Paper Girls is Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's outstanding, Stranger Things-esque all-girl time-travel adventure comic, and after four years, the pair have completed the story, tying up the increasingly complicated braided timelines of their tale in a fantastically satisfying bow.

Strip Mall is a short story by Leigh Alexander (previously) about a small town's run-down shopping drag, told entirely through Yelp reviews. There's the praise and the angry rambling you'd expect to read about venues in a deteriorating mall—and then there's something else. — Read the rest

A flying pork product helped an Austin writer claim literary infamy in this year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which crowns the author of the worst opening sentence to an imaginary novel. Lawrence Person beat out more than 6,300 contestants with his deliberately dreadful description:

"She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck." — Read the rest

The MIT Press's Radium Age series continues to unearth fascinating proto-science fiction from the early 20th century. Series editor Joshua Glenn (who I'm fortunate to count as a friend and who listeners might recognize from his numerous appearances on Boing Boing's Gweek podcast) has curated another excellent pair of releases for Spring 2025. — Read the rest

Yesterday, the Minecraft movie trailer emerged to howls of complaint from… adults. People like me:

It's going to be a "real people transported to the Game World" dealie and looks like one of those fancy shader packs that lipsticks the aesthetic so your video card has something to do.

Scientists, philosophers, and everyone else have long pondered and argued the question of free will. Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky is the latest to weigh in on the subject with the publication of his new book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. — Read the rest

The Clarion Writer's Workshop is generally considered to be the leading training ground for science fiction and fantasy writers. Not that I'm biased — I attended the program myself in 2013, where I honed my chops under the mentorship of established writers like Cory Doctorow, who attended the program himself when he was younger. — Read the rest

President Barack Obama opened his summer reading list post with encouragement to read or re-read Toni Morrison and then suggested ten other titles including the following:

• Sometimes difficult to swallow, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead is a necessary read, detailing the way Jim Crow and mass incarceration tore apart lives and wrought consequences that ripple into today.

Why does Elon Musk think that AI is going to kill us all? Why do so many "rationalist" techbros assume that he's right?

Charlie Stross's keynote at the 34th Chaos Communications Congress Leipzig is entitled "Dude, you broke the Future!" and it's an excellent, Strossian look at the future we're barelling towards, best understood by a critical examination of the past we've just gone through.

Here's this year's complete Boing Boing Gift Guide: dozens of great ideas for stocking stuffers, brain-hammers, mind-expanders, terrible toys, badass books and more. Where available, we use Amazon Affiliate links to help keep the world's greatest neurozine online.

Hot off filming Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life to great acclaim and Blade Runner II, Denis Villeneuve is tackling the great white whale of screen science-fiction: Dune. Brian Herbert, son of author Frank Herbert, tweeted the news last night. — Read the rest

The instructors for this summer's Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy writers' workshop are Dan Chaon, Lynda Barry, Nalo Hopkinson, Andrea Hairston, Cory Doctorow, C.C. Finlay and Rae Carson: the workshop runs from Jun 25-Aug 5 at UCSD in La Jolla, California.

Here's this year's complete Boing Boing Gift Guide: more than a hundred great ideas for prezzies: technology, toys, books and more. Scroll down and buy things, mutants! Many of the items use Amazon Affiliate links that help us make ends meet at Boing Boing, the world's greatest neurozine. — Read the rest

When we got to rounding up our favorite books for our annual Gift Guide, we found that there were simply too many this time to throw in the Christmas/Kwanzaa/Hanukah/Yule/Solstice/Nonspecific Winter Celebration/New Year/Chalica hopper along with the tech and toys.

It's almost as if 2016 made the traditional way of learning more about our world — and of sharing dreams of other worlds — somehow more enticing. — Read the rest

Science fiction author Ted Chiang's Nebula award-winning short story "Story of Your Life" is getting the big-budget Hollywood treatment. Arrival, starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker, comes out in November.

From Wikipedia:

When multiple mysterious spacecraft touch down across the globe, an elite team is put together to investigate, including language expert Louise Banks (Amy Adams), mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), and US Army soldier Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker).

The ethics of torturing robots is not a new question, but it's becoming more important as robots and AI becomes more lifelike. Author Ted Chiang explored it in his 2010 novella, The Lifecycle of Software Objects. In 1998 I wrote an article for Wired Online called "Virtual Sadism" about people who liked to torture artificial life forms called "norns" (and a movement of norn lovers who tried to stop them). — Read the rest

There are no pictures of Greg Egan online, and his website has a disclaimer that while some of his more dedicated fans claimed to have tracked down a picture of the author, it’s not him.

We dig into the first four stories from Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others, and boy do we learn a lot about ourselves and others. Plus you'll want to take your vitamins since Margaret Atwood's latest novel won't be available to read for 100 years and we explore the idea of regaining your literary virginity. — Read the rest

The Clarion Writers' Workshop at UC San Diego has announced its lineup of instructors for the 2014 session, and it's pretty spectacular: this year's writer-instructors are Gregory Frost, Geoff Ryman, Catherynne Valente, N.K. Jemisin, Ann VanderMeer, and Jeff VanderMeer.

Clarion is a six-week, intensive boot-camp for science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction writers. — Read the rest