Boing Boing » sf

Cory's last night in San Francisco tonight!

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:02:28 +0000

Tonight's my last night in San Francisco on my Homeland tour. I'll be at Borderlands books at 7PM. Tomorrow I'll be at the Leonardo in Salt Lake City; and on Sunday I'll be at Changing Hands in Tempe, AZ. Come on down (and thanks to everyone who came by the Booksmith last night!).

US naval analyst on science fiction space warfare

David Pescovitz — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 21:16:45 +0000

Foreign Policy magazine interviewed naval analyst Chris Weuve, a former US Naval War College research professor, about space warfare in science fiction.

Has sci-fi affected the way that our navies conduct warfare?
CW: This is a question that I occasionally think about. Many people point to the development of the shipboard Combat Information Center in World War II as being inspired by E.E. Doc Smith's Lensman novels from the 1940s. Smith realized that with hundreds of ships over huge expanses, the mere act of coordinating them was problematic. I think there is a synergistic effect. I also know a number of naval officers who have admitted to me that the reason they joined the Navy was because Starfleet Command wasn't hiring.

"Aircraft Carriers in Space" (Thanks, Todd Lappin!)

Lord of the Rings: The Orcs' side of the story, told in LEGO

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 15:55:15 +0000

[Video Link] A short LEGO parody telling the Orcs' side of the story from Lord of the Rings, Directed and Animated by Kevin Ulrich.

Snarky (but accurate) Prometheus review

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 19:13:49 +0000

Henry Rothwell has an epically long, epically snarky review of Prometheus, entertainingly and engagingly written. Its fundamental point is that science fiction films are visually consistent, not logically consistent (the opposite of science fiction novels, which is why I'm a pain in the ass to take to sf movies). Rothwell gets there by pretty humorous means.

The first duty of the captain is, naturally, to decorate the Christmas tree. Because it’s Christmas apparently. Charlize Theron reminds him that there is a mission briefing. He informs her that he has yet to have breakfast. He’s been asleep for two years, and decides to decorate a Christmas tree (while smoking a cigar in a closed environment) before he has breakfast. We realise that the crew selection procedure was yet another casualty of the cuts required to ensure that they had a sodding big spaceship (SBS from here on in).
At the breakfast table a rather nice biologist (played by Raef Spall, son of Timothy) introduces himself to a grumpy geologist, who is very rude. Later on, he confirms he’s the geologist, by shouting “I’m a geologist, I fucking love rocks!” as if that was the most pressing point that needed explaining. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The current point that needs explaining is the implication that these two crew members have managed to make it this far without actually meeting each other, and are plainly incompatible. It seems that at least one part of the crew selection procedure took the form of a raffle at an arsehole convention.

Prometheus: an archaeological perspective (sort of).

Ray Bradbury at NASA JPL, 1971, reading his poem "If Only We Had Taller Been" (video)

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 02:24:36 +0000

[Video Link] A beautiful video from NASA JPL honoring Ray Bradbury, who died Tuesday, June 5 2012 at 91.

Through the years, Ray Bradbury attended several major space mission events at JPL/Caltech. On Nov. 12, 1971, on the eve of Mariner 9 going into orbit at Mars, Bradbury took part in a symposium at Caltech with Arthur C. Clarke, journalist Walter Sullivan, and scientists Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray. In this excerpt, Bradbury reads his poem, "If Only We Had Taller Been."

(Thanks, Stephanie L. Smith)

Historical novel tells the story of San Francisco's profit-sharing madam and the cops who betrayed her

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 23 May 2012 15:41:02 +0000

Hank Chapot sez, "You've published two links to my research about the 1937 police corruption scandals in San Francisco, November and February, 'the long lost Atherton Report.' After all the research, I wrote a novel. 'Bordello Politique'. Its an e-book available in most formats on most sites. Dolly Fine was the first profit sharing madam, she enrolled her girls in Social Security. She was wiretapped, raided and dragged before the Atherton grand jury. First woman in California indicted for contributing to the delinquency of (8) minors."

