Sci Fi news - some of it great stuff!

Again, you'll find terrific items for your gift list here... at least for your beloved science fiction fan!

Be sure to check out the Hugo Award winners for 2020, including the winner for best novel, A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine. The award for best novella went to This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, while The Expanse, by James S.A. Corey, won for best series.  A Song for A New Day by Sarah Pinsker won the 2020 Nebula Award for best novel, while Cat Rambo won for  her novelette, Carpe Glitter.... among the many remarkable SF titles from the past year.

Meanwhile I have been slogging through editings and revisions of five Uplift novels, including Startide Rising and The Uplift War and Brightness Reef. (The refreshed Sundiver is already available!) All were sprung from the House of Flightless Birds (Bantam/Penguin) and are shifting to Open Road, for re-issue in May! Alas, they had to be typeset using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) from physical books. OCR is much improved!  But I am glad to have a cabal of wonderfully nitpicking pre-readers! My 'irregulars' catch mistakes... some 40 years old! Oh, and there will be new introductions!

Meanwhile, there's plenty of diverting stuff on that gift list!  Including refreshed versions of The Postman, Sundiver and The Practice Effect, with new Patrick Farley covers and introductions! Oh and some fun new items...

== More Sci Fi news! ==

In Entertainment Weekly -- I was excellently interviewed by Clark Collis about The Postman and its pertinence to these troubled times... and the rise of neo-feudalism that it predicted, along with deliberate efforts by enemies of our Great Experiment to burn down our one American institution that predates even the Revolution. I go into much more detail… including how you can do small/important things to help, in this blog posting -- "The Postman Guy" speaks about the Postal System crisis and lists all the things you citizens can do (some of them amazingly easy!) to prevent this would-be Holnist coup against America and especially our oldest institution. Do drop by.  

Meanwhile, in a lighter vein – and reaching far more people – the Stephen Colbert "apologize to Costner!" video is choice. But hey Stephen, what am I, chopped liver? I thought you were a sci fi nerd! 

 

While we’re on the subject… Do you have a book club? Or a classroom that needs a study guide for a good novel and movie comparison? Here are three resources for THE POSTMAN!

 

a Postman class discussion guide.

 

A Postman reading group discussion guide.

 

The Postman Curriculum Web Site.

 

One of them was among the oldest such items ever posted on the Web! And still pretty good.

 

And unrelated… A fun, informal interview on the creative process of authoring, on “Drinking With Authors!” (And yes, some beverages are involved.)

 

 

== First Nations. first in fiction ==

 

A fascinating article shines light on the burgeoning number and quality of Native American authors writing both science fiction and ethno-fantasies that revolve around First Nations peoples and themes and legends. I won’t claim any great insights except as a minor fellow-traveler. But I think this trend and the larger expansion of the genre enriches us all.

(A completely unimportant aside. My very first fictional character - Jacob Demwa the protagonist of SUNDIVER - was half Native American and half African; that was 1978. Then came Athaclena's heroic partner Robert Oneagle in THE UPLIFT WAR, and his mother the ethnically Amerind Prime Minister of Garth Colony. And let's add the Cherokee-led terraforming of Venus that is featured in STARTIDE RISING. So that's three for three, a very long time ago.  Just sayin'.)

And... see a list of my personal favorite science fiction titles -- and a list of recommended science fiction for young adult readers who want to explore the world of science fiction and fantasy.

== And more visionary stuff! ==

One of the very best podcasts around is Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur - a series of wonderfully detailed and cogent explorations about super-science possibilities that dissects almost every aspect you can list regarding interstellar travel, alien motivations, star drives, terraforming or the Fermi Paradox. This one - on “black holes as weapons” - naturally refers to my own novel EARTH (which he flatteringly calls his Book of the Month about 27 minutes in). But I highly recommend the entire series. (Though oddly, he doesn't quite mention my concept for gravity lasers! Though he comes close and hints.)

Here’s a very well-written… even moving… review of Stephen Baxter’s three NASA novels, including Voyage, Titan and Moonseed.

After fifteen years of translating Bulgarian speculative fiction into English a group of authors have compiled an anthology with the best Bulgarian-originated short stories and excerpts from longer works. Certainly there have been lately many efforts to promote science fiction from international sources, especially China, Africa and India and Latin America. And why not this hotbed of vivid sci fi!

