MetaFilter posts tagged with ScienceFiction

Do we have wormsign?

Artw — Fri, 24 May 2013 09:12:05 -0800

In 1997, Last Unicorn gave Zug the chance at recreating Frank Herbert's 'Dune' through a new trading card series. He was originally told to base his work off of David Lynch's film, but after complications with licensing, "they told me to avoid similarity to Lynch's visuals" says Mark Zug. Mark Zug's Dune trading cards.

Yes, llamas sure are scaly!

MartinWisse — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:33:19 -0800

Because you’ve seen this story so many times, because you already know the nature and history of llamas, it sometimes shocks you, of course, to see a llama outside of these media spaces. The llamas you see don’t have scales. So you doubt what you see, and you joke with your friends about “those scaly llamas” and they laugh and say, “Yes, llamas sure are scaly!” and you forget your actual experience. -- We Have Always Fought: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative by Kameron Hurley.

Science Fiction (or something like it)

Artw — Thu, 16 May 2013 07:54:16 -0800

The Science Fiction and Fantasy art of Yuko Shimizu

Science fiction novels for economists

brundlefly — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:50:31 -0800

Science fiction novels for economists [via Paul Krugman]

reeks too much of "space pirate" or similar bad science fiction

Sara C. — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:38:58 -0800

How do you solicit freelance scripts for a science fiction television series that breaks the mold? You create a comprehensive guide to writing an episode of Star Trek. Harvard's Houghton Library recently acquired the 31-page document, which has not (yet?) been completely digitized. But what has been released provides a glimpse into a world before the conventions of TV sci-fi that Trek cemented into place. No pockets. No space suits. No, we are not on LSD. In other "incomplete smidges of weird Star Trek ephemera" news, wikia is working with Roddenberry Entertainment to start releasing materials from the archives of Gene Roddenberry via their new Trek fan portal, Trek Initiative.

AskMetafilter In 1946.

The Whelk — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:34:02 -0800

A Logic Named Joe is a short science-fiction story by Murray Leinster. Published in 1946, the story depicts data-mining, massively networked computers, search engines, privacy/censorship filters and internet porn. Read it here.

The short sci-fi/fantasy/noir/b-movie stories of Richard Kadrey

filthy light thief — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:20:19 -0800

Richard Kadrey is not the most prolific novelist in the world. Still, every five, six years or so out comes another book like Metrophage, or Kamikaze L'Amour, dark, violent, intense works mostly set in and around Los Angeles with characters straight out of a good punk rock song. The self-confessing film nerd is probably best known for his Sandman Slim series, and if you're impatient for the forthcoming Dead Set novel, you can bide your time with a ton of short stories online. Most come from the extensive Infinite Matrix archives (previously), but a few can be found in various volumes of Flurb (previously, twice). At least one story has been pulled from Infinite Matrix, but you can still find it via the Internet Archive (the PDF link works). Speaking of offline, Kadrey's blog has been emptied, but Archive.org shows a dormant site as of May 17, 2011. Still, you can find the list of movies referenced in the first three Sandman Slim novels, which was linked from the Nerdist interview, linked above the break. And if you're interested in this whole Sandman Slim thing, I have good news for you -- the four volumes are available to preview through Google books (Sandman Slim, Kill the Dead, Aloha from Hell, and Devil Said Bang), and you can preview excerpts from Harper Collins. As a random bonus, Kadrey wrote a short piece for Wired in 1998, called Carbon Copy: Meet the First Human Clone. It became a TV movie, No Ordinary Baby.

Viewing is mandatory, citizen!

fearfulsymmetry — Mon, 06 May 2013 11:40:24 -0800

Judge Minty is a fan film based on a minor character from the comic 2000AD's story Judge Dredd

My personal opinion is the best type of Science Fiction involves science

Perko — Mon, 06 May 2013 07:15:58 -0800

Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison & Gene Wolfe discussing Science Fiction in 1982 (slyt). And oh yeah, one of the moderators is Studs Terkel

The Mothership Connection

Artw — Thu, 02 May 2013 20:51:05 -0800

Minister Faust explains the meaning of George Clinton's Mothership

The Net Before The Net

the man of twists and turns — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:08:34 -0800

John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider Brunner is perhaps more famous for Stand On Zanzibar

The book, published in 1969, is set in the year 2010, and this allows us to make a point-by-point comparison, and marvel at novelist John Brunner’s uncanny ability to anticipate the shape of the world to come. Indeed, his vision of the year 2010 even includes a popular leader named President Obomi — face it, Nate Silver himself couldn’t have done that back in 1969!

