- Is the future of Twitter in code? Orangeman? [via]
- Though I don’t like it, I’m not diametrically opposed to five-day-only mail delivery. But I’d be screwed if the post office shut down all services on Saturday. That’s the only chance I get to check my post office box, and usually my only chance to mail anything like issues of Kaleidotrope. (Act now if you want a copy then?!) [via]
- Ah literary ice creams… If only.
- Homeless Offered Free Airfare To Leave NYC. I’m not really sure what to think about this. On the one hand, it’s an effort to reunite the homeless — many of whom I’m sure are teenage runaways — with family members, who may be better equiped to care for them. On the other hand, it’s shipping the homeless problem out of state to save some money and make them somebody else’s problem.
- But on a somewhat happier note… It’s not often you read the phrase “aerospace engineer turned composer,” but I enjoyed reading about these failed London musicals [via]:
A common complaint in the reviews for Too Close to the Sun is that the show doesn’t even fall into the so-bad-it’s-good category – that rarefied realm which made Gone With the Wind and Imagine This instant classics of a sort. Crucial to such flops is a sense of failed grand ambitions, which is why the burning of Atlanta in the first was as hilariously inept as the evocation of life in the Warsaw ghetto in the second. To enter the annals of true awfulness, you need to stake a greater claim on the imagination than was ever going to be proffered by a chamber musical about the waning hours of an American novelist. It would have still been a hard sell on the West End if Elton John had written it. (That, by the way, is not a suggestion.)
books
That’s one way of putting it
Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Apple’s ruthless control of content and commerce on the iPhone:
Indeed, Apple is best understood as the Singapore of technological ecosystems—smart, forward-looking, and every so often you get caned for chewing gum.
Tales from the future
This just in: science fiction is just as bad at predicting the future as everybody else.
Good science fiction isn’t really about prognostication. Good science fiction, despite its futuristic settings and sometimes predictive imaginings, is just like any other fiction: about describing the present. It’s like Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness:
Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
Yet reporters keep playing the game of “what science fiction got right and what science fiction got wrong.” Twenty-five years after Neuromancer was first published, PC World gets into the act, suggesting that “Neuromancer is important because of its astounding predictive power.”
This seems like an interesting exercise — I’ll admit, it’s amusing to see how we do, or do not, live in Gibson’s imagined future world — but it sort of misses the point. Whatever its considerable strengths or continued relevance, Neuromancer is much more a book about 1984, about its present, than about the future we now live in. What it gets “right” or “wrong” is sort of beside the point. For one, Mark Sullivan’s article acknowledges right up front, in quoting Jack Womack’s intro to the book’s 2000 re-release, that Neuromancer was as much a direct influence on the future (particularly the development of the internet) as a prediction of it. “what if the act of writing it down, in fact,” asked Womack, “brought it about?”
And for another, Sullivan might want to read another Gibson story, “The Gernsback Continuum“. Science fiction has been getting things wrong since day one, and that’s very often a good thing.
Then again, as Ken Jennings writes:
“…it occurred to me the other day that we are finally getting to the future promised by bad ’50s science fiction. No rocket packs or flying cars, but consider the following. One distinctive (and oft-ridiculed) thing about old sci-fi was the dorkiness of its attempts to suggest the vocabulary of the future. “The Maidbot was vacu-cleaning as I Flashfried my Soysage and read my digipape, so I didn’t hear you trying to Vidphone me!”
A lot of the clumsy made-up words seemed to be brand names, despite the fact that trademarks almost never became verbs–at least not in 20th-century American English. (In the U.K., vacuuming is still called “Hoovering,†but I can’t think of a colloquial American example.)
But in the last decade, for the first time in history, trade names have started to become verbs. I can Google, I can Twitter. As awkward as it sounds, I can even Facebook. Will I someday be able to Twitter and Google as the maidbot flashfries me up some Soysage? Fingers crossed.
Wednesday various
- Sense And Sensibility and Sea Monsters, huh? I worry about diminishing returns, but I’ve heard pretty good things about Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, Quirk’s last book in this sort-of-series. (Seeing as how Pride and Prejudice is the only Jane Austen I’ve ever read, maybe I should also read Seth Grahame-Smith’s parody of it. Then again, I read Austen’s book, along with another for a test, in a single weekend, and I can’t say I remember a lot about it. Some people get married in the end, I think?) I just worry: can The Werewolves of Mansfield ParK or Emma: Vampire Hunter be far behind?
- I fucking knew it! Cursing may be good for you. Clay Davis must be the healthiest man alive. [via]
- Toxic Substance Allows Birds to “See” Magnetic Field:
Cryptochrome is also present in the human eye, but our amount of superoxides is even lower.
That’s because superoxides reduce longevity, so human evolution has put a premium on longer life spans instead of on better steering.
In birds, however, evolution has favored a bit of cellular damage in return for the navigational benefits of magnetic vision, the researchers conclude.
What this seems to suggest, possibly, is that if we increased the amount of superoxides in our system, we could “see” the magnetic field just like birds. Of course, given the trade-off in toxicity, I don’t think we’ll find anyone too eager to test this hypothesis. [via]
- One should always be scared when George Lucas turns his eye towards “relationships and emotional landscapes.” [via]
- And finally, I love these fake library ads. More pictures from the Johnson County Library here. [via]
Thursday various
- When mass hysteria and facts clash: The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years [via]
- John Scalzi on Why New Novelists Are Kinda Old, or, Hey, Publishing is Slow
- Farrah Fawcett was friends with Ayn Rand. Bo Derek “is a really good friend” of Ray Bradbury. I don’t really have a point; I’m just amused by the unlikeliness of the pairings.
- Did you know that the title for one of Winston Churchill’s most famous titles, While England Slept, was actually based on a publishing mistake?
- And finally, while I think the idea of a Goonies sequel is probably a bad idea, Chris Columbus raises an interesting point as to why:
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for a Goonies 2 would be believing that modern kids would play outside.
“I don’t know if that’s possible anymore,” Columbus said. “Maybe if all the parents in the new Goonie movie forbid their kids to play on the Internet, that’s gotta be the plot. You can’t go anywhere near a computer or cell phone. I guess the adventures are online.”