Scientist Andrew Love has published a clever meta-tale , a critical essay about a civilization whose writers have been obsessed with tying together millions of disparate works into a fictional construct called “Earth.” Of course, as the author of… EARTH… I guess that makes me the worst offender! (This tale has some “wake up!” elements in common with my own tale “Reality Check”!) 

My colleague Bruce Golden has released his post-apocalyptic novel After The End, which speculates on what might happen after a rogue comet collides with the Earth, setting the entire planet on fire. The few survivors must contend with an alien spore that arrived with the comet, developing a symbiotic relationship with a native species. Not us.

Here’s a futurist image I haven’t seen in sci fi. Drones could save energy by taking the bus.

A lickable screen can create almost any taste? The Norimaki Synthesizer transmits a mix of glycerin-based gels into a small panel you press against your tongue.

  

RIP Barbara Marx Hubbard. I only knew her a little, personally. But she was a figure of much insight, courage and good.  As eminent futurist Glen Hiemstra put it, she “set out to change the conversation in the nation from what we wanted to get away from to what we wanted to move toward. To that end she traveled the nation and set up Positive Futures Centers, which were collections of local citizens come together, in town after town…. Barbara’s big idea was that the office of Vice President ought to operate the “Office for the Future.” This would manifest in the development of a “Peace Room” to rival the technology and scale of the War Room. In the latter, there is constant monitoring of global threats, and a place and a way for leaders to come together to confront the threats. The Peace Room, in contrast, would be designed to monitor the globe to map the opportunities that are emerging around the planet, to observe the real breakthrough ideas and programs wherever they are developed, and to plan the positive options to create a preferred future.”

== Is this a 'sci fi' pandemic? ==

So gosh, here we are in the long forecasted pandemic, and it seems nothing like what was portrayed in any sci fi, including my own! Who'd a thunk it would be so daily-mundane... so ambiguous in its after-effects - especially organic damage on the "asymptomatic" (including reported erectile dysfunction)... 

...or that a quarter of the citizens of the most scientific nation in the world would zombie-chant foreign propaganda that simple safety measures like masks - used by our ancestors effectively against the 1918 flu - will somehow transform all the people into what they already are --

-- zombie-obedient morons.

Stranger than fiction, indeed.

Sci Fi Invades Reality

Announcement for today only!  The ebook for Insistence of Vision, my third (and best) story collection is discounted to $1.99 for Kindle. 

Okay, I've been video'd a bit, lately. For example, the “Neo” Project aims to create a vividly beautiful film, combining science and art to offer up something almost totally missing from our world discourse about the future — optimism. Their initial teaser-trailer features some of my blather. But the stars of this show are vivid imagery and remarkable sound editing. I don’t claim to know very much about where the project goes next, but it’s off to a great start! Neo is sponsored in part by Humanity+ and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

In honor of the 50^th anniversary of Star Trek, I earlier offered up this posting: To Boldly Go: Star Trek at Fifty.  The Verge site, cribbed from it along with another baker’s dozen in “13 Science Fiction authors on how Star Trek influenced their lives," with thoughts from Allen Steele, Madeline Ashby, Becky Chambers, Elizabeth Bonesteel and others.

In this lavish and vivid short video (from X Prize Foundation)– with many sci fi flick-snippets in the background – I talk about why so many (not all) sci fi dystopias are turgid and lazy.

Elsewhere I offer a much more extended riff explaining why so many films and books slothfully assume the worst. It doesn't have to be this way! With a little work and creativity, a director and /or author can keep her protagonist in delightful jeopardy without insultingly assuming that all our institutions are automatically crap and all or neighbors sheep. 

Also... be sure to watch the episode Is Privacy Dead? of "Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole" discussing privacy in the future.  It's well-done and provocative... and I blather last.

== Sci Fi invades reality ==

Consider seven ways Science fiction predicted the future.  A short list and some are better than others. But he does list John Brunner’s classic 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar which forecast in 2010 a “President Obomi.” And see the innovations predicted by the visionary H.G. Wells, born 150 years ago.

An AI-made trailer: Fox Pictures asked IBM to set its brainiac series of computers – Watson – onto an artistic task – make a trailer for the new SciFi - horror flick “Morgan.” You can view the results. Coincidentally, I’ll be co-keynoting IBM’s big World of Watson convention in Las Vegas, October 26. 

