I’m back from my vacation in Spain. I hope you all missed me, sorry about the week of silence. I reckoned I could keep the blog up out there but the places I was visiting weren’t well wired and what internet I did get was absolutely medieval so I gave up in frustration.
Flying into Madrid’s […]

It’s with quivering anticipating that I bring to you five steaming examples of prose most purple. It was with heavy hearts that we whittled the voluminous mountain of glittering submissions to this portentous content. The whole experience was a drama of Odysseian proportions that may have left us surprisingly unchanged for the rest of our […]

The good people over at SFSignal decided to turn the tables on your memetherapists and stick us under the spotlight. They asked all three of us a load of questions and you can read our answers here.

As an experiment we decided to ask a load of the denizens of stumbleupon.com this question: What is the strangest thing you believe to be true? We got an amazing response and some truly fascinating answers. This is first installment of a series of articles so if you don’t see your answer here don’t despair, as I’ll be printing all of them eventually.

I asked a lot of people the following question:
What is the strangest thing that you believe to be true?
I started with a few writers and scientists whose answers are below. But I found myself continually asking people this question. I went on Stumbleupon and asked dozens of people this question. I’ve got all kinds of weird and wonderful answers…

We kick the week off with a Brain Parade that got suggested to me by Lou Anders at Pyr.

What is the job of contemporary SF? Does it have a job?
I found it hard to come up with comments for this one, it’s much easier to answer your own questions.
Read the second part of this brain parade here

John C. Wright answers the question “Is it worth preserving the thin red line between sci-fi and fantasy” with his usual eloquence.
You can find our brain parade on the same subject here

We asked a number of Authors to change history with a manky towel. “Manky” is British slang for dirty and used. I’ve been in the UK long enough to go native so I didn’t realize that people on the other side of the pond don’t know what the word means.

A few days ago the Armchair Anarchist over at Velcro City Tourist Board tagged us with a book meme and since then it’s been cropping up in some very odd places… Find out where we managed to trace it to.

Another excellent post by David Louis Edelman on Greasemonkey and self selecting reality. Greasemonkey being the app that lets you self censor and run macros on the web pages you’re reading. Essentialy modifying the web page according to criteria you select before you read it. Here’s an excerpt of what he had to say:

Science Fiction and Fantasy author John C. Wright went to town with our last question. We hope this vision of the future doesn’t come to pass as it would pretty much wreck the planet but at least it’ll get wrecked in an amusing way.

Two months back I interviewed Alexander Gough a data manager doing a tour of duty at Halley Research station in Antarctica. Well he’s just posted some cool images on his blog that I’d like to share with you folk. They’re a good example of life imitating science fiction.

There’s plenty of people who point to real world developments in technology, politics, science that were supposedly predicted by science fiction. I don’t put much stock in science fiction’s crystal ball myself. The genre has a lousy track record of predicting things, the ocassional sucess is usually vague and has a “even a broken clock is right twice a day” feel to it.

Rosie and I were just talking about advanced forms of viral mimetics delivered through the internet just before I got hit by one. It’s a pass along book quiz. Velcro City Tourist Board tagged me with a post titled When book memes attack!. The idea is a bit cheesey but I couldn’t resist:

I already had this Brain Parade in the works when Lou Anders at Bowing to the Future posted The State of Science Fiction, Part II but this could very well be a response to Lou’s musings about how other’s see SF.

Every once in a while we run a Brain Parade on a question that we don’t really have an answer for ourselves. In a way these are my faves because these are often the Brain Parades I learn the most from and it also means that I don’t have to write any commentary of my own because I simply can’t answer the question.

Today we interview The Guardian’s Technology editor Charles Arthur on the Free Our Data campaign, aimed at persuading the British government to stop charging for non personal data collected at the taxpayers expense. To read the original article that started the campaign go here. (link)

I have to confess to having a crush on utopian visions. I suspect that’s a side effect of a happy childhood and reading too much science fiction growing up. On the flipside however whenever people get the idea in their heads that the world would be perfect if only we did X, Y and Z then they tend to be a bit ruthless in their pursuit of it.

As usual you’ll have to wade through my two cents first: The first step that I see happening are networked grassroot movements gaining an increasing say in the internal politics of political parties. This isn’t going to happen quickly.

Oh, wow. This is an easy one. Easy and ubiquitous access to space, in all its forms. Great spinning Lagrangian colonies filled with bright white curving hallways. Moonbases with gritty miners and frontiersmen. Mars colonists, building the foundation a whole new world.

