Chuggnutt!

Tag: Science Fiction

  • The Time Traveler Convention

    I don’t know whether to file this under “weird” or “science” or “brilliant”: MIT is hosting a time traveler convention on May 7.

    What is it?

    Technically, you would only need one time traveler convention. Time travelers from all eras could meet at a specific place at a specific time, and they could make as many repeat visits as they wanted. We are hosting the first and only Time Traveler Convention at MIT in one week, and WE NEED YOUR HELP!

    Why do you need my help?

    We need you to help PUBLICIZE the event so that future time travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web page is insufficient; in less than a year it will be taken down when I graduate, and futhermore, the World Wide Web is unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.

    Great idea, I’d love to help! What should I do?

    Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.

    You can also make an absolute commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring a time capsule or whatever it may be to the party, and then bury it afterwards.

    I wish I’d thought of that. :)

  • David Brin

    Ugh, it looks like I’m taking a blogging vacation. Time to try to get back on track. Tonight, since I’m reading one of his latest books, I thought I’d provide some links and commentary on David Brin, one of my favorite science fiction authors.

    The book I’m reading is Kiln People, and it’s really good so far. Brin has a knack for taking some of the most out-there, implausible-sounding ideas and turning them around into fascinating, believable premises. Kiln People is a good example; the premise is that future society will be transformed by the ability to create temporary, clay copies of yourself (called “dittos”) that essentially operate as a proxy version of you, and at the end of the day you can “inload” all the memories from the copy—in effect, experiencing and remembering everything the ditto did without risk or effort to yourself. I put off reading this book for a long time because it sounded a bit absurd, but once I got into it, it’s entirely engrossing and convincing.

    Brin also excels at portraying alien points of view. Brightness Reef is the best example of this I can think of, jumping POVs among half a dozen different alien species fluidly. That sort of writing is hard work, but it pays off when done well. Which Brin does.

    Herewith my thoughts on the essential David Brin reading list; if you haven’t read any of his books, start with these.

    • Startide Rising: This was the first Brin book I read. Utterly fantastic, I was hooked from that point on. It’s actually the second book of his Uplift series, but it’s the best one to start with, hands down. Space opera, lots of aliens, cool ideas—it has it all.
    • Earth: This paints a frightenly real portrayal of Earth in the near future (2038, I believe). Much different tone than his Uplift stories, but very good.
    • The Postman: Forget the movie, the book is totally different, except for a few things. And a thousand times better. As a plus, it mostly takes place in Oregon :)
    • Otherness: The second collection of his short stories. I like this one better than his first collection, River of Time, because he’s a much stronger writer with the later stories.

    And, if anyone’s counting, my least favorite Brin novel is Glory Season. Why? It was just too long for me, and the ending was far too ambiguous for my tastes—it didn’t leave me with any real sense of closure, just left me feeling unsatisfied.

  • Matrix Revolutions Trailer

    The theatrical trailer for “The Matrix Revolutions” is online. If you got the bandwidth, I recommend the big version.

  • New Cory Doctorow Ebooks

    I’ve just added six new Palm Reader ebooks to my ebooks page that are really short stories from Cory Doctorow’s new book, A Place So Foreign and Eight More.

    There’s still one more short story I need to convert, and then I’ll combine them all into one big book download. Enjoy. And thank Cory!

  • Ender’s Shadow

    I began reading Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card this past weekend, and, predictably, I can’t put it down. Brilliantly written, ties in beautifully to the Enderverse yet remains completely fresh.

    Particularly well written, and heartbreaking, is the depiction of Bean’s childhood on the streets of Rotterdam. Brutal, harsh, and utterly believable even though my mind wants to reject this point of view from its cozy, sheltered outlook on the world.

    Go read it.

  • The Matrix Rebooted

    Yes indeed, saw The Matrix Reloaded Saturday (the 31st), and my short review is: I liked it a lot. Oddly, though, I’ve been seeing some interesting things about this movie: there’s a large portion of people who were big fans of the first movie that hate this movie. My wife seems to be one of them.

    As we left the theater, she said: “Was the first movie that stupid?”

    Upon further clarification, what she means is that there was too much talking and not enough action (although the action that it does have is great). This seems odd to me, because I remember re-watching The Matrix for the first or second time since I originally saw it, and I was struck by how relatively little action there actually was.

    Anyway.

    So I’m not entirely sure why people hated this movie; I have yet to find a good answer, other than of the “there was too much talking” variety which people mean to be slow for them: too much unnecessary filler between action scenes, the rave scene was too long and pointless, etc. etc. If anyone can give me a good, coherent answer to why you might have hated this movie, drop me a line.

    To each his own, I guess. As I said, I liked it quite a lot. The action was great, and the effects were flawless; as I mentioned in my X2 post, there’s pretty much nothing that can’t be done in movie effects anymore. I enjoyed the story, too, and I think most of it makes sense to me… there’s still a few things I’m mulling over.

    I’m thinking I’ll need to see it again before it leaves the theaters; the effects are that good, and it’s definitely a multi-tiered movie that warrants multiple viewings.

  • Tribute to Gharlane

    A post on Wil Wheaton’s Soapbox made me think of this.

    If you had ever spent any amount of time on Usenet prior to 2001, especially in the geek-populous (hey, I’m a geek, so I can say that) groups relating to science fiction, then you’ve probably read posts from Gharlane of Eddore. As a Usenet poster, he was probably the smartest, most prolific, and most opinionated person I’ve ever come across on Usenet, before and since. Reading his posts were always worth the time, and it’s fair to say that in many ways, Gharlane was Usenet culture.

    Sadly, he died in June of 2001.

    I’ll just quote from the post on Wil’s site:

    *sigh* I miss Gharlane…