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
Arizona State University's Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative held a short story contest to write "climate fiction," judged by Kim Stanley Robinson and others; now the best stories have been collected in a free downloadable ebook that includes a forward by Robinson, and an interview with Paolo Bacigalupi.
Charlie Stross is on a tear: he's catalogued 22 screens' worth of space opera cliches, grouped by themes: Planetary civilizations, space and cosmology, biology, economics, politics, culture, technology – space travel, technology – pew! pew! pew!, aliens… His readers have added 300 comments' worth of omissions.
Our biggest posts last year were out of this world.
Rudy Rucker is one of my favorite authors of all time. So it's no surprise that the books he read in 2015 and recommend on his blog sound interesting to me: Purity by Jonathan Franzen, Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Inherent Vice and Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Peripheral by William Gibson, All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland, Sandman Slim Series by Richard Kadrey, Genius at Play: the Curious Mind of John Horton Conway by Siobhan Roberts, Jean-Michel Basquiat by Leonhard Emmerling, A Palazzo in The Stars by Paul Di Filippo, and The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne.
Joey from Arizona State University writes, "ASU's Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative is holding its first-ever Climate Fiction Short Story Contest. First prize is $1,000, and three more winners will receive book bundles signed by Paolo Bacigalupi, who was our annual Climate Futures lecturer last month. — Read the rest
Paolo Soleri's Arcology: The City in the Image of Man is a techo-hippie dream of deep mid-century modern futurism.
With Joe Haldeman, Kim Stanley Robinson, Pat Cadigan, Charlie Stross, David Brin and many more!
Laura Mixon (AKA Morgan Locke) writes, "Check out The Other Half of the Sky, a 2013 anthology of original short stories edited by PhD biologist and author Athena Andreadis, co-edited by Kay Holt of Crossed Genres. It has come out of left field to take science fiction by storm. — Read the rest
I'll be joining thousands of fans and hundreds of presenters at Loncon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, later this week. I hope to see you there!
Eileen Gunn writes, "What's science fiction good for? The May issue of Smithsonian magazine has an essay on the relationship between science, science fiction, and the future by Boing Boing buddy Eileen Gunn. Major writers — Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Samuel R. — Read the rest
The Clarion Writing Workshop at UC San Diego is the oldest science fiction writing workshop in the world, and it's graduated distinguished alumni from Bruce Sterling and Nalo Hokinson to Kathe Koja and Ted Chiang (and me, for the record). I'm on the board of the Clarion Foundation, the charitable 501(c)3 that oversees the workshop and fundraises to keep tuition as low as possible. — Read the rest
Jeff VanderMeer sez, "Greg Bossert (who's actually also a World Fantasy Award finalist this year!) put together a cool animated video based on the instructional story fish in Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction."
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
Slate's "Stranger Than Fiction" podcast has just aired its second episode: a discussion between Tim Wu (a cyberlawyer, Internet scholar and good egg) and me (MP3)! Future installments will include talks with Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood (as well as others) — the inaugural episode featured Tim in discussion with Neal Stephenson.
This year's Hugo Award nominees have been announced, and it's a great slate! Congrats to all the authors, artists, fans and editors who are up for the award in San Antonio, Texas this Labor Day weekend.
Best Novel (1113 nominating ballots cast)
* 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
* Blackout, Mira Grant (Orbit)
* Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
* Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, John Scalzi (Tor)
* Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW)Best Novella (587 nominating ballots cast)
* After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, Nancy Kress (Tachyon Publications)
* The Emperor's Soul, Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon Publications)
* On a Red Station, Drifting, Aliette de Bodard (Immersion Press)
* San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats, Mira Grant (Orbit)
* "The Stars Do Not Lie", Jay Lake (Asimov's, Oct-Nov 2012)
My latest column for Locus, "Ten Years On," looks back on my first decade as a novelist, and speculates about what a difficult utopia might be, and announces my next novel project:
— Read the restAnd then I realized I had no idea what novel I'd write next.
Locus magazine has just released its 2012 Recommended Reading List of science fiction/fantasy/horror, which is always a great reading guide (and a fabulous resource for those of us nominating for the Hugo awards. I'm delighted to see my novel Pirate Cinema and Rapture of the Nerds (written with Charlie Stross) on the best novel list! — Read the rest
Welcome to this year's Boing Boing Gift Guide, a piling-high of our most loved stuff from 2012 and beyond. There are books, comics, games, gadgets and much else besides: click the categories at the top to filter what you're most interested in—and add your suggestions and links in the comments.