I invited a number of science fiction authors to be mean with a silly question:
Is there a character depicted in a science fiction story who survived to tell the tale who you would have liked to have seen killed. If so, how would you have liked to seen him finished off?

The 21st century has been hyped up to be the biotech century. Do you agree with this assessment? And if so what killer app do you think we might see (or would like to see) next?

The world’s commercial airline fleet vanishes overnight. What do you replace it with?

MT: And once again I’ve been beaten to the punch by the commentators (Tim Pratt is the guilty party this time). Without further adieu:

o me the answer is to the first part of the question is a hell ya. To a limited extent we’re already there. The CIA extraodinary rendition scandal was broken by a network of bloggers with digicams. Tracking the movements of a CIA black op qualifies as government level survaileance in my books.

We wrap up a heavy week of blogging with Chris Roberson a young turk who has been making waves with Paragea a new SF novel that’s getting quite a buzz on the SF blogosphere. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get my hot little hands on a copy on this side of the Atlantic yet but I’m a big fan of pulp and Chris Roberson is at the forefront of what seems to be a resurgence of 21st century pulp action in SF.

Today we do some more reminiscing (we’ll get more intellectual later honest) with a Brain Parade that basicaly gives us another opening to talk about our favourite books. Here’s today’s question:

What’s your favourite death scene in a science fiction story?

We’ve resolved not to make a meal out of links posts. There’s other guys doing a great job and we doubt we could do better. However I do spend a lot of time on author’s blogs and thought it might be an idea to specialize and do the odd links posts highlighting my favourite posts there. So here goes:

Being the hard sf geek that I am I decided to run a Brain Parade where I questioned some science types on how they felt about the way science is portrayed in the genere. Here’s the question I posed:

How do you feel about the way science is portrayed in science fiction?

I’m a bit of a naysayer on this topic. I do agree that the internet lets us all connect to each other in wonderful new ways. However to me that’s beside the point, technology (or more specificaly the way our society uses technology) is alienating.

As promised here’s the second part of our Underrated Technology Brain Parade. Just in case you missed it the original is here (link). Here’s the question I posed to our commentators:

Out of our currently exsisting technologies, is there one that you feel has the most underrated potential?

Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics and carries out research in artificial intelligence, control, robotics and biomedical engineering. I first heard of Kevin Warwick on the news several years ago when his nervous system was wired up to a computer. I didn’t take much notice of him at the time but I saw him again on Building Gods (a documentary available on Google Video- link)

I had the pleasure of interviewing Natasha recently, a transhumanist theorist and futurist with a background in the arts. She was kind enough to answer a few questions about transhumanism and futurism for us.

Meme Therapy continues to limp along without regular internet access. Rosie, Charlie and I continue to make noises about finding a permanent place with broadband but so far little has happened. Mostly this has because Charlie has been rinsing (freeloading) accommodation in a seriously fine flat so he hasn’t been highly motivated.

Three science fiction geeks. Four liters of lager.

Sorry for being so late with this. We’ve compensated for the delay by making this podcast too long. We discuss a grab bag of science fiction related stuff.

We normally steer clear from Science Fiction on television but I’ve just come across this pic of the new K9 and I couldn’t resist putting it up here. I’m not a big fan of SF on TV normally but the new Dr. Who hasn’t disappointed. There’s even talk of a K9 based Dr. Who spinoff which sounds dubious .

I’ve had some feedback that our audio files are hard to find. And yes our blog isn’t the most user friendly. Sorry for being a bit crap in that department but we’re working on it. In the meantime here’s a few quick links to our audio.

The Meme Therapists are in the process of moving house so there is no discussion among us this episode (that might be a good thing). However we did get a hold of a prominent Transhumanist. Those of you who have been following the blog may have notice us mention him before, he’s Dr. James Hughes the executive director of the World Transhumanist Association.

We continue the science fiction and politics thread we started in the blog last week. Rosie joins me and Charlie for this podcast. We discuss the nature of the relationship between science fiction and politics from two angles. First we discuss the nature of science fiction’s political messages. And secondly we discuss real world politics that involve science fictional concepts.

Charlie and I headed up to London last Sunday to attend Copyfight. We interviewed users’ rights activists and some speeches at Speakers Corner. The show was a nightmare to edit but the whole experience was a real blast nonetheless. We hope you enjoy the show. We sure as heck enjoyed making it.

The third episode of the podcast is a day late. Apologies for the delay, but it will be up late tonight. You can either check back to download it or even better subscribe (don’t be shy) by copying this into your podcatcher software’s “Add a Feed” field: