March 30th, 2008
SF Signal has a page collecting links works from this year’s Hugo nomination list that are online for free. This is a great chance to read some of the year’s best speculative fiction - nearly all the nominated novellas, novelettes and short stories are online, and Harper Collins has even put up a substantial preview (71 pages) of Michael Chabon’s alternate history novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
Out of the stories I’ve read so far, I particularly enjoyed Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate (time travel, Arabian Nights style - also available as a free mp3 podcast episode from Starship Sofa) and Nancy Kress’ The Fountain of Age, a clever and affecting piece of science fiction.
Link
March 25th, 2008
Always wanted to create comics but can’t draw? Try Bitstrips. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:
BitStrips is a fast, easy, sharing-friendly comic creation site — you make “characters” using a Wii-style menu, pose them and fill in dialog, layout your strips and monkey with the backgrounds, borrowing material from any of the thousands of strips that have been made to date. Once your strip is done, anyone can modify it — it becomes part of the commons. In the first two weeks of the site’s existence, more than 16,000 strips were created by the users of the service.
Link
March 25th, 2008
Joel Rickett writes:
Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.
The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan’s classic thriller The 39 Steps.
It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.
The stories - which can be read online at wetellstories.co.uk - will feature clues that point to a seventh story hidden on the internet, culminating in a competition to win a £13,000 Penguin Classics library.
Link to the Guardian article
March 25th, 2008
Matt Buchanan of Gizmodo has a great article up about book-buyers’ rights in the age of ebooks and licensing.
If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the “first sale” doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School’s Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?
In the fine print that you “agree” to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books—you’re not paying to own ‘em, in spite of the use of the term “buy.” Digital retailers say that the first sale doctrine—which would let you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay—no longer applies. Your license to read the book is unlimited, though—so even if Amazon or Sony changed technologies, dropped the biz or just got mad at you, they legally couldn’t take away your purchases. Still, it’s a license you can’t sell.
But is this claim legal?
Link (via BoingBoing)
March 22nd, 2008
The Guardian has an exclusive excerpt from Philip Pullman’s latest book, Once Upon a Time in the North, which takes place in the same world as his acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy and a few decades earlier.
The most interesting thing was the bears. The first time Lee saw one slouching casually out of an alley he could scarcely believe his eyes. Gigantic, ivory-furred, silent: the creature’s expression was impossible to read, but there was no mistaking the immense power in those limbs, those claws, that air of inhuman self-possession. There were more of them further into town, gathered in small groups at street corners, sleeping in alleyways, and occasionally working: pulling a cart, or lifting blocks of stone on a building site.
The townspeople took no notice of them, except to avoid them on the pavement. They didn’t look at them either, Lee noticed.
“They want to pretend they’re not there,” said Hester.
Link
March 22nd, 2008
The official shortlist for the Hugo (one of the top awards for science fiction and fantasy books, stories, movies, TV shows, art and more) has just been released. Here are the candidates in the best novel category:
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
Brasyl by Ian McDonald
Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
The Last Colony by John Scalzi
Halting State by Charles Stross
Link to the full list of nominations
From the Hugo award site:
You do not need to attend Denvention 3 in order to participate in the Hugo Awards. A “supporting membership” will be sufficient to make you a member of the World Science Fiction Society and get you voting rights for both the nomination stage and the final ballot. A supporting membership costs US$50 and you can buy one here.
March 22nd, 2008
BBC News has an article featuring a study that (unsurprisingly) shows that therapeutic writing can help patients deal with the stress of cancer.
Her “expressive writing” exercise, lasting just 20 minutes, posed questions to leukaemia or lymphoma patients about how the cancer had changed them and how they felt about those changes.
When those taking part were contacted again a few weeks later, 49% said that the writing had changed their thoughts about their illness, while 38% said their feelings towards their situation had changed.
While there was no evidence of direct impact of the session on their illness, where the patients had reported greater changes in their mindset during the writing, this could be linked to more positive reports of quality of life given to their doctors during follow-up appointments.
Ms Morgan said: “Thoughts and feelings, or the cognitive processing and emotions related to cancer, are key writing elements associated with health benefits, according to previous studies. Writing only about the facts has shown no benefit.”
Link
March 19th, 2008
People have been direly predicting the death of the novel for decades. Dave Edelman has an interesting and well-considered new take on the subject.
Will the novel die? I won’t keep you in suspense: Yes, the novel will die. It might not happen in your lifetime. But yes, I can say unequivocally that the novel will eventually breathe its last and lay down contentedly in the grave of dead art forms. I’ll be very conservative and estimate 50 years.
And you know what? It’s not that big a deal.
Very soon we’re going to have a medium for distributing the written word that’s not only easier but better suited to the task than books. So let’s dispense with the silly, sentimental arguments you often hear about why storytelling is never going to go electronic. “You can’t replace the feeling of a holding a book,” “I don’t like reading on a screen,” and “I can’t read an e-book in the bathtub” are some of the sillier excuses you hear all the time for why printed books are going to survive until the end of time. I’m sorry, but “I can hold my entire library in my hand,” “I can download new books at will,” “I can search my entire library in a nanosecond,” “I can instantly send books to my friends,” “I can translate and define words on the fly,” and “I don’t have to devote an entire room of my house to holding my books” are going to trump reading in the bathtub any day of the week.
To sum up: the written word is going electronic. Permanently. Soon. Once that happens, storytellers will have no need to shoehorn their stories into these 8? x 12? hunks of pulped wood and ink. And once we’re not restricted to the medium of the novel, we’ll be leaving the form behind.
The death of the novel doesn’t mean the death of storytelling. It doesn’t mean that nobody’s ever going to put an Aristotelian structure of fiction into 120,000 words. On the contrary, it’s going to mean that storytelling will finally be unleashed. We’re going to see fiction strap on blue tights and a red cape and really soar.
Personally I think that’s going to be fun to see.
Link (via Futurismic)