One book review ah ah ah two book reviews ah ah ah three book reviews

MartinWisse — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 08:17:53 -0800

As you know Bob, the gender inbalance within science fiction and fantasy has been a hot button item for a while now. As the just released Strange Horizons count of books reviewed and reviewers writing in sf publications in 2012 shows, this gender inbalance shows no tendency to decline just yet, with some notable exceptions. However it might just be that this gender imbalance is exacerbated in the count by the omission of RT Bookreviews? Natalie Luhrs, the senior science fiction and fantasy reviewer and section coordinator at RT Bookreviews until november last year, thinks so:

RT primarily reviews romance novels and mentions of RT often draw sniggers from men (and some women) in the SF audience because hey, romance novels are somehow inherently funny. Here’s the thing: they do have a pretty good (if I say so myself) science fiction and fantasy section, one which I was pleased to be involved with for just over eight years. I manage data at my day job, so I have kept data for every single book that passed through my hands during my tenure (that would be 100-150 books a year, give or take). These books were mainly from the Big 6 publishers and mainly science fiction and fantasy with a smattering of urban fantasy. RT has a separate urban fantasy section and it was and is coordinated by someone else and I’m not sure if she keeps records or not–but I can say pretty confidently that most of the books reviewed in that section were written by people who identify as women and reviewed by the same. From 2004 to 2012, I reviewed a grand total of 564 books for RT, 354 by women and 210 by men.

There's more; she has graphs. Luckily, the Strange Horizon editors have taken this criticism to heart and on Twitter promised to include RT Bookreviews in next year's count.

Plate of Shrimp

Artw — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 15:36:22 -0800

It is an apocalypse tale with no doomsday, a punk movie with no concert, a science fiction story with less than ten seconds of aliens - Repo Man: A Lattice of Coincidence, a look back at the 1984 classic film by cult director Alex Cox, whose current project is a crowdfunded adaptation of Harry Harrison's Bill, the Galactic Hero.

I hope it is at least better than Prometheus...

Renoroc — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 12:21:39 -0800

The first reviews of Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise, are in!

The Best 3D Movie Ever Made!

hippybear — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 11:46:34 -0800

Starchaser: The Legend Of Orin (trailer) is an animated SF film released in 1985. Presented here in 11 parts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11. Or perhaps you prefer the original 3D, in 13 parts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13. If you don't want to actually watch the movie, Nostalgia Critic will summarize and dissect it for you in 1/3 the time. In more recent news, the impending live-action remake of Starchaser got a boost this past November, when it was announced that writer/producer Harry Werksman was joining the production.

Night Shade's Deal or No Deal

MartinWisse — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 04:58:14 -0800

"I should have known before Night Shade came to me with a deal that things were rotten. Instead, I got an email immediatley upon announcing that I’d inked the deal saying “You know they aren’t paying people, right?” Everything authors knew about the rotten abuse at Night Shade was shared in private. With a few exceptions (Moon and Williams, most notably) no one was talking out loud about what was happening. The SFWA was accomodating and gracious and gave them chance after chance. We should have spoken up. All of us." Kameron Hurley talks about the culture of silence surrounding the problems at Night Shade Books. Night Shade Books is an independent publisher of science fiction and fantasy which has been relatively successful, e.g. publishing Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which won basically every major SF award the year it came out. They're one of the bigger independent publishers with a broad range of interesting authors, but over the last few years seems to have had problems actually paying their authors the royalties owned on their books. As Justin Landon explains, most of the problems Night Shade had to deal with seems to have come from the owners being fans more than business people:

Night Shade, throughout its existence, consistently exhibited the kind of behavior that fundamentally precluded them from ever finding success. To my knowledge Williams never consulted people running other independent presses. Instead, he opted to seek my advice – a relatively new blogger whose most illustrative credentials were calling God’s War amazing and Pillars of Hercules a piece of shit. I have no experience in the publishing business, nor have I ever studied it.

