Reading in the dark
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Below are the 18 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Kestrell" journal:
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01:17 pm
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Free remixable audiobook of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Here's the announcement from Cory, and you can read my review of the book in the post previous to this one:
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My next novel, Little Brother, officially goes on sale today! In
addition to the US print edition, there's a DRM-free audio edition
(there's also forthcoming editions in the UK, Greece, Russia, France and
Norway, with others pending) from Random House Audio. My deal with
Random House is that they're absolutely not allowed to sell the book
with DRM on it, which, sadly, means that Audible (the largest audiobook
store in the world) won't carry it -- they insist on selling books with
DRM, even when authors and publishers don't want it.
Instead, you can buy the audiobook from Zipidee, a retailer that Random
House uses -- they have the spiffy embeddable Flash sales-object you can
find on Craphound.com (feel free to paste it into your own blog or
whatnot), and there's also a static URL for those of you who can't use
Flash.
The audiobook comes with my own sampling license: once you own it,
you're free to take up to 30 minutes' worth of material from it and
remix and then redistribute it as much as you like, provided that you do
so on a noncommercial basis, make sure that it's clear that this is a
remix and not the original, and make sure that you tell people where to
find the original. This is in addition to all the fair use remixing that
you're allowed to do without my permission (of course!).
I'll also be releasing (as always!) a free, Creative Commons-licensed
version of the text of Little Brother, just as soon as I get back to
London (I'm presently in Toronto, visiting my family with my newborn
daughter). It'll likely be Monday or so -- there's a bunch of little
clean-uppy things I need to do with the Little Brother distribution site
that I need to be in my office with uninterrupted time to accomplish.
Random House's page for Little Brother:
http://www.randomhouse.com/littlebrotheraudiobook
Buy Little Brother audio:
http://www.zipidee.com/zipidAudioPreview.aspx?aid=c5a8e946-fd2c-4b9e-a748-f297bba17de8
Buy Little Brother:
http://us.macmillan.com/Retailer.aspx?isbn=9780765319852
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Current Location: aerye
Current Mood:  excited
Tags: audiobooks, books, coryd, ebooks, science fiction
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04:39 pm
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Free download of Mothers and Other Monsters by Maureen McHugh
Small Beer Press is offering a
free ebook download of Maureen McHugh's _Mothers and Other Monsters_
http://lcrw.net/mchugh/index.htm ;
if interested, here is a review I did of this book for Green Man Review
http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_va_fictionquartet.html
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: books, ebooks, science fiction
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09:39 am
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Books read in March +"science fiction melodrama"
1. "Fountain of Age" Nancy Kress (2007) [Fictionwise]
Along with the short story "Memory Dog" mentioned next, I have generated a subgenre which I call "science fiction melodrama." It tends to have really unsympathetic characters who I am supposed to want to see redeemed, except I don't believe it because a short story is too short a period for people like this to suddenly turn around and become someone else. Also, the tech in these stories tends to be just a MacGuffin used to instigate and/or resolve the story. All this aside, even as I forced myself to finish these stories, I found myself thinking "I just know these stories are going to win awards." Maybe I'm just not girl enough to like "relationship" stories.
2. "Memory Dog" by Kathleen Ann Goonan from Asimov's April/May 2008 [Fictionwise]
3. Midnight Premiere edited by Tom Piccirilli (2007) [scanned myself]
I had been lusting for this anthology of horror stories about horror movies since I first read about it last summer and when I saw a used copy on Amazon for under $25, I jumped on it. It wasn't a disappointment, and the stories range from the subtley weird to the complete gross-out. Standout stories for me were the first and last stories in the book:
Gary Braunbeck's story"Onlookers," which exploits the uncanniness of film itself and reminded me a bit of Ramsey Campbell's _The Grin of the Dark_ in its focus on early silent film, and Ed Gorman's "Scream Queen," which is the perfect endnote as it highlights the difference between movie horror and real-life horror. "Between the Storms" by Gerard Houarner was another excellent story which used an eerie setting to really deliver the shivers.