My colleague author Hannu Rajaniemi (author of The Quantum Thief) is using brain scans to let the emotions of readers decide which way a story goes next.   Volunteers don the Epoc neural sensing headset, then read the story of Snow White, and the story would branch and change in different ways, depending on whether the volunteer showed more affinity for ‘life’ or ‘death’ imagery.  Rajaniemi comments, “I’m actually planning a near future, very biotech-driven story, focusing more on the unpredictable side effects of all these technologies.”  

People who read books lived an average of 23 months longer than those who did not. That makes me your Doctor....  you're welcome.  And I further prescribe...

A wonderful resource: Download or flip through archived issues of Weird Tales, dating back to the 1930s and 40s. And much more if you follow the embedded links ... and much, MUCH more if you follow the sidebar links at this site. You'll find older, but classic stories from Lovecraft, Bradbury, Hamilton, Sturgeon and others, along with those fantastic, evocative covers.

Amid the hoorow over possible (even likely) foreign interference in the U.S. elections, plus ‘bromance’ connections between one of the major U.S. nominees and a major eastern leader… have a chilling look at this! It is like an out-take from The Cool War – one of the creepiest of the great novels by Frederik Pohl.

The “Gerasimov doctrine,” formulated by Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov in 2013, proposes that modern conflicts are waged and won not with guns as much as through dirty tricks. This 'hybrid warfare' aims to destabilize the opponent's political system in order to weaken the enemy.   In The Cool War, adversaries who don’t dare risk open warfare engage in tit-for-tat , deniable sabotage… Oh, note, I have a character named Gerasimov, in Existence.   

== Science Fiction Book Roundup ==

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. This New York Times bestseller offers a tense, tightly wound thriller that explores the Many Worlds theory of quantum physics. Jason Dessen abandoned a high-profile research career to take up a quiet life with his wife and son, working as a physics professor at a small college. Mugged while out on an evening walk, he wakes up in a new thread of reality and sees where his life might have gone, the paths not taken. For in this world, he is an award-winning quantum physicist at a secret research facility, where he has discovered a way to superimpose quantum states … and he wants desperately to return to his old life. Unfortunately, he’s not the only one…

 Blue Remembered Earth, by Alastair Reynolds, offers a near-utopia set in a post-catastrophe future where Africa has become the reigning economic, political and technological superpower. Humans have established thriving colonies from the moon to Mars and Titan. An omnipresent surveillance system, the Mechanism, maintains peace throughout the system. The story follows the descendants of Eunice Akinya, who established a sprawling family mining empire that stretches to the asteroid and Kuiper belts. After her death, a historic artifact discovered on Luna sets Eunice’s grandchildren off on a journey through the solar system in search of answers that could affect the destiny of humanity. Reynolds, former scientist at the ESA, presents a believable vision for a future forged in space.

I keep an eye open for semi-pro works that rise above that level, and are worth noting.  Mother Moon, by Bob Goddard, doesn’t set the planet ablaze with style or characters or action… but it does relate a story you can care about, with some interesting ideas. About 250 scientists and engineers at an international lunar base use advanced, late-21^st Century tech to exploit buried ice at the moon’s south pole, when word comes that a comet is streaking toward the Earth.  They must at-minimum race to become self-sufficient, since it might take a long time for Earth to recover launch capability. In an interesting device, Goddard alternates scenes set in 1504 aboard a sailing ship whose hometown is being persecuted by an inquisition.  All becomes clear.

With her novella, Murder in the Generative Kitchen, new author Meg Pontecorvo cooks up and dishes out for you not one, not two, but three original sci fi premises. Enjoy and digest them well.

A fun book for Young Adult readers: Mad Science Institute, by Sechin Tower, offers up a teenage girl genius who loves inventing robots and electronic devices. But Sophia “Soap” Lazarcheck’s science projects have a way of going awry, setting off frequent explosions and the occasional fire. When she is admitted into the secretive Mechanical Science Institute (founded by Nikola Tesla), she uncovers a conspiracy of evildoers who want to subvert the institute’s science advances for nefarious purposes. Sophia teams up with her older cousin, Dean, to unravel these mysteries and prevent an imminent doomsday. For more YA, see my extensive list of suggested SF books for young adult readers. 

Teachers and parents! See a Science Fiction anthology for middle grade readers. Bring the stars to a new generation with diversity, representation & great stories!  SFWA has named the 2017 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide  anthology as a STAR project.  A followup to the successful 2016 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide.

