Sable Aradia's Blog, page 48
January 26, 2018
Living Plant Lights
Roads of the future could be lit by glowing trees instead of streetlamps, thanks to a breakthrough in creating bioluminescent plants. Experts injected specialized nanoparticles into the leaves of a watercress plant, which caused it to give off a dim light for nearly four hours. This could solve lots of problems.
The chemical involved, which produced enough light to read a book by, is the same as is used by fireflies to create their characteristic shine. To create their glowing plants, engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) turned to an enzyme called luciferase. Luciferase acts on a molecule called luciferin, causing it to emit light.
Read the full article at The Space Academy.
January 25, 2018
Fighting and Gender
By Nancy Jane Moore
At a recent meeting of my writers’ group, we discussed fight scenes while critiquing an early draft of my novel in progress. The discussion went something like this:
“Women fight differently from men,” one of the guys said in pointing out that the sword fight scenes didn’t vary much.
I didn’t think he was referring to the inaccurate ster24eotype that women can’t fight, but I also didn’t think his point applied, so I said – speaking as a long-time martial artist and instructor as well as a writer – “In my experience, that’s not always the case, especially with weapons.”
And he replied, “Yeah, but you’re big.”
Read the full article at SFWA.com.
January 24, 2018
Farewell, Ursula K. Le Guin
One of my favourite authors, and personal heroines, died on Monday. I am grieving, as I’m sure many of her fans are, and I’d like to send out my deepest condolences to her friends and family. The world has lost a great light. But what is remembered, lives, so here’s a tribute I put together for her, and a list of some of my personal favourites of her quotations. The video features quotes mostly about the nature of life:
On Activism:
[image error][image error][image error] [image error]
[image error]
On Writing:
[image error] [image error] [image error] [image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error] [image error]
On Human Nature:
[image error] [image error] [image error][image error] [image error] [image error][image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error]
January 23, 2018
Warts and All: Why You Should be Real With Your Readers
By Angeline Trevena
We’ve all experienced it: posting something on social media, and receiving a comment along the lines of ‘great pic, check out my profile’. Sometimes it’s painfully clear that they’ve not read your post, or even looked at the image, they’ve simply addressed you because of your hashtags and content. It’s not engaging, it’s not interesting, and it certainly doesn’t inspire you to check out their content, let alone buy their services or products.
And the reason is simple: people like to be treated as people. They like to be spoken to as a person, by a person. And you are a person, don’t let that get lost under marketing.
Read the full article at Angelina’s blog.
January 22, 2018
Book Review: Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Read for the 12 Awards in 12 Months Challenge and the SF Masterworks Reading Challenge and Science Fiction Masterworks Reading Club here on Goodreads.
This novel won the 1976 Nebula Award.
Some books stand up to the vicissitudes of time better than others. I’m a big believer in taking vintage SF on its face, and reading it as alternate history in some cases as opposed to a vision of the future, but in this particular case, that was really challenging for me, and I don’t recommend it to anyone younger than I am because I don’t think they would get it.
I’m old enough to remember the Cold War. I’m old enough to remember growing up in the 80s (I was 10 in 1985; you do the math) and I remember how it felt to be convinced that any day, any day now, we were going to incinerate ourselves in a nuclear holocaust. You have to accept this mindset to accept this novel, because otherwise it makes no sense.
I also found it challenging to accept, since we’re on the verge of finally making a manned mission to Mars, accepting all the anachronisms around getting there in this novel. It was written in the 1970s when computers were clunky. I can’t imagine doing what they’re doing with the stuff they were trying to do it with. And yet . . .
And yet, what Pohl was trying to do with this novel was astoundingly ambitious, and might even be prescient, if you don’t linger overmuch on technology that is capable of almost completely replacing the human body with cybernetics, but is incapable of running all those systems without a computer terminal the size of a backpack that must communicate with a mainframe.
Roger Torroway is an astronaut who has been assigned to the Man Plus project. The object? To make a man capable of living on Mars, unaided by a biodome. The novel concerns itself with the dehumanizing effects of the technology, and speculates that a human who has almost entirely been replaced by machines may not be exactly human anymore.
I don’t agree, and I don’t think most modern readers would, but that was a valid concern in the 70s and even 80s and writers spent a lot of time on it. It was believed that machine parts might be better than human parts (see The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman,) but of course, now it’s become apparent that the human system is so complex that this is doubtful at best.
But assuming it’s so, much of the novel also centers around relationships. Here the novel becomes even harder for the modern reader to read. The sexism is extremely distracting. Torroway’s very liberated wife has a pottery shop all her own; how cute! And the doctors and astronauts are all men, except the psychologist of course. And the men call her “sweetheart.” Also they’re smoking everywhere, including in a hospital environment in rooms with the patient. I’m telling you, if 1970s SF is any indication, women’s liberation happened in the 70s because it was a necessity. There’s some casual racism as well. Not as much, but a little.
By this time, Pohl had been writing sci-fi for many years, and was in his 70s, so I guess he was trying. But he clearly held certain views of toxic masculinity and it’s hard to read now. For instance, a character who was a chronic womanizer would cheat with someone’s wife because he had managed to avoid all athletic competitions in his youth and was therefore inclined to be a moral coward.
