Wednesday, December 10, 2014

November: A Few Links

Formal Announcement of Intention to Neglect.

It may be a little while before I get back to any serious blogging (I am spending November to February sharpening my face). But in the meanwhile:

1) I have a longish review of Peter F. Hamilton's Geordie procedural space opera Great North Road in Foundation #118. Haven't seen that issue yet but it's a large & interesting contents page.

(BTW meant to say in review that it says on the stargate stop on Market Street that the last stargate is 11:28 but actually the last one is 10:54. Don't stand there in the rain).

2) I've written a novelette tie-in for the alt history near future cyberpunk board game Tokyo Yakuza. It's not out just yet, but you can follow Godan Takami on Twitter for news of the series: I think I'm about #27ish or so. (And there will be other short fiction before long. Working title, "Actually, It's About Ethics In Grand Juryism.")

3) Look at Darius Kazemi's semi-random scratching OCR appeasement bot! Reverse OCR.



4) Have you noticed that Nina Allan is posting story-by-story responses to The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women ed. Alex Daly MacFarlane? Twitter has weaned itself off Jonathan McCalmont so fingers crossed for the ascendancy of "the long tweet" over at Ruthless Culture. & Amal El-Mohtar has started a weekly review of short fiction, Rich and Strange. So yeah, we can't all blog at once, can we?

5) And by now there is more than enough nonsense on this blog already to keep you pickled in nonsense at least until I return. E.g.:

Reviews:

Reviews (originally published in Interzone) of anthologies including 21st Century Science Fiction and Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy.

Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation (on SF Signal).

Waaay too long review of Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema. The last bits try to make a connection between a certain kind of idealised copyright and the reputation currency Whuffie from Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom.

& OK it's still not quite finished, but long review of my namesake Jo Walton's Among Others, which ruminates on immersiveness, words & worlds.

&/or use the label: reviews.

Other SFF:

Underappreciated Authors: a short piece sort-of-in-defence-of continuing to underappreciate them.

Storytelling & Sludge. I think progressive & radical stories are harder to tell than conservative & reactionary ones. (& it's easy to convince ourselves we're telling them when we're not).

Kicking Asphalt & Taking Names: some thoughts on urban fantasy, names, & Tom Pollock's Parva "Pen" Khan. (w/ links to other blog posts about names in SFF).

The SF of gamification (a list). Economic speculative fiction (another list).

Some made-up drones.

Social media:

Thoughts lightly touching algorithmic curation, & what it's like following thousands of people on Twitter: Why I Am So Uncool, by me Nietzsche.

Also a thought experiment about crowdfunding, online collaboration, and the future of the book. (Imagine the "spine" as an n-dimensional virtual object, the "binding" as an intricate system of nested pledges of finance, labour and consumption ...)

A wee thought occasioned by the rise of Glass & other wearables. Always lurking, always performing: is there an equivalent in SF literature (or any culture) of .@?

Other:

I am still trying to work out, for myself at least, this: what is money? Old blog post about imagining money without numbers, among other things.

& for other round-ups & links lists, try the executive summaries.

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