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 […]

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…

Me and Charlie had a drunken conversation about the “Does Science Fiction have a Job?” Brain Parade last night. Charlie didn’t like the question initiately because he thought the answer was obviously no. And of course he’s right, just about all the responses we got on that Brain Parade were basicaly variations of “no”.

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:

Today we take a crack at an old chestnut: Is it worth maintaining the thin red line between Science Fiction and Fantasy? My two cents is that for adults this question is largely irrelevant. Experienced Science Fiction and/or Fantasy readers know what they want and where to find it.

Meme Therapy asks: On the whole do you think science fiction promotes scientific literacy more than it perpetuates scientific myths (ie. clones are evil). And secondly, does it matter?

Science Fiction often presents a coded commentary on the present. What current work of science fiction do you think delivers the most relevant/poignant message with respect to our present geopolitical situation?

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.

It’s once again time to ask a number of clever people a stupid question….

We apologize for the inconvenience, but the planet Earth is scheduled for alien invasion. Your species’ custom is important to us. Please leave a message at the tone indicating your preferred choice of alien invader and why.

Which place would you most like to see destroyed by a science fictional disaster? Please provide gory details.

MT: My pick would be an evil scientist ressurecting tiny dinosaurs and setting them loose in southern alberta where they terrorize the local inhabitants.

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.

Apologies to any of you who may have visited rectly only to discover that Meme Therapy has turned into a single scary looking block of text, but we’re going to be migrating over to our own domain over the next couple of days and so I’ve been importing the posts into wordpress.

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.

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.

I don’t pretend to have a crystal ball but I’m very optimistic about the effect of reputation systems will have in opening up new ways of doing business that sidestep Big Capital. Which isn’t to say that I think that market capitalism is somehow about to vanish but that we’re probably going to see more and more enterprises running on a different economic model.

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.

We’re seeing renewed attacks on evolution, certain branches of scientitic research and conspiracy theories involving climatologists and Global Warming. At the same time supernatural thinking (new age, crystals, ID, deified interpretations of the Gaia hypothesis) are thriving. Should we be concerned by the level of magical thinking in our society? And if so what, if anything can be done about it?

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.

Has reading and writing SF changed your world view? And if so how?

MT: As usual you have to read my answer before we get to the really interesting people, please bear with me but I can sum it up very simply.

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.

I interviewed another British researcher stationed at Halley Research Station in Antarctica about his life there. Mark Wales is an electrician currently wintering over in Britains most remote Antarctic research station.

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?

What is your favourite characteristic or quirk of an alien depicted in SF?

MT: My favourite trait comes from one of Niven’s creations, the Moties. Specificaly their idiot savant like ability to repair, modify and improve technology based on their perceptions of what it is intended to be used for.

Today we talk about our aspirations of what we’ll be doing on the internet in five years time. Here’s today’s question:

What do you see yourself doing on the internet in five years that you aren’t doing now?

We kick the week off with a chat with Robert Charles Wilson author of Spin.

MTHow is work coming along on Axis? I realize its probably too early to ask you about it, but… Can you tell us anything about it?

For my take I first have to state that I see the trend of increasingly autonomous weapons as nigh unstoppable. So I’m not going to whinge about should we or shouldn’t we as that is tantamount to pissing in the wind. However what does concern me is oversight.

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:

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) has alienating effects as well that are worth paying attention to.

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?