Science Fiction

Linkdump for June 25th through July 16th

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Sometime between June 25th and July 16th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Linkdump for April 27th through May 17th

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Sometime between April 27th and May 17th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • The Case of the Stolen Source Code: Last week, for about three days, the macOS video transcoding app HandBrake was compromised. One of the two download servers for HandBrake was serving up a special malware-infested version of the app, that, when launched, would essentially give hackers remote control of your computer. // In a case of extraordinarily bad luck, even for a guy that has a lot of bad computer luck, I happened to download HandBrake in that three day window, and my work Mac got pwned. // Long story short, somebody, somewhere, now has quite a bit of source code to several of our apps.
  • JSON Feed: Announcing JSON Feed: We — Manton Reece and Brent Simmons — have noticed that JSON has become the developers’ choice for APIs, and that developers will often go out of their way to avoid XML. JSON is simpler to read and write, and it’s less prone to bugs. So we developed JSON Feed, a format similar to RSS and Atom but in JSON. It reflects the lessons learned from our years of work reading and publishing feeds.
  • Let’s discuss the Linguistic & Pragmatic use of the [“N-word”]: No matter what your intentions, the word WILL mean something different depending on your relative status. Language is circumstancial.
  • The neural network writes the episode list for next season’s Dr. Who: I’ve trained this open-source neural network framework on a variety of datasets, including recipes, Pokemon, knock-knock jokes, pick up lines, and D&D spells. Now I give you: training a neural network on the complete list of Dr. Who episodes.
  • What we really need is an adaptation of the original 1740 The Beauty and the Beast: So were you aware that the The Beauty and the Beast story we all know is a heavily abridged and rewritten version of a much longer novella by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve?  And that a lot of the plot holes existing in the current versions exist because the 1756 rewrite cut out the second half of the novella, which consisted entirely of the elaborate backstory that explains all the weird shit that happened before?  And that the elaborate backstory is presented in a way that’s kind of boring because the novel had only just been invented in 1740 and no one knew how they worked yet, but contains a bazillion awesome ideas that beg for a modern retelling?  And that you are probably not aware that the modern world needs this story like air but the modern world absolutely needs this story like air?

Linkdump for April 19th through April 26th

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Sometime between April 19th and April 26th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • I had a dream about a Star Trek series with a ferengi captain…: …and he was super endearing but it was like…the worst ship in the fleet and it was full of the misfits of starfleet But I loved this captain I loved him who is he // It’s Nog.
  • What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free Speech: 'Free speech' as the ability to say anything you want vs. 'free speech' as the ability for all to participate equally in public discourse. (Summary via @leftoblique on Twitter)
  • NorWesCon: Norwescon's page on Fancyclopedia 3. We are the third entry (without camel case).
  • Fancyclopedia 3: Fancyclopedia 3 is a collective enterprise of all of fandom. Based on the previous works by Jack Speer (Fancyclopedia 1), Dick Eney (Fancyclopedia 2), and Rich Brown, it is written by fans who want to contribute.
  • 5 Things That Don’t Seem Like Mansplaining But Are, Because Playing Devil’s Advocate Doesn’t Enlighten Anyone: By now, you may have heard the term mansplaining — explaining things as a man to a woman with the incorrect assumption that she doesn't understand — and heard of it in its most common forms. But some things that don't seem like mansplaining, but are, may have escaped your attention. Mansplaining, after all, is part of a set of cultural assumptions that place men's opinions above women's, and these assumptions are everywhere.

Linkdump for April 16th through April 19th

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Sometime between April 16th and April 19th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black: Dolezal is simply a white woman who cannot help but center herself in all that she does—including her fight for racial justice. And if racial justice doesn't center her, she will redefine race itself in order to make that happen.
  • Volunteers, Professionals, and Who Gets to Have Fun at Cons: If your fun is dependent using your status as a volunteer as an excuse to not act responsibly, if it requires victims to stay quiet about mistreatment: then it’s not really a fun time for “everyone” is it? It’s not the expectation of professionalism that’s killing the fun at cons, it’s the lack of it.
  • Time to Fix the Missing Stair: It’s time to stop pretending the missing stair doesn’t need to be fixed. Relying on word-of-mouth means that the people who are new, who are just entering, are the ones most at risk of trying to step on it.
  • seriously, the guy has a point: A global investment firm has used a global advertising firm to create a faux work of guerrilla art to subvert and change the meaning of his actual work of guerrilla art. That would piss off any artist.
  • Westboro Wannabes Picket Norwescon: Thank you for proving, by your actions, the value that Norwescon (and all such fan-run conventions) have in this world. Thank you for proving that we can’t be bullied. You gave us all a teachable moment, and we learned something about ourselves.

Linkdump for April 8th through April 10th

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Sometime between April 8th and April 10th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Linkdump for March 30th from 13:25 to 16:32

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Sometime between 13:25 and 16:32 on March 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • The Male Power Fantasy (and why Mad Max and Captain Kirk don’t fit): This relates to a theory I have, which is that the archetypal Western Male Hero is James Bond, to the degree that people (Mainly straight white men) start to see every Western Male Hero as James Bond. Which is to say an aggressively masculine, quip-spitting, hyper violent womanizer. The ultimate Male Power Fantasy. A new supermodel love interest (or two) every film, a gun in his hand, and no consequences for his actions.
  • So many biological genders: If anyone tells you that there are 2-3 sexes in the world I want you to just go ahead and slap them.
  • Fight Club and toxic masculinity (with a side of Mad Max: Fury Road): Hold up – you mean there are people who watch Fight Club and don’t realise that Tyler Durden is meant to be full of shit?
  • Geisha FAQ: Please do not spread misconceptions about these hard-working women artists. They deserve respect and have persevered for centuries with women at the forefront of these professions.
  • Earth is dangerous: I really want a science fiction story where aliens come to invade earth and effortlessly wipe out humanity, only to be fought off by the wildlife.
  • Of privilege and nostalgia: The reality is, there was never a time when everyone could just enjoy things. To be able to say you had that time is to admit the privilege you had at not having to think about problematic behavior because it didn’t negatively affect your life.
  • To everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.: Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don’t really understand.
  • Snarky but amusing and thorough Romeo and Juliet analysis: SUMMARY: Romeo and Juliet is a stunningly rich play that is mostly about how feuds fuck people over badly and how if you have to wait until YOUR KIDS OFF THEMSELVES to figure that out you deserve to lose your children. Romeo and Juliet are victims of the feud and its mindless death-lust, not perpetrators of death on others. They’re not supposed to be figures of ridicule OR representatives of True Love: they’re supposed to make the audience go “oh BABIES, no, you’re going to end so badly” and then be sad when they do.
  • The singular “they”: Next time someone complains about singular “they” I’ll point them to this 17th century rant against singular “you”.

Linkdump for March 30th from 11:01 to 11:37

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Sometime between , I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Free Islamist SF anthology eBook

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This looks interesting to me. I’ve downloaded it, and it’ll be on my iPad soon.

A Mosque Among The Stars available for free!:

A Mosque Among The Stars was the first anthology that dealt with the subject of Muslim characters and/or Islamic themes and Science Fiction. It was edited by me (Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad) and the Canadian Muslim author Ahmad Khan. It came out in 2007. Now that it has been years since it was released in printed form, we have decided to release A Mosque Among The Stars to the public as a Creative Commons Licensed (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs) book. 

(Via Boing Boing)

Links for January 20th through January 26th

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Sometime between January 20th and January 26th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Here comes the new cell phone etiquette: "It's easy to be rude with a cell phone. A visitor from another planet might conclude that rudeness is a cell phone's main purpose. Random, annoying ring tones go off unexpectedly. People talk too loudly on cell phones in public because of the challenge of holding a conversation in a noisy environment with someone who's not present. Cell phones need their own rules of etiquette, or we'll descend into social barbarism. But cell phones — and the ways we use them — change. In the past three years, the whole world of cell phones has evolved so much that we need some additional rules of etiquette."
  • Menifee school officials remove dictionary over term ‘oral sex’: "After a parent complained about an elementary school student stumbling across 'oral sex' in a classroom dictionary, Menifee Union School District officials decided to pull Merriam Webster's 10th edition from all school shelves earlier this week. School officials will review the dictionary to decide if it should be permanently banned because of the 'sexually graphic' entry, said district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus. 'It's just not age appropriate,' said Cadmus, adding that this is the first time a book has been removed from classrooms throughout the district. 'It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,' Cadmus said." Ugh. See also: the followup article, in which a committee will determine the curriculum applicability and educational appropriateness of the dictionary.
  • The Cost of Care: "The United States spends more on medical care per person than any country, yet life expectancy is shorter than in most other developed nations and many developing ones. Lack of health insurance is a factor in life span and contributes to an estimated 45,000 deaths a year. Why the high cost? The U.S. has a fee-for-service system–paying medical providers piecemeal for appointments, surgery, and the like. That can lead to unneeded treatment that doesn't reliably improve a patient's health. Says Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies health insurance worldwide, 'More care does not necessarily mean better care.'"
  • The Science & the Fiction: "It is impossible to determine just how much science misinformation audiences retain, but it’s safe to say the minuscule amount of good science in the movies is entirely outgunned. After combing through a vast library of science fiction flicks both sublime and ridiculous, your intrepid Bad Astronomer sat down to explain the best and worst of movie science. So grab some popcorn, relax, and be glad that when the lights go back up, the real universe will still be out there for us to enjoy."
  • Christopher Hitchens on "Like": "The actual grammatical battle was probably lost as far back as 1954, when Winston announced that its latest smoke 'tasted good, like a cigarette should.' Complaints from sticklers that this should have been 'as a cigarette should' (or, in my view, 'as a cigarette ought to do') were met by a second ad in which a gray-bunned schoolmarm type was taunted by cheery consumers asking, 'What do you want, good grammar or good taste?' "

