November: a few links

"With Augmented Reality You'll Always Know When No REALLY Means Yes," by Tim Maughan.  "Weakness analysis — having trouble finding chinks in her armour? Our powerful face and body analysis software will scan your target and compare her attributes to a constantly updated top ten of celebrity hotties, identifying areas where she likely feels inadequate. Make her feel a million dollars instead by complimenting her in the ways she’s desperate to hear." See also: "Collision Detection."

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An intriguing request from Karen Lord about her novel The Best of All Possible Worlds. "What I am wondering is whether certain parts of my book are being overlooked by readers and reviewers who are not well-versed in postcolonial and Caribbean literature. I’m referring to two chapters: ‘Bacchanal’ and ‘The Master’s House’. [...] I’d be so grateful if an academic or reviewer in Caribbean and postcolonial literature could examine, assess and critique the book in general and those two chapters in particular from a position of expert knowledge. My job is to write the stuff, not explain it, and my policy is to rarely react to reviews, so I can’t guarantee any kind of ‘you’ve got it’ endorsement. I simply want to see a discussion started in an area that I feel is significant but has been barely mentioned as yet."

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Tony Ballantyne's "If Only ... A Taste of Your Own Medicine" (Nature / Concatenation, PDF) is a seething quirky one-page parable. "'Magic?' said Sacha, her eyes suddenly shining. “You mean there’s really such a thing?' 'Of course not. But I can’t explain to you how it’s really done because you’re not allowed science any more.'"

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Greg Egan's The Arrows of Time is hitting a shelflike direction near you. "In between the timelike and spacelike directions are those traced out by light; these are known as lightlike or null directions." Try out his worldbuilding notes, in which there is no distinction between timelike and spacelike. Plus: spot the deliberate physics mistake!

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“Memorably described by Charles Stross as the 'fictional agitprop arm of the Technocratic movement,' science fiction has tended to do incredibly well in periods of hubristic cultural expansion when the boundaries of possibility somehow appear both endless and within easy reach. Despite this proven track record when it comes to frontier spirit and two-fisted optimism, science fiction has also displayed a remarkable capacity for re-invention that has seen it resonate in periods of intense cultural retrenchment when all thoughts naturally turn to the moral difficulties of empire and what it means to live in a culture that has definitely passed its prime.” Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted column #1. Originally in Interzone.

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Amazon nano-choppers delivering It straight to your driveway (BBC). You have a driveway, right? You want It, right?

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With 27 days still on the clock, Adam Roberts calls it for the best science fiction of 2013 (Guardian). Also: Roberts on Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam (Strange Horizons).

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Nicholas Royle's Nightjar Press publishes limited edition fiction chapbooks, with recent titles by M. John Harrison & Hilary Scudder.

My envelope arrived stiffened with cereal box cardboard: Crispy Minis and Golden Nuggets.

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Patrick McCray on the futurism of Kaku and O'Neill.

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Edinburgh fowk: the 17th of December is Syndicate 10: Subsong, the last Syndicate of the year, & perhaps even the last.  Why not come along (Facebook)? Advanced poetry, the possibility of scattered robot parts, even a Syngularity.