A white vestibule, with white floors and white walls and a lit white ceiling. The only other color is red. A crack in one wall, exposing a raw fistula in the bioelectric packeting. Blood leaks from the hole, down three inches of slick white wall, to pool on the floor. A broken heart in the interstitial net of veins and wires that makes our houses live and breathe.
I wasn’t too chuffed about the weird changes I saw in my favorite start-up guy. Crawferd was a techie I knew from my circuit: GE Industrial Internet, IBM Smart Cities, the Internet-of-Things in Hackney hackathons. The kind of guy I thought I understood.
I relied on Crawferd to deliver an out-there networked-matter pitch to my potential investors. He was great at this, since he was imaginative, inventive, fearless, tireless, and he had no formal education. Crawferd wore unlaced Converse shoes and a lot of Armani. He had all the bumbling sincerity of a Twitter Arab Spring.
One of my favorite science fiction writers Rudy Rucker has a new short story posted at Institute for the Future's Web site. The story, titled "Apricot Lane," was part of a large forecasting project my IFTF colleagues and I just completed called the Coming Age of Networked Matter, which lies beyond the Internet of Things. — Read the rest
“My father kept things. I mean, he didn’t like to throw things away. Nothing.” I looked into his eyes as I said these words. I’d said them before, to explain my spotless desk...
The 2013 Locus Awards final ballot has been announced, and as ever, it is a fabulous guide signposting some of the very best work published science fiction and fantasy in the past year — a perfect place to start your explorations of the year's books. — Read the rest
vN, Madeline Ashby's debut novel, drops today. I'm an immense fan of Ashby's work (I actually published her first story) and vN did not disappoint. The novel is set in a medium-term future where a race of self-replicating robots ("von Neumanns" or vNs for short) have been engineered to act as servile helpmeets by an apocalyptic Christian cult that wanted to leave behind a kind of relief mission for the unbelievers and heretics who'd be left behind by the Rapture. — Read the rest
Madeline Ashby sez, "The Border Town design studio has been invited to the Detroit Design Festival to exhibit costumes, board games, 3D-printed snowglobes, mixtapes, and other kipple of an awesome nature about cities divided by international borders. I wrote a story scattered over the Internet about the future of border security in Istanbul, and Wednesday I'll open my first art installation where visitors can explore it. — Read the rest
Update:I was wrong. Writing on behalf of the Tolkien estate, Steven Maier, partner at the Oxford law firm of Manches LLP, says, "Zazzle has confirmed that it took down the link of its own accord, because its content management department came across the product and deemed it to be potentially infringing." — Read the rest
Madeline Ashby sends us this photo of "Elf" toys filed away in the Toys "R" Us "Science" section, noting, "My husband and I braved Toys R' Us on the final Sunday before Christmas to bring the happy mutants this FAIL. Our theory is that Toys R' Us committed a classic logic fallacy: science = nerdy; elves = nerdy; elves = science. — Read the rest
This week's Escape Pod podcast story is Madeline Ashby's βoyfriend, a marvellous, sweetly romantic science fiction story about teenagers who use clever artificial intelligences as "training wheels" on the way to their first real love, but who quickly find themselves substituting the warm companionship of their imaginary friends for the confusing and fraught people around them. — Read the rest
Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention (to be held in Montreal this year) is almost upon us, and the programming committee has put together a kick-ass program, and they've put it online. Here's my program items — hope to see you there! — Read the rest
Issue #7 of FLURB, Rudy Rucker's astoundingly awesome free sf zine, has just hit the net, with a collection of stories from some of my favorite authors, including a collaboration between Rudy and John Shirley, and work by Madeline Ashby and Terry Bisson. — Read the rest
Yee-haw! It's Christmas around here because Rudy Rucker's just released a new ish of his peripatetically published by inevitably brilliant science fiction ezine, Flurb!
Rudy Rucker:
Qlone
Madeline Ashby:
Fitting a New Suit
Michael Blumlein:
The Big One
Brian Garrison:
3 SF Poems
Charles Platt:
The Gnirut Test
Brendan Byrne:
The Loa and the Gaping Jaw
Jetse de Vries:
Random Acts of Cosmic Whimsy
Bruce Sterling:
Computer Entertainment Thirty-Five Years From Today
This Saturday, Toronto's Bakka Books will host the official launch of Tesseracts 11, the latest volume of the seminal Canadian science fiction anthology series that launched 22 years ago. I was immensely privileged to co-edit (with Holly Phillips) this year's edition, and doubly privileged to buy knockout stories from the likes of Daniel Archambault, Madeline Ashby, Greg Bechtel, Nancy Bennett, Lisa Carreiro, Peter Darbyshire, Khria Deefholts, Candas Jane Dorsey, Susan Forest, Kim Goldberg, Andrew Gray, Alyxandra Harvey-Fitzhenry, Stephen Kotowych, Claude Lalumière, John Mavin, Randy McCharles, Steven Mills, David Nickle, Kate Riedel, Hugh Spenser, Jerome Stueart and Élisabeth Vonarburg. — Read the rest