Top 100 Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novels of All Time

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Obviously, a list like this one is subject to a lot of debate due to everyone’s personal taste. Still, it’s not a bad list of works. Herewith, in true blog-meme style, the list, with those that I’ve read in bold. 35 out of 100. Not bad, but could be better!

(Note: Though this list is numbered 1-100, it should be read as being 100-1. That is, the #100 spot on this list is the #1 spot on the original list. Just a side effect of the HTML list that I don’t feel like trying to hack around.)

  1. The Word For World Is Forest by Ursula K. LeGuin
  2. Sorcerer’s Son by Phyllis Eisenstein
  3. Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
  4. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
  5. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
  6. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
  7. The Company by K.J. Parker
  8. An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe
  9. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
  10. Danny, The Champion of the World by Roald Dahl
  11. Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch
  12. Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
  13. Song of Kali by Dan Simmons
  14. Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
  15. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller
  16. Sphere by Michael Crichton
  17. Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin
  18. The Alteration by Kingsley Amis
  19. The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
  20. The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers
  21. Watership Down by Richard Adams
  22. Griffin’s Egg by Michael Swanwick
  23. Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
  24. Free Live Free by Gene Wolfe
  25. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
  26. Ringworld by Larry Niven
  27. Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling
  28. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
  29. Maske: Thaery by Jack Vance
  30. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
  31. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
  32. Flow My Tears The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
  33. The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
  34. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
  35. The High Crusade by Poul Anderson
  36. A Song for Lya by George R.R. Martin
  37. At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft
  38. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
  39. Wildlife by James Patrick Kelly
  40. The Book of Knights by Yves Maynard
  41. The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (Well, I made it up to book six or seven, then decided to wait until he was dead or the series was finished, since there was no end in sight. Now he’s dead, and I’m just waiting for the last book to appear in paperback before starting over.)
  42. Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman
  43. Nightwings by Robert Silverberg
  44. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
  45. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
  46. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
  47. The Book of the Short Sun by Gene Wolfe
  48. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
  49. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
  50. The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
  51. The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe
  52. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
  53. The Demon Princes by Jack Vance
  54. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
  55. The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson
  56. Alastor by Jack Vance
  57. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
  58. Flatland by Edwin Abbott
  59. Farmer in the Sky by Robert Heinlein
  60. A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
  61. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  62. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  63. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
  64. Lyonesse by Jack Vance
  65. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
  66. True Names by Vernor Vinge
  67. Ubik by Philip K. Dick
  68. The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons
  69. Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein
  70. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
  71. A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge
  72. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
  73. More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
  74. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  75. 1984 by George Orwell
  76. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
  77. The Cadwal Chronicles by Jack Vance
  78. Lost Horizon by James Hilton
  79. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  80. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
  81. The Fifth Head of Cerebus by Gene Wolfe
  82. A Song of Ice And Fire by George R.R. Martin
  83. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
  84. The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay
  85. The Master and the Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
  86. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
  87. All My Sins Remembered by Joe Haldeman
  88. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
  89. Planet of Adventure by Jack Vance
  90. Dune by Frank Herbert
  91. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  92. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
  93. The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
  94. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  95. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  96. Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
  97. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
  98. The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
  99. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
  100. The Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe