Fun Fantasy/Science Fiction Web Articles

[Jim]

If you like the Bohemian Rhapsody AND string theory (or just Einstein sock puppets) then this is for you.

http://io9.com/so-this-physics-grad-s...

This kid is a serious hoot.

[[deleted user]]

The Guardian comments on A Glossary of science fiction. Or sci-fi. Or whatever...


"To recap: Science fiction is a genre consisting of made-up stories with science. Unless the stories are sci-fi, which doesn't have science but is what most people think of as science fiction. Unless it's called SF. Or Speculative Fiction, which is what posh people call sci-fi."

[[deleted user]]

Cartoon day:


Sanderfuge : How to hide from your friends that you don't like Brandon Sanderson's books. (Penny Arcade)

"It's important technical exposition. The plot will begin in book 2." (Two Guys and Guy.)

[Jim]

Not exactly SF, but Carl Sagan rocks in "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection". Here's the Wiki article on it.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Fine...

[[deleted user]]

TED Talk on Constructed Languages: Elivish, Klingon, Na'vi, Dothraki . (Link goes to YouTube.)

[[deleted user]]

How Readers will Discover Books in Future - Charles Stross

In the future, readers will not go in search of books to read. Feral books will stalk readers, sneak into their ebook libraries, and leap out to ambush them. Readers will have to beat books off with a baseball bat; hold them at bay with a flaming torch: refuse to interact...

[Jim]

Interesting & I agree with him overall. It's the logical progression with interaction. Some of it is already here & very cool or annoying. I read a murder mystery a few years ago where the author's web site had customized Google Earth views of the area. (Precious Cargo by Clyde Ford) It was very cool. Many ebooks have links to outside sources in them. Some that I've read on line are marked up like articles with links on key words that would take me off to sponsor supported sites if I wasn't careful to avoid them.

I have some nitpicks with the facts, though. 40-50K books published per year is about 10 times lighter than the numbers I've seen, although they are all over the place depending on who is counting what. Many don't count ebooks for some reason.

Aren't some of the cheaper Kindles already blasting people with advertizing so the device costs less?

No advertizing in books since the 40's? The ads & coupons in my 70's paperbacks are not illusions. They're fat pieces of cardboard smack in the middle. Attempting to take them out destroys the book.

[[deleted user]]

Jim wrote: "Aren't some of the cheaper Kindles already blasting people with advertizing so the device costs less?"

I think all the kindles are ad supported at their base price; for an extra $20 you can get them "without special offers". (The ads are on the initial lock screen when you wake it up. They don't intrude on your reading.... yet)

All Kindles (special offers or not) show other recommendations on the "carousel", which is the Kindle home screen (a bit like Apple's familiar cover flow display of recent items used... books on the basic reader and books, music, and movies on the Fire tablet models.) This can turn you into a serial downloader (I started trying a couple of "free samples" one night, and spent the next two days reading the first 25 pages of a couple of dozen novels. At least the free samples are really free. I left a couple of them on the carousel in case I want to buy them later.)

And when you finish reading the eBook, you immediately get shown several "similar items" you might buy (from the same author and others.) Makes it really easy to pick up the sequel right away.

The Kindle is a drug delivery system with Amazon as your pusher. :)


Jim wrote: "Many ebooks have links to outside sources in them."

Most of them these days have links to an author website and publisher website. I haven't run into any with specialized content like Precious Cargo, though.

[Jim]

Thanks for the update on how the Kindles work. So I was right - most of what Stross says is already true or at least there in its infancy.

I think factual books will really take off with outside links. I see this often in online articles that lead to definitions & more advanced content, along with ads. Many readers won't need or want further explanation on some subjects or pieces of them, at least on the first read through, but the content would automatically expand for those that do. It would keep the original work short & sweet.

Well, for all Stross' doom & gloom, he got it partially right. It will likely get ugly, but there are good & bad sides to all of this. I get a few really great free books offered to me for free every year. I get a couple of dozen others that aren't to my taste & a few that are just awful, but all told, I'm pretty happy with them.

I think it will be a bit like email. I've seen it go from a new toy to a brutal master for some. I filter the email for my company & close to 90% of it is garbage. For less than $2/month, my users have very few problems & rarely see any spam, viruses, or have any issues. IOW, there are issues, but there are fixes, too.

