SF Signal: SF Tidbits for 8/8/07

SF Tidbits for 8/8/07

Silicon.com interviews William Gibson, who has given up writing about the future. "The trouble is there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can't convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years." [via Tai-Chi Policy]

Reuters also has a William Gibson interview: "Personally I think that contemporary reality is sufficiently science fiction for me. Some critics are already maintaining that science fiction is a sort of historical category and it is not possible any more."

Premiere.com has an interview with special effects legend Ray Harryhausen and author Ray Bradbury.

CBC interviews Robert J. Sawyer. "My purpose is to shake up complacency, to get people thinking, to talk about issues--abortion, evolution vs. creationism, capital punishment, the genetic revolution, unequal access to health care, you name it. Note that I'm not writing to preach: it's honestly irrelevant what I think about those issues. What I do is contrive scenarios in which those issues go from being abstract to concrete, so that we can get at the underlying ethics and philosophy."

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist interviews Daniel Abraham. (A Betrayal in Winter).

The Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast episode for August 3 features an interview with Jasper Fforde. [via Michael A. Burstein]

Amazon has an audio-interview (WMA format) with Joss Whedon.

Fantasy Book Critic has an excerpt from Joe Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine .

Awards news: The British Fantasy Society has announced the short-listed nominees for this year's BFS Awards, for work published or created during 2006. [via UKSFBookNews]

Free fiction: "The Right's Tough" by Robert J. Sawyer, originally published in the Visions of Liberty anthology. [via Robert J. Sawyer]

The film adaptation of Jumper, a young adult novel by Steven Gould, has a website. [via Cinematical]

SciFi Scanner lists Five Implausible Sci-Fi Robots. Spot on regarding the AT-ATs.

So why not write about the future?
The trouble is there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can't convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years. I think we've been in a very long, century-long period of increasingly exponential technologically-driven change.

We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it's going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that - we have no idea at all now where we are going.

Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilisation collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That's a possibility too.

It is sad really.....right after he says "we have no idea at all now where we are going." (is this even a problem with writing sci fi?) he goes on and states like 4 potential story lines he could write about.

Posted by joshua corning on Friday August 10, 2007 at 12:09 AM