Great news.  At long last, the audiobook for my second short story collection, Otherness, is now available at Audible.com - including The Giving Plague, Dr. Pak's Preschool, Detritus Affected, and more..... I worked pretty closely with the reader, veteran Hollywood actor Stephen Mendel and I can tell you, this is what you want for your commute, or those long sessions at the gym! Why not make your commute interstellar and your strides take you across fate and time?

== SF Announcements ==

The Raw Science Film Festival is open for submission! The festival honors films on science and technology worldwide. The film festival partners are Explore Mars, Space Tourism Society Canada, and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. Categories include fiction and non-fiction for both students and professionals. Cash prizes are awarded. Animations and infographics are welcomed. The film screening and awards ceremony takes place on Saturday, December 10, 2016 on the Fox Studios lot inside the historic Zanuck Theater. The deadline for film festival submission is November 9, 2016. Raw Science Film Festival proudly accepts entries via FilmFreeway.com, the world’s best online submission platform. FilmFreeway offers free HD online screeners, unlimited video storage, digital press kits, and more.  

The 2017 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop will be held June 25 - August 5, 2017 on the campus of UC San Diego, in partnership with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. 2017 Clarion instructors will be Nalo Hopkinson, Cory Doctorow, Dan Chaon, Lynda Barry, Andrea Hairston, C.C. Finlay, & Rae Carson. 

See bios at the Clarion site. Established in 1968, the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop is the oldest workshop of its kind and is widely recognized as a premier proving and training ground for aspiring writers of fantasy and science fiction. The list of distinguished Clarion alumni includes Ed Bryant, Octavia Butler, Bob Crais, Cory Doctorow, George Alec Effinger, Nalo Hopkinson, James Patrick Kelly, Vonda McIntyre, Kim Stanley Robinson, Martha Soukup, Kelly Link, Bruce Sterling, and many others. 

Sci Fi Warnings and Optimism: calling fans to advise us with stories!

You don't have to choose! Between pessimism and optimism, that is. A sane person uses dollops of both - simultaneously - to help navigate a path ahead. Because making a better world requires two phases. First finding the errors, snake-pits, land mines and quicksand that lie in wait, as we charge into the future.  Those dangers are best revealed by eager complainers shouting “look out, you fools!” It is the supreme value of reciprocal criticism -- and science fiction has played a role, by issuing very effective self-preventing prophecies.”

But there is another vital phase.  Responding to such warnings with: “Oh… that? Well, sure. I guess we’d better roll up our sleeves and work together (or compete) to solve it. Which we can do!”  

That confident (and nowadays so-rare) can-do spirit was the theme and topic of Disney’s movie Tomorrowland, an ode to ebullient optimism that was crushed by today’s overpowering Cynicism Machine. A sick-addictive habit spread deliberately by those who profit or benefit from a pervasive public mood of despair.

Have a look at this moving tribute to the can-do spirit, by Jim Wright. Oh, sure, it devolves into a cynical rant of his own, in the middle (while making some good points).  But the beginning and the end are crystal clear, urging us to fight back against the cynics and gloom merchants. Stand up. Tell them “I will listen to your warnings. But in order to discuss with ambitious folks how to solve them! Keep your damn gloom away from me.”

== Self-preventing prophecies ==

Fred Kaplan, author of Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, describes how the Matthew Broderick 1983 film War Games so disturbed President Ronald Reagan that he ordered the nation’s first high level investigation of cyber-security, resulting in major redesigns of national and military systems. Again, science fiction helps us to avoid errors with “self-preventing prophecies”… powerfully affecting destiny by drawing attention to threats to freedom (Orwell), to our ecosystem (Soylent Green and Silent Running), or to peace (Dr. Strangelove, On The Beach, Fail-Safe, War Games.) 

And it goes on. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has been holding meetings lately about applying science fiction to stimulating public enthusiasm.... in STEM education for example. A few months ago an event in Los Angeles introduced space scientists to Hollywood mythmakers, along the theme of "homesteading in space."

At the latter gathering I raised an older topic that all SF writers and fans have pondered, at times...

.... that the vast trove of Science Fiction novels and short fiction represents a library of thought experiments that might prove useful to policy makers at some point -- about the pitfalls we may face in the future.

A new biography of Ray Bradbury suggests that, "Bradbury conceived his early science fiction as a cumulative early warning system against unforeseen consequences." 

