Keith Stevenson's Blog, page 9
July 20, 2016
Review - The Circle - Dave Eggers
The Circle by Dave Eggers My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is a pretty chilling extrapolation of what might happen if the geek inherited the Earth: the overpowering tyranny of a single mindset with the grunt of a global tech company (a lot like Google) behind it, that decides privacy and secrets are bad and full access to everyone's data is good. The descent into dystopia is presented through a
July 10, 2016
The internet is not your friend
Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth’s classic novel The Space Merchants posited a future where it was impossible to escape advertising, with marketing messages beamed directly onto our retinas. But they didn’t foresee how big data could be used, or misused, in the real world. Or how lethal the whole system could become. Your mobile phone carries a great deal of information about you, including
June 26, 2016
Review - Into Everywhere - Paul McAuley
Into Everywhere by Paul McAuley My rating: 2 of 5 stars Paul McAuley is a British speculative fiction author, best known for his Arthur C Clarke award-winning science fiction novel Fairyland, which has just been re-released twenty years after its initial publication under the Gollancz ‘SF Masterworks’ imprint. His Quiet War series of books chart a Solar System-spanning war between Earth-born
May 31, 2016
How far will we see?
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May 21, 2016
Review - Leviathan's Blood - Ben Peek
Leviathan's Blood by Ben Peek My rating: 4 of 5 stars This review originally appeared on the Newtown Review of Books ( http://www.newtownreviewofbooks.com ) I’m not overstating things when I say that Ben Peek is one of the most accomplished writers of richly detailed and intricately plotted epic fantasy working in Australia today. When I reviewed The Godless, the first book in his Children
May 14, 2016
The (Un)Productivity Commission
The Australian Productivity Commission's latest draft report contains a section called Copy(not)right, which demonstrates how Government-funded economists really don't 'get' the creative industry in Australia. Or maybe they just hate writers, film-makers and musos. One of their draft recommendations proposes (yet again) the abandonment of Australian territorial copyright. This ‘zombie idea’
March 31, 2016
Killbots ahoy!
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March 15, 2016
Science v Politics - Real Carbon Capture
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February 29, 2016
Snowball Earth
Science fact and science fiction walk hand in hand, and this particular cross-fertilisation affected me directly. Imagine planet Earth locked in a never-ending ice age: a giant, lifeless snowball encased in 3-kilometre-thick ice sheets with an average temperature of minus 50 degrees Celsius at the equator. It almost happened a number of times in our pre-history. The most severe of these