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Current Location: aerye
Tags: books, horror, science fiction
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11:42 am
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Free award-nominated stories offered by Night Shade Books
Whenever I start to feel that genre fiction is getting stale, I pop over to Night Shade Books and get an attitude adjustment. I'm currently writing a review for Walter Jon Williams's new book _Implied Spaces_, to be released by Night Shade Books in April, and noticed that NSB is offering some free downloads at their downloads page
http://www.nightshadebooks.com/downloads/
Andy Duncan's Nebula-nominated short story"Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse"
Garth Nix’s Ditmar-nominated story “Bad Luck, Trouble, Death, and Vampire Sex”:
Richard Kadrey’s novel _Butcher Bird_ (formerly titled _Blind Shrike_, it features a yes! blind swordswoman)
Jon Armstrong’s "shocking high-fashion dystopian" novel _Grey_, nominated for the John W. Campbell Award
You can also order other great new SF from Night Shade Books like Walter Jon Williams's _Implied Spaces and
_The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Vol. 2_, featuring stories by Stephen Baxter, Peter S. Beagle, Holly Black, Ted Chiang, Greg Egan, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Susan Palwick, Bruce
Sterling, Charles Stross, Michael Swanwick, and many others.
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: books, science fiction
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04:49 pm
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Finalists for 20th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Announced
Kes: The complete list other than the SF finalists is below the cut.
Q: I was thinking it would be great to try to organize a group of blind SF fans so that we could each pick one book and scan it, then contribute the group of books to Bookshare. Anyone interested in participating in a blind queer SF fan distributed effort?
LGBT SCI-FI/FANTASY/HORROR
* Wicked Gentlemen, Ginn Hale (Blind Eye Books)
* A Companion to Wolves, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear (Tor Books)
* Spaceman Blues: A Love Song, Brian Francis Slattery (Tor Books)
* The Dust of Wonderland, Lee Thomas (Alyson Books)
* Ha'penny, Jo Walton (Tor Books)
( list below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood:  tired
Tags: books, queer, science fiction
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12:47 pm
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Cory Doctorow and Ben Rosenberg's new story True Names available as podcast
Sqwee! I recently read the Vernor Vinge story which Cory is talking about here--it was probably the first story to mention virtual worlds, but was written in the mid-1970s--and of course, I am always excited about a new Cory story.
Here's the info form the newsletter:
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I've just posted the first installment of a podcast reading of a new
novella that I co-wrote with Hugo- and Nebula-nominee Benjamin
Rosenbaum</a>. The story's a big, 32,000-word piece called "True Names"
(in homage to Vernor Vinge's famous story of the same name), and it
involves the galactic wars between vast, post-Singularity intelligences
that are competing to corner the universe's supply of computation before
the heat-death of the universe.
Ben and I will be reading the story in weekly installments, taking turns
as our schedules allow. The reading is Creative Commons licensed --
Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial -- and the story itself will be
published this fall in Fast Forward 2, Lou Anders' followup to his
knockout 2007 anthology, Fast Forward (regular Boing Boing readers will
remember Paul Di Filippo's Wikiworld story from that volume). Lou's
given us permission to post the story's text simultaneous with the
book's publication, under the same Creative Commons license.
I had a nearly illegal amount of fun working on this story with Ben, who
is a gonzo comp-sci geek with a real flare for phrasing, and I hope
you'll enjoy hearing it as much as we enjoyed writing it!
MP3:
http://www.archive.org/download/CoryDoctorowPodcast114TrueNameswithBenjaminRosenbaumPart01/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_114_-_True_Names_With_Benjamin_Rosenbaum_-_Part_01_64kb.mp3
Podcast feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
Ben Rosenbaum:
http://www.benjaminrosenbaum.com/
Fast Forward:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/23/fast-forward-1-wonde.html
Wikiworld:
http://www.pyrsf.com/chapters/WikiWorld.htm
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Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: ecstatic
Tags: books, cdoctorow, podcasts, science fiction
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08:28 pm
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Jennifer Pelland's "Captive Girl"
I just read this Nebula-nominated short story from Pelland's collection, _Unwelcome Bodies_.
It's another one of those disability science fiction stories which explores the really scarey outer limits of our own brains and our perception of ourselves. Until now, I thought Kelly Eskridge's story "Alien Jane" was the edgiest of these stories, because it demonstrated how easily people can lose track of their own ethical compass even while claiming to do so in the name of medicine, but "Captive Girl" is even more transgressive in that the relationship in the story is between two people who are intimately involved and not just patient and caregiver. Not that that makes their relationship any more politically correct, quite the opposite, actually, because we give people we love all sorts of power over us that we would never hand over to anyone else under any condition.