When Dolly’s elegant brothels are raided without warning, she is outraged. Her houses are raided, her girls are jailed, her money is stolen, and she’s dragged before a grand jury to testify against the cops she’s been bribing for years. As if that isn’t bad enough, she loses her immunity when her bail bondsman/crime boss buddy is named the “fountainhead of corruption” in an expensive, incendiary civil investigation called the Atherton Report. The good citizens of San Francisco command the mayor and the police commission to crack down on gambling, good-time girls and crooked cops, and Dolly is left high and dry. She tries to save herself but can’t count on anyone—can the city really come clean? Bordello Politique is a true crime story from a city searching for its center between the Great Depression and the World’s Fair.

Bordello Politique (Thanks, Hank!)

Wild skyscraper designs awarded

Rob Beschizza — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 18:21:12 +0000

Zhi Zheng, Hongchuan Zhao and Dongbai Song from China won Evolo magazine's 2012 Skyscraper design competition. My favorite, however, is the runner-up (above) which crawls up the side of the Yunnan mountains. Designed by Yiteng Shen, Nanjue Wang, Ji Xia and Zihan Wang, it has the advantage of being neither outrageously science fictional nor horrible: consider the third place winner, a concept design for kilometer-high landfill silos.

Fantasy Maps

Rob Beschizza — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:17:18 +0000

Victoria Johnson revisits the maps we "wandered into" as kids:

If I ruled the world, or at least a publishing company, all books would contain as much supplementary information as possible. Nonfiction, fiction—doesn't matter. Every work would have an appendix filled with diagrams, background information, digressions and anecdata. And of course, maps.

I did not accept that I was a map nerd until the day I caught myself scoffing at geological implausibilities in a map in a pulp fantasy novel. An excellent coffee-table compendium is J.B. Post's Atlas of Fantasy, but the itch may be scratched immediately with Google and TVTropes' entry on Fantasy World Maps. Artist Jon Roberts specializes in making them. Mapblogger Jonathan Crowe has an overview of resources for following suit.

Pictured above is fantasy epic Elfquest's world of Abode, a personal fave, and refreshingly geologically plausible until you start thinking about biomes.

Previously: Wondrous, detailed map of the history of science fiction and Maps.

SF vs SF

Madeline Ashby — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 04:17:27 +0000

Illustration: Kurt Caesar (?)

Tell me the difference between these two pieces of text.

Example 1

Even if Junior had understood enough English to answer her, he didn’t get the chance. The RV swerved abruptly to the right, throwing them both against wall. Amy grabbed him and tucked him in close to her as the RV bounced up and down. She rolled off the bed just as a shower of cups rained down on them from a cupboard with a faulty lock.

“Javier, what do you think you’re doing?”

“LET’S BOTH GET SOME REST,” the RV said in a gentle tone.

Gripping the wall as the RV slowed down, Amy made her way to the cockpit.“Javier?”

“YOUR VEHICLE WILL NOT START AGAIN FOR ANOTHER TWO HOURS. YOUR INSURANCE COMPANY HAS BEEN NOTIFIED. PLEASE TAKE A NAP.”

Javier sat in the driver’s seat, head on his chest, eyes shut. The RV had driven itself onto a gravel access road with deep ruts, the sort that heavy logging trucks must have once made. As Amy watched, the RV’s displays all dimmed and vanished, and the vehicle quieted. Only the image of an old padlock remained, with a series of Z’s fluttering away from its keyhole and a countdown timer showing her how many minutes were left of the enforced nap.

Example 2

"You know who watches Offside?" Tien asks. "Kim Jong-un."

"Just because the Dear Leader watches it doesn't make it a bad show." Zhuang tries the account again. No luck. His usual feed, this guy in New Brunswick, has recently changed the parameters of his account and now the whole thing is impenetrable. "Besides, there's no content in North Korea. He has to Squee, like everyone else."

"It's a stupid show to get in trouble for, is all I'm saying. They should have killed it two years ago, when the story was still good."

Zhuang frowns. "I thought you didn't watch."

Tien casts his eyes to the ceiling. "Well, I don't. But when my little sister was in the hospital during the smog storm... There was this nurse..."

"And you thought she'd give you her number if you gave her the Squee?"

"Something like that."