Stross seems to thrive on making mountains out of mole hills, too. His latest blog post on his author page is wishing Microsoft Word would die.
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

I've fiddled with computers for as long & still have files from my old 8 bit Atari that are quite readable. Everything he says about Word, I could say about every other word processor or software program. Yeah, it's a PITA, but features & proprietary code is how these companies get market share & he completely misses the point.

Microsoft's domination of the desktop market sucks in a lot of ways, but it was masterful from a business perspective. It's also a fact of life & a lesson to be learned - which is why I stay away from the Kindle. Obviously Amazon took note.

Staying away from any DRM is also something we should all do. Talk about nailing us to a proprietary floor! Sheesh. And for what? Anything popular is soon cracked & available without a fee or the hassles of DRM. Apple had the right idea when they got rid of DRM on their songs & just made the price point right. They're dealing with the market, not punishing their law abiding customers.

[[deleted user]]

All things being equal, I generally prefer Kindle e-books to hard copy these days, just because I'm tired of expanding my bookshelves :) The "all things" in this case is usually price.

Jim wrote: "Staying away from any DRM is also something we should all do...."

DRM doesn't bother me because it's so easy to strip it off. I do that regularly with e-books and audiobooks, just a had a platform-independent backup.

"The Man Who Bridged the Mist" was my first experience with a Word document in several years. (It was trivial to change it to RTF and send it to the Kindle, Because so many text programs can at least read Word. As you say, it's so ubiquitous it's unlikely to become obsolete in my lifetime.)

Jim wrote: " Apple had the right idea when they got rid of DRM on their songs...."

Ditching e-music DRM wasn't Apple's idea; it was the (reluctant) music publishers. Not that the labels wanted to so much as had to. Music DRM had locked 90% of the market into Apple's iTunes and iPod ecosystem, and the labels finally figured out the only way to let a competitor sell e-music was to let them sell it without DRM so it could be played in Apple's dominant environment. In that case, Amazon was the beneficiary, able to open an MP3 store without offering their own hardware.

No doubt schooled by that, Amazon struck first with its Kindle in the e-book market, and now DRM works in its favor to keep readers locked into the Amazon ecosystem. So Amazon's dominance (70%+ of e-books in US) now scares book publishers, and a few, such as Tor & Baen, have already dropped DRM. Eventually all the publishers will suss it out and follow the music industries lead.

[Jim]

It doesn't matter who's idea ditching DRM on the songs was, the fact that they did was the right direction - that was the point.

[[deleted user]]

A pretty good History of Space Opera, concise with lots of pictures :)

[Jim]

Interesting & fun reading. Thanks.

[Jim]

While looking for some information on an entirely different matter, I got side tracked (Damn you, Google!) & found this interesting list of the best SF books. Some books are listed more than once, most have a short blurb telling why the person thought they were so good. It's an interesting place to start if you haven't read much of the genre or are looking for a book. Neither fits me, but I still enjoyed looking through it. I found a couple to put on my list.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/tabl...

[[deleted user]]

I'm not sure if this actually qualifies as "fun", but there is an article in today's New York Times by a parent who edits Harry Potter books as she reads them to her kindergartner:

Child-Proofing ‘Harry Potter’

Not sure whether to laugh or cry... I suppose after (view spoiler)[finding out there is no Santa Claus (hide spoiler)], kids get used parents lying to them.

[Jim]

Cry. What an idiot. Kids are a lot more resilient & pick up a lot more of the world around them than people like that ever think. They'll find out eventually & it won't be pretty.

[[deleted user]]

Slate (the online magazine of politics, culture and decorative stone quarries) has an amusing article today

Textual Ananlysis of "Hunger Games", "Harry Potter" & "Twilight" .

"A list of [J.K. Rowling's] most frequently used sentences could be repurposed into a script for an absurdist play called Waiting for Voldemort."

[[deleted user]]

Todays eye-candy is a pair of time-lapse videos of Earth from the ISS (via Youtube):


The World Outside My Window

All Alone in the Night

Both have HD fullscreen with background music from Two Steps to Hell. A sort of Koyaanisqatsi for LEO space geeks.

[[deleted user]]

i want to change the background music to All Along the Watch Tower....

There must be some way out of here
Say the Joker to the Thief....

[Baelor]

Moorcock's Epic Pooh.