Proof again that exploring the shadow self is the real final frontier.
Note that "Captive Girl" is included in Jennifer Pelland's short story collection _Unwelcome Bodies_, which is available as a multiformat ebook from http://www.fictionwise.com. If you are concerned about accessibility, the multiformat ebooks can be converted to accessible text using any one of a number of ebook format converters. If you need a recommendation, post here and I will leave a link to the program I use.
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: impressed
Tags: books, disability, science fiction
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10:40 am
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Science meets science fiction, again
Having very recently read Vernor Vinge's _True Names_, this article from Wired provided one of those moments when science fiction and science fact converge.
Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/google-to-provi.html
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Building on the company's acquisition of the data visualization technology,
Trendalyzer,
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/world-in-motion.html
from the oft-lauded,
TED presenting Gapminder
http://www.gapminder.org/about/about/
team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination and probing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.
The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount
of data to explore. For example, two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the
Archimedes Palimpsest
http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/
the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project.
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Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: Meta Girl
Tags: google, science fiction, technology
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03:45 pm
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Penguin Canada needs an SF/F/mystery editor
Robert J. Sawyer asks, Want to be my editor?
from RJS' blog post
http://sfwriter.com/2008/01/want-to-be-my-editor.html
(at which you can also find a link to the job posting):
Penguin Canada is looking for a full-time editor specializing in science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and other commercial fiction to work out of its Toronto office. The
new editor will work on the Canadian editions of Robert J. Sawyer's upcoming
WWW trilogy,
on future books by Guy Gavriel Kay, and on other projects.
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.wers.org I'm in Love with the McDonald's Girl
Tags: jobs, science fiction
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11:51 am
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It's sort of a 2001/Portal crossover fan fic thing
My FF (favorite fanboy) just sent me this captioning of a Web comic which touches on one of my narrative fetishes, homicidal AI. It is also relates to one of my favorite technologies, text-to-speech or synthetic voice, as the song "Daisy" which HAL sings in 2001 was embedded in the DecTalk, one of the original synthetic speech synthesizers, while the voice actress who played GLADOS in Portal was "coached" by listening to a text-to-speech recording of her lines.
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Today's XKCD strip is a series of panels all showing the ship from 2001, with the EVA Pod hanging outside of it.
Title: Pod Bay Doors
Panel 1
D: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
H: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
D: What? Why?
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: Meta Girl
Tags: comics, portal, science fiction, tech, transmedia storytelling, tts
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11:24 am
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The Nebula and Peter Watts' Blindsight: have you read this book yet?
A couple of days ago I was looking up links for someone who had asked about science fiction etexts, and I found that when I entered the search terms
"Peter Watts" Blindsight etext
into Google, the first two results were from my own LJ. This means not enough people are finding their way to Watts' sight and his amazing book, which is both up for a Nebula and being offered as a free etext on Watts' Web site. I figured if my LJ is a signpost for readers finding their way to _Blindsight_, I should make one more plea for people to read this book, because it deserves to be read and it deserves an award.
[Note: you can get the free etext from either Peter Watts' Web site
http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm .
or from the http://manybooks.net site (look under categories and then science fiction].
Like most people looking at the long list for the Nebulas, I'm taken aback to realize how few of the finalists I have read--is it possible to read them all without limiting oneself strictly to a SF diet?--but I have read this one, and I thought it was the kind of SF book which epitomizes what good SF should do, that is, frame some interesting questions based on scientific research and then let the reader think, as opposed to being moralized to. It still ranks in my top three that I have read in the past five years. Note that I say "the past five years," because this points to one of the questions I have about what the qualifications are for SF awards: is it innovative writing that says something new? or is it nostalgia? Does, for example, any writer--especially one who has been deceased for years and is unlikely to have his work overlooked or forgotten--*need* a thirtieth Nebula? Is it about honoring new writers or helping to convey the old chestnut, "They don't make SF like they used to"?