Okay; now that I’ve given you all its flaws, let me talk about its merits, and why it does indeed deserve to be in the SF Masterworks. I don’t think anyone had ever examined the issue of technological dehumanization quite as thoroughly before this book. And what he has to say about letting computers do all our thinking diminishing our ability to make our own decisions and trust our own senses is poignant in this age of social media spreading mass hysteria, and science becoming so complex that many people, incapable of understanding it, rejecting its validity entirely.
I’m convinced that James Cameron and/or Bill Wisher, who wrote the script for The Terminator, must have read this book, because in many ways it’s an anti-Terminator plot (nope, not telling you more, that would be a spoiler!)
Also, I’ve read it before. I remember that its ideas spawned a short story I wrote for an assignment on adaptation when I was about eleven (I took it to an underwater environment). Also as I recall, I got an A.
Also, the ending is a neat surprise that puts the whole thing in an entirely different context than when you started reading it.
Do I recommend it? Well, sure, if you’re like me and you can mostly ignore the anachronisms; and if you can accept that during the Cold War, the extermination of the species through nuclear war seemed a far greater threat than climate change. Certainly it’s a formative book, and those who enjoy vintage sci-fi will enjoy it. But younger and modern readers might find all that too much work, and perhaps should give it a pass.
January 21, 2018
Scott Kelly: An Astronaut’s Exit Interview
By David Plotz
Being an astronaut is not all zero-gravity gymnastics and big blue marble flyovers. There’s also all the time spent repairing the urine collector and hunting for lost screws. Scott Kelly’s delightful new memoir, Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery, chronicles the mundane, frustrating, and surprisingly funny reality of life on the International Space Station (ISS). Endurance recounts his year up there—including the Sisyphean struggles to fix the urine collector—his unlikely career as an astronaut, and his partnership with identical twin brother and fellow astronaut Mark Kelly. Kelly retired as an astronaut in 2016, shortly after the end of his year-long mission, but NASA continues to monitor his health. They’re examining specifically how his year in space affected Scott compared to his ground-bound twin, Mark. Atlas Obscura CEO David Plotz interviewed Kelly on his book tour in Washington, D.C. He was accompanied by his fiancée Amiko Kauderer, who makes a cameo.
Read the full article at Atlas Obscura.
January 20, 2018
Too Busy to Write Right
I’ve been wanting to write, honestly I have. It’s just that I’ve been too busy writing. As you know, The Killing Scar is drafted, but that was only the beginning of the work. First I had to edit it, which means I had to re-read it, not an easy task when I just wrote it. It sounds like a lousy pitch for your book that it’s the last thing in the world you want to read, but it’s true. But that’s done now. As soon as I get the cover, I’ll preview it. Then, if the beta readers don’t threaten to turn my ms. over to the police as evidence of a literary crime, I’ll publish. That’s a big “if.”
In the meantime, I have to start outlining Marauders from the Moon (due out in June, and when am I going to start it?). And at the same time I’m…
View original post 162 more words
January 19, 2018
Book Review: The Dark Tower by Stephen King
The Dark Tower by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Read for the 12 Awards in 12 Months Challenge, the Apocalypse Now! Reading Challenge, the High Fantasy Reading Challenge, and the Read the Sequel Reading Challenge.
This novel won the Derleth Award in 2005.
The conclusion of the Dark Tower series is probably the best book in it, tying it all perfectly together. It has a lot of conventions in it that are generally frowned upon in in modern fantasy literature (deus ex machinae, heavy-handed foreshadowing,) but these things are an integral part of mythic stories, and this book makes it clear that above all, the Dark Tower is a narrative myth. Sometimes the heroes get out of things because of psychic forewarning, which feels like a cheat, except that the bad guys also make use of such things and have from the start, so it levels the playing field a little, and is not the solution to all of their problems.
Once again the characters are defined as much by their flaws as their merits. Roland is obsessive, Susannah divided between Jekyll and Hyde personality elements, Eddie cocky, Jake brave to the point of foolheartiness, and Oy loyal to a fault. All of these things are also their merits, and they give them strength, but they cost every last one of them in the end.
King brings back all of the themes of all of the previous stories, and nods to little elements here and there. It feels like he’s honouring all of the story that’s come before. That could be why it’s so long (more than 1000 pages, my friends!)
The ending is intense. I did not like it at all when I read it as a teenager. Now, at 42, I absolutely love it.
January 18, 2018
Scientists Have Accidentally Discovered a New Material
By Josh Gabbatiss
An international team of physicists has “stumbled upon” an entirely new material, which they have called “Weyl-Kondo semimetal”.
The “semimetal” belongs to a category of substances known as “quantum materials”.
Quantum materials have various quirky properties, some of which could contribute to future technological innovations like quantum computing – regarded by many as the next revolution in computer technology.
Read the full the article at the Independent.
January 17, 2018
2 Simple, Awesome Pieces of Characterization Advice
By Kelly Robson
I’ll always be grateful to Steven Barnes. At Orycon 2012, he passed on advice that made a huge difference to my writing. Steven said, when we get a story idea, we usually know either the character or the problem. To develop the story, we can ask ourselves the following questions:
If we know the character, ask, “What is the worst thing that can happen to this character—and better yet, how can they do it to themselves?”
If we know the problem, ask, “Who is the worst person to give this problem to?”
And from Kelly Robson herself:
A character should either know who they are or what they’re doing.
Read the full article at Clarkesworld.
