon integration stuff working.
Thank you for your work in updating the site, Eric. I'm sure it will have a beneficial effect, and the recent stories block was being a bit dodgy the last few days, anyway.
The admin section for my login is different, too, if that makes a difference.
Thank you to member Steve Carper for posting a link to the New York Times article about this. It seems that Amazon has responded to the concerns of those decrying the read-aloud feature of the Kindle 2 as eating into audio edition sales. However, they aren't just turning it off outright or deleting the code. Instead, they are allowing rights holders to decide whether they want to permit Kindle 2 to read their works aloud. What Amazon proposes is a tag that indicates whether a work can be read aloud. This compromise, a form of DRM that actually came up during a lively discussion on our Google Groups listserv, hopefully will satisfy all parties involved. Of course, the party who brought it up was dead set against the idea of restricting the reading aloud of books by Kindle 2, but at least the feature isn't being eliminated.
--
eDave
Patent Lawyer, Aerospace Engineer, Mac Geek
"French is the language that turns dirt into romance."
Be sure to attend the launch event for our anthology, 2034: Writing Rochester's Futures on Saturday, 31 July 2010. See http://r-spec.org/content/2034-launch-event for more information.
On Friday, 30 July 2010, at 1pm, Alicia Henn and Craig DeLancey join Jack Garner on 1370 Connection to discuss the 2034 anthology and its launch, the next anthology, and the group overall. Check out http://r-spec.org/content/r-spec-radio for more.
The skills of these authors in delivering so much, so entertainingly! Coping with sheer tsunamis of information seems to have become a potent aspect of human life, to the extent that it rivals coping with society, coping with pain, or coping with oneself. Characters in a story must often spend time (and in suspense) distinguishing a lethal figure from a confusing ground, turning infodumping into an increasingly powerful plot tool.
Great list, great examples, broad reach.
We live in the era when information overwhelms us, and finding our way through it is a journey worth the tale.
It's also easy to envision a nightmare scenario where the bacterium runs rampant and solidifies sandy soils all over the place.
Who can say what effect that would have on existing plant and insect ecosystems?
We've seen analogous changes before that have had devastating consequences. Kudzu, for example, or any of the several species of carp introduced to North America for aquaculture. The scale here is much greater, though. We've reached a point in our technological development where, because the actions are on such a vast scale, our mistakes also cost radically more than they did in the past.
I don't know what a APA 45 publication is, but that is what Visions of Paradise is called at this site, efanzines.com, which posts VoP:
http://efanzines.com/VoP/VoP139.pdf
Um, thank you? It just seems like it might be sarcasm, is all. Bot?
Just in case the existing links don't get there, here is a link for the F&SF stories that were nominated: http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/neb08.htm
This comment showed up as from Anonymous, but it's posted by eDave.
On Dune, no: Got right through it the first time. The stuff that bugs me about it did not bug me at all at the time. I wasn't a very ecological thinker as an 11 year old.
But there are many other books I've had that experience with, and some of them are among my favorite books.
Little, Big I had to start three times before I got into it, and now I think it's easily one of my very most favorite novels. Same with Watership Down. Only one false-start on Reservation Blues, though.
I haven't been keeping up on my reading. When do I ever? Trying to write, instead... I've read Little Brother (ripping yarn, wot!), but not likely to get to any of the other Novel picks.
I've seen WALL-E and Dark Knight twice each (I love the way the Nolans deal with moral ambiguity in their films, and Ledger was brilliant, but I have to go with WALL-E). I enjoyed "Mars: A Traveller's Guide", and didn't so much enjoy "Tomb Wife" because it just never quite came together for me.
I didn't get through Dune until my third try. There's just something about it. On the third try, I whipped through it. I guess my head wasn't ready the first two times. Anyone else have something like this experience?
This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, so thank you Aharen. I ask others to hold off until I have a chance to post articles/posts devoted to each author except where there are other cross-genre authors in the list that I have not included in both fantasy and science fiction. Also, please note that I have not yet subdivided either broader category by sub-genre or age group, and that I've lumped horror in with fantasy. I will break out horror for sure, as well as young adult oriented works. My categorizations are hardly final - I regard this as a recursive process that, with the help of our members and visitors, will eventually resemble opinions in the greater community and that will probably expand to have pages for the broader sub-genres of speculative fiction (fantasy, horror, science fiction). <cliche>Time will tell.</cliche>
Much of the categorization will take advantage of the new tag system we have courtesy of Eric's upgrade of our site to the latest version of the engine. Thanks, again, Eric! :-)
I've seen parts of two movies in the last year in which orbital energy beam platforms were used to alter weather/climate. In one, there was some kind of superhurricane and, just as Bova's heroes would have wanted, the heroes use an orbital maser or laser to alter the behavior of the storm. In another, Earth is plummeted into an ice age from a cometary/asteroid impact and an orbital weapons platform is used to literally heat things up a bit.
It makes me think of an old Ben Bova "juvenile", called The Weather-Makers, wherein noble studly scientist-heroes casually discussed using military satellites to "squirt a few lasers" at hurricans to make them go away.
Their biggest problems weren't with the weather, but rather with Big Bad Government Bureaucrats who wouldn't get out of their way and let them squirt lasers at cloud formations, damnit!
Recent Stories is really the only way into the blogs in the current information architecture, so I wanted to be sure we got it back post-haste. I've cleaned up the presentation a little, too.
We may have to live with the centered text in the editor for a while, though -- it's an easy but time-consuming fix.
Either you already fixed it, or it's behaving differently for others, because I have the recent stories/posts block in my view of the page. It looks good and is working properly. Thanks, again, Eric!
It's a whole-number version upgrade, so some things will be different. Including having a working WYSIWYG editor, a little later today. (TinyMCE just never worked right on this site; we'll now be using FCKEditor, which I've had good luck with on sites I build for work.)
I'll have a summary document in a few days. First I need to try to get the Amazon integration stuff working.
Thank you to member Steve Carper for posting a link to the New York Times article about this. It seems that Amazon has responded to the concerns of those decrying the read-aloud feature of the Kindle 2 as eating into audio edition sales. However, they aren't just turning it off outright or deleting the code. Instead, they are allowing rights holders to decide whether they want to permit Kindle 2 to read their works aloud. What Amazon proposes is a tag that indicates whether a work can be read aloud. This compromise, a form of DRM that actually came up during a lively discussion on our Google Groups listserv, hopefully will satisfy all parties involved. Of course, the party who brought it up was dead set against the idea of restricting the reading aloud of books by Kindle 2, but at least the feature isn't being eliminated.
--
eDave
Patent Lawyer, Aerospace Engineer, Mac Geek
"French is the language that turns dirt into romance."
- Stephen King