If SF is supposed to be about looking at the present science and the questions we should be asking about how this science frames the future--what are its purposes? effects? assumptions and biases?--then _Blindsight_ qualifies as as an exceptional example of SF writing. The amount of research Watts did for the book on the current state of cognitive science is impressive, and he includes this bibliography in the etext version. It goes way beyond Oliver Sacks and his own sometimes over-romanticized and, at times, sloppy research. Instead, Watts uses a collection of characters to present a variety of perspectives on that favorite theme, what is the nature of being human? More than that, Watts explores some of the other elements which we conflate with what we call "being human": intelligence, sentience, personality, individuality, ethics, and the ability to experience emotions. All this is used to create a first contact story that ultimately challenges some of the biases we make about what we describe as "being human," and how we use our ideas about "aliens" --both extraterrestial and human--to cast our own humanity into starker distinction. Indeed, I really need to thank Peter Watts for releasing this book a couple of months after I handed in my thesis on images of disability and technology in SF, or else I would have had to write another chapter. If anyone doubts the framing of at least two of the characters as "disabled," then check out the Power Point posted on Watts site which presents a doctor's discussion of one of the characters non-normativity--I would call him a "mad doctor" except that he sounds frighteningly like many of the doctors I have had.
Okay, that's it, I promise not to push this book on anyone again.
But hey, have you read Vernor Vinge's _Rainbows End_ yet?
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: books, crip fiction, science fiction
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02:21 pm
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Verner Vinge's _Rainbow's End_ available free online
This one falls into one of my narrative fetishes: it's about a library (possibly a sentient library?).
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: bookish
Current Music: Little Red Rooster www.wmbr.org
Tags: books, ebooks, etexts, science fiction
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08:08 pm
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Superheroes and Supervillains art exhibit to open in San Francisco
Via the
Disability Studies: Temple U blog
http://disstud.blogspot.com/
(which also has a great post about H. G. Wells and images of disability in his stories)
this announcement about an art exhibition in San Francisco:
Super Heroes, Super Villains (San Francisco, October 4-November 21)
http://www.creativityexplored.org/whats_new/happenings/2007/10/super_heroes_super_villains/
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Reinterpreting famous and infamous characters from comic book history….
Fly, leap or zoom over to Creativity Explored for a special exhibition straight off the pages of your favorite comic book. Studio artists reinterpret famous
saviors of the universe and those who would thwart them. Laron Bickerstaff gives a new look to heroes like The Flash and Green Arrow, while Edana Contreras
contributes an ode to Oracle — the only major super heroine in a wheelchair. Michael Bernard Loggins imagines his own cast of super characters including
Super Toothbrush Hero, Super Serious Man and even Super Average Girl — “Trying to stay as average as she can be.” Curator Francis Kohler of Creativity
Explored also contributes food for thought placing text panels throughout the show to highlight real life heroes and villains of the disability movement.
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"
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: Meta Girl
Current Music: Sam Cooke "Only Sixteen"
Tags: art, comics, disability, media studies, science fiction
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08:27 pm
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Cory in Japan
Kes: Yes, most attendees just posted yesterday that they arrived and were going to go to sleep, and then there's Cory...It's like Godzilla all over again, can't you see the fifty foot tall Cory crunching through the city?
Posted to the Cory Doctorowmailing list:
Last night at the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan, I
sat down for an interview with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the editor who
runs the largest science fiction line in the world for Tor Books.
Patrick is my editor and a friend, and we had a rollicking, quick
discussion about copyright, technology and the future of science
fiction. It's live now on the Tor podcast, for your listening pleasure.
MP3 Link:
http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/torpodcast/media/tor_podcast_083107_cbr.mp3
Tor Podcast homepage:
http://www.tor-forge.com/podcasts
Podcast feed link:
http://www.tor-forge.com/GenerateRSS.ashx?type=itunes
--
Current Mood: amused
Tags: copyright, coryd, science fiction
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11:43 am
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On science fiction's influence on technology
Posted to the ICFA mailing list
MIT's Technology Review features the following today:
On Science Fiction, by Jason Pontin.
How it influences the imaginations of technologists
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18282/
(Video version:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18367/ )
and:
Science Fiction: Osama Phone Home. By David Marusek.
What happens when an ideologist, technologically adept, highly determined, group of conspirators are Americans?
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18307/
Current Music: www.wumb.org
Tags: science fiction, technology
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06:20 pm
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Boston Science Fiction Film Festival Feb. 18-19
Kes: Someone also pointed out that any one who mentions Arisia in their ticket order gets a discount. See the ad in the Arisia souvenir book for details.
