"Rewilding Etiquette," Karl Schroeder's guest-post on Charlie Stross's blog, looks at a future where social contracts, not social control, are used to keep things running. As Larry Lessig wrote, the three forms of governance are law, technological constraint, and norms, and while activists and science fiction writers focus on the first two, the third is the most important (the reason your neighbors don't break into your house has more to do with being "good" than fear of arrest or difficulty defeating your locks). — Read the rest
This weekend, the University of Toronto's Faculty for Information is bringing me to Toronto to give a keynote at its Boundaries, Frontiers and Gatekeepers conference. Admission is free for U of T iSchool students. For others, the keynote is $5 at the door, or the whole event is $7 for non-U-of-T-students and $10 for the general public. — Read the rest
This March, the University of Toronto's Faculty for Information is bringing me to Toronto to give a keynote at its Boundaries, Frontiers and Gatekeepers conference. Admission is free for U of T iSchool students. For others, the keynote is $5 at the door, or the whole event is $7 for non-U-of-T-students and $10 for the general public. — Read the rest
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
Ars Technica reports on the nascent Google Wave RPG scene, in which wavesters are amusing themselves by using Google's collaboration tool s a surprisingly effective (for some games) means of keeping track of the action in game:
The few games I'm following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions ("table talk"), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place.
Michael Geist sez, "Science fiction author Karl Schroeder, Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, Wide Mouth Mason drummer Safwan Javed, Lulu.com's Bob Young, and Nettwerk music exec Terry McBride are among the people in this short video talking about copyright reform as Canadians have the chance for three more weeks to speak out on copyright." — Read the rest
Because of farm fertilizer runoff, the seaweed in coastal waters in Brittany is growing like a monster. Scientists warn that as the seaweed rots, it forms white crust that traps hydrogen sulphide gas. When the crust breaks, it can poison people. — Read the rest
Dead-Air sez, "At the Science Fiction Message Board the results are in for our 2009 'Author August' post-a-thon extravaganza! The regular members, along with some visitors lured by news of the upcoming event, have nominated a wildly diverse range of authors. — 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
The American Institute of Physics has a fabulous resource in "The Discovery of Global Warming" — a deep and long look at the history of climate science. If you're interested in understanding how the interdisciplinary scientific consensus on the reality of deadly human-caused climate change arose, this is the right place to start. — Read the rest
Climate Change Economics is an excellent, thoroughgoing look at the economics of climate change mitigation. Aimed at legislators and people interested in policy implications of climate change, CCE offers a series of well-organized directories of white papers and technical information from a variety of sources for people trying to understand why it makes good economic sense to take immediate, drastic measures to curb emissions and mitigate the effects of anthropogenic climate change. — Read the rest
A frequent shibboleth of climate change denialism is that the Medieval Warm Period — a period of apparent global climate change in medieval times — indicates that the Earth's climate rises and falls all the time, and that therefore, human beings don't cause global warming. — Read the rest
From Nature's excellent Climate Change section, excellent summation of the year's research into anthropogenic climate change — that is, the hard scientific evidence from unbiased, independent scientists indicating that climate change is real, caused by humans, and dangerous to the planet. — Read the rest
Fast Forward 2 is the second volume in Lou Anders' excellent science fiction anthology series, featuring knockout stories from Karl Schroeder and Tobias Buckell, Kay Keyon, Ian McDonald, Paolo Bacigalupi and many others. I'm very proud to have a story in the book, too — a long, long novella I co-wrote with Ben Rosenbaum called True Names, which tries to imagine what the wars between light-speed-lagged, self-replicating nano-machine-based galactic civilizations would look like as different nanites warred to see who would convert the universe to computronium first. — Read the rest
Michael Geist sez,"One year after launching the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group, I've just released a new film that explores why copyright emerged as such a high profile issue. Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law, which I produced together with Daniel Albahary, features a wide range of Canadian voices – artists like Gordon Duggan of Appropriation Art; writers like award winning science fiction author Karl Schroeder; musicians like Wide Mouth Mason's Safwan Javed; business people like Nettwerk Record's Terry McBride, Lulu.com's — Read the rest
The Toronto Public Library system is just kicking off a gigantic, ambitious speculative reading series that starts next Monday with Michael Skeet hosting a panel discussion with Karl Schroeder, James Alan Gardner and Peter Watts on the pursuit of foresight in Canadian science fiction. — Read the rest
A paper from political scientist John Hickman, published in the journal Astropolitics, seeks to establish whether it would be possible to conduct commerce and trade over lightspeed-lagged interstellar distances. This has already been explored in science fiction (Karl Schroeder does a particularly fine job with his idea of the "Rights Society" in Permanence, a book with more fizzingly cool ideas per page than 98 percent of the sf ever published):
Economic exchange itself might be "alien" to the aliens.
The annual Locus Magazine Recommended Reading List just came out — it's the critical consensus of Locus's reviewers on the best science fiction and fantasy of the year, and a more reliable guide to great speculative fiction you will not find. — Read the rest
The Locus Magazine poll for the best science fiction of 2006 is closing soon — the poll is open to everyone, and invites you to select your favorite works published last year for receipt of the prestigious Locus Award (I've won it twice: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom won Best First Novel in 2004, and I, Robot won best Novelette in 2005). — Read the rest