Things came to ahead earlier this week, as Nightshade sent a lettre to all their authors about the proposed sale to another publisher and the revised contracts that would need to be signed by them for the deal to go through, with the threat of bankruptcy looming otherwise. As Michael Stackpole explains, those new contracts are much more unfavourable to an author than the existing ones, e.g. only offering a flat ten percent royalty rate on the net income. Not surprisingly therefore, there has been a lot of agitation against the companies proposing to take over Night Shade, some seeing them as the villains in this story. Of course, the would-be new owners themselves don't see it this way:

"We're the good guys," insists Jarred Weisfeld with Start Publishing. "We're the ones who are coming in and trying to save something."

Central Station

homunculus — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:34:26 -0800

The Smell of Orange Groves. This short story by Lavie Tidhar (author of Osama: A Novel) is part of his Central Station story cycle, taking place in or around Tel Aviv’s Central Station neighborhood sometime in the future. Here are a few more free Central Station stories: Crabapple The Lord of Discarded Things Strigoi

Part time Earthling

MartinWisse — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 07:31:00 -0800

According to Lindner, his patient first began experiencing a strange feeling while reading fanciful adventure novels during his youth. "In some weird and inexplicable way I knew that what I was reading was my biography. Nothing in these books was unfamiliar to me: I recognized everything... My everyday life began to recede at this point. In fact, it became fiction—and, as it did, the books became my reality." At the further stage of this "psychosis," the patient "filled in the spaces" between the written stories with "fantasy 'recollections.'" -- So you thought otherkin and people believing they're the reincarnation of a fictional character were a modern thing? Well, it turns out science fiction author Cordwainer Smith might've been otherkin half a century before the term was first coined, if The Atlantic is to be believed. Cordwainer Smith was the pseudonym of Paul Linebarger, born in China to parents working for Sun Yat Sen, who would become his godfather. During World War II he would return to China to work as an expert in psychological warfare, turning his experience into bookform after the war. It's not proven that the patient Lindner talks about was really Cordwainer Smith, but it would fit well with the rest of his life.

We demand rigid boundaries between science fiction and fantasy!

MartinWisse — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 07:03:32 -0800

"There use to be just sci-fi [sic]; then along came New Wave, New Weird, Cyberpunk and countless other genres; now new writing is stepping beyond even these" -- The Irish Times discovers it can be hard to tell what's science fiction and what's fantasy these days.

Khaaaaaaaan!!!

Artw — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:06:33 -0800

Inside Secrets of the Making of Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan and "Space Seed" - of course Benedict Cumberbatch is totally not playing Khan, a genetic superman from 1993, in the new Star Trek movie. Maybe he'll sing a song.

Ask Nicola

Artw — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:31:21 -0800

Nicola Griffith recommends good lesbian science fiction novels.

Predicting is hard, especially the future

MartinWisse — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 03:31:03 -0800

"During a summer in the late 1960s I discovered an easy and certain method of predicting the future. Not my own future, the next turn of the card, or market conditions next month or next year, but the future of the world lying far ahead. It was quite simple. All that was needed was to take the reigning assumptions about what the future was likely to hold, and reverse them. Not modify, negate, or question, but reverse." -- science fiction critic and writer John Clute discusses the secret of predicting the future for Lapham's Quarterly's Future theme issue.

Faster Than Light

Artw — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 15:38:42 -0800

Davis and Ma wrote up a long list of one-paragraph game pitches to prototype. They would be small, manageable games that two people could complete on their own. The game they chose to go with would have to be finished within a year, because that was all they had budgeted for. Among the pitches inspired by board games, roguelikes and all the genres that excited them was a 2D, top-down management game called FTL. The Opposite of Fail - The making of FTL (Previously)

How science fiction/fantasy blogs cover female writers

MartinWisse — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 04:13:44 -0800

"When looking at a sample of bloggers reviewing SF/F, a majority of men will skew toward reviewing more men. A majority of women will skew toward a more equal gender parity, or the opposite in which they review a majority of women. There will be a handful of outliers." -- An analysis of the visibility of women in (online) science fiction and fantasy reviews and whether the gender of the reviewer impacts that visibility.

Valibation

homunculus — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 18:20:38 -0800

Valibation: It isn't in you, it is you. NSFW short film in which a man's addiction to his smartphone gets a bit out of hand. [Via]