Boston Science Fiction Film Festival, 2/07
UFOs spotted over the Charles River
> > The Boston Science Fiction Film Festival returns to
> > Somerville Theatre on President's Day weekend!
> > Tickets now available!!
> > Short film competition debuts!!!
> > BOSTON - As much fun as an alien abduction, but slightly less messy, the 32nd edition of the annual Boston Science Fiction Film Festival
> (BSF3) returns to The Somerville Theatre for 24 hours of science fiction cinematic mayhem on
February 18-19. Tickets are now available at the theatre box office and at
www.bostonsci-fi.com.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood:  exhausted
Current Music: www.wumb.org
Tags: events, science fiction
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01:57 pm
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Proposed panel for WisCon: "The feminization of the technologized voice..."
Just wrote this up and emailed it to WisCon programming, per you-know-who-you-are's na--uh, nudging. But this leads to a question I had which I was hoping someone here could answer:
In which episode of DS9 does the station computer fall in love with O'Brien?
Programming proposal for WisCon 31
"The Feminization of the technologized Voice or, Is the Hotel Elevator a Tool of the Patriarchy?"
Computerized voices are all around us, in both science fiction media and in real life. Famous computer voices include HAL from "2001," the Enterprise's computer from the original "Star Trek," and the multiple incarnations/avatars of the ship computer in another Gene Roddenberry t.v. show, "Andromeda."
These fictional computer voices have obviously, like so many other science fiction images, shaped our real life expectations and desires regarding computerized voices, and much of the development of technologized voices, from the voice menus used in telephone systems to airport announcements to home electronics, is involved in fulfilling our emotional as much as our informational desires regarding the artificial voice.
In both the fictional and real-life technologies, traditional gender expectations seem to be projected onto technology even without the presence of a physical body: female voices are typically used to help technology be perceived as helpful and friendly, while male voices are more often used to give directions or issue orders.
What do these computerized voices say about gender and human-computer interactions? Are technologized voices ever used to complicate or queer gender roles (consider Ziggy in the television show "Quantum Leap," who is referred to as "he" but later in the series speaks in a sultry female voice)>
References:
Clifford Nass
http://www.stanford.edu/~nass/
is the guy to google on this subject, in both his role as Director of the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab at Standford University
http://chime.stanford.edu/
and as co-author of the book
Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship, Clifford Nass and Scott Brave (MIT Press, 2005).
Dennis Klatt Klatt synthesizer, the basis for the DecTalk speech synthesizer
Klatt's History of Speech Synthesis Page
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/rhythmsp/ASA/highlights.html
includes a soundclip of the first song in synthetic speech, "Bicycle Built for Two," later reprised by HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey."
Two more books which are extremely useful are
The Computers of Star Trek, by Lois H. Gresh Robert Weinberg (Basic Books, 1999)
HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality, David Stork, ed. (MIT Press, 1996)
contents available online at
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/Hal/contents.html
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: productive
Current Music: "Broadway Baby" www.wers.org
Tags: 2007, cons, disabilitytech, science fiction
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08:23 am
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Cory Doctorow's new book serialized on Salon
From Cory's mailing list:
I've been working on a new novel since last December, working title
"Themepunks." The first third is in the can, and it is a short novel
unto itself. The book is about a post-dotcom boom and bust, built on
the ready availability of commodity hardware and open source code,
and concerns itself with the lives of a gang of visionary tech
entrepreneurs, journalists, bloggers, as well as Florida squatters,
students in the midwest, and Brazilian geek activists. I've read
aloud from it on a number of occasions, most recently at the Worldcon
in Glasgow in August, and always to enthusiastic responses.
Salon magazine has begun to serialize the book, and they will publish
a section every Monday for ten weeks. By that time, I hope act two
will be done and Salon will be interested in it, though of course
there's no guarantee of either (but act one is self-contained and
stands on its own). When the whole thing is done, Tor will publish it
between covers and I'll be doing my normal Creative Commons release,
but I relish the opportunity to do what Dickens did -- write a novel
in serial form just a few weeks ahead of my readers.
Hope you enjoy it!
Part 1 on Salon:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2005/09/12/themepunks_1/index.html
( excerpt )
Tags: cdoctorow, etext, science fiction
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