Suppose our leaders ever face a sudden, disturbing and scientifically surprising event - ranging from real alien contact to a disrupting energy technology, to some drug that amplifies both human intelligence and insanity. You name it and there have been scifi "gedankenexperiments" that explored it.  Now imagine that policy workers had instant access to a network of nerdy expert-readers, ready to speak up about that library of ideas:

"You know, these 15 tales explored - in varied detail - something strangely similar to this situation. A few of the stories point to possibilities you may not have considered." 

This would be a perfect job for an an ad hoc and informal band of science fiction fans. Envision an advisory group called TASAT -- or "There's A Story About That." It wouldn't take much  - and almost zero funding - to get such a group rolling.  Perhaps one panel at a Science Fiction Worldcon might suffice to get it rolling. And the effort could more than pay for itself, if useful SF'nal insights came in handy during an emergency. 

Perhaps someone should suggest this as a panel topic at the coming MidAmerica Con?

== More Dire warnings ==

For the direst, larger-scale warnings, see 12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy the Entire Solar System, by George Dvorsky on io9, with scenarios ranging from AI super-intelligence run amok to an interplanetary grey goo disaster.

Quite a number of sci fi scenarios will be brought to television or movies in the next few years, with upcoming adaptations of novels such as: Foundation, Robopocalypse, Spin, Annihilation, Little Brother, and Ancillary Justice. See this extensive list -- stories full of both optimism and warning.

The prediction biz just gets better. In EARTH I foresaw a “Swiss Navy” that might enforce the rights of a Sea State - flotillas of ships bearing displaced populations.  In EXISTENCE the wealthiest have bought rights to distant reefs and island nations drowning under rising oceans, in order to perch new “seastead” enclaves upon them, according to plans hatched in the Alps. 

Now see how Swiss submarine-maker Migaloo is offering a 100,000 sq.ft yacht-island that would be at home in either near-future… a custom-built multistory mega-yacht that comes complete with a penthouse, submarine bays, a beach club, and a shark elevator -- to help the 0.1% avoid the rising seas of climate change.

And yes, I portrayed Chinese forces contesting over these reefs. (Calling that Prediction wiki!)  Only… wait a minute.  “Swiss submarine-maker”? In real life? Wow, man.

== Tales of pitfalls ahead ==

Cumulus, by Eliot Pepper, presents a gritty view of a near future of accelerting economic inequality. Most public services have been taken over by private companies. And a high-tech Google-like corporation, Cumulus, reaches its tentacles ever deeper into all aspects of daily life. Omnipresent surveillance raises questions of corporate accountability: who is monitoring the surveillance feeds? In a city divided between the haves and have-nots (Greenies vs Slummers), anonymity is virtually impossible...  except for a few insiders who have the power to subvert the system for their own purposes. See Cumulus reviewed here.

Tears of Abraham, by Sean T, Smith, is an action-packed page turner, that's also thoughtful about loyalty, honor, courage and what it takes to be American, especially when the chips are down. Those chips tumble as the U.S. spirals into a violent new phase of our recurring civil war -- a fate we can avoid, helped by warnings like this one.

The Only Ones, by Carola Dibbell, offers a near-future scenario where pandemic has struck down much of the population. A 19-year old “hardy,” Inez Fardo, is immune to the virulent plague. Surviving on the edge of society, willing to sell anything for money, she is hired to donate her genes in an experiment to create an immune baby for a wealthy woman. When the woman backs out, Inez ends up alone, with a child who is an identical clone of herself. Since cloning is illegal (with clones hunted down by religious fanatics), she must hide the identity of her child, as they struggle to simply stay alive in a dismal post-apocalyptic world.

(Look, post-apocalyptics are okay. I wrote one! (Though my novel The Postman was about citizenship and our neighbors being wiser than slime molds.) Still, have a look where I decrypt why PA has become the reflexive go-to premise for so many authors and directors.)

Here's a cute and well-made web site about counter-terrorism and the world of Intel & Spies revolves around publicizing SyFy’s new TV series “Hunters,” which ponders a terror campaign led by… aliens, of course.

Another dire scenario: Phage, by Mark Tamplin offers a suspense-filled look at a virulent epidemic set off by a genetically-engineered pathogen -- intentionally released by a psychotic madman, a rogue government biochemist with a long-simmering grudge. Our hero, Dr. Sam Townsend is on the verge of developing an antidote, a phage to kill the pathogen, when he finds himself targeted by the terrorist. Tamplin, a microbiologist, incorporates lots of science coupled with fast-paced action. And yet, suspicion of authority is taken to an extreme to drive the plot in this novel.

And in the end, science (and transparency) are the keys to problem-solving...