Author and OG io9 founder Annalee Newitz has an excellent new SubStack newsletter (although, doesn't everyone?) called The Hypothesis. Each week so far has been a focused explosion of themed scientific madness — things like fossilized brains and space colonization — with a ton of great links and insights. — Read the rest

Annalee Newitz has a piece in The New York Times about the "Great Plague" of London (1665-1666)–the last outbreak of bubonic plague in England–which ended up taking the lives of almost a quarter of the city's population.

A lot of English people believed 1666 would be the year of the apocalypse.

This Sunday, November 10th, see the wonderful science fiction writers Charlie Jane Anders (previously) and Annalee Newitz (previously) in conversation with Terry Bisson at the always-great SF in SF lecture series; doors open at 6PM at the American Bookbinders Museum (366 Clementina Alley) ($10/$8 students) with a post-show podcast from Somafm, and books on sale from our friends at Borderlands Books.

Annalee Newitz (previously) just published her second novel, The Future of Another Timeline, a madcap feminist time-travel novel that pits incel extremists who are trying to snuff out feminism before it can get started against a secret liberation army of feminists inspired by the (alternate history) Senator Harriett Tubman.

The End of Trust is the first-ever nonfiction issue of McSweeney's, co-edited by McSweeney's editors and the staff of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; on December 11, we held a sold-out launch event in San Francisco with EFF executive director Cindy Cohn, science fiction writer and EFF alumna Annalee Newitz, and me.

Annalee Newitz's debut novel Autonomous is everything you'd hope for from the co-founder of IO9, a much-respected science communicator with a longstanding sideline in weird sex and gender issues: a robosexual romp through a class war dystopia where biotech patent-enforcement is the only real law remaining, where indentured humans resent the conscious, enslaved robots for making forced labor socially acceptable, and where hackerspaces become biohackerspaces, home to reverse-engineered, open source pharma and GMOs that might just save the future.

We've followed Annalee Newitz's career here for more than a decade, from her science writing fellowship to her work as an EFF staffer to her founding of IO9 and her move to Ars Technica and the 2013 publication of her first book, nonfiction guidance on surviving the end of the world and rebooting civilization: now, I'm pleased to present an exclusive excerpt from Autonomous, her debut novel, which Tor will publish in September 2017, along with the first look at her cover, designed by the incomparable Will Staehle. As her editor, Liz Gorinsky, notes, "Autonomous takes an action-packed chase narrative and adds Annalee's well-honed insight into issues of AI autonomy, pharmaceutical piracy, and maker culture to make a book that's accessible, entertaining, and ridiculously smart." I'm three quarters of the way through an early copy, and I heartily agree.

Newitz, who co-founded IO9 and recently moved to Ars Technica has already published marvellous, book-length science non-fiction, but now she's publishing her first sf novel!

IO9's Annalee Newitz takes aim at the idea of the Singularity in an essay called "Why the Singularity isn't going to happen." Newitz's objection to the idea that technology will allow us to transcend human limitation and misery boils down to this: the vision of technological utopia is insufficiently weird. — Read the rest

Reminder: I'm doing a benefit reading for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco tonight along with Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders. Hope to see you there:

Join EFF on Monday, March 23rd, for a fundraising event featuring award-winning writer Cory Doctorow.

I'm thrilled to announce that I'm doing a benefit reading for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco on March 23, 2009 — a week this Monday — along with Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders. Hope to see you there:

Join EFF on Monday, March 23rd, for a fundraising event featuring award-winning writer Cory Doctorow.

Annalee Newitz, Editor and Time Distortion Field Operator for science fiction blog io9.com, has posted a nonlegal legal complaint for injunctive relief from "possibly the worst movie ever made, the recently-released, straight-to-DVD flick The Mutant Chronicles."

Annalee Newitz tries to figure out why we love steampunk:

I think the popularity of steampunk also expresses our collective yearning for an era when information technology was in its infancy and could have gone anywhere. In 1880 we hadn't yet laid the cables for a telephone network, and computer programming was just an idea in Ada Lovelace's head.

The Geowankers email list is where the action is online for locative media hackers, geoweb buffs, and cartogeeks. BB pal Annalee Newitz attended last week's San Francisco Geowankers F2F meeting and wrote up her experience for AlterNet. Rich Gibson, co-author of the excellent Mapping Hacks book, presented at the meeting as did my Institute for the Future colleague Mike Liebhold. — Read the rest

Charlie Anders and Annalee Newitz from Other Magazine (subtitled Pop
Culture and Politics for the New Outcasts) are on the RU Sirius Show this week
talking about the freakiness of everyone, Rae Dawn Chong, and how
gender confusion inevitably resolves into chase scenes and parades. — Read the rest

Ms. Newitz opines:

It all started with those Dove ads that show all the hot, mostly naked girls in weirdly desexualized lingerie with the tagline: "Real women have curves." I can only assume it's from this sentence alone that we are supposed to guess that the women in the ad are fat or have otherwise culturally unacceptable bodies (a few are people of color, one has a large tattoo, another is sort of tomboyish).

Acclaimed sci-fi author and commentator Annalee Newitz is currently promoting their upcoming non-fiction book Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, which — as the title suggests — looks at the real-life sci-fi-like history of psychological warfare in America. — Read the rest

A celebrated science fiction author who spun wild tales of subversive cat women and psychic sex parties led a shocking double life — as the military mastermind behind America's psychological warfare operations for the US Army.

In their upcoming book, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, journalist and author Annalee Newitz's writes of learning that science fiction author Cordwainer Smith was actually Paul Linebarger using a pen name. — Read the rest

Authors and former io9 majordomos Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders have a fortnightly podcast called Our Opinions Are Correct, which covers all sorts of nerd culture and science-related topics. In the December 3 episode, "Birth Control of the Future," Newitz and Anders discuss reproductive and contraceptive technologies, both real and imagined, and the various ramifications they might have on society. — Read the rest

"Vital: The Future of Healthcare" is a crowdfunded anthology of short science fiction stories about the future of health care, with contributions from top writers like James Patrick Kelly, Seanan McGuire, Annalee Newitz, Paolo Bacigalupi and Caroline M. Yoachim (they're also open to submissions!).