Ken MacLeod's Blog, page 29

Poetry Competition

The Genomics Forum's poetry competition, organised by Pippa Goldschmidt, is doing well, with around a hundred entries so far from all over the world.

Deadline: 7 October. So there's still plenty of time to enter. (When the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig was asked how long it took him to write a poem, he answered: 'Two cigarettes.')

That iffy skiffy science ...

Over the past few years I've got a lot of mileage (quite literally - one presentation of it was used to finagle funding for a trip to Australia by a science fiction academic speaking at the same conference) out of a talk I first gave to a Communicating Science class at Glasgow University. One of the points I make in that talk is how rare good science is in - not written SF, which, I argue, is largely kept honest by the sharp teeth of the well-read, ravening hordes of SF fandom - but SF in oth...

Parallel Worlds

At 7 pm this Friday evening I'm on a panel at Newcastle's amazing Centre for Life with acclaimed author Scarlett Thomas, as part of Newcastle University's project Parallel Worlds: Literature and Science.

From the blurb:

Ideas from physics, computing and philosophy have increasingly fed into the work of novelists, not only in science fiction but also "mainstream" fiction. Concepts such as virtual reality, alternate history or the "multiverse" have influenced popular culture and contemporary...

Has Karen Armstrong ever read Feurbach?

In her best-selling and widely praised The Case for God Karen Armstrong contrasts the recent New Atheists with the good old atheists who at least understood theology:

In the past, theologians have found it useful to have an exchange of views with atheists. The ideas of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886 - 1968) were enhanced by the writings of Feuerbach ... But it is difficult to see how theologians could dialogue fruitfully with Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, because their theology is so...

The man who stared at dolphins

Even when I was a rather credulous teenager who took seriously the writings of Carlos Castenada, Colin Wilson, Timothy Leary, Teilhard de Chardin and R. D. Laing, all it took was one flick through a snazzy paperback of John C. Lilly's The Centre of the Cyclone for me to conclude that the author was out of it. Just how far out is detailed here.

Needless to say, he had NASA and Naval funding. Was there any part of the counter-culture that didn't start as a black op?

(Via, with a juicy taster quot...

' ... for then we would know the mind of God'

Stephen Hawking famously concluded A Brief History of Time with these words. Now he has no need of that hypothesis.

My talented brother James responds:

Queen Victoria's Terraformers

In effect, what Darwin, Hooker and the Royal Navy achieved was the world's first experiment in "terra-forming". They created a self-sustaining and self-reproducing ecosystem in order to make Ascension Island more habitable.

Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it "find its own way".

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Filling a much-needed gap

One of the major problems for writers is that the machine we use to write is connected to the biggest engine of distraction ever invented. One can always disconnect, of course - there's even software that locks out the internet and email for selected periods - or use a separate, isolated computer, but I think something more elegant as well as radical is needed.

What I'm thinking of is some purely mechanical device, that took the basic QWERTY keyboard with Shift and Return keys and so on, but w...

The man who knows what it is like to be a bat

The Genomics Forum's third Book Festival event was last night, and it was excellent.

Skillfully chaired by SF writer Justina Robson, who has herself given a lot of thought to transhuman themes, this discussion on transhumanism and what human enhancement could do for - or against - human beings ranged widely. Forum Director Professor Steve Yearley opened by pointing out that, even in popular media discussion, transhumanism was a conspicuous exception to the kind of risk-centred approach to almo...

All right on the night

The Word Power event on Red Plenty went very well. The space was filled to capacity, and almost everyone in the audience stuck around for an hour and a quarter of often quite demanding discussion, with good contributions from the floor. The two speakers shared - across a broad political gap - an enthusiastic and informed interest in the subject. I managed to fumble the introduction by (a) garbling the name of the Word Power Edinburgh Book Fringe (b) failing to introduce myself and (c) failing...