The first snippet is from my novel vN, and the second is from a class project I did on the future of kids' entertainment for the interactive division of Corus Entertainment. The first conjectures vehicles that assert control when the driver falls asleep. The second suggests that adolescents in China will soon enjoy Canadian content so much that they'll hack content distribution networks to get it. Which of these is a science fiction premise? Neither. Both of these things happen already, more or less. So, what's the difference between strategic foresight and science fiction?

I could be cynical here, and tell you that the difference is the paycheck. Strategic foresight pays more, because the clients often have budgets for research, innovation, and/or strategy. Publishers also have budgets, but they're smaller and the competition for a piece of them is ferocious.

The real difference from the writer's perspective is the degree of freedom afforded by each context. When I first learned my manuscript had been purchased, my dad was concerned that my editor would "interfere" with my work, and turn it from a Godfather-with-robots story (about self-replicating humanoids developed with funds from a Rapture-minded mega-church) into something with vampires in it. I told him not to worry. Editors read interesting stories, and help them become even more interesting. It's a collaborative process. I would have the freedom to drive the text my way, but I would also have a friend to take away my keys if I were clearly incapacitated -- provided he weren't too busy collecting awards like a boss.

Strategic foresight is also a collaborative process. It involves facilitating workshops, sitting down for long conversations, and standing up at white boards with sticky notes. Unlike the writing of a novel, there are other people in the room with you -- and their ideas matter more than yours. You, the researcher, are there to help the client open up about the problems and the potential endemic to her industry. For this reason, the research phase of a foresight project can sometimes feel like corporate therapy. People have to feel comfortable before they can express genuine hopes or anxieties about the future. But once they realize this is an opportunity to think creatively, they run with it. li{margin-top:1em;}

Here's how I've worked in the past. The methods outlined here are by no means complete, but they do relate to the work I've done in foresight and how I think as a science fiction writer. For a nice big list of methodologies, check out Rafael Popper's foresight diamond.

Find signals. Or, as I think of it, pay attention and take note. Get a team together. Learn everything you all can about the industry, market, demographic, problem, etc. Find recent news stories about it. Save and organize them. Listen to the sources no one else is listening to, because weak signals have more to say about the future than strong ones. (A good example is the anti-vaccination movement. Once upon a time, it seemed like a small cluster of people influenced by faulty research would have no impact. Now, California has record numbers of measles patients.) This is also how I research my fiction. I learn unusual things and write about them. This is why my last story had Quiverfull families working with fansubbers to uncover the truth about zombies.
Organize those signals into trends. Inevitably, some of the signals you find will fall into the same areas. Group them together as trends, like "the democratization of media" or "spending cuts for education." When you have those, further organize them into a STEEPV (.pdf) framework of social, technological, economic, environmental, political, or values-based trends. Some will overlap. That's okay. You're describing a culture, and cultures are messy. (Worldbuilders, take note: STEEPV also works as a method of organizing the current events in your fictional realm. It's like a character sheet for a whole culture.)
Determine what drives those trends. Think of signals, trends, and drivers as the ocean: signals are waves, trends are the tide, and drivers are the moon. Waves may be big or small, the sea may be choppy or flat, but without the moon the water wouldn't move in the same way it does now. Drivers are elemental forces impelling the trends we participate in. They can be things like the expanding capacity of a chip, the price of lithium in Afghanistan, or the human urge to communicate. But they're always the thing undergirding reality that you most take for granted.
Create a critical uncertainties matrix. Critical uncertainties are independent factors that have little influence on each other within the problem space, but could change the space as a whole if they tipped too sharply in one direction or another. They're determined from the drivers, and the client's workshop group decides which uncertainties are the most nagging. It's easiest to establish uncertainties which are polar, like "public funding for scientific research," which can go high or low. Then it's set against another uncertainty in a 2x2 matrix. That matrix creates the four scenario worlds.
Write a scenario. When I'm writing a short story or a novel, I can decide which aspect of the future I'd most like to explore. When I'm developing a foresight scenario, I need to explore the aspects that are most important to the client. Scenarios can be heavy or light on the narrative, or somewhere in the middle. Sometimes they're more like a field-guide description. But the more lived-in that future feels, the faster the client can decide whether or not she'd like to live there, too. What both have in common is the need to write entrancingly about a place and a time that doesn't yet exist.

For me, that's Strategic Foresight vs. Science Fiction.