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Dearh to False Metal

It's just like Warhammer 40,000
Has fantasy ruined sci-fi? SF writer Gregory Benford thinks it's ruining the whole damned world. Of course, the bloggers respond.

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Reinventing Utopia

Some neat thinking here.

The question, for thinkers like these, is how to revive the spirit of utopia - the current enfeeblement of which, Jameson claims, ''saps our political options and tends to leave us all in the helpless position of passive accomplices and impotent handwringers" - without repeating the errors of what Jacoby has dubbed ''blueprint utopianism," that is, a tendency to map out utopian society in minute detail. How to avoid, as Jameson puts it, effectively ''colonizing the future"?

Is the thought of a noncapitalist utopia even possible after Stalinism, after decades of anticommunist polemic on the part of brilliant and morally engaged intellectuals? Or are we all convinced, in a politically paralyzing way, that Margaret Thatcher had it right when she crowed that ''there is no alternative" to free-market capitalism?

(From BoingBoing)


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SF writing guide

BoingBoing points us to a free guide for sci-fi writers. Free! I like free!


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A few thousand science fiction covers
For your viewing pleasure.

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Free Sci-fi
Metafilter has a nice roundup of free SF shorts online, from the classics to contemporary stuff. Some excellent stories here. (Also another Metafilter Calvino roundup here.)

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Sci-fi round up

Aside from the fact that it begins with a grossly inaccurate statement, it's nice to see sci-fi being reviewed in the NYT, even if it is a jam-em-all-in omnibus.


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Speaking of barely coherent nerds...

Sci-fi fans clutter up the streets of Glasgow, where it's getting harder by the day to tell the Mountain Dew-induced acne from the native alcohol-indooced pockmarks.


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Apostles of mercy
Oh, how those Martians in War of the Worlds have changed.

Perhaps that idea of terrorists with a cause and defenders with doubts influenced the discomfort felt in the current film as well. At any rate, the novel was more rigorous. It saw the similarities between victim and attacker but also what was at stake and what effect the attacks ultimately had. Through them, Wells writes, humanity was robbed "of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence."

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Peggy on the whereabouts of angels and demons

Margaret Atwood defines her terms before dusting off the bullet points to defend SF.

If you're writing about the future and you aren't doing forecast journalism, you'll probably be writing something people will call either science fiction or speculative fiction. I like to make a distinction between science fiction proper and speculative fiction. For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can't yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe; and speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards, and that takes place on Planet Earth.

I guess that makes Oryx and Crake (a good book, btw) a hybrid between speculative fiction and scifi... Cause, aside from the blue-penised weirdos, there were DVD players in the distant future (which is odd, because there won't be DVD players in about 10 years).


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Ninja nerd gives sci-fi roundup

Peter's CBC article on contemporary scifi is up.

"The Gernsback Continuum" announced the death of classic sci-fi. The Vancouver-based Gibson and other members of the cyberpunk movement — mainly Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker — rejected the “architecture of broken dreams,” as a character in Gibson’s story calls it. In their novels and stories, the cyberpunk writers replaced the fanciful devices of alien invasions and jetpacks with more realistic and immediate concerns: multinational corporations run amok, the decay of urban centres, bioengineering, environmental collapse, addictions to technology. In the process, they created not only a cultural phenomenon but a brand new future.

As it turned out, the old future didn’t fade away as smoothly as the visions in Gibson’s story. In fact, as the cyberpunk movement shows the rust of its aging ideas, classic sci-fi is enjoying a sort of renaissance, thanks to a group of Canadian writers.


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