[[deleted user]]

B&N Book Blog reports the 9 Warning Signs You Are Living in a YA Novel.

[[deleted user]]

This article: How Many Novelists are at Work in America? has collected a bunch of interesting tidbits beyond what its title implies. E.g.:

* 2012 fiction books published with an ISBN: adult fiction 67,254; YA and juvenile fiction 20,339
* 2011 books published: traditionally published 347,178; self-published 235,000
* 76% of all books released in 2008 were self-published.
      [Doesn't seem consistent with previous point, does it?]
* 50% of all fiction is a romance, mystery, sci-fi, or fantasy story.
      [The rest were Westerns? :) ]
* 1% of published books stocked in brick-and-mortar stores.
* 20% of all books sold in 2012 were e-books.

[[deleted user]]

Fans of Japanese Animation by Studio Ghible (founded by Hayao Miyazaki) may enjoy Ghibli Studio Trivia (from RocketNews24).

[[deleted user]]

Not exactly "fun", but Tor.com as an interesting article up this morning on sci-fi/fantasy fan awards: How You Ruined the Hugos .

SF Awards have, as a rule, much to recommend them; but they have two big flaws. One is the loyalty implied in the descriptor 'fan', in which a [poor] work by an author of whom (or a [poor] episode of a show of which) one is a fan gets your vote because that's what being a fan means -- it means sticking with your team. Ditto: voting for an author rather than voting for a text.

(Quote is originally from Sibilant Fricative [which I slightly edited for group-appropriate language.])

[[deleted user]]

After JK Rowlings' suggested that perhapps Hermione should have married Harry instead of Ron (CNN), the Colbert Report Discusses JK Rowlings' announcement. (video)

[[deleted user]]

This is funny: One Ad to Rule Them All ( Using Lord of the Rings quotes in advertising slogans.)

My favorite is, "Courage is found in unlikely places."

[[deleted user]]

Here's something for our linguists: Have you always wanted to Learn to speak Dothraki, Na'vi, Klingon or Elvish? or Lapine?. Mother tells you where the best on-line courses are.

What, no Hyborean? Crom!

[Tim]

G33z3r wrote: "After JK Rowlings' suggested that perhapps Hermione should have married Harry instead of Ron (CNN), the Colbert Report Discusses JK Rowlings' announcement. (video)"

Hermione and Harry, heh heh . . . I suggested that a couple years ago to my wife, who is a fan, and was chewed out for my ignorance . . .

[[deleted user]]

SteamPunks at Sea (A look at a steampunk-themed luxury cruise to the Bahamas, courtesy of the NY Times' Travel section :)

[[deleted user]]

The BBC looks at The great 1980s Dungeons & Dragons panic. Ah, the BADD old days.

[[deleted user]]

Some Americans apparently name their kids after SF/F characters

Note the numbers are rather small compared to the 4 million births in US each year, though. There are 150 new Khaleesi's, 700 new Arya's, and 12 Katniss's out there.

[[deleted user]]

Did you know that Terry Pratchett jokes that he is the "the most stolen author in Britain".

The Independent has a puff article on book theft — not the usual piracy by download but physical book shoplifting from bookstore. Apparently some authors are more theftworthy than others.

The Independent notes dryly that Pratchet is "a refreshing departure from the usual, über-trendy suspects" whose books are often purloined, which include Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino & Jack Kerouac.

[[deleted user]]

http://celestials-series.blogspot.com is a new blog publishing a chapter of a Sci-fi fantasy story Celestials every week - .::

[A.J.]

Here is my article of the most important game of throne characters http://ajmartinezauthor.com/important...

[[deleted user]]

The Guardian has a Quiz to identify Movie Spaceships.

[[deleted user]]

Tor was kind enough to share this amusing product description/price tag for a cedar cabinet from CostCo (US discount store chain.)

[Jim]

LOL!

[Allynn]

Darn, I was so hoping to obtain one. I will have to keep searching.

[[deleted user]]

Doctor Loo. (I only posted it for that title. :)

[[deleted user]]

Doctor Loo? as in what if the TARTIS' calmilian circuit was broken when it was in the shape of a porta-potty?

[[deleted user]]

OMG!!

[[deleted user]]

Netflix has a cute website dedicated to the art of the Spoiler .

Of course, being in the movie/TV biz, it's not books (except when the book is also a movie that follows the book.)

