StarShipSofa: Science Fiction Audio Podcast

An appropriate response to hearing the sad news of the death of Bebe Barron is to pause and remember her pioneering work (along with her husband, Louis Barron) in creating the electronic music score for Forbidden Planet.  NPR provides an excellent introduction to the couple, their work, and the effort involved in teasing never-before-heard sounds out of primative equipment.

Thanks to some ridiculous union politics, the Barrons were denied a shot at an Academy Award they almost certainly would have won for their work; indeed, they were not even listed as composers in the movie's credits.  (They were mentioned as providing "electronic tonalities" instead.)

-The Fredösphere

Vernor Vinge, call your office.  Researchers at the University of Tokyo are developing "Smart Goggles" that have the potential to map your real environment:

The camera records everything you focus on. So you begin training the Smart Goggles by slowly walking around your environment so they can learn your space. While doing this you can focus specifically on items, like your keys and cell phone, that you may need regularly, and you name them as the Smart Goggle camera is recording them visually. By training its computer to get to know your space -- your office, your house, your car, maybe even your purse -- it will be able to find items in your environs when you need them.

From there, your environment could be linked to the internet, or any database you like.  It looks like this is a first step toward the kind of real-time, visual overlays which augment the real environment that Vernor Vinge described in Rainbow's End.

-The Fredösphere

It's reminiscent of the role the Reverend Marcus Morris played in the creation of the Dan Dare comics:  a new SF novel with a strong retro-futuristic vibe is being written by Gary K. Wolf, best known as the author of the novel that became the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and his childhood friend, John J. Myers, best known as the Catholic Archbishop of Newark, New Jersey.  The novel will be titled Space Vulture.  This is, apparently, no joke.

-The Fredösphere

Wired Magazine predicts we'll see increasing respect for the SF genre from "literary fiction" types.  SF is the only "literature of ideas" right now.  I tend to believe that's true.

Teenagers love to ponder such massive, brain-shaking concepts, which is precisely why they devour novels like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, the Narnia series, the Harry Potter books, and Ender's Game. They know that big-idea novels are more likely to have an embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge.

Adults and serious intellectuals used to love ruminating over this stuff, too. Thought experiments formed the foundation of Western philosophy — from Socrates to Thomas Hobbes to Simone de Beauvoir.

So, then, why does sci-fi, the inheritor of this intellectual tradition, get short shrift among serious adult readers? Probably because the genre tolerates execrable prose stylists. Plus, many of sci-fi's most famous authors — like Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick — have positively deranged notions about the inner lives of women.

(I tend to believe that last point too.)

-The Fredosphere

That toy is evil, I tells ya!  Eeeeeeeeevil!

This is almost the opposite of news, in the sense of information about something that just happened, but it deserves a look nonetheless.  At the blog 2 Blowhards they're talking about an effort in 1910 to imagine what warfare wil be like with those newfangled flying machines.  The conclusion:  it will be pretty much like sea warfare, but up in the sky.  What's missing is any awareness of vertical maneuvering.  They've got some cool images of flying dreadnaught-like vessels.  Head on over and have a look.

-The Fredösphere

A neat little article in the Times Online. Not much new, but always good to see people talking about why sf doesn't get any respect. (Personally, I don't agree with him about how sf is always so negative, but his distinction between sf and fantasy is interesting.)

Neil Gaiman's Journal, his blog, just won the Best Literature Blog from the 2007 Weblog Awards. So if you haven't been reading it already, this should be encouragement enough.

Kaolin Fire (what a name!) asks some hard questions about the SF short story publishing business, now apparently in decline.  The question everyone seems to be asking is, "does anyone read these mags besides the writers who get published in them (or aspire to be)?"

Follow the links for interesting points, especially the link to Jason Stoddard's blog, wherein he asks, "what do you hate most about short science fiction?"

-The Fredösphere

A short review of a new collection of stories, Infinite Space, Inifinite God caught my eye, partly because of the recent episodes on Catholic writer Walter M. Miller, but especially because of this lede:

It`s a mixture not often seen, religion and science fiction.

That claim is defensible only with the most crabbed definition of "religion."  Science fiction, of all genres, lends itself to religious speculation.  I suppose what the reviewer found unusual is that someone could write science fiction within a framework of a traditional, conventional religious belief system, as is true of authors Karina and Robert Fabian.  Still, the statement seemed so perversely wrong, it took me a few moments to understand the mentality that could have produced it.

-The Fredösphere