Netflix offers three section:

* "A what kind of spoiler are you?" self assessment quiz

* A "which of these "spoilers" are well known? You can take the survey or view the results. (I didn't think many of these were actual spoilers. Ghostbusters has a spoiler?) Strangely, "Star Wars V" not on the list. (Maybe it's limited to what Netflix has licensed for streaming? I notice a presence of a lot of Netflix originals.)

* An option to view random spoilers from the ends of movies.

[Jim]

Here's an interesting look at the possibilities for us ending the world.
http://www.alternet.org/visions/how-e...

[[deleted user]]

Last week Ursula K. Le Guin received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Her acceptance speech is on YouTube, 6 minutes.

[Bryn]

I thought this was funny, perhaps because I hadn't heard before Margaret Atwood's dismissal of SF as 'talking squids in outer space.'

Kazuo Ishiguro has written a fantasy novel, or has he? Ursula K. bites back on behalf of SF:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/book...

[[deleted user]]

Bryn wrote: " I hadn't heard before Margaret Atwood's dismissal of SF as 'talking squids in outer space.'
Kazuo Ishiguro has written a fantasy novel, or has he?..."

When an author doesn't want his/her book classified as science fiction or fantasy because s/he thinks it cheapens the work or consigns it to some literary ghetto, I'd just as soon grant their wish and shelve their books somewhere other than the SF/F aisle. That way I won't accidentally pick up a copy of their litcrap by mistaking it for something I'll enjoy reading.

[Bryn]

I've since seen that Ishiguro wrote science fictiony stuff before this one, so he must have a leaning.
I like to give visitors to/guests in sf/f a go and not assume they don't know what they're doing, although often they are green or unsophisticated on the sf/f side of things.
I'm sorry to hear Atwood too, not that I've read her. What sf can she have read herself, to have this view? Unless she is quoted out of context.

[Jim]

Thanks, Bryn. I agree, that's ridiculous. I agree with both G33z3r & Pandanima, too. Genres should be a useful guide, not a constraint. With millions of books available, I need some help to narrow my selections. Much like deciding what to eat, some generalizations help create a good meal. Once I've chosen the meat, I concentrate on other food groups to round out the meal.

I agree with the article that readers will ultimately decide. I enjoy looking at the shelves people use for books here on GR & Oryx and Crake is counted as SF by a lot of us. IMO, it fits the definition of SF to a tee & there's nothing wrong with that. Some of the best literature available is SF.

The idea that SF or any genre is inherently bad is ludicrous. It's sheer snobbery & doesn't do an author any PR favors, IMO. Theodore Sturgeon addressed that decades ago with his law/revelation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon...
Note that Rudyard Kipling said something similar over a century ago. Atwood & Ishiguro should pay attention.

I've always thought Atwood was rather pretentious, but now I'm sure of it & have less interest in trying any more of her books. Seems as if Ishiguro is, too. I'm not interested in fiction as a way to improve my mind, but want it to entertain me. If it makes me expand my thinking at the same time, that's a bonus.

[Bryn]

Thanks for the Sturgeon, Jim. I didn't know that famous quote resulted from his struggle to defend sf. You know, I do come to sf to improve my mind, and Theodore Sturgeon is one to whom I come for that. These 'literary' people can have no idea how exploratory he was, which must have been frustrating for him.

I've been trawling the web on the issue; Ursula K. Le Guin obviously feels it worth a fight, she's vocal, and I have to say, amusement aside, it pees me off when I think hard about it. It is snobbery and stupidity and licenses plain insult.

[Jim]

Glad to help, Bryn. Sturgeon has done some great work. While most people point to More Than Human, I've always thought his short story, "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let Your Sister Marry One?" was one of his best works. As an intellectual exercise, it's pretty close to perfect since it takes one of our most ingrained taboos & turns it on its head. The first time I read it, I mentioned it to my grandfather who was so freaked out by the very idea that he ranted, raved, & practically frothed at the mouth. It was amusing, if sad. He couldn't get past the taboo at all.

We rarely agreed on books, though. He was sure he had the high ground since he owned & edited a newspaper (The Long Islander founded by Walt Whitman) was on the board of the library & such. We had a long running feud about the merits of Hemingway versus Spillane similar to theirs. I gave him Slaughterhouse-Five & he thought it was ridiculous